Satori - Don Winslow [78]
Nicholai heard himself howl in pain.
He pulled himself back, but his arms were too weak now and his feet could find no purchase on the floor.
He wanted to die standing.
He tried to push himself up, but his arms collapsed and he fell flat. All he could do was roll over so that he could at least die facing his opponent. In the clarity before death, he saw the Go board and knew the answer to why Haverford would leave the black stone in place.
He wouldn’t.
He didn’t.
Wu Zhong chambered his leg for the lethal axe kick.
“Salaama,” he said.
Peace.
The bullet struck Wu Zhong square in his broad forehead and he fell backward.
Nicholai turned his head in the direction of the shot.
Colonel Yu lowered his pistol.
The monk, standing behind Yu, squatted beside Nicholai and said, “Satori.”
“You’re late,” Nicholai said.
Then he blacked out.
Part Three
WULIANG MOUNTAINS, YUNNAN PROVINCE, CHINA
87
THE SOUND OF A FLUTE WOKE HIM.
At first Nicholai thought it was a bird singing, but then he heard the deliberate repetition of a particular phrase and realized that he was listening to someone play a lusheng.
But there was birdsong in the background.
Birdsong and clean fresh air, and then he knew that he was no longer in the city, or in the tight, fume-choked back of an army truck, but somewhere in the countryside, perhaps even in the wilderness.
He turned toward the slight breeze he felt on the back of his head, but movement was still painful and difficult, and it took him over a minute to roll over and feel the cool air dry the sweat on his face.
His leg throbbed in protest of the motion.
A voice snapped an order in a language that Nicholai did not understand, and then he heard footsteps quickly shuffling across a wooden floor.
He didn’t know where he was, but then it seemed like a long time since he had known. The last thing that he clearly remembered was his fight with the formidable bajiquan practitioner and his rescue by Yu and the monk. He remembered waking up briefly in the back of what must have been a truck — because its rattling forced him to suppress a scream of pain before he blacked out again. He recalled being given a shot of what was probably morphine, and the deep, painless slumber that followed, and he had a vague memory of being lifted out of the truck and placed in another, soft worried voices, and a nightmare in which he heard concerned whispers and hushed discussions about amputating his leg.
Now he reached down in alarm and felt with intense relief that both limbs were still attached to his body. But his left leg was hot and swollen, and now he recalled the fevers and the shaking, his head being lifted to receive sips of bitter tea, and the horrible pain as the truck bounced over rough roads as it first climbed and then descended hills.
Indeed, Nicholai saw that he was in the hills now. Outside the window he saw a lush forest of firs, pines, camphor, and nanmu trees in a series of rolling ridges below him. The landscape seemed impossibly green, after the white and silver of Beijing, and the blackness of the journey to this place, wherever it was.
Maybe I’m dead, Nicholai speculated without alarm. Perhaps this is chin t’u, the paradise promised by the amida Buddha. But the “pure land” was not for killers, and he had killed Yuri Voroshenin with a single leopard strike to the heart.
At first he thought this might have been part of his morphine-induced dreams — crazy, twisted images of Solange, Haverford, shengs and dans and sharp wires and men dressed all in black. But then he realized that the memory of killing Voroshenin was just that — a recollection of an actual event, and he felt some satisfaction at completing his mission, even though the Americans had betrayed him.
Nicholai blamed himself as much as them.
I should have seen it earlier, he thought as he lay in what he now realized was a hammock. I should have known that Haverford never intended to honor his part of the deal.
Even this small mental exertion exhausted him and he sank deeper into the hammock,