"Just the one in your room. You hurt him?"

"It'll leave a mark."

"Ca.s.siopeia, Karl Tang wants that lamp. Can't you just give it to him and be done with this?"

"And lose that child? Like you say, my having that lamp is the only bargaining chip I possess. You said you know where the boy is being held. Tell me."

"It's not that easy. You'd never get near him. Let me help."

"I work alone."

"Is that why you involved Malone? And I knew you were lying on that one, but Tang made me make contact."

"What happened in Copenhagen?"

"I haven't heard from the two who were hired for the job. But with Malone, something bad surely happened to them both."

She needed to call Denmark and explain. But not here. "Where are the keys to that car outside?"

"In the ignition." He stood from the chair. "Let me go with you. I can't stay. No matter what I say, Tang will hold me responsible for your escape. My job with him is over. I have good intel on his operation that could prove valuable."

She considered the proposal. It actually made sense. No matter how she felt about Viktor Tomas, he was clearly resourceful. Last year, he'd cleverly managed to wedge amazingly close to the president of the Central Asian Federation. Now he was near Karl Tang, who held the key to reuniting Lev Sokolov with his son. No doubt she'd made a mess of things. She needed to retrieve the lamp, then broker a deal. So why not a little a.s.sistance from a man who could make direct contact with Tang?

And who knew where Sokolov's child was located.

"All right," she said. "Let's go."

She stepped aside and allowed Viktor to leave first.

He reached for the cell phone and pocketed the unit. Just as he pa.s.sed, headed for the door, she raised the gun above her head and slammed the b.u.t.t into the base of his neck.

A moan seeped from his mouth as a hand reached upward.

She drove the gun's hard metal into his left temple.

His eyes rolled skyward and he collapsed to the floor.

"Like I'm going to believe a word you say."

FIFTEEN.

SHAANXI PROVINCE, CHINA.

11:40 PM.

Tang wandered among the clay warriors, keeping their eternal guard. He'd left Pit 3 and returned to Pit 1. His expert was gone. The fact that the Pit 3 repository contained no Confucian texts, though all six should have been there, was telling. As was the silver watch, which he still held.

He'd suspected much had happened thirty years ago.

Now he knew.

Back then this region of Lintong County had been rural farmland. Everyone realized that the First Emperor lay beneath the hill-like mound that had stood there for the past 2,200 years. But no one had known of the underground army, and its discovery had led to a flurry of digging. For years workers toiled night and day removing layers of earth, sand, and gravel, photographing and recording the hundreds of thousands of shards. More workers then rea.s.sembled the shattered figures, one piece at a time, the fruits of their exhaustive labors now standing all around him.

The terra-cotta army had come to be regarded as a monumental expression of Chinese communal talents, symbolizing a unified state, a creative, compliant culture, a government that worked for and with its people.

A near-perfect symbolism.

One of the few times he'd agreed with using the past to justify the present.

But apparently, during all that digging, a cache of doc.u.ments-Qin Shi's lost palace library-had also been found.

Yet no one was told.

And a reminder of that omission remained.

A watch.

Left on purpose?

Who knew.

But given the person who'd most likely made the discovery, Tang could not discount anything.

Pau Wen.

Special counsel to the Central Committee, adviser to both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, a learned man whose value came from his ability to deliver desired results-as nothing secured privilege better than repeated success. Neither Mao nor Deng was the most effective administrator. Both governed with broad strokes across vast canvases and left the details to men like Pau. Tang knew Pau had led many archaeological digs throughout the country and had, at one point, overseen the terra-cotta warrior excavations.

Was the watch he held Pau's?

It had to be.

He faced one of the warriors who stood at the army's vanguard. He and the others with him would have been the first to descend on an enemy, followed by waves and waves of more terrifying men.

Seemingly endless. Indestructible.

Like China itself.

But the nation had come to a crossroads. Thirty years of unprecedented modernization had produced an impatient generation, one unmoved by the pretensions of a communist regime, one that focused on family, cultural and economic life, rather than nationality. The doctor at the hospital seemed an excellent example.

China was changing.

But not a single regime in all Chinese history had relinquished power without bloodshed, and the Communist Party would not be the first.

His plan for power would take daring, but he hoped that what he was searching to prove could provide a measure of certainty, an air of legitimacy, perhaps even a source of national pride.

Movement above caught his attention.

He'd been waiting.

At the railing five meters overhead a figure sheathed in black appeared, then another. Both forms were lean and muscular, their hair cut short, their faces unemotional.

"Down here," he quietly said.

Both men disappeared.

When he'd summoned his expert from the West, he'd also ordered that two more men accompany him. They'd waited nearby until his call, which he'd made on his walk over from Pit 3.

The men appeared at the far end of the line of warriors and approached without a sound, stopping a few meters away.

"Burn it all," he ordered. "There are electrical cables and a transformer, so the lights can be blamed."

Both men bowed and left.

Malone and Stephanie crossed Hjbro Plads. The late-afternoon sun had receded behind Copenhagen's jagged rooflines. Ivan was gone, back in one hour, saying there were matters that required his attention.

Malone stopped at a fountain and sat on its damp edge. "You had a purse s.n.a.t.c.hed right here a couple of years ago."

"I remember. Turned into quite an adventure."

"I want to know exactly what this is all about." She remained silent.

"You need to tell me what's at stake," he said. "All of it. And it's not a lost child or the next premier of China."

"Ivan thinks we don't know, but we do."

"Enlighten me."

"It's kind of remarkable, really. And turns on something Stalin learned from the n.a.z.is."

Now they were getting somewhere.

"During World War II, refineries in Romania and Hungary supplied much of Germany's oil. By 1944 those refineries had been bombed to oblivion, and not so coincidentally the war ended soon after. Stalin watched as Germany literally ran out of oil. He resolved that Russia would always be self-sufficient. He saw oil dependency as a catastrophic weakness to be avoided at any cost."

Not a big shock. "Wouldn't everyone?"

"Unlike the rest of the world, including us, Stalin figured out how to do it. A professor named Nikolai Kudryavtsev supplied him the answer."

He waited.

"Kudryavtsev postulated that oil had nothing to do with fossils."

He knew the conventional wisdom. Over millions of years an ancient primeval mora.s.s of plants and animals, dinosaurs included, had been engulfed by sedimentary deposits. Millions more years of heat and pressure eventually compressed the mix into petroleum, and gave it the name fossil fuel.

"Instead of being biotic, from once-alive material, Kudryavtsev said oil is abiotic-simply a primordial material the earth forms and exudes on a continual basis."

He instantly grasped the implications. "It's endless?"

"That's the question that's brought me here, Cotton. The one we have to answer."

She explained about Soviet oil exploration in the 1950s that discovered ma.s.sive reserves thousands of feet deep, at levels far below what would have been expected according to the fossil fuel theory.

"And it may have happened to us," she said, "in the Gulf of Mexico. A field was found in 1972 more than a mile down. Its reserves have been declining at a surprisingly slow rate. The same thing has occurred at several sites on the Alaskan North Slope. It baffles geologists."

"You're saying wells replenish themselves?"

She shook her head. "I'm told it depends on the faulting in the surrounding rock. At the Gulf site the ocean floor is cut with deep fissures. That would theoretically allow the pressurized oil to move from deep below, closer to the surface. There's one other thing, too."

He could tell that, as usual, she'd come prepared.

"The geological age of the crude coming out of those wells I mentioned, the ones seemingly replenishing, is different than it was twenty years ago."

"And that means?"

"The oil is coming from a different source."

He also caught what else it meant.

Not from dead plants or dinosaurs.

"Cotton, biotic oil is shallow. Hundreds or a few thousand feet down. Abiotic oil is much deeper. There is no scientific way for organic material to end up so deep beneath the surface, so there has to be another source for that oil. Stalin figured that the Soviet Union could obtain a ma.s.sive strategic advantage if this new theory about oil's availability could be proven. He foresaw back in the early 1950s that oil would become politically important."

He now grasped the implications, but wanted to know, "Why have I never heard of this?"

"Stalin had no reason to inform his enemies of what he learned, especially us. Anything published on this was printed in Russian, and back then few outside of the Soviet Union read the language. The West became locked into the fossil fuel theory and any alternative was quickly deemed crackpot."

"So what's changed?"

"We don't think it's crackpot."

Tang left the Pit 1 museum and stepped out into the warm night. The plaza that encompa.s.sed the historical complex loomed still and quiet. Midnight was approaching.

His cell phone vibrated.

He removed the unit and noted its display. Beijing. He answered.

"Minister," he was told, "we have good news. Lev Sokolov has been found."

"Where?"

"Lanzhou."