The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [129]
He felt exhilarated, almost carefree. It was strange, because he had nothing but cares. He had to catch Li Lan before Simms and Peng did—warn her that her organization had a mole and that she and Pendleton would never be safe. And he was now the proverbial man without a country—not America, not China. If he survived the next few days, which was a poor bet at best, he had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
But he felt the energizing simplicity of desperation. It felt great to be done with the myriad complexities of intrigue, with the subtle maneuvers, with the twisted emotions, with the damn thinking. The whole mess had come to a race up a mountain, and the fresh air and open spaces sang to him as he settled into a pace.
He realized he hadn’t been alone in three months, not for a single hour, and he certainly hadn’t been free. Now he looked up at the magnificent panorama of mountains and valleys, and he felt … clean. He hadn’t felt clean in a long, long time.
The climb began abruptly as the grassy plateau gave way to a narrow saddle and the dirt trail yielded to a more formal stone path. The saddle emptied into a thick grove of bamboo, beyond which was a stone bridge over a fast, narrow stream. On the other side of the bridge, Neal passed under a large open gate to the bottom of a steep knoll. The stone steps flanked the edge of a wall, behind which was an enormous temple. Neal paused at the first landing and felt the pins and needles in his legs. The trail ahead of him went straight uphill for as far as he could see. It was going to be a long day.
And he had to find an elephant.
No, not an elephant. The elephant. On a Chinese mountain.
Speaking of elephants on Chinese mountains, he thought … I’m probably pretty conspicuous now that daylight’s here.
He walked up the stairs until he came to an open arched gate, then stepped inside. He was standing at the edge of a large courtyard where a small battalion of monks were doing t‘ai chi. Other monks, who looked like young novices, scurried about with wooden buckets of water and bundles of firewood. Neal surmised that they were getting ready for the old after—t‘ai chi breakfast. Neal sidled along the edge of the courtyard beneath a tiled portico, then slipped through the first open door.
The sanctuary was full of statues, sticks of incense smoldering in their stone hands. Neal hit the staircase just inside the door and found himself in a hallway in front of a row of rooms. In the trusting, cloistered atmosphere of the monastery, the rooms were unlocked.
So much for trust, Neal thought, as he went inside the first room. A heavy shirt and a pair of peasant trousers hung on a wooden peg. Working clothes, Neal thought, as he held the shirt up against his chest. It was much too large, so he tried the next room. Still too large.
He hit the jackpot at the end of the hallway, where a larger room had eight kangs and eight sets of work clothes. Must be the novices’ dorm, he thought. He found a set of clothes that fit loosely, then stripped off his own Western clothes and changed into the Chinese workaday outfit. He kept his tennis shoes, though, figuring that a change of footwear didn’t make sense for a long climb up a mountain. Besides, if anyone got close enough to notice his shoes, they would also notice his round eyes.
A few more minutes of scavenging got him a wide straw hat, which he slanted down over his forehead.
There was still the problem of his modern Western bag. He gave a resigned sigh, then removed his copy of Random and Li Lan’s brochure from the bag and put them in the shirt’s wide hip pocket. He took out his toothbrush, toothpaste, and razor and put them in the other pocket, and shoved Simms’s pistol into the back of his pants at the waist. Then he rolled the bag up tightly and put it under his arm until he could find a safe place to dump it.