Collector of Secrets (45 page)

The first two sites were bare of any markings, and they moved to the third burial site while keeping a wary eye on the laneway.

The final moss-covered tomb was clearly the oldest. Snaking vines and tree roots hung over the edges of the encroaching hillside, covering the tomb’s top. Crumbling pieces of wall lay on the ground, mixed with dead leaves and discarded water bottles. The stench of urine filled the air. “A homeless shelter,” Jeff said wryly. “Hey—help me move these vines.”

Working from opposite sides of the battered wall, they yanked back overhanging vegetation, unearthing blank surfaces along with an excess of dirt and startled insects. With each tug, Max’s voice overflowed with frustration. He spat dirt from his mouth. “Nothing—nothing—nothing—noth—”

His last pull yielded something different. High on the wall, rising out of the tomb’s face, was the stylized shape of a sixteen-point chrysanthemum. The Imperial symbol. He pointed at the spot. “That’s the same image as on the diary’s satchel!” His voice rose an octave. “This is it!” He stood on his toes and ran his fingertips across the plate-sized symbol.

“It’s the Japanese royal crest . . . but what to we do now?” Jeff sounded perplexed. “It’s not a cross, and the
Hanjie
shows a picture of a cross.”

Max’s face pressed against the rough rock wall while his fingers probed around the image’s outer edge. “I can feel a space between the petals and the wall. It’s not carved from the wall; it’s been inset into the surface. They feel like they’ll move.”

“Maybe—maybe we have to push the four that form the shape of a cross . . .”

“It’s worth a shot!” Max nodded with excitement.

“But we don’t know what order to push them in.” Jeff was pacing on the grass now. “I’ll bet there’s a specific order.”

Their heads jerked in unison when the brakes of an aging truck squealed in the laneway below them. It crawled over a speed bump before driving away.

Turning back, Jeff shook his head. “We’d better hurry. Just push the top one and then go around the symbol clockwise.”

“All right.” Max stretched his arm up, but paused as he heard Jeff muttering the words, “North, east, south, west.” His hand stopped in midair. “What did you just say?”

“Uh . . . first push north, then east, south, and west. Why?”

Max flashed back to Mr. M’s office, and he recalled seeing the top of the wooden box as it was pressed four times. “That’s it!” He felt a rush of excitement as his outstretched fingers pushed the eastern petal first, then the bottom one, followed by the left, and finally the top.

Jeff grabbed him by the shoulder. “Why in that order?”

“
Mahjong
winds—east always goes first.” The waist-high burial stone slid quietly backward.

Jeff let out a whoop and clapped his hands before fumbling in his jacket pocket. He produced two hikers’ headlamps. “I thought these might come in handy at the underground museum.”

Max grinned with anticipation, feeling sure they were close to a breakthrough. He slipped the elastic strap over his head before flicking on the light. “I knew you must have been a Boy Scout.”

“Yeah, right!” Jeff laughed. “Let’s roll—hurry up, before it closes.”

At that moment, Max spotted the maroon sedan pulling into the laneway’s end. “The car!” He dropped to his knees and scrambled forward, brushing away cobwebs. “You think they spotted us?”

“I don’t think so,” Jeff replied as he followed hastily.

Inside the narrow passage, the headlamps cast pale glowing beams. Just ahead was a metal lever jutting from a split in the rock wall, and Max gripped it as his voice echoed. “Here goes.”

He slammed the lever down, sealing them within—it seemed not a moment too soon.

HER PURSE sailed through the air and crashed into a shelf, scattering its jumbled contents onto the industrial carpet. Yoko stared from her office chair at the room that had held her secret dreams of freedom. She listened to the silence, amazed to find that she actually would have preferred the chorus of children’s laughter in the classroom next door. It had always seemed like such an annoyance, but now without it, the place felt like a hollow husk.

Armani, Lauren, and Versace had been replaced by sweatpants, a baggy T-shirt, and white sneakers. Her normally immaculate bobbed hair was disheveled.

She picked up the legal documents on her desk and read again from Murayama-
san
’s
last will and testament. The old man had left everything to Max.

How could she not have foreseen? She had been too blinded by her own ambitions to notice everyone conspiring against her. Max had transformed so quickly into Brutus. Her mind raced a wild course, consumed with betrayal. She struggled to find the pivot point when everything had turned.

There would be no new gallery. The palazzi of Venice would no longer welcome her with open arms. One selfish boy had washed away years of painstaking work.

Pools of moisture gathered in her eyes, threatening to roll down her cheeks, but she dabbed them away. Her mother’s haunting voice whispered over her shoulder, urging her to run and hide, to begin anew. But the thought that troubled her most: is there time enough to start again?

She wasn’t young and beautiful anymore, and she couldn’t risk taking much when she left—Masami Ishi’s men were parked in a van on the street below.

Luciano trailed her as she stomped from the office down to the third floor. The costly art prints would go with her. Since the gallery exhibit was technically still underway, it shouldn’t raise questions from Masami’s men. Glancing around, she attempted to locate a cardboard tube. As her eyes swept the long, pictured wall, they stopped on a gap. An empty space stared back. She knew the spot well—a picture was missing.

Yoko gasped.

Rushing to the wall, she prayed that the photo had somehow fallen from its hook. Her eyes scanned desperately, but it was nowhere in sight. Turning around, she finally saw it on the corner of the desk. The slim copper frame was lying face down, the paper backing torn open.

Almost simultaneously, she saw pages in the fax machine’s bottom tray. A receipt slip showed they had been sent only hours before. On the cover page, the
FROM
box was blank, while the
TO
box simply said, “Max.”

Luciano rubbed against her leg, and he hissed as she kicked him away.

Yoko’s hands shook uncontrollably and a tear finally escaped its prison, snaking its way down her cheek. She recognized Mr. Murayama’s
handwriting on the pages. Dropping into a chair, she studied the first paragraph of the guilt-filled confession, but there was no point reading it all. She knew it as her own story, or more accurately, their story. The voices in her head grew to a screaming crescendo. They told her to be strong, to get up and flee, and to not stop until she was far away.

But from this . . . there was no place to run or hide.

She laid her head into folded arms and wept. Forty years of tortured thoughts and haunted nights burst forth. Tears from her uncontrollable sobs soaked the pages and blurred the ink.

Only a single way out remained.

MAX CRAWLED into the forbidding gloom, drawing in the tomb’s dank musty air. Goose bumps slithered over his exposed skin. The wet black walls, cut straight but unfinished, pressed in around him. He hated confined spaces. Slender drainage canals ran down both sides of the narrow passage. Even so, stale water lay in shallow pools on the ground. Twenty feet inside, light from the headlamp allowed him to view the rising ceiling. He desperately wanted to take the weight off his aching knees.

Several paces back, Jeff’s voice rang forward. “That door better open up again.”

Max turned his head back, momentarily blinding them both.

“Bro! Point that thing at the floor.” Jeff threw up a hand to block his eyes.

“Sorry.” Max rose to a half stance. “Hey, it’s high enough to stand up. Whoa!” His right foot shot forward, and he bridged his hands between the walls to keep from falling. “Careful—it’s slippery.”

Jeff guffawed while standing. “We’re crawling around inside a tomb. I think falling on my ass is the least of my worries.”

Max swiped cobwebs from the path and edged forward with determination. “This whole mess is my fault.”

“Ease up, bro—it’s not like you planned it. Let’s just find what we need and get outta here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Walking single file, they advanced a dozen paces. The slender passage joined a foyer-sized room at right angle to a ramp—ten feet wide—descending farther into the stone hillside. Opposing handrails allowed them to simultaneously navigate the slick incline.

Trailing behind, Jeff lost his footing and let out a shout as he slipped the last few feet, dropping hard onto the smooth floor. “I’m okay, I’m okay!”

Max took a couple of tentative steps forward, barely noticing Jeff’s echoing voice. “Look at this room!” The chamber they were standing in was fifteen feet wide and extended another twenty feet before a steel door blocked the way. The oval-shaped door was embedded in the center of a curving wall that arched up and forward before meeting the high ceiling above them.

Jeff whistled his astonishment. “Amazing!”

“No kidding.” Max walked slowly toward the door. “After you mentioned the extra burial site in the Philippines and we found that the
Hanjie
coordinates pointed here, to Okinawa, there were only two things I thought it could be.” His voice rose with excitement. “Either it was the location of a map for the 176th treasure, or else it was the treasure itself—somehow moved here after the war ended—Yamashita’s Gold!” He touched the curving wall’s vulcanized rubber surface. “Maybe it really is the treasure. Maybe I will have something valuable to bargain with after all.”

“Look here, this floor is dry.” Jeff held a hand on the smooth ground. “The granite must be heated—it’s slightly warm—and there’s writing.”

Max moved back toward the incline’s base. “Can you translate what it says?”

“It’s a Haiku-style poem. Basically it says:

I kill an ant

And realize my three children

Have been watching.

Jeff’s lips moved silently, reading it over again. “I think . . . whoever built this place was concerned about his kids learning to murder innocents based on his actions.”

“Three innocent people have already died in just the last few days.” Max bent down to stare at the inset letters. “I just hope for Tomoko’s sake . . .” He wanted to finish the sentence, but the words caught in his throat, and he fell silent.

“Don’t worry, man, we’ll get her back. As a matter of fact, what are we waiting for?” Striding forward, Jeff spun the round metal handle in the center of the steel door, then heaved on it. The door groaned and opened, revealing a chamber the size of a closet and an identical steel door on the opposite side. They each tried the handle of the second door but it refused to budge, so Jeff sealed them inside the airlock while Max again tried the handle. The door swung outward easily, and he had to catch himself from falling forward as fresh, dry air rushed in.

High above, at the apex of the arching ceiling, a fluorescent light clapped on, followed by another equally noisy light, then another and another until at last a row of more than two dozen lights blazed overhead, stretching seventy yards into the distance.