The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (9 page)

Evy seemed hurt again. “You felt you could confide in your uncle, and not your parents? We have to trust each other, Alex—we can’t keep hurtful secrets. This is not how a proper family behaves.”

Alex’s eyes widened; he grinned mirthlessly. “Proper family? We may be related, but we haven’t been any kind of family, in a long, long time, much less a ‘proper’ one.”

He shook his head and quickly climbed out of the booth.

From his vantage point at the bar, Jonathan saw this and followed Alex up the stairs and out past the doormen and onto the street, a world crammed with steaming food carts, rickshaws, pimps, beggars, and club hounds. The boy moved through the exotic bustle and his uncle clambered after him.

“Alex!
Wait . . .”

Alex turned slowly and faced his uncle.

“You need to give your folks a chance, my boy. You’ve thrown them quite a curve . . .”

The boy shook his head, waved his arms. “They
never
change, Uncle Jon! You know what sort of discovery I’ve just made, and how do they react? They still treat me the same—like I’m ten years old!”

“Be fair—you caught them by surprise. And you weren’t exactly supposed to be here now, were you?”

Alex sighed. “What the hell are they
doing
in Shanghai? Don’t you think it’s a little strange that they show up, just as I’m about to make my mark?”

Jonathan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I understand. Your parents
do
throw a long shadow . . .”

“Are you kidding? More like a total eclipse . . .”

Jonathan squeezed his nephew’s shoulder. “Come back inside, my boy. I’ve got some champagne on ice—to hell with Coca-Cola. Have a couple of glasses of the bubbly, and trust your old uncle—you
will
feel better.”

But Alex only shook his head. “Sorry, Uncle Jon. Not tonight. Rain check.”

And he turned and stalked off and was soon swallowed in the late-night throng.

Moments later, Evelyn and Rick O’Connell burst from the club onto the neon-drenched street.

O’Connell was right behind his wife, who was livid.

“This is all your fault!”

“My
fault?” O’Connell shook his head in disbelief. “You’re the one who constantly smothered that boy—couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes without wiping his nose.”

She wheeled and got in her husband’s face. “Maybe I was overcompensating for the fact you never took any real interest in your son’s life.”

O’Connell’s eyes popped. “Are you kidding? His life has
always
been my top priority. Do you have any idea how many times I stopped him from breaking his damn-fool neck?”

She put her fists on her hips. “Perhaps with a little warmth and encouragement, he might not have felt the need to show off for you. A little fatherly support would have gone a long way.”

“Well . . . it was implied.”

They said nothing for several long moments, just standing facing each other, mutually flummoxed, with the Chinese doormen as mute observers.

Finally Evy, shaking her head, said, “We’ve spent the better part of our lives finding priceless artifacts, you and I . . . and now the one thing that’s most precious to us, we’ve lost.”

O’Connell could say nothing to that.

Evy sighed. “We should never have sent him away to Australia.”

Shrugging, O’Connell said, “He was fourteen! How were we supposed to keep him safe, with bombs blitzing London, and Nazis swarming Cairo? What other choice did we have?”

She considered that, then asked, “Is that really true?”

“Well, of course it is.”

“Or is that just what we tell ourselves, to make it all right that we went off adventuring again?” She shook her head again, determination mingling with frustration edged with sadness. “I will not allow Alex to become some stranger in framed pictures on our mantel.”

O’Connell drew in a deep breath, and then let it out. “Okay. So how do we fix this?”

“Frankly . . . I am not really sure. But I do know one thing.”

“What, Evy?”

Her eyes met his and they were alone on the bustling street of neon-streaked Shanghai.

She said, “We need to do it together.”

He swallowed and nodded and slipped an arm around her, and led her back inside the nightclub.

Neither of them was aware that from the shadows of the alley across the street, a tall, formidable-looking Chinese woman in her thirties in a slit-up-the-side silk dress—her lovely face marred by a scar—had been watching them with much more than casual interest.

 
4
 

Eye Opening

China—General Yang’s Training Camp

U
nder a high, hot sun, an orderly arrangement of yurt-style tents encircled the sprawling ruins of an ancient Ming temple; carts of ammunition and weapons and other military gear were neatly stacked at various key points.

Nearby, platoons of Chinese mercenaries in gray uniforms representing no modern nation—bearing the insignia of Emperor Er Shi Huangdi’s three-headed dragon—were engaged in a variety of training exercises, including target practice and close-order drill, displaying a precision that indicated these endeavors had been going on for quite some time now.

Through the training field rumbled a chauffeured jeep with a general in back, who received salutes from officers as the vehicle passed. This was General Yang, who also represented no nation, other than that of his own ambitions, his rank self-bestowed. A tall, slender yet round-faced man with thinning dark hair and a trim goatee, Yang had the intensity and intelligence of a real general, and the hard cold eyes of a genuine sociopath.

Half an hour later, Yang was studying a map at his desk in the strategy room he’d had equipped within the crumbling Ming temple, a large banner with the three-dragon emblem draped behind him. Through a ruined doorway, an officer entered, but not just any officer: a beautiful woman, who made the crisp gray uniform, black-leather-trimmed cap and black leather boots seem fashionable.

And not just any beautiful woman, either, but Choi, the scar-faced beauty who had positioned herself in a dark alley across from the Imhotep’s nightclub to gather intelligence on Alex, Rick and Evelyn O’Connell.

She was here to report on her spy duties, standing before the desk and giving a razor-sharp salute before saying in Mandarin,
“The O’Connells are indeed in Shanghai.”

“The parents and the boy?”

“Yes, General. They assembled at the club owned by the O’Connell woman’s brother, a fool named Jonathan Carnahan.”

He gave her the cold, blank stare that was his response to good news, bad news and everything in between.
“Do they have the Eye?”

“They do, General.”

This news brought a remarkable response from the stone-faced general: a tiny, curt smile.

“Then our hour is at hand,”
he said.
“Call the troops to order.”

In minutes, General Yang was standing on the steps outside the crumbling temple to address his seventy-five mercenaries-turned-zealots, in perfect formation and supervised by the lovely woman with the scarred face, Colonel Choi.

His head was up, as he said in Mandarin,
“Soon all of our training, all of our sacrifice, will bear fruit.”
He gestured downward.
“Out of this soil soaked with the blood of centuries, we will raise our emperor once more.”

All eyes were on the general, his men as motionless as the Emperor’s terra-cotta warriors.

Yang continued:
“We will
live
for him . . . and
die
for him . . . until China is again the most powerful nation on earth, as it was two thousand years ago. We will fulfill the vision of Er Shi Huangdi and rule the world.”
His eyes traveled along the rows of soldiers.
“Tonight, we few will summon the might. Tonight, our great battle begins!”

Choi nodded permission to the troops to respond, and they did, cheering wildly and firing their weapons in the air in the ecstasy known only by true fanatics.

Neons of blue and orange and yellow and white were further illuminated by bursts of firecrackers and small rockets as the white Bentley—Jonathan Carnahan’s prized possession—crawled in heavy traffic down a major Shanghai thoroughfare.

The cars were mostly American, but this traffic consisted of both tourists and natives, and was more than automotive: bicycles and rickshaws and horse-drawn wagons mingled with revelers on foot, who claimed the rain-slicked street on this New Year’s Eve as their own.

Rick O’Connell rode shotgun as Jonathan drove, if this snail’s pace could be calling “driving,” and Alex and Evelyn were in the back. The little group was spruced up even beyond the fancy attire of the night before at Imhotep’s: O’Connell and Jonathan in black tie, Alex in a white dinner jacket, Evy in a pink backless satin grown with lush white furs wrapped around her shoulders.

O’Connell watched as a rickshaw, drawn by a wrinkled prune of a man, passed them by. “We’d do better if we hired
him,”
O’Connell said with a nod to the old boy.

Jonathan was smiling, though, casual at the wheel. “Chinese New Year—you have to love it.”

“No,” O’Connell said, “I don’t.”

But Jonathan, beaming, burbled blithely on. “God, I adore this country—they have all these extra holidays and drinking is virtually
mandatory
. . . a bar owner’s dream!”

In the rearview mirror, O’Connell saw Evy reaching to take her son’s hand, but the father’s eyes caught the mother’s and warned her not to. Alex was in no frame of mind to be coddled, and O’Connell knew it, and Evy got the point—she withdrew her gloved hand.

But she couldn’t contain her pride in her offspring, saying to him, “I can’t believe we’re on our way to see your first big discovery—it’s so exciting!”

Rather sullenly, as he looked out the window at the revelers and the colorful goings-on, Alex said, “After last night, I’m surprised you even want to see it at all.”

Now Evy caught her husband’s eyes in the rearview mirror and her look told him to say something positive to their grown-up child.

“Are you kidding, Alex?” O’Connell said. “We wouldn’t miss it.”

Evy smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

Then O’Connell shrugged and said, “Anyway, we have a package to drop off at the museum.”

Evy frowned at him in the rearview mirror.

Alex smirked sourly.
“I
get it—
my
life and
your
mission just happen to intersect, so why not throw the kid a bone?”

O’Connell sought Evy’s eyes again and saw his wife was rolling them in “Oh, brother” mode. He had once again stuck his foot in it . . .

“Son, that’s not what I meant . . .”

Jonathan, who was more attuned to this conflict than he let on, changed the subject. “Listen, I’ll pick you up in an hour and we’ll go out and celebrate the New Year in style. What do you say?”

Evelyn frowned at the back of her brother’s head. “Aren’t you going, Jonathan?”

“My dear darling sister, I have seen enough mummies to last a lifetime. Make that a thousand lifetimes. And besides . . .” He nodded to the left. “. . . my favorite watering hole in Shanghai is just around the corner.”

O’Connell made a face at his brother-in-law. “Jonathan, you already own your own bar.”

“Ah yes,” Jonathan said, pulling in at the portico of the massive museum, whose lights were mostly off, “but what fun is it running up a tab on yourself?”

Soon, Alex had led his parents into the rotunda of the museum, where the formality of the marble floor and massive, arched stained-glass windows were at odds with the work in progress. Crates of artifacts were stacked against the walls, and repair scaffolding lined either side of the vast chamber; a desk, presumably Roger Wilson’s, was scattered with books and other research materials.

The Emperor’s memorial, discovered in the crypt of the tomb, resided under worklights in the midst of the rotunda, scaffolding forming an L around the monument’s platform. Almost as attuned to museum restoration as his highly trained wife, O’Connell could tell that the chariot, horses and cortege wagon—as well as the bronze statue of the Emperor himself—had been cleaned up considerably since his son discovered them.