Black Sun: A Thriller (7 page)

The fact that this dispersion had taken place here, hundreds of years later than the description in the Brazilian temple, told him it had been planned. There was a purpose to it, a reason. It was more than a simple inheritance or a division of spoils. The act had to have a meaning to it, a greater intention in the grand scheme of things.

At that very moment, McCarter had felt the urge—no, it had been a need—to look for these stones. He had gone to those who could help him: Arnold Moore and the NRI.

It all seemed so foolish now. Not the theory but his pursuit of the proof. Who did he think he was? Some spy, some agent of change for the world? It had ended so
badly, he wished it had never begun. And yet even in such despair, some part of him knew that if he managed to get healthy he would continue on.

At the sound of someone entering the room McCarter tried to look up.

“Oco?” he asked.

A different voice answered. “Oco has not returned from Xihua.”

McCarter saw a younger man who spoke English and who had acted as an interpreter between McCarter and his primary caregiver. Right behind him stood the shaman himself, in full regalia.

“When will Oco return?” McCarter asked.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” the interpreter said. “But we cannot wait. The poison of the blood is spreading.”

McCarter looked around, desperate to see what preparations might be under way. “What are you going to do?”

“The shaman say, he now understands why you are sick,” the interpreter said.

“I’m sick because someone shot me,” McCarter managed to say. “I have an infection.”

Apparently the shaman disagreed.

“He say, you are looking for something,” the interpreter said. “But you not admit to yourself what it is you want to find. He say, you fear it will be taken from you. And your spirit fights against that truth.”

Great, McCarter thought. Now he was getting his horoscope and medical treatment all from the same person. Not his idea of comprehensive medical.

He laid his head back, the strain on his neck too much to bear. He found the shaman’s statements utterly
confusing, but he lacked the energy to ask anything more. At another time he would have enjoyed speaking with them, exchanging words and concepts and trying to gain an insight into their unique view of the world. But at the moment, he couldn’t have cared less.

The shaman spoke some words over him. “The poison blood has brought bad spirits to you,” the interpreter said. “They control you in your sleep, bringing the dark dreams. The healer is going to force the spirits to leave and then the medicine will be able to work properly.”

At that, McCarter heard the fire being stirred, felt another wave of heat, and heard the shaman begin to chant. The interpreter was grinding some type of medicine in a cup, mixing it with goat’s milk. Seconds later McCarter was drinking it.

The taste was bitter enough to make him close his eyes. When he opened them a moment later, he felt dizzy once again and quickly the room began to blur.

Around him, the chanting continued as the shaman fanned the flames of the fire. The room began to spin and McCarter felt his head growing heavy. It felt as if the sounds had become distorted. He heard voices: the shaman chanting, the interpreter as well. And then, he thought, another voice.

“Oco?” he said hopefully.

The voice reached him again. A woman’s voice, though he couldn’t make out the words. They were just whispers. Hidden.

The shaman passed through his field of vision, casting ash into the air. The fine dust floated down, catching the light of the fire. In it McCarter saw a face.

He tried to focus but the shaman waved a hand through it and the dust scattered on the current.

“What have you given me?” he asked weakly.

The young man answered. “The potion is to calm the dark ones, to make them unaware.”

McCarter could not follow anymore or even pay attention. He felt less pain, that was for sure, but he was more certain than ever that he was on the way to the great beyond.

He thought of his wife, who had died from cancer several years earlier. There were people in this life that made it seem worth all the trouble, made it feel like things would always get better no matter how bad they were. McCarter’s wife had been one of those people.

As college students in the mid-1960s, they had endured racial slurs and threats together. And of the two of them, it had been she who’d insisted that minds would change. When their first child had been deathly sick with pneumonia, she’d promised him that their son would be fine, and he grew up to be a strong young man. And even when she’d lain dying herself and McCarter had stood at her bedside, she had been the one to comfort him.

“If this is my time,” he whispered, “then let me find you.”

The shaman moved past, chanting and whirling like a dervish, shaking some feathery wand. It was all a blur.

McCarter ignored him now. “Let me see you again,” he said aloud to his wife. “If it’s time, bring me to you.”

The shaman was over him now, gazing through the smoke and the haze into McCarter’s eyes. There was something in his hand.

McCarter looked past him. “Bring me to you,” he said again, and then he heard the woman’s voice. It was his wife. She whispered back to him.

“No,”
she said.
“Bring me … to you.”

And then the shaman raised a cast-iron rod from the glowing embers of the fire and plunged it downward. The molten tip burrowed into McCarter’s open wound; his head tilted back and he screamed.

Lantau Island, three miles east of Hong Kong, December 2012

H
awker arrived at Chep Lap Kok Airport shortly after midnight. He stepped off a cargo flight from Nairobi dressed as a member of the crew and helped to supervise the unloading.

Then, instead of reboarding the aircraft or entering the brightly lit passenger terminal, he traveled with the freight to the huge warehouse at the edge of the ramp.

The whole thing had been prearranged, the night foreman and a customs officer dutifully taking their bribes and hiding him. A new set of clothing was handed over, along with travel papers and a stamped passport. Thirty minutes later Hawker was streetside with the rest of the second-shift crew, stepping onto a bus that would take him to Hong Kong’s central district.

At two o’clock in the morning, the city was ablaze with lights, skyscrapers outlined in white and yellow, others up-lit by colored floods, while the ever-present glow of the orange halogen bulbs reflected on the layer of clouds that hung over the city. Though not quite deserted, the streets were quiet, at least by Hong Kong standards.

Hawker wandered around the district for twenty minutes or so, getting his bearings, stopping for an English language newspaper and a bite to eat: Cantonese chicken and a cup of green tea.

In many ways Hong Kong was the same as Hawker remembered, the same neon face for the world to see, the same subconscious buzzing of energy, even at night. It even smelled the same; food cooking and salt air mixed with the exhaust of idling traffic.

To many that would have seemed impossible a decade and a half earlier, as the British prepared to hand the territory back to the Chinese and the threat of communist rule loomed. Many had expected a muting of Hong Kong’s vibrancy, with the imposition of communist taxation, regulation, and bureaucracy. A duller, grayer place was the likely outcome. Certainly money had been fleeing the island for years before the switch.

But it hadn’t happened that way. Aside from growing bigger and brighter, Hong Kong remained the same densely packed bundle of energy it had always been. The place was New York or London on speed, a more youthful and less restrained Tokyo. Its spirit, rather than being dulled, had infected the mainland, right up to the highest levels of the Communist Party, with mini versions of the great city sprouting in Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Chongqing. As it turned out, China hadn’t taken over Hong Kong after all; Hong Kong had taken over China.

As if further proof were needed, Hawker’s last foray into China had been with the state as an adversary. That monolithic source of power no longer existed in the same way. In all likelihood, Kang could be as much an
enemy of his own country as he was currently an enemy of Hawker and the NRI. And that fact was important, because though any action against Kang would be dealt with harshly in the aftermath, especially if linked to the United States, the machinery of the state had better things to worry about in the meantime. If he was right, the only real security he would have to deal with would be Kang’s.

Hawker made his way to the Peninsula Hotel and checked in under the assumed name on the passport: Mr. Thomas Francis.

“Are there any messages for me?” he asked.

“There is one message,” the clerk replied in English. She handed Hawker an envelope.

Hawker opened it. A single sheet of hotel stationery. No name, only three words. It read:
Enjoy the view
. He put it in his pocket and went to his room.

Sitting down, he flipped open a laptop computer that Moore had given him and signed on to the Internet. Using an encryption program, he secured the connection and checked for any messages. There were none. Next he tapped the account that Moore had set up.

Once the security protocol went through, Hawker saw the balance for the first time: $1.4 million. A life’s savings, pledged to save a life. But then Danielle wouldn’t have been in danger had Moore not convinced her to work for him once again.

Hawker stared at the screen. The truth was, he would have come for Danielle without any payment at all. But the money in front of him wasn’t without meaning. It was enough to change Hawker’s life, enough that he could escape the world he’d lived in for the past twelve
years. And the thought had a magnetic attraction that he could not fully deny.

He transferred half the money to an account of his own. The rest would wait; that was the deal. Then he logged out of the site, closed the browser, and shut the laptop.

Glancing at the note he’d been given at the front desk, he stood and walked to the picture window of his seventeenth-floor room. Moving his face up against the glass, he exhaled, creating a slight fog on the window-pane.

A small arrow appeared in the condensation, drawn with fingers and the subtle oils that resided on them. From Hawker’s point of view, it led directly to a moped rental kiosk on the opposite side of the street far below.

He reached out with his hand and wiped the window clean. He would meet his contact there in the morning.

D
anielle stood in the darkness, the filth in the air surrounding her. Hearing more movement, she stepped back in a defensive posture, waiting for something or someone to attack her.

“Show yourself,” she demanded.

A voice called out to her. “You disturbed our rest. So why don’t you show yourself.”

An oil lantern was lit, lending a fraction of light to the room. As her eyes adjusted Danielle saw a figure moving forward: an older Asian man, with a scraggly beard and mustache. Four or five bodies lay on the floor around him, covered with filthy blankets. She guessed they were sleeping. Beyond them were more stone walls and the remnants of cast-iron bars rusted and flaking.

“What is this place?”

“This is the brig,” the older man said. “You cross Kang, there is no court of law. Just this place or worse.”

“Stop talking, old man,” a stronger voice demanded.

Danielle looked and saw another prisoner, younger and larger. He studied her in return and she felt certain that his intentions were anything but pure.

“Who are you?” she asked bluntly. “And why the hell should he do anything you say?”

The younger man seemed insulted by the directness of her questions, but that was the point, to establish dominance or at least a position of strength.

He stood up, throwing off his blanket. He was at least a foot taller than she was, and probably seventy pounds heavier. In comparison to the others, he looked well fed. She guessed that he stole their food. That made him the head rat in the cage.

“You call me
Mister
Zhou,” he demanded. “You’re going to be here with us a long time. Better you learn right now, how things are.”

He stepped toward her and Danielle prepared for the fight.

“Stop,” the old man said. “No fight, not now.” He pointed toward the far wall. Through thin slits that might have once been gunports, the blackness beyond had turned a shade of blue. The day would be breaking soon.

“They feed us now,” he said. “No food, if we fight.”

Danielle stole a quick glance at the old man. He was skin and bones. She turned back to Zhou, and with her eyes locked on his, she stepped backward toward one of the stone bunks.

Zhou sat back down, waking another man and pointing Danielle out to him.

A few minutes later, as thin slivers of light crept across the stone wall, the rest of the prisoners began to wake. It seemed she had six cell mates: the old man, Zhou and his friend, an Indian woman who did not speak or make eye contact with anyone, and two others,
who appeared to be Caucasian: a male child who looked about ten to twelve years of age and a man in his early sixties. He was short but stocky with broad shoulders.

He did not rise or look particularly well. In fact, he seemed to be dying.

H
awker stood in line at the rental kiosk as the morning sun filtered through the skyscrapers. The streets were already clogged with a mad rush of cars, trucks, and people. Bicycles and pedestrians cut between the vehicles, seemingly unconcerned with the thought of a collision. Double-decker buses swerved around other traffic, changing lanes as if guided by Formula One drivers in training. Horns were almost omnipresent and brakes squealed at every intersection.

Renting a moped to enter that madness seemed about as smart as charging into a stampede with an umbrella for protection. But based on the line of people at the desk, both Chinese and foreign, it must have been a preferred means of transportation.