Red Message

  A DESPERATE HUNT . . .

  for a vanished man. A deadly odyssey across thousands of miles into a strange and terrifying world.

  A BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN . . .

  abandoned by her government in a land of ancient splendor and agonizing death.

  A DESERTED LOVER . . .

  trapped in the malevolent claws of global intrigue. A web of conspiracy and danger from which there is no escape.

  "PETER ABRAHAMS HAS THE TOUCH!" —John Saul

  Avon Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund raising or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

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  PETER ABRAHAMS

  AVON

  PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT, DISCUS AND FLARE BOOKS

  Permission for use of the quotation from "White Rabbit" is gratefully acknowledged. Lyrics and Music by Grace Slick. Copyright © 1967 IRVING MUSIC, INC. (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

  Dialogue from the B.C. cartoon (page 77) is used by permission of Johnny Hart and News America Syndicate.

  RED MESSAGE is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1790 Broadway

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1986 by Peter Abrahams Published by arrangement with the author Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-90794 ISBN: 0-380-89803-9 '

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U. S. Copyright Law. For information address Jane Rotrosen Agency, 226 East 32nd Street, New York, New York 10016.

  First Avon Printing, April 1986

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U. S. A.

  Printed in the U. S. A.

  K-R 10 987654321

  I've followed the official pinyin system for rendering Chinese, except in the case of some proper nouns which may be more familiar to the reader in Wade-Giles transliteration.

  Many thanks to Kelly Haggart in Beijing, Lynne Lindley in Falmouth, and X. T.-Xu in Wuxi.

  To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed

  the proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted

  without the proper limits being exceeded.

  —Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung)

  An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Prologue

  The baby always woke up early. That was what saved his life, the morning the Green Snake men came.

  The nurse felt the baby stir beside her. She sat up. He was lying on his back. In the gray, predawn light, she could not see his features very well: just his big, dark eyes, watching her. He was a beautiful baby; the nurse told her friends no baby had eyes like his.

  "Good morning, little mouse," the nurse said. He batted the air with his fists. She picked him up and went outside the yellow house, walking toward the lake.

  Wisps of fog hung over the water, and wrapped themselves around the plum trees like rumpled blankets. The nurse followed the gravel path around the orchard, crossed the arched footbridge over the little stream, and came to the red pavilion. It stood on a spit of land jutting into the lake, and it was there the nurse liked to give the baby his morning feeding. As she opened the door, she felt the earth shudder under her feet, and the next moment heard thunder in the north. The fighting went on.

  Inside the pavilion, the nurse sat on a bench and put the baby to her breast. His lips fumbled frantically for her nipple, found it, sucked hard. There was a moment of pain; then it was gone. The nurse looked out at the water. The fog was slipping away from the shore, retreating to the middle of the lake. Her eyes closed. She dreamed about her mother.

  Someone ran by, waking her with a start. The baby started too, and lost her breast. He made a little cry. "Shh," she said, offering him her nipple. Outside there were more footsteps.

  Crouching, the nurse went to the latticed parapet, knelt, and peered over the edge.

  She saw men running toward the Master's house; how many, she didn't know. She had never learned to count past ten. There were more than ten. They all had guns.

  The men stopped in front of the house. One of them tried the door. The nurse knew he was their leader because he was the biggest, and the only one wearing shoes. The door was locked. The leader turned and made a little gesture with his hand. Two of the men flung their bodies at the door. It gave with a cracking sound and sagged on its hinges. The men went inside.

  The nurse listened hard. She heard the distant booming of the war; she heard a fish splash in the lake; but from the Master's house came only silence. The nurse muttered a prayer to her ancestors. Then, in the house, a woman screamed. The nurse had never heard a scream like that. It shot an icy pulse through her body. The baby squirmed; she rocked him in her arms.

  The men came out of the house. Two of them were carrying the Master of the Mountain. One held his ankles, the other his wrists. The Master's throat had been cut so deeply that the back of his head bumped between his shoulder blades as the men walked along.

  The man who wore shoes was dragging the Master's wife. She was naked, and kept trying to cover her sex with her fine little hands. He jerked her upright and said something to her. She did not reply. He spoke again, more loudly. The nurse could tell it was a question, but couldn't make out the words. Again the Master's wife was silent. The man stared down at her. Then, with a movement so sudden the nurse did not understand what had happened until she heard the cracking sound, he twisted her arm behind her back and broke it. The Master's wife slumped to the ground. She moaned—a high-pitched moan like a dog having a nightmare. The nurse moaned too. When the man questioned the Master's wife again, she answered him.

  The leader spoke to his men. Fanning out, they moved toward the lake. The nurse knew what the question had been. She backed quickly away from the window and looked around. There was only one place to hide: a small storage room under the pavilion. She raised the trapdoor leading down to it, saw it was filled with gardening tools, fish nets, sacks of grain. The nurse climbed down the short ladder and pulled the door shut.

  Darkness. Bending to avoid the low ceiling, the nurse moved cautiously to the farthest corner. Spider webs clung to her face; her foot slid on something soft and wet. The baby stopped sucking. The nurse rubbed the back of his neck.

  She felt the wall in front of her; it was damp, and crumbled at her touch. Squatting, she drew some sacks of grain into a pile around her. Then she lay down on the cold earth floor, her back to the wall. She cradled the baby in her arms.

  Silence. Go to sleep, little mouse. Go to sleep. But the baby didn't want to sleep. He was alert. He twisted his head and tried to roll out of her arms. As she gathered him back to her breast, the nurse heard the Master's wife scream again. It sounded far away. Abruptly, the baby went very still in her arms. She put him to her other breast, and he sucked. A moment of pain. Then it was gone.

  After a little while, the nurse thought she heard a faint splash in the lake. Then another. Her body began to tremble. The baby made an annoyed little grunt. Don't be afraid, the nurse told herself. Fear turns milk sour, and the baby will cry. She knew she couldn't bear to stand naked in front of those men, to have her arm twisted behind her back and broken, to have things done to her.

  Footsteps sounded on the floor above. Hard, clicking footsteps, the kind shoes make. The baby grunted again. Don't go sour, don't go sour: She begged her breasts not to betray her.

  The trapdoor opened, sending a shaft of light down into the storage room. The baby stopped sucking. The ladder creaked. The nurse huddled between the damp wall and the sacks of grain. Footsteps came closer. A hard shoe kicked one of the sacks. The baby felt it quiver, twisted, and tried once more to roll out of her arms. The nurse loved the baby, but she couldn't bear to have things done to her. She felt for his face, found it, pressed her palm over his nose and mouth.

  A big hand reached over the sacks of grain. Long fingers came close to the baby's head. The baby wriggled with all his might, desperate for air. She tried to squeeze the life out of him. The hand clawed the air. The nurse saw a thick wrist with a green snake curled around it, fangs a few inches from her eyes. The hand touched the wall, felt it, and then withdrew. The ladder creaked. The trapdoor closed. Darkness.

  When she could no longer hear footsteps, the nurse lifted her palm from the baby's face. For a moment, she thought she'd killed him; then he made a harsh, gasping cry, like the cry of birth. In the tight space between the sacks and the wall, she rocked him as well as she could. Soon he stopped crying. The nurse did not stop crying for a long time.

  She stayed where she was. Once she heard a man shout. After that, silence. The baby slept. He woke. She fed him. He slept again. The next time he woke, she rose, mounted the ladder, and opened the trapdoor. It was very quiet. She went up. The men were gone. There was no sign of the Master of the Mountain or his wife. The nurse could not even hear the fighting in the north.

  Much later, there was singing. It grew louder. Soldiers came marching up the road. They were not the soldiers
in khaki she had seen many times. These were the soldiers she had only heard about, the ones with the red stars on their caps. They marched past singing. Some of them smiled at her and the baby.

  The nurse did not know what the war had been about. She only knew it was over.

  Part One

  Friday, the eleventh of April, was doubly special for Beth Hunter. First, it was her wedding day. Second, the bridegroom did not appear. Among other things, that meant Beth did not learn the secret of his honeymoon plans.

  Afterward, when it became crucial to remember the details of their last weeks together, Beth was able to isolate the moment she first found out Teddy had something special in mind. It had occurred two months before the wedding day, on a cool, sunny, February morning.

  Beth had been up late the previous night, grading freshman essays on the Inquisition and awaiting Teddy's return from one of his Washington conferences. Grading freshman essays stole time she needed for her thesis, but, at first, it was amusing (' 'The Inquisition: Pros and Cons"). Then it became irritating ("Because I don't feel the Inquisition speaks vety much to our times, I have chosen to write instead about food and drink in the Middle Ages.") Finally, it was drudgery ("The eight causes of the Inquisition are . . ."). Beth woke with the phrase "The Inquisition in song and stoiy" running through her mind. She couldn't remember whether she had read it or dreamed it.

  "How about an Inquisition sitcom?" she said. "Like Barney Miller, but in fancy dress." She opened her eyes. No audience. Teddy was already up. He'd left a warm depression in the sheets beside her. Getting out of bed, Beth noticed an equation written in felt pen on the floral pillowcase: x - Ofts, t) = t)t. The last part trailed unsteadily onto the bottom sheet. Equations like that turned up all over the apartment—on the title pages of novels, the labels of wine bottles, the wall by the bathtub. Teddy wrote them down when he thought of them, with whatever came to hand.

  Down on the floor. Fifty sit-ups. Twenty push-ups, from the toes; the last three or four were wobbly. Beth had a swimmer's body with the kind of long, tapering muscles that are much stronger than they look. She still swam three times a week, but her body wasn't as lean as it had been a few years ago. Gravity was at war with her, and pasta was on its side. She threw in five more push-ups, then took the pillow from the bed and went looking for Teddy.

  He wasn't in the living room, where she'd expected to find him lying on the old corduroy sofa, with a cup of coffee and the Chronicle. Silvery morning light filled the quiet room, falling on the oil portraits of Beth and Teddy over the fireplace. The artist, recommended by a friend, was becoming well known, but Beth considered his painting of Teddy almost a failure. In the shaping of the forehead and the fine bones around the eyes, he had caught something of Teddy's intelligence, but the look of heavy, Confucian dignity which hung on the painted face was never there in life.

  The artist had done better with Beth, despite some physical inaccuracy. Her hair was too light—in reality it was as dark as hair could be and still be called blonde; and her eyes weren't so blue—almost anyone with blue eyes had them bluer than Beth. But he hadn't turned her into Doris Day. The strong features were there, and the look on her face suggested she was about to say something she shouldn't: something with too much edge for polite society. She got that from her father.

  Beth went out to the balcony. A north wind was blowing one or two brave sailboats across the Bay. The air was very clear. She could see white gulls soaring over the green Berkeley Hills on the other side of the water. Teddy was seated in an unraveling wicker chair, reading a letter. He wore red long underwear and a terry cloth robe.

  "Are you crazy?" Beth said. "It's freezing."

  Teddy looked up at her. "It's freezing because you're nude." He looked more carefully. "Naked."

  "Watch your language." She held up the pillow. "Is this important?"

  "Only if you don't want a stiff neck in the morning," Teddy

  replied. She threw it at him. He hunched over, protecting the letter.

  "What's that?"

  "Just a letter."

  "Who from?"

  Teddy answered with his inscrutable face: eyes half closed, lips curled in a sly grin.

  "Don't bother with your inscrutable face," Beth told him. "Unless you're trying to do an imitation of Warner Oland with smoke in his eyes."

  Teddy Wu was not very good at being Chinese: couldn't look inscrutable, didn't know the language, and always asked for a fork in Chinese restaurants. "I'm a banana," he would say whenever Beth reminded him of these shortcomings.

  Beth squeezed onto the wicker chair, put her arms around him and tried to read over his shoulder. "Subtle," Teddy said, folding the letter and pocketing it in his robe.

  "Just tell me what it's about."

  "That would ruin it."

  "You mean it's going to be a surprise?" She wriggled her hand down under his robe.

  "Not at this rate."

  "Like a wedding present?"

  "Nope."

  "Or a trip? A honeymoon trip to somewhere far away?"

  Teddy's eyes flickered, but he was only glancing at a gull flying by. "Browbeat all you like," he said. "I'm not talking."

  "You don't have to talk. I'm going to look deep into your eyes and start naming names. I'll know when I've hit it." She looked deep into his eyes. "Paris. Rio. Fiji. Athens. Nairobi."

  "Daly City."

  "Now you die.'' Beth slipped her forearm under his chin. He ducked out of her grasp and went inside to perform his coffee ritual.

  Beth rose and gazed out at the water. One of the sailboats, running before the wind, threw out a bright red spinnaker. It fluttered for a moment, then puffed out like a plump breast. Beth went to find Teddy. He was at the kitchen counter, pouring his special blend into the new German grinder.

  "Let's go back to bed," she said.

  "Can't." Again Teddy's eyes flickered; this time there was no gull. ''I have to go to the office."

  That was unusual. Teddy did have an office at Berkeley, where he was a professor of mathematics, but he seldom went there. It had been almost two years since he had published anything. Beth had seen his last paper: "Aspects of Mordell's Conjecture." It consisted of an introductory sentence, two pages of equations, and a concluding sentence, all incomprehensible to her. The paper had won Teddy the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent in mathematics of the Nobel. Time had done an article about Teddy, calling him one of the three or four most important mathematicians of the century, and then explaining the significance of his work in a way that made Teddy roll his eyes when he read it. Beth's understanding of what he did wasn't much better, but she had an idea why he did it.

  "A proof is forever," he had once told her.

  But then, when he tried to describe one he was working on at the time, she hadn't known the language. Teddy was used to that. "It's no shame," he'd said. "I don't know who won the Battle of Anghieri.''

  "Neither do I."

  That had surprised him. The conversation had taken place not long after they had met (in the gallery at a Berkeley swim meet) and he wasn't yet aware of Beth's approach to history. It had little to do with wars, treaties, and power politics—or with units per hectare, suiplus value, and power economics. Beth wanted to know what it would be like to open, for example, the door of a peasant cottage in the Vaucluse in 1423 and look in. What would have been cooking over the fire? How did it smell? What were the people wearing? What did they name their kids? What did they talk to the village priest about? What did they think of the seigneur on the hill? Beth's job wasn't to daydream about all this, although she sometimes did, had done since childhood. As a historian, her job was to track down the facts. Persistence counted. And so did creativity. That was the word the professionals used when they meant daydreaming

  Now, in the kitchen, Beth held out her hand. "Come on, Teddy. Back to bed. Just for five minutes."

  "Five minutes!" He looked shocked. "I wouldn't dream of insulting you like that."

  Beth tried another tack.

  "Okay," Teddy said after a minute or two.

  They went into the bedroom, leaving behind the smell of freshly ground coffee beans, and Teddy's robe. And Beth loved again the smoothness of his skin, the strength of his lean body, the glint that shone in his eyes as he grew more aroused. There was panting, hers and his, and sensations impossible to bear for long.