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So a secret exploration was ordered.
Luckily a tunnel had been discovered almost immediately, and they’d dug down, entering from above. When they finished, a well had been built over the entrance and capped with an iron plate, the entire area fenced and declared off limits.
His flashlight revealed a towering, arched passage, perhaps ten meters high. The floor was paved with veined stone. Archways appeared at regular intervals, holding the roof aloft. A cable lay against one wall, placed there by the first exploration team.
Follow it, had been his instruction.
If what he’d been told was right, no one had followed this path in more than thirty years. Before that, two millennia had passed between visits.
He walked for what he estimated as a hundred meters. The beam from his light revealed a stone gate, but two doors blocked the way. He approached.
The glistening stone portal stood three meters high, dark green and black veins glistening in his light. Each door was carved from a single slab of marble, the surfaces littered with symbols and a bronze clamp. The right door was cocked open, which allowed a passage through the center.
He hesitated and shone his light left and right. Slits in the passage walls, high, near the roofline, indicated where crossbows had once been placed to fire on any interloper. The premier had told him that the reports of booby traps in some of the historical accounts had proven true, though 2,200 years of aging had rendered them useless. The doors themselves had been barred from the outside, and he spotted a heavy timber that had once rested inside the bronze clamps.
Every schoolchild was taught of Qin Shi. He was the embodiment of China, the founder of the longest-enduring political system on earth. A conqueror, unifier, centralizer, standardizer, builder—the first in a long line of 210 men and one woman to occupy the Dragon Throne.
And this was his tomb.
He negotiated the opening between the doors and stepped into more blackness on the other side. He’d been told to look to his right. His light found the cable on the floor, which had also passed through the open doors, ending at a metal box.
He bent down and examined the exterior. Still in good condition. He grasped a lever, prepared himself, and rotated it downward.
CASSIOPEIA LED THE WAY AS THEY TURNED ANOTHER CORNER and negotiated a third set of right angles. She realized that there would be another twist coming to swing them back on a line toward the tomb mound. She estimated they’d traveled maybe two hundred meters, so they should be getting close to whatever lay at the end.
She couldn’t help but marvel at the engineering. Her own stonemasons, hired to reconstruct the castle that she’d been laboring to build for nearly a decade, had early on explained the difficulties. To build today exactly as they had in the 14th century, using 700-year-old tools and methods, was daunting. But the builders of this tunnel had not been nearly as fortunate. Their tools and technology didn’t even approximate the sophistication of the 14th century. Yet they’d managed to accomplish the task, and their resounding success made her even more committed to finishing her own restoration.
“We are near the end,” she heard Pau Wen say.
Surprisingly, the air was stale but not fetid. Apparently, ventilation had likewise been part of the builders’ plan.
She knew that being enclosed underground was not Malone’s idea of fun. But flying through the air, looping around in a plane or helicopter, was not her favorite, either. Nothing about their situation was good. They were relying on a man who was utterly untrustworthy, but they had little choice. She had to admit that she was excited about the possibility of entering the tomb. Never had she imagined such an opportunity would present itself. She felt better with the gun nestled at her waist and Cotton at her back, but remained apprehensive about what lay just beyond the beam of her flashlight.
They passed two more exits, both labeled with Chinese symbols. The passage right-angled ahead, just as she knew it would.
She stopped and turned.
Malone was a couple of meters behind her. She lowered her light, pointing the beam to the ground.
He did the same.
Then she noticed something.
“Cotton.”
She motioned with her light, and he turned.
Pau Wen was gone.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Malone muttered.
“He must have slipped into one of the side passages along the way.”
She found her gun, as did Malone.
“Lead the way,” he said.
She approached the corner and carefully peered around. The tunnel extended another fifty meters, ending at what appeared to be a doorway. A thick slab of stone, cut into a near-perfect rectangle, filled the opening, one side cocked outward, as a door would be partially opened.
Light filled the space beyond, splashing back their way, into the darkened corridor.
“I didn’t expect that,” Malone whispered in her ear.
FIFTY-SIX
TANG SURVEYED THE INTERIOR OF THE TUMBLED-DOWN SHANTY into which Ni Yong had disappeared. Earlier, he’d watched on the closed-circuit monitor as Ni entered through the door, but now his nemesis was nowhere to be seen.
“He went out there,” Viktor said, pointing to the collapsed rear wall.
Two other men were with him, more brothers of the Ba, eunuchs like himself and the two he’d left in Pit 3, all pledged by oath to do as he commanded. More of his forethought, which he silently applauded himself for having, especially given the way things were progressing.
The rain had eased, though the moist air reeked. His gaze locked on the wall, wattled and plastered, broken in a gash that exposed the bamboo beneath. He stepped across the damp floor, past rusted implements and broken pottery, and fled the building.
The others followed.
Outside was thick with shadows, the ashen sky blocked by a canopy of wet limbs and leaves. The first violets of the season bloomed beneath the trees. The fence that encircled the site stood fifty meters away, intact. Ni could have scaled it, but where would he have gone?
A well caught his eye and he approached.
Not unusual. The whole area was dotted with them. In fact, the digging of one in 1974 had led to the discovery of the terra-cotta army. But an iron plate plugged the opening.
Where had Ni gone?
He glanced around at the wet terrain, thick with trees, toward where the mound began its rise upward.
Ni had come here for a reason.
He’d learned that the fence had been erected in the early 1990s, on orders from Beijing, and that the area had remained off limits. Why? No one knew. Viktor had reported that Pau Wen had told Malone and Vitt that he knew a way into Qin Shi’s tomb. Pau had then gone straight to the recently found imperial library and made good on his promise, locating two underground passages, one of which Vitt, Malone, and Pau had disappeared into.
“Minister,” Viktor said.
His mind snapped back to the moment.
Viktor pointed inside the well. “See the scarp marks on the side. They’re fresh. That plate was removed, then replaced.”
The observation was correct. The yellowish white lichen had clearly been disturbed. He ordered the two brothers to lift the plate away and the top of a wooden ladder came into view.
They’d driven over in a museum security vehicle. “See if the car carries any flashlights,” he ordered. One of the men ran off.
“Where does it go?” Viktor asked.
Tang knew. “Into the tomb. Where Ni Yong awaits.”
MALONE APPROACHED THE BACKLIT DOORWAY, STAYING TO one side of the partially open portal while Cassiopeia stayed to the other. They’d switched off the flashlights and replaced them in their pockets. Both held their weapons.
He noticed L-shaped bronze clamps affixed to their side of the door, another to the left and right of the jamb. A thick cut of timber rested against the wall, standing upright. Easy to determine its use. Once it was dropped into the clamps, there would ha
ve been no way to open the door from the other side.
What had Pau read to them?
Concubines without sons were ordered to follow the emperor in death, and of the artisans and workers not one was allowed to emerge alive.
He peered around the edge into the lit space beyond.
