“It fits in the socket,” she said. “I tried inserting it. But nothing happens when you put it in.”
“Was there another one?”
“There was, at one point,” Qi said. “By the time I got here, there was only one that was whole, and pieces of another, shattered on the ground. Fragments. Would you like me to get them?”
“No, that’s okay,” Gabriel said, turning the faceted sphere in his hands. It was not a gem—it was glass, worth about as much as a chandelier at a discount house. But he’d been around enough giant, ancient statues over the years to know it surely had a function. “Give me a hand here, Mitch, would you?”
Gabriel handed the eye to Mitch and scaled the idol, climbing up to its shoulder. Mitch passed the sphere up to him once he had. It fit equally well into either eye socket on the giant, glowering statue.
“Give me some light.” Gabriel said. She turned a flashlight on, pointed it up at him.
After brushing away the accretions of ages with his sleeve, he could see a fine, almost microscopic line of ideograms around the rim of each eye socket.
He called down a description of what he saw. “You think you could you read them?” he asked Qi. “Give us even a rough idea what it says?”
Up went Qingzhao.
“No,” she said as she perched in the crook of the statue’s arm. “They look like they’re upside down or backward, or both—they make no sense.”
“Mitch,” Gabriel called, “shine that light up toward the eye. No, the big light,” He was referring to the dual-xenon job he had used in the cave, the million-candlepower one.
Nothing. Part of the ceiling turned red as the light reflected, but that was about it.
“Pass it up here,” Gabriel said.
Qi descended to the lap of the idol, took the heavy lamp from Mitch and passed it up.
“The glass is faceted,” Gabriel said. “In fact—” he shifted the lamp into position “—it looks like it’s ground to a very fine tolerance, like optical glass.”
“Like a lens?” said Mitch from below.
“You got it.”
He held the lamp dead-center on the crimson eye and turned it on.
The tiny glyphs sprang into hard relief in a wide arc on the opposite wall of the chamber, each about a foot high. Optical graffiti.
“They still do not make any sense,” said Qi, after straining to read them.
“That’s because it’s only half the information,” said Gabriel, dislodging the crystal and mounting it in the other socket. Sure enough—a second set of characters appeared on the far wall, like a bi-pack cipher. “If we had both eyes and lit them at the same time, the projected images would merge on the wall and you could read them.”
“So what do we do?” said Mitch from below.
A low, almost subaural hum had become present in the chamber.
“We start writing down those characters,” said Gabriel, “exactly the way they appear.”
The hum became a louder sound, a kind of chuddering bass note.
“What is that?” said Qi. “Did we start up some kind of machine?”
“No,” said Mitch. “It’s outside, damn it.” “What is it?” said Qi.
Before Mitch could answer, the sound became loud enough for them all to recognize it.
A chopper, incoming.
Chapter 20
Outside, crouched among the rocks, Mitch spotted the helicopter through binoculars, coming in soft about a hundred yards from the pagoda, the blades on powerful Ribinsk turboshafts spinning a silver halo above the craft.
“It’s a Kamov,” she said. “The kind the Russians nicknamed the Orca. Jesus, there could be twenty guys in there.”
Gabriel grabbed Qi’s upper arm. “Could you have been tagged somehow? Followed?”
Surprise and incomprehension sparked within her dark gaze. “No, I…”
Then brutal logic slapped her. “The Glock,” she said with disgust.
“What Glock?” said Mitch.
Qi snorted, angry at her own lack of vigilance. “Why would he have a Glock? Ivory prefers fully automatic pistols—that is why he has that Russian monstrosity. He would not have a Glock around unless it was disposable.” She drove a fist into her own hand. “Damn it. He handed it to me. He knew I’d take it. Stupid!”
“He misdirected you,” said Gabriel. “Could have happened to any of us.”
“He gave me the chance to shoot him with it!”
“Well, obviously he was confident you wouldn’t take him up on it.” The location of the leaning pagoda had just ceased to be a bargaining chip. They had been made, blown, outfoxed.
“Load everything,” said Qi. She was obviously envisioning some kind of glorious standoff that would get them all killed.
“Wait,” said Gabriel. “Let’s see if they’re soldiers, Red Police guys or Cheung’s men.”
“I see the bald guy from the casino,” said Mitch, still glassing the slope, where the men from the chopper were now climbing, hunched over in a protective crouch.
“That is Dinanath,” said Qi. “Number Two, after Ivory.” She ducked into her armory and came up with a Nightforce-sighted LMT rifle, already zeroing in.
“Wait!” said Gabriel. “No shooting! We can still—”
Qi fired without hesitation just as Gabriel shot out a hand, bumping her aim off true. The 5.56 round spanged off a tree branch, severing it two feet from Dinanath’s head.
Cheung’s crew answered.
The rocks all around began to flint and chip with bullet hits, half of them silenced. The other half of the shooters didn’t care if they were heard, time-delay gunshots bouncing around the hillside and trapping them in a weird Doppler cone of weapons fire. Mitch, gunless, had hit the dirt, and Gabriel was trying not to get nailed by flying frags of rock.
He took the binoculars from Mitch, peered through them. At least eighteen men were coming at them up a hillside with excellent cover.
Qi could pick some of them off one by one, pacing her fire, but there were too many. She could never bag them all.
Gabriel held her in abeyance until the first salvo wrapped.
“Don’t,” he cautioned her. “We have something they want. We still have the upper hand. Cheung’s not even with them. Let me handle them.”
Disappointment flashed in Qi’s eyes.
“There will be no more shooting, Mr. Hunt,” came Dinanath’s voice over a bullhorn. “We have your brother Michael. You will cease fire and stand down now.”
“Both of you, go now,” Gabriel said to Qi and Mitch.
“What are you going to do?” said Qi, still bitter at being cheated of deaths she felt were owed her.
“They want the Killers of Men, let’s give ’em what they want,” Gabriel said. “If they have Michael we have to dispense with all this pawn-pushing and get right to the royalty.”
“Chess,” Mitch said in response to Qi’s blank expression.
“You have a plan?” said Qi.
“Don’t worry about it,” Gabriel said. “Just worry about getting away. If either of you stay, you’ll just wind up in cages. At best—that’s if they don’t just kill you on the spot. Go. Now. Take the back path down the hill.”
Both women were staring at him stubbornly. What the hell did he have to do, point a gun at them?
“We can set up in the shrine rooms,” said Qi. “Each of us with a rifle, and kill them as they—”
Gabriel overrode her. “No. Don’t you see? That won’t save Michael—and it won’t kill Cheung. Please: go.”
Bad trouble would have them crosshaired in moments. A tidal wave of downside was coursing up the hill toward them.
“Get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Seriously. Leave them to me.”