Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) (12 page)

Riley took note of the three exits and the relationship of Wat Pho to the river and the main streets where she could catch a taxi if necessary. All the while she stayed close to buildings, out of the open whenever possible, and stayed alert, checking out every person she encountered. She did not want to be taken by surprise, and now she knew just how good her adversary was.

When she finally got to the chapel that housed the Reclining Buddha, Riley took off her sandals, and rather than leave them on the rack outside she stuffed them into her backpack. She didn’t want to end up running around Bangkok in her bare feet.

It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the low light inside, but when she could finally see down the full length of the statue, she was aghast at the size of it. The statue barely fit inside the building that housed it, and according to her brochure it was almost one hundred and fifty feet long. You couldn’t step back far enough to take it all in. In other circumstances, she would have enjoyed playing tourist, but on this day, she searched the chapel for a shadowy alcove where she could keep her back to the wall and stand watch. She found her spot down by the mother-of-pearl-inlaid feet of the statue.

Riley slid the backpack off and reached inside for the artifact Peewee had given her. She had not had time to examine it. He’d said it was a Tibetan prayer gau. She supposed it weighed eight to ten ounces, and assuming it was pure gold and that gold was selling at around fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, it had significant value beyond any historical value. But was twelve to fifteen thousand dollars enough to make a big fuss over? To some people, yes, but not, she thought, to the sort of people who hire men like the one who had chased her.

Riley thought again about her father and the organization he had belonged to most of his adult life: Skull and Bones. They
were
the sort of people who could hire a man like that, and it was time she stopped avoiding the issue and considered that possibility.

Skull and Bones was a Yale secret society whose members pledged loyalty to Bones until their deaths. When she had first met Cole, Riley didn’t want to believe his wild conspiracy theory about how the Patriarchs, an inner circle of Bonesmen, had orchestrated the murder of Cole’s father, James Thatcher. Cole claimed his father had somehow learned that evidence was hidden aboard the wreck of the submarine
Surcouf
that proved how those monsters had been perpetuating the business of war for profit.

Then that fall day back in DC, Riley began to believe Cole wasn’t crazy after all. In a matter of hours, she learned that her own father was one of the monsters, and he had sat idly by as his fellow Patriarchs ordered her brother Michael’s murder. Then, when that rogue Bonesman Diggory Priest had murdered her father before her eyes, Riley and Cole had escaped and returned to the Caribbean, determined to find the
Surcouf
and expose them all.

Only it had not quite turned out that way. Thanks to old Henri Michaut, Cole located the
Surcouf
down in the Caribbean, but he was diving inside the wreck when the volcano on Montserrat erupted, causing an undersea earthquake that rocked the Leeward Islands and sent the submarine’s wreck sliding into deeper water. Cole never surfaced. The madman Diggory Priest died in a boat explosion that same day, and Cole’s first mate, Theo, and Riley were left to try to make sense of what happened. As the police boat approached, they had agreed to report that Cole too had died in the explosion and fire.

She had not gone back to Washington for her father’s funeral. She just wanted to find a quiet cove to anchor her boat and give in to her
grief. Eventually, Riley had returned to France, where she had lived as a child. She visited her mother, who had remarried a French national, but found only a woman intent upon distancing herself from her first marriage and the daughter who had been its result.

Thankfully, that bruising discovery wasn’t all that she found in France. It was there that she’d last seen Theo, who’d hinted not only that Cole might still be alive, but also that the two of them had found the
Surcouf
, along with its secrets. Riley had so wanted it to be true, wanted to believe that the Patriarchs were through.

Then Theo too had disappeared.

It was crazy to think that this business with Peewee and the strange Asian mustache guy could have anything to do with Cole or the Patriarchs. But then again, if there was one thing Cole had taught her, it was to be careful about calling anything crazy.

After thirty minutes of waiting and watching all the people who passed through the chapel admiring the huge Buddha, Riley decided that Peewee was not coming. She realized she was still holding the gold tube in her hand. She’d been rolling it across her palm with her thumb, then pushing it back with her fingers like a devotee counting prayer beads. Flattening her palm, she held the object close to her face and tried to examine it in the dim light. She shook her head, hiked her pack higher up her shoulder, and walked to the closest door to the exterior.

The ground was paved with cut stone, and the single bench was already occupied by a monk sliding on his sandals, so Riley continued barefoot. She found a shady spot down a walkway between two buildings. Off the walkway, she leaned against the column and opened her palm again. The light there was much better. The goldsmith work was exquisite, with tiny beads placed around the caps on both ends and on several strips around the middle. This divided the tube into three
bands, each decorated with intricate curling designs forming letters or pictographs, she assumed. Not being an expert on the Tibetan alphabet or language, she couldn’t be sure, but that was what it looked like.

The top had a loop so that the tube could be worn around the neck on a string, and the bottom was a removable cap. It took some tugging, but she pulled the cap free and slid out one of the rolled scrolls of paper. The paper was very thin and the ink had bled through, so though the writing was on the inner side, she could see the designs. The figures looked very different from the writing in the gold-work on the tube.

From the corner of her eye, Riley noted movement, and when she turned to look, she saw the monk wrapped in his orangish-yellow robes and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled at her and pointed at the gau in her hand.

She smiled back, not sure if she was supposed to speak to him or not.

“Excuse me,” he said, and he stepped closer to her. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes. I’m American. Your English sounds very good.”

“Thank you. You are very kind.” He nodded at the object she was holding. “Do you know what that is?”

“I was told it is a Tibetan prayer gau.”

He nodded again. “Yes. I studied in Tibet, and I speak and write the language. A wonderful country. I have seen many of these prayer gaus. They are worn around the neck to keep the prayer close to the heart.”

“So this is writing on the outside?”

“Yes, it is the Tibetan Buddhist mantra,
om mani padme hum
, which translates to ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus.’”

Riley sighed. “That’s really lovely.”

“But the scroll you hold looks very strange. May I see it?”

Riley knew that monks were not allowed to touch women or take objects directly from them, so she slid the gold pieces into her pants
pocket and unrolled part of the scroll. She held it up for him to see. Each figure was like a little drawing.

“It almost looks like hieroglyphics to me,” she said.

“Hmm. Yes, you are correct. This is not Tibetan writing, and it is not Egyptian either. I study languages, and I have never seen writing like this. It may be a code.”

“Code, huh? I’ve had a little experience with that.” She rolled the scroll back up and pulled the pieces of the gau out of her pocket. She slid the paper back inside and closed the cap. Then she held the object in her palm for him to examine. “Is there any way to know how old this is or when the scroll was written?”

“I am not an expert in objects of antiquity. I cannot say. But there are many places here in Bangkok where you could find people to help you.”

Riley pulled her backpack around to her side and slid the gau through the zipper. “Well, you have been very helpful. Thank you.” She placed her hands together in front of her chest, then bowed her head until her thumbs touched her forehead in the traditional
wai
, or Thai greeting.

The monk looked down at her bare feet, then smiled.

Wat Arun
Bangkok, Thailand

November 17, 2012

When they arrived at the entrance gate to Wat Arun, the old man told Benny he didn’t have any money for the entrance fee, so Benny paid for them both. But he wondered if the old man was lying to him about the girl’s location. Why choose the
wat
as a meeting place if he didn’t have the money to get in? They walked around the gardens, looked into a few chapels, and Benny even climbed halfway up one of the
prang
spires to get a better look across the entire compound. The view of the river was great up there, but there was no sign of a young white woman alone. Benny had had enough.

When he got to the bottom of the stone steps, the old man could probably tell from the look on Benny’s face that he wasn’t happy.

“I swear this is where she was supposed to meet me,” Peewee said. The side of his face with the scars didn’t move much, while the good side was trying too hard to look believable.

“You think you are a clever trickster, old man, but you are going to end up dead.”

“We all will, Benny. But you know what they say,
It’s the bad plowman who quarrels with his ox.
You want this girl? I can find her for you, but not with you hanging in my shadow and threatening to kill me.”

“Peewee, I wouldn’t fit in your shadow.”

“Are all Malay people that literal?” Peewee whacked himself on the side of the head. “What am I thinking? You’re headhunters. It doesn’t get much more literal than that.” His cap had slid down over one eye, and he reached up and centered it on his head.

“Let’s get out of here, old man. She’s not going to show. It’s almost six o’clock.”

“I’ve got to drain my lizard.”

“What did you say?”

Peewee rolled his eyes. “Aw,” he groaned. “You know, I’ve got to point Percy at the porcelain?” He turned his head sideways and looked at Benny out of the corner of his eye. “I’m going to free Willy?” He shook his head. “Still nothing, huh? How about, can you find me the little boys’ room?”

“Are you saying you’ve got to take a piss?”

“That’s the idea.”

“I’m sure there’s a toilet around here somewhere.”

“Yeah, I saw it up close to the exit. You know, where we saw those two big demon statues? This way.”

Several vendors had parked their carts around the exit gates. They were selling food and trinkets. Off to one side, a slender man in a broad straw hat led a young elephant around by soft touches to the animal’s ear. Over his shoulder was slung a cloth bag. He reached in and handed out handfuls of elephant food to a group of children. They giggled as the trunk vacuumed up the grain.

“I’ll be right back,” Peewee said as he hurried past another group of children who were playing a game of tag in and around the bushes. The old man turned and called over his shoulder, “Sometimes at my age, this can take a while, though.”

Benny followed the old man down the path to the concrete slab outside the latrine. Along the edge of the concrete, a cluster of vendors was selling bottled water and food. One woman had a blue plastic tub filled with eight- to twelve-inch live eels. He recoiled at the sight of the slithering animals. When he was a young boy, Benny had lived in his grandfather’s stilt house on a river in Borneo. His people were the Dayak and he remembered eating fish, but he had no memory of eating anything that looked like these nearly colorless worms. But Benny didn’t remember much of his boyhood. His mother had taken him to the city of Kuching when he was ten years old, and he had fallen in with a group of boys who ran wild in the streets. By the time he was eighteen, he had already killed two men.

Later, when he was much older, he went back and tried to find his grandfather’s house. There weren’t many Dayak still living on the river. They said his grandfather had died shortly after they left the village. That was when Benny decided it was time to learn more about his heritage.

His thoughts were interrupted by a child’s scream. Benny turned his head. A little girl lay on the grass and the elephant had his foot on her abdomen. The man in the straw hat was screaming at the beast and pointing at the girl.

Benny ran over and scooped the child up off the ground. He was surprised at how easy it was to slide her tiny body out from under that big gray foot. It seemed the elephant’s foot had just been hovering over her. He knelt in front of her and brushed off the girl’s dress. She smiled at him and looked as though she expected praise for something. When she turned to look up at the elephant, she reached out her tiny fingers toward the trunk. He saw no fear in her face at all. There were no tears on her cheeks.

Benny looked up at the man in the straw hat and saw the shadow of a smile on his face, too.