"Cao ni ma,"
Jowa whispered. It was a curse in Mandarin. Fuck your mother. Fuck your mother, Sui.
They nodded their thanks to the woman and began to walk away.
"We should have taken him to the other place," the dropka woman said in a hollow tone behind them. "Alta wanted to go there. Maybe he would be safe there."
Shan turned back. "The other place?"
"Where the shadow clans sometimes meet. The lama field, the children call it, but only the ghosts of lamas live there."
Khitai had shown the place to the zheli, Shan recalled. It was why Batu had insisted on going there. "Why did Alta want to go there?"
The woman shook her head with a sad smile. "Lau had given them work to do, a collection of autumn flowers. Some other boys told him many flowers grew there, that Lau would be pleased with flowers from the lama field. He said the boy Khitai liked to go there, that he often persuaded his foster families to take him to the lama field for a day, that Khitai would meet the new boy with the strange accent and play in the rocks there." She meant Micah, Shan knew. Khitai liked to meet the American boy at the lama field. When the dropka looked up at Shan he thought she was going to burst into tears. "It was for Lau. They thought they had to complete their last assignment from Lau, so she could rest in peace." She looked away, and her head dropped almost as if she were falling asleep. Jowa pulled him away.
"The ghosts of lamas," Jowa repeated in a haunted voice. Shan took a moment to understand. The lama field had another dead lama now. The Yakde Lama.
"There was no storm that night Aha was attacked," Shan sighed. "We were only a few miles away."
"No," Jowa said slowly, as if fitting the pieces together as he spoke. "But the killer saw something like lightning, cursed Sui, and ran away. Which means it wasn't Sui who attacked Alta."
"She could have the words wrong," Shan suggested.
"I don't think so," Jowa said. And neither did Shan.
Jowa led him through another of the heavy security doors to a small room where four men sat at a wood plank table, studying maps. Planning. Shan recognized the young purba who had met them on the trail and driven away their truck. The youth looked up and nodded at Shan without rancor, a conspiratorial nod. The others looked at Jowa, not Shan, with unhappy, impatient expressions. A fifth man, at a table with thermoses, turned as they entered, a thin Uighur with a crooked nose. Fat Mao. Explaining that he had just arrived from Yoktian he filled two mugs with tea and handed them to the two new arrivals. Shan studied the room. Wires hung loose from several conduits along the ceiling. A tangle of pipes ran overhead, some painted red. There was a yellow sign warning of radiation exposure painted on the back of the door. The walls were almost covered with more maps, many bearing the legend
Nei Lou
across the top. Scattered across the maps were colored pins and bits of paper taped to their surface. Beside the maps on the table sat a portable computer.
"I told them about the boys," Jowa said. "About Gendun and Lokesh. They want to know where the murders took place, on the maps." As he spoke, one of the Tibetans pulled his chair back and gestured for Shan to join them. Together Jowa and Shan studied a map of the region and agreed on the location of the Red Stone camp, the road where Alta had been attacked, the canyon where Kublai was killed, and the lama field where Khitai was buried. The young purba inserted pins on penciled numbers on the spots, one for Suwan, two for Alta, three for Kublai, and four for Khitai. He ran the point of his pencil in the air over the pins as though to outline the route taken by the murderer, a pattern.
As he did so a hand reached over the table and inserted another pin. "Five," Fat Mao said, and he inserted the pin at the head of a valley ten miles from Yoktian. "Not killed," he said quickly as Shan looked up in alarm. "Jakli and her—" he began. "Last night Jakli and others were traveling to the valley because they heard one of the zheli boys was there, with a shadow clan. It was getting dark. They heard a sheep crying in great pain."
They. Fat Mao meant Jakli and her cousins, Shan knew. She had joined the riders from her clan who were searching for the boys.
"They looked down into a pass, where a rough road entered, and saw a sheep tangled in a vine by a tree. Or, that was the way it was supposed to appear. When they got lower they used binoculars and saw that the sheep was tied with wire to the tree and was lying on the ground, bloody." Fat Mao touched one pin, then another, as he spoke. "Suddenly a boy appeared, running to help the sheep. But the moment the boy reached the sheep, a man dressed in black clothes leapt on him. The boy fought back. One of the men with Jakli had a rifle, and they shot the boy's attacker when he stood up for a moment. He was hit somewhere by the bullet and ran into the shadows. A moment later a black utility vehicle raced out of the trees. The boy had been beaten," the Uighur continued, "and his shirt was ripped open at the neck, but he was not seriously injured. The sheep's rear leg tendons had been cut. They had to shoot it."
"Who was it?" Jowa asked urgently.
Instead of replying, Fat Mao inserted a disc into the computer and tapped a key. A screen appeared, with a heading that read
Yoktian People's Clinic.
He shifted the cursor and a list of recent patients appeared. "See for yourself. Last night, three hours after the attack, admitted for a minor gunshot wound to the forearm."
Shan and Jowa leaned forward and read the screen. Major Bao Kangmei.
"I thought," Jowa said heavily, "that I would feel better when we knew for certain."
Shan nodded silently. The knobs were untouchable. The Ministry of Justice would never prosecute the knobs. It would be suicide for the purbas or the Maos to act against Bao. Jowa was right. It did not feel like closure. It felt like they had crept into the beast's lair and glimpsed it, only to see how huge it was. Moreover, Shan was convinced more than ever that Bao was only part of the answer. He gestured toward the map. "There is one more," he said in a taut voice, and pointed near the edge of the desert, where he believed Karachuk lay. "Lau. The ani. She was the first to be killed."
The boy hesitated, then drew a number on the spot. A zero.
"It's been too easy for Bao. Most of the boys lived with known economic units," Jowa said. "The herding enterprises. Each enterprise has a registered set of pastures, a known set of camps."
"Known to the knobs," Fat Mao said.
"And to the Brigade, and to the prosecutor, and to anyone who can access the software reports," Shan added with a look at the Uighur.
"You mean you think it is not only Bao," Fat Mao said.
"Sure," Jowa interjected. "It's not. There's lots of knobs. A barracks full of helpers in Yoktian."
Shan shrugged. "Seeing him attack a boy last night still doesn't tell us his goal. But it means he's not stopping with Khitai. It means," he said in a hushed voice, expressing the thought as it entered his mind, "that he did not get the Jade Basket. Khitai gave it to someone else. It's still out there with the boys. And the key is still the death of Lau. The boys could be found, once Lau was exposed. Once the killer knew that Lau was Tibetan, that she was an ani, then he knew that the boy he wanted was one of the zheli. After that, finding the boys was easy."
"But after all these years," Jowa said. "Why now, why would they suddenly suspect Lau?"
"Because there was a meeting with a general in Urumqi," Shan said. "Everything happened after that meeting. Kaju was assigned to Yoktian, Lau's political reliability was questioned. Ko began his campaign to buy out the clans."
Fat Mao looked up. "The Poverty Eradication Scheme?" He spat the words like a curse. "Surely it's not connected."
"I think it is. The memo you took back from Xu. Did you read it?"
The Uighur nodded.
The oldest of the Tibetans, a man with the hard-bitten features of a khampa, stood and poured himself some tea. "You know his name?" he asked. "This general in Urumqi?"
"Rongqi," Shan said. "That's all I know. From the army. Now vice chairman of the Brigade. But they still call him general."
The man glanced at the youth, who quickly rose and left the room. Moments later he reappeared carrying a thick, oversized ledger. He laid it on the table and began leafing through its pages, Jowa looking over his shoulder as he read.
Shan had seen such books before. The Lotus Book, the purbas called it, the unofficial compilation of crimes against the people of Tibet, the expanding chronicle of the people and places and treasures lost since the Chinese invasion. It was compiled and copied by the purbas primarily from interviews with survivors as information became available and thus was in no particular order.
As the young purba and Jowa scanned the pages, Shan spoke of Gendun and Lokesh with the others. People would watch, they pledged, on both sides of the border. It was too risky to send more Tibetans into Xinjiang but Fat Mao promised he would take word when he left in the morning. There were places that were always watched by the lung ma. Glory Camp. Knob barracks. And hospitals.
"How will you go?" Shan asked.
The khampa answered the question. No one was allowed to leave a vehicle anywhere near the silo sanctuary. Two hours away, by foot, was a road, or what passed for a road, that connected to the road through Kerriya Pass. Sometime between six and seven in the morning a truck would go by carrying six wooden barrels and three sheep in the back. It would stop if three rocks were placed in a line at a certain spot in the road.
"I will go too," Shan said.
As the khampa silently nodded, there was a rap on the door and a man and a woman, wearing the fleece vests of dropka, carried in food on a plank of wood. A large bowl of tsampa and pickled vegetables. Shan ate quickly, then lay on one of the pallets along the wall. He sat up for a moment and looked for Fat Mao. The Uighur was missing, and a door at the rear of the room was slightly open. Shan stood and stepped into the doorway.
"No!" Fat Mao called as he saw Shan, putting his hands up as though to push him back. Shan quickly retreated as the Uighur emerged through the door and shut it.
"One more thing," Shan said. "The silver bridle from Nikki. Someone gave it to a Mao, to get it to Jakli and Marco. Can you find out who it was?"
Fat Mao shrugged, as if not understanding the significance, then nodded and turned to the maps.
Shan returned to the pallet. He closed his eyes but did not sleep at first, for he was replaying the scene he had glimpsed in the adjacent room. Four figures at a long bench, in front of a large chalkboard filled with translated words and alphabets. Two of those inside, a man and a woman, were carving slabs of wood into wedges. The other two were inscribing them with black ink. He had inadvertently discovered at least one of the ways the Maos and purbas communicated to their networks, using the ancient Kharoshthi text on simulated tablets. Ingenious, he thought. The knobs would not be able to translate the extinct tongue and they were so full of resentment for the tablets that they would simply destroy any they found.
He had finally drifted into slumber when the young purba cried out. Shan shot up and stood at the Tibetan's back as he read out loud. "The first entry says Colonel Rongqi, but that was twenty-five years ago." The purba read quickly at first, then more slowly, pausing more and more frequently as the words sank in. Rongqi had three tours of duty in Tibet, the last two especially requested due to what one file glimpsed in Lhasa said was his extraordinary patriotism and, perhaps, the fact that his father had been killed in 1961 by khampa guerrillas. He had become renowned in the People's Liberation Army for subjugation techniques, even to the extent of becoming a special lecturer on the topic at one of the PLA's training academies. During his first tour he had been notorious for forcing public copulation between monks and nuns, typically in the courtyards of gompas before they were leveled by his explosives experts. By forcing them to break their vows of celibacy, he forced them out of the church. Thirty-six gompas in central Tibet, north of Lhasa, had been looted and leveled on his orders, usually under his personal supervision. Pieces of two huge bronze Buddhas from one of the gompas had been seen by witnesses at a foundry in Tientsen, near Beijing. During his cleansing program, six hundred ninety-six monks and nuns had disappeared. Shan asked if Lau's nunnery, built beside the small gompa of the Yakde Lama near Shigatse, was on the list of those destroyed by Rongqi. The purba read silently, then looked up with a slow nod.
"She recognized him that day in Urumqi," Shan said with a chill in his voice. "The butcher had come back from her past." He shuddered, thinking of the horror that must have shaken the sturdy Lau, the momentary reaction that had given everything away.
The purba read on. During his second tour Rongqi had been commended by the Chairman himself for an initiative he called Sterilize the Seed, based on the principle that the Tibetan religious establishment was held together by its reincarnate lamas and that the death of every such lama represented a political opportunity for the people's government. Ideally, the government should assure the extinction of the reincarnate line by preventing the identification of the new incarnation. Rongqi accomplished this in over thirty documented cases, by destroying the tokens used to identify the new incarnation, imprisoning the lamas who traditionally were charged with the process of identifying new lamas, and, in one case, dynamiting and permanently draining the oracle lake consulted for the new lama.
