“You’re describing something along the lines of the Library of Alexandria.”
“Perhaps some of that collection was part of what Zhu gathered. Who knows? Legend has it that an observer standing on a tall mountain couldn’t see the entire length of the caravan. Zhu Zhanji took the treasure trove deep into western China, into an isolated valley called Rinpoche-La, and bade the local people to guard it well. Zhu died on his return to the imperial court and the archive appeared lost for all time. But Zhu hadn’t chosen this valley by accident.
“Rinpoche-La was an enigmatic place, fabled because even though it was high in the foothills of the Himalayas, it remains warm year-round. The village was built near geothermal springs deep inside the mountains, allowing for a standard of living not found anywhere else in that barren part of the country.”
“Sounds like James Hilton’s book, Lost Horizon.”
“His story of Shangri-La is very likely based on the legend of Rinpoche-La,” she concurred, “similar to how Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula after hearing of the Transylvanian king Vlad the Impaler. For a hundred years the archive was left in vast underground storehouses beneath the monastery. Then some of the monks began to decipher what Zhu had left them. One particular part of the treasure caught their attention.”
“I assume the gold.”
“More Western bias,” she teased. “No, it was a set of blueprints and some texts, a gift to the emperor from the Sultan of Muscat, perhaps the richest man in the world at the time the treasure fleets roamed the Persian Gulf. No one knows how he came about the documents. It is believed they were created by one of his great mathematicians. When I heard these stories as a child, I imagined him to be like an Arab Leonardo da Vinci. It took generations for the monks at Rinpoche-La to understand the full potential of what they were studying, and many more years, centuries, in fact, for them to attempt to build the oracle described in the sultan’s plans.”
“An oracle?”
“They called it the Navel of the World, a machine that could accurately measure the earth’s chi. They completed the work in the 1850s and set about to see if the machine was right. And soon found it was. Uncannily so. For years they sent people to chronicle the effects of the chi and report back to the Lama what they’d seen. And that’s the way it remained until the summer of 1908 when a cataclysmic event upset the planet’s delicate balance of forces.”
The year triggered another memory for Mercer. “Can I venture a guess as to the exact date? June thirtieth, 1908.”
This time it was Tisa’s turn for a moment of stunned silence. “How did you…?”
“That’s when a meteorite slammed into Siberia near the village of Tunguska and leveled several thousand square miles of forest. The blast was heard in Scandinavia and darkened the sky as far as London. Can’t be too many other cataclysmic events that year.”
Her eyes were still wide. “Few people have even heard of the event and yet you know the exact date.”
“I’ll tell you the story why sometime,” he said evasively, then steered the conversation back to her tale. “You believe the impact changed the earth’s balance in some way.”
“Not the planet’s, obviously, but the chi forces. Up until then, the earth behaved as the oracle at Rinpoche-La predicted. After the event, the predictions were no longer accurate. The Lama and his acolytes became concerned. The times and locations between predicted events diverged further as the years passed. Twenty years ago it was decided that the Order had to do something to correct it. We would heal the earth and restore its proper balance of chi.”
“And the tower is one way you do this?”
“Oh, no,” Tisa dismissed. “That is just one small project. A short-term, ah, Band-Aid.” She smiled at her turn of phrase. “Our main efforts are a little more subtle. You see, to rebalance the world we must focus on points where the earth’s chi lines intersect. This is becoming more difficult because humanity is also beginning to affect chi with such things as atomic bomb tests and hydroelectric dams that shift rivers. These all change the force lines.”
Mercer was having a hard time keeping the skepticism from his expression. There could be some truth in the history Tisa had told him, but he didn’t believe a word about the interpretation. He was taunting when he said, “So you guys must hate what China is doing at the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest hydro project in history.”
“On the contrary,” she replied quickly. “Members of our group were on the committee to see it built. Three Gorges is an important nexus point for chi. The weight of the water is helping to bring the earth balance.”
Mercer scoffed. “Come on, Tisa. This is ridiculous.”
“Eight years ago you were approached by a company called Jaeger Metals to help them in the development of a copper mine in Brazil. Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely,” Mercer said uneasily. “I turned them down. How do you know about that?”
“Because the Order controls Jaeger Metals. Do you recall why you refused the job?”
“They wanted to shift billions of tons of overburden for a copper deposit that didn’t justify the expense. I tried to tell them they were pouring money into a hole with no bottom but no one on the board of directors cared.”
“Do you know what happened to Jaeger?”
“Yeah, they went ahead with the project, dug a three-mile-wide, eight-hundred-foot-deep pit in the middle of the jungle and went bankrupt.”
“What you didn’t know, what no one knew, is that spot in the jungle was a chi point and by removing all that dirt we managed to regain five minutes of accuracy.”
“I—” Mercer checked his sarcasm. Could that possibly be true? At the time, he’d suspected that the whole debacle was a financial swindle of some sort. He’d followed the story in trade magazines after bowing out and recalled that Jaeger had blown about seventy million dollars before giving up, but when the mining company folded no one came forward with a complaint. An SEC investigation after the collapse found all the money had come from a private source that was satisfied with Jaeger’s “good faith” efforts. Could Tisa’s group be that private source? Could all they have wanted was a giant hole and not the copper?
They did build an undersea tower just to keep a hydrate deposit stable, a little voice reminded him. This appeared to be an organization where you couldn’t question their methods or their motivation.
Tisa watched the play of conflicting thoughts in Mercer’s eyes. She looked pleased. “Jaeger’s just another example of how we work. You should see the oil field we paid a company to develop in the middle of Australia, about a thousand miles from the nearest oil deposit. They thought we were nuts but took our money and drilled eleven hundred wells for us, every one of them dry.” She frowned. “I hate to admit all that work only corrected another six minutes. Don’t worry, you’ll understand better tomorrow.”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“You just have to wait and see. I ask for one night of patience. If you don’t think I’m right then, well, nothing matters much after that.”
She spoke earnestly, and Mercer recalled what she’d said the night they met. “The end of the world?”
“As we know it, yes.” In the moonlight, her eyes began to glisten.
Mercer knew it didn’t matter if he believed what she was saying. It was abundantly clear that Tisa was certain. The deep melancholy that so wracked her features was back, worse than ever.
“What time is it?” she asked, just to say something.
“Eight o’clock. That reminds me. I have something for you.” Mercer hastily reached into his jacket pocket. He opened and then handed across a slim black case. Inside on a bed of satin was a woman’s gold Raymond Weil watch. “I remembered you don’t have one and always seem to ask for the time. I bought it for you at Dulles on the way to Greece.”