some things, he’d give himself that. And he’d achieved them without shooting people, which he was proud of. But like Ying Ning, he was on his own side, and that was all. He had more people to help him than she did. His life was more of a compromise. All that business of no possessions, no bank account, no car. It was a public image and Ying Ning had seen through that immediately. It was a public image for a man who claimed to have no public image. It was also tactic, a way of staying below the radar, although everyone assumed it was some kind of personal political statement. Stone didn’t like that. Because political statements are simply justifications for what you want do with your life.
And Stone knew perfectly well that “justification” is another word for “lie”. As Ying Ning pointed out, Stone was paid by a university, even if it was in cash. Where Ying Ning ignored rules and laws entirely, Stone used the rule of law. He relied on it. He used the laws of England, of America, of Sweden to get his message out. True, the more of a problem he became to the authorities, the more their commitment to the rule of law was strained, and the slanders, smears and bogus charges had started to come out. But all in all, Stone was less of an outsider than he cared to admit in public.
Contrast Ying Ning. Right now, Ying Ning was an outlaw in China — but even that was a sideshow. Her life was more like performance art — a living act of dissidence and rebellion — occasionally poetry. She did everything for herself, and that explained her lack of morals. If it was useful to Ying Ning, it was OK. That was her moral code.
Ying Ning was an artist, Stone was a “warrior for peace”, but both had plenty in common with that screwball UFO-hound Carslake. It was the need to discover, the need to know which drove them, the thing they had in common. When they found the Machine, and uncovered what made Semyonov flee to China, all three would be happy for knowing and for the act of finding out. Not one of them expected fame or fortune out of it.
Stone followed noises into the tiny bathroom, and found Carslake, lovingly unwrapping the long rectangular box he’d collected from the Fedex office in Chengdu.
‘This baby,’ said Carslake, with a voice of hushed awe, ‘This baby’s going to tell us everything when we get up there in the hills. Ground penetrating radar. This will give us 3D images to a depth of five kilometers underground. If anything’s hiding down there, this thing is going to find it.’ He spoke as if it had been his idea to bring the equipment, whereas he’d been following Stone’s specific instructions. Which was all to the good.
After what had happened earlier, Stone insisted they would leave first thing in the morning. They would travel towards the Tibetan border by bus at first light.
Chapter 44 — 8 April — Garze Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China
Stone realised early on in the journey that things weren’t going to come up to expectations. He’d seen Ying Ning’s photograph which purported to be the site of the Machine — a barren mountainside, devoid of life, with a high electric fence. But the landscape up to now didn’t look too promising. First of all they passed a town in the foothills which was billed as Shang-ri La in the tourist guides, but was in fact called Shang Li. Shang Li was a fairy tale vision of old China. Enchanting wooden buildings, temples and pagodas, and a nice line in covered bridges over a babbling river to frame the photo opps.
And the scenery got better, if less Disney-fied. When the bus halted at the town of Tieshi Lin, the Ironstone Forest of Semyonov’s scribbled notes, Stone had expected the blasted scrubland from the photograph. But Tieshi Lin was lush and forested. Ying Ning pointed like a botanist to the silver Yunnan pine, and Sichuan pepper plants with fuchsia-pink blooms twenty centimeters across standing out in the profusion of spring flowers.
They travelled the last fifteen kilometres in an ancient bus, painted in faded yellows, reds and blues, with large Buddhist swastikas. It reminded Stone of his time undercover in Pashtun tribal dress, riding the beaten-up trucks from Kandahar up into the thin air of the Pamir Plateau. The Afghan Death Zone, thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the Himalayas
By contrast, the colourful swastikas painted on its side marked this wagon out as the bus from the Buddhist monastery at Shanglan.
Stone stepped out and breathed in cool, fresh air. The monastery stood at the head of a forest valley with the Great Snow mountains rising behind to 7500 metres, way higher than McKinley, or even Aconcagua. A view so clear it made him pity the rest of humanity. A river burbled and sploshed down the hillside a hundred metres away.
At the Shanglan monastery was a Buddhist temple, surprisingly large, its frontage dominated by a red- painted wooden portal, seven metres high. In front stood a courtyard where a trio of teenage monks played and chased, and the open entrance to the temple. Wisps of incense smoke trailed amid a tinkling of bells and some chanting. The three boy-monks stopped dead as they spotted Stone and Carslake, dumbfounded to see Westerners. They stared at first, then chattered, edged forward and finally reached out their fingers to touch the white skin and Stone’s unruly, light brown hair.
Inside the temple was a group of monks at prayer. Three of the older monks looked lost in contemplation, eyes closed, lips moving in quiet incantation. But the younger monks looked out at the foreigners in excitement. They forgot their incantations, and their smiling eyes peered out through the incense smoke and tinkling of brass bells. A lone, aged monk caught Stone’s attention. He was outside the doorway in his robes, crouching on the steps and twirling a scripture reel as if oblivious, his face lined and wizened by the years, muttering his incantations.
Stone scanned the faces inside the temple. One monk looked different. In his mid-twenties, tall and muscular, the same height as Stone. The robes and the shaven head were the same, but there were no smiling eyes, no childish curiosity. His face and head had a muscular self-confidence, and he was staring at Ying Ning aggressively.
For while Stone and Carslake stood respectfully before the mesmerizing spectacle, Ying Ning was hand-on- hip, standing right over the crouching monk on the steps with a scornful pout. Stone saw her quite deliberately pull a cigarette carton from her bag, tap against it, then light up and smoke. Ash fell from her cigarette onto the old monk’s saffron robes. She made loud remarks to no one in particular, pointing at the monks with her cigarette. The boy-monks shrank away, but the old gentleman beneath her sat unmoved, eyes closed, spinning his scripture reel. Finally, getting no reaction, Ying Ning threw down the cigarette butt, and stalked off around the back of the temple.
‘She has no right to do that, even if she has no respect,’ muttered Carslake.
‘She’s consistent at least,’ said Stone. ‘I didn’t exactly expect her to bake a tray of cookies for them.’
‘Bitch,’ said Carslake.
Someone else thought so, too. The strong, aggressive-looking monk had been staring at Ying Ning all along, and after seeing her little performance with the cigarette ash, he left his place and strode after her round the back of the temple.
Stone made a show of bowing in front of the temple, then walked off in silence.
Behind the temple in the trees were two long, low buildings, not ornate like the temple, but equally old. A couple of hundred years, Stone guessed. In the Manchu dynasty of three hundred years up to 1911, the Tibetans had enjoyed a privileged status in China. Most of their lovely temples were built at that time, many outside of Tibet in China proper. The two buildings were the living quarters for the monks. One comprised a dining hall, kitchens and workshops, and the other had tiny wooden cells for the monks — austere and windowless.
Stone oriented himself, and looked around at the lush hills and the valley. Could it really be the right place? It seemed preposterous that the barren landscape and the old mine workings where the Machine was hidden should be here.
‘Stone!’ The American voice of Carslake. He emerged through the trees with another monk, an intelligent- looking gentleman wearing glasses called Giyenchen. He spoke English, and invited Stone and Carslake to take tea with him. A novice monk materialized with a teapot and some cinnamon cakes for them.
Giyenchen’s face was one that stays in the mind. It had an aura of the saintly. A benign smile, an unknowable contentment. Giyenchen was in his mid-forties, Stone guessed, and his skin was brown and smooth, with small crow’s feet around the eyes from smiling. Neither young nor old. His head was shaven, of course, with signs of grey stubble by the ears, and he wore black-rimmed spectacles. It was a face which carried its own peace, as if the
