Dragon Bones (45 page)

The rocky ceiling lowered even farther. If it got much tighter, he’d have to abandon the lamp and do this blind. If it got much tighter than that, he wouldn’t be able to make it through at all.

The people below had gone home, and it was just the four of them now: Hulan, Michael, Su, and Hom. She still had her weapon, and it was loaded, but she could see that Su had his service revolver, and for all she knew Michael had Hom’s. But every time she tried to focus on how to disable the two men without getting killed herself, Michael interrupted her thoughts with his persistent and increasingly personal conversation.

“How many times has your husband gotten you into dangerous situations?” he asked.

“I’ve gotten myself into things that were dangerous.”

Michael considered this, then said, “Your husband led you to your father’s hiding place. Your father would have killed you.”

But David had taken the bullet for her.

She stayed beside Hom and put her hand on his chest. She wanted him to know she wasn’t leaving. To Michael she said, “You’ve researched my life, but so what? Any fool can find my life history. A search on the Internet, a day reading newspaper clippings….”

Michael ignored her words. He stood and gracefully stretched his arms above his head, then brought his hands down to the small of his back and stretched again. He crossed over to her and hunkered down so that they were eye to eye. “And what man who loves a woman would let her go into a factory of death?”

Yes, the terrible deaths at the Knight factory, but Michael didn’t know the truth of that day either.

“I went in there against his wishes.”

“That man has no sensitivity to our culture—”

“It is not
your
culture—”

“If he’d opened his eyes, he would have known you weren’t safe. He would have protected you,” Michael wheedled.

“I’ve protected myself—”

“You’ve protected your heart.”

“You’re trying to exploit my weaknesses just as you’ve abused the weaknesses of the people, but it won’t work.”

But even as she contradicted him, she knew that he’d hit the core truth about her. She didn’t deserve happiness. She had never been strong enough to protect the people she loved, whereas the real Liu Hulan had loved so much that she’d been willing to lay her life down to save an entire village.

“Actually,” Michael said, as though reading her thoughts, “you would let your body go in a minute. That is why you have always put yourself into positions where you could die.”

“I’m not brave. If you knew anything about me, you’d know that.” She looked down at Captain Hom and squeezed his shoulder. “But this man is a hero, and he’ll be remembered as a martyr when you’re revealed as a fraud—a foreign one at that.”

Michael’s eyes flashed angrily. Could she provoke him into making a mistake? Again he seemed to read her mind, because with the grace and speed of a
qi gong
master he’d grabbed her gun and tucked it into his belt even before she could begin to react. Then he motioned to Officer Su, who set down his sponge, picked up an ax, and in two brutal motions chopped off both of Hom’s feet. Hulan heard Hom’s muffled screams through his gag. Su looked at Michael, who motioned for his underling to put the ax on the stone platform next to Hulan. She wasn’t sure if he was tempting her to pick it up or warning her that her end was inevitable.

Michael resumed his niggling. “You marry this David Stark, but you don’t really love him.”

“Of course I do.”

Michael shook his head knowingly. “The man loves you— anyone can see that—but you don’t love him with your whole heart. Your heart is a fortress against happiness.”

In spite of herself, Michael’s dime-store babble was getting to her. She broke eye contact with him and looked down at Hom. “You can’t know what’s in my heart.”

Hom’s eyes were glassy. His skin, which had always looked jaundiced and unhealthy, was even more depleted, wrinkling as the life ran out of him.

“Your husband gave up so much to be with you—his homeland, his career, his happiness. You can’t do that to a man.”

“I tried to make him happy.”

“But you failed. You failed in the one way a woman must never fail.”

She turned back to Michael. His smile was beautiful, and his skin glowed in the candlelight. “Yes, Hulan, I’m talking about your daughter.”

“How do you know about her?”

“You were after us, Hulan. It was important for me to know everything about you.”

Hulan knew what she was dealing with now. Michael Quon was not a psychopath. He’d gotten to this point with the cold and deliberate plotting of a mathematical mind.

“You should have done more,” he said. “You should have protected her.”

She’d been trained never to be tricked into giving personal revelations, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I did everything I could.”

“Why didn’t you take her to the hospital sooner? Did you not want to make a fuss because no girl child is worth it?” He paused, then recited, “‘When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.’”

Hulan could almost hear her father grinding those words into her as a child. “I never thought that way about Chaowen.”

“No, because you’d been too corrupted by the West,” he said in a mocking voice. “You probably thought the whole world was open to her.”

Why didn’t he just kill her and get it over with?

“You’re a thoughtful person, analytical in your own way,” Michael continued. “Think about that night. Were you embarrassed that your daughter was sick?”

Each word he spoke smashed deeply into Hulan.

“Were you afraid people would think you weren’t a good mother?”

Her heart ached and she felt utterly defenseless, yet something strange was happening. She was beginning to relive those last days. She was seeing them as they were, not as her grief had warped them.

“Did you delay in going to the hospital because you didn’t want people to see you fail again?”

“That’s not what happened,” she said. And it wasn’t. Instead of tormenting her, the truth was beginning to feed her strength. “Everything that could have been done for my daughter was done.”

“But you
could
have done more,” he pressed. “You
could
have taken her to America—”

That thought had been looping in her head for a year. If only they had moved to Los Angeles earlier, Chaowen might never have gotten sick. If she had, she might have had better medical care. But here in this cave, at what Hulan supposed was the end of her life, she finally understood that those were only wishes that could never be known or fulfilled. She had done everything humanly possible to save her daughter.

Hulan noticed that Michael was speaking again.

“When she died, you got what you think you’ve always deserved—an empty heart.” He spoke his conclusion triumphantly, not realizing that he’d failed in his task. His ignorance was an advantage Hulan could exploit. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. Open yourself, Hulan, join me. Not as a follower, but as an equal. Think what we could do together.”

She almost had to laugh. How could he think that his flirting these last couple of days had meant anything to her? There was a big difference between being flattered by a man’s attentions and giving up her moral center to him.

“Some people deserve happiness. Some people earn it. You’ve earned it, Hulan.”

“Maybe living righteously doesn’t deserve a reward.” She knew the truth now, and it gave her the fortitude to fight for her life.

“But what about those who do wrong?” As he spoke, Hulan realized that, for all of his supposed awareness, Michael Quon was completely blind to the things he didn’t want to see. “Don’t you think Lily deserved punishment for the things she did?”

“She was not an honest person, but she didn’t deserve to die.”

“Mankind has come to believe in science and the exactness of math,” he offered thoughtfully. “For every action there is a reaction, and all that. But maybe the ancients had it right when they trusted in karma, fate, and getting your just deserts. Certainly you’ve seen people who deserved the worst but received no punishment.”

Hom was dead now. Within arm’s reach was the ax that Su had used. The thing was covered with bits of flesh and blood, but she could also see that the blade was made of some type of chiseled stone, which had been strapped to a wooden handle.

Quon answered her question before she asked it, just as he had last night at dinner. “It’s a chime,” he explained. “White jade is the strongest stone in the world, and it makes a clean cut. Every one that Brian stole and Lily put up for sale I bought and brought back to its rightful place.”

“But not for its rightful use,” she pointed out. “It was supposed to make music, not be an instrument of torture and death.”

He ignored the comment and asked, “Where’s the rest of it, Hulan?”

“What?”

“The chimes. I’ve been looking for the rest of the set.” His eyes glittered in anticipation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I choose to believe you,” he said mildly. “In that case, give me the journal.”

“I don’t keep one.”

“But Brian did. Once I knew you had it, our path together was clear. You can help me find the rest of—what is it, Hulan?—a tomb or a treasure chamber?”

What had been right in front of her these last years as she’d tracked the activities of the All-Patriotic Society finally dawned on her. “Your travels, Michael, I understand them now,” she said. “You went to ancient sites along the Yellow River. Then you came to the Yangzi. The Society’s growth mirrored your journey and you used the watershed of the rivers to proselytize.”

He stared into her eyes, and she stared back, reading the calculation in his. Should he respond to her? A subtle shift deep within him signaled his decision, and her courage expanded yet again.

“You hear so much about the Yellow River as the birthplace of Chinese civilization,” he said at last, “but we know people traveled. We know that Yu came this far south. I first came here because I was following his legend—through poetry and art, then myth, and finally fact.”

“To see the nine provinces. To see the places where Yu stopped the floods. And you found more followers.”

“So much had to do with planting seeds,” he admitted, and Hulan felt another surge of hope. She could draw him out. She could distract him. He traced something that looked like a maze in the dirt between them.

“Do you know what this is?”

She shook her head.

“Ha!”

She looked at him squarely. “I never pretended to be anything other than ignorant.”

“I never lied to you, Hulan. You should know that. But I did omit a few things. I told you that I loved puzzles as a boy and that I liked Yu’s mathematical game. It was nothing special really, but I got hooked on the man. I even used his map as my company logo. When I came to China four years ago, I began searching in my own way to find my
purpose.
As I told you last night, I wasn’t going to fit in with organizations back home, not even the Committee of 100. I am a very rich man, yet I will always be seen as an outsider in America because of my race.” He leaned forward and confided, “You understand that. Being an outsider in your homeland is one of the things that binds us.” Then he relaxed and resumed his story. “But it’s all a process and, as you said, I began following Yu’s landmarks of the nine provinces. The next year I began making speeches as Xiao Da.”

“You began to believe your own propaganda.”

“Xiao Da has been an invigorating experience. He brought me closer to Da Yu.”

Quon spoke now of the transition from looking at arbitrary sites to something much more focused. “The most successful emperors understood the power of symbols. I knew that by bringing the past to the present I could consolidate the people, but what would our symbol be?”

He realized that the key to his grip on the multitudes lay in the mythology of the past. Mao Zedong had understood this very well when he’d said, “Make the past serve the present.” When Catherine Miller began talking about the missing ninth tripod, Quon was convinced he was following the right course, because even the conniving Lily had been caught up in its mythology, though all historical evidence said it couldn’t possibly be in the Yangzi. But Brian had tired of the game and, to avoid Lily’s nagging, found solace in caving.

“He invited me along, because I’m, well, I’m Michael Quon— inventor of VYRUSCAN. The first time we entered this cave it was like going back to the mother. You smell it, don’t you, how this place is alive?”

To Hulan these caves had always reeked of something moldy and rotting. Now she watched as Quon reached up, sank his fingers into the roof of the cave, and came away with a spongy mass, which he handed to Su. The officer took the blob, dipped it into one of the blood-filled buckets, then began coating Hom’s body with his own drained fluids.

“Last summer,” Quon went on, as though nothing had happened, “Brian and I explored a lot of caves. I showed him this one.” He tilted his head deprecatingly. “I told him who I was. He became a convert, and I have to say he was very helpful. He did extra research on Da Yu, which I incorporated into Xiao Da. Brian gave me entire passages from the
Shu Ching
to use in my sermons, knowing they would speak to the people on an atavistic level. He came up with some of our better chants. ‘You can’t stop the river from flowing’ and ‘The river brings us life’ were his. Then the kid falls in love. I granted him religious power and he turned it down for a piece of ass.”

Hulan wished Xiao Da’s followers could hear him now.

“Maybe he had doubts about what you were doing.”

Quon shrugged off the idea. “I came back to Bashan this year after I bought my first chime from Cosgrove’s, because I knew Brian had hit pay dirt, so to speak. But Brian would no longer talk to me. He had a secret and he wouldn’t reveal it no matter what I offered him, not even money. I had to wonder why. So I kept exploring. I found the tunnel into the guesthouse and the life of this cave. While these things have served me well, they were not what I was looking for. Meanwhile, Lily continued to put up for auction some very interesting pieces. She also sold privately through Cathay Antiquities. I bought discreetly. Only I could see what the others didn’t—these pieces had all come from the same source, and her primary source within China was Brian.”