Book Description
1943 -- the Year of the Ram. In the Temple of Sublime Truth, high in the Himalayas, a master monk prepares to transfer an ancient scroll to his young protégé. The scroll holds the key to an unspeakable power, one which in the wrong hands could destroy the world. According to prophecy, the young monk will become the steward of the scroll for the next sixty years -- five times the Year of the Ram. But to do so, he must sacrifice everything he has -- including his name. Present day -- the Year of the Ram. It is time to pass the scroll and its secrets on to a new guardian, one chosen by destiny and revealed through the fulfillment of the three Noble Prophecies. But the bulletproof monk has no students. He's far from home, in another world, another time, and an old adversary from one of history's most evil chapters is closing in. Though he is hunted and alone, fate throws the monk together with a very talented but undisciplined -- and unorthodox -- young pickpocket named Kar. Could this be the disciple he's been searching for? Could Kar possibly have the strength and the will to be entrusted with this task? Can a common thief possibly be enlightened? Maybe -- but they may not survive long enough to find out.

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"1943 -- the Year of the Ram. In the Temple of Sublime Truth, high in the Himalayas, a master monk prepares to transfer an ancient scroll to his young protégé. The scroll holds the key to an unspeakable power, one which in the wrong hands could destroy the world. According to prophecy, the young monk will become the steward of the scroll for the next sixty years -- five times the Year of the Ram. But to do so, he must sacrifice everything he has -- including his name. Present day -- the Year of the Ram. It is time to pass the scroll and its secrets on to a new guardian, one chosen by destiny and revealed through the fulfillment of the three Noble Prophecies. But the bulletproof monk has no students. He's far from home, in another world, another time, and an old adversary from one of history's most evil chapters is closing in. Though he is hunted and alone, fate throws the monk together with a very talented but undisciplined -- and unorthodox -- young pickpocket named Kar. Could this be the disciple he's been searching for? Could Kar possibly have the strength and the will to be entrusted with this task? Can a common thief possibly be enlightened? Maybe -- but they may not survive long enough to find out. "

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 Waiting on the platform, Kar was already whistling a brisk, tone-deaf little melody by the time the subway car came screaming into the station. Bishop Square was his favorite station, and he watched as the doors of the train opened, and his plump and juicy prey came spilling out: Wall Street types, most of them, with thousand-dollar briefcases and glistening gold Rolexes on their wrists. He hoisted his well-worn duffel bag over his shoulder and jostled his way into the crowd. He liked his work, he told himself; he was cheerful, he told himself. Today was just like any other day. Truth was, for the past several weeks, a restlessness had come over him: he had begun to question himself, his life, why he lived as he did. This morning, he had crawled from his bed with an uncharacteristic tightness in his gut, a sense -- was it foreboding, or anticipation? -- that today everything was about to change. He had scolded himself then: Quit with the sensitive jerk stuff -- so you feel your life is empty, blah, blah, blah. Quit letting your nerves get to you. You're just worried about getting caught, that's all. And it's not going to happen. You're too good. It was bogus, this sense of guilt -- he hadn't exactly had an easy life. And he was at least decent enough to steal only from the rich -- me and Robin Hood -- who could easily afford to lose a twenty-thousand-dollar watch here, a Prada bag there, an Hermès scarf or a wallet loaded with cash and credit. Hell, they're probably all insured. At least they all had mothers and fathers -- rich ones, most likely, who'd sent them to the best schools, given them every opportunity in life. And they had real names and knew their family history, and hadn't had to grow up fighting for survival on the streets. Kar set to work. Not exactly the nine-to-five variety: this particular job required exquisite skill and even better timing. He conjured up a look of innocence in his wide eyes and "accidentally" bumped into his first victim: a guy in a three-piece gray pinstripe Armani and polished wing tips that cost more than Kar's annual rent. Kar brushed an elbow against him, slipped a hand into the guy's rear pocket -- too quickly for the victim to feel, much less see -- and deftly slipped the captured wallet into the duffel bag. Victim number two: female in high-heeled Manolo Blahnik pumps, wearing a diamond Rolex. Kar pumped up the charm, accidentally brushing against her arm, then smiled in apology -- such a dazzling little grin that she smiled back, oblivious of the fact that her Rolex was now safely inside the duffel bag. Kar turned away, slightly disgusted. He bore no ill will toward the young woman, but -- diamonds, no less. The watch must have been worth thirty, forty grand...and people in the city were going hungry. He turned to his next mark, scarcely noticing the person itself, only the pocket, bulging with cash, that called to him from a pair of nearby khaki pants. Almost of its own accord, his hand fished into the pocket, effortlessly withdrew a wad of cash... ...and was immediately slapped with a steel cuff. A snap, and suddenly both hands were cuffed. Kar stared up into the face of his intended mark: a uniformed cop, who held the chain leading to the cuffs tightly in a large, thick-fingered fist. "You picked the wrong pocket to pick, prick," the cop sneered. He was a large man, broad-faced, broad-shouldered, used to intimidating others with his bulk. Beside him, Kar looked like the skinny kid he was. Anyone standing on the subway platform with spare change to bet on the outcome of the encounter would have put all their money on the cop. Kar was not in the least bit shaken: he'd made the same mistake before, with similar results. For an instant, he regarded the policeman with a purely pleasant expression. And then he spun around, hands a blur, moving so quickly his eyes could not even follow what his own fingers were doing -- but his brain knew, and that was all that mattered. He snatched the key from the burly man's grip and wriggled his hands from the cuffs, then just as swiftly slapped one on the cop's wrist and the other one to a railing. Before the policeman could even register what had happened, Kar favored him with his best, boyish Kar grin. "Sorry about that, Officer. Nice cuffs." His tone wasn't particularly sarcastic; Kar in fact was sorry that the cop had caught him, and forced him into the unpleasantness. And they were nice handcuffs: cold, quality steel. He took off into the crowd, listening with one ear as the officer pulled out a walkie-talkie and shouted into it. "Officer needs assistance! Perpetrator on foot, heading northbound on Bishop Square platform! Repeat: northbound on Bishop Square platform!" Outside on the street level, the dirty sidewalk was filled with rush-hour commuters, all hurrying to make their way home; a few stopped at the corner newsstand to make a quick purchase of a magazine, a newspaper. One man among them, however, stood calmly studying a headline: from him radiated a sense of quintessential stillness. He was in no rush to go home; it had been destroyed by Germans some sixty years before, followed shortly by the Chinese Communists. Yet in all that time, the monk had not aged: his hair was still jet black, his face unlined, his body as strong and firm as it had been the day his beloved master transferred the power of the scroll to him. Indeed, the overcoat he wore, acquired soon after he had made his escape to the West, showed more signs of his travels than he did himself: the fabric was shiny, almost threadbare in places. And, slung over his shoulder, he still bore the bamboo case that housed the sacred scroll, just as he had every day for the past six decades. He read the headline silently to himself, after many years finally accustomed enough to the English language not to have to translate the words into Tibetan first: UNIDENTIFIED ASIAN MAN PULLS THREE FROM FIRE. He felt no sense of achievement, of self-congratulation at having done a good deed. The people would have died otherwise; it was the responsibility of all those on the path to prevent suffering wherever possible. He was only fulfilling his karma. Perhaps, in one of his previous incarnations, he had been trapped in a burning building, and one of those souls had rushed in to save him. Perhaps he was doing no more than returning a favor. In one sense, however, the headline disturbed him. It reminded him that he felt unfulfilled; it was his duty to find and train a successor, and thus far he had found no suitable candidate. And five times the Year of the Ram had come and gone. The monk drew in a slow, even breath and dismissed the thought. Such concerns were a form of grasping. When the time was right, the student would appear. In the interim, the monk lifted his gaze slightly above the newspaper's edge, with its incriminating headline, and looked beyond, to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. There, a hardened-looking man wearing a dark suit and barely detectable earpiece smoked a cigarette. To most, he no doubt seemed perfectly calm; but the monk saw clearly his nervousness. He had encountered this cigarette-smoking man before, and knew him to be a mercenary; as the monk continued to surreptitiously watch, two more dark-suited mercenaries joined the first man. They spoke quietly together...and the monk knew himself to be the subject of conversation. Silently repeating the Vajra Guru mantra, the monk drew in another calming breath, then gently manipulated his neck in order to stretch it. When he glanced back at the newspaper headline -- then took stock of his surroundings -- he realized that two more men in dark suits now stood only a few feet away from him in front of the newsstand. Casually, they began leafing through Soldier of Fortune magazines. The first three mercenaries started across the street, for the stand. The monk took note of the glances exchanged between the five men. He had always wondered why his master had insisted on martial-arts training; he had never understood, until he had come to this wild country, why a monk would ever need training in anything other than meditation. The five dark-clad mercenaries closed in on him, hunters closing in on prey. With a violent sweeping motion, the monk scattered his newspaper at them, causing paper to fly in their faces, cover their eyes and mouths, buy an instant of distraction. It worked. The men clawed at the paper, tore at it, cast it down and aside. Once freed, they encircled the monk, surged forward at him, fists raised. One man swung; the monk ducked, then launched himself into their midst, flipping from feet to hands to feet again. The one who seemed to be the leader swung again at the monk; again, the monk dodged the blow skillfully -- with the result that the leader wound up hitting one of his own men. A well-placed kick, and another mercenary went flying into the newsstand, bringing down a cascade of paper that half buried him. The monk spun and ran. Instinct led him down into the bowels of the city, into the subway station. Behind him, the voice of the leader rang out. "Get him!" The monk increased his speed, hurrying down to the station. It would have been wiser to lose himself in the city; there were few places to hide in the subway, especially if no trains happened to be arriving or departing at an auspicious time. Yet he felt drawn, with a certainty he had learned long ago to trust, to head southbound at Bishop Square. Behind him, his pursuers' steps rang out on the stairs. At the same time, Kar was still heading north -- this time at full sprint, gasping beneath the weight of his overstuffed duffel bag. It had been a good day's haul, and he wasn't about to let himself get caught with it. He also couldn't afford to slow; the cops were still in pursuit -- at least two of them at last backward glance. And they seemed to be gaining on him. For the first time in a long time, Kar let himself feel afraid. Maybe this was what the unsettled feeling he'd had for weeks was trying to tell him: that he was going to get caught, and that he might as well give up his life of crime now, for good. That hardly seemed an option at the moment. Jail seemed a more likely outcome. He couldn't exactly stop in midstride, turn to the nearest cop, hand over his duffel bag, and say, "Here, Officer, just take this and let's call it even, shall we?" And go off to start life afresh. Not going to happen. And then, in the midst of his mad, anaerobic dash, Kar felt his fear transform into something very different, very odd: a sense of destiny, as if for the first time, he was no longer running away from something, but running toward. On the other end of the same platform, the monk was likewise running at top speed from his pursuers...but very quickly saw his way blocked by a crowd waiting at a broken turnstile. A repairman crouched over it, tinkering away with a small tool. The monk could not let his progress be hindered. He reached into his pocket for a token, then launched himself upward and vaulted over the broken turnstile, flipping the token to the repairman as he flew past. As he ran off, a glance over his shoulder confirmed that the dark-clad mercenaries were not so polite: they had brazenly drawn automatic weapons and were now brutally shoving their way through the terrified crowd. In the midst of his high-speed dash, the monk felt pity for the innocents being pushed and frightened, all because of his presence here; even more, he felt pity for the mercenaries pursuing him. They had been paid to do so, and -- caught up in the hypnotic pull of this world, of samsara, with its illusory glittering riches -- they did not know the truth of who and what they were pursuing, or why. He longed to cease his running, to stop and explain these things to them, that they might have better understanding... ...but he had tried to do so before, at other times, with other pursuers, with near-disastrous results. He did not fear death: he knew, as his master had taught him, that death could bring the greatest bliss, so long as the soul was prepared. But he dared not die without finding his Next, and he knew the mercenaries would not stop to listen to explanations. They would fire their weapons. He could elude most bullets -- in fact, he had eluded all of them since 1943, when he carelessly permitted one, fired by the Nazi commander, to strike him. Most of all, he dared not stop because he saw before him, on the crowded platform, many more innocent souls awaiting the next train; and he hoped fervently to bring them no harm. And then the monk registered an odd sight: someone running toward him from the opposite direction. Not a mercenary, for he could sense such things about human beings; his training permitted him to see beyond the facades people wished to present, into their souls, and see the goodness or evil there. A man -- perhaps twenty years old, pale-skinned, with cropped brown hair -- both deeply good and deeply troubled, was fleeing with his own burden slung over his shoulder: a worn duffel bag. Despite his speed, he wormed his way through the crowd with considerable physical skill, a grace that reminded the monk of the martial-arts exercises he had performed with his brothers. Farther beyond came his pursuers: the police, a sight that surprised the monk. So this young man was a criminal...? How could he have so misjudged him? Yet another sight worried the monk. He realized, with an abruptness that permitted him to take no action, that both groups -- the mercenaries chasing him, and the police chasing the young man -- were about to meet. And he noted, with concern, a young mother, oblivious of how perilously close she and her six-year-old daughter stood to the platform's edge. The mother, smiling and unaware of the two groups bearing down on her, knelt down to adjust her daughter's shoe. The child stared down at the affected shoe, her gaze innocent and somber, a doll clutched in her hand. In the space of less than a human heartbeat, the collision occurred: one wave of human flesh struck another, with a group of commuters caught in between. The young man and the monk both managed to spin themselves free of entanglements of arms and legs and bodies, but policemen and mercenaries both plowed into professionals, with disastrous results. As the crowd swelled to the edge of the platform, the little girl teetered on the precipice above the tracks. The monk watched with horror as, rather than let go of the doll and use her arms to fight for balance, she grasped the doll harder, fearful of losing her treasure... Grasping, the Buddha said, is the root of all suffering. ...and plunged downward, onto the train tracks. "Katie!" the mother shrieked, with such ferocity it could be heard above the din. The crowd quieted at once; mindful of the police, the mercenaries holstered their weapons at once and lost themselves in the crowd. Even before they left, the monk had already leaped down onto the tracks. Oddly, he was not surprised to find that the young man with the duffel bag leaped down at precisely the same instant. Both men hurried to the little girl, her face red and tear-streaked, her arms still wrapped about her doll. During the fall, her tiny ankle had become twisted and wedged firmly beneath a steel railroad tie. The tunnel filled with the wind and roar of an oncoming train. The duffel bag still slung over his shoulder, the young man stared down, lips parted, brow furrowed, in despair. His expression indicated clearly that he saw the girl's situation as hopeless...and nonetheless, could not bring himself to leave her lying in the path of the train. The monk knew better: he had been trained to see hope in the most hopeless of all situations, possibility in the midst of the greatest impossibility. Over the roar of the coming train, he shouted at the young man. "Grab her leg -- get ready to pull!" The young man hesitated. On his expressive, handsome face the monk saw played out the battle between grasping and surrender: the duffel bag contained items very dear to the young man, items he was reluctant to part with. But the struggle was brief, and the goodness the monk had detected in the young man won. He tossed the duffle bag aside, and with both hands took hold of the girl's leg, firmly but tenderly. On the platform, an awestruck crowd watched in silence as the distraught mother screamed again. "Oh my God -- help her! Help my baby!!!" With detachment, the monk noted the increased rushing of wind and noise, the growing vibration beneath his feet as the train neared. He drew in a deep, calming breath, focused his mind on the Buddha, and ran his fingers over the railroad tie. At last, he wrapped his hands around the tie and began to pull. The young American watched in stunned disbelief as the railroad tie trembled -- not from the approaching subway car, but from the monk's impossible effort. The monk ignored all -- the sound of the train, the young man's gaping stare, the crying child -- and remembered only the Buddha. Only the Truth. He pulled harder, but felt no effort. The thick steel yielded slightly upward, just enough so that the young man slipped the girl's leg free with ease. A policeman on the platform watched the entire event in amazement; had he not been surrounded by a crowd, which included two of his fellow officers, he would have doubted what he had seen. He knew well enough that eyewitness accounts were often faulty and suspect, including his own. But too many people saw what he saw: the perpetrator -- of all things, a perp who'd had the nerve to slap an officer in his own cuffs! -- and an Asian man jump onto the tracks to rescue the little girl. The Asian had to have been some sort of martial-arts wizard -- bending the tracks with his bare hands, leaving the perp to pull the little kid free. It had been a miracle, and the frantic mother had cried aloud in joy...then, all too cruelly, the train had roared into the station, bearing down on them. There'd been no time. The cop considered himself tough; he felt he'd seen it all. But at that moment, he'd closed his eyes, and wished he'd been able to close his ears, as well, so that he couldn't hear the mother's agonized screams. The train -- the express, no stops -- had howled by. There followed a second of aghast silence, in which the cop opened his eyes, but couldn't bring himself to look down. Beside him, someone tried to grab the mother and keep her face averted, but she wrenched free. The policeman steeled himself and looked down at last; it was his duty to take control of the situation, to call for paramedics to remove the bodies, to protect the crowd and move it away from the tragedy before anyone else fell onto the tracks. One of his fellow officers had already made her way to the scene and was trying to comfort the hysterical mother. But the bodies he expected to see weren't there. No mangled perp, no Asian man.... And on the opposite platform, tousled but unharmed, stood the little girl, alone and squalling at the top of her lungs. Her doll, the only victim, lay crushed on the tracks between them. Copyright © 2003 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

1943 -- the Year of the Ram. In the Temple of Sublime Truth, high in the Himalayas, a master monk prepares to transfer an ancient scroll to his young protégé. The scroll holds the key to an unspeakable power, one which in the wrong hands could destroy the world. According to prophecy, the young monk will become the steward of the scroll for the next sixty years -- five times the Year of the Ram. But to do so, he must sacrifice everything he has -- including his name.