Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (23 page)

These underground rooms, ventilated through an ingenious system of pipes, had absorbed a
strange odor over the centuries: a combination of dampness, grease from the lamps, and several kinds of incense, which the monks lighted to frighten away rats and evil spirits. Some rooms were used to store public administration parchments, statues, and furniture; others were depositories of medicines, provisions, or the antiquated weapons no one used anymore, but most were empty. Walls were covered with paintings of religious scenes, dragons, devils, long texts in Sanskrit, descriptions of the horrible punishments evil souls suffer in the Beyond. The ceilings were painted as well, but soot from the lamps had turned them black.

As the king progressed deeper into the palace, he lighted lamps from the flame of his candle, thinking that the time had come to install electricity throughout the building; at present, it was available in only one wing of an upper floor, the one the royal family occupied. He opened doors and walked through rooms without hesitation; he knew the way by heart.

Soon he came to a rectangular room, larger and with higher ceilings than the others; it was lighted with a double row of gold lamps, and at the far end was a spectacular door of bronze and silver, incrusted with jade. Two young guards, attired in the age-old uniform of royal heralds, with plumed blue silk headgear and lances adorned with colorful ribbons, were standing watch on either side of the door. They looked tired; they had been on duty several hours in the solitude and sepulchral silence of this chamber. When they saw the king, they fell to their knees, touched their heads to the floor, and stayed in that position until he gave them his blessing and told them to get to their feet. Then they turned their faces to the wall, as demanded by protocol, so they couldn't watch as the sovereign opened the door.

The king twirled several of the many jade medallions that embellished the door, and pushed. The door swung heavily on its hinges. He stepped inside the room and the massive door closed behind him. From that moment, the security system that had protected the Golden Dragon for almost eighteen hundred years was automatically activated.

Hidden among the gigantic ferns in the park around the palace, Tex Armadillo followed every step the king took through the subterranean rooms of the palace, as clearly as if he were dogging his heels. Thanks to modern technology, he could see the king perfectly on the small screen of his laptop. The monarch had no suspicion that he was wearing a tiny, high-precision camera on his chest, which allowed the American to observe as the king avoided the series of obstacles and disarmed the security mechanisms that protected the Golden Dragon. At the same time, he was plotting the coordinates of the route the king was following, outlining with the help of a Global Positioning System an exact map that he could follow later. Tex couldn't help smiling as he thought of the genius of the Specialist, who left nothing to chance. The apparatus he was using, much more sensitive, precise, and with broader capabilities than any currently in use, had been developed in the United States for military purposes, and was not available to the general public. The Specialist, however, could obtain anything; that was what contacts and money were for.

Crouching among the plants and sculptures of the garden were the twelve fiercest Blue Warriors of the sect, all under Armadillo's command. The remaining members were carrying out the other half of the plan in the mountains, where they were preparing the escape with the statue and
where they held the kidnapped girls. That distraction, too, was the product of the Machiavellian mind of the Specialist. Because the police and soldiers were busy looking for the girls, the intruders were able to get into the palace without meeting resistance.

Even though they felt very confident, the murderous men were proceeding with caution. The Specialist's instructions had been exact: They must not attract attention. They would need several hours' head start to hide the statue in a safe place and extract the code from the lips of the king. They knew the exact number of guards still on duty and where they were located. They had already taken care of the four that patrolled the gardens, and did not expect their bodies to be discovered until the following morning. They themselves were armed with an arsenal of knives, which they had more faith in than firearms. The American was carrying a Magnum pistol with a silencer, but if everything worked out as planned, he would not have to use it.

Tex Armadillo did not take any particular pleasure in violence, though it was inevitable in his line of work. He believed that violence was for hit men, and he thought of himself as an intellectual, a man of ideas. Secretly he harbored the ambition of replacing the Specialist or of forming his own organization. He did not enjoy the company of the Blue Warriors, they were brutal and treacherous mercenaries with whom he could barely communicate, and he wasn't sure, should the need arise, whether he could control them. He had tried to convince the Specialist that he needed no more than a couple of the best men to perform the mission, but the response he received was to stick to the plan. Armadillo knew that the least insubordination or divergence from instructions could cost him his life. The one person he feared in this world was
the Specialist.

His orders were clear: He was to watch the king's every movement through the hidden camera, wait until he arrived in the Chamber of the Golden Dragon and was consulting the statue—to be sure it was functioning—and then rush into the palace and, using the Global Positioning System, go as far as the Magnificent Door. He was to take six men inside: two to carry the treasure, two to kidnap the king, and two for protection. He would have to skirt all the traps on his way to the Sacred Chamber and, to do that, he was counting on the video he had recorded.

The idea of kidnapping the leader of a nation and stealing his most precious object would have been absurd in any country other than the Forbidden Kingdom, where crime was nearly unknown and where, therefore, there were almost no defenses. For Armadillo it was child's play to stage an attack in a country whose citizens still used candles to light their houses and who believed that the telephone was some kind of magic. His sneer disappeared, however, as he witnessed on his laptop the ingenious ways the Golden Dragon was defended. The mission might not be as easy as he had imagined. The minds that had invented those traps eighteen centuries before were not in the least bit primitive. He owed his advantage to the Specialist's superior mind.

When Armadillo saw that the king had reached the final room, he motioned to six Blue Warriors to guard the rear, as planned, and he headed toward the palace with the others. They went in through a service entrance on the ground floor and immediately found themselves in a room with four doors. Referring to the GPS map, the American and his followers moved with little hesitation from one room to the next, until they reached the heart of the palace. In the hall of the Magnificent Door they encountered the first
obstacle: the two soldiers standing guard. When the king's guards saw the intruders, they raised their lances, but before they could take a step forward, two lethal knives, perfectly thrown from several yards' distance, struck each in the chest. They collapsed to the floor.

Replaying the video on his screen, Armadillo followed it step by step. He twisted the same jades the king had turned before him. The door opened heavily, and the bandits walked through into a round room with nine narrow doors, all identical. The lamps the monarch had lighted were burning, casting wavering illumination on the precious stones that decorated the doors.

At that point, the king had stepped onto an eye painted on the floor, opened his arms wide, and then had turned at a forty-five-degree angle, so that his right arm was pointing to the door he needed to open. Tex Armadillo imitated him, followed by the superstitious men of the scorpion sect, who by now each had a knife between his teeth and one in each hand. The American suspected that the camera had not recorded all the risks they would meet; some would undoubtedly be purely psychological, or tricks of illusion. He had watched the king pass unhesitatingly through certain rooms that seemed to be empty, but that didn't mean that they were. They would have to move forward with great caution.

“Don't touch anything,” he warned his men.

“We hear demons and witches and monsters live in this place here,” one of the men murmured in his mangled English.

“There are no such things,” Armadillo replied.

“They say, too, that the man who touch the Dragon . . . that something horrible happen him.”

“Nonsense! Those are just superstitions, pure ignorance.”

The man was insulted when the American's
comment was translated, and the entire group shuffled and muttered, ready to turn on Armadillo.

“I thought you were warriors, but I see that you're really little babies! Cowards!” Armadillo spit out with infinite scorn.

The first bandit, outraged, raised his knife, but Armadillo already had his pistol in his hand, and there was a murderous gleam in his pale eyes. By now the Blue Warriors were very sorry they had accepted this job. Their band had always survived by committing simple crimes; this was unknown territory. They had made a deal to steal a statue, and in exchange they were to receive quantities of modern firearms and a pile of money to buy horses and anything else that occurred to them. No one had warned them, however, that the palace was bewitched. And it was too late to turn back, they had no choice but to follow the American to the end.

After overcoming the obstacles, one by one, that protected the treasure, Tex Armadillo and four of his men found themselves in the Chamber of the Golden Dragon. Even though they had the advantage of modern technology, which allowed them to see how the king had avoided falling into the traps, they had already lost two men to horrible deaths: one fell into a deep well and the other's flesh was eaten in a matter of minutes by a rampaging acid.

Just as the American had thought, they had not been subjected merely to physical ambushes but to psychological tricks as well. To Armadillo, it was like descending into a psychedelic hell, but he maintained his self-control by telling himself over and over that most of the horrifying images that assaulted them were only in his mind. He was a professional who exercised complete control over his body and mind. For the primitive men of the Sect of the Scorpion, on the other
hand, the journey toward the dragon had been much more harrowing, for they were unable to distinguish between what was real and what was imaginary. They were used to meeting danger head on but they were terrified by things that could not be explained. The mysterious palace rubbed their nerves raw.

The invaders had no idea what they would find when they went into the Chamber of the Golden Dragon; the images on the laptop screen had not been very clear. They were blinded by the brilliance of the gold-sheathed walls, which reflected light from countless oil lamps and thick beeswax candles. The scents from the lamps and from the burning incense and myrrh filled the air. They paused at the threshold, deafened by a hoarse, guttural sound impossible to describe, something that at first impression suggested the moan of a whale inside a vast metal tube. After a moment, however, they could detect a certain coherence in the song, and soon it was evident that they were hearing some sort of language. Seated in the lotus position before the statue, the king had his back to them, so immersed in the sounds and absorbed in his task that he didn't hear them come in.

The monarch's voice was rising and falling, chanting strange wordlike sounds, and then from the mouth of the statue would come the response, rumbling throughout the room. The intense vibration could be felt on the skin, and in the brain, and on the nerves; it was like standing inside a reverberating bell.

And there, before the eyes of Armadillo and the Blue Warriors, stood the Golden Dragon, in all its splendor: leonine body, paws with great claws, curled-up reptilian tail, plumed wings, a ferocious head with four horns, protruding eyes, and gaping maw filled with two rows of sharp teeth and a forked serpent's tongue. The gold work
was delicate and perfect: each scale on the body and tail was set with a precious stone, the feathers of the wings were tipped with diamonds, the tail displayed an intricate design of pearls and emeralds, the teeth were ivory, and the eyes were perfect star-rubies, each the size of a dove's egg. The fabled animal was mounted on black stone, in the center of which was a strip of yellow quartz.

The bandits were stupefied, trying to digest the assault of the lights, the rarefied air, and the thundering sound. None of them had expected the statue to be so extraordinary; even the most ignorant man in the band realized that he was standing before an object of unimaginable value. Their eyes glinted with greed, and each of the men thought about how just one of those precious stones could change his life.

Armadillo had also succumbed to the magical fascination of the statue, though he had never thought of himself as a particularly ambitious man—he did this work because he liked adventure. He prided himself on living a simple life, completely free of sentimentality or any other kind of bond. He treasured the idea of retiring when he was older, when he grew weary of seeing the world, and of spending his last years on his ranch in the western United States, where he planned to breed race horses. In some of his missions he had held a fortune in his hands, and had not felt any temptation to appropriate it. He was satisfied with his commission, which was always very generous. However, when he saw the statue, it crossed his mind to betray the Specialist. With the statue in his power, nothing could stop him. He would be enormously rich; he could fulfill all his dreams, including that of having his own organization, one more powerful even than the Specialist's. For a brief moment, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of that idea,
but quickly returned to reality. “That must be the statue's curse: overpowering greed,” he thought. He had to exert great self-discipline to concentrate on the next steps of the plan. Silently, he signaled his men, and they moved toward the king with knives in hand.