Part 61 (1/2)

Jake carefully moved Bliss off his lap. He was very tired. With an effort, he bent over his daughter. Her face, so long in his memory, seemed subtly altered somehow. Familiar in an altogether unfamiliar way.

”Lan,” he said. ”Lan.”

Her lids fluttered open. Her eyes were filled with him. ”Bah-ba,” she said softly, disbelievingly. And began to cry.

”Time's gone so slowly,” she whispered. ”Oh, how I've missed you.”

Summer/ Present Hong Kong Jake was going to go alone but Lan insisted on accompanying him. The sun was s.h.i.+ning with a fierce intensity. The stench of air-drying fish was everywhere. The waves of the South China Sea were chips of beaten bra.s.s where the sunlight hit them. In the troughs, deep aquamarine shadows crept, stealing the light.

Jake still did not walk well. The bullet had entered his right side just above the hip. Perhaps it had chipped off a tiny piece of bone or pierced a nerve, it was impossible to say. In any case, the pain stayed with him. Not that he minded that. It was proof that what had occurred up in the Shan had really happened.

Lan, when she awoke, could not remember seeing him moments before, let alone shooting him. In fact, she was a wholly different person. The anger and rage had all been expunged from her. She was his little girl again. Or, perhaps, he had returned to being her father.

Simbal's Shan had taken the head of General Kuo from its corpse and had held it before them as they had advanced into the camp. Without their general, the army could not exist. Those not already dead or wounded were disarmed and beaten and sent scrambling down the rocky scree. The old man with one shoulder higher than the other was flung like a rag doll after them. The Shan had no use for a Chinese.

Jake and Simbal had found him fifty meters down the steep slope, head down, his neck broken by an outcropping of granite. It was an ignominious death for a man who had wielded such awesome power.

Jake, crouching over the frail figure, could only wonder at the furies of the mind which drove human beings to such lifelong quests. His father had been such a man. So had been his enemy, Huaishan Han.

That was ironic and at the same time terribly sad. Huaishan Han had been the darkness to Zilin's light. But they were two sides of the same coin and that was a sobering thought, indeed. It made Jake wonder whether the Zhuan should retire at this moment. He did not want to look back on a life filled with interminable sorrow as his father and Huaishan Han had.

He recalled the session at McKenna's house with White-Eye Kao and wondered how he ever could have done so much vicious damage to one human being. The cause was just. Or was it? The line was blurring for him and that was a danger sign. It frightened him that he could justify the means through the end. Was that a product of being in the dark and the cold on the mountain? Huaishan Han had been like that. Had his father felt that way as well? Jake thought he knew the answer. Perhaps it was time, then, for him to step aside. Let someone else shoulder the burden of being tai pan of all tai pan.

He felt Lan's hand warm inside his now, felt the weight of the urn he held against his chest. He breathed deeply, abruptly overcome by sadness.

Simbal and Rodger Donovan had come with Jake to Hong Kong but not for long. There was another battle to be won: the one involving the power struggle at the Quarry.

Alone, Jake and Simbal had shaken hands.

”It's not over yet, is it, Jake?”

”No,” Jake had said. ”The world won't be safe from Kam Sang until we've managed to dismantle what they've built, dispersed the scientific team that worked on the project.”

”The Shan,” Simbal said. ”The Shan won out this time.”

”The killing ground,” Jake said. ”The place where it all began.” On the mountain it is cold and dark, Zilin had cautioned him. That is where you are now. The Shan.

”I'm going to need your help,” Simbal said.

”There's more than friends.h.i.+p between us,” Jake had said. ”There's trust.”

After Simbal and Donovan had left, Jake learned from his hospital bed that Bluestone's combine had at last succeeded in acquiring more than fifty percent of InterAsia stock. But to do that, the tai pan's investors had mortgaged their businesses to the hilt.

He had thrown his head back and laughed for the first time in many weeks, so hard in fact that he had almost popped several st.i.tches.

”Let them have it,” he had said to a semihysterical Andrew Sawyer. ”They're finished now.”