by Alex Archer
“In what way?”
“Let’s suppose he told me that if I ever showed my face in Katmandu again, he’d have me drawn and quartered.”
Annja smiled. “Sounds about right.”
“When Tuk told me that Tsing was involved I kept an even lower profile. Specifically, I flew to India and stayed there until I knew what was going on. Once you were off to Jomsom and Mustang, something didn’t feel right, so I flew back into the country, waiting for Tuk’s phone call.”
“But when it came,” Annja said, “we’d already crashed.”
“Exactly. By then, I didn’t much care if Tsing knew I was back. I went to him, prepared to offer a truce until I could find you, but he’d already chased you up to Jomsom. Or actually, I think he was chasing Hsu Xiao because she tried to poison him.”
“So, by the time all of this was happening, we were already at the fabled Shangri-La.”
“Yes, well, that does sound better than nuclear waste facility masquerading as a mystical land.”
Annja hefted her bag. “You ready to go?”
Garin rose. “Sure am.”
They walked out of the hospital together and the weather was spectacular. Annja took a deep breath and exhaled. Her body felt good. Not perfect, but really good. And well on the mend.
She felt rested. Better than in a very long time. “I’m looking forward to going home,” she said.
Garin smiled and handed her a plane ticket. “Here you go. It’s first class.”
“First class? What did I do to deserve this?”
“As if you didn’t know.”
Annja laughed. “What about you, Garin? Where are you off to now?”
“Ah, well, you know how it is. Lots of things to do and see. Lots of other activities to keep me busy.”
Annja looked at him for a moment. “Maybe someday you’ll stop doing whatever it is that you do.”
“Maybe,” Garin said. “And maybe someday you’ll stop what you do, too.”
“I don’t know if I can. The sword seems to have my destiny all mapped out but damned if I can fathom it.”
“We all have our destinies to play out, Annja,” Garin said. “But play them out we will. And maybe when they’re done and finished, we can actually live how we want to. You know, if you happen to believe in free will and all.”
“Free will,” Annja said. “That’s quite a concept.” She turned her gaze away.
“Looking for something?” Garin asked.
“I was hoping to see Mike. I haven’t seen him since the mountain. He left me a message saying something about his brain tumor, but then it got cut off and I never learned what was going on.”
“Maybe Mike’s got his own destiny to play out, too.” Garin smiled. “Remember, nothing’s ever quite what it seems, is it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Garin kissed her on the cheek. “Goodbye, Annja. I’ll be seeing you around. We won’t always be friends, but we won’t always be enemies, either. Remember that the next time you want to kill me.”
Annja looked at him for a long moment and then stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on his cheek. “You do the same.”
“I shall.”
She watched him walk away and vanish into the crowd. Annja never knew how such a large man could so easily disappear, but somehow he always did.
Annja looked around. She needed a taxi and then it was a trip to the airport followed by a long flight home. She wondered if they served ice cream sundaes on the plane?
A taxi sidled up next to her and she got in. “Airport, please.”
“Why the hell do you want to go there?”
Annja looked up and then saw the face of the driver. “Mike!”
He grinned at her. “Hey, kid.”
“What are you doing driving a cab?”
Mike nodded at her ticket. “You got time to take a ride? Maybe have a conversation about stuff?”
“My flight’s not for hours yet. I’ve got some time.”
“Good.” Mike eased out into the traffic and they drove through the congested streets of Katmandu. Gradually, the city limits fell behind them and they passed into more rural areas. Annja looked out of her window and watched the children playing soccer and laughing and running through the streets.
“What’s going on?” Annja asked.
“You’ll see,” he said.
He pulled over near the airfield where they’d been stowed aboard Tsing’s plane and switched off the cab’s engine. Then he got out of the car and leaned against the hood.
Annja followed him. “It’s great to see you again, you big lug.”
He hugged her and then set her back down. “Sorry, I haven’t been around. I had to take care of some things.”
Annja nodded. “I heard. Tuk said something about your cancer being in remission. That’s wonderful news! Congratulations.”
“Thanks. But it’s not in remission.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s gone. Completely.”
Annja felt her heart leap. “Even better! Wow, how did that happen?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t want you to get mad at me, okay?”
Annja backed away. “What is it?”
“I never had it to begin with.”
“What?”
Mike held up his hands. “Annja, hear me out—”
“You faked that? I was beside myself with grief for you and now you tell me it was all a lie? How dare you!”
“I had to lie, Annja.”
“Why in the world did you have to lie?”
“Because that was part of my cover.”
Annja frowned. “Cover? What cover? You’re a teacher, Mike. You don’t need a cover.”
“The teacher thing is my cover. The brain cancer was another facet of it. Together, they helped sell me.”
Annja shook her head. “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you’re a spook.”
“Guilty.”
Annja sighed. “How the hell did that happen? The last I heard you were doing great at your job and you had a great career.”
“I do have a great career. But it’s doing something other than teaching. The Agency uses me for a variety of unorthodox assignments, and the rest of the time I’m a mild-mannered teacher. It works out very well.”
“CIA?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look like a case officer.”
Mike smiled. “Not everyone who works for the CIA, works for the CIA, if you get my meaning.”
“I don’t.”
“The Agency uses a whole network of independent contractors. It goes back many years. In this country there is a network of people who can be called upon at any time to step up and take on assignments best handled by someone other than official CIA officers, even those deep-cover guys. So the Agency uses us and we’re sort of cutaway from the apparatus as a whole. It gives us better flexibility and more freedom to pursue what needs to be done without a whole bunch of hamstringing oversight.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t be upset with me, Annja. I feel bad enough that I had to get you involved in this. It’s all my fault that this happened to you and you got so banged up. But I needed you to come along or I never would have been able to sell it to Tsing.”
“Sell what to Tsing?”
Mike sighed. “For a long time now, the Agency has suspected that the Chinese have been dumping nuclear waste somewhere, but we never knew where. Some analysts thought it was a safe bet that they were dumping it at sea, but we’ve been watching for signs of that and never caught them doing it. That left either space or they were burying it.
“Now the Chinese have a fairly admirable space program, but they’re not anywhere ready to start shipping rockets full of waste to dump up there. So that left burying it.”
“Would they really do that?”
“China’s got more environmental waste than almost any other country on the planet, including us, if you can believe that.”<
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“I don’t know if I can.”
Mike continued. “We’d heard rumors about a construction project that happened over near Mustang, but we never had a solid lead to follow until a few weeks ago. One of the contractors offered a map of the area on the black market.”
“A map? That one you had that supposedly showed the way to Shangri-La?”
“The same. Of course, Tsing tried to buy it back, but the dealer said no way. We heard about it and the Agency figured I would have the best chance of acquiring the map.”
Annja shook her head. “Wait—why would Tsing need to buy back a map to a place he already knew all about? Didn’t he help build it?”
“He sure did. But he wanted the map so he could make sure it was off the market. He didn’t need it per se, it was just his attempt to contain an information leak.”
“But why go to him for the fifty thousand you needed to buy the map? Couldn’t the Agency just front you the cash?”
Mike frowned. “No, Tsing was too well connected in Chinese Intelligence to ever believe that I had the capacity to finance the map purchase. If the Agency fronted me the money, Tsing would have known who I was immediately and just had me killed.”
Annja sighed. “I’m still confused as to why Tsing even brought us before him and told you that he was interested in finding Shangri-La. What was that all about?”
“The code name for the supposed location of the nuclear waste facility we had learned about was always Shangri-La. The contractor who put the map on the market called it that, after what the Chinese planned to name the place.”
“So, a dual-meaning sort of thing, huh?”
“To Tsing, I was just a history teacher looking for the fabled location of the real Shangri-La. In his mind, he was going to get the map back. In my mind, I was working to ascertain the exact location of a nuclear waste facility built and operated by the Chinese government. Three layers of duplicity, I guess you could say.”
“And one very confused Annja Creed.”
“Welcome to the intelligence world.”
“No, thanks.” Annja turned away. “What happened to the facility, anyway? I haven’t seen any mention of it on the news.”
“That’s because there hasn’t been any.”
“How in the world could they possibly keep that a secret?”
Mike shrugged. “They had help.”
“Who?”
“Uncle Sam.”
“We helped them? Why the hell would we do such a thing? They damn near contaminated an entire country. The world deserves to know what happened.”
“Things aren’t that black and white anymore, Annja. The cold war’s over and we live in a new world now. Enemies aren’t always enemies. Friends aren’t always friends. About the best we can manage now is a sort of gray relationship where hopefully we all get along and manage to keep the world spinning.”
“So we helped them keep the lid on this?”
“More than that, we helped them clean it up.”
“Clean it up?”
“Turns out their containment structure is pretty amazing. It kept most of the gloop inside where it needed to be. The Shangri-La structure atop the waste box simply fell in and vaporized or whatever.”
“But all that radiation…?”
“Currently being piped to a new treatment facility. One we’re helping the Chinese build so they do it right.” Mike shrugged. “It ain’t a perfect world, Annja, but it’s pretty much the only one we’ve got.”
“And what about me?” Annja asked.
“What about you?”
“I ate a peach off one of the trees in the land we were in. So am I going to get radiation poisoning?”
“Nope.”
“You say that so positively.”
“I am positive. You weren’t exposed to any radiation. Nothing showed up on your tests.”
“What tests?”
Mike smiled. “The ones you took while you were in the hospital.”
“I don’t remember those tests.”
“Blood work, mostly,” Mike said. “I had my friends check you out to make sure there was no lasting damage to you. You’ll be sore from your other injuries, but otherwise, you’re good to go.”
Annja frowned. “And what if I don’t feel like keeping what happened here a secret? What if my conscience demands I tell people about it?”
Mike scowled. “Then I’d have no choice but to let my superiors know about that incredible sword of yours.”
Annja stopped. “You’re blackmailing me?”
“It’s not blackmail, Annja. It’s just an agreement. We help each other here. You don’t get hassled by the government and you keep quiet about that thing you witnessed. Everybody makes out just perfectly.”
“What about Tuk? He saw the same things I saw.”
“Tuk’s not a problem. He’s being paid a handsome annuity to stay quiet. And he says he wouldn’t say anything, anyway.”
Annja stayed quiet for a moment. “All right.”
Mike clapped his hands. “Great. Thanks, Annja.”
“So, answer me this. How did the Chinese know about Tuk? And how did they find all those people to look like him? He really thought they were his long-lost tribe.”
“Hsu Xiao reported Tuk to Vanya and they figured it out from there. As for the workers, they’d been carted in from a small village in southwestern China. Turns out everyone there is that size and no one really knows why. Who knows, maybe that’s where Tuk is really from.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” Annja said. “Vanya killed them all.”
Mike nodded. “One of the tragedies of this whole thing.” He pointed at the cab. “We should get going.”
Annja slid into the cab and rested her head back against the seat. The enormity of what Mike was asking her to do was something she would have to reconcile on her own time.
Mike started the engine and drove back out onto the street. “Look, I know it might take you a while to get through what I’m asking you to do, but I’ve got something that might take your mind off of that.”
Annja almost laughed out loud. “And what, pray tell, is that?”
Mike tossed something into the backseat. Annja picked it up and saw that it was a laminated map. She unfolded it. After a moment, she looked back up. “Is this what I think it is?”
Mike nodded. “Yep.”
Annja smiled. “I don’t know if I should go looking for another Shangri-La so soon after this one.”
“Annja, this is the real thing! Honest! I got this map from a friend of mine who swears the real Shangri-La is in the Kunlun Mountains. Hey, it’s better than the Himalayas, right? Not nearly as cold there. Well, maybe it is cold there, too, but you know…”
Mike kept talking, but Annja just stared out the window. She was headed to the airport, that much was certain.
But beyond that, she had no idea.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8840-3
FALSE HORIZON
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jon Merz for his contribution to this work.
Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
