“It’s brilliant.” Don Fernando passed a hand across his forehead. “I wish to God I had thought of it.”
“Don Fernando,” Bourne said, “Maceo Encarnación and the thirty million are going to Lebanon to consummate a deal.”
The older man brightened considerably. It was clear Martha Christiana’s death had hit him hard. “Then we need to get there as quickly as possible.”
Bourne regarded him warily. “We’re not going anywhere until we take care of Nicodemo. You told me you went to a lot of trouble to prove to Maceo Encarnación that you died when your private jet crashed. But if Nicodemo was at your door earlier, then chances are he saw you outside the building. Encarnación knows you’re alive. Nicodemo won’t allow you to leave Paris alive.”
"So many things can go wrong.”
Minister Ouyang, a tiny, translucent teacup balanced between his fingertips, stood in the large central chamber of the magnificent Chonghuagong, the private suite of Qianlong, emperor of the Qing dynasty, buried in the secret center of the Forbidden City. Few people were allowed into the chambers, which gleamed with the emperor’s jaw-dropping collection of precious jade figurines and historic calligraphic scrolls, and none but Minister Ouyang and several others of the Central Committee at such a late hour. The flames from tiers of thick yellow candles threw off flickering, glimmering light that both illuminated and shadowed the array of the Middle Kingdom’s treasures.
The woman to whom Ouyang had directed his concern was curled like a cat on a Mandarin divan brought in for the occasion and followed him with her coffee-colored eyes. Even in this position, the power in her long legs was apparent. Cloaked in a gleaming orange shantung silk robe, she looked like the emissary of the sun. “If you think that way, darling, you will make it so.”
Ouyang turned sharply enough for the hot tea to sting one fingertip. He ignored the pain to stare at his wife. “I will never understand you, Maricruz.”
She bowed her head slightly, her thick waterfall of hair covering one eye, acknowledging the compliment in the restrained manner of the high-caste Chinese with whom she had lived since coming to Beijing a decade ago. “This is as it should be.”
Ouyang, in a long, traditional Mandarin’s robe, took a step toward her. “But, really, you are not like a Westerner at all.”
“If I had been,” she said in a voice of stillness and depth, “you never would have married me.”
Ouyang studied her the way a painter eyes the model for his most important work of art. Transformation was the painter’s skill; it was also Ouyang’s. “Do you want to know what ultimately attracted me to you?”
Maricruz opened her eyes slightly.
“Your patience.” Ouyang took a sip of his tea, held it in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed. “Patience is the greatest of virtues. It is almost wholly unknown in the West. The Arabs understand the value of patience, but they are primitives compared to us.”
Maricruz laughed. “I think that’s what I like most about you Chinese—your incredibly high opinion of yourselves.” She laughed again. “The Middle Kingdom.”
Ouyang took another sip of tea, savoring it much as he savored these intellectual boxing matches with his wife. No one else had the guts to talk to him in this blunt manner. “You’re living in the Middle Kingdom, Maricruz.”
“And loving every minute of it.”
Ouyang crossed to a narrow niche and took up a small jade box, exquisitely engraved with rampant dragons on a field of stylized clouds. He held this box in his two hands.
“The Middle Kingdom has always been a rich source of mythology. I think you know this, Maricruz. Your own civilization is steeped in myth and legend.” Ouyang’s obsidian eyes glittered. “However, our history is so long and twisted that we have had several setbacks, all of them egregious. The first one occurred many centuries ago, in two thirteen bc, when Emperor Shi Huangdi of the Qin dynasty ordered the burning of all books on subjects other than medicine, prophecy, and farming. Thus were lost many of the Middle Kingdom’s root mythological sources.
“As often happens here, Shi Huangdi’s order was reversed in one ninety-one bc, and much of the literature was reconstructed. However, it was rewritten to support ideas popular with the then current emperor. Mythological history was rewritten, as it is over and over again, by the victor. Valuable information was lost forever.”
He came toward her with the box held like an object of infinite value. “Rarely, however, a piece of the precious past is somehow discovered, either by fate or by the desire to find it.”
Standing in front of her, he held out the box.
Maricruz eyed the jade warily. “What is this?”
“Please,” Ouyang said, bending down to her.
Maricruz took the box, which weighed far more than she had expected. It was cool to the touch, smooth as glass. With one hand, she opened the top. Her fingers trembled. Inside was a folded square of paper. She looked up at Ouyang.
“The name of your mother, Maricruz.”
Her mouth opened but no sound emerged.
“Should you wish to find her.”
“She’s alive?” Maricruz breathed.
Ouyang watched her, eyes alight. “She is.”
Very slowly, she closed the box and set it down on the settee beside her. She uncoiled with a lithe strength he found intoxicating. She reminded him of the American movie stars of the 1940s. As she rose, her robe parted. How did she manage that magician’s sleight of hand? he wondered. The inner hemispheres of her firm breasts revealed themselves like beautiful bronze bowls. She pressed her body against him.
“Thank you, Ouyang,” she said formally.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I want to know. I don’t want to know.”
“You have the chance to undo the revision of your own personal history.”
“It means defying my father.” She rubbed her forehead against his shoulder. “What if my mother doesn’t want to see me? Why didn’t she try—?”
“You know your father,” Ouyang said softly, “better than anyone.”
“There must be a reason,” she said. “Do you know what it is?”
“I have reached the limits of my knowledge in this affair.” But, of course, Ouyang knew the reason, just as Maricruz would the moment she saw the name of her mother, married to a powerful drug lord, a friend, a business partner, who Maceo Encarnación cuckolded without a scintilla of remorse. He had desired Constanza Camargo. That was Maceo Encarnación in a nutshell.
“I need time,” Maricruz said now. “I need to concentrate on what is about to transpire.”
Even as Ouyang felt his body respond to hers, his mind returned to what she had said. “You are correct, Maricruz. I have the perfect partners. Nothing is going to go wrong.”
She smiled at him, her arms wrapped around him.
“This plan would not have been possible without you,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “Without the participation of your father and brother.”
Maricruz’s laugh was a gurgle deep in her throat. “My poor brother, Juanito, saddled with the name Nicodemo, with the sobriquet the Djinn Who Lights The Way, both given to him by our father in order to bury himself even more deeply in the shadows.”
“Your father moves in a circle of light in his legitimate business dealings as CEO of SteelTrap. He moves in a circle of shadow with his illegitimate dealings with the cream of the drug lords and arms dealers.”
His fingertips caressed her bare shoulders beneath the slithery robe.
“But I know a different Maceo Encarnación, the one who moves in darkness, the one who makes plans like a master chess player, the one who brings disparate elements together, often without their knowledge or consent, the one who is invaluable to me.”