The Game - Laurie R. King [11]
“Tibet.”
“Yes. A country all too aware of its vulnerability and its desirability, and therefore closed with grim determination against the eyes of all foreigners, a place with the habit of executing anyone even suspected of secret doings, a place where no Westerner had ever set foot. Unfortunately, just four months earlier, a Survey agent had gone missing from a mission into the reaches of Tibet, and it was feared that he had been taken captive, and was being questioned, under fairly drastic means—certain pieces of inside information had come to public knowledge. It was feared that any agent known to this man was in danger of exposure.”
“So Mycroft suggested sending in someone whom the man could not have known,” I supplied. “You.”
“Correct again. The timing was coincidental—my own unlooked-for availability and their sudden and urgent need for a competent stranger. And although by the time I reached India, O’Hara and his lama had left the plains, I managed to join a Scandinavian expedition into the mountains whose path would coincide with theirs.”
“Wheels within wheels.”
“Quite an appropriate image, Russell. The Tibetans often pray by means of a wheel spun on the end of a stick, its body filled with written prayers. With prayers, or with any other piece of writing a man might wish to carry with him. A map, say, or the copy of a private letter.”
“So you persuaded a couple of Tibetan monks to take on a Norwegian explorer?”
“They were, as I mentioned, begging for their meal by the side of the road, as is customary for religious individuals in the East. I was in the habit of concealing a roll in the breast of my coat, for just such an eventuality, and slid inside it a wadded-up note suggesting that a ‘son of the charm’ might find a friend in the tent with the orange door. The boy came to me after his lama was asleep that night, bristling with suspicion, fingering in a most un-monk-like fashion the revolver he wore inside his shirt lest I prove an enemy—or worse, a colleague set on dragging him back to his responsibilities.
“I gave him food—the boy ate meat as if he was starving, which he may well have been—and tobacco, and we sat on our heels in the dark and talked. He was the most remarkable blend of hard and soft, cunning and naïve, schoolboy one moment, petty criminal the next. He was a prodigy, who’d played a similar Game in the streets before he’d even heard of Crown or Tsar—if Creighton had sat at a drawing-board to design the very tool for bearing the Survey’s eyes and ears, he couldn’t have come up with anything better than Kimball O’Hara. His only weakness was a distaste for lying to his friends, and even then, he would practice deceit joyously when it was part of The Game.
“In the end I managed to convince the lad that, far from wishing to pull him out of the mountains, I would urge him to go as far and as wide as he could with his lama—my sole request being that he take me with him. Two purposes had I: The more immediate was to find word of Creighton’s missing agent, but beyond that, I had been asked, if it came into my purview, to whisper into the Dalai Lama’s ear that, despite the alarming actions of certain importunate missionaries, England was in fact more interested in treaty than takeover. That we had no wish to rule Tibet, merely wished Tibet’s assurance that they would not side with Russia and allow The Bear to use their land to stockpile troops and matériel for an invasion of India.
“At that time, I had no real thought that I would be allowed within shooting distance of the Dalai Lama, much less close enough to converse. That possibility came much later.
“The boy didn’t want me. He was afraid I’d give them away, and bring some impossible-to-predict form of wrath down on his lama. However, he was greatly tempted, seeing that supporting my assignment might go some way towards obviating his rebellion against his Survey masters. O’Hara would freely have given his life for the