"Careful!" he commanded excitedly. "Xiao xin, fool!"
Gradually Stratton uncovered the coffin lid, the cheap Chinese metal streaked with moisture and freckled with incipient rust. Like a teacher bestowing reluctant favor on a backward child, Wang Bin paid out rope to allow Stratton more movement.
Shovel plunging, the puppet dug his way around the coffin from corner to corner.
"Huang di," Wang Bin said, a reverent whisper.
"What is it?" gasped.Stratton.
"Do not stop now, Professor. You are about to have the history lesson of your life."
Wang Bin positioned himself at the foot of the grave. The barrel of the pistol poked from his shadow, an ominous telescope on Stratton's midsection.
"Pull it out now," the deputy minister said. "Be careful."
Stratton staggered to the gentle slope of soil at the peak of the grave. He squatted in the mud, wrapped both blistered hands around the head of the coffin and pulled it toward him. The metal was slick, and Stratton's purchase poor.
The coffin edged a few inches from its bed and then slid back as Stratton's legs flew out from under him. The rope stopped his fall, but left him choking and scrambling in a tortuous pushup pose.
Wang Bin played out the rope and Stratton collapsed, prying with nerveless fingers to loosen the noose.
He lay there for what seemed like a long time, his lungs devouring draughts of fresh air. His brain teetered between blackness and reason.
"Pull, you must pull again," came the thin, ice-pick voice of his captor. "Pull, donkey. Pull."
Stratton levered himself to a sitting position, encouraged by a fresh jerk on the rope. "I can't," he cried. "I need air."
Wang Bin fired once. The bullet slapped into the mud between Stratton's knees.
The puppet lurched back into the grave. Moments later he had dragged the coffin out of the pit onto the muddy slope, bracing it there with a heavy rock.
Wang Bin inched forward along the side of the open grave. "Now break the welds, Professor. Use the point of the shovel." The rope hung loosely from his left hand now. The time for donkeys was nearly over.
Stratton found the welds soft and accommodating; a child could have fractured them. The lid of the coffin sprang open. Unbidden, Stratton stripped away a protective layer of gray quilts. Then he slumped against the grave wall to stare.
Russian dolls, he thought dully, a game of Russian dolls-one inside the other.
"What is it?" Stratton murmured again.
The gleam of Wang Bin's smile was visible in the darkness. "It is beauty, Professor-or can you no longer recognize it? It is beauty. It is history. It is mine."
Inside the coffin that was never meant for David Wang lay another coffin, cushioned by green quilts and chocked with fresh-cut wood.
The smaller coffin was exquisite, a masterpiece of latticework gold studded with gems-diamonds, rubies, pearls-that sparkled even in the sallow lantern light. It was like nothing Stratton had ever seen. Beauty and majesty unsurpassed.
"I know what it is," Stratton marveled. So this was the deputy minister's private excavation at Xian. No wonder David had raged. A crime against humanity, he had called it.
Indeed, it was more than that.
"Open it." The eyes of the old man flashed in triumph. The voice was placid, confident. "Open it, Stratton. There are latches on the side."
Stratton opened it.
He looked, then spun away and retched into the grave.
"Huang di," Wang Bin said. "Son of Heaven. Ruler of the Middle Kingdom. Beloved ancestor."
It was the Emperor Qin.
He lay as serenely as when his vassals had placed him at the heart of his colossal tomb, protected by his army of ceramic soldiers. Twenty-two hundred years ago.
The ultimate artifact.
Thomas Stratton had never imagined anything so macabre. It was hideous, a loathsome caricature of life, a rotted monster that did not belong on this verdant hillside, David's place.
No one would ever know what secrets the emperor's alchemists had employed to prepare him for eternal reign. But they had failed. They had not cheated time, but perverted it. A mummy can have dignity, like a man making his own grave.
Wang Bin's emperor had none. It was a green-tinged parody of empty sockets, spore-covered bones, shreds of dusty silk and a rictus grin.
For this abomination men had died. David had died. Stratton would die.
Drenched, fatigued, bleary, Stratton looked up at Wang Bin. "Why?" he ask feebly.
"Think, Professor. As a student of history, as an observer of mankind." He held the rope and the gun where Stratton could see them. "You know what this is, Professor. It is the most cherished archaeological treasure in all China. Its value is both symbolic and very real. It is-truly-priceless. My government-"
Wang Bin caught himself, smiled self-consciously. "Excuse me, my former government will do anything to recover this artifact. It will do anything, in fact, to conceal the circumstances of the theft. You see, Stratton, in China the scandal would be more of a calamity than the actual crime. There is no limit to what my former colleagues might do to prevent such a thing."
"So you're a blackmailer, too," Stratton said derisively.
Wang Bin stiffened. "I am not familiar with that term," he replied, testing the rope with a sharp twitch. "However, I do intend to seek what is due to me after a lifetime of devotion."
"The soldiers weren't enough?"
"Think, Stratton. There are seven thousand celestial soldiers. There is only one imperial casket. There is only one… " His voice trailed off in the night. His eyes fell to the grave, gazing at the withered creature within.
Stratton watched the gun and waited.
"By now they know," Wang Bin said smugly. "The comrades know of my achievement.
They know what they must do, for I left precise instructions. The men who would have purged me are the same men who will beseech me for this treasure. They will pay enormously for my future comfort, and for my silence. And, in return, I will give them back their precious little corpse."
"And then you disappear?"
Wang Bin nodded. "I disappear from history. My name will never again be mentioned in Peking. Those who worked with me… I cannot say what will become of them. The comrades who pursued me, however, will certainly suffer. They were too slow and much too stupid. Their defeat and humiliation is my vindication, Stratton. That much even you can understand."
Stratton understood. He understood why the celestial soldiers were not enough.
He understood the genius of the crime, the genius of the vengeance.
And he knew why Wang Bin-so small and unimposing-frightened him so.
"Close the coffin now," the deputy minister ordered. "Remove it from the grave."
"I can't."
The rope cracked. Stratton was on his toes, then peddling in the air, gulping for breath. Then he was on his knees, on all fours. Dizzy. Dying.
David, help me.
"Now," said the brother. "Remove the emperor's coffin!"
"No."
For this Thomas Stratton would not die.
With all his strength he hurled a wet handful of dirt in Wang Bin's face and dove across the grave with a scream.
Sometimes you have to take a shot. It was something you were taught but never spoke of. Sometimes the only remote chance is to give the enemy one shot and hope to survive it. Bobby Ho had remembered, there on the bloody stage at Man-ling.
Diving low, Stratton survived because Wang Bin made a mistake. Logically, he should have jerked on the rope with all his weight; that would have snapped Stratton's neck.
But Wang Bin chose the gun instead. He fired reflexively, and missed by a hair's breadth.
The bullet scored the top of Stratton's shoulder and exploded in the grave behind him. When Stratton hit Wang Bin, the almond eyes were riveted in horror-not at his assailant, but at the coffins.