The Ninth Buddha Read Online Free PDF Page A

too hard.
    “But time passed and Zamyatin’s name wasn’t mentioned, and I knew he must still be alive.   They have to denounce their victims, you see it’s no good just doing away with them some dark night.
    Their deaths are a sort of atonement, you understand, and their sins must be expiated in public.   Pour encourager les autres.
    “Then, about four months ago, I had a firm sighting.   One I could rely on, from one of my best men.”   He hesitated.
    “He was seen in Tibet, in the west, near Mount Kailas, near a monastery called Phensung Gompa.   He was alone, and he seemed to have been travelling for a long time.   In Tibet, Christopher.   Nikolai Zamyatin.   I didn’t believe it at first.   But my man managed to take some photographs.   There’s no doubt about it.   He was there.   Am I making sense to you?”
    Christopher nodded.   Winterpole was making a sort of sense.
    Tibet was Christopher’s territory, one of his special sectors.   The agent who had sent the photograph had probably been one of his own men, recruited and trained by him.   He followed the other man’s gaze into the darkness beyond the windscreen.   More strongly than before, he felt that he was being sucked down beneath heavy waves.   Thin hands above the water; the taste of salt on his lips; and a cold wind coming from the shore, driving him out to sea.
    “You were in the Kailas region back in 1912, weren’t you, Christopher?”
    Winterpole asked.
    “Yes,” said Christopher dully.
    “What were you doing there?”
    “I was looking for agents.   Russian agents.   We had received a report, a reliable report.   I was sent to investigate.”
    “And what did you find?”
    Christopher shrugged.
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “I spent a month up there, on the slopes of Mount Kailas itself and round Lake Mansarowar.   It’s a sacred region.   I made excursions to several of the monasteries.   I spoke with pilgrims.   If there were Russians, they must have been invisible.”
    He saw Winterpole shake his head.
    “Not invisible,” he said.
    “Dead.”
    Christopher realized that, with one hand, he was holding tightly to the door-handle beside him.   Drowning men never let go: that is an axiom.   He tightened his fingers on the cold metal.
    “There were two of them,” Winterpole went on.
    “Maisky and Skrypnik.   Maisky was a Jew, the son of a watchmaker from the stetl.   I met him once in Petersburg.   A small man with bad teeth.
    “There was a third man with them, a Mongol guide.   He made his way back to Russia after they died and managed to make a report.   Badmayeffwas their expert on Tibet then.   He interviewed the man and wrote the report himself.
    “Now, Maisky and Skrypnik had gone to Tibet officially as explorers, so heavily edited versions of the report were deposited in all the proper places the Institute of Oriental Languages at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Oriental Section of the Imperial Archaeological Society, and the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
    One or two articles were even published in journals.   I read some of them myself.”
    He paused and fingered the steering-wheel again.   No-one passed in the street.   It was Tuesday night, and it was cold, and children were in bed at home, dreaming of fat Father Christmases and dining off brandied pudding in their sleep.
    “The real report, the unedited version, was locked away in a file in the Secret Service archives and promptly forgotten.   The Mongol disappeared almost certainly killed because of what he knew.”
    “What did he know?”
    “Be patient, Christopher.   I’ll come to that.   I think Badmayeff planned to act on the report, but first of all he needed funds and the backing of the right people.   However, it was already 1913 and circumstances were far from propitious for an undertaking in Tibet. The file stayed where it was, gathering dust.   I had no idea of its existence, of course.   No-one had any idea.
    “I