Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7)

by Jacques Antoine

  Ip trotted across the square holding a sack of whatever she’d purchased, and called out to Danko in words that were unintelligible. Finally, she found a suitable English phrase: “Time to go. Tatmadaw.”

  The news made the rounds of the square quickly, and soon most of the people who could do so rushed down one or another side street. This was the instinctive knowledge mountain folk all over the world seem to have – the town is where danger strikes first, the countryside is safer, if only because more diffuse as a target. Within minutes, they had exited to the east, since they naturally expected the troops to approach from the southwest, from the direction of Lashio.

  The scooters turned out to be an altogether more suitable mode of transport for the roads they encountered, since the ruts and holes that would bring four wheels to a near standstill barely slowed two wheels down. Within fifteen minutes, they’d put five miles between themselves and the trading post. Danko climbed a promontory with the binoculars he’d saved from the jeep and was able to confirm Ip’s intel – a cloud of dust suggested a moving column had settled in, though they were too far to discern what sort of equipment they’d brought.

  What would the Tatmadaw find back there? All the Shan knew exactly where Hsu Qi could be found, at least nominally, though her precise whereabouts might be rather more difficult to ascertain, and none of the shopkeepers who’d remained behind would divulge any information, however out of date it might be.

  “You’ve got to try these,” Connie said, once he’d come down from the hilltop. She held out a sampling of the food from Ip’s sack. “They’re like crabcakes, only tart and way more garlic.”

  “Htamin Gyin,” Danko said. “I love these. They’re sort of like pierogi, but with fish and rice. They have the best rice up here.”

  Ip held out a paper cup of red sauce, and invited Connie to spread some on hers.

  “Ketchup?”

  “No,” Danko said. “It’s probably tamarind paste. If you like sweet and sour, that stuff’s for you.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It looks like an armored column, judging from the dust. If they dispatch outriders, we’ll see them within thirty minutes.”

  “Then we should get moving, right?”

  “Maybe, though I suspect they’ve gone as far north as they mean to.” He located a stick and used it to sketch the area. “Everyone knows she’s in Kutkai… that’s up here, on the other side of these hills. But the Tatmadaw can’t risk a direct assault…”

  “Don’t they have a huge logistical advantage?”

  “Yeah, but they have morale issues, too… you know, it’s a dictatorship, and their conscripts are not willing to die for the Junta, and a direct assault on Kutkai would be a pitched battle. Whatever assets the Shan have would be brought into action, and their soldiers will die for her.”

  “Then their only play is to try to undermine her position through indirect warfare, like shelling. But how do they know she’s in Kutkai?”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  “What do you mean, everyone knows?”

  “That’s the way it has to be. She makes an appearance at the main pagoda every few days…”

  “… and the rest of the time?”

  “Tammy keeps security high… never the same place for very long. He needs to keep her safe, but she won’t go into hiding.”

  Ip gathered up all the remnants of their meal and kicked dirt over Danko’s map. “Time to go,” she said, which seemed to be one of the few English phrases she knew.

  24

  A Diplomatic Passport

  “I don’t know. Maybe I panicked a little.”

  Yuki had listened patiently to Emily’s little confession, but since Michael was not available, there wasn’t much she could tell her.

  “Is it too late to get off the plane?”

  “I think so.” Emily felt the flutter in her own voice, and the hand holding the sat-phone trembled ever so slightly. Maybe Li Li wouldn’t notice, and speaking in Japanese kept her from having to hear the whole scene rehearsed again. “They’ve closed the cabin door. If I make a scene now, it’ll just draw attention to us in the terminal, and…”

  “… and that’s where the trouble was.”

  “We turned the corner and there were dozens of uniformed officers, and everyone was trying not to get too close. I think something happened.”

  “So you’re going to fly to Shanghai?”

  “It was the next available flight, and we just needed to get out of there. I’ll book a connection to Beijing on the other end.”

  “Why couldn’t you just go back to your hotel?”

  “I don’t know… it was the way Choi acted yesterday, like something had him spooked about the whole thing… and now he turns up dead when I’m supposed to hand her over.” Emily whispered this last bit, even though Li Li wouldn’t understand what she was saying. “Something is way wrong here, and I didn’t know who I could trust in Seoul.”

  Yuki hadn’t asked about the consequences of this impulsive decision on Jiang Xi’s plans for Li Li and Kit Yee, but Emily had plenty of time to reflect on them a few hours later, sitting in the Shanghai-Pudong Airport terminal. If Choi had been killed by people working to entrap Jiang, taking Li Li to Beijing under her own name could be disastrous for both of them. Taking her there as Li Li Tenno would keep her safe for the next few days, but it could mean the end of Jiang’s hopes of reuniting what remained of his family.

  One other possibility tickled the edge of her thoughts, that Choi had been killed through some connection to the death of Jae Kyu Kim. It hadn’t been ten years since she’d snatched his life away, like a grizzled old fate snipping the thread of an ill-starred mortal – and it astonished her to think she was only a few years older than Li Li now. She had to wonder how long the memory of his colleagues at the NIS was, and whether they would kill one of their own to get at her. She couldn’t quite bring the dimensions of such a plan into plausible focus, but this didn’t mean it was impossible.

  “The Beijing flight isn’t for another two hours,” she said, now that Michael had finally called. Li Li was happily distracted with a rice bowl from a bibimbap stand near the far end of the terminal, and weary travelers pressed past them on the moving walkway. Steamed rice with vegetables, a soft egg and two slices of fatty pork had suited her appetite for the moment.

  “We have no intel on Choi’s death,” Michael said. “You know as much we do.”

  “I’m not sure I did the right thing. Maybe I should have brought her back to Japan, you know, met up with Andie and Yuki on Hokkaido.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The next available seats would have meant waiting in the airport until the evening and…”

  “… and it didn’t feel safe there?”

  “No, and if I had to fight our way out, with all the electronic surveillance in the terminal… there’s no way we could have brought her to Jiang after that.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Shanghai, waiting for a flight to Beijing. I can keep her safe in the embassy compound, at least, and we can figure out what to do next. But it may have screwed up any chance for Jiang’s scheme.”

  “Not necessarily. His plan always depended on telling Kit Yee sooner or later. He wasn’t going to be able to keep the truth from her indefinitely. Maybe now, he’ll just have to tell her sooner… assuming he can trust her. How confident did he seem last time you spoke?”

  “More hopeful than confident…”

  “She cleared customs in Shanghai as Li Li Tenno, right? Maybe we should try to buy him a little more time.”

  “How?”

  “If you bring her through Beijing, you’ll have to begin the credentialing process tomorrow, which will place the two of you, but especially Li Li, under maximum scrutiny, photographs, paperwork… you get the drill.”

  “I’m sure there are security videos of her at passport control here.”

  “It’s a different database… a
nd you had her in a hat and sunglasses, right?”

  “But it’s still searchable.”

  “Sure, but whose going to know to look. All we need to do is have Li Li Tenno get an exit stamp from one of the southern ports, and you can meet Jiang somewhere else less official, some place out of the way, maybe one of the smaller western cities.”

  “I know,” Emily said. “Shiyan… it’s smaller and out of the way, and there’s a Daoist shrine nearby that I’ve been meaning to visit. The only problem is that I don’t have a way to contact Jiang from here.”

  “How do you normally communicate?”

  “Under bridges. He’s usually lying in wait for me when he wants to talk. But I don’t know how to initiate contact, not without compromising him. Can you get a message to him?”

  “Maybe… but if this incident in Seoul means he’s under surveillance, too… it’ll be tricky.”

  After ending the call, Emily stood up abruptly, and Li Li turned her head, chopsticks in hand, and a nearly empty bowl of rice in front of her.

  “Are we going somewhere, Emmy?”

  “I remember seeing some sort of ice cream stand back at the other end. Shall we go see?”

  “But I haven’t finished my kim chee.”

  “Bring it, if you like.”

  Li Li tidied up the table and put the remains of her meal in a nearby trash can, but hesitated over the little plastic container of pickled cabbage. The aroma of garlic and chili wafted through her nostrils. After a moment’s deliberation, she tossed it in the trash, too. Emily consulted several video screens along the way, and inquired at an information desk, before stopping at the Shanghai Air counter to cancel their passage to Beijing, and pulled Li Li across the terminal floor to the much smaller Spring Air counter and booked two seats to Shiyan, in Hubei province.

  Once they were seated, Li Li complained briefly about the lack of a business class section, and then managed to relax, and even doze off. Emily had avoided telling her much about the nature of their evolving itinerary, or the concerns that motivated the changes. Once the plane leveled off, the drink cart squeezed down the aisle, and the flight attendant reached tea and biscuits, or juice and fruit cups to the passengers in the first several rows. Click clack – a drawer or a door on the cart must have clattered open and then closed, much more loudly then one might deem necessary, and the desired snacks were distributed. On a western airline, drinks served over ice would be offered, in keeping with the American taste for refrigerated liquids. But in Asia, that taste had yet to take hold, and only room temperature or hot drinks were available.

  Once the attendants had completed the drink service, the cabin settled down and Emily’s mind drifted off as she reflected on the infinite cares a parent takes on, and which she had taken on, at least in part, with regard to Li Li’s well-being. Passing her on to Jiang and Kit Yee did not promise to ease the burden of those cares – it might even increase them. The plane shuddered, and sleeping passengers around them groaned and shifted in their seats like so many cabbages in a produce cart, but did not awaken. Across the aisle, a young mother held a sleeping infant to her chest, and Emily paused to admire the child’s blissful expression, and wonder how long this hypnotic scene would last.

  The plane seemed light for a moment, or heavy, and Emily felt her hips press against the belt strapped across her lap, as if the cabin had suddenly fallen fifty or a hundred feet. Why hadn’t the seatbelt indicators ticked on? The lights flickered for an instant, and an artificial twilight took hold as the sun was obscured by a cloud bank, which the plane shortly entered. Her seat shivered once more and the darkness fell quickly – click, clack – louder this time than before, and the smell of sulfur hung in the air. Smoke issued from the end of the gun barrel, elongated by a noise suppressor, and a body fell with a groan and a thud in the hallway, all only dimly visible, if at all, in this light. Could she really even see it?

  The sword slashed the air, looping silent on the breeze, and she felt it sever tendons and peel the flesh along one man’s thigh, before carving through his belly. It hacked through the muscle tissue encasing another’s throat and plunged hungry through the soft spot behind the collarbone of a third. If the light were better, she’d have seen a red mist hanging in the air, or so Emily thought, and then settling on her hands and face, clinging to her hair. She drew the wakizashi from the chest of the last man, already dead though he scarcely knew it, and brought it around once again, overhead, dagger-style, the tip nearly scraping the ceiling.

  The sight of the gun barrel gave her pause, inches from her nose, and Jae-Kyu Kim’s blank, sad eyes met hers in one of those moments of understanding. When he turned the gun aside, she knew what it meant, and the blade came crashing down, carving a vast chasm through his chest. Moments later, crouching by his side, he smiled up at her and croaked out a dying man’s gift of wisdom: “Keep her safe. It’s all that matters.”

  “Emmy, let go. You’re hurting me.”

  The noise of the wind around the landing gear increased, and Emily glanced down to see her hand clutching Li Li’s. A few minutes later, the wing flaps shifted into glide position and shortly after that the wheels touched the tarmac, and the pilot spun up the engines to slow the plane for taxiing.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Emily pressed the little hand to her lips, and handed the embassy phone to Li Li. “Why don’t you look up Wudangshan?”

  “Wudangshan?”

  “Yeah. There’s a temple complex on the mountain we should go visit.”

  “But aren’t we supposed to be meeting uncle Jiang?”

  “Soon... we’ll meet him soon. But in the meantime, there’s some cool stuff to do here.”

  It didn’t take long to find a hotel near the People’s Park – Emily figured there was probably a ‘people’s park’ in every Chinese city – and to drop off their packs in the room. One large bed instead of two twin beds, that’s what they had available, but Li Li would probably want to sleep close anyway.

  “There’s a folk concert in the park tonight.” The old man at the front desk beamed at them with civic pride, then nodded to Li Li. “Don’t worry, little one, there’s pop music after.”

  At ten stories, the tower dominating the central promontory of the park could be seen from anywhere in this end of the city, and after a late lunch, they used it to guide their steps the few blocks. Emily wanted to explore the hiking trails and the bamboo forest before dark, but a mockup of the Great Wall captured Li Li’s attention and she insisted on running the whole length of it. Across the central lake, a small zoo featured alpacas, but Li Li was not interested in petting them. At the far end, they found a replica of the Purple Cloud Temple, probably for tourists who didn’t have the stamina to brave the mountain and see the real thing.

  “What’s so important about Wudang?” Li Li asked, once she’d tired of watching Emily study the paintings in the temple.

  “It’s a center of Daoist worship.” Emily considered the blank look on her charge’s face. “You know… yin and yang, and the Yi Jing.”

  “Yi Jing?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the Book of Changes. It’s a sacred text that explores the changing face of the universe.”

  “You mean the fortune-telling book?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s used for that, too, but it’s so much more.”

  “Emmy, you’re such a mystic.”

  “Poke fun, if you like. But for thousands of years, Taoism was an important religion across China.”

  “I thought it was more like a philosophy, or something… whatever that means. If it’s a religion, it must have gods, right?”

  “It does, and the main one is called Zhenwu, or Xuanwu. He’s a god of warriors.”

  “His name sounds like it means ‘dark warrior’.”

  “That’s him.” Emily pointed to the image of a red-faced man in armor whose eyes seemed to bulge with rage. “…and the Taoists developed their own styles of wu shu in his honor. But he’s so
much more than that. I think he’s a symbol for something much deeper.”

  “Why is he standing on a turtle and… is that a snake?”

  “He’s associated with the north wind, and turtles and snakes. There’s lots of stories about him. I think my favorite is the one where he’s a butcher who’s sorry for all the animals he’s killed. One day, he helps a pregnant woman in labor, and when he offers to wash her clothes in a river, he sees the words ‘dark god’ in the water, and realizes the woman is one of the immortals. He repents of his sins against the animals and pulls his stomach and intestines from his belly…”

  “Ooh, that’s gross, Emmy.”

  “It gets better. The Jade Emperor… you know, the king of all the immortals… he’s so impressed by the butcher’s repentance that he makes him immortal on the spot, and gives him the title Xuantian Shangdi.”

  “The dark god.”

  “Exactly. But a problem arises when his stomach and intestines turn into demons… a turtle and a snake, and they terrorize the countryside, and no one can defeat them. Zhenwu returns to Earth to subdue them, and forces them to carry him around on their backs. That’s why he is commonly depicted riding a snake and a turtle.”

  “Where do you find all this weird stuff, Emmy?”

  “You know, half the time I think it finds me,” she said with a laugh. “But it’s in lots of books. You can read about it for yourself.” Li Li rolled her eyes at this.

  An attendant passed through the main hall to notify stragglers that there was still time to get to the folk music concert across the park. Li Li was less than enthusiastic, and since the woman hadn’t specifically said the rest of the park was closing, she tugged Emily in the direction of the bamboo forest. They quickly found that in close stands of bamboo, it was just possible to scamper up the larger stalks until they gradually bent down toward the horizontal. Jumping off at a low point allowed them to spring back and shake the canopy of nearby trees.