Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

She heard his shoe edge out across the floor. She felt his hand on her arm. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her.

“Don’t be frightened,” he whispered in her ear. His heart beat steadily against her fluttering one. Her body felt how gentle he was, and her heart began to slow to match his rhythm.

“I’m going to look for the flashlight,” he told her. “Stay still.” Then, using her body as a guide, he ran his hands down her waist, over her hips, and down her legs. He kept one hand in a proprietary grip around her ankle while he searched the ground with his other hand. A second later the flashlight was back on. He took Hulan’s hand and led her out to the cave entrance.

They stood at the mouth of the cave looking down on the roiling river. At last Michael turned to face her. “I’m sorry. That was a boyish and stupid maneuver to get us alone together in the dark. I shouldn’t have done that.” Then he dropped her hand, stepped out into the rain, and with an assured gait headed up the hill back toward the Site 518 encampment.

She waited a few more minutes, trying to understand her feelings, then she followed the path down to where it disappeared into the rushing current. Brian’s little beach had to be three meters or more below the raging waters.

THE WEATHER HAD CALMED TEMPORARILY, BUT THAT WAS TO BE expected. The storm would circle back again at least once before blowing itself out. But even with the break, the airport was nearly deserted. No one wanted to fly in this weather. David went to China Southern’s ticket counter and checked in for the 11:50 flight to Wuhan. He hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four hours, so he got some breakfast while he waited for his departure. A television was tuned to the news, where every fifteen minutes the scroll across the bottom of the screen reported that massive flooding along the Yangzi below the Three Gorges had now claimed twelve hundred lives. At 11:30 he boarded the plane; it taxied out to the runway, and then everyone waited as thunder rumbled and lightning streaked around them. Three hours later, in another momentary calm, the plane took off. Even after reaching cruising altitude, the seat belt sign remained on because of violent turbulence.

David couldn’t stop thinking about Michael Quon. He was sophisticated. He’d figured out how to propel his cause through money and charisma. He was masquerading as a religious leader, but he had a rotten and corrupt core. He advocated austerity yet partook of the finer things in life. He was also probably very good with women, if for no other reason than that success and money are great aphrodisiacs. He’d used the Society’s tenets as a means to gather a group to him, with the understanding that religion is more powerful than politics. That was why Communism was failing, while groups like the Falun Gong and the All-Patriotic Society were growing.

Xiao Da was all about manipulation and control. He believed himself to be the wind; the inferior people were the grass. He got away with that in China, where the people were, as Hulan said, susceptible to indoctrination. Xiao Da mirrored what others wanted to see. For poor Chinese peasants on the banks of the Yangzi, he was a savior who would protect them from the dam. To someone like Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang, he was a way of catching the newest fad. For someone like Brian McCarthy, he was a way of honoring the past.

David wondered if possession of a mushroom could be enough for the man who called himself Xiao Da to wrest the wind from the current Chinese government. It might be if he had a religious hold on the masses. Beyond that, could a foreign-born person be influential enough within another country to upset global stability? Stranger things had happened in other parts of the world.

This line of reasoning led David back to Vice Minister Zai. How much of this did the old bachelor know? He had made a strong and believable case for David and Hulan’s trip to Bashan as a possible last chance for their marriage. At the time, David had been embarrassed but also grateful. But Zai had said other things that day, about David and Hulan reconnecting to the special gifts they each had that made them able to see beyond the petty cases they’d both been working on in recent years. For David, that would mean larger, more sophisticated, global matters; for Hulan, the rekindling of her ability to see into the mind of a killer. Zai had also talked about David’s method of using logic to deal with cases, while Hulan put her physical body between herself and evil. Was that why Zai was on his way to Bashan now? Had he truly sent the two of them into danger without telling them what they were about to encounter? Or did he know that something had already happened to Hulan?

All this “logic” was just a way for David to manage his feelings. He couldn’t lose Hulan. He couldn’t face the world without her.

That night electricity was out in Bashan Village. Candles and a couple of hurricane lamps illuminated the Panda Guesthouse’s dining room in a warm glow. The chef managed to put together one of his better meals. Beer was on the house. A sense of camaraderie reigned. There is nothing like a natural disaster to bring people together.

Given the conditions, talk turned once again to the great edifice being built at Sandouping. Without the five men from the municipal museums, the conversation was measured. What if the dam was built to a height of only 150 feet? What if a series of smaller

dams was constructed instead? What if China allotted twenty more years for archaeological excavation? What if only half a million people had to move?

Hulan sat next to Michael Quon. He’d come by her room to escort her to the dining room. This time she hadn’t objected. How could she, since she was going there anyway? But he’d stood just inside her door as he had this morning, waiting as she finished getting ready, looking around with that same measured appraisal that he used to take in everything. They didn’t speak then about what had happened earlier, but as the rain poured down and the candles cast their golden light, Hulan kept going back to that moment when she’d been swallowed by the blackness of the cave.

What if when Michael dropped the flashlight he’d tried to kill her? Hulan would have attempted to fight him—in the pitch-black without a weapon. But even if she’d somehow triumphed, what would she have done then? She would have tried crawling out. She might have fallen down through one of the shafts that led to the river, drowning in the dark. She might have chosen the wrong route and could still have been flailing in the tenebrous gloom even now. No one would have known where she was, and when the lake behind the dam flooded those caverns sometime in the next few years, her bones would have been lost forever, like so much else along the river. But what she couldn’t shake from her mind now was that moment of surrender when Michael Quon had held her in his arms and she’d let her heartbeat follow his.

From the international terminal on the outskirts of Wuhan, David grabbed a taxi to drive to the airport for small local flights. The term “buckets of rain” came to him as the taxi inched down the highway. Here the weather was not so much a storm—with winds and lightning—as one huge waterfall cascading from the sky. More than once the taxi floated several yards before the tires found asphalt again. The first bridge they came to was completely submerged. When the driver said he could go no farther, David reached into his pocket and pulled out the money Stuart had given him. He counted out five hundred dollars U.S. and promised the driver more if he would do whatever he had to do to get David to the local airport. The driver made a U-turn and sought out a different—and ultimately successful—route.

The local airport was as different as could be from Wuhan’s international airport. David saw no radar and no landing lights flanking what passed for the runway, which sat in the middle of a flooded meadow. The terminal, an old Quonset hut, was packed with stranded passengers, and it had the smell of sweat, home-cooked food beginning to go bad, and stale cigarette smoke. David was the only foreigner.

He went to the desk of a company that gave helicopter tours of the Three Gorges, but the people shook their heads and said flying would be impossible today. He next tried the companies that flew small planes locally. There had to be an airstrip somewhere near Bashan. If he could fly there, he’d get to Bashan, even if he had to go on foot. But the people who sat behind the counters looked at him—with his bruises, the huge lump on his head, his Little Mermaid Band-Aids, and his wild insistence—as though he were insane.

The airport didn’t have a bar, but it did have a little stand that passed for a café. David quickly struck up a conversation with a couple of men who flew planes to Yichang near the dam site. They introduced him to a helicopter pilot. None of them wanted to fly. They all said it was crazy. But his cash offer, worth more than two years’ salary, was enough for the helicopter pilot. David knew the trip would be bad, however, when the pilot left the money with his friends—just in case.

They left Wuhan at eight. David held the wrapped ruyi on his lap. It would take almost two hours to reach Bashan.

After dinner, Hulan went to her room and locked the door. She decided to go through all of the material she’d gathered again. She lit a couple of candles and began to read. David always said that her greatest strength as an investigator lay in the intuitive leaps she made. She thought, however, that her strongest attribute came from what she knew about people—that they nearly always acted out of greed and that they told only one-third of the truth. She always took steps back from a crime scene, but this time she did it differently, by looking only at what people had wanted and what they’d lied about.

She started with Vice Minister Zai. She loved him more than her own father, but she also knew that he didn’t always tell her the truth. She didn’t believe that the death of a foreigner or the theft of artifacts would matter to the Ministry of Public Security or to the men across the lake. She’d been sent here for a political reason. She’d wondered from the beginning if it had to do with the All-Patriotic Society and, later, a possible threat against the Three Gorges Dam. She’d followed those theories all the way to the dam, but having seen the security measures there and heard Stuart’s reasoned explanation of the redundant safety systems, she didn’t think that the MPS’s interest had to do with the Society, terrorism, or sabotage. Yet Annabel Quinby had been right today when she talked about how the dam presented China’s national face. And Hulan was sure that Li Guo, the vulture, was trying to tell her something. His dangan said he was a low-level functionary, but he spoke in riddles about the power of symbols for the country. He also said that Brian understood their importance. Why couldn’t she?

She thought of David’s legal style and focused her mind into a sharp beam. Director Ho: A musty old man dealing with forces beyond his control. Dr. Ma: Spy, probably at the core of this. That he still hadn’t returned from Hong Kong was now of great concern. But had he lied? His arrogance suggested he hadn’t. Greedy? Yes, but for what? He’d had plenty of opportunity to steal from the site, and one could say it would even have been expected of him, but if Zai had sent Hulan to deal with Ma in some way, she’d failed miserably. Hom: His lies had actually shown him to be honest and honorable. Hom’s officers: Not worth considering.

Now to the people on the site. Stuart Miller: His lies had to do with buying stolen artifacts, not murder. Catherine Miller: Stuck in a body that didn’t match her brain. Only she had pointed out the most obvious and salient point about the ruyi. It couldn’t have come from the soil of Site 518. Annabel Quinby, Schmidt, and Strong were useful to Hulan only for what they’d said about Brian and Lily.

Angela McCarthy had lied about how and when she got here. She’d also lied about her brother’s website and what those photographs meant, because they’d been strong enough to lure her here even though she didn’t have much money. And there was the question of Brian’s journal. Captain Hom said he’d turned it over to Angela, who vehemently denied it, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have it. Hulan would ask Angela again about the journal and other things in a moment, but first she wanted to sort through her thoughts about Lily Sinclair one last time.

Lily had been a natural liar. This ability was central to her character, her successes and her failings. She certainly had lied on the night of her death. Her story about the Panda Guesthouse and the Wang family had been amusing though there’d been very little truth to it. Later she’d lied to David and Hulan when she said she was going to bed, because Catherine had walked with Lily to the outskirts of town. What had Lily done in those hours that she was still in the hotel? What had inspired her to leave town so late at night? And how had her body been brought back without anyone seeing it? Her killers hadn’t come through the front door, and no one could have gotten past the old caretaker and her back gate. Only one person had mentioned anything out of the ordinary. Hulan flipped back through her notes to her interview with Dr. Strong, whose room was directly opposite Lily’s. He said he’d heard noises in the courtyard.

That easily Hulan understood everything. She jumped up, got her Luger out of its hiding place, then ran down the hall to Angela’s room. Hulan pounded on the door with her fist. Angela opened the door a crack, and Hulan pushed her way in.

“I need your brother’s flashlight and some other gear,” she said in a rush. She looked around, grabbed Angela’s backpack, and dumped the contents on the bed.

“My specimens!” Angela cried.