The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3) (21 page)

Feng stood slowly. ‘Excuse me, please. I’ll just be a moment. Should I send the girl up with something to eat?’

Ledner had been staring at the serving girl all night. His leer consisted of one part lust and one part awe. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. He would gladly sign away his fortune just to taste her. ‘Definitely. She can serve me all night long.’

Feng ignored the remark and followed Lim below deck for a private conversation.

‘What is it?’ Feng demanded.

‘Remember the two foreigners from the Loulan ruins?’

‘Of course. The only reason I didn’t have Chen killed was because of the sheer range of the sniper’s attack. I still don’t know how he killed a man from that distance.’

‘It took us a while, but we were finally able to recover the hi-res video from the helicopter’s camera system. We identified him as a former US Marine. His name is Joshua McNutt.’

Feng stroked his chin in thought. ‘An American soldier in Xinjiang. Very interesting indeed. But surely you didn’t call me out of the meeting just for that.’

‘No, sir,’ Lim said. ‘You know me better than that. The Marine and the other man were spotted arriving on a private plane in Hong Kong earlier today.’

Feng was stunned. ‘They’re here?’

Lim nodded.

‘Outstanding. I assume our brothers are watching them?’

‘They just checked into the Peninsula with another two men and two women.’

‘All military?’ Feng asked with a hungry gleam in his own eyes.

Lim could tell that his boss was already envisioning how he would punish the foreign intruders. ‘No. That’s the strange thing, sir. One man is French. A businessman. The others we couldn’t identify, although one woman is Chinese.’

Feng wondered about her ethnicity. ‘Han?’

‘She appears so.’

Feng thought about the information and fell into silence.

‘Should we pick them up?’ Lim asked.

‘No, not yet. Let’s see what they’re up to first.’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘One more thing,’ Feng said, ‘when Ledner is done signing the papers, make sure his trip home meets with some kind of horrible tragedy. His manners are atrocious.’

Lim smiled. ‘Perhaps a mugging on his layover in Singapore? That city is getting so dangerous these days.’

Feng nodded. ‘Perfect.’

Saturday, April
5

Huairou District

Beijing, China

The Great Wall stretched for as far as Cobb could see. It marched up and down hills, twisting and turning as it went, giving the impression it could still keep the barbarian hordes out today.

In reality the Mutianyu section of the Wall stretched for only 2.5 kilometers, but it was dotted with twenty-two watchtowers that helped to achieve the illusion of endless security. The hills around it were lush and green, a picture postcard come to life.

But that was where the touristic glory ended.

The day was bitterly cold, with a brutal wind ripping down from the Mongolian steppe to the north. The bite of the frigid air seeped through Cobb’s coat. The relative scarcity of tourists on the Wall was explained by the season and the fact that Mutianyu was off the beaten path. Other nearby spots had the expected infrastructure of gift shops and eateries, but not here.

This place was like a ghost town.

McNutt kept an eye on things in the nearly empty parking lot while Cobb and Maggie met Professor Chu Shen up above. He was an extremely short man with a ridiculously long white beard. A lecturer from the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology at Peking University, he looked old enough to have actually built the wall.

‘Thank you for taking the time to speak with us,’ Maggie said.

‘It is my pleasure, Ms Liu. It has been quite some time.’ The small man strolled across the path on the top of the Wall as if he owned the place. With no one around, Cobb could understand how he felt that way. ‘It is also very nice to meet you, Mr Cobb.’

‘Likewise, sir.’

‘Maggie tells me you are interested in details about the Great Wall. Things that I alone might know.’ The man smiled, flashing teeth stained from a lifetime of coffee consumption. ‘You have me quite intrigued.’

‘If it’s okay with you, I’ll let Maggie tell the tale. I’d only mess it up.’

The old man nodded and, when he did, his beard flapped in the breeze.

‘Professor,’ she said, ‘we are interested in what you can tell us about the Wall during the Yuan Dynasty.’

The strolling man stopped in his tracks and turned to her, eyebrows raised. ‘The Mongol period? Very interesting. It is a time that much of the world no longer cares about – and one that most Chinese would like to forget. What aspect of this period interests you?’

Maggie exchanged a look with Cobb, who nodded his approval.

Then she turned back to Chu and whispered, ‘The Venetian.’

Chu’s face darkened. ‘Ahhh, I see.’ He walked down a flight of steps on the Wall’s top, heading for the nearest watchtower. ‘I come here every week to walk the length of this section, and I’ve visited all the other sections as well. I’ve studied this structure my entire life. In all my decades investigating the Great Wall, you are the first person to ask me about Marco Polo.’

Maggie remained silent, fearing they had offended Chu.

The truth was far from it.

Chu smiled. ‘I am not a Polo scholar, of course, but I am one of the foremost experts on the Wall. And since the Wall stretches back to the Qin Dynasty and before, I’m naturally well versed in the history of China. I have to be. You see, the Wall
is
China, and China
is
the Wall.’

Cobb remained silent. He knew the man was just getting started.

‘This part of the Wall was restored and built in the early Ming Dynasty – 1368 on toward the seventeenth century. That was less than a hundred years after Marco Polo would have passed this way on his journey to meet Kublai Khan. Of course, his narrative is famous for many things in the West, primarily for him being the first Westerner to visit and describe so much of Asia. Although he certainly did the latter, he was hardly the first European to make the journey. Can you tell me about the connection you are seeking between Polo and the Wall?’

Maggie nodded. ‘We’ve come across a few documents that imply he did, in fact, see the Wall during his time in China. What’s more, these writings insinuate that the Wall held some special place for him, even though it was mostly ruins by the time of the Tang Dynasty.’

Maggie gave away as much as she could without coming right out and saying they were seeking Polo’s treasure. Not that it mattered much. She had known Chu for many years, and she realized that he had probably guessed their true intention as soon as she had mentioned Polo.

The man was as sharp as a scalpel.

‘The ruins were featured widely in the poetry of the Tang,’ Chu said, and then he abruptly turned to Cobb. ‘618 to 907 AD.’

Cobb nodded his thanks. As Chu had guessed, Cobb was not familiar with all the various dynastic periods of China’s long history.

‘The Tang was a memory some four hundred years before Polo arrived, so you can imagine the state of the ruins back then. But there still would have been segments of it standing at that time, circa 1275. As you know, Polo’s account is notable for his omission of any mention of the Wall. Many scholars have even posited that Polo couldn’t have visited China, all based on that omission. They say any Westerner visiting China would certainly have mentioned the Wall.’

The old man lapsed into silence as they walked along the deserted battlements.

Cobb glanced out through the parapet to the wilderness beyond. ‘We were aware of such theories.’

‘People always want to challenge antiquity,’ Chu said with frustration in his voice. ‘The notion that someone like Polo could get so much right, and yet, because of one simple omission, his entire tale is suspect? Ridiculous.’

Chu shook his head before continuing. ‘Of course Polo visited China, and all the other places that he mentioned. Back then, there was a scarcity of knowledge about Asia in the West. The level of detail in the book alone suggests he must have visited. No merchant, even one who collected tales from Asian travelers for decades, could have included such detail in his account.’

‘I agree,’ Maggie said with confidence.

‘Besides,’ Chu said, ‘there are several Chinese sources that confirm his presence as well. After all, the Great Wall was where Marco Polo met the love of his life.’

Maggie was stunned by the professor’s claim. In all of her years as a tour guide, this was the first time she had heard it mentioned. ‘Marco Polo had a woman in China?’

‘Not just a woman,’ Chu stressed, ‘Yangchen was the love of his life.’

He glanced at Cobb and smiled. ‘Her name means
the sacred one –
and she certainly was to him. Marco met the young Yangchen, a Chinese girl, on his way into China from the Silk Road. This was way out by the western end of the Wall near Lanzhou.’ The man pointed vaguely west, but it was understood he was talking about the other side of China.

‘Why have we never heard of this before?’ Cobb asked.

‘Why indeed, Mr Cobb. Western scholars are so fond of congratulating themselves for their accomplishments and so busy reinforcing their imperialistic viewpoints that they forget there was a “rest of the world” before they discovered it. The written histories in China go back more than thirty-five hundred years. Yet from the Middle Ages onwards, Western scholars interested in Marco Polo – and anything else for that matter – have been content to dig through musty libraries and monasteries in Europe while pretending that the Chinese and the Arabs were so underdeveloped that they couldn’t read or write. The truth, of course, is very different. While successive wars and invasions decimated libraries in the Middle East, China’s history has been preserved. Unfortunately, there is one major problem with it.’

‘And what is that?’ Cobb asked.

‘There is too bloody much of it,’ Chu said with a laugh.

Cobb smiled in understanding.

Compared to China, America was just a baby.

‘Too bloody much,’ Chu repeated. ‘Several thousand years of history recorded by several thousand bureaucrats, who note every little detail that happens in government on the national and local levels. Combine that with folklore, superstition, songs, poetry, and the like, and it quickly gets overwhelming.’ The old man stopped walking and turned to face them. ‘It’s just too much information for any one person to consume in a single lifetime.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Cobb admitted.

‘In the not-too-distant past, you had to study everything to be a scholar. But somewhere along the line, people began to specialize – just as I have with my studies of the Wall. But you see, the folly in that is you don’t see the big picture. Are you familiar with the story of the blind men describing an elephant? One touches its leg and says it feels like a tree stump. One touches its tail and says it feels like a rope. The last one touches its ear and says it feels like a fan. Eventually the three men come to blows over their wildly different perspectives, and yet none of them are technically wrong. The problem is they can’t see the whole animal.’

Cobb was familiar with the parable, but smiled nonetheless.

Chu continued. ‘Scholars are like that now. Polo specialists read the early editions of his book, and they argue over silly things like whether or not he came to China. But how many of
them
ever did so? How many of them took the time to track down imperial court records from the time of Kublai Khan to confirm Polo’s stories? Maybe a handful. And those that did were expecting Polo’s appearance to be likened to the arrival of a foreign king – described with pageantry and grandeur. When they found nothing matching their preconceived Western notions, they returned home and claimed that Polo never set foot in China.’

‘But …’ Cobb said.

‘But the truth was Marco was simply a merchant when he arrived; barely a footnote in the eyes of China. He was not the figure that he is today.’

‘But
still
a footnote, right? I mean, he
was
mentioned, wasn’t he?’

Chu smiled. ‘Yes, he was. Many times.’

‘In what context?’ Maggie asked.

‘In many contexts,’ Chu assured her, ‘though not always by name. To find evidence of him in China, a researcher would have to focus on Polo,
and
the time period,
and
the bureaucracy of the day. I only know about it from reading up on the Wall during that era.’

Maggie pressed the issue. ‘What can you tell us about his connection with the Wall? Or this woman?’

‘Only that the two were intertwined. Beyond that, I’m afraid the details escape me. I came across Polo several decades ago, but I wasn’t particularly interested in him at the time.’ He tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘Luckily for you, I do remember that the records I was looking at were from the court of Kublai Khan.’

‘Any records in particular?’ Cobb asked.

‘Unfortunately, no. But the time period you are concerned with is fairly small. Less than twenty years. And the other details were mostly dull observations. Ledgers declaring how much grain was being stored for the winter. That sort of thing. I suspect you’ll be able to find what you are after – if you can get to the records.’

‘If?’ Maggie asked.

‘The records passed from Peking University to the State Administration for Cultural Heritage sometime in the 1980s. They’re not on display at any museums, or I would have heard about it. Most likely they are in storage somewhere.’

‘Somewhere? Could you narrow that down for us at all?’ Cobb asked.

‘I’m afraid not,’ the old man said. ‘There are hundreds of storage facilities all over China, which is one of the biggest problems facing researchers today. Remember, we are talking about thousands of years of history packed away in boxes and crates. To know which documents are being kept where, you’d have to be a genius.’

‘Thankfully,’ Cobb said, ‘I have one of those on retainer.’