Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (32 page)

Dakpo pointed to his sandals. “With these, no. I gave the only boots here to the monks. “But,” he added, rising, “I can guide you for the first hour and point the way from there. It is difficult,” he warned. “Not even the wild goats can do it.”

They paused every quarter hour to scan the slopes with Yates’ binoculars. As they rushed up one steep switchback after another, Shan caught Yates looking back with worry toward the smoke of Tumkot’s chimneys, visible now over a ridge, the village that had been saved in the deal that had betrayed the rebels. The hermit had not actually denied that Ama Apte was the traitor. And the fortuneteller, while secretly trying to force Yates out of the country, had deliberately hidden the fact that she had known his father.

The hermit led them at a near-frantic pace after the first steep slope, through tight rock passages, under a narrow waterfall, around fields of jagged snow bound scree, through several frigid streams gorged with meltwater. He halted abruptly as they navigated along a glacier-shattered landscape, a fractured wall of granite on one side of the trail, a treacherous vertical drop on the other.

“If you watch carefully, there is an old trail,” he announced, “at least the shadow of an old trail. When there is a choice to be made, always go up.”

Yates and Shan exchanged confused glances then the hermit stepped aside to reveal a two-foot-wide hole in the ledge they walked on, no different from a dozen others they had passed. Except that this one had a barely perceptible legend painted on a rock above it, a mantra to the mother protector. Shan removed his pack and lowered himself, taking it on faith he would find purchase in the deep shadow below, and in fact discovering slots carved in the wall like a ladder, leading to a flat stone floor eight feet below. A moment later Yates had joined him.

“Lha gyal lo!” Dakpo called as he handed their packs down.

They had dropped into a twisting corridor of stone that soon opened onto a steep sheltered slope dotted with heather and wildflowers. The granite wall they had taken to be the side of the mountain revealed itself to be a massive outcropping that hid the slope and the path above it. They climbed without speaking, spotting fresh boot prints where rare patches of soil showed, at every junction in the path following the hermit’s advice to take the more difficult, steeper route, climbing up narrow shelves that had been chiseled into the stone like stairs. Yates moved with increasing urgency, hesitating not a moment when they reached a tall chimney, grabbing the narrow bars of old juniper wood that had been fixed between the stone walls. They climbed another steep slope that glistened with pockets of snow, passing a row of stone columns, then halted at a path through a high wall marked by a crumbling stone cairn.

At the end of the path they emerged onto a broad, nearly flat shelf almost two hundred feet wide and a quarter mile long. Directly to the south a glacier rose toward the horizon. To the southeast was a sweeping view of Everest and her sister peaks Lhotse and Makalu. To the north, in the shadow of the massive granite wall, were several crude structures of dry laid stone. Yates took a step and raised a strange jingling sound. He kicked and loosened several long brass cylinders, bearing the green patina of age. Bullet casings.

There was no sign of anyone, though in several patches of snow Shan saw more fresh imprints of boots. He willed himself not to follow them, to move instead toward the ragged lip of the deep crevasse that ran along the eastern edge of the little plateau.

“We came for evidence,” Shan reminded Yates, who insisted on searching each of the crude, crumbling structures before joining Shan at the lip of the crevasse. Lying at the lip, with the American anchoring his legs, Shan searched the fissure with the binoculars, studying the jumble of broken slabs and boulders that lined the bottom nearly two hundred feet below. Much of it was shrouded in shadow, though at its end it curved toward the southeast, where many of the slabs of rock were lit by the sun. The unlikely odds of discovering Megan Ross were compounded by the many gaps between boulders and slabs where a corpse dropped from above could easily have fallen. Seeing nothing, Shan rose and walked slowly along the top, studying the ground. At last, less than fifty feet from where the crevasse opened out onto the side of the mountain, he found older prints in a patch of snow, grown faint with freezing and thawing. There was more, a long indentation where something heavy had been dragged to the edge. He laid down again over the lip and instantly saw a patch of red below, the color of the windbreaker the woman had been wearing when she died.

“You’re some kind of wizard, Shan,” the American said in a hollow voice over his shoulder. “All these hundreds of miles of wilderness and you come right to her.”

Shan eased back from the lip and stood. “From the beginning the killer has tried to make it seem that one of the old rebels committed the crimes. If he ever needed more proof he would see to it that Public Security found this place, would make sure they knew this was where the rebels secretly disposed of bodies, that only one of them would know how to find it.”

Yates emptied his pack, dumping out the climbing gear at Shan’s feet.

“I can’t go down on the ropes,” Shan declared. “I’ve never done it before.”

“And I can’t do what has to be done at the bottom,” Yates countered in a grim tone.

Shan, filled with a new form of dread, lowered his head and listened to the American’s instructions as Yates produced two harnesses and began to fasten lines to a huge boulder near the edge.

SHE LAY ON her side as if sleeping, her face nearly as pale as the snow she rested on, one arm jutting at an unnatural angle from under her head. The cold, dry air had kept Megan Ross preserved as it did the dead climbers of Everest, though she had not been there so long as to become affixed to the stone. Shan gripped himself, telling himself not to look into her open eyes, then rolled the body over, straightening the arm along her side. But as he worked he seemed to feel her gaze, and when he finally looked into her face he saw the confusion and longing that had been there when she had died but also something else, an oddly plaintive expression. He glanced at Yates, who sat with his back to Shan, carefully avoiding looking at his dead friend, and was about to begin unwrapping the length of rope he had carried around his waist to fashion a harness for the body when he saw the bloodstains along the buttons of her shirt, faint but unmistakable fingerprints. With a shudder he unfastened the buttons, revealing a small silver gau, Ross’s prayer box, also bearing the marks of her bloody fingers at its latch. In his mind Shan replayed the awful moment when Megan Ross had died in his arms. He had almost forgotten that she had pushed her gau toward him, at the moment had simply assumed she had wanted to show him she was Buddhist. But now the fingerprints told him she had fingered the latch after being shot. She could have told him her killer’s name, could have explained everything with her last breath, but instead she had shown him the gau.

Glancing back at Yates, who had retreated further down the long slab that marked the opening of the crevasse, Shan opened the ornate box. There were prayers inside, rolled up in the traditional fashion, a turquoise stone, and a grainy photo torn from a book. He studied the photo with a chill then folded it again and buttoned it inside his shirt pocket.

As he reached Yates, Shan was rethreading the rope around his waist.

“You have to put it around her,” the American reminded him. “Make a harness.”

“No,” Shan said, “I’ve changed my mind. She doesn’t need to go down to the world anymore.”

The American searched Shan’s face, then shrugged. “If we took her down her body would become the star attraction in an international media circus,” Yates observed, obviously grateful he would not have to spend hours carrying the body of his dead friend. “What family she had she wasn’t close to,” he added, as if trying to persuade himself. “She was always going to die on a mountain.”

“In the Himalayas,” Shan said, “half those who do are never recovered.”

“I will let her friends know she died the way she wanted, doing something someone had never done, making her own rules, at the top of the world.” Yates offered a melancholy grin then rose slowly, bracing himself, then turned and walked back with Shan to the dead woman. He produced a wool cap from his pocket and placed it on her head, then cupped her cold cheek in his hand. “I want her to be more comfortable than this,” he declared. “I want the mother mountain to know she is here.”

They carried her down to a flat slab that faced southeast and rested her back against another rock, her hands in her lap, her legs, stiff from cold, bent under her as best they could. Yates stepped back, returned to straighten her wool cap, and nodded. Megan Ross was facing Everest, meditating, as she often did before a strenuous climb. Shan thought of the strange chain of events that had brought them to the dead woman, of how he had grown close to her after her death. Ama Apte had been right, Shan realized. Ever since the American woman had died, the mother mountain had been using her. The shining light of her death had guided him to the truth he so desperately needed.

HALF AN HOUR later, his arms aching from the climb back up to the plateau, Shan knelt in one of the old rock shelters, coaxing a smoldering pile of dried goat dung into flames to boil tea. He looked up to see Yates bend into the shadows of another of the crumbling structures, probing a pile of debris, extracting several scorched sticks. The American carried them back to Shan, studying them, deep in reflection, until he finally dropped them by the smoky fire. They were not sticks, but charred remnants of a wooden crate. On one, still visible after so many decades, was stenciled the words CAUTION! AMMUNITION! in English..

Yates was already away when Shan looked up, walking the perimeter, eyes on the ground for more evidence. As he watched, the American’s head snapped up and he flattened himself against a boulder, warily watching a cleft in the rocks at the far side of the plateau. Shan heard voices as he reached the American’s side, then in quick succession three ringing blows that he recognized as a hammer driving a metal piton into rock.

They edged through the cleft to find four figures working hard to erect a leanto of rock and canvas against the rock face. The smaller clearing where Kypo and three men in red and yellow climbing parkas worked was sheltered on three sides by the rock face and high outcroppings, with a shallow pool that caught meltwater as it trickled from the cliff above. Here had been an inner camp, Shan realized, as he saw the ruins of several more rock shelters, imagining the scene decades earlier when it was the hidden headquarters of the rebels. There were still vestiges of that time, a yak hair rope hanging loose from an iron hook driven into a crack in the rock face, faded paint on a flat boulder in the image of the flag of free Tibet.

Suddenly Kypo stop hammering the pitons being used for support ropes. The Tibetan spun about and advanced on Shan and Yates, the hammer still in his hand. The three men bent low behind one of the old walls, as if hiding. As they did so Shan glimpsed the red robes they wore under their parkas, which bore the logo of Tsipon’s climbing company.

“I want to speak with them,” Shan said.

“No. She says we must stay away from you. Both of you.”

Shan followed Kypo’s uneasy gaze toward the edge of the plateau, where it opened to a view of the Himalayas marching along the border to the east. Tumkot’s astrologer sat near the edge of the plateau, one hand resting on a low mound of stones and earth, on which a few wildflowers bloomed.There was an odd contentment on the face of Ama Apte as she looked up to acknowledge him. “Once this was the most secret place in all of Tibet,” she said. “Now all the world comes here.”

Shan was about to quietly settle beside the fortuneteller when he heard the crunch of gravel under running boots behind him.

“Ever since I arrived you’ve wanted me gone!” came an angry voice. Yates hovered over Ama Apte’s back, his face so fierce Shan braced himself lest the American try to strike the woman.

“You found out about what I was doing from Megan! You knew I was trying to find my father and you destroyed the evidence! You sabotaged my equipment, planted evidence so I would be deported. And now I find you here. It’s as good as a confession! You betrayed me because you betrayed my father!”

“Your father would have been gone from here, would be alive, but for me,” the Tibetan woman agreed in a tight voice, her gaze back on the horizon.

The words seemed to confuse Yates. “Then you admit it,” he said in a quieter, though harsh tone.

“It’s always felt as though I betrayed him,” Ama Apte agreed.

“How can you live with yourself?” Yates snapped.

“I think,” Shan said, fighting an unexpected melancholy, “she has only been trying to protect you, to help you.” He could see the tears now, flooding down Ama Apte’s cheeks. “You came to find your father, didn’t you?”

The American glanced in confusion at Shan. “What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t listened,” Shan said. “The old hermit told us how Ama Apte couldn’t flee across the glacier, that she had to be with family in the village. You told me yourself you couldn’t understand what force it was that kept your father on this side of the border when he could have fled a hundred times, when his own unit was ordering him, begging him to come back.”

Shan turned to Kypo, who now stood with a fearful expression by his mother. “You always wear sunglasses outside, like lots of Tibetans, because the sun in the thin air causes so many cataracts. But inside it’s different. Inside you wear contact lenses, one of the only Tibetans I know to do so, lenses that probably cost half a year’s income to buy.”