The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [145]
The food was good, the beer better, but he would be happy when Li Lan came home. Everything was better when she was there. Well, she should be home from the mountain any day now, any day.
He shoveled down some rice and speculated about the nitrogen content in the Dwaizhou soil.
Neal Carey steadfastly refused to eat. He sat on the kang in his dark monk’s cell not even looking at the bowl of rice that the monk brought in every day. He had a vague awareness of hunger somewhere in his body, but the pain and guilt more than drowned it. Li Lan was dead because of him. Pendleton was dead because of him. He wished the driver had thrown him off the cliff instead of carrying him to the remote monastery on the west slope of the mountain. He wished that Xiao Wu had killed him instead of Simms. He wished he were dead. He wouldn’t eat to keep himself alive.
The monk opened the shutter of the window to let the noonday light in. How many days had it been, Neal wondered. Seven? Eight? How many days did it take to starve?
“You must eat,” he heard a woman’s voice say.
The English startled him and he looked up. Who spoke English on this damn mountain?
Li Lan stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a white jacket and white pants. White ribbons held her hair in two braids. White, he recalled, was the Chinese color of mourning. Behind her stood an older man. The resemblance was startling, even though he wore a green Mao suit with a plain white armband.
Neal blinked twice to try to clear the hallucination from his head. He understood that his subconscious was desperate to relieve the feeling of guilt, so it had produced Li Lan alive for him. But the vision didn’t go away. It stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the sunshine.
Then he understood. It was not Li Lan, it was her sister. They were twins.
“You must eat,” she repeated.
He shook his head.
“You used to like my cooking.”
He looked up again.
“I am alive,” she said. “So is Robert.”
“I saw—”
“My sister, Hong. My twin sister. When we were babies, Father and Mother tied blue ribbons in my hair and red ribbons in her hair to tell us apart.”
Twins.
“It was my sister who took you from The Walled City, my sister who came to you at Leshan and asked you to go home, my sister who made love with you.”
Sister Hong. The actress.
“She told me a story, about her sister killing her mother.”
“She was talking about herself. She could never overcome her guilt. She found herself in the Buddha’s Mirror.”
Neal felt the room spinning. “Why? Why did you do all this?”
The older man stepped forward. “Mr. Carey, I am Xao Xiyang, Party Secretary for Sichuan Province. Lan’s father. Hong’s father. I am the responsible person in this matter.”
Neal could only stare at him.
Xao continued, “You must understand how desperately we need the expertise that Dr. Pendleton can offer us. You have never seen hunger, Mr. Carey. You have never seen starvation. I have seen both. I never want to see them again, no matter what the price.
“When Lan began her relationship with Dr. Pendleton, I was overjoyed. I saw a wonderful opportunity, one that might never come again. As you know, I asked Lan to bring Dr. Pendleton into China. But such an operation was fraught with danger. Your own CIA, the Taiwanese, even our own government—especially our own government—would seek to prevent his defection at all costs.
“You see, Mr. Carey, we are engaged in a desperate struggle for control in China, a struggle between the hard-line Maoists, who seek to reimpose tyrannical madness and backwardness on us, against progressive, democratic reformers. I need not tell you that I am numbered among the latter. I need not tell you it is imperative that we prevail in this struggle. The agricultural advances that Dr. Pendleton could provide may be a critical weapon in that struggle.
“He who feeds China, Mr. Carey, controls China.”
Xao paused for comment or agreement, but Neal remained silent.
“We exercised every caution