The Fourth Sacrifice (49 page)

‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said. ‘Look at this.’ And he held up a tape. Li crossed to have a look at it. ‘Why do you think he’s got a security tape from Beijing University? What’s the Fourth Chamber?’

Li snatched the tape and examined it. It was a labelled tape from an internal video security system at the university. Written on it by hand were the words,
Fourth Chamber
, and it was dated
September 14th
. Li repeated the date aloud. ‘September fourteenth … Should that date mean something to us?’ Wu shrugged.

Qian said, ‘We found Professor Yue’s body on the fifteenth.’

Li handed the tape back to Wu. ‘Put it on,’ he said.

Qian drew the curtain on the window behind them to stop sunlight reflecting off the screen, and all the officers gathered around to watch. The picture flickered and jumped as a fuzzy black and white image came into focus. The lighting was poor, and it was difficult to tell what they were looking at. There was no soundtrack. There appeared to be rows of dark figures standing still in the background. But then almost immediately a moving figure came into shot, emerging from the bottom of the screen, from below the camera. It was the hunched figure of a man, staggering as he was pushed forward by a more erect figure following behind. As they reached almost centre screen, the second man forced the first one to turn and then pushed him to his knees.

‘Shit,’ Wu said. ‘That’s Yue Shi, Professor Yue. Look, his hands are tied behind his back.’

And they saw, also, the placard hanging around his neck and could clearly read the name,
Monkey
, upside down and scored through, below the number 4. The professor seemed to be weeping. The other man, whose face they still could not clearly see, appeared to be talking to him and looking around. And then he turned, so that he was almost facing the camera. Li had known, from the moment the figures stumbled into shot, who they were. But it was still a shock to see Yuan Tao turning towards the camera, his face triumphant, almost gloating. The last time Li had seen him was on the autopsy table.

Yuan raised something from his side, and they saw that in his right hand was his executioner’s sword, the bronze replica that he had commissioned from Mr Mao in Xi’an. The professor made a half-hearted attempt to get to his feet, but Yuan pushed him down again. He was easy to manipulate under the influence of the flunitrazepam. Yuan put his hand on the back of Yue’s head and pushed it forward, then he stood back, adopting a position, legs astride, slightly behind his victim and to his left. He placed the blade of the sword briefly on the back of the professor’s neck, and then in one swift and expert movement, he raised it high over his head and brought it down to send the professor’s head spinning away across the floor.

In Zimmerman’s apartment there was a collective intake of breath, six men watching in horror as the headless body of Yue Shi fell forwards and sideways, blood spurting from the severed carotid arteries. Yuan stepped back, took a rag from his pocket and drew it swiftly along the length of his sword, then seemed to look behind him again at the rows of silent witnesses.

Li said, ‘No wonder they knew how to replicate the murders. They had the whole thing on tape.’

One of the uniformed officers made a dash for the bathroom, hand over his mouth.

‘What’s Yuan doing?’ Wu asked in a hushed voice. ‘What are those figures he’s looking at in the background?’

Li picked up the remote control and pressed the
pause
button. The picture flickered momentarily, and then held in a perfect freeze-frame. Li leaned forward to try to make out what it was in the background. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he whispered. ‘They’re Terracotta Warriors.’

*

Margaret stood shivering among the silent figures. She was not certain if it was the cold or her fear that made her tremble so violently. In the momentary glow of the pinpoint of red light that flashed at regular intervals overhead, the faces of her companions took brief form in the dark and then plunged again into blackness. But their faces were cold as stone, lifeless eyes staring off towards an eternity into which they had been marching for two thousand, two hundred years. She did not know how many of them there were. Dozens perhaps. They stood in hushed rows, one behind the other in the cold and dreadful darkness of this underground chamber. They had had time to get used to it. Margaret had not.

At first, after the lights had gone out, there had been a distant clang of metal and she had called out, frantically hoping that someone would hear her. Terrified, she had felt her way back up the tunnel, inch by inch, one hand on the wall, one probing the darkness ahead of her. She could not remember ever having been so completely without light. The blackness seemed to take form and substance, enveloping her totally. It was frightening, disorientating. She had wondered if this was how it felt to be blind, and thought briefly of Pauper losing her sight slowly, first one eye, then the other. When she had told them her story of the sun rising red over the Yellow Sea and firing the town of Chongqing in the light of its crimson dawn, Margaret had been able to visualise it so clearly. Now she could see nothing, not even in her mind’s eye.

Up ahead her hand had touched something cold and wet, and she recoiled with a little scream. After a moment she had reached out again, and realised that what she felt was the cold metal of the gate at the tunnel’s entrance. Her relief was only momentary, as she realised that the gate was shut. And locked. Any illusions she may have harboured that she had been shut in here by accident had quickly vaporised. Her fear had turned to terror, and she had made her way quickly back to the chamber where the Terracotta Warriors stood waiting for her, as if it had been their destiny, and hers, to share the darkness of this awful place.

It was some time before she had realised that the winking red light which afforded her the briefest glimpses of her companions, was the light of a security camera mounted on the wall above the tunnel entrance. Was it an infrared camera? Was there someone, somewhere, at a monitor who could see her in the dark, who was watching her every movement? The thought made her feel sick.

Now she squeezed herself carefully among the warriors to crouch down and obscure herself from the camera and huddle, arms around her legs, for warmth and comfort. She wanted to cry. She did not know how long she had been here. But it seemed like a very, very long time.

III

Li slammed down the phone and shouted, ‘Wu!’

Wu appeared quickly in the doorway. The office behind him was buzzing with activity.

‘Boss?’

‘Get down to the Procurator General’s office and pick up that warrant for Zimmerman.’

‘On my way.’

Qian took his place in the doorway as Wu left it. ‘No one seems to know where Zimmerman is, boss. He’s not out on location, or at the production office. He’s not at the American Embassy …’

The phone on Li’s desk rang. He snatched the receiver. ‘Just a moment,’ he barked into it and put a hand over the mouthpiece. He flicked his head at Qian. ‘Try that bar where he said he was the night of Yuan’s murder. The Mexican Wave. I think it’s in Dongdaqiao Lu.’ And into the phone, ‘Deputy Section Chief Li.’ He flicked open his file on the murders and a couple of sheets of paper fluttered to the floor. He leaned over to pick them up.

‘It’s Mr Qi here, Deputy Section Chief. At the Centre of Material Evidence Determination. Hope I didn’t get you out bed.’

‘What do you want?’ Li was in no mood for Qi’s levity. He laid the fallen sheets on his desk in front of him.

‘I’ve got the results here that Dr Campbell asked for. She wanted me to phone you.’

Li frowned. ‘What results?’ His eyes were drawn by the printed sheets he had picked from the floor. They were in English, two of the pages from the print-out Margaret had made of the
North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts
after she had downloaded it from the Internet.

‘The dark blue dust she brought in this morning. She wanted me to run a comparison with the samples you found on Professor Yue and at Yuan Tao’s embassy apartment.’

Li was mystified. ‘She brought you a sample? This morning?’

‘Yes,’ Qi said. ‘It was a positive match.’

He now had Li’s full attention. ‘Did she tell you where she found it?’

‘Sure,’ said Qi. ‘It was in the tread of her shoes from when she was in the pits of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an.’

But Li barely had time to register this information before a name leaped out at him from one of the sheets of paper on his desk. A name that came several paragraphs below Yuan’s, in a list of winners in a minor Tameshi Giri competition in San Diego. It seemed extraordinary to him that they hadn’t seen it before. But, then, they hadn’t been looking. He felt sick.

‘Hello … hello …’ he heard Qi saying. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Sure.’ Li’s throat was thick. He knew now who had killed Yuan. ‘Thank you, Mr Qi.’ He hung up and sat for a moment. A thousand conflicting computations ran through his mind before one of them punched up an answer that sent a chill through him. He became aware that the sheet of paper in his hand was trembling.

He jumped up suddenly, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair, and headed for the door. In the detectives’ office he called to Qian to give him the mobile phone. Qian threw it across the desk and he caught it deftly and clipped it on to his belt. ‘Keep me in touch with any developments,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to find Dr Campbell. I think she could be in danger.’

*

The playpark was almost deserted. A handful of toddlers played in a sandpit watched by their mothers, who sat nearby on toy cars, smoking and talking. A breeze that stirred the leaves of the surrounding trees rattled the empty climbing frames. A giant Donald Duck, facing a slightly smaller dinosaur, presided over motionless swings and roundabouts. Out on Lake Houhai, the warm wind sent tiny ripples racing across the surface of the water. Li looked around with an increasing sense of anxiety. Margaret and Xinxin should have been here by now. But there was no sign of them. There was a shop in a tiny pavilion on the waterfront selling soft drinks and cigarettes. The proprietress sat reading a magazine. She shook her head when Li asked if she had seen a
yangguizi
with a little Chinese girl. No, she said. She had been here all morning and would have noticed something so unusual.

Li hurried back through a small park, past a garden where a woman in a white coat administered a massage to a fat, middle-aged man lying face down on a table. A few old men sat on benches around a circular flowerbed, staring into space. There was barely a flicker of interest in their eyes as Li ran past them to the
hutong
where he had parked the Jeep. He backed up and drove to Mei Yuan’s
siheyuan
.

She was surprised to see him, and he was relieved to see Xinxin. He looked around. ‘Where’s Margaret?’ he asked, expecting that she would come through the door from the other room any moment.

‘She wouldn’t take me to the park,’ Xinxin said petulantly. ‘She promised.’

‘She said she’d be back later,’ Mei Yuan said to her. ‘You know that.’

Xinxin folded her arms crossly. ‘Fed up waiting,’ she said.

‘Well, do you know where she went?’ Li asked impatiently.

Mei Yuan nodded towards Xinxin’s trainers by the door. ‘She got very excited when she found some dark blue powdery stuff on Xinxin’s shoes.’

Li stooped immediately to look at them, and recognised the blue-black ceramic dust he had found on Professor Yue and in his killer’s apartment. He frowned his confusion. This didn’t make any sense. He looked up at Mei Yuan, but she just shrugged.

‘She said she had to go to the university.’

IV

Margaret felt her fingers and joints stiffening. She had started to shiver uncontrollably, her lower lip trembling with every breath. It was, she recognised, the early stages of hypothermia. She had lost all sense of time now, and realised that soon she would start to become drowsy, comatose. If she allowed herself to drift off into sleep she knew it was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

Stiffly she got to her feet again and stamped them on the concrete floor. She swung her arms in circles around her body to try to get her circulation going and generate the heat that would keep her alive. For a long time she had been afraid of someone coming. But now she would have welcomed it. Anything would be better than dying down here in the cold and dark, simply slipping away without so much as a fight. They were insidious, intangible enemies, the cold and dark. You could not fight them. Their patience was endless, and would far outlast her will to survive. It seemed ironic that just a few feet above her the sun was shining, warm and bright and full of life. But there was no way she could reach it, or it reach her. And not for the first time did she feel the urge to cry, but fought it back. Tears would be futile.

She had long ago stopped trying to make sense of anything. Her thoughts and her senses had been focused on the need to stay alive. Twice she had made her way back to the gate hoping that she might find some way to break it down or force the lock. But it was solid and unyielding.

She had carefully picked her way through the ranks of the warriors to the back of the chamber. There it narrowed, and two steps led down to the opening of another tunnel. Hope had flared briefly, only to be extinguished by the discovery of another gate, which was also locked.

One by one she had counted the warriors. There were sixty-seven of them, including eighteen kneeling archers. She had felt their features, as if she might find in their faces some expression of comfort. But their cold, hard bodies were icier to the touch than the dead she had dissected on her autopsy table. And now she felt physical and mental control slipping away from her. Fear of death was slowly giving way to acceptance of it. How long could you remain afraid? Fear, like pain, could not sustain itself indefinitely.

But it was fear that returned, like a knife plunged into the heart, as suddenly she found herself dazzled by light. They were the same feeble lamps as before, but their light now seemed blinding after the dark. She screwed up her eyes against the glare until her pupils shrank to bring the light into perspective, painfully restoring her sight. The chamber appeared smaller somehow than it had in the darkness of her imagination. The warriors stood mute and expressionless, unblinking in the sudden light, unmoved by her plight.