He shot a sideways glance at the aide before looking Zhu straight in the eye.
‘But, Captain, there’s no need to… complicate matters. You are required to contain this situation and ensure that it remains secret. We need you to find the boy. That is all.’
‘Find?’ replied Zhu in a tone of mild surprise, hands still clasped behind his back.
The Director looked down at his desk, averting his eyes for the first time. When he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper.
‘Kill,’ he said simply.
Zhu’s lips curled slightly into a smile.
‘I’ll be back within a month.’
Chapter 11
Tossing his car keys into the empty fruit bowl, Luca pulled some dirty clothes off the bed and lay down. He stared up at the ceiling and breathed out, attempting to exhale all the staleness he’d felt since first walking into his father’s office.
He had left the building almost immediately after their conversation, shaking his head as he had gathered up the scattered papers from the floor. As he walked out of the lift a small group of colleagues were standing at the entrance, clutching take-away cups of coffee and shaking their umbrellas. Luca had dredged up a smile as they clapped him on the back and asked him about the trip. Then, pleading a bad headache, he’d escaped to his car.
Now he exhaled again, feeling the tension slowly seep out of him. He glanced across his small flat towards the tiny open-plan kitchen in the corner. By the cluttered sink was a huge stack of mail. He had scanned through it all when he first got back, looking for any handwritten envelopes. The rest, he knew, would just be an assortment of bills or endless offers for broadband or the latest mobile phone.
Christ, there was just so much of it.
They had only been away five weeks. Five weeks. Such a brief amount of time, yet the rest of the world had been churning away at such a pace it made him feel he had been away for years. At some point today he should file it all away, write letters, send cheques.
Raising himself off the bed, Luca walked over to the kitchen and stood by the mail. Then, with a sudden angry movement, he gathered up all the envelopes in both hands and rammed them into the lowest kitchen drawer.
Screw it. It could wait some more.
Glancing at his watch, he took a bottle of Coke out of the fridge and levered the top off using the sideboard. Then he took a few gulps and sat down to make some work calls. For a couple of hours he worked steadily through the emails and phone calls, hating the sound of his own voice as he grovelled to the string of customers he had neglected.
He felt so tired, so drained of energy, yet it was only midday and he’d done nothing more strenuous than travel a few miles up and down a motorway in a car. Out in the mountains, he could climb for hours on huge vertical pitches, swinging his axe in again and again. Then, after no more than a few hours’ sleep, he could do it all again, day after day, even at high altitude. But here he felt perpetually out of breath: choking on the dense, petrol-fumed air, jolted by the barging shoulders of commuters on the streets. It made him feel like an old man.
As he worked his eyes would occasionally flicker over to the stack of papers lying by the side of his bed in the adjacent room. Most of them were photocopies from the library book that had mentioned that ring of mountains. At the bottom, larger than the rest, was the folded satellite map that Jack had given him. He had looked at it several times over the last few days, and each time he did, his thoughts went straight to Bill.
He should ring his friend. Get back in contact. They had already let this argument fester for too long, and besides, he couldn’t feel any worse than he did right now.
Luca was just about to pick up the phone again when a text came through. It was from Jack Milton, asking if a package had arrived.
After dialling his uncle’s number and resting the phone under his ear, Luca strode over to the kitchen drawer and sifted through the contents. Nothing. As the phone continued ringing, he opened the front door of his flat and went into the communal hall to look through today’s mail. There was a brown cylindrical tube, taped up with thick sellotape and slightly crushed from being pushed through the letterbox.
‘Jack. It’s Luca.’
There was a clunking sound, then a soft cursing as Jack caught the edge of his coffee cup on the desk.
‘Hey, Luca, how are you? Did you get the package I sent?’
‘Yeah. It’s right here. Hold on a second.’
Ripping open the cylinder, Luca pulled out a large photocopied sheet of paper that was curled in on itself. Clamping the phone to his shoulder, he spread it out on the kitchen counter, using the empty bottle of Coke to hold down one edge. A beautifully detailed pen-and-ink drawing filled the entire piece of A3 paper. It had been rather clumsily photocopied, so that the bottom right-hand corner was missing, but as Luca realised what he was looking at, he felt his pulse quicken. A disbelieving smile crept across his face.
‘Holy shit, Jack! Where the hell did you find this?’
‘I thought you’d like it,’ he replied, a smile in his voice. ‘After you mentioned the word beyul, I did a little bit of research myself. That scroll is just the half of it.’
The picture showed eight snow-capped mountains forming in a perfect circle, and at its centre another mountain shaped like a pyramid. The artistry of the original work must have been spectacular. The detail was meticulous, every inch crowded with finely inked images and complex symbols.
In the centre, at the very summit of the pyramid, a priest was depicted, staring out from the page with the otherworldly detachment of someone deep in meditation. In his open hand was a symboclass="underline" a circle with eight points merging into a central triangle.
‘It’s called a thangKa,’ Jack continued. ‘They were originally teaching scrolls, drawn by Tibetan Buddhist monks and passed on from monastery to monastery. And I found your pyramid mountain when I was looking though the Mahayana Sutras.’
‘The what?’
‘It’s a philosophical doctrine adopted by a certain sect of Buddhists. I was put on to it by one of the lecturers here in Cambridge, but they said the real people to talk to were from the Asian Studies Department.’
Luca’s voice rose in pitch. ‘But that pyramid is exactly what I saw from Makulu. This proves that the mountain actually exists!’
Jack laughed. ‘As a scholar, I can assure you that it doesn’t prove anything. You’ll need to find a few other corroborating sources before you can claim that.’
‘But Bailey’s book in the library,’ said Luca excitedly, his eyes falling on the photocopies stacked by his bed, ‘it mentioned that the pyramid mountain was in one of these beyuls.’
‘Again, that’s anecdotal. But you’re right, it is beginning to get interesting. Listen to what I discovered in the Sutras.’ Jack paused, trying to find the right place in his notes. ‘So, according to this, the ring of mountains is supposed to depict the eight-fold path of a lotus flower. And then, right in the centre, is this mythical kingdom.’ He paused again as he tried to decipher his own spidery handwriting. ‘It’s called Shambhala.’
‘A mythical kingdom?’
‘Apparently so. It’s a place where the Lamas have moved on to some kind of higher spiritual plane. You know, total enlightenment and all that.’
Jack reached out one shaking hand and picked up his mug of coffee. Kingdoms of total enlightenment — Jesus, he could do with a bit of that around here.