I answered. “The person worthy of the prize is the person with the knowledge and skill and intelligence and determination to find it. The ability to find the treasure is the test.”
Wei Wei smiled at me, and I felt like I’d won a prize. “Quite right,” she said. “He hid the jadeite tablet, and he developed an elaborate web of riddles and clues, not unlike those he himself had to crack to find the tablet when it was hidden by the Imperial court. He cast the clues throughout China. No individual person or place holds more than one of the keys. In most cases, the person entrusted with the clue doesn’t even know about it.”
Mackenzie swooned. “Sounds complicated.”
I nudged Mackenzie. “You’re more checkers than chess, aren’t you?”
Wei Wei led us back out of the room where Salvador waited, sweat beading on his nervous forehead. Wei Wei looked at Mackenzie and said, “There’s room for pawns on the game board,” then at me, “but we’re definitely playing a game of chess.” She looked at Salvador, who appeared even more confused now than when we left the last room.
“You know the main difference between chess and checkers?” I asked.
“There are a lot of differences,” Mackenzie said.
Salvador added, “The pieces are different, for one thing.”
Wei Wei answered as though telling rather than guessing. “In chess, as in life, every piece moves differently, has a different role to play.”
Mackenzie said to Salvador under her breath, “And I guess she’s the queen.”
Mackenzie smirked at me when she saw I’d heard her. I frowned and asked, “Are you going to be nice or are you going to be gone?”
“Moi?”
“Wrong foreign language,” I said.
Salvador grimaced as Wei Wei led us through the Gate of Heavenly Purity. “Dammit, Clive, I missed the first half of the conversation. What’s she talking about?”
“Calm down.” Mackenzie filled Salvador in. “Crazy old dude hid the tablet and left a bunch of clues. To find the tablet, we’ve got to find the clues. That about sums it up.”
Wei Wei dropped an adorable chuckle. “It’s so easy to make things sound simple in English.”
Mackenzie counted the dragon guardians on the roofs before us. “Americans don’t feel the need to convolute things. You can bet that if the collector had been American, it would already be securely in the hands of the next-of-kin. And probably tax-deferred, too.”
“We excel at complicated puzzles in China,” Wei Wei said. “That’s the challenge we’re up against. Find the clues, we deserve to find the prize. But the clues won’t be easy to find or figure. They were put into place by a cunning mind.”
Salvador scoffed. “How do you know so much about this guy?”
Wei Wei frowned at him. “Gossip hovers in the air like pollution.”
We stood in a circle in the courtyard, surrounded by the trappings of Imperial China. “We’re getting nowhere slow,” Salvador griped. “Are we really going to search ten thousand rooms for a clue?”
“It’s not in the main halls; we’ve searched them,” Wei Wei said. “We need to think this over carefully.”
“Take your first step where the last Ming took his last,” I repeated. “We know the last Ming emperor was Chongzhen. And that he killed his daughter and concubines while an angry mob of peasants came to storm the Forbidden City. But where did he do it?”
Salvador and Mackenzie stared blankly at each other. Wei Wei strained to remember. “Wait a minute! He didn’t hang himself in the Forbidden City—he hung himself behind the Forbidden City. On the hill, Jing Shan.”
“Should we look there?” Mackenzie asked.
“No,” Wei Wei said, still thinking. “His last step as a man was to kill himself. His last step as the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, before the killing, was to write his final missive—in the Forbidden City.”
I remembered, now that she mentioned it. “In red ink.”
Wei Wei nodded. “In the Palace of Heavenly Purity.”
“Let’s go!” I started, and we rushed toward the palace.
6
Heavenly Hunt
When we got to the Palace of Heavenly Purity, we found it was not pure—but contaminated by two middle-aged Chinese men. We stood and looked in at the ornate rooms, trying to blend in with the rest of the tourists. The half-dozen others here consisted of Chinese, Europeans, and Americans, so we were a perfect fit. Salvador shifted from one leg to another, looking antsy, and Mackenzie nudged him, moaning, “Quit it.”
“It’s my knee!” he barked back, “I can’t help it!”
“Shhh,” I hushed, and Wei Wei shot us each a stern glance.
We continued to watch as the crowd around us changed, one or two people at a time. Mackenzie whispered, “Are they workers?”
“Maybe,” I whispered back. But Wei Wei shook her head. As Salvador watched the men suspiciously, I looked at all of the details of the room: three carpeted stairwells, each with three steps, ascending to a platform above the marble-tiled floor holding the Emperor’s desk and throne. Before the platform, pedestals held four ding pots, each one supported on three legs. Behind the desk stood an enormous golden screen with five panels, engraved with the teachings of ancestors. A crane statue guarded each end. A side-staircase came off of both the left and right sides of the platform, leading back to giant mirrors on the main floor. The ceiling, as three dimensional as the statues and columns below, was festooned with dragons.
The two men in the palace were rummaging around the desk and throne on the platform, looking in the turquoise ding pots and around the statues. One of them had sterling silver hair, wavy and long. The silver pony tail contrasted with a black blazer. The other man sported a shiny, black bowl cut to go with his larger frame—more muscle than pudge. Neither of them seemed to notice us or anyone else in the crowd. They went about their search as though they worked here.
“They say the key to not getting caught is to look like you belong,” Mackenzie said.
A loud pair of Chinese tourists came from the courtyard behind us; I turned to see that they were towing a uniformed guard with them. Just shy of making a citizen’s arrest, the Chinese tourists insisted that the guard dispose of the intruders. Reluctantly, the guard did, calling Silver Hair and Bowl Cut down, escorting the two men back into the courtyard and out of sight.
“There’s a better way,” I said to Mackenzie. “Don’t let them see you.” With the guard and other intruders walking away, and the concerned citizens and other tourists watching the commotion, I crossed over and walked beyond the platform, behind the golden screens, and out of view. When I turned around, I noticed Wei Wei had followed me and I almost ran into her. “Fancy meeting you here,” I said.
“Fancy’s a fitting term,” she said, turning away from me and beginning to inspect the treasures around us. Mackenzie came up behind her.
“Why are we sneaking around back here?” Mackenzie asked. “Isn’t it more likely we’ll find our clue in the throne or desk?”
“If that’s where it was,” I said, “those jokers would have found it already.”
Mackenzie shrugged. “That’s assuming those two were looking for the same thing we were.”
“They were,” Wei Wei said without a note of doubt in her voice. “We’re not the only people looking for the tablet.”
“How