Dark Time: Mortal Path (32 page)

2009-08-25 02:50

such a list.”

Maliha sighed, heaving her chest. “I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for my satisfaction.” She stood up. “You do have competition.”

“I wish I could offer more.”

“I had plenty to offer, but you’ve passed on the opportunity.”

She made sure he knew what opportunity he’d passed on as she walked out the door. It was the last he’d see of her gorgeous, swaying ass. The regret was palpable in the room.

Out in the parking lot, she phoned Amaro and said she’d been unsuccessful. She asked if he could hack into SecureClean’s records and get the crew list for ShaleTech so she could work on finding a vulnerable employee. Maliha had centuries of experience in picking out vulnerabilities. She hadn’t asked him to do it in the first place, because if the task could be accomplished by her in person, so much the better. She had a large network of informants in thrall.

At that thought a vision flitted through her mind of Manco, the archaeologist in Peru, lying dead in his office.

Unlike Midas, I have the death touch.

It was such a depressing idea that she stopped dead in the conversation.

“What was that you said? My cell reception’s acting up.” It was an excuse that had rocketed to classic status in a few years.

“I said, no need to bother. I got hold of the original blueprints for the building,” Amaro said.

“Do I want to know how?”

He ignored the question. “The blueprints show a normal area there, with offices and labs that have doors to the hallway. So changes must have been made after the original construction and inspections.”

“What good does that do us? I could have guessed that myself.”

“Ah, but can you guess the architect’s name? It’s on the blueprints, and I’m in the process of tracking her down. I have a feeling Ms. Yolanda Preston might know something about those alterations.

Who better than the original architect to do the customization?”

“Is this architect still alive? People who worked for Greg Shale seem to turn up dead.”

“I’ll have to let you know on that.”

C
hina was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong. The Red Guard, a civilian army spurred on by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, began a purge of those who showed any opposition to the Communist party. After the obvious targets within the government were gone, the Red Guard turned to artists, teachers, professors, even the families of the Red Guard youths.

It was a fruitful time for Maliha as far as moving the scale in her favor. She, along with brave Chinese who knew they risked all, established passageways to safety to get dissidents to Mongolia or Japan, similar to the Underground Railroad in America more than a century earlier. Few Westerners were tolerated in China at that time, so Maliha operated in a clandestine manner, living hidden in the homes of supporters of the underground movement and moving frequently.

Maliha was currently staying in the tiny apartment of Xia Yanmeng, a thirty-five-year-old teacher turned factory worker, and his wife, Eliu, a writer of children’s stories who now wrote lyrics for songs like

“Workers and Peasants and Victory” and “Revolutionary Youth on the March.” They did what they needed to do to stay alive and keep the railroad running.

Yanmeng was a practitioner of the government-approved version of wu shu, acrobatic movements sometimes performed to music, that had replaced real martial arts in China. Having fully trained fighters among the populace was too much of a threat to the government, so Maliha taught Yanmeng in secret.

The windows were tightly sealed, so that the light of a single candle couldn’t leak out. Yanmeng and
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Maliha circled each other, treading softly, sparring in silence. Blankets padded the floor so that the
elderly hard-of-hearing couple downstairs wouldn’t hear them. Maliha could see Eliu’s eyes gleaming
proudly in the candlelight as she watched her husband practice the forbidden art: the elegant,
traditional, and deadly art that was not wu shu. Yanmeng’s body shone with sweat and joy as he blocked
Maliha’s attacks and sometimes landed a blow of his own. Grandfather had taught her that it is the
responsibility of the fighter with more experience to protect the student from harm, and Maliha
protected both Yanmeng’s body and his dignity in subtle ways.

One evening, after a modest dinner, there was a loud knocking at the door. Yanmeng and his wife sat with eyes wide, motionless, rabbits in the grip of a hawk. They were the parents of a rebellious fifteen-year-old son, Xietai, a member of the Red Guard. Yanmeng and Eliu feared that he would reveal his parents’ involvement with the underground. It looked like the time had come.

The knocking came again, more insistent. There was shouting, and the men outside said they’d break down the door if it wasn’t opened immediately.

“You must open the door. Do it now,” Maliha urged. “Don’t resist, don’t give them an excuse to kill you right here in your home.” She pulled Yanmeng to his feet, aimed him at the door, and gave him a firm shove.

Then Maliha ran to the hiding place she used when anyone else came into the apartment. There was a hidden door in the cramped kitchen that concealed a compartment just big enough for Maliha to squeeze into. She pulled the door closed and waited in the dark, certain that her breathing was loud enough to give her away. In spite of her brave words, she wrestled with her own fear. Her heart beat a wild rhythm inside her chest, and she shivered as images from her imprisonment, trial, and burning came flooding back.

Hard as it was, the best thing to do was let them be hauled away, then make her plans to rescue them on her own terms. She needed a getaway plan for two people, needed to get them on the railroad and out of the country.

She needed time.

Maliha stiffened as the men surged into the room. There were only a few thin planks of wood separating her from the soldiers, with their gruff voices and pounding boots. Now that she gave in to the memories, she was fully back in her snug home in Massachusetts with the glow of a dying fire, the scent of herbs in the air, and her husband stumbling toward the door that shook with the pounding of fists. She reached in front of her to cradle the phantom weight in her womb, to protect it, and in her mind she felt the rounded form, a baby’s foot kicking under her hands. It was a moment totally given over to the terror she’d felt then.

Then they were gone. The silence was frightening, incriminating. Had she done the right thing?

Should she have fought?

Her friends were gone, and it was up to her to get them out alive.

E
ven though she put her plans together in record time, there was always the chance that Yanmeng had already died in prison, after “questioning.”

Maliha, dressed as a prison guard, disarmed a second prison guard and forced him to take her to Yanmeng’s cell. She ordered the guard to exchange clothing with Yanmeng. She winced when Yanmeng took off his shirt and revealed fresh seeping welts and burns.

The guard put on Yanmeng’s prison uniform. “I’m going to take you through the hall at gunpoint, like a prisoner being taken to interrogation,” she said to the guard. “Instead you will be leading me. Take me to Xia’s wife. Her name is Eliu.”

The man shook his head. “I can’t. I know nothing about the women’s section. I’ve only worked here for a few days. I don’t know where she is.”

The guard held to his story after a slash on the arm.

Yanmeng put his hand out to stop the questioning. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll find her myself.”

Maliha knocked the guard unconscious.

“Your plan?”

Yanmeng hesitated.

“Hurry, friend. What is your plan?”

“You’re not going to believe it, but here goes. I can see my wife and her surroundings in my mind.

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I’ve tracked her since we entered this vile place.” Tears welled in his eyes. “Terrible things have been done to her. She’s said nothing about you or the railroad. Please, we must get her out of here.”

“This tracking—you’re a remote viewer, then?”

“You know about it?”

“Only a little.”

“How? Are you a scientist, or a viewer yourself?”

Maliha wasn’t willing to say that her information was acquired during pillow talk with a high-ranking KGB agent, who’d said that formal study of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union was still a few years off but interest was building.

She dodged Yanmeng’s questions. “It would be a useful military tool. My suggestion is to keep your ability hidden.”

“It’s not something I can do in the way they’d want me to, for spying. I need a connection to a person I know well in the remote location.”

“Then lead the way. When we meet others, let me do the talking.”

Yanmeng nodded. “Hold on.”

He closed his eyes to concentrate. She waited nervously.

She was astonished to see his aura flare in the dimly lighted space: a wide band with whirls of clear yellow, white, and blue. It was a rare sight, indicating a person capable of moving into the lower level of the psychic plane, the state above the physical. That’s what she did when she replayed the last minutes before a person’s death, the ghostly imprint.

Yanmeng sighed and opened his eyes, which had an unfocused look.

“Got her. Let’s go.”

I
t turned out that the architect of Greg’s building-within-a-building was alive, but living under a different name in Colorado. Amaro tracked her down through one of the simplest mistakes that “disappeared”

people make. When her subscription to
Architectural Record
expired, she renewed it under the same customer number but with a change of both name and address. In order to make a disappearance viable, the person had to be willing to make a clean break with the past. That meant a new name, occupation, no contact with friends or relatives, and no connection to anything that belonged to the previous life. Few people were able to do it 100 percent.

Maliha, of course, was a pro at disappearing. She thought of it as shedding her skin to reveal a new one underneath.

The subscription change was almost ten years ago, the year after construction of the ShaleTech building was completed—at least, completed according to the filed blueprints. Yolanda Preston, now Pearl Burton, kept up the subscription during the intervening years. She worked as a landscape designer now, but couldn’t close the door on her true love, architecture.

Yolanda lived outside Grand Lake, Colorado, in a small log cabin at ease with its surroundings of pine trees and mountains.

Maliha went to her home unannounced and knocked on the door. The door remained resolutely closed and the house was silent, but Maliha suspected Yolanda was inside. She just didn’t want to answer the door when there was someone unfamiliar there. The shades on the windows were pulled all the way down, and heavy curtains hung behind them, to keep in the heat, or to ensure privacy, or both.

“Yolanda.” Maliha’s voice was raised to make sure someone inside could hear. “I’m here to talk to you about the work you did for Greg Shale, and I’m not going away.”

Maliha sat on the porch and waited. It was a chilly mid-October day in the mountains. The cabin had a splendid view. She decided on the spot that she was going to get a cabin for herself.

When it got dark, she pulled her jacket around her. The smell of wood smoke emanated from the cabin, proof that someone was at home. The stars were beautiful and brilliant, so many more of them 109 z 138

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visible than in Chicago. She settled down and became as still as one of the posts of the porch. Around her, nocturnal animals played the game of predator and prey, tiny cries in the night marking the passing of the losers.

At about three in the morning the door opened, and a female voice said, “You’d better come in, then.”

Maliha rose, stiff from the cold, and went inside. She was accustomed to setting aside creature comforts when the situation called for it, but she let the fire, visible through the glass of a wood stove, warm her. She hung her jacket on a hook near the door.

The cabin was one large, open room on the inside. A kitchen occupied one corner, with a gleaming stove, refrigerator, and freezer, and a display of pots belonging to a woman who liked to cook. A twin bed was pushed into another corner, the hearth had the third, and a small enclosure Maliha took to be the bathroom was in the fourth. Bookcases lined the walls, and in the center of the cabin stood an architect’s drafting table with a tall swivel chair, a slanted surface, and a clamped-on lamp that meant business.

Yolanda was in her sixties, thin and wiry, spry from outdoor work. A cap of white hair contrasted with her dark skin, and her brown eyes sparkled with intelligence—and wariness. She was wrapped in a faded flannel robe. Maliha took an instant liking to her, and she’d long since learned to trust her instincts, even without the benefit of reading auras.

Except possibly with Jake.

“Hot chocolate?” Yolanda asked.

“Yes, please.” Maliha pulled a chair near the stove and sat down, showing her appreciation for Yolanda’s consideration. She’d shared a hearth with so many people in her lifetime who’d asked for nothing other than a few hours of good company. Sometimes Maliha had been there to kill her host. The thought profoundly saddened her, the thought that if she hadn’t made the decision to forego immortality, she might be here to kill this woman.

Staring into the glass of the wood stove, she saw her face reflected there among the flames, a woman burning. Maliha looked away.

A mug of steaming hot chocolate was thrust into her hands, and Yolanda pulled up a chair to sit next to her. The two women said nothing for a few minutes, just blew on their chocolate and sipped from the mugs.