Thugs rje hdul dang dbang…

I crossed the earth floor and climbed the ladder. If there had been movement, if it hadn't been an errant flicker of hallucination, I would find out what it was at close range. The first ladder had a tilt to the left, and I put my feet on the other side, testing the rungs. This was the ladder the monks used, Bian the guard and his replacement; they brought water from the reservoir, and food, and changed the sanitary bucket. It was a good strong ladder, and the tilt didn't worry me. It was something else that worried me.

I stopped climbing and let the data come in, the chanting and the bells and the moonlight and the scent of the incense and the lamps, the feel of the rough wood under my hands, while the primitive brainstem signalled the nerves, opening the pupils by a degree, stimulating the olfactory sensors, turning the tympanic membranes to sweep the environment for unfamiliar sounds, sensitizing the tactile nodes of the fingers and palm, returning me to the ancient status of the animal in the wild seeking the means for survival, the skin crawling now and the hairs lifting on the scalp because of the scent I'd detected, strange and sweet and unfamiliar here, perhaps dangerous.

I couldn't identify it, couldn't find the key, the association with other things, other environments where I'd smelted this scent before. I waited, standing still on the ladder, and let the mind range on its own, taking slow breaths to present the stimulus. Nothing came. Nothing came and I climbed again, watching the long gallery on the second floor, watching the gap where the timbers had fallen during the fire, watching for movement.

Ldna na… Dpal ldan mgon po…

My boot scraped a splinter from a rung of the ladder and I heard it fall, because it was silent here in this huge derelict place, with a silence beyond the chanting and the bells and the creak of the beams as the cold contracted them, a silence in which all I could consciously hear were unfamiliar, unexpected sounds, the animal brainstem tuned to them, and this was good, this was as it should be, the senses taut, alert beyond the norm; but I was not reassured. There was still something else, other than the strange sweet unfamiliar scent, that was causing the gooseflesh, lifting the hair on the scalp.

Screech of a night bird somewhere and I felt the sweat springing, saw lights for an instant leaping against the dark as the nerves were fired.

I stopped moving, absorbed the shock, climbed again. Still something else, but I was beginning to know that its source wasn't physical, sensory. Information was shimmering at a level of awareness beyond the conscious, as subtle as the trembling of a web, and it was bringing fear into my spirit, bringing desolation.

But let us not, my good friend, lend ourselves overmuch to the imagination: the organism is under stress, and prey to fancy. Let us rather climb to the gallery and find things out.

You know it's true. It's not just your imagination.

Yes, but what can I do about it, for God's sake?

The ladder gave a little when I reached the top; one of the rawhide straps had worked loose, but no matter, I was safe enough, I was on the gallery and this was where the movement was, the one I had seen from below. It was a colored rag, hanging across a strut of timber and moving very slightly in a draft of air; it must have dropped from the floor above, and caught across the rough woodwork. I hadn't noticed it the first time I'd come; perhaps it hadn't been there.

Po spyan hdren na a…

Faint now, the voices below, the muted tinkling of the bells. What were they praying for down there where the great gold Buddha sat with his fat stomach and his enigmatic smile? For peace on earth and goodwill to all men? For a brave new China and the blessings of democracy? For the sergeant down there across the trackless wastes, or perhaps for Dr Xingyu Baibing, the new messiah? Let them pray for him, above all pray for him.

Screech of that bloody bird, enough to scare the wits out of you as they say, I suppose it was one of those that wheeled and dived across the burial site that Chong had spoken of, as I'd seen them doing in Bombay, and there's a euphemism for you, sky-burial, a pretty thought but what it means when you get down to it is that you leave your dear ones out there under the sky and those bloody birds come down and pick at them, taking chunks of flesh in their great hooked beaks and flying off with them, plundering the dead I would rather call it, the flesh tearing under the talons — nor is it the time, though, to be morbid, no, I take your point, standing here on the gallery with the sweat seeping along the skin and the hackles raised and the fear of Christ in me because of that strange smell and the intelligence that informed my spirit that something had gone wrong here in the monastery tonight, horribly wrong.

Chapter 20: Dawn

'The subject has been seized.'

I waited, giving him time.

In a moment: 'Is he still alive?'

'I don't know. They killed the monk on guard.'

Waited again. Pepperidge would want to put the questions in order of their priority and I left it to him. He'd have to signal London as soon as I'd rung off, and they'd want the precise facts. The mission had crashed and I didn't know what they would do, put another one together with a standby executive, fly people in from Hong Kong, call out everyone they'd got in Lhasa, sleepers, supports, agents-in-place, God only knew what they would do, if there was anything they could do at all.

'When would you say it happened?'

There was a lot of crackle on the line but I suppose that was normal for this place. 'I can't say for certain. One of the monks said he thought he heard something like a shout, not long before we got there. Call it between twenty-three-thirty and midnight.'

Chong watched me from the cab of the truck. He'd broken the lock on the gates of the depot to get me inside to the phone and then brought the truck up to block off the entrance. His face looked smaller than ever at the window of the cab, cold, pinched, his eyes watchful, pain in them, it hadn't been his fault but it had bruised him: he'd been called in by Pepperidge to support a major operation and the subject had been Dr Xingyu Baibing, the messiah, and he'd only been with the mission a matter of hours before it had crashed, and on the long nerve-wracking trip south across that appalling terrain he'd been terse, brooding, banging his fists on the rim of the big wheel and shouting above the din of the truck, cursing in Chinese, cursing or praying, I didn't know which, then falling quiet for an hour, two hours, finally finding his centre and talking normally, the rage and frustration buried again behind the easy, American-style manner.

He watched me from the cab, turning sometimes to check the street. In the sky behind him, to the east, a crack of saffron light lay across the horizon. Neither of us had eaten, slept, washed for the past twelve hours, rations in the truck but we couldn't touch them, no appetite for anything but the rancour in the soul to chew on.

'Was there any sign,' Pepperidge asked me, 'that he wasn't taken alive? That he was killed?'

I thought back. It didn't look as if there'd been a struggle. Bian, the monk was lying on his back staring into the moonlight, his prayer beads lying half across his face; I would think that another monk or someone in a monk's robes had brought food or water to the third floor and surprised him, killing him silently and going in to Xingyu's cell.

Told him these facts, Pepperidge, these assumptions.

'There would have been a second man?'

'Possibly.'

A second man who'd climbed the ladder as soon as Bian had been dealt with, in case it needed physical force to take Xingyu. But I thought I knew now what that strange sweet smell had been in the monastery: chloroform.