Lethal Circuit (12 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Seven-seven-seven.”

And the line went dead. Ted cursed to himself and handed the phone back to the tired Madame.

“Thank you,” he said in flawless Cantonese.

Seven-seven-seven. Screw the budget, Ted thought. Screw the backpackers too. He’d been seated ramrod straight in a cracked plastic chair listening to tired prostitutes squeal about how cheap their johns were for the last five hours. All things being equal, he intended to spend what was left of the night dead to the world on a clean firm mattress. Ted dragged his weary bones into the expansive lobby of the Forum hotel and within five minutes he was headed up the glass elevator to his room. He couldn’t be happier to be done for the evening.

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•

C
OOL
BREEZE
IN
his hair, cab speeding through the night, Michael had to admit that life, for the moment at least, was good. They had been traveling along the same rutted road for over an hour now and though the taxi driver was short on conversation he apparently had a limitless supply of ice cold Tsingtao Lager. And though perhaps problematic in the way of safety, the beer was such a balm to Michael’s parched throat that he chose not to over think the matter. Outside, bicycle rickshaws pulled their massive loads, men played cards under lantern light, and whole families gathered around cooking fires, dark mountains looming in the distance above. Even the air out here in the country smelled sweeter, somehow more primal than Michael remembered it being just a few hours earlier.

“Pull?” Michael asked, offering Kate the tall bottle.

“Seven-seven-seven?”

Michael passed Kate the beer as he pulled the Lonely Planet Guide from the top flap of his backpack. He turned to page 777, reading from the page, “Yangshuo, ninety minutes south of Guilin. That’s where we’re headed, right?”

“Right.”

“So Ted kind of feels responsible for me over here. I promised I’d keep him in the loop.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Good.”

Less than ten minutes later, the cab turned in front of a group of structures built at an intersection in the road. A few hundred yards more and they came to a stop before a timber frame building identifying itself as the Whispering Bamboo Backpacker’s Hostel.

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F
OUR
TIME
ZONES
away, Hayakawa stared down from his walnut paneled boardroom into the early morning streets of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district below. A second phone call had arrived. It indicated that a Chinese cargo plane had deviated from its prescribed flight path, landing in Guanxi province. The deviation was recorded and per procedure, the MSS was notified. Twenty-six minutes later two individuals meeting the profile boarded a taxi bound for Yangshuo. Hayakawa had not thanked the caller. He had simply replaced the phone in its cradle and considered the content of the call.

This time, Hayakawa thought, there was a real chance that the object would be found. And that was not something he could allow to happen. Not now that they were so close to their goal. Hayakawa exhaled slowly, reminding himself that he was more than simply the CEO of one of Japan’s leading heavy industries. He was the leader of an even older consortium. His father before him had also been leader of this consortium. And his ancestors before that had been samurai. And so, like all good samurai, Hayakawa reflected that rising stakes served only to make the victory sweeter. Preparations had been made. The course had been set. All that was left now was to follow through.

18

YANGSHUO

S
OFT
MORNING
SUNLIGHT
filtered in through the slatted window, but Michael’s mind was on his aching back. His bed for the night had been about as comfortable as a wood pile. On the plus side the spartan room was clean, but it wasn’t much consolation for his sore spine. He gazed across the gap to the second single bed. It was empty, indicating that Kate had already gotten up. Time to rise. Michael pulled his legs out of his sleeping bag and threw them over the side of the bed.

“Ow!” Kate moaned as he stepped on her sleeping bag shrouded form.

“What are you doing on the floor?”

“It’s more comfortable than that bed. What time is it?”

Michael glanced at the watch on his wrist to discover that he hadn’t reset it since leaving Seattle.

“I’m thinking breakfast time.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

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M
ICHAEL
’
S
BODY
WAS
sore but his spirit was rested, and after throwing a sheet over the capsule and securing the door of the room with a padlock, they stumbled down the chipped stone steps and into the new day. A few early rising backpackers were already out and about and one thing was clear to Michael: he had stepped into a new world, a world he could have scarcely imagined existed if he wasn’t standing smack dab in the middle of it. What had been shadows in the dark night, had now, under the magic light of day been transformed into mountainous green hills. But they weren’t ordinary hills. They were jutting vertical towers that popped out of the landscape in all directions like a gang of angry gum drops; soaring dollops of vegetation encrusted earth that would look more at home in middle earth than modern day China. And at the end of the street, a magnificent river glistened jade green in the morning light, the same crazy hills rising from its loamy banks, fishing boats crowded around a tiny pier. It was a scene right out of Wonderland.

“Like the landscape?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, it’s so —”

“Surreal?” Kate said.

“Sugar coated. The mountains look like, I don’t know, emerald green cotton candy.”

“They call them karsts. But, yeah, this place has that effect on people.”

Michael soon discovered that in addition to its spectacular limestone karsts, Yangshuo was known for a second attribute, its food. Or to put it more specifically: the best Western food east of Bangkok. Teahouse after teahouse advertised banana pancakes, Western omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches, all to be consumed under the mellowing influence of Bob Marley, the Eagles and a hundred other old school acts. Michael and Kate wasted no time stepping onto the veranda of a tea house named Yangshuo Bob’s and sinking into its richly padded bamboo furniture. Almost immediately a young Chinese hostess appeared with two hand drawn menus. Kate didn’t need to look at hers.

“Tell Bob I’ll go for the muesli. And a large milk coffee.” Kate looked to Michael. “The banana pancakes are famous in forty countries.”

“And a banana pancake,” Michael said. “And another coffee.”

Michael felt briefly self-conscious of the fact that he had been in China for thirty-six hours and had yet to eat a meal of actual Chinese food, but he let it go. If there was one thing Michael knew, it was that the most expeditious route between two points didn’t always involve a straight line. More often than not you had to roll with what came. The hostess smiled and returned a few moments later with two steaming mugs of coffee and Kate’s muesli. Apparently the banana pancake was going to take a few more minutes, but Michael didn’t care. His attention was focused on the street outside where vendors set up their carts selling everything from vegetables to Hollywood movies. Alongside them backpackers of every ilk, some worn from travel, others spiffy clean in their Gore-Tex caps and Northface cargo shorts, crawled out of their guest houses to life. Like a slow wave, the teahouses up and down the street filled with them, a displaced expatriate community who had found a common home, at least for the moment, in this storybook corner of China.

“You look confused,” Kate said.

“Let’s go with curious.”

“Curious then.”

“It’s nothing, it’s just that, when you said this place was on the Circuit, I didn’t expect it to be so,” Michael struggled to find the right word, “on the Circuit.”

“They come from everywhere. The year before college. The year after college. The year before grad school. In between jobs. In the UK they call it a gap year. I forget what you guys call it.”

“Slacking off?” Michael said. “And believe me, I know. Since college I’ve done two tours of duty at Starbucks with a stab at Internet entrepreneurship wedged between mystery shopper gigs. When it comes to the art of the slack, I’m a master.”

“So would you prefer people laze about locally? Contribute to their hometown angst instead of traipsing off to the far corners of the Earth?”

“No. Nothing like that. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no problem with seeing the world. I just didn’t realize the whole world was doing it.”

Michael’s banana pancake arrived, succulent pieces of fried banana poking their heads out of the lightly fried batter, a swirl of whip cream with blueberries on the top. Michael wasted no time digging in, pausing long enough between mouthfuls to say, “Damn that’s good.” What he didn’t expect was a heavily accented reply in return.

“Yes, they are very tasty.”

Michael looked up from his pancake at an attractive young Chinese woman with a friendly face, a wide-brimmed straw hat covering her head. She wore sandals and stained blue trousers, a man’s white shirt covering her torso and a devil may care glimmer in her eye.

“My name is Ester,” the woman continued. “May I be your guide today?”

19

E
STER
TURNED
OUT
to be a college student studying in nearby Guilin who worked as a guide in her native Yangshuo on break. After some quiet back and forth, Michael had agreed with Kate that a local might just be of some help, especially if they were looking for a particular peak as the engravings on the rim of the capsule suggested. So, after finishing their breakfast, Michael and Kate returned to the hostel where they examined the inscriptions. Looking at the capsule now, Michael admired the finely cut beauty of its craftsmanship. Though it appeared to be no more than a shell, the karst-shaped engravings had obviously been etched by the hand of a master metal worker.

After carefully photographing the engravings, they then took the precaution of hiding the capsule. After a few minutes searching, a spot was found under the cowling of a disconnected metal swamp fan on the building’s roof. The metal enclosure had a rusty hasp which Kate then secured with another padlock. It wouldn’t stop anyone who actually knew where to look, but Michael thought it was about as good a hiding place as they would find under the circumstances. From there they joined Ester at a bicycle stall in the street below. She had already arranged for the rental of a pair of well-used mountain bikes and within moments they were pedaling after her up West Street and into the countryside beyond.

Green limestone karsts towered above them as they followed Ester’s squeaky bicycle down the narrow dirt berm between rice paddies. Here, in the country, men and woman practiced agriculture as generations had before them. The rice, green in flooded mud flats, was still planted seedling by seedling, and it still needed to be tended by men and woman standing up to their thighs in muddy ooze. There was the odd nod to modern contrivance here and there: one man rode what looked like a paddle wheel equipped tricycle in the mud; another wore a “Nirvana” t-shirt, Kurt Cobain’s mug peering up from the rice shoots, but all in all, this pocket of paradise offered no hint of the modernity that lay just beyond its dew drop gates. It was a timeless China, a place of such serene bucolic wonder that it almost seemed self-evident that the weight of the world had never touched it and never would. Michael silently reminded himself that every place, no matter how beautiful, had its secrets, and it was the pursuit of those secrets that had led him here.

With this in mind, Michael forced his mind back to the inscriptions rimming the capsule. Though varied in shape and appearance, they consistently returned to the motif of what looked like a broken horn, or in the lexicon of the regional topography: a crooked limestone karst. Of the sixteen engravings, the image of the crooked karst was repeated four times and for that reason, both Michael and Kate had agreed it was as good a place to start looking as any. Kate had shown Ester a digital photo of one of the engravings and Ester had vowed to take them there. It had been that simple.

Regardless, even with a one-stop destination, Ester apparently had too much of the tour guide in her system to completely shirk her duties. She happily pointed out the sights along the way. There was the Moon Hill, a karst with a perfectly round opening naturally occurring at its peak. Not far beyond it was an ancient carved wooden bridge where the villagers were said to catch magical fish. Then came a cave spawning a tale of a hidden jade Buddha followed by a bend in the stream that was once home to a nesting dragon right out of the Chinese Brothers Grimm. Michael was convinced that the next sight would involve three Panda bears, porridge, and a hungry girl with long golden hair lost in the forest. Instead, Ester simply dismounted her bicycle.

Ester said, “This is the place.”

Michael immediately looked up. He saw it right away. They had stopped in a shadow at the base of what looked to be a crooked karst. It wasn’t a perfect match to the inscription, but it wasn‘t unlike it either and Michael reasoned that the next thing to do would be to thoroughly search the area. He thought Kate could accompany him and perhaps Ester could watch the bikes, but before he could articulate his plan, Ester began to speak.

“I knew this crooked mountain from long ago. This is the place my mother lived.”

It was then that Michael noticed several grave stones marking the sight, a tiny entrance to what appeared to be a limestone cave, visible through the thick foliage. A small brook ran close to the path here and Michael noticed that the karst, covered in emerald green trees, rose so steeply that standing in the shadow at its base as they were, the mountain was more like a skyscraper than any kind of natural formation. Once Michael had laid his bike in the grass, Ester continued.