Steve Berry - Cotton Malone 06 The Emperors Tomb

To the folks at Random House: Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, Cindy Murray, Kim Hovey, Katie OCallaghan, Beck Stvan, Carole Lowenstein, Rachel Kind, and all those in promotions and sales. Once again, thanks.

To Mark Tavani, thanks for being a persistent editor.

To Pam Ahearn I offer a ninth bow of gratitude and my continued appreciation.

To Simon Lipskar, I deeply appreciate your wisdom and guidance.

A few special mentions: Charlie Smith, who performed some much-appreciated reconnoitering in China; Grant Blackwood, a superb thriller writer who saved me from falling in Denver; Els Wouters, who provided, on short notice, vital on-site research in Antwerp; Esther Levine for opening doors at the terra-cotta warrior exhibit; Bob and Jane Stine, who stimulated my imagination over lunch and connected me with Julia Xiaohui Zhu; James Rollins for once again helping save the day; Michele and Joe Finder, who offered some sage advice; Meryl Moss and her wonderful staff; Melisse Shapiro, who is more helpful than she could ever realize; and Esther Garver and Jessica Johns who keep History Matters and Steve Berry Enterprises running.

I also want to say thank you to every one of my readers around the world. I appreciate your loyal support, insightful comments, infectious enthusiasm, and, yes, even your criticisms. You are what keeps me writing every day.

And theres Elizabethcritic, cheerleader, editor, wife, muse. The whole package.

Finally, this book is dedicated to Fran Downing, Frank Green, Lenore Hart, David Poyer, Nancy Pridgen, Clyde Rogers, and Daiva Woodworth. Together, they showed me how to teach myself to be a writer.

Whether I succeeded is still a matter of debate.

One thing, though, is clear.

Without their influence, nothing ever would have been printed.

ALSO BY STEVE BERRY

NOVELS
The Amber Room
The Romanov Prophecy
The Third Secret
The Templar Legacy
The Alexandria Link
The Venetian Betrayal
The Charlemagne Pursuit
The Paris Vendetta
E-BOOKS
The Balkan Escape

S TEVE B ERRY is the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Vendetta, The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Venetian Betrayal, The Alexandria Link, The Templar Legacy, The Third Secret, The Romanov Prophecy, The Amber Room, and the short story The Balkan Escape. His books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and sold in fifty countries. He lives in the historic city of St. Augustine, Florida, and is at work on his next novel. He and his wife, Elizabeth, have founded History Matters, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving our heritage. To learn more about Steve Berry and the foundation, visit www.steveberry.org.

This book took Elizabeth and me to Copenhagen and Antwerp but, unfortunately, not to China. That excursion would have taken far more time than was available. A book a year demands a tight schedule. So, with Antarctica from The Charlemagne Pursuit, China remains at the top of our must-see list.

I did, though, have the characters visit as much of the country as possible. Chongqing, Gansu province, Xian, Kashgar, Yecheng, Beijing, Lanzhou, Yunnan province, and the western highlands are all accurately depicted. The statistics relative to China in ).

Time now to separate more fact from fiction.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Chinese Communist Party exists and functions as described ().

All of the ancient scientific discoveries, innovations, and inventions attributable to the Chinese, detailed in , about Jesuit missionaries displaying a clock the Chinese did not know they themselves had invented 1,000 years before, is real. A British academic, Joseph Needham, during the 20th century, made it his lifework to document Chinas lost technological and scientific past. The research and publications that he began continue today through the Needham Research Institute.

Tivoli Gardens, in Copenhagen, is a wonderful place to visit. All that is described in ) anchors Hjbro Plads in Copenhagen and continues to serve some delicious tomato bisque.

Sadly, child stealing plagues China (). More than 70,000 children do, in fact, disappear there each year, the vast majority young boys, sold to families desperate for a son. Including this incredible reality in the story is my way of drawing attention to the problem. Theres an excellent documentary, Chinas Stolen Children, that you can watch if you want to learn more.

The debate between Confucianism and Legalism has raged for 3,000 years (). Three of the four in the defeated gang lost their lives. Here, I simply created another war for political control between two new contenders.

Centuries ago, the Ba flourished. The history of hegemony, the Ba, and Legalism are indeed accurately related (, totalitarianism is a Chinese innovation.

Antwerp is a wonderful European city with a distinctive Old World feel (), though, is my creation. Since I knew I was going to destroy the building, I thought something fictitious would be a better choice. Interestingly, though, I modeled it after an actual Antwerp museumwhich burned while this book was being written.

Lev Sokolov and Cassiopeia Vitt have a history, which is hinted to starting with . If youd like to know the full story of how these two met, and why Cassiopeia owes him, there is a short story, The Balkan Escape, which can be downloaded as an e-book original. Check it out.

Eunuchs (). Associating eunuchs with the Ba is my invention, though most certainly they would have played some role in that movement.

Two tortures are utilized: the first with scalding chili powder (). An intranet, solely for use within the country, is currently being created.

Quotations from Chairman Mao, or The Little Red Book (), is the most printed book in history with some 7,000,000,000 copies. Once, every Chinese carried one. Not anymore.

The sky burial, described in ) is real, though found in another Chinese imperial tomb, adapted here to Qin Shi.

, all books and websites that even mention the incident are censored in China.

The terra-cotta warrior museum () is not mine. That came from The Terracotta Warriors: The Secret Codes of the Emperors Army by Maurice Cotterell.

Qin Shis tomb mound, which rises near the underground army site, is accurately portrayed ( is based on the most popular representation, but it was fashioned centuries after his death. In reality, no one has a clue what the man looked like.

Incredibly, the Chinese did in fact drill for oil 2,500 years ago in the manner described in ).

The debate between biotic and abiotic oil is real, and continues to this day. Does oil come from decaying organisms or is it naturally produced by the earth? One source is finite, the other infinite. The Russians, at Stalins prodding, pioneered the abiotic theory in the 1950s and continue to find oil, utilizing the concept, in places where fossil fuels could never exist (), were first isolated from Czech petroleum in 1933, then from U.S. samples in the late 1950s. Of late, these amazing compounds have shown promising applications in nanotechnology. I adapted them as proof of abiotic oil since diamondoids can form only under extreme heat and pressure, the kind experienced deep within the earth, far away from where any fossil fuels may lay.

And what of this long-standing myth of finite oil?

Fossil fuel is nothing more than a theory, created in 1757 by a Russian scientist named Mikhail Lomonosov. In proceedings before the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov wrote, Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure, acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil