by Ronan Frost
He looked through the contents.
There was nothing particularly interesting in it, a few credit cards, her driver’s license, a colorful fold of Nepalese rupees, and a slip of paper with his name and the Moonlight’s address on it. There was no husband’s photograph, no smiling children to look out of the billfold, or anything else incriminating.
He tossed the wallet onto the bed and crossed the room to the hotel phone. Zero dialed down to reception. “Hi, can you connect me through to the German embassy?”
“Of course, sir. One moment.”
After a couple of rings, a very crisp, clear Germanic accent told him, “Good morning. You’ve reached the German embassy in Nepal. How may I direct your inquiry?”
“Hi,” Rye said. “Could you put me through to Cressida Mohr, please?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Cressida Mohr? Dresses like she stepped out of the 1930s?”
“We have our fair share of those,” the receptionist said, and Rye could hear the smile in her voice. “But I’m afraid we have no one called Cressida here.”
He didn’t ask for a third time.
Rye hung up.
He pocketed the wallet and went in search of the others, not sure exactly what he was supposed to tell them.
He found Carter Vickers in the bar sipping a latte. He waved as Rye approached. “And where did you get to last night, young man?” he mocked, doing a passable impression of a wiseass parent catching his son creeping into the house after curfew. “You dirty stop-out.”
“We may have a problem,” he told him.
His demeanor changed instantly. “What?”
Rye explained the one-night stand and the fact his mysterious paramour wasn’t who she said she was. “It doesn’t need to be anything,” he said.
“But it could be,” Vickers finished for him. “Okay, we better tell Rask.”
Which wasn’t what he wanted to hear but was what he knew needed to be done.
They found the man in the middle of treatment; it was the first real sign of just how sick he was. Greg Rask sat immobile, tubes in his arms, eyes closed. Thelonious Monk’s soft jazz filled the room, but there was an extra set of notes playing free-form around his melody. They came from the machine. Rye didn’t understand what the machine was doing, though it appeared to be some sort of dialysis, where it took his blood from his body, purified it, and returned it to his veins. Rask looked properly sick for the first time.
Rask didn’t open his eyes.
“Mr. McKenna, Mr. Vickers, what can I do for you?”
“We’ve got a problem,” the thief said, but Rye amended it to, “Maybe.”
“Go on,” Rask said, still not opening his eyes, so Rye told his story again, explaining how he’d met the well-mannered German woman in the street and how she’d steered him away from the burning monk and helped him procure their equipment at the bazaar, and how her parting suggestion had been that he visit the monkey temple, then how they’d met again, later, drank a little too much, and ended up in bed.
“Which is all very human, and I can understand why you might feel some shame, or at least guilt, given your situation, Mr. McKenna, but hardly a problem,” Rask said.
“I found this.” He showed them Cressida’s wallet. “I tried to return it via the embassy where she said she worked, only they have no record of a Cressida Mohr on staff.”
Rask said nothing.
“It could be nothing,” Rye said. “A woman who picks up tourists, spins them a line to get laid, then moves on.”
“Or it could be something,” Carter said.
“She was asking questions,” Rye conceded. “Stuff like why was I here, were we heading into the mountains. It could all have been completely innocent. Faking an interest. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried to get someone else into bed by pretending to give a crap about what’s going on in their lives.”
“Or it could have been a fishing expedition,” the thief said, again offering counterpoint, which felt more and more believable the more Rye thought about it.
“Hence, we’re here. What do you want to do?” Rye asked.
Rask thought about it for a moment before making his mind up. “I will send Guuleed to find out who your nighttime caller was, and if necessary take care of her. In the meantime, we need to make arrangements to move. Assume the worst, hope for the best. If this German woman is part of this, that means she sent you up to Swayambhunath with the intention of seeing you dead. That possibility cannot be ignored. We must act accordingly until we know otherwise.”
“What do you want me to do?” Rye asked.
“Pack. Be ready to leave in a few minutes. I will have Iskra meet you in your room.”
“Where am I going?”
“Somewhere else. Right now, Cressida Mohr knows where to find you, that puts us at a distinct disadvantage. Once you are resituated, we shall regroup. With luck Mr. Byrne will have news for us before long.”
FORTY-THREE
And he did.
The call came through before Rye had left his room. Iskra Zima knocked once on the door and told him Rask requested his presence upstairs. He carried his few possessions with him, leaving the tangled sheets for the cleaners.
In the time he’d been gone, the medical paraphernalia had been packed away and a projector had been set up utilizing the room’s largest wall as a screen. Byrne’s face was a dozen times larger than life as it looked down on them. Carter Vickers was already lounging in one of the room’s plush armchairs. Vic was the only member of the team not in place.
“Proceed, Mr. Byrne,” Rask told the man as Rye took up a seat.
“Well, it wasn’t easy, but I got a hit eventually. I did what you suggested and followed the routes of the SS Ahnenerbe’s expedition from Sikkim, a border region, into Tibet itself. They traveled from Gangtok, through the Teesta River Valley and north, venturing into Lhasa, heading for Gyantse. What I found particularly fascinating about this leg of the expedition was that it was dedicated to the exploration of the ancient deserted capital, Jalung Phodrang, which immediately made me think of what we were looking for, a lost city. So, I focused my search here for a while, but came up empty. Records show the Ahnenerbe ventured on to Shigatse. But again, I came up empty-handed. As far as I can tell, the first expedition was purely an anthropological one, but what I didn’t know was that the SS had two concurrent expeditions running in the region at the time, and the second, a mountaineering one, headed by Heinrich Harrer, was set on the exploration of the Nepalese mountain ranges.”
“You found what they were looking for?” Rask asked.
“I did, indeed. The thing about the region is that even as recently as the ’80s it was still incredibly poorly mapped. The heights of summits were wrong, locations of mountains themselves misplaced by cartographers. But the Germans had near perfect maps made, and that proved a better starting point than randomly trying to overlay the reference points from the Blavatsky painting onto satellite imagery and photographs of the region looking for a match. What I found was that if I divided the Blavatsky dots into two, the ten pale ones and the other more pronounced ones, I got two separate matches. The ten match the approximate summits of various peaks in the range around Gangkhar Puensum—which isn’t in Tibet at all, but lies on the border between China and Bhutan, and is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. The name means White Peak of the Three Spiritual Brothers. I would have missed the connection without the old maps. The White Peak wasn’t measured until thirty-three years after Blavatsky’s death, and was so badly misplaced by those original maps the first expedition into the region couldn’t even find the mountain. To give you an idea about how bad those early maps were, some showed it miles away from where it actually is in Bhutan, placing it in Tibet. It has never been surveyed, and mountaineering is completely forbidden. Before the ban, no expedition succeeded in making the climb, either because of impassable terrain or freak weather conditions, almost as though the mountain did
n’t want to be climbed. Legend holds that the secrets of the white peaks are protected by phantoms that oppose and ultimately block any attempts to climb them. It’s a key location in numerous yeti sightings, ghostly apparitions of dead climbers and lost travelers; the recorded expeditions all claim to have experienced weird magnetic anomalies, seen strange lights in the night sky, and there are reports of numerous disappearances over the last century.”
“Which all make it perfect in terms of what we’re looking for,” Rask said.
“As does this,” Byrne said, and his face on the screen was replaced by a photograph of the mountain. “You see that?” he asked, and a ring appeared around a discoloration on the mountainside.
“What am I looking at?” Rask asked, leaning forward.
Byrne magnified the image. It lost some clarity, pixelating in the process, but it was obvious what they were seeing. The red-tiled rooftops of a monastery built on one of the highest ridges.
“Now this is where it gets interesting,” Byrne said, flipping the image and overlaying the darker dots of Blavatsky’s painting on the landscape. They lined up almost perfectly with the jagged edge of Gangkhar Puensum’s spine. “I’m willing to bet we won’t find a closer match anywhere in the one and a half thousand miles of the mountain range. This is where the map’s leading us. I’m absolutely sure of it. The deviations are just down to the fact that Blavatsky painted the mountain range without having ever been there. It’s remarkable, really.”
“And this is what the Ahnenerbe were looking for?” Rask asked.
“I’d say X marks the spot,” the space archaeologist said. “Now I know where to focus my attention, I shall analyze every frame of satellite footage I can find and look for any kind of clue as to what might be hidden beneath the mountain.”
“Good work, Mr. Byrne. Very good work.”
“Which is all well and good,” Rye said, “but you’re forgetting about the whole forbidden mountain thing. We can’t just walk up to it.”
“Ah, but that’s exactly what we can do,” Rask said. “Break the rules, then apologize later. It’s always easier that way.”
“Especially when someone is chasing you,” Carter added helpfully. “You notice the name? Three spiritual brothers. You think it’s a coincidence? We’ve killed the same man three times.”
“Not the same man,” the Russian corrected him. “Just someone with a very strong resemblance.”
“Like, oh, I don’t know, brothers? Three of them?”
“It’s not impossible,” said Rask.
“Says the man who thinks they are creatures from outer space,” Iskra Zima said, though this time it was gentle chiding, delivered with an almost tender smile.
“I am open to the possibility,” Rask said. “Especially when we are hunting for wisdom fallen from the stars.”
It was obvious this was an argument they had had many times, and would, god willing, have many more times. It was equally obvious that the Russian cared for Greg Rask. There was genuine affection in her gentle mocking. For his part, the dying man took it in the spirit it was obviously intended and was quite happy to play his part.
“So, we’re off to the mountains,” Rye said.
“You’re looking at almost thirty hours by car from where you are to the staging post at Jakar,” Byrne told them, changing the image on the screen again. “Then several days’ trek through inhospitable country to Bampura. There’s also a site—I’m going to call it a temple but that’s not really what it is, at least according to the few notes I’ve been able to find about the place. It was constructed by the Ahnenerbe. I’m going to send through coordinates. You might want to check it out. There are some pretty interesting stories about the place. And given its links to the Thule Society and Blavatsky, I’ve got a feeling the detour could pay off. It’s closer to Jalung Phodrang than the mountains, but not so far out of your way.”
“Want to enlighten us?”
“Not really. I don’t want to oversell the place. Better you see it for yourself.”
Rye nodded. “Given the fact we’ll be climbing to serious heights and risking serious altitude sickness if we ascend too quickly, it’s probably worth taking it slow and checking the place out. It’ll give our bodies more time to adjust.”
“Why can’t we just air drop you in?” the thief asked.
“To put it at its most basic, altitude sickness is no joke. The higher we climb, the less oxygen there is in the air around us. Once we’re up around the two-and-a-half-thousand-meter mark we’re in dangerous territory. If we ascend more than one thousand meters a day, we’re risking some serious problems; in the mildest cases it’s like having a hangover: Loss of coordination. Trouble walking. Headaches, nausea, dizziness. Aching muscles. Confusion.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“That’s the mildest case. You’re at risk from high-altitude pulmonary edema, which is a buildup of fluid in your lungs from the reactions of the air pressure on your body. With the fluid in your lungs, it becomes harder and harder to breathe. Your breathing gets wheezier and wheezier as you fight for each breath, until you’re coughing up a pink froth of sputum. This is life-threatening. Your blood can’t get the oxygen it needs. And normal medication isn’t going to help you. This is bad shit.”
“Got you.”
“The worst-case scenario, cerebral edema,” Rye said. “Fluid in the brain. That happens, you’re not coming back from it.”
“And this is all because we go up too quickly?”
“Yep. The only way to combat altitude sickness is acclimatization.”
“There’s no way to just fly in, grab the stone, and get out before it all goes to hell?”
“Do you know where the stone is?”
“Good point. Slow it is.”
“Wise move. But it doesn’t solve every problem we’re going to face on the mountain.”
“For some reason I didn’t think it would,” the thief said.
“Hypothermia is a very real possibility given the hostile weather. We’re going up through so many different temperate zones, that temperature drop is steep.”
“And that’s ignoring the spirits protecting the mountain,” Carter Vickers said.
“And the Bhutanese military, which are likely to shoot us in the back for trespassing on their holy mountain,” Iskra agreed.
“Sounds like a whole heap of fun,” the thief said.
No one argued with him.
FORTY-FOUR
Vic returned while they were packing up the equipment into the back of one of the two off-road vehicles Rask had sourced that morning. There was no denying the fact that money made the world go around, and Greg Rask stood slap-bang in the middle of its axis.
The big man had his fists buried in his pockets and a face like thunder.
As he approached Rye, he took his right hand out of his pocket and Rye saw his bloody knuckles.
“Defending my honor?” he asked, not too keen on hearing the answer.
“I was jumped in an alleyway near the embassy. Three of them. They should have brought more,” he said soberly. He flexed his fingers. “It got ugly.” The blood was proof of that. “They brought weapons, but weren’t prepared to use them properly. It was a warning rather than a murder. When a man isn’t prepared to end a fight but turns up with a weapon, it makes him vulnerable rather than strong. He is restraining himself. He isn’t fighting for survival. Now one of them, at least, won’t be able to chew his food for a very long time, and the other two will not forget our meeting in a hurry.”
“Thank you,” Rye said.
Vic shook his head, as though denying his thanks. “This place is ugly, Rye. There is an undercurrent here that reminds me too much of the country I left behind. It isn’t a civilized land, no matter what it looks like on the surface. That is just a veneer of civilization. There is a darkness here. Step out of line and it will drown you, no questions.”
Rye nodded. The fact that a man had to set himself on fire f
or his argument to be heard underlined just how barbaric so-called civilized society was in this place. “Did you find her? Cressida?”
“No, but I found the answers I was looking for even without finding her. The mugging wasn’t some random act of violence. They have our hotel under surveillance. They watched me leave the hotel, followed me, and waited until I was in a place where they could move without risk of being seen—or stopped—by passersby to make their move. It was professional. A lesser man would be in the ground now.” Rye didn’t doubt him for a moment. “I don’t know who your German woman is, but I have been around enough violence in my life to know that someone is playing with us. Word will get back to her that her men failed. The sooner we are away from here and in open terrain where we can see her coming, the better. I have no great fondness for pretending to be someone’s prey, but neither do I particularly enjoy hunting killers through streets crowded with women and children.”
“I’m sorry,” Rye said.
“Don’t be. It is not your fault. You are the victim here. The only person to blame for anything that has happened to you is the German woman. And I will make sure she faces the consequences of her actions, even if she is a woman, you have my word.” He raised his hand to his heart, his ruined knuckles emphasizing his promise in a way that went far beyond words.
“You’re a good man, Vic.”
“Not many people would call me that,” he said, with a grin, and stooped to lift the heaviest of the sacks with his bloody hand and heave it into the open tailgate. “Have the others left you to do all the hard work?”
“You don’t expect Carter to get his hands dirty, do you?”
“No,” the big man said.
“I heard that!” the thief called from somewhere not too far away.
“You were meant to,” Rye said, looking around for him. “Come on, it’s your stuff, too.”
It took ten more minutes to load the cars, distributing the equipment evenly across them, by which time Rask had emerged from the hotel. He leaned heavily on his nurse’s arm. Before Rye could ask, he raised a hand to forestall questions and told them, “Don’t worry, I am not foolish enough to try and make the journey with you. Mr. Byrne has assured me our communication lines will remain intact during most, if not all, of your journey, as they are satellite linked. I have merely come to wish you god’s speed, my friends. My life is in your hands, and I couldn’t ask for a finer bunch to fight in my corner. I’ll hold the fort while you go find me a miracle.”
