The Mongol's Coffin, page 4
"Stone lions." Casey gave a soft chuckle at Liz's questioning look.
"You've got company."
"A client."
"Have her check the mailbox."
The door buzzed, and he pushed inside.
"A password?" She felt as if she'd moved into a spy movie, but not an upscale classy film like James Bond, something earnest and low-rent. Graffiti marked the mailboxes at the entrance. Casey rapped one with his knuckles and it popped open.
"Don't tell me there's a secret door, too. Is this whole place a government installation?"
Casey's eyes sparkled, but he just pointed. "Like the man said, check the mail."
The spy stuff gave her something to focus on other than being attacked and watching a man get killed on her behalf. Liz leaned down and peered inside the box, a small hole pierced the back, but it was otherwise empty. "Nothing." She shrugged and tapped the mailbox shut.
The inner door buzzed, and Casey ushered her through, glancing quickly around before letting the door shut after them. They mounted the stairs that formed a squared-off spiral around a central elevator, and arrived on the fourth floor. With a rattle of chains, a door opened to reveal a black man in a wheel chair, one leg propped up on the footrest, the other a stump below the knee, a tablet computer strapped one of his armrests. Liz swallowed hard and gave him a nod as he wheeled back to give her space to enter. As he turned, she saw the scars that ran along the right side of his face, neck, and his arm below his sleeve. Three fingers remained on his right hand.
"Chief." The man spoke with a deep, resonant voice. "Police band says you had a busy night."
"What happened to your leg?" Casey asked.
Liz flinched. She'd assumed that they served together in whatever war had molded the Bone Guard, so Casey's blunt question felt intrusive, but the other man gave a shrug.
"Conduction issues. D. A.'s re-tooling the cup for a better fit."
"Hey, chief!" hollered a woman's voice from the back of the apartment, over the low whine of some sort of equipment. "With you in a minute!" A corridor led back past a wall with a cut-out into an adjoining kitchen. The combined living room and dining room held sparse furnishings, carefully spaced, including a large-screen TV with a freeze-frame of Liz's face, her blue eyes wide and ringed with lack of sleep.
"How—?" she started to ask, then realized the routine with the mailbox had exposed her to the eye of a camera in that tiny hole. Liz stopped moving, her glance flitting between the image, the men, the apartment door, which was already rolling shut at other man's tap of a pad.
"Need a drink? Coffee?" Casey moved around the partition into the kitchen beyond.
"How about an explanation?" She pointed to the screen.
Casey poured himself a steaming mug from the carafe on the counter. "Nick Norton." He tipped his mug toward the other man. "Paranoia's one of the side effects."
"Of what?" Liz demanded, then regretted it—she had no right to this man's personal problems.
"The job," Casey said. "Sure you don't want a coffee?"
"Really, I want to go home." She folded her arms. Her hands felt shaky.
"Thanks, Chief, now she thinks I'm a contractor. She's already had a rough night. You were the vic, right? The victim?" Nick addressed her, hands spread, face open despite his scars and rippling muscles. "Hey, thanks for the chai—are those hash browns?" He lit up like a child as he took the tray from her. "Anyhow, I heard there was an attack last night at the U, a mugging, and someone was killed. Was that your first time as a victim of violence?"
"I'm an ethnomusicologist—we don't get much violence." A nervous laugh bubbled up, and she let her knees go soft, sinking her onto the couch across from Nick's chair.
"An ethno-who?" He sniffed the drink, then took a long swallow, giving a satisfied sigh.
"I study the relationship of music to culture. I'm specializing in peoples of central Asia—Tuvans, Nepalese, Mongolians."
Nick shook his head. "That's a new one on me. What got you into that field?"
"We hosted a Mongolian exchange student when I was in high school. He practiced singing all the time, and I guess I got hooked." In more ways than one, but these people didn't need to know everything.
Casey emerged from the kitchen and held out a second mug. "Decaf. You'll need some rest."
"Chief—get lost. We're talking."
With a slight bow of his head, as if he had been bested in a duel, Casey departed, heading down the hall to the back, finally swinging the gym bag off his shoulder. Liz took a swallow of the warmth, and settled into the sympathy she saw in Nick's dark eyes as she told him all about it.
Chapter Eleven
Grant rapped on the last door in the hall, then pushed through, ducking the black curtain that blocked light—and signals. Six monitors glowed among the racks of equipment, one of them showing the front door, one the dark interior of the mailbox, one a view of Liz Kirschner settling back on the couch, sipping and chatting, stifling a yawn.
D. A. Silverberg pushed back from the desk and studied the monitor with Grant, her short curls bobbing. "Damn, he's good. Who would've thunk it? From sniper to counselor in one explosion. We're lucky he didn't go all Phineas Gage on us."
Lucky. Right. "You're re-fitting his prosthesis?"
She gestured toward the humming and whirring machine in the corner, an oversized frame with a printer head pivoting and moving through its space, the pinkish rubber cup already taking shape under the thin stream of material. "On-target. Should be ready in another hour. What've you got? You said a client?"
"Maybe. Not sure where the compensation will come from, though. She thinks she's found the map to the tomb of Genghis Khan. Someone else believes it enough to steal her laptop and notes, and wouldn't mind leaving her dead." He slipped Liz's phone from the pocket where he'd stowed it when he appropriated it earlier. "Check I.D. on the corpse. I also need some intel on a Professor Chan, head of the Asian Studies Department, and Mr. Huang Li-Wen, some kind of high-powered businessman."
D. A. tapped a few keys and brought up the image of the perp, then sent it off to her own device and handed back the phone. "I take it you didn't get that security job at the University."
Since they left the service D. A. had appointed herself their den mother, which sometimes Grant appreciate more than others. He shrugged. "Thanks for sending the listing over though."
She shook her head. "Wasn't me. But that's how you got mixed up with this, right?" She tipped her head toward the picture of Liz. "Worth doing?"
"If she's right, it's high profile, the kind of thing that could set us up. Genghis Khan's tomb—people have been hunting it for hundreds of years. If I can get in on finding it, that could make my career, and I can get you out that telecom job you love so much, maybe get Nick on logistics."
D. A. slid back to her desk. "I'll get on it, then." Keys tapped and fingers slid over the touch screen.
"How's he been?"
She glanced at the screen again, where Liz slumped on the couch and Nick gently relieved her of her cup, spreading a blanket over the sleeping woman. "Not bad. Not combat-ready." The computer gave a soft chime, and she brought her attention back to the screen. "Great—I love a quickie. Don't know what to call this guy, though, let's go with 'Jurgen'—he's used that one for at least two of his passports." A few more taps and she populated a second monitor with images of the dead man in life, in the background with a few now-dead Mexican kingpins.
Grant leaned over her shoulder, scanning the list of presumed aliases. The guy was a free agent, living in Boston the last few years, suspected of drug-related offenses, but not arrested—not yet. What was a cartel mercenary doing with a Mandarin mugger? Or was he an operative, taking out the competition on behalf of some other party? Interesting.
"He doesn't look like a Mongolian. I'll keep digging, Chief. Get a few hours' rest."
Grant drained the last of his coffee and stretched, taking another look at the woman on the screen, the one who might be their ride to their next great mission—or straight to the grave.
Chapter Twelve
Over—what else? Chinese take-out—Liz played the music, the dramatic overtones of Khoomei singing filling the apartment. Nick closed his eyes with a cat-like smile, apparently enjoying the deep voices and the other-worldly buzzing, while D. A., the woman from the back room, screwed up her face and shuddered. "That's some weird shit. You say that's all one guy?"
"The finest Khoomei singers can produce as many as three or four distinct tones. But listen: this one's about the mountains. The next one is about a river—there's even birdsong worked into the primary line."
"So your map is a song." Casey put down his chopsticks, resting his elbows on his knees, that dark-eyed stare utterly intent upon her.
"Actually, it's a cycle of nine songs—I've got eight of them right here—describing a journey, to the place of deepest rest and greatest glory, where the heart of our ancestor resides forever, beneath the great Eternal Sky." She spread her hands, picturing the mountains reflected in pristine lakes. "Each of the songs begins with a reference to one of the other places, so they can be placed in order. That's how I know I'm missing one. Together, they form a whole landscape, pointing to a single place."
"What makes you think it's the Khan, not just some bit of metaphor?"
"The horsetails." She stopped the playback, scrolled to another song, and started again. "Listen, they mention horsetails nine times—only nine, exactly nine. That's based on the number of horsetails in the war banner of the khan. And this one—"she scrolled again—"the song is about the mountains, but the word 'crown' appears seventy-eight times. That's the number of kingdoms the Great Khan is said to have conquered. Among the treasures in the tomb are the seventy-eight crowns of those kings."
"Seventy-eight crowns? Must be a very long song," said D. A. She stuck a finger in her ear and jiggled it, as if to get rid of the sound.
Liz tapped the music off.
"How come nobody else has thought of this?" Casey asked. "If all the songs are about real places, you can't be the first person to know about it."
"The recordings came to the U as part of the estate of a long-time Chinatown resident, a woman who had fled the Cultural Revolution. She left us ten trunks that hadn't been opened since the fifties. Poetry manuscripts, scroll paintings, most of them damaged—pretty random, like an Asian yard sale. The labels on the chests indicated they were meant to be delivered to Joseph Needham, but only the first chest was ever sent. It looks like she found another way out with the rest of her documents. We get these kinds of legacies all the time, usually from alumni, and the ones with little apparent financial or research value get set aside until some grad student—me—has time to sort through them.
"My job in the archives has been to convert the old reel-to-reel tapes and records to digital before they get any further degraded. My thesis project centers on the tradition of landscape imagery in Mongolian music, so I've been looking out for more examples. I'm not sure anyone's even listened to these recordings since they were given to us. The first one opens with a sort of introduction, the missionary who recorded them wanted to find the oldest songs he could. He was looking for confirmation of the Biblical Flood in local legends, so he asked the elders, and one of them responded with this cycle of songs, but wouldn't tell him any more about them. He said they were the oldest songs in all Mongolia." Liz stared down at her device. "Then there was an argument about whether the singers were even Mongolian any more, since the Communists."
"Who else knows you found them?"
Liz tapped her fingertips together. "Professor Chan, and that collector who was visiting him. My Mongolian tutor, Toregene, who helped me check my translations; Byambaa, my fiancé, knows a little. My room-mate, Sara, knows I found something, but she doesn't really understand what. Professor Joyeux, my thesis advisor. Oh—and Marko at the archives. He checks people in and out, so he knows where I've been looking, but probably not what it means."
"And one of those people wants to kill you."
She jerked back against the couch cushions, but Casey's face hadn't changed, his expression as focused as ever. "No way. They're professors and students—they're not like you."
Casey went still, and all the air left the room for a long moment. "If you think you don't need me, you can leave. Right now. I happen to think you're wrong."
Spreading her hands, Liz told him, "Everything we do in my department is theoretical or archival. We listen, we describe, we compare—we don't get shot at, and when we do field work, it's with microphones and cameras, not weapons and bloodshed."
"You're talking to the guy who brought the knife to the gunfight. Like it or not, Ms. Kirschner, I didn't start this."
Her heart drummed, and she glanced away. D. A. and Nick had a whole conversation in tiny gestures, ending with the woman scooping the take-out containers back into their bag and standing up. "This has been fascinating, but I've gotta get to work, and Nick has an appointment at the VA. Chief, I'm standing down. Give me the high-sign if you need to. Nice to meet you, Liz." She flashed a brief smile, more a baring of the teeth, and stalked into the kitchen.
"There's really no reason to connect the muggers with my research—they grabbed my laptop because they can pawn it." The whole thing was just too bizarre. She came from the academic world, not the military one. Earlier, in the tension after everything that had happened to her, she thought it might be possible, but now, in the light of day, she'd come to her senses. Nobody killed over music, even if the songs could mean what she thought. Besides, she had a lot more research to do before she could come to any positive conclusions. Even her potential academic rivals wouldn't act on the little she knew. Liz pushed to her feet, still tired, but eager to put some distance between herself and a man who could kill that fast without losing his stride. "It's not that I don't appreciate what you did for me. I... you probably saved me from worse than a mugging, so I owe you for that, Mr. Casey." She put out her hand. "Good luck with the Bone Guard."
Casey rose in a fluid movement. His grip was solid and direct, and she recoiled a little, imagining that hand plunging a knife into her assailant. "Good luck with the khan." A brief smile. "You've got my number."
As she let herself out of the apartment, Liz hoped she'd never have to use it.
Chapter Thirteen
"Told you this idea was nuts." D. A. dumped the trash and came back to clear the plates. "Academics either don't have money, or they don't do anything interesting. She's probably headed back to the library to spend the next twenty-four hours immersed in whack-o music and books you can't even understand."
"She's going to her apartment." Grant gave a shake of his head, then grabbed his go-bag. "I'm tailing her."
"You're what?" D. A. stood with a stack of tableware in each hand, like that girl statue from the Garden of Good and Evil. "Chief, she said no. She's not a client, she's just a music major with an obsession. I've dated people like that, okay? Forget it. She's probably right about the mugging and the attempted rape and all of that."
"Fine, I'll waste another day."
"Maybe you need a distraction. Have you thought about Maria, down at the VA? She likes you."
"Thanks, Mom. I need to focus on my job, or what it could be." He side-stepped D. A., only to find Nick blocking the door.
"The Bone Guard's a cool notion, Chief. But it's meant to be details, not ops. You get to hang out at some digs or museums, defending the artifacts, maybe bring some friends along when you need help." Nick sighed. "You're treating this like an op because you miss the Unit. We know that, we get it. Maybe you're a little sensitive because you escalated when you didn't have to and somebody's dead."
"Don't pull the psycho-babble on me, buddy, I don't need that." Grant tipped his head toward the door. "You gonna let me out, or am I going out the window?"
Nick wheeled back with a graceful half-bow, gesturing toward the door. "Just remember," he said, when Grant was already halfway out, "paranoia's one of the symptoms."
Grant flashed him the finger and pulled the door shut. He took the stairs two at a time and hit the street. As he walked, he shifted the bag from one hand to the other, pulling off his shirt, replacing it with one from the bag, adding a beanie and a set of headphones that didn't connect to anything. At the T-stop, Liz stood tapping her fingers as she studied the route map. Grant adopted the slouch of a slacker, fists in pockets, shoving his jeans down too far. He slumped past her and got into the next car when she boarded. Green line trains had only two double-cars, each articulated at the middle, rattling and flexing around the bends in the surface tracks, occasionally sinking underground. Transfer to the Red-line, back toward Cambridge. Tall blond guy, on at the same stop, off at the same, checking his messages—or not. Long-haired Chinese girl, waiting for a train, changing her mind and pushing through the turnstiles just after Liz. She tapped her fingers all the time, did she know that? It was a tell, but for what? Details, the team said, not ops. Work details: like a cop standing around at a construction site, waving through the commuters and getting angry looks. Was it true? Yeah, okay, he hadn't felt this pumped since his discharge. So what? He wasn't the one who used a password for his apartment and facial recognition software in his mailbox.
Redline crowded, as usual, mostly students. That one had a lump under his jacket that might have been a gun. Grant bumped him by accident, ignored the guy's protest. Turned out to be a magazine, rolled up. Besides, his paranoia had kept him alive for fourteen years—had kept all of them alive, almost.
Blond guy hailed a cab. China girl kept walking, phone to her ear now, smiling and laughing, showing a lot of teeth. Liz walked from Porter Square, with its thousand restaurants and sidewalk sales, along increasingly narrow streets to come up to a brick triple-decker, where she patted down her pockets, and let out a little cry of dismay. Her keys must have been in her laptop case. Grant fumbled with his own keys at a doorway a few buildings down, on the opposite side, where he could watch her reflection in the broad window of an empty shop. Grey sedan, recent model, in the Permit Only zone, but no permit showing. Looked like an unmarked.
