Jake Maroc - Shan Part 55

She said nothing for a time, but took his hand in hers. She made certain that their fingers twined. Together, they watched the restless clouds, piling up like dirty linen until the yellow sky beyond was entirely obscured. In a moment, there was a dull boom of far-off thunder. But it seemed to go on forever.

"Did it ever frighten you, Jake?"

"What?"

"Ba-mahk."

"The power?"

"Not so much that. The insight. The intimations," She put both her hands around his. "The connection to another world."

"I only ever saw it as power," he said.

That's the difference between us, she thought. "Perhaps," she said carefully, "that is why you miss it so."

He turned to her. "What do you mean?"

"Ba-mahk, it seems to me, was a great deal more than power."

Jake disentangled himself from her, held out his hands. "Look at this," he said. "They're shaking. It was ba-mahk that kept me safe. Through it I could determine strategies, I knew instinctively what was the right step to take and where there was danger."

"And now?"

"Now I have nothing," Jake said. He ran his hands through his thick hair. "There is nothing between me and death."

Bliss was glad that she had not told him what had happened with his father. She had believed, perhaps, so much in s.h.i.+ Zilin that she had convinced herself that the old man somehow knew of Jake's loss of ba-mahk, that his qi merging with hers was meant as an aid to his only remaining son.

In this moment of Jake's agony she saw what it was Jake had to do. And she knew that she could not overtly help him. He was like a child who carries his beloved teddy around with him for years and years, even when it begins to wear out, shred and fall apart.

The teddy bear, the child believed, kept him safe from harm, especially when he ventured out into the frightening world away from home. But eventually the bear was gone and the child had to adjustto believing in his own inner power to keep him psychically safe from harm.

This was the point at which Jake now stood poised. Perhaps, she thought, Fo Saan had not done him a favor by teaching him ba-mahk. One needed a full understanding of such an extension of qi in order to cope with it while it was available and to do the same when it wasgone.

"If you cannot trust in yourself, Jake," she said, "how can you expect anyone else to? You are the Zhuan. How much truly rests upon your shoulders I think only you know."

A young girl with the face of an angel stopped several meters away. Like her elders, she was painted with powdered thanaka bark and her long hair was pinned back from her face with a red clip fas.h.i.+oned into a star-shaped flower.

"I don't think you understand," Jake said slowly. "And I suppose I only have myself to blame for that. I feel as if I have lost something more than just ba-mahk, Bliss. I feel as if I have lost a part of myself as well."

"But wasn't ba-mahk a part of you?"

The girl was staring openly at them. She put a fingertip in her mouth and sucked on it as if it were a stalk of sugar cane.

"There is a void inside me," he said, "that is more than ba-mahk."

"But what?"

She wasn't staring at them, Jake saw now, but at something quite close to them. It was just beyond Bliss's right shoulder, out of his sight. Now the girl began to cry.

"If I knew that," he said, "I'd know everything." But his mind was on the girl and what was making her cry. She took one step backward and on her face Jake could see the desire to flee. But she was caught, somehow, her eyes fascinated.

Fascinated a "Bliss," Jake said softly, "don't move." He could feel the tension come into her body almost immediately.

"What is it?"

"Just do as I tell you," he said in her ear. "All right?"

He could see her face now only at the periphery of his vision.

"Jake, what it is?"

"Don't move, I said!" he hissed. He had to hold her tight because her head had begun that involuntary motion that the body required when it sensed it was in danger.

"Will you do as I tell you?"

"Yes," He could hear the fear edging close to the surface.

"Good. Now listen to me. In a moment I am going to move. When I do I want you to do nothing. Do you understand? Absolutely nothing. You are not to move. Clear?"

"Yes. Jake?"

"No time," he said shortly. "I'm going."

And leapt over her, kicking out and down hard, his heel smas.h.i.+ng the body of the serpent into the hard cracked earth.

It was this that had attracted and frightened the little girl. Nothing else in the countryside would have engendered such a response in a child of the hill tribes.

The adder whipped around and Jake caught it just behind the head. Still holding it with his heel, he reached down and gripped the body with his other hand. It was a mwe-boai, Burma's deadliest viper. It was so dangerous not only because of its lethal venom but because it was p.r.o.ne to unprovoked attacks on beast and man alike.

He heard Bliss's gasp and knew that she had turned at last. The mwe-boai hissed and Jake tramped heavily on its head. There was the sound of bones breaking as Jake crushed its skull.

The body, perhaps five feet in length, whipped back and forth and Jake let it go. The child, crying in earnest now, was rooted to the spot. Jake left the twitching snake and crouched down beside the girl, He began to talk gently to her and then, as she put her head into the hollow of his shoulder, he picked her up.

Took her over to where the mwe-boai lay now quite still. Jake, still talking quietly to her, took her tiny hand in his own. Together they reached out. She gave a little yelp as she saw them nearing the dead serpent but Jake forced her to touch it so that she could feel for herself that its power to hurt was gone forever.

"Bad thing," she said in the accent of the hill tribes, and Jake laughed, saying, "Yes, bad thing."

He took his hand away and the child kept hers on the snake's back. Her small fingers traced the slick, cool scales. But she kept clear of the mashed head that lay half-driven into the compacted ground.

When, at last, he began to stand, she crawled up him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He lifted her and walked back to the shade of the tree where Bliss was waiting for him.

"I hope you understand," she said, "what you possess that keeps you safe from harm."

Jake watched the child as she lay cradled in his lap. Those bright black eyes stared up at him, unblinking, now unafraid.

"You did not become aware of the snake through ba-mahk. Ba-mahk did not allow you to kill it before it bit me."

"No," he said and she could hear the bitterness welling up from the depths of him. "But my father is dead becausebecause I lost the ability to see ahead. I was lured away from the junk at just the time when the dantai was set to arrive. Ba-mahk would have revealed that to me. Instead" Emotion constricted his throat.

The Burmese girl made a sound in her throat and reached upward. With the tip of her finger she took the tear standing at the corner of Jake's eye, let it roll into her palm. "Bad thing gone," she said. "Bad thing dead."

Bliss wondered at the amount of human compa.s.sion in that young mind. Jake felt it, too. He leaned over and kissed the child on her forehead. When he lifted his head, his lips were coated with her thanaka bark makeup. She giggled unselfconsciously, and Jake, laughing, too, squeezed her tight.

I wish, Bliss thought with a touch of envy, that I could make him laugh like that. But the child cannot see how wrapped up in guilt he is, so it cannot affect her. The loss inside Jake was not only that the lack of ba-mahk had made him, in a very real sense, blind, but that, having been reunited with his father only months ago, he was now alone again.

Jake, his head back against the tree, said, "Maybe you and your father are right. You both think I'm walking into a trap."

"What difference has that made to you?" Bliss asked. It was a loaded question and they both knew it.

Jake sighed. "In j.a.pan, I discovered that the dantai sent to a.s.sa.s.sinate my father was composed of members of the Moro clan."

"Mikio's rivals?"

"No. That was the interesting part. Mikio's battle is with the Kisan clan." Jake pulled his knees up, making a more comfortable cradle for the child. "We penetrated to the core of the Moro clan. Hige Moro told me that my father's death was requested and paid for by a Chinese Communist minister named Huaishan Han."

"That seems improbable," Bliss said. "Since when do the j.a.panese underworld and the Communist Chinese make their beds together?"

"Never," Jake admitted. "At least not that I've ever heard of."

"Then Hige was lying."

"Perhaps." But his tone suggested that he did not believe it. "And if not?"

"How would it make sense?"

"We're here," Jake said, "in the Shan. We're on the mountain." By the way he spoke she knew that he was working it out as he went along. "I asked Hige the question. He said he had made a mint for his clan by dealing with this particular minister."

"Did your father ever mention his name?"

"No. But Hige mentioned the mountain. I asked him why he was being paid all this money and he said, *Only the mountain knows!" Jake's head came down, his hooded copper eyes searching her face. "I wonder if it was the Shan that he meant."

"You mean the tears of the poppy?"

Jake nodded. "Maybe. But the Communist Chinese are set foursquare against its growing, harvesting and distribution. A good part of the yearly disburs.e.m.e.nt to the army is to cover the Shan through Yunnan province. The poppy generals encounter constant hara.s.sment from Chinese Communist army forays into the fields."

"Then it is a false lead."

Jake watched the shadows creeping over her face. The planes, dells and hillocks of her physiognomy were turned by his mind's eye into the topography of a strange and alien place. He knew they were in enemy territory in more ways than one. "Now White-Eye Kao tells us that though he ostensibly works for Sir John Bluestone, he has been trained by Chen Ju. Chen Ju is behind the takeover raid on InterAsia and so is Bluestone, so we know that the two have formed a partners.h.i.+p. Yet Chen Ju has a spy in his partner's employ. Interesting, no? What kind of a partners.h.i.+p could that be?"

"Obviously not one filled with trust."

"No," Jake agreed, "at least not on the part of Chen Ju. But then he would hardly be likely to trust anyone."

"Where does all this lead us?"

"Back to the Shan," Jake said. "That is the interesting part. The Shan is the common denominator in all of this: my father's murder, the run on InterAsia, Chen Ju's scheme of revenge."

"Who is this minister, Huaishan Han?" Bliss asked.

"I wish I knew," Jake said. "That might go a long way toward solving this mystery. I wonder what could bring together Chen Ju, Huaishan Han, Hige Moro, Sir John Bluestone, and Daniella Vorkuta."

"There are a number of natural enemies there," Bliss pointed out.

"That's what makes this so puzzling," Jake said. "And frightening. What is their common goal? It can't be the destruction of the yuhn-hyun, as I had originally thought. These sharks would rip each other to shreds going for the spoils. No, it is something else entirely. Something of which we are not yet aware."

The sun, so long obscured by the roiling clouds, was gone beyond the mountains. The shadowless light was gone, too, replaced by an odd illumination that was entirely reflected off the base of the cloud bank. But the heat had not dissipated any and the insects' buzzing was very loud.

"What if it is you?" Bliss said in an ominous tone. "What if that is their goal?"

"From the Shan? I hardly think so."

"This is the one place where your death would go unnoticed," she repeated. "And, perhaps, unavenged."

He watched her carefully. "You'd like me to say, *Okay, let's get out of here. Let's go back to Hong Kong.' "

"Frankly, yes," Bliss admitted. "But I know that's fruitless. I know you won't turn back now." "You're right"

"But I wonder why. Something crosses my mind but I hope I'm wrong." "Which is?"

"That you've got a death wish."

Jake looked down at the Shan girl. Her eyes were half closed. "Mariana used to say that about me. My first wife, as well." "Does that mean there's something to it?" Jake heard the tension in her voice. "I don't think so," he said. "Then why are you out here, in the middle of a red sector? Is it to protect InterAsia, the yuhn-hyun, your father's dream?" "They're one and the same," Jake said. "Yes." "No!" she said so vehemently she woke the girl. "It's to a.s.suage your guilty conscience. Your mind insists that you are to blame for your father's death. That somehow, if you still possessed ba-mahk, you could have deflected the dantai's attack.

"The fact is that with ba-mahk or without it the result would have been the same. Joss, Jake. Why don't you listen to your Chinese side a little more often. Accept your father's fate. I know he did. Joss that he was killed. Joss that you were miles away when it happened. Do you think ba-mahk would have allowed you to dispatch the tick thatwas following you any quicker? Do you think you would have ignored her and allowed her to follow you back to the junk where you father was waiting for you?"

Jake said nothing but he knew what the answers were. She was right. Ba-mahk would have altered nothing. His father was dead. Joss.

He looked down at the small face in his lap. The child was sleeping contentedly. A little fist had grabbed hold of his s.h.i.+rt for security. Staring into that beautiful, painted face, he felt an exquisite pang of longing and grief.

"Funny what you think of at certain times," he said softly. "I miss my daughter now more than I ever did when she was alive and living with that rogue Triad up near the border."

He looked away from the child's sleeping face, to Bliss's. "The most painful memory I have of her is also the truest. It was she who had a death wish, Bliss. Lan, my only child."

In a moment, there were more tears than the Burmese girl could ever hope to wipe away.

"He's on his way!"

Chen Ju was jubilant. He had just taken off the earphones, shut down the powerful transceiver. "Huaishan Han," he said, "I have just heard from White-Eye Kao. s.h.i.+ Jake is coming, just as you planned."

He stopped at the open doorway to the room. He could see the humped sprawl of the old minister in the dusty rattan chair. At his feet, the girl knelt. They were holding hands. Perhaps they were asleep.

It was an odd symbiotic relations.h.i.+p the old man had with the girl. Did she love him, hate him or fear him? Chen Ju wondered. Perhaps it was a combination of all three. Certainly her brainwas.h.i.+ng had turned her into another person. But who knew, really, what she was capable of doing?

Now she was the vehicle of Huaishan Han's revenge. Jake Maroc s.h.i.+'s daughter.

And what was his own vehicle? No single human being. But rather a shanthe implacable mountain, an international organization that had taken decades to build into the most powerful smuggling network in the world. Chen Ju would rather put his faith in the grinding jaws of his diqui than in the workings of one psyche.

That his dismissal from Sawyer & Sons had become the single most fortuitous event in his life in no way mitigated his desire for justice to be done. He had turned a devastating blow into something positive.