Biblical (26 page)

Tennant was rich twice over, having inherited family wealth but also amassing a second fortune through the companies he had set up himself. Having studied molecular biology at Caltech, Tennant had combined scientific understanding with business nous and set up a string of related biotech R and D
companies, all of which seemed to have won significant government contracts. The most commercially successful part of the Tennant empire was, however, cosmetics research: Tennant had ring-patented several anti-ageing skin agents that beautyproduct companies paid through the nose to buy as an ingredient.

Tennant – unlike the retiring, almost reclusive Killberg – had cultivated a playboy image. There were dozens of press pictures of him, mainly being seen where the young, rich and glamorous were expected to be seen.

One photograph took Macbeth off-guard. It was a society shot taken as Tennant was leaving some glitzy Platinum Triangle party. The girl on his arm was slim, with thick, shoulder-length dark hair and large, strikingly blue eyes. And she looked happy; in all the time they had been involved, Macbeth could not remember ever seeing Melissa look as unguardedly, completely happy as she did in that photograph.

He sat and looked at the picture for a long time, the uneasy feeling in his gut taking a more defined form. Melissa had been connected to both dead men, one professionally, one personally. And there was more to the Tennant story. A lot more.

There had been a buzz of press stories, conspiracy theories and half-assed speculations about what had happened to the young billionaire, the most reliable article from the
New York Times
. Eighteen months before, Tennant, the partygoer and bon viveur, had suddenly dropped off the West Coast social radar. Even his colleagues and employees had seen less and less of the young tycoon, and those who had had been alarmed by Tennant’s sudden loss of weight. The last press photograph, of a gaunt Tennant failing to fill his expensive tailoring, confirmed something was far wrong. It had been assumed that the young man had fallen victim to illness, probably cancer, and his privacy had been respected.

But there had been no cancer.

The
Times
headline read: AUTOPSY REVEALS BIOTECH ENTREPRENEUR DIED OF MALNUTRITION. It had been one of those stories that had registered with Macbeth at the time without him taking much notice of it: a strange story, but at a time of general, and increasing, strangeness.

Tennant had been found dead in his New York penthouse, to which he had retreated presumably to remove himself as far as possible from his colleagues in California. Increasingly reclusive, he had refused even janitorial or cleaning staff access to his apartment, and was scarcely seen outside it.

His reclusion became complete invisibility and total silence.

Eventually, Tennant’s concerned family and colleagues had entered the apartment, accompanied by police and the apartment building’s management. The scene that had confronted them had been bizarre. Tennant had been found sitting in the middle of his opulent apartment, surrounded by designer furniture, fine art and sculpture valued at two million dollars. The temperature- and humidity-controlled apartment was also found to contain half a million dollars’ worth of high-tech electronics. Thirty thousand dollars in cash was found in a desk drawer and his wardrobe contained nothing but the most expensive designer wear.

Yet, in the whole of the apartment there was no food other than three apples in the refrigerator. Kitchen cupboards were empty of food but stacked with vitamins and supplements. Vials of human growth hormone were the only things other than the apples found in the refrigerator.

And in the middle of it all, looking out over Central Park through the apartment’s vast picture windows, sat Samuel Tennant. Not only was the thirty-four-year-old entrepreneur dead, he had been dead for three weeks. During that time, the dehumidifying air conditioning he had had installed to keep his computers and electronics in the optimum conditions, coupled with the lack of fatty mass in his body, had begun a
process of mummification. Accurate measurement had been difficult, but it was estimated that Tennant had weighed less than seventy pounds at the time of his death.

Macbeth leaned back in his chair, staring at the screen and trying to work out what connection there could be between Tennant’s bizarre death, Killberg’s horrific murder and Melissa’s inexplicable suicide.

He had just gone back to the article on the Golden Gate suicides and noted down the CHP police officer’s name when he heard Casey’s key in the door.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she brushed back blonde hair that was between red and gold from her oval face, her forehead wide and pale above bright green eyes, before fastening her hair behind her head with the clasp she had until then held between tight lips.

A foreigner gazed back from the mirror. Or at least parts of a foreigner. Hers was a face that spoke of two worlds, two hemispheres, but belonged to neither; a face whose detail – the high cheekbones, the shape of her eyes, her small, heart-shaped mouth – was Han Chinese, but whose general form and architecture, whose skin tone and hair color, was European. It should have had the effect of making her look like the child of mixed parentage, but it didn’t because she wasn’t. She looked exactly what she was; she looked like many others from her village but like so few in a nation of one and a third billion.

Growing up in Liqian, Zhang Xushou had not felt foreign or different, because there had been so many others in her village with hair shaded from red and blonde to chestnut and auburn; eye colors from hazel to green to pale blue. It had been an accepted part of her childhood, when her universe had extended only as far as the stumps of the ancient city walls at the edge of the village. It had only been when she went to the senior school in the neighboring village that Zhang Xushou became aware that there was something different, odd, about her village. About her.

It was then she had heard the legend of the legionnaires: the tall blond Roman soldiers, separated from their commanders in the ill-fated expedition of Marcus Licinius Crassus against the Parthians. The legend told that legionnaire survivors of the battle ended up impossibly far east and lost in the Gobi Desert, eventually washing up on its shores and finding refuge in her village, then a frontier city, where they were pressed into service by the Han Dynasty.

At one time, Zhang Xushou and her kind were shunned, mocked. As the borders of her world had expanded, so had her understanding of what it was to be other, different; to be one blonde head in an ocean of China Black. And then, as she grew older, she had begun to stand out from the crowd even more. Literally. The length of bone her ancient genetics had given her made her taller as a thirteen-year-old girl than many of her male teachers at the school. At an age and in an environment where conformity and acceptance was everything, Zhang Xushou had been subjected to hostile stares and name-calling; mainly
wai guo ren
. Foreigner.

Her isolation had not made her resent her individuality but value it, embrace it. She welcomed the nicknames, turning insults into compliments and particularly liking it when others called her
Lijian
, which meant Greek or Roman. Her heritage became a passion, then an obsession. She spent hours reading all she could on the Roman Empire, about the six thousand lost legionnaires, about the people and culture of Europe. She pinned pictures of Western models and pop stars on her wall.

Then, as she grew older, she saw attitudes change around her. Tourists began to visit Liqian to stare at the villagers who paraded proudly and often took money for interviews from the Chinese and foreign press. One day, a day she would never forget, a film crew from an Italian television station came to the village. She had, at first, been disappointed because the Italian men in the crew had not been much taller than the
average Han Chinese, and their hair had been as black. But then she saw the reporter, dressed in baggy cargo pants and sweatshirt, her hair tied back into a clasp at the back of her head. Her hair. Her bronze-gold hair, exactly the same shade as Zhang’s. Zhang Xushou had thought the Italian journalist the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Zhang’s joy had been immeasurable when the Italian woman had spotted her and, recognizing her as one of the ‘Roman’ children, had come over and chatted to her as best she could through the medium of a squat, stern government translator.

After the film crew had gone, Zhang had sought out a friend who she knew had a hair clasp similar to the Italian woman’s and bought it for much more than the clasp was worth. From that day forth, Zhang Xushou had worn her hair scraped back from her face and clasp-fastened behind her head.

About a year after the Italians had visited, the people from Lanzhou University had come. They had taken photographs of the village, examined the ancient ruins of the old city, had talked to the villagers. Among the university people had been specialists interested exclusively in the thirty families in the village who everyone agreed looked like
wai guo ren
. These rubber-gloved specialists had asked Zhang Xushou to place a cotton bud in her mouth and rub the inside of her cheek, before placing the cotton bud in a sealed tube. Each of us, they had explained, had a secret history within us, coiled up tight in spirals. Their job was to unravel these histories. Zhang had stared at them with her bright green eyes in the frank and defiant way that had gotten her into so much trouble at school and had said: “DNA? I may be a Gansu village girl, but I know what DNA is.”

The university people had smiled and explained that they had done tests on the other thirty families and it would prove, one way or another, if she was the distant descendant of a Roman.

And it did. Or at least, when the results had eventually come back, they proved to the excited villagers that what they had always believed was true: they were nearly as much European as they were Chinese. The archaeologists in the team also confirmed that the village was, indeed, the site of the ancient fortress city which had stood guard on the western frontier of the Han Empire. The government, however, maintained that the results proved nothing more than Zhang Xushou and the other Lijian families belonged to some sub-clade of the Han ethnic group.

But Zhang Xushou never stopped believing.

Life had returned more or less to normal after that, other than the Roman-styled gift shops and café that the enterprising locals had set up for the tourists, who came in even greater numbers. Zhang had done her own research and had learned about others in Gansu region and beyond who shared her foreign looks. No hint of legionnaires about them, but of ancient races of Celts, of Tocharians, of the
Wusun
 – the Grandchildren of the Raven – who, a millennium and a half before, Yan Shigu had described as apes: green-eyed, red-haired savages.

She scoured the Internet, which was easier and more fruitful than visiting the nearest library in Yongchang, reading up about mysterious people: about the three-thousand-year-old bodies found, perfectly preserved, in the Taklamakan Desert; looking at photographs of Cherchen Man and the Beauty of Loulan: tall, blond and red-haired people who had lived in western China nearly three thousand years ago. Zhang knew the chances were the origin of her distinctive look lay with these people and not with some mythical Roman, but she clung on desperately to the romance of being the Legionnaire’s Daughter.

Now, as she prepared to leave her village to attend university in Lanzhou, she also prepared for a life as a foreigner in her own country. And her identity became even more important to her. In the evenings, she would walk to the edge of the village and watch the sun set behind the Qilian mountains, gazing out over the desert sands and allowing the dimming light and
distant dust clouds to play tricks and conjure imagined outlines of some faraway phalanx.

*

But then there had been the talk of the Age of Visions.

It had started with reports of strange occurrences in bigger towns far away: third-hand tall tales made taller through the magnifying glass of village gossip. Stories had begun to circulate of people seeing their ancestors, seeing past times; witnessing cataclysmic events or the moon twenty times its size in the daylight sky. People, especially the old, superstitious villagers, began to talk of the old religions and their tales of an Age of Visions that marked the End Times; about the return of
Hundun
, the spirit of chaos from before time began. One old man, Zhia Bao, who was Hui Chinese and supposed to adhere strictly to Islam, announced portentously that what was happening was that the Wall of Heaven had been breached. He explained that it had happened once before in mankind’s history, but the creator-goddess Nüwa had stopped the gap with her own body.

“If what you say is true,” Zhang had heard one of the villagers ask, “what will become of us if the Wall is breached?”

Zhia Bao had taken a long, contemplative pull on his pipe, playing the village elder of older times. “According to the legends, then the world of heaven and this world will collide and all things will end.”

It had all been the excited speculation of distance: the thrill of a threat at one remove. But then there was talk of a panic in the streets of Lanzhou, of people running from monsters that could not be. Then strange happenings in Yongchang. But it was when one of the women in the village itself, a woman deaf for twenty years, had said she had heard the sounds of marching men and clashing metal coming from the desert, that Zhang knew that something momentous was about to happen. It was then that she began to sit for hours at the edge of the village, watching the sands beyond. Waiting.

The legion was coming.

When Casey got home, Macbeth told him about his meeting with Bundy, and what he had found out about the names the FBI man had mentioned; about Melissa’s connections to two dead men; and about Bundy’s interest in John Astor and the Simulists.

“He seemed to want to know more about them than about Blind Faith, who I’d have thought would be a bigger priority for the FBI,” Macbeth explained. “Have you ever heard of the Simulists?”