-- I never do, but I should have. You have a talent for coming in at the worst possible moment.
Yifan sucked in Vicky’s breath. How dare she! It was very wounding. Tears began to prick her eyes.
-- It’s okay, please, I didn’t mean it. It’s just tension. Look, we’ll just go have a look, and then get out and raise the alarm. If this is a robbery, it’ll take them ages to get anything valuable out through the West tunnel.
By this time Vicky had come to a circular open space with ledges cut around the walls like seats. She shone her torch to the right. There was a square opening cut through the rock at floor level. Before Yifan could object Vicky was on her hands and knees and looking through it. And then she switched off the torch.
*
“She’s spark out, love,” said John. Ji Ye was holding Yifan’s hand and looking glum. An hour had gone by since they had found Yifan up in the playroom. It was a long time, compared to her other excursions. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Thanks,” said Ji Ye, handing her empty mug to John. “I know she’ll be back. It’s just been a long time. What if her boyfriend is… well.”
“Vicky wouldn’t let it get to that, love, with Yifan around. And Yifan would probably kick him in the unmentionables.”
This made Ji Ye laugh, and they both laughed, but Yifan slept on.
*
There were noises below them. Muffled speech in Mandarin. Scraping and clinking. The dim glow of torches.
Beneath Vicky and Yifan there was a sweep of glossy green tile dulled by dust. It was the roof of a great Chinese temple, and the square tunnel had led them here to the very top of it. Really it was half a temple, jutting out from the rock, with a flat space between the roof ridge and the wall where Vicky was kneeling, looking over the ridge pole which formed a parapet about waist height. The only light was from the torches down below, but Yifan had the impression that they were in a great space. The implied pressure of millions of tons of earth and rock seemed to press her down; breath came with difficulty. Then Vicky adjusted the air flow and the pressure on her chest eased.
-- What’s happening? asked Yifan.
-- Thieves, I guess, said Vicky. And right on cue two of them came into view, dressed in NBC suits, carrying torches and pointing at things. They talked in Mandarin, and were discussing the position of some switches. Their faces were dimly visible behind the plastic faceplates. Both were Chinese. One disappeared from view, and a few moments later there came a great clang! and the floodlights came on.
Yifan gasped. She was gazing down on a huge map of China. The rivers were dry channels, but she knew they had once flowed with liquid mercury. The mountains were sculpted and exaggerated, carved from dully-gleaming jade. The rounded hills of Guilin were dark green, the tiered sweeps of mountains in Yunnan were brown and white. The great deserts were scattered with gold dust graded in different colours, the cities were jewelled pavilions. Where the capital Xianyang should have been was a huge sarcophagus, glittering with plates of gold and studded with gems. Around the walls of the vast space were half-temples like the one she knelt on, each sparkling with treasure and inhabited by huge statues of the ancient Chinese gods.
She looked up and was dazzled by the stars. Pearls, rubies, emeralds scintillated in the harsh light of the floods, making recognisable constellations. The dig team had strung a wobbly-looking catwalk up there, crossing the cavern about three metres below the ceiling, and five metres above her. It was ten metres from where she was perched to the ground below, and she was beginning to feel dizzy.
“Who’s that?” came a shout in Mandarin.
Vicky’s head shot round and her eyes fixed on a new figure below them. It was looking up at her. Yifan realised that they had risen to their feet as she had looked on the wonders around her; everyone could see them now.
“Abel.” said Vicky, dully. And Yifan saw with a sinking feeling in the pit of Vicky’s stomach that it was him, in an NBC suit, and his hand came out of its pocket holding a pistol.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said sadly, his shoulders drooping as he recognised her voice. “You really shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in all this.”
His companions looked up at her, and Abel shooed at them with his left hand, telling them sharply in Mandarin to get on with their work. In his right he held the pistol down against his leg.
Shrugging, the thieves made off towards the sarcophagus with a toolbox scurrying behind them.
“How could you do this? How could you do this to me, to China?” Vicky wailed. “You couldn’t sell any of this; it’s world history, it’s… priceless.”
“Everything’s got a price,” he replied. “And I’ve got buyers for everything.” He lifted his arm and motioned with the gun. “Come on down now, Vicky. You’ve got nowhere to run to. There’s only one way into this dump, and it’s the only way out.”
“You’d shoot us?”
“Us?”
“Me. I mean, what about us? Don’t we mean something together?” Tears were trickling down Vicky’s face, and Yifan was feeling rather uncomfortable. She hoped he wouldn’t start calling Vicky something yucky, like ‘babe’.
“Us? What ‘us’? From where I stand all I see is me and some money, babe. Now get down here.”
“So you can shoot me more easily?”
“Yeah; something like that.”
Vicky said a word so rude that Yifan wished she had been the one to think of saying it. Abel just chuckled, and extended his arm to sight along the barrel of the pistol. His left hand came up to cup the grip, his knees bent slightly. Yifan looked straight down into the dark round barrel of the gun. She felt Vicky start to move, and stopped her, locking Vicky’s legs.
-- What the hell are you doing? Vicky almost screamed this into Yifan’s mind, but Yifan stood firm; so Vicky had to, too.
-- John told me about pistols, said Yifan, rather more calmly than she felt. After all, John had been known to be wrong, often.
Yifan opened Vicky’s arms wide, giving Abel a view of just how good-looking an NBC suit could be, when filled with Vicky.
Abel just shook his head slightly.
“It’s not going to work with me, kid,” he said in a gritty voice. It was as if he was living in a film, thought Yifan. And he pulled the trigger.
Vicky, impelled by Yifan, fell to the floor of the parapet, and Yifan mentally slapped her across the face.
-- Stay down, she said.
Vicky kept down. She had not been shot. There were no holes in her, or in her suit. There was no permanent damage; all she had was a bruised knee from dropping to the floor.
-- What happened? she asked.
-- It’s a pistol. It doesn’t shoot far in a straight line, the bullet falls in a curve. We were a long way away, and up at a big angle. He’s a creep and he doesn’t know about guns. I bet he just watches movies.
-- You are a very dangerous little girl to go around with.
-- Yeah, and now he thinks you’re dead.
*
Abel put the gun back in his pocket. It was a revolver, so there was no bullet case to find and clear up, and no-one would smell the cordite because no-one would be in here without a suit. He called to one of the guys and told him to find a way up there and get the body down, got a nod and was satisfied.
Abel looked around at the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi without really seeing it. He saw only money. It glittered, it gleamed, it shone. That was what it was all about. Rich men paid him to steal shiny things.
Abel had no feelings about the late Vicky Shen, just irritation that one leg of his alibi was missing, and he now had a body to get rid of. She had been fun, much of the time, but really boring about Chinese history. Her most valuable contribution to his plans had been a guided tour, showing him around inside the hill, pointing out the most valuable items, not noticing the tiny recording drone that had perched almost invisible on his shoulder.
But she hadn’t told him about any secret passages. How the heck ha
d she got up there? Maybe there was some other way out.
It didn’t matter. She’d already been shown the exit.
Abel walked over to the sarcophagus, to where his men were discussing how to get the gold plates off without damaging them.
*
-- They’ll find this place soon, said Vicky. Once they search along the entrance passage. There are several niches along the passage, some of them with small rooms. One of them has steps up to this gallery system, and another on the other side does the same for the West to South galleries.
-- We can wait for them to go away.
-- We’ll need to change air soon. The only supplies that aren’t with the thieves are at the entrance airlock, and that’s guarded now. We’ve got about half an hour left.
-- Do you want to make me cry?
-- Darling, you’re really brave. If you cry, you’ll start me off too. We’ll just have to go out another way.
-- There isn’t another way.
-- There is. God bless health and safety - we had to make an emergency exit, but Abel doesn’t know about it, just like he didn’t know about the galleries.
Yifan thought for a few moments. She raised her objection.
-- We can’t get past them. They’ll see us.
-- Only if they look up, was Vicky’s incomprehensible reply.
*
“Really, if she doesn’t come out of this soon I’m going to get the doctor in.”
“Love, she looks comfortable, she’s not in distress.”
“We’ll have to sit up with her tonight.”
John yawned. This would probably mean another day off work. “I’ll make a pot of tea,” he said.
On her attic couch Yifan slept her unnatural and dreamless sleep. Ji Ye softly stroked her hair. Time passed, ticking off her daughter’s lives in two worlds at different and unknowable rates.
*
John, being British and old, would have thought in terms of feet. So Yifan was standing on the brink of a drop of more than forty-seven feet straight down to the rock floor below. She hoped he would appreciate her making the mathematical effort for him.
The flimsy catwalk looked even less safe close up. It was made from steel cable and aluminium and it stretched out in front of her across the lighted chamber and disappeared into gloom on the other side. Support struts hung from the ceiling every four metres or so (thirteen feet, she thought), and between them the cable handrails and unsupported sections of treads curved like Christmas tinsel.
It did not look safe.
-- Come on, it’s perfectly safe.
-- No it’s not.
-- Let go of my legs and I’ll show you.
-- Have you done it before?
Vicky pondered for just a little bit too long.
-- You haven’t. You don’t know.
-- Oh come on. It’s the only way out.
-- It won’t take our weight.
-- It will.
-- There are two of us.
-- Oh, for goodness’ sake! Vicky gripped the steel cable handrails, which wobbled alarmingly, and got her left foot onto the bridge. It shook, but there was no noise. She could hear Yifan whimpering inside her head, but as she started to move along the catwalk Yifan calmed down, and even seemed to be beginning to enjoy the experience.
-- Don’t look down, warned Vicky, which immediately made Yifan look down.
--
-- Yes, said Vicky, that’s how I feel too.
The floor was a very long way down, and the bridge was flimsy. Almost any movement made it swing alarmingly, and the various metal parts twisted against one another in ways that seemed certain to cause it to break apart at any second. Vicky trod carefully and slowly, short steps, no rhythm. She stopped often to let the swinging die down. It took her almost five minutes to get to the first pair of ceiling supports.
The second stretch was faster, but now they were emerging over the great map of China. Down below the thieves were lifting off the last of the gold panels from the Emperor’s coffin. It was obviously immensely heavy.
-- Why does he want to find you? He thinks we’re dead.
Vicky pondered this.
-- I think he doesn’t want any suspicion to fall on himself. He said he was going to Shanghai, and me telling people I saw him off would have been enough, I guess, to keep him out of any enquiries. Maybe an accomplice got on the plane pretending to be him, so he could come back here to direct the theft. But finding my body here would bring the investigation too close. There’re no fingerprints in here, no hairs, no scraps of fabric; we’re all sealed up. If he and his men got changed in their trucks the only forensic evidence would be from their support team, the ones who’re manning the control room. They’re probably just small-time crooks from Xi’an. I’d bet that Abel’s got that pistol so he can get rid of them later.
Yifan could not argue with that. Carefully they went on over the centre of the floodlit map. Yifan’s heart leapt in Vicky’s mouth when something – a bolt, probably – fell from beneath the catwalk and narrowly missed Abel. The sound of the object striking the ground was masked by the noise as the gold panel was dropped onto a pallet. It was another half minute before Vicky took a breath and started slowly forward again.
One of the gang came running from the direction of the entrance tunnel. He reported to Abel that the parapet had been found, but no body; and more important, no blood.
“So I missed, ah? Well, it’s not going to do her any good. We’ve got all the air bottles, and her air will be running low by now. Lee’s been guarding the tunnel airlock since she dropped. She’s going nowhere.”
-- You know, I never knew that he could speak Mandarin, said Vicky, now almost at the next support strut. He’s always only ever spoken English. Sneaky.
“We find her, we kill her?” asked one of the men.
“Maybe take her with us. Kill her when we’re well away.”
“When we dump the outside crew.”
“Yeah.”
Up above their heads Vicky was making steady progress. There was only one more set of support struts to reach before she would be hidden in deep shadow, and only one more after that until she would find the ladder that led through the ceiling to the top of the mound and freedom. It was one of the holes which had been made to lower in a set of exploration robots, and served to satisfy the safety officers who had demanded an alternate exit.
Of course, no-one had ever expected it would have to be used.
She reached out for the strut in front of her, grabbed it, and yelped as the walkway gave way.
*
In the morning John phoned work to tell them he would not be going in. He promised to pick up emails and try to do something useful, and thanked them for their concern about his tummy bug.
“I’ll have to start calling Yifan ‘my little tummy bug’ now,” he said to Ji Ye, who did not laugh.
Yifan still lay on the couch. Her forehead was clammy and cold, her limbs floppy. Her breathing was very slow and shallow. Altogether she looked dreadful.
“I’ll call the doctor when the surgery opens,” said Ji Ye. She, too, looked pale and ill. Her face shone with sweat. “I just want her back.”
John nodded, touched Ji Ye’s hair briefly, and went off to make coffee.
*
As Vicky started to swing out over the void, Yifan hurled her body back across the walkway and grabbed the companion strut that was still attached to it. The action wrenched at Vicky’s shoulder, and she gave a yell of pain that probably could have been heard in Beijing, and certainly was startling enough to the thieves below. Abel looked up and swore profusely, then he motioned to the one who had looked for Vicky’s body and they both set off towards the tunnel, leaving the others to start moving their treasure.
-- Oh, that hurts so much!
-- Well, we’re still alive.
They clung to the strut and looked along the catwalk. In a few minutes Abel would appear at one end, and to get to the other there was
a sagging set of aluminium treads dangling beneath a cable handrail. It did not look safe.
-- Ready?
-- No.
-- Okay. Let’s go.
Vicky and Yifan squatted down and shuffled their feet along the edge of the walkway, hanging on with their hands tight to the cable that drooped between the struts. The combination of walkway and handrail was very unstable, and several times tried to flip over, putting the walkway above the rail. Watching hapless contestants do this sort of thing had been a major entertainment for Yifan at home, on TV, with the lights on and no-one trying to shoot her. It did not seem quite as entertaining now.
They were a little more than halfway to the last set of struts when Abel appeared in the opening at the start of the catwalk. Behind him his colleague grinned and waved.
“Bye-bye,” he cooed, in English.
Vicky said a swear word, loudly, in Mandarin, but it just made Abel laugh.
“You won’t last long there, sweetheart. But just in case you make it, and there really is a way out at the end, I’ll have to make sure I don’t miss again.”
To Vicky’s and Yifan’s horror he stepped out onto the catwalk. He held lightly on to one handrail, and held the gun steady in front of him as he advanced.
He reached the first set of struts.
Vicky resumed her shuffling towards the ultimate set.
The swaying of the catwalk was getting quite bad. Abel stopped and waited for the unfamiliar motion to settle down, and then continued on. Behind him his henchman leaned in the doorway, unconcerned. Vicky’s back was aching, her arms were being pulled from their sockets, her ankles were on fire with the strain of balance and movement, trying to keep the walkway from flipping completely over and plunging her to the ground. But she made progress, inch by inch, and as she approached the struts it became easier, and within a minute she had clutched a strut and was pulling herself up.
-- Just one more stretch to go, Yifan
-- Don’t mind me. What about him?
Abel was trying to steady himself for a shot. His knees were bent, his body leaning forward. The gun at the end of his outstretched arm wavered. The big black hole at the end of the barrel was making circles in the air.
He watches too many films, though Yifan again, and behind her head Vicky nodded.
-- Here it comes, said Yifan, and keeping a tight hold on the strut turned to face Abel, and made Vicky into a big target again.