Part 56 (1/2)

That was his genius. But it did not excuse the wrong that had been done him.

It had, in fact, been Three Oaths Tsun who had given him the idea. Before being brought to Sawyer & Sons for employment by s.h.i.+ Zilin, Three Oaths Tsun had been the finest runner of the tears of the poppy in the Shanghai area. The money he had made on the periphery of the business was astounding. How much more could be made, Chen Ju had thought, at the very center of the opium trade? All the world would be knocking on his door.

Thus the diqui had been born and, with Huaishan Han's aid, had flourished. Yet even this was not enough for Chen Ju. He wanted more. He wanted the world.

And now with the help of the two Americans, Bennett and Curran, he was going to get it.

It was amazing the difference it made, Daniella thought. With the knowledge of Carelin's baby inside her, nothing else seemed quite as important. Certainly not Oleg Maluta's threats against her. It astounded her how much power an unborn creature could possess. The gun, wrapped in its poly bag so as not to smudge her incriminating prints, seemed as distant and unimportant to her as the far side of the sun.

With the future in mind, she picked up the phone and made a date to pick Maluta up after work. A concert and then a late dinner, she proposed. He seemed delighted.

She dismissed both their Chaikas, telling the drivers to take a night off. They were used to such things but were grateful nonetheless. There was nothing so debilitating for a military man as to wait around doing nothing.

At day's end, Daniella signed out for a departmental Volga she had phoned down to reserve early that afternoon. She had one of her people purchase tickets for the Beethoven Quartet. They arrived at the Hall of the Gnesin Music Inst.i.tute on Vorovsky Street five minutes before the concert was scheduled to begin. If Maluta was surprised at being driven by Daniella in the Volga he made no mention of it. Perhaps he was just as happy that they were alone.

The concert might have been played by four pigs for all the music that penetrated Daniella's consciousness. She stared at the vaulted, groined ceiling and it was like peering into the convolutions of her own brain. She felt as if she had lost all sense of herself, as if her hearthad stopped beating without her knowledge, and now she stood, breathless, staring at the wreckage life had wrought.

She watched synapses spark and snap and, on stage, spotlights were brought to bear upon the musicians and that light, reflecting off their precious instruments, sent jeweled flashes upward onto the faceted ceiling, the ma.s.sive crystal chandelier that glowed like a star at intermission.

Daniella felt that she was walking through her life like an automaton, the dazed survivor of a s.h.i.+p dashed against hidden shoals. Her homeland, always so dear to her, now seemed nothing more than a cleverly rendered stage set upon which she had been playing out a bizarre and totally inexplicable role. She wondered what it was that she had been doing all her days. And how in the name of G.o.d it had ever made her happy.

In fact, she realized dully, she had no real conception of what true happiness was. Or how to do so basic a thing as live. Up until now she had been doing nothing but surviving. Her life had been a day-to-day struggle for power, an endless agon from which there could be no surcease. How pitiful that seemed in the face of the kind of love she felt for Mikhail Carelin.

Maluta spoke to her but she had no conception of what he was saying. It was as if she had lost the ability to understand the language, as if she were some cosmic cinder floating in the vastness, the utter blackness of s.p.a.ce, cut off from everyone and everything. ”Daniella?”

”Yes.” Eyes closed against the bright light. A sun blazing. The chandelier lit up, it must be intermission. ”The concert is over.” ”Yes.”

”It is time to go.”

It is time to go. His words echoed eerily in her mind, as if he had spoken them in a cavern or, perhaps, from the recesses of a church. It was not surprising that she should think of her mother at this time. Religion had played such a strong, though clandestine, part in Daniella's formative years. It was something that never left her. Though she could not, as a member of the sluzhba, go near a church, still she could not help but wors.h.i.+p in her mind. And hold the precepts of her mother's religionand in a very real sense, her owndear.

It is time to go. She rose, bidden by a voice inside her own mind. In the gilt-and-cream lobby, she caught sight of a bleak-faced woman, beautiful but drawn. There was an expression in her clear gray eyes that Daniella had seen many times before in the Lubyanka. Always the ”interviews” were completed and the prisoner was being sent down to Level Three, the depths of the prison from which there was noescape.

With a start, Daniella realized that she was looking in a mirror: the woman was herself. With a little shake of her head, she cleared her mind and, pulling on her coat, walked beside Oleg Maluta out into a night spangled with Moscow's streetlights.

The sky was clear and the breeze was freshening, taking with it the choking diesel fumes and the plaster and cement dust. When Daniella suggested a stroll down by the Moskva, Maluta was delighted.

They got into the Volga and she drove to the spot where he had first taken her. She remembered the cautionary tale he had told her about falling through the ice as a child and recognized it now for what it had been; a warning. He had survived that early disaster; he could survive anything now.

In a way, it had about it the aspect of a mystical experience, almost as if there had been a kind of divine intervention on his behalf. I am among the chosen, he had been saying, so be content to do my bidding. It smacked of the almost supernatural quality he attributed to Oreanda. In a way, he believed that she lived on after her death in the same way he was convinced that his being saved from drowning was fated.

They got out and went down the crusty scree to the glimmering river. This time, Maluta reached back, helping her past the several steep patches where shale was easily sheered off by the weight of a human body.

”Daniella,” he said.

But she already had hold of him and, kicking out, dislodged his footing from the mossy rocks along the bank. He fell with a great exhalation of air and she quickly jammed an elbow into his solar plexus.

As his knees rose up in spasmodic response, she shoved him out along the rocks and down until his head and shoulders were beneath the chill water. Her fingers closed around his neck and chin, trapping him there without air.

Moonlight glimmered along the Moskva. She could see traffic moving as slowly as molten lead across the expanse. The sound of a klaxon littered the air for a time and with great reluctance died away.

He was struggling very hard and she climbed on him to keep his powerful legs from working himself upward into the cool night air.

She did not want that, did not want him to get even one small breath. She did not want him to be able to use his superior strength against her.

It was getting very difficult now and she kneed him in the groin. She could imagine the airless dark which he was inhabiting, could imagine his lungs desperate for oxygen, the reflexes wanting to open the mouth, to inhale through the nostrils. Only the brain holding out, desperately seeking some way to be rid of the water.

But there was no way. Daniella made certain of that. And, after a time, there was no movement at all. She found herself wet with sweat. Her vision was blurry so perhaps she had been weeping.

Without taking his head out of the Moskva, she felt with her hands for the chain and the key around his neck. When she found it, she pulled, and it came away in her hands.

Then she set about making quite sure Oleg Maluta's body would never surface. When she was through she pushed him in, wading out until the water lapped at her thighs. It was cold and she s.h.i.+vered heavily.

He sank like a stone, which at this point, was what, mostly, he was made of. For just an instant, the moonlight glistened off his still face. Then he was gone, claimed at last, perhaps, by his Oreanda. And his guilt.

In the shadows of the night, she let herself into the office. She could smell him immediately. His malign presence dominated the suite like the stench in a crematorium. Maluta.

She went immediately behind the desk and sat in his chair. Took the key she had ripped from his neck and, opening the bottom drawer, unlocked the steel case inside.

And there it was. With a trembling hand, she lifted out the poly bag. She recognized the gun inside. The oil had slicked the inside of the plastic. Beneath the gun was the packet of photos of her weeping in the night. She pulled the steel case out of the drawer, set fire to the negatives, using the case to contain the flames.

Putting the gun inside her purse, she was about to leave when she saw the corner of an envelope wedged into the corner of the now empty drawer. She pulled on it but it would not budge.

Looking around the desk, she seized on Maluta's bra.s.s letter opener and with some effort wedged it into the seams at the bottom of the drawer. It took her several minutes of intense work but at last she freed the envelope from its hiding place.

She slit it open. There were four sheets of flimsy upon which were typed in single s.p.a.ce a detailed breakdown of profits, expenses, percentages and the like as if for some business. But the figures were gargantuan.

When Daniella got to the Mandarin word, diqui, she knew she was on to something very big indeed. With every sentence she read she felt her excitement building. No longer were her thoughts filled with home and hearth, with love and an idyllic future that, deep down, she had known could never happen.

Now the old, the true Daniella, perhaps, rea.s.serted itself. She felt the power flowing from the few flimsy sheets of paper into her hands, knew with a certainty that was undeniable what it meant.

It was as if fate had drawn her here, causing her to make this astounding discovery. It was as if fate had handed her back her power the power she was meant to wield.

So be it.

She knew what she must do.

She breathed in the darkness, the aura of strength in the office that had, at last, delivered up to her its ultimate secret. If there was a G.o.d then surely he hardened her heart now. Held within the silence of the night, she braced herself for what was to come.

And found, to her surprise, that it was not that difficult to do.

The storm was at their backs when they plunged back into the triple-canopied jungle. The Shan States. Off the plateau, it was enemy territory, a full red sector. It was the killing ground, from which, Fo Saan had taught Jake, there could be no retreat. Before them lay only victory. Or defeat.

It is determination which wins many battles, Fo Saan had said. And determination is strictly a matter of force of will. Often the outcome of a contest is not decided by the first strategy or even by the third. Rather, endurance is involved. Force of will is endurance. If you do not lose your sense of self, you will endure and your power will not wane. On the contrary, it will endure even after your body has wasted away.

Jake and Bliss were following the directions given to them by Uncle Tommy, the master lacquerware maker. But even so it was most difficult. For one thing, the terrain was unknown to them and its density tiring to work through. Without a compa.s.s they would have been lost within a few hours. For another, the farther they penetrated up the mountain, the more frequently they were obliged to hide from units of the poppy warlords' independent armies: patrols, heavily armedsupply trains and, going in the opposite direction, the mule trains loaded down with the tears of the poppy.

There were the patrols of the Burmese and Chinese armies to be on the lookout for, as well. This is not a country, Jake thought as they moved with almost painful slowness; this is a war zone.

They had set out from the plateau village at first light. By noon, they had covered six hard-won kilometers and were forced to take a break. They ate dried foods and washed the unpalatable stuff down with clear, icy water from a swiftly running stream. Jake, staring into the silvery depths of the river, found himself envying the ease with which the water flowed down the mountainside.