Chapter 19: Bells

Something brushed my foot, a rat, I think.

I stood still, just inside the doorway. It was as far as I had got. I watched the two great beams of timber, above my head and to my right. There was a gap there, where the balustrade along the second floor had broken away. The movement had been there, just now. I had seen it when I had come in.

They were everywhere, the rats. You heard them squeaking. It was winter, and they were desperate for shelter all over the town, desperate for food.

The movement had been just there, in the gap along the balustrade, or what I'd thought was movement. This was the door the abbot had shown me earlier. I could come in this way without disturbing the monks: I'd told him it was important to me, not to disturb them in their prayers, their daily life, and in part it was true. But he understood. It mattered more to me that I wasn't seen coming or going.

The moon was high in the south, its light slanting in rays through the breaks in the timber where the roof on that side had been destroyed; the rays were gray, substantial, like a milkness in water, because of the incense they burned in here, and the yak-butter lamps with their smoky wicks. I was used to the smell of this place; it was pungent, a presence; it only faded after I'd been back here for an hour or so.

Dpal Idan mgon po…

It was close on midnight, a time, I suppose, for the last prayers of the day. The chanting was not loud; it came from the big hall on the east side of the monastery, where the huge gilded Buddha sat, brought here from a gutted temple after the uprising, the abbot had told me.

Po spyan hdren na a…

Small bells rang at intervals. The chanting and the bells didn't worry me; the whole ruin was already alive with sound: in the intense heat of the sunshine during the day the timbers swelled, and at night cooled; their straining was as familiar and as particular to this place as its smell, and I was used to it. It was a kind of silence, and unfamiliar sound would alert me.

Movement again and I caught it but not in time to identify it before it was gone. I kept still, waiting for minutes, then took a step across the earth floor, sighting again from a new angle. At this point hallucination began, the eyes becoming jaded by the unchanging view, the mind presenting phantasmagoria for them to look at. I let them close and stood for minutes on end, clearing the images.

Perhaps it had been the same kind of illusion when I'd come in, the movement I'd seen, thought I'd seen. Or possibly there were owls here. It was time to go forward, find the first ladder and climb. Xingyu Baibing was in danger, here now; the police and the PSB had called in the military to help in the search and they'd set up roadblocks everywhere and soon they'd be beating on every door in the town, searching every building, house, hotel, temple, monastery.

Chong was waiting outside with the big Jeifang.

It had taken three hours to get here, moving overland and keeping clear of the roads and their intersections, coming up against terrain that wouldn't allow even the big truck across it, turning back a mile and going north again, keeping a watch on the lights flashing far in the distance.

'Little thing I learned from the CIA.'

We'd been bumping and rattling for nearly two hours since we'd left the jeep, over rocks that split under the weight of the front wheels and sent bright slivers flying through the moonlight. I was waiting for a tire to blow.

'How to make them?'

'Yes.' The little remote-control bombs. 'They were designed for automobiles and planes, but I've used them a few times on people. They're good. I call them people-boomers. I got a few bigger ones stashed away, building boomers. You need any, you tell me.'

He'd driven the military jeep half a mile and run it into a ravine deep enough to hide it from level sight. They'd see it all right from a chopper in the morning but we couldn't do anything about that; all we wanted was enough time to get to the monastery and take Xingyu Baibing to a new hide-out. There was no hope of getting him to the airport now.

We'd left the sergeant to the birds.

'He'll be picked to the bone inside of two hours from first light,' Chong said when he got back into the truck. 'There's a sky-burial site a couple of kilometres from here, that direction. The birds know where to come. Then, get a wind, the rest should be covered in silt, but the military are going to look for the bastard anyway, once they find the jeep.' He peeled some chewing gum. 'Did me a whole lot of good, you know? Drop in the ocean, sure, but I got a real kick out of looking at all that red in the moonlight, head coming off — did you see the head coming off? Kind of making a personal statement, lighting one little lamp in Tiananmen, you know the trouble with guys, I mean guys as distinct from gals? They're so fucking romantic. Glory of war, all that shit.'

I let him go on talking as we drove the big Jeifang north; he didn't want any answers, any questions. I was getting to know him; underneath the easy manner there was rage burning, in the name of Tiananmen.

'We got enough gas,' he said after a while, 'for maybe another fifty kilometres, this kind of ground, if the tires hold out, got two spares. Got food, I brought some army rations, canned stuff, last awhile, the two of you.'

Xingyu and myself. Chong would make his way back and report to Pepperidge and provide liaison.

I put my feet on the top of the dashboard to ease the muscles, head was all right, wasn't throbbing so much now in spite of the bouncing around. A crack had started in the windshield; this wasn't shatterproof glass. The whole truck was taking a beating and that couldn't last for ever, perhaps not even for fifty kilometres.

'What are the chances,' I asked Chong, 'of finding somewhere for him between here and the airport?' He knew the region better than I did, and I could be missing something.

He turned to look at me. 'We don't have any. We don't have any chances. Go south with him on board, we're just putting him into their hands.'

'North then,' I said, 'within fifty kilometres, what have we got?'

'Few farms. Few more monasteries, up in the hills. Yak herds, nomad camps, couple of mining sites.'

'They'll check all those. The military.'

'Bet your ass they will. They got choppers, go where they like, put troops down and beat the bushes.' A front wheel hit a rock and something smashed, I think a headlamp.

'Shit.'

I asked him if there were caves.

'Caves? You bet. Few hundred.'

'How big?'

He half-turned on the seat, interested. 'All sizes, I guess, but there'd be plenty with enough room for just two people, no crowding, you know? Some of them big as a ballroom. Sure, you could do that for a couple of days, maybe more if you had to.'

I thought about it. The objective for Bamboo was to fly Xingyu Baibing into Beijing, assuming the coordinator replacing Sojourner had managed to take over without any delay. But we couldn't do that now. All we could do was keep him from being flushed out and sent to Beijing and brainwashed and pushed in front of the cameras, the return of the prodigal son, penitent, reformed, an example to others who thought fit to impede the onward struggle for socialism.

'That's the plan?'

Chong was watching me, taking snatched glances away from the moonlit rocks ahead.

'There's nothing else,' I said, 'we can do.'

'Okay. Have to do it tonight, use the dark. That sun comes up, we're going to see a sky full of choppers looking for that fucking sergeant.'

That had been an hour ago, and now he was waiting outside the monastery with the truck. It didn't need two of us to fetch Xingyu Baibing.