The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror nc-2

by Don Winslow

  Then he heard voices echo below. Li Lan stood up and peeked over the rock. Then she slammed her fist on the rock in rage and frustration. She turned back to Neal.

  Tears of anger streamed down her face.

  “It is too late!”

  Neal leaned out over the rock. His ribs exploded in a burst of pain. He saw Simms pacing steadily across the saddle, almost to the base of the ladder. Peng waddled about a hundred yards behind him, followed closely by Wu, who was shuffling along in his distinctive pigeon-toed gait.

  He turned back to Li.

  “We can run. We can make it. We can warn them.”

  She looked steadily in his eyes. “Fate is fate. You cannot change it. You Americans always think you can change it. You must learn to face your fate, learn to face the truth. Face what your stubbornness, and selfishness, and lust have done.”

  “Love.”

  “No, lust. I begged you to stop, but you wouldn’t stop. Now see what you have done. See what we have done. Accept it.”

  Neal slipped the pistol from the small of his back.

  “Go. I’ll buy you the time.”

  “Neal Carey, listen for one time. I do not love you. That is the truth. I love Robert. That is the truth. I was never going to go with you. That is the truth. I made love with you to deceive you, to buy your silence. But now your silence is worthless.”

  She pointed down the hill.

  She’s right, he thought. Everything she says is true. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because of her. Because I wanted her and couldn’t have her.

  “Run,” he said. “If you run you can make it.”

  “Do not make this sacrifice for me. I do not lo-”

  “I know. You don’t love me. But neither do I.”

  But I do love you, he thought.

  She turned and ran.

  Now think, he told himself. For the first time on this whole fucking job, think. Simms can pick you off from here, and that’s no good. You need to shorten the range so that your pistol is as good as his rifle.

  He looked uphill to where Li Lan was scrambling up the slope. There was a slight curve in the path, and some rocks off to the uphill side.

  If I can make it there, that might do.

  He rolled onto the path and started on all fours. His ribs slammed at him, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t look up, either, but he could hear Li Lan running, as bits of rock and shale slid down behind her.

  Go, go, go, he thought.

  Now he could hear Simms on the path behind him. Also running. Shit. Have to make it to that curve. Have to make it there with a few seconds’ lead.

  Neal stood up straight and burst up the hill. He screamed as his ribs exploded and screamed again as he reached the curve and threw himself behind the rocks. He could see a bit of the path below him and all the path in front of him. He saw Li Lan on all fours, and then he watched as she stood straight up, waving her arms and shouting, trying to warn the three men to get off the edge of the summit.

  “She is waving!” Xao said. “But where is Carey?”

  “He must be resting.”

  “Can he see from there?”

  “I am sure.”

  I hope so, Xao thought. I hope so. Come on, Mr. Carey. Where are you?

  Where are you, you little bastard? Simms wondered. The Chinese babe was flattened against the hill like a bug, but Carey had disappeared. Planning another little ambush, are you?

  Simms saw the path curve about forty yards above him.

  Okay, he thought.

  He left the path, working himself down the slope on the seat of his pants. There was a nice rock down there to steady the rifle on, and it would give him a beautiful fire angle at the summit. They would be silhouetted, backlit by the setting sun.

  Then he could deal with Carey at leisure. Leisure… what a nice concept. He sure could use a little leisure.

  Simms slid down behind the rock.

  What the hell is he doing? Neal wondered as he watched Simms’s maneuver. Then he saw Simms drop into a shooter’s crouch, wrap the rifle sling around his wrist, and lay the barrel against the rock. He watched as Simms put his eye to the scope and began to scan the summit,

  Li Lan reached the top. She stopped again and waved her arms. They were about a hundred yards away, heading toward her, arms spread out in welcome-the largest possible targets they could be.

  Neal saw it too. Pendleton was wrapped in a native black serape, and he looked like some sort of giant bat as he strode toward Li Lan. The Chinese man was older, shorter, but he also walked purposefully toward her as she ran toward them.

  He looked down and saw the rifle barrel wave gently as Simms picked a target.

  Now this, Simms thought, is what I call a target-rich environment. Now let me see… Well, first things first.

  He tightened his grip and centered the cross hairs.

  Neal knew he couldn’t hit Simms from that distance with the pistol in a thousand years, but he gave it a try. The pistol bucked in his hand as he pulled the trigger.

  The shot didn’t even distract Simms. He chuckled to himself as he followed his target, waiting for the two of them to get closer together so he could make an easy adjustment for the second kill. Or should I try for a double kill with one shot?

  No, that would be vulgar.

  He practiced his lead once and waited for the ideal shot.

  Neal put both feet to the rock and pushed. His ribs strained and screamed as he as he pushed, wedging his back against the slope. Then the shale began to give way underneath. The rock began to slip.

  Time to stop fucking around, Simms said to himself. He began to put just the right amount of pressure on the trigger.

  The boulder gave way and started to roll. Neal watched it bounce over the path and pick up speed as it tumbled toward Simms. Please, God… please, please, please.

  He heard the shot go off a half-second before the boulder hit.

  He looked up and saw Pendleton drop.

  Like he’d been shot.

  Then he heard Li Lan scream.

  He sprang to his feet and ran toward her.

  Simms was about to grease the babe when he felt a jolt through his hands as a big fucking rock hit the gun barrel and tore the rifle from him.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. They just don’t want to make this easy. Well, he’d just have to do her with the knife. He wished she’d quit screaming, though.

  Neal heard her wailing as he made it to the summit.

  She stood with her back to him, Pendleton in her arms. There was a big hole in his back. The other two men stood as still as statues on the edge of the pavilion.

  She was dragging Pendleton to the edge of the cliff, to the Buddha’s Mirror.

  “No!” Neal screamed as he ran toward her. “Noooo!!!”

  She turned toward Neal as she reached the edge.

  The two Chinese men started to run toward her.

  Neal was close enough to see her eyes, close enough to see her smile, close enough to reach her with one lunge as she turned, looked into the Buddha’s Mirror, cradled Pendleton in her arms, and jumped.

  Neal sprawled on the edge. He peered into the mists below, into the Buddha’s Mirror, but he couldn’t see them. All he could see was the mist, and golden circles of light, and in one golden circle his own face. His own soul.

  He closed his eyes and sobbed.

  “We thank you for your assistance,” Xao said. He raised his teacup in the form of a toast.

  “You are very welcome,” Simms answered.

  They were sitting at a pavilion on the summit.

  “I must confess,” Xao continued, “that when we started to lure the traitors here, we did not know we would have the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Peng has been most thorough.”

  Peng blushed. He was burning with rage, but could not let it show. Xao’s plot had been foiled, but Xao would come out of it as a hero. Without the bodies, Peng could prove nothing. It would be his word against
Xao’s, and he knew he would come out the loser.

  “The woman was obviously unstable,” Xao continued.

  “Apparently,” agreed Simms.

  “Perhaps she loved him.”

  “Emotional involvements are dangerous in our type of endeavor.”

  “Just so.”

  Xao turned to Peng. “You have been very loyal, Xiao Peng, almost to the point to cause concern. For a while it seemed that you thought that I was a traitor, and yet you were willing to conspire with me.”

  Xao’s eyes burned into him.

  Peng said, “Comrade Secretary, it is not for me to question your instructions, but merely to carry them out.”

  Xao’s smile had the warmth of a dagger.

  “Even so, accept my gratitude.”

  “Humbly, Comrade Secretary.”

  Xao turned to Simms. “You will inform your superiors that the problem of Mr. Pendleton is resolved?”

  “They will be most grateful.”

  Jesus, thought Simms, can we cut the Oriental bullshit and get out of here?

  “What about Carey?” Simms asked. “It would be awkward to bring him back to the States.”

  “A reckless young man,” Xao answered. “Prone to the sort of rash behavior that leads to accidents. This is a dangerous mountain, particularly on the stretch known as the Elephant’s Saddle. Careless hikers have been known to slip and fall, especially if they were foolish enough to attempt to traverse it at night.”

  “But I am afraid I have little choice, Secretary Xao. I wonder if I could borrow a flashlight?”

  “Of course. Xiao Wu and my driver will escort you. Mr. Peng will stay here for the night. We have much to discuss.”

  Xao smiled pleasantly at Peng. So pleasantly that Peng wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. Xao stood up and offered his hand to Simms.

  “Thank you for all your help,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  They both laughed at his joke.

  Wu sat with Neal at the pavilion near the summit. Neal’s hands were tied behind him. In the three hours since Pendleton’s murder and Li’s suicide he hadn’t uttered a sound, just stared into the distance.

  Simms came up, stood in front of Neal, and then kicked him in the ribs. Neal toppled over on his face.

  “That’s for the swim in the river,” Simms said.

  The driver picked Neal up gently and lifted him to his feet.

  “You like to walk, Neal,” said Simms. “We’re going for a walk.”

  Simms held a large flashlight in one hand. So did the driver.

  The soldier led the way. Simms pushed Neal in behind the soldier, and Wu brought up the rear. They trudged slowly down the Buddha’s Ladder as the driver carefully pointed out the trail with his flashlight. They reached the bottom and started along the Elephant’s Saddle.

  “You want to be real careful, Neal, so you don’t slip and fall.”

  Neal heard the words with intense relief. They were going to kill him after all.

  They’d walked for a couple more minutes when he heard Simms say, “I guess this will do.”

  Neal waited for the push. Neal wanted the push.

  “Cocksucker.”

  Neal turned and saw Wu kick Simms’s feet out from under him. Simms tottered on the edge for a long moment, flailing his arms as he tried to regain his balance. Then he tumbled into the darkness. His scream echoed in the night.

  Then the driver lifted Neal into his arms.

  21

  Robert Pendleton squatted in the muck of the rice paddy for a moment and came up with a beaker full of mud. He held it up to the light, swished it around, and looked at it carefully.

  “It’s the nitrogen content that’s crucial, as you know.”

  Zhu smiled and nodded.

  “We’ll take this back to the lab and see what’s what,” Pendleton said. He waded up to the dike, shook the mud off his shoes, and looked around him. Dwaizhou’s broad paddies and fields shone green and fertile in the morning sun. He inhaled the fecund scent of the rice crop, so different from the sterile smell of the corporate laboratory, so much richer.

  AgriTech, he remembered, had always bragged that it was “where the action is.” No, he thought, this is where the action is.

  And what would the boys in the office say if they could see me now? In my green Mao suit, little Mao cap, and rubber sandals? They probably wouldn’t give me a tee time on the company course.

  Gee.

  He decided to stop off at home for lunch, handed Old Zhu the beaker, and said he’d meet him at their makeshift lab later. The lab was actually pretty good. Nothing like AgriTech, but still pretty decent, all things considered, and he’d given Xao a shopping list to fill as time, money, and secrecy allowed.

  Pendleton walked along the dike, then along the road past the rabbit wood to his plain, tin-roofed, cinder-block dwelling on the brigade’s far edge. He found a bowl of cold rice with some fish in it, and a warm bottle of beer, and sat down at the plain wooden table.

  The food was good, the beer better, but he would be happy when Li Lan came home. Everything was better when she was there. Well, she should be home from the mountain any day now, any day.

  He shoveled down some rice and speculated about the nitrogen content in the Dwaizhou soil.

  Neal Carey steadfastly refused to eat. He sat on the kang in his dark monk’s cell not even looking at the bowl of rice that the monk brought in every day. He had a vague awareness of hunger somewhere in his body, but the pain and guilt more than drowned it. Li Lan was dead because of him. Pendleton was dead because of him. He wished the driver had thrown him off the cliff instead of carrying him to the remote monastery on the west slope of the mountain. He wished that Xiao Wu had killed him instead of Simms. He wished he were dead. He wouldn’t eat to keep himself alive.

  The monk opened the shutter of the window to let the noonday light in. How many days had it been, Neal wondered. Seven? Eight? How many days did it take to starve?

  “You must eat,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

  The English startled him and he looked up. Who spoke English on this damn mountain?

  Li Lan stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a white jacket and white pants. White ribbons held her hair in two braids. White, he recalled, was the Chinese color of mourning. Behind her stood an older man. The resemblance was startling, even though he wore a green Mao suit with a plain white armband.

  Neal blinked twice to try to clear the hallucination from his head. He understood that his subconscious was desperate to relieve the feeling of guilt, so it had produced Li Lan alive for him. But the vision didn’t go away. It stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the sunshine.

  Then he understood. It was not Li Lan, it was her sister. They were twins.

  “You must eat,” she repeated.

  He shook his head.

  “You used to like my cooking.”

  He looked up again.

  “I am alive,” she said. “So is Robert.”

  “I saw-”

  “My sister, Hong. My twin sister. When we were babies, Father and Mother tied blue ribbons in my hair and red ribbons in her hair to tell us apart.”

  Twins.

  “It was my sister who took you from The Walled City, my sister who came to you at Leshan and asked you to go home, my sister who made love with you.”

  Sister Hong. The actress.

  “She told me a story, about her sister killing her mother.”

  “She was talking about herself. She could never overcome her guilt. She found herself in the Buddha’s Mirror.”

  Neal felt the room spinning. “Why? Why did you do all this?”

  The older man stepped forward. “Mr. Carey, I am Xao Xiyang, Party Secretary for Sichuan Province. Lan’s father. Hong’s father. I am the responsible person in this matter.”

  Neal could only stare at him.

  Xao continued, “You must understand how desperately we need the expertise th
at Dr. Pendleton can offer us. You have never seen hunger, Mr. Carey. You have never seen starvation. I have seen both. I never want to see them again, no matter what the price.

  “When Lan began her relationship with Dr. Pendleton, I was overjoyed. I saw a wonderful opportunity, one that might never come again. As you know, I asked Lan to bring Dr. Pendleton into China. But such an operation was fraught with danger. Your own CIA, the Taiwanese, even our own government-especially our own government-would seek to prevent his defection at all costs.

  “You see, Mr. Carey, we are engaged in a desperate struggle for control in China, a struggle between the hard-line Maoists, who seek to reimpose tyrannical madness and backwardness on us, against progressive, democratic reformers. I need not tell you that I am numbered among the latter. I need not tell you it is imperative that we prevail in this struggle. The agricultural advances that Dr. Pendleton could provide may be a critical weapon in that struggle.

  “He who feeds China, Mr. Carey, controls China.”

  Xao paused for comment or agreement, but Neal remained silent.

  “We exercised every caution in our seduction of Dr. Pendleton. There were two factors that we did not predict: Lan actually falling in love with the man, and you. Lan shook you off easily in California, but we did not expect you to follow her to Hong Kong, which was the midpoint of the operation. We had to keep Pendleton in Hong Kong until our internal arrangements were complete. You were never supposed to leave San Francisco. The fact that you did was the fault of Lan’s local case officer, a certain Mr. Crowe. He failed to delay you, failed to deflect your search.”

  It’s all about making money now, Neal. Is that what Crowe said? Is that why he came so quickly to Mill Valley to pick me up?

  “Was it Crowe who tried to shoot me that night?”

  “No. To the best of our understanding, that would have been Mr. Simms. It appears now that Mr. Simms was working for our government, and he wanted Lan and Pendleton to make it into China, where I could be implicated along with them. He apparently mistook you for Pendleton, but the shot was intended to miss.