by Sean Ellis
Though his counterparts in the Politburo did not fully appreciate it, this was an unprecedented crisis.
It would not be long before word of what was happening in the outside world broke through the censorship barriers imposed by Xu’s agents, and when that finally happened, the old methods of keeping the populace under control—restricting public assembly, arresting dissidents—would be about as effective as trying to put out a wildfire with tea cups.
Yet, as he turned over what few options were left to him, he realized that he was making an even bigger mistake. He was looking at the problem like a Westerner, trying to force the world to obey his will, reacting to the problem and meeting it head on like some kind of gung ho cowboy.
That was not the way of his ancestors.
His mistake was not in underestimating Mira Raiden, but rather in letting Atlas goad him into taking precipitous action—action that only benefited Atlas—when something altogether different was required.
Fortunately, it was an easy mistake to correct.
He picked up the telephone receiver again and spoke into it without dialing. “Get me Xhu Kiong.”
30.
Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China
The assault began even before they stepped off the plane.
The enemy was not some mercenary in Atlas’ employ, nor even an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security—though it was quite possible that one or both of those dangers were lurking nearby. What attacked them was not even human. Rather, Mira and Booker were being attacked by nature itself.
At an elevation over eleven thousand feet—two miles above sea level—the extremely low atmospheric pressure made every breath a minor battle. Mira had experience with high altitude environments, but unfortunately that experience was only good for warning her of the potential hazards. Altitude sickness was a precocious and unpredictable enemy. A person might move freely between high and low altitude with no adverse effects dozens of times, and then, without any warning, come down with a case of pulmonary edema—fluid build-up around the lungs—or even cerebral edema, in which the brain and spinal fluid increased pressure on the brain causing potentially fatal effects. They best way to avoid these altitude attacks was to spend as much as a week slowly acclimatizing to progressively higher altitudes, but Mira and Booker did not have a week, which meant their only defense was to stay hydrated. Fortunately, the rest of the tour group was having an even tougher time getting used to the altitude, which meant that no one was in a particularly chatty mood.
Early on the second day in Lhasa, the miserable little group rode a bus to the magnificent Potala Palace, which occupied the summit of Marpo Ri—the Red Mountain—overlooking the entire city. Just seventy years earlier, when Walter Aimes had accompanied the Ahnenerbe expedition, the palace had been the seat of power in Tibet and the residence of the Dalai Lama. Now it was a museum, a mere shell of its former glory, visited now by hordes of tourists.
“We must arrive as soon as the palace opens,” explained Choden, their English-speaking Tibetan tour guide. “There is a strict quota of visitors, and if we arrive too late, we will not be allowed to enter.”
Indeed, they arrived to find the vast complex already packed with crowds of tourists and worshippers alike. The palace was enormous, consisting of numerous chapels and other structures, connected by maze-like paths and staircases that seemed like something from an Escher painting. The red and white buildings were adorned with towering gilt dhvajas—victory banners—along with golden statues and fluttering banners emblazoned with cryptic mandalas and other designs, and the stale air, already thick with the odor of too many unwashed bodies, was a veritable miasma of smoke and incense.
As Choden kept them moving along a prescribed tour route, Mira found herself unable to concentrate on what she was seeing, much less identify anything that might help her locate the path of enlightenment.
At one point, as she struggled to catch her breath after climbing yet another staircase, Booker pulled her aside. “I just got a message from back home. They ID’d the picture of the shooter from Germany.”
“A message?” For some reason, the news made her temples throb. “You mean like a text? Are you sure that’s safe?”
“It’s encrypted. Don’t worry about it.”
Mira did worry about it. Although there had been no overt interference from the Chinese government, Mira was under no illusions about their privacy. She could sense that they were being watched. Routine surveillance only; their cover remained intact, but if the State Security agents discovered that they were receiving encrypted messages, they would come under much more intense scrutiny.
“Well, who is he?”
“The question should be ‘who was he?’ A Chinese national named Li Fang. The Germans have suspected that he was a spook for a while now, but until a couple days ago, he hadn’t done anything more than schmooze with college students, trying to recruit intelligence assets. A good thing we took that picture, because there wasn’t much left of him or the other two people in that car to identify.”
“Why would the Chinese come after us?”
Booker made a sweeping gesture, as if to say ‘look where we are.’
Mira rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to will the headache away. “That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody knew that we were on our way here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your old boyfriend knew.”
She frowned, but didn’t take the bait.
“Look,” Booker went on. “The Chinese know about the Trinity, and they know that you and I were involved with what happened in Libya. Maybe they want it too, and think we would be able to help them get it.”
“They tried to kill us, remember? There’s something else going on here that we’re not seeing.”
He shrugged. “Well, let’s just do what we came to do, and get the hell out of here before anyone figures out who we are. You got anything yet? Picking up any vibes?”
“No vibes,” she replied, and then because she felt she had to do something to battle the rising tide of defeatism, she continued: “But if you’d been paying attention to our guide, you might have learned a thing or two. This palace was built about three centuries ago, so it’s fairly new in the grand scheme of things. However, there used to be an even older palace here, built in the sixth century by Songtsan Gampo, the founder of the Tibetan empire and a bodhisattva—a human who has achieved enlightenment in one lifetime.”
“Enlightenment. There’s that word again.”
“This entire mountaintop is riddled with caves where monks and holy men would go to meditate. Maybe the path to enlightenment begins in one of those caves.”
Booker frowned. “You think they’ll let us wander off and explore?”
“No. We’ll have to keep our eyes open and hope to find something a little more familiar.”
‘Familiar’ continued to be elusive. Mira’s memories of Shambala were of a place almost ten thousand years old. Landmarks had been weathered to unrecognizability or covered over by much more recent construction. Yet, Tarrant’s words kept echoing in her head: I see it clearly now.
What had changed for him that had made the path so easy to identify?
She considered asking one of the red robed monks, but felt certain that any answers they might give would be as cryptic as the lama’s words to Schafer and Tarrant.
“To reach Shambala, you must walk the path of enlightenment.”
Enlightenment was the singular goal of Tibetan Buddhism. It was achieved by making a lifelong—or in some cases, many lifetimes long—journey, through trial and suffering, to purge oneself of desire. Only then could nirvana—complete enlightenment—be achieved.
Yet, Tarrant had recognized a more literal interpretation of the message, and figured it out in a single afternoon.
How?
What else had he done?
“Tarrant said that when he asked the lama to explain, he pointed to the other monks,” Mira said. “Remember what he wrote
? ‘I will pay closer attention to their activities. Perhaps I will chance to see one of them walking this path.’”
“Watch the monks?” Booker said. “It makes sense. If there’s a path, then someone is bound to be walking it.”
They slipped away from the tour group and made their way to one of the many porticoes that looked out across the city. Lhasa was surprisingly modern for such an ancient and remote location, doubtless a form of order imposed on the Tibetans by their modern Chinese conquerors as a way of demonstrating the superiority of Communism over superstitious traditional religions. Yet, despite the twenty-first century affectations, the old ways were still in evidence.
To the south, in the vast open space of Potala Palace Square, locals gathered by the hundreds to prostrate themselves repeatedly before the palace, their backs turned to the ungainly spike of the Monument to the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet—a reference not to some future grant of independence, but rather to the occupation by Communist Chinese forces which began in 1951. The figures were tiny, barely larger than ants on a sidewalk, but like ants, they moved in long columns as if following an invisible trail, weaving around the perimeter, ritually circling holy monuments called chortens, always in a clockwise direction.
Mira felt the scales fall from her eyes. “Del, look.”
She pointed to the park below, her finger tracing the path that led back and forth across the square like a sacred labyrinth.
“I see it,” Booker said in an awed voice. “It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. But what does it mean? I can see where the path ends, but…where’s Shambala?”
Mira spied Choden, moving their way against the crowd, an irritated look on his broad swarthy face. “We’d better get going before someone notices us taking an interest. Tonight, we’ll come back here, walk the path, and find out if it’s really there.”
31.
Zhu Kiong stood on the portico and gazed down at the palace square. Evening had fallen over Lhasa and Potala Palace was virtually deserted; the tourists having retreated to their hotels and the worshippers to their homes. Far below in the square, a patriotic spectacle was in full swing, martial music synchronized with fountains and lights, but Kiong wasn’t looking at the show. Kiong was blind and had been for more than twenty-three of her thirty-one years. Yet, Xu knew that the woman from Guangdong Province did not need eyes to find what she was looking for.
“She was here,” Kiong murmured. “A few hours ago. She stood here with a man, and looked there.” She pointed out at the square.
“Why?” Xu asked.
“The thing they seek is there.” Kiong’s voice was strained, as if the effort to make sense of what she was “seeing” had left her emotionally exhausted. Xu did not press her for an explanation. It was enough to know that they were close.
He did not doubt Kiong’s statement for even a second. In twenty-five years that he had known her, Kiong had never made a mistake.
It was difficult for Xu to remember a time before Kiong, before the Tèshū Értóng program had brought them together, along with dozens of other potentials—children who had exhibited what was termed “extra human function.” Most of the children had been quite ordinary; their high initial test scores a mere fluke of probability. Xu himself had almost been dismissed, since no one was certain if his ability to read people was an actual example of EHF or merely an innate but otherwise ordinary talent. There were no such questions when it came to Zhu Kiong. She was, to use the rather crude term favored by Westerners, a “remote viewer” but that did not begin to describe what Kiong was capable of doing. Given the name of a person and just a little bit of information about them, Kiong could project her consciousness outward and see the world through that person’s eyes.
When she was very young, her nascent ability had seemed like mere trickery. She could eavesdrop on conversations behind locked doors or cheat on tests by reading the answers of her classmates. Her power had not become truly manifest until one of the program scientists had decided to test whether her literal eyesight was interfering with her psychic acuity by ordering the surgical removal of her optic nerve.
The experiment had proven successful beyond the scientist’s wildest hopes. Kiong’s power had increased by an order of magnitude, and all it had cost her was her literal eyesight. No one had bothered to ask her whether she thought it was a worthwhile exchange.
With an army of far-seers like Kiong, China would surely have dominated the world in short order but there was no such army. The EHF project could only find those rare children with special abilities, it could not create them, and so Kiong remained merely a unique curiosity. A test subject.
Xu had remained at the program throughout his childhood, refining his own special talents, using them to vault himself into the upper echelons of power, but he had always remained close to the other children, and when the opportunity had presented itself, he had taken control of the program, folding it into his department. Now, that investment of political capital was about to pay an enormous dividend.
After escaping from the agents he had activated in Germany, Mira Raiden and her companion had turned around and come right to his doorstep. It was almost enough to make Xu believe in fate or luck or some other superstitious nonsense, but of course, there was no great mystery to it, no coincidence. It was all part of Atlas’ game, though exactly what that game was remained unclear. Had Atlas known that they would come to Tibet? If so, why had he not revealed this to Xu, allowed the minister to set a trap for the Americans, instead of risking everything with an ill-advised attack on foreign soil?
He would have to ask Atlas about this.
“Where is she now?”
Kiong turned to Xu, staring at him with her dead eyes. She was slim, attractive if a bit wild looking. Her blind expressionless face was impossible for Xu to read, and that had once made her desirable to him in his younger days. No longer. Now, she was just one more weapon in his arsenal. “It does not matter,” she replied, extending a hand to point down at the square. “What she seeks is there. That is where we must go.”
32.
By any measure, the palace square was a magical place, especially at night. The fountains and lights created shimmering curtains of illumination, which lent an aura of enchantment to the place. Mira tried to ignore the spectacle. It was a distraction, window dressing to hide the true magic that was present here.
She closed her eyes and turned slowly, seeing in her mind the beginning of the path—the kora or prayer circumambulation—that she had seen the worshippers and monks walking earlier in the day. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Booker was already standing at the first step.
He smiled reached out to her with an open hand. “Are you ready to be enlightened?”
She took his hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”
The first few steps felt strange, like some kind of child’s game—a scavenger hunt or musical chairs—but with each step along the way, her focus began to change. The noise and spectacle of the square became indistinct, so much white noise, while the path they were walking seemed to grow more substantial, like a bridge wending over a shadowy chasm, until it was the only real thing in her world. That, and Booker’s hand in her own.
Then, just like that, the path ended.
They stood there together, the entire universe shrunk, so it seemed, to that spot of ground beneath their feet. Everything else—the square, the fountain, the people gathered to enjoy the spectacle—seemed to be made of ephemeral mist.
“Now what?” Booker asked. “Where’s the city?”
Mira turned slowly, looking in every direction for a hidden door, the entrance to a passage that would lead them to secret Shambala.
Nothing. If there was a door, it remained hidden.
33.
Xu caught a glimpse of a couple that might have been Mira Raiden and Del Booker starting out across the square. They were swallowed up by the crowd before he could verify his sighting. He watched for the
m to reappear, safe in the knowledge that they would not escape him again.
Just knowing that the two Americans were in Lhasa would have been enough for him to find them using simple detective work, but that process was time consuming, and time was a commodity in short supply. Better, he had decided, to let them come to him. Kiong had assured him that the pair would return here, and she had not been wrong.
“What are they doing?” He turned to Kiong waiting for her answer, but her face remained impassive, as if she had not heard him.
“It wasn’t a rhetorical question,” he snapped. He had never snapped at Kiong before, but then there had never been a need.
“She is searching for something.”
“Searching for something? Searching for what? You have the sight. Use it.”
“I see only what they are doing, not what they seek.” Kiong answered in a taut voice. Though she was unruffled by his ire, Xu could tell that she was more frustrated by the limitations of her ability than he was.
Xu gripped her arm. “Take me to them.”
Kiong did not hesitate, but immediately strode forward into the square, moving so swiftly that Xu had to jog beside her to keep up. As he ran, he spoke a command into his radio, ordering the agents spread out along the perimeter to close in. He scanned the square again, hoping to catch a glimpse of them. There was still no sign of the pair, but he knew that they were close, and completely oblivious to the noose that was tightening around them.
34.
“Where is it?” Booker repeated, his tone growing more frantic. “Did we do something wrong?”
He started to move away but Mira grabbed his arm. “Stop. Don’t move an inch.”
Booker froze, but she could tell that he would not remain still for long. His curiosity was blazing, and if she didn’t give him an explanation, it would burn through his restraint.
