Golden Buddha (Oregon Files 1)

Lincoln turned toward Kasim and brushed his nose with his middle finger. “That’s okay, Kaz, the fireworks also make it harder for you lily-white Hugh Grant types.”

“There’s still the question of weight,” Cabrillo said, ignoring the exchange. “The Golden Buddha weighs six hundred pounds.”

“Four men on each side could lift that weight without too much strain on their backs,” Julia Huxley said.

“I think I’ll have Hanley and Nixon fabricate something,” Cabrillo said. “Any suggestions?”

The crew continued planning the operation—Macau was just about a day’s sail away.

THE chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Legchog Raidi Zhuren, was reading a report on the fighting just across the border in Nepal. Last night, government forces had killed nearly three hundred Maoist insurgents. The ferocity of the attacks on the communist rebels had been increasing since spring 2002. After several years of growing rebel activity, the Nepalese government had begun to feel threatened and finally started to take firm action. The United States had sent army Green Beret advisors to the area to coordinate strikes, and almost immediately the body count had begun to grow.

To prevent the fighting from spilling over across the border into Tibet, Zhuren had needed to call Beijing for additional troops to station them on the high mountain passes that led from Nepal to Tibet. President Jintao had not been happy about the development. In the first place, the cost to secure Tibet was increasing at a time the president wanted to cut costs. In the second place, the Special Forces advisors added a dimension of danger to the mission. If a single American soldier was wounded or killed by Chinese forces protecting the Tibet border, Jintao was worried the situation might spiral out of control and China would be embroiled in another Korea.

What Legchog Zhuren did not know was that Jintao was starting to consider Tibet more of a liability than an asset. The timing was critical—if the Tibetan people launched a popular uprising right now, China might have another Tiananmen Square on its hands, and the world mood was not the same as in 1989. With the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and their increasingly close relations with the United States, any heavy-handed action against the Tibetan population might be met with force from two fronts.

American forces could be launched from carriers in the Bay of Bengal and from bases in occupied Afghanistan, while Russian ground forces could sweep in from the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, as well as the area of far eastern Russia where it bordered northern Tibet. Then there would be a free-for-all.

And for what? A small, poor mountain country China had illegally occupied?

The reward didn’t equal the risk. Jintao needed to find face—and he needed it fast.

8

WINSTON Spenser took his pen to paper to tally his ill-gotten gains. The 3 percent commission on the original $200 million sale of the Golden Buddha was $6 million. This was hardly a small sum. In fact, it was just over five times Spenser’s income last year—but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the money he was about to collect for selling it again.

In the first place, against the $6 million commission check, he had the cost of the decoy. The fabricators in Thailand had charged nearly a million for that. In the second place, the company he’d had hired in Geneva to transport the Golden Buddha to Macau and provide armored-car service to A-Ma had charged too much, a flat fee of $1 million for their services, while Spenser had quoted the billionaire a cost of one-tenth of that so as not to arouse suspicion. Bribes now, and in the next few days, when Spenser was planning to transport the original out of Macau and into the United States, would run him another million or so. As a result, right at this instant, for all practical purposes, Spenser was broke.

The art dealer had tapped all his available savings and business lines of credit to fund his nefarious operation—if he didn’t have the commission check lying before him on the table, he’d be in trouble. If Spenser had not been completely certain he had a buyer for the Golden Buddha, he might be worried. Tearing the slip of paper from the pad, he tore the note into tiny pieces, tossed the pieces in the toilet and flushed. Then he poured himself half a glass of Scotch to calm his trembling hands. It had taken Spenser a lifetime to build his reputation—and if his crime was known, it would be gone in seconds.

Money and gold can make men do strange things.

THREE-QUARTERS of the way across the globe and sixteen time zones distant, it was almost midnight, and the Silicon Valley software billionaire was passing his time making changes to his newest yacht. The blueprints for the massive 350-foot-long vessel had been created on a computer, designed on a computer and refined on a computer. Each individual piece could be highlighted and changed, all the way down to the screws that attached the thirty toilets to the deck. Right now, the billionaire was playing around with the furnishings and upholstery, and his ego was running rampant.

The computer would generate a full-bodied hologram of him to welcome guests to the main deck salon, and that had been a cool touch, but at this instant he was deciding what font would be best for his initials, which were to be sewn into the fabric on all the couches and chairs. A few years ago, he’d bought himself a minor British title that had come complete with a coat of arms, so he inserted the script he’d selected into the emblem, then overlaid that onto the fabric. A cameo of my face might look better, he thought, as he stared at the royal crest. Then people could sit on my face. The idea brought a smile; he was still smiling when his Philippine houseboy entered the room.

“Master,” he said slowly, “I’m sorry to bother you, but you have a long-distance telephone call from overseas.”

“Did they say their name?” he asked.

“He said he was a friend of the fat golden one,” the man said.

“Put him through,” the billionaire said, smiling, “at once.”

THE time was just before four in the afternoon in Macau, and while he waited for the software billionaire to come online, Spenser was fiddling with a voice alteration device that he had placed over his satellite telephone. He had placed a new battery in the device and the tiny light was blinking green, but still he questioned if the scrambler would work as advertised.

“Yo,” the billionaire said as he came on the line. “What have you got for me?”

“Are you still interested in owning the Golden Buddha?” a mechanical-sounding voice asked.

“Sure,” the billionaire said. At the same time, he input commands into the computer hooked to his telephone to counter the effects of the scrambler. “But not at two hundred million.”

“I was thinking”—the man’s voice was scrambled, but then the computer did its magic and the voice cleared—“a price of one hundred million.”

A British accent, the software billionaire thought. Talbot had told him a British dealer had made the successful bid for the Buddha, and maybe he had acquired it for a British collector—but that made no sense. No one would buy something for $200 million, only to offer it a few days later for half that. The dealer must have pulled the old switcheroo—or he was offering a fake.

“How do I know what you are offering is real?” the software billionaire asked.

“Do you have someone who can date gold?” Spenser asked.