RANDOM HOUSE/NEW YORK
SHAN
Copyright © 1986 by Eric Van Lustbader
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Doubleday and Company, Inc.: "Kudakutemo" by Chosu, from An Introduction to Haiku by Harold G. Henderson. Copyright © 1958 by Harold G. Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from The Wisdom of Laotse, by Laotse, translated and edited by Lin Yutang. Copyright © 1948 by Random House, Inc. Copyright renewed 1976 by Lin Yutang. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Shan is a work of fiction. All characters, save those of a recognizable historical nature,
are products solely of the author's imagination.
Any similarity with any person, living or dead, is coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lustbader, Eric Van. Shan.
I. Title.
PS3J62.10752845 1987 813'.54 86-10027 ISBN 0-349-55640-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
98765432
First Edition
CARTOGRAPHY BY ANITA KARL AND JAMES KEMP CALLIGRAPHY BY CARMA HINTON BOOK DESIGN BY JO ANNE METSCH
This is for my father
with love and respect.
Special thanks to Kate Bush
for running up that hill.
Kudakutemo
kudakutemo
ari mizu-no tsuki
Though it be broken—
broken again—still it's there:
the moon on the water.
—Choshu
Fame or one's own self,
which does one love more?
Loss of self or the possession of goods
which is the greater evil?
—Laotse
AUTHOR'S NOTE
In the Buddhist religion, the Sanskrit word kalpa is used in several ways. It is an almost incalculable period of time. It is also the word used to measure the period between the creation and the recreation of the world. Each great kalpa is divided into four parts. So, too, is Shan.
Those familiar with my novel, Jian, will recall that the Chinese transliteration of kalpa is ka. The masters of wei qi, the ancient board game of warfare and strategy that Jake, Shi Zilin and Daniella Vorkuta play in Shan, use the term to mean the point where the contending forces have reached a stalemate.
It is common knowledge among wei qi masters, however, that a Jian—a master general of wei qi—may find a strategy to break ka. It is Shan, the Mountain.
CONTENTS
part I Destruction 7
part II Emptiness 155
part III Formation 267
part IV Existence 397
According to known history there is no highly clandestine espionage organization (originally sanctioned by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy) called the Quarry. Just as, in the summer of 1945, there was no aide to Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Hurley, Ambassador to China, named Ross Davies. But there could be. And there might have been.
"Jake," Rodger Donovan said, without turning around. He seemed quite calm, despite the desperateness of the situation. "You seem to have as many lives as the hero of a novel. I knew we couldn't kill you."
"It didn't stop you from trying."
Donovan winced at the tone. "Of course not. What do you take us for, amateurs?"
"No more talk," Jake said. "Take me to Wunderman."
"Ah, Wunderman. I imagine he'll want to know how you evaded all our security measures."
"Then he'll be disappointed. Come on, let's go."
Jake Maroc, in Hong Kong, dreaming of another time, another place. Of a day nine months before, a rain-swept day. He had flown into Washington's Dulles International Airport after spending hours with Bliss deciphering the papers for which so many people had died, not the least of whom was David Oh, Jake's closest friend. Papers that irrefutably identified Henry Wunderman—now the Director of the clandestine intelligence organization known as the Quarry, for which Jake had worked—as a double agent working for the KGB's Daniella Vorkuta. His code name was Chimera.
General Vorkuta and Chimera, the papers showed, had masterminded the assassination of Antony Beridien just weeks before. Beridien, the Quarry's first Director and its founder.
Now Jake was in Washington, racing by car to Great Falls where, nestled within the rolling emerald hills, Greystoke sat: the nineteenth-century mansion, seat of power for the new Director. And Wunderman, asserting that it had been Jake himself who had murdered Antony Beridien in retaliation for the Director's cutting Jake off from the Quarry, had instituted a number of new security systems at Greystoke.
This is what Jake dreamed of: the day he confronted his father and struck him down forever.
Not that Henry Wunderman was Jake Maroc's real father. But as Jake dreamed of crouching in the high grass just outside the perimeter of Greystoke's eastern boundary, his thoughts were filled up with images from a time when Jake was young, a wild orphan roaming the filthy back alleys of Hong Kong, a great unwieldy anger riding his shoulders like a deformity.
Henry Wunderman had changed all that. He had come to Hong Kong to search Jake out. To recruit him into the Quarry. Henry Wunderman had given Jake's life a purpose, his faith in the young man had redeemed Jake from emptiness and perhaps even self-destruction. He was Jake's spiritual father.
And now Jake was forced to destroy him.
To do it Jake needed ba-mahk. Ba-mahk meant, literally, "feel the pulse." It was a state of mental preparedness in which one was able to "feel" the energy sources of one's surroundings. Through ba-mahk one could therefore discover much that was hidden from the normal five senses. One could even discern the strategies of one's opponent and thus counter them even as they were occurring.
Ba-mahk is what Jake used now at the eastern edge of the treacherous minefield of security traps that Henry Wunderman had devised. He sat and entered ba-mahk. For him it was another world entirely; it always had been. Here he was free of corporeal concerns. He was almost entirely spirit or, as the Chinese would say, qi. Qi was the inner energy that resided in every living thing. It was, in essence, life. Without qi a man had no strength, no inner reserves; he was not in harmony with either himself or his surroundings.
In ba-mahk, Jake's qi, his strength of spirit, expanded. Like the ripples on a lake widening from the spot where a stone had been thrown, so Jake's extraordinary qi roved outward, encountering first the infrared units like rogue blades of grass, well camouflaged to the eye, then the ultrasonics, implanted as clumps of speckled mushrooms at the foot of rustling trees.
Ba-mahk revealed to him the outer defenses of Greystoke. He moved around them, above them, so that the electronics were as oblivious to him as they were to the wind that rushed by his side.
Within the double outer ring Jake stopped and returned fully to ba-mahk. It was a comforting sensation, as if one were to return to a private world where the very pulse of the cosmos could be felt, examined and absorbed. Jake was aware of how much he delighted in, of how much he depended on ba-mahk. It was his ultimate weapon, the manner by which he had gained his victories for the Quarry and, after, for himself and for his father. His real father, Shi Zilin.
It was ba-mahk, Jake knew, that made him special. It was ba-mahk that guided him through the dangers inherent in the life he had chosen to lead. Without it he would never have been able to make it to Greystoke, sitting like a great old man at the center of the security web.
The dogs were next. Dobermans trained to scent out humans and immobilize them at the point of contact. Ba-mahk picked them up, allowing Jake to keep downwind of them, to pass them by without incident.
His dream never revealed to him how many more rings he had to pass through. The number was irrelevant. Infiltration into Greystoke was akin to a game of wei qi, the ancient Chinese board game of strategy. It would have been fruitless to take the security rings one at a time, for they had been so set up that often the solution used to penetrate one would have set off the next. Ba-mahk allowed Jake to "feel" several of the rings at once.
So it was that Jake had come at last upon Rodger Donovan, the Quarry's wunderkind and number-two man, working on his 1963 Corvette in the driveway beside Greystoke's famous rose garden.
It was Donovan who took Jake into the house itself, into the inner sanctum of the Director. Face to face with Henry Wunderman.
The prodigal son had returned home to face the wrath of his father. The replaying of events of mythic proportion. There should have been portents: thunder crashing, lightning forking. Instead the black skies were almost somnolent, and the only discernible sounds were the droning of the bumblebees greedily gathering attar from the roses two stories below.
The scent of the enormous flowers was in the room. And it was to this aspect that the end of Jake's dream clove. The struggle with Henry Wunderman, while Rodger Donovan looked on, sphinxlike, was inextricably bound to the rich perfume.
Wunderman had pulled the pistol. By all rights he should have shot Jake dead where he stood, not two meters away. But ba-mahk had revealed his intent to Jake even before the movement had begun. Enough time—just enough!—for Jake to spill his body forward, the shot passing through the spot where he had been.
Now the die had been cast. The stink of death mingled with the scent of the roses, the strangled sounds of their struggle punctuated the droning of the gluttonous bees.
How many myths in how many different cultures scattered throughout time and place foretold the prodigal son returning to kill his father? Jake, in righteous anger, used ba-mahk yet again to penetrate Wunderman's defenses, used the lethal liver kites because of David Oh, because of Jake's wife, Mariana, because of Jake's half-brother, Ni-chiren. Chimera had had a hand, either directly or indirectly, in all their deaths.
Protected by ba-mahk from the terrible implications of what he had to do, death was in Jake's mind, in his hands; death was in his heart. The naked flame of revenge expunging the light of all the pure stars in the vault of the heavens.
And now, in the space of a heartbeat, everything had changed. Instead of the satisfaction of revenge, there was only death, appalling and irreversible. The knowledge and the guilt and the crying inside was too much, too much, mingled always with the scent of roses, powerful as the ocean's tide.
I
DESTRUCTION
SAMVARTA
Winter-Spring Present
Hong Kong/Beijing/Washington/Moscow
Jake and Bliss were down in the Hole. In the night, the sounds of Hong Kong came to them as through a mist. They were so near the harbor they could hear the lap-lap, lap-lap of water against pilings. The high-pitched squeal of rats came to them now and again through walls of packed earth and rotting timbers.
The sounds of gambling took precedence over everything else. That was the essence of the Hole, a warren of underground chambers linked by low tunnels: gambling. The only legal gambling allowed in Hong Kong was the horse races at Happy Valley. But the Chinese were insatiable gamblers.
It was very dark down in the Hole. Jake had no love for it but it was the spot insisted upon for the rendezvous.
"How well do you know this man?" Bliss asked him.
Jake stared at her. "He is one of the half-dozen I have been running for the past six months." He caught her tone. "I trust him."
Bliss shivered a little. "I don't like this place," she said, echoing Jake's own thoughts.
"He must have a reason for meeting us here," Jake said.
Bliss looked around. "Easy to get trapped down here."
"Just as easy to get lost," Jake said. "Don't worry."
She gave him a little smile. "Just nerves." He could see the long sweep of her beautiful neck. "I don't like to be underground."
"You could have stayed home. I told you."
'Not after what your contact hinted at." She moved and the hollow of her throat filled with shadow. "Jake. Do you really think he's that close to the spy who has infiltrated our inner circ...
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