Текст книги "The Lord of Death"
Автор книги: Eliot Pattison
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Полицейские детективы
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Chapter Two
With his one good eye Shan watched the dead prisoner’s hand twitch, disturbing the flies that fed on its oozing wound. He had seen this before, the reflex of a laboratory frog, in those who had recently died after torture from electric shock. The sinewy fingers kept grabbing at thin air, as if frantically seeking the rainbow rope that pulled good Buddhists to heaven. With a stab of pain he raised his head from his pallet high enough to follow the dead arm, in search of its owner. Then a deep, shuddering moan escaped his throat. It was his own.
With agonizing effort he pushed himself upright against the painted cinder-block wall, ignoring the numbness in his legs, exploring his blind eye with his fingers to confirm it was only swollen shut. The pain that erupted as he lifted his head was like none he had known for years. His head swirled as he tried to study his cell, noticing pools of fresh blood and vomit on the concrete floor below a filthy porcelain sink. The last thing he saw as he slid down the wall, losing consciousness again, was a faded political poster on the wall outside the cell, an image of workers with radiant smiles over the caption REJOICE IN THE WORK OF THE PEOPLE.
When he woke again it was night, the only light a single dim bulb hanging in the middle of the corridor of cells, over a metal table with a blackboard easel beside it. He rose onto unsteady legs by pushing against the wall and took a step forward. The cell floor heaved upward and his knees collapsed. Again he struggled to his feet and took another step, using the lessons of his Tibetan teachers to fight the agony of each movement, until at last he crumpled onto the floor in a front corner. He gripped the bars of the door to pull himself into the light to examine the work of his captors. His left arm was mottled with blood, the skin scraped away in several places. His lips were bloody and swollen, several upper teeth loose and bleeding. The prisoner instincts that had lurked within him ever since leaving the gulag took over, taking inventory of the instruments used on him. A baton to his jaw and shoulders. A club covered with coarse sandpaper to his arm, which lifted patches of skin wherever it touched, a favorite of rural garrisons. Steel boot toes to his shins. Boot heels on the top of his feet. He closed his eyes, collecting himself, then explored the inside of his cheek with his tongue. There was no lingering taste, no metallic tinge. They had not begun to use chemicals on him.
He pulled his legs under him, in the meditation position, clenching his teeth against the pain, and stared at a little oblong window with wire-reinforced glass near the top of the back wall. Stars made their transit across the window. He dipped his finger into the nearest pool of blood and drew a circle on the wall, then a circle within a circle, then patterns within the circles. As he worked on the mandala, his mind clearing, the hairs on his neck began to rise. He turned to see the glow of a cigarette from an open cell at the end of the dark corridor. Someone was sitting on a cot, watching him.
Shan twisted, grabbed another bar, and with an effort that sent stabs of pain through his shoulders pulled himself around to squarely face the corridor. He stared back at the moving ember of the man who watched, until a new tide of pain surged within, lighting a fire at the back of his head that left him writhing on the floor. He faded in and out of consciousness, his mind churning with memories and visions, his body rioting in pain, leaving him unable to discern what was real and what was not. The bodies of the escaped monks were stacked like firewood, with a knob officer pouring gas on them. His father, the professor, recited Shakespeare in short, gasping syllables as he was tortured with burning sticks. Shan stood at the summit of Mount Chomolungma with Tenzin and the blond woman, then the wind seized them and threw all three into a shaft where they floated with the bodies of dead climbers.
He became aware of dim light filtering through the small window. Hours had passed. He was lying on the floor again, sprawled in his own filth. A man paced along the front of the cell, his black officer’s boots glistening as they passed a pool of sunlight. The man paused, spoke to someone. A moment later someone threw a bucket of frigid water over Shan.
He did not react. Someone cursed. Someone murmured new orders. A metal door opened and shut, then opened and shut again. Shan watched through a fog of pain as the officer began emptying a plastic bottle into the bucket.
With the first acrid sting of the odor Shan struggled upward, clenching his jaw in agony, pushing himself forward, reaching for the bars. He knew from experience that some knobs liked to throw ammonia on prisoners.
“Risen from your nap at last,” the officer observed in a slow, refined voice with an accent that sent a chill down Shan’s back. He had been trained in Beijing, probably was from one of the anonymous disposal units that cleaned up embarrassments for the Party elite. New foreboding rose within him. Why would such a man be sent to deal with Shan?
Shan gripped the bars, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. Blood trickled down one leg. He could not take a deep breath without wincing from the pain. He closed his eyes, centering himself a moment, then fixed the officer with a steady gaze. “I need some tea,” he declared in a hoarse voice.
Though the officer’s eyes were still in shadow Shan could not miss his bloodless grin. He turned with quick, whispered orders and a jailer hastened down the corridor.
No one spoke again until Shan was ushered to the metal table in the center of the corridor and chained to a chair, a mug of tea in front of him. He held the mug to his nose before drinking, letting the steam burn away the cloud inside his head, then drained nearly half the near-scalding liquid in one gulp.
“My name is Major Cao,” the officer announced as he filled another mug from a tea thermos. “We will be working together to resolve things.”
“Traditionally,” Shan said in a ragged voice as the officer settled into a chair across from him, “interrogation begins before the torture. It might be-” he searched for a word– “counterproductive to incapacitate a prisoner before seeing if he is going to cooperate.”
“You misunderstand,” Cao replied. “What they did to you was just a going-away present. Every Public Security officer in this district, every soldier of that detail, has been reassigned because of what you did. Most to desert outposts where they won’t be heard of for years. They felt an urge to express their true feelings to you before they left.”
Shan watched in chilled silence as the officer opened a tattered, stained yellow file on the table with familiar characters inscribed boldly across the front. The man was a master of his craft. It would not have been difficult to ascertain Shan’s identity from the prison registration number tattooed on his arm, but he had thought his file had been buried so deep no one would ever find it. With a new, desperate realization he looked up. “What day is it?” It would have taken at least forty-eight hours to retrieve the file from distant Lhadrung.
Cao ignored him. “Reads like one of those operas written for the Party,” the officer observed dryly as he leafed through the file. “Tragic misjudgments lead a reliable cadre down an antisocial path, at each stage sinking him deeper among the criminal element until, in a last gasp of self-hate, he commits an assassination. His subconscious longing to be executed finally finds voice.” He spoke looking toward the empty cells as if to an audience before turning to Shan. “If the Party doesn’t decide to muzzle it your execution will make headlines all over China.”
Shan clenched his abdomen, resisting the threats in Cao’s words, finally piercing the chaos of pain and fear that welled within. “She was an official then? The one shot in the belly?”
“His rage was so blind it affected his memory,” the officer continued toward the cells before turning back to Shan. “You destroyed a paragon of society, severed the head of Beijing’s favored monument. You, Comrade Shan, assassinated the Minister of Tourism.”
Shan stared into the shadows, a new kind of pain surging through his body. Images returned, of the dead Chinese woman, of the blond woman who had died in his arms, her final mysterious words sounding like a question to the mountain. Finally he gestured to his mug and Cao refilled it with another icy grin. “What day is it?” Shan asked again, in a voice that quivered. “Is it Thursday yet?”
Major Cao produced a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a drawer in the table and carefully drew seven blocks joined together, crossed off the first two, and shoved it across to Shan. “For the rest of your life this is all the calendar you will ever need,” he declared.
A wave of nausea swept over Shan. He bent over the steam of his mug again, closing his eyes. “A crime so important will require a real investigation,” he said when he looked up, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Forensic work.”
“You were found clutching one of your victims, soaked in blood. You had the name of the minister’s hotel in your pocket.” With new fear Shan’s hand shot toward his now empty pocket. He had forgotten the paper, could not afford to have Cao know why he had it. “The only other evidence we need,” Cao said, with a gesture toward the file, “is the pathetic story of your life.”
For the first time Shan gazed into the officer’s eyes. “No,” he said, his voice steadier now. “Otherwise they would not have sent for you.”
Cao sighed, as if already fatigued from his work. “A hundred million. That’s what the climbing trade is worth in one year. Beijing asked us to be certain it wasn’t Tibetan separatists or something else that might threaten this vital segment of the economy. An abundance of caution, you might say.”
“So it’s not about murder, it’s about foreign exchange.”
The major stared at Shan as though for the first time, with cool curiosity. “As you are well aware, Inspector Shan, we prefer the subjects of our executions to be conscious, so they can express their remorse in their final moments. But you can be strapped to a chair and still recite your sins. Do you know how many bones and nerves there are in the feet and ankles?”
Shan fixed Cao with a level gaze as he considered the man’s words. “Beijing asked you. So you’re not from Beijing. That means Lhasa. Provincial headquarters.”
Cao’s eyes flared. Shan had hit a nerve.
“When you were unconscious, you shouted out a name, again and again. Ko. Who is this Ko? Should we be seeking a coconspirator?”
Shan’s gut tightened into a knot. He feigned another spasm of pain to hide his reaction to the name. “A political parable might be enough to explain things to the public, Major. But in the end, in the final secret discussions about the death of a state minister, the State Council will expect proof. Forensic work. You seem to shy away from the topic.”
Cao lifted a another mug from beside the tea thermos, squeezing it so hard Shan thought it might shatter.
“I was only there by coincidence. I saw the minister’s wounds. She died of a shot at point-blank range,” Shan said. “I had no gunpowder residue on my hands. Did you even bother to check?”
“I arrived twenty-four hours after your arrest. Other officers were responsible for the initial fieldwork.”
“The ones lost in the desert now,” Shan observed.
“I believe some were also sent to oil platforms in the China Sea. The twenty-first century equivalent of Mongolia.”
“Sort of like Lhasa,” Shan observed, “for an ambitious Public Security officer.”
A ligament in Cao’s neck tightened as he stared at Shan. “Some of our country’s greatest security challenges are in Tibet. I am honored to serve the motherland wherever she sends me.”
It was, Shan knew, the code, and tone, of a man who had suffered disappointments in his career. “Did you at least search the rocks?”
“For what?”
“The murder weapon. The murderer obviously knew that Public Security had closed the road and was focused on that bus of monks. He apparently even knew it meant that Public Security had decided the minister didn’t need her usual security detail. He knew he could get close to her as long as he avoided that bus. He also knew he could not afford to be found with the gun.”
“What are you admitting?”
“I am admitting how incompetent Public Security has been. The pistol is in the rocks there, probably no more than two or three hundred feet away.”
“In twenty-four hours you will be begging to show us where it is.”
Shan returned Cao’s stare without expression. “Public Security interrogation is such an inexact science, Major. What you might have in twenty-four hours is either a dead prisoner with no confession or the murder weapon, fresh enough that the elements haven’t damaged its evidentiary value.”
Cao closed the file and covered it with a fist. “Who the hell are you, Shan?”
“I am the sour seed that Public Security always spits out,” Shan said in an earnest voice.
Cao lifted a new folder from the table. “A leading local Party cadre has submitted a petition. He reminds us that the bureau operates a hospital for the criminally insane not far from here. A famous hospital, at least in Public Security circles. The spa, we call it in Lhasa.”
“The yeti factory,” Shan murmured. “The Tibetans call it the yeti factory.”
“No doubt because the spa is producing superhumans.”
“Because inmates sometimes escape and are found wandering aimlessly in the mountains, usually naked, in the snow, with the mental faculties of a large ape.”
Cao’s thin lips did not move but his eyes lit with amusement. “This cadre suggests we owe a duty to the people to cure you before we shoot you, so you can explain to the inhabitants of this county why you shamed them so. I called him in. I asked him what proof he has of your insanity. He said every conversation with you is proof enough.”
So the real torture had begun. Cao undoubtedly had the authority to send him to the knobs’ experimental medical units. Shan had spent time in one before being dumped into the Tibetan gulag over five years earlier. Any sane man who knew about them would rather take a bullet in the skull than be sent to such a place.
Cao rose and circled the table. He was older than Shan had thought at first, and had a gutter of scar tissue along the top of one hand that could only have been made by a bullet.
“Surely, comrade,” the major stated, “since the day you left Beijing in chains, you must have expected that your life would ultimately be claimed by the government.”
Shan stared into his empty cup. “I remember an old uncle telling me I would end my days writing poetry at some mountain retreat, surrounded by singing birds.”
Something low and guttural escaped Cao’s throat. It might have been a laugh. “I have read and reread your background. Especially your early career, when you grew famous for sending high officials to jail for corruption. I even spoke to some of your former colleagues. I begin to understand you. Your defining characteristic is completeness. You must have all the loose ends connected. For you, justice has little to do with judges and courts. Your justice must be absolute, must be cathartic. You must have redemption. It is what I offer you now. Help me avoid calling in the team that waits outside. Make a clean end of it.”
Cao paused, then stepped to the blackboard, tossing a piece of chalk from hand to hand for a moment before quickly writing. “I always enjoy the Japanese verses,” he declared. “Simple, absolute words.” He stepped to the side for Shan to see.
Confession to release the heart, bullet to release the soul,Cao had written. Then Blood spatters on small birds.
“I will take you to the mountains, Shan,” Cao offered in a near whisper. “I will find a place with songbirds.”
Shan read Cao’s strange haiku several times before responding. “Major,” he said at last, “you strike me as vastly overeducated for your job.”
Cao glared at Shan then spun about and disappeared into the shadows. Shan did not look, just listened as the door opened and shut, twice. Guards appeared, unlocking his chains, escorting him to an interrogation room in another hallway off the cell corridor, chaining him to another metal chair. Moments later three men appeared, all wearing white laboratory coats, the oldest one carrying a doctor’s bag. He extracted his instruments slowly, fastidiously laying them in a line on the table. A small stainless-steel hammer. Four dental probes of various sizes. Two pairs of pliers. Several long, very thin, stainless steel needles. Short lengths of latex hose. A tooth extractor.
As they stood staring at him in the odd silent prelude with which such sessions always commenced, Shan grabbed one of the oversized needles. The three men stiffened, stepping back as Shan wielded it like a knife, leaning forward in his chair, swinging the treacherous-looking needle toward them until the chain on his wrist tightened and halted the movement. “Not to disappoint you,” he declared, “but I am no virgin.” With a single swift motion he buried the needle halfway into the bicep of his left arm.
One of the technicians gasped and threw his hand to his mouth as if about to lose the contents of his stomach; the other’s face drained of color. The doctor smiled.
Shan doubted that in all the history of the world anyone had organized the administration of misery and fear as efficiently as Beijing’s Public Security Bureau. The knobs had manuals, charts, entire six month training programs on what they termed physical interrogation. Like all mature sciences, it had its own jargon. Shan, in the hands of a master, had been given what the knobs called a ranging exam, a quick application of each of the primary tools, to gauge which he seemed to be most responsive to. As he had learned from the lamas with whom he had been imprisoned, he had gone to another place, had removed himself from his self. Let it be a storm that rages outside,a lama had once told him, over which you have no control. Stay on the inside, where the storm cannot reach.
He lay on the cell floor where they had thrown him afterward, unaware of anything except the pain that rose and ebbed, gradually becoming curious about the strange white pebble clutched in one hand, until he finally remembered. The knobs, becoming frustrated when he had responded only with silence, had rushed the rest of the session, knowing they would need Cao with them before they began in earnest, reacting only with disgust when, as they had lifted him from the chair, he had vomited onto the table, sending them reeling backward so that they did not notice him palm the tooth they had extracted.
He spat out blood then, steadying his shaking hand, stuffed the tooth back into the socket with a hard shove to seat it. His years in prison had taught him that a tooth so recently removed had a good chance of reattaching to the jaw. Stretching the fingers of his left hand, he rubbed the place where he had punctured his arm. The knobs had not recognized the trick taught to him by an old prisoner years earlier. If you were careful, and lucky enough, you would not only put your interrogators off their pace, you could also achieve a crude acupuncture, blocking the nerves from the left hand, a favorite target of interrogators, who preferred to keep the right one intact for penning confessions.
He crawled to the pallet by the back wall and collapsed on it, losing consciousness. When he awoke again night had fallen. He struggled into the meditation position and stared into the dark. Bits of his life outside again mingled with nightmarish visions. The serene faces of the two old Tibetans he loved like family, whom, for their own safety, he had left months earlier in the mountains east of Lhasa. The screams of other prisoners coming from behind closed interrogation room doors. Again and again, he ventured toward a chamber in his mind whose door had come ajar during his interrogation, not daring to look inside for fear of what he might see. But then a new storm of pain erupted, the door swung open and he could not stop the nightmare, seeing in his mind’s eye his son Ko, gulag prisoner Shan Ko, lying in his bed at the yeti factory, being tortured by the same team that had worked on Shan.
In the morning a slip of paper lay on the stool beside his pallet. It was a notification on a printed form. Unless directed otherwise by a signed statement, witnessed by a magistrate, a prisoner’s organs would be harvested for medical purposes immediately after execution. Not a prisoner, he saw, theprisoner. The form was made out in his name.
He did not acknowledge the team when they arrived, he just stared at the symbolic circle, the mandala he had drawn on the wall with his blood. The day before he had had the strength to make a show of resistance. Today it was all he could do not to cry out in pain as they pulled him to his feet. He tried to withdraw, to remove himself from the prisoner who shuffled down the corridor, raging at the voice inside that kept recounting to him the dozen ways a clever prisoner could bring about his own death during interrogation. His body reacted involuntarily, wretching in dry, shuddering heaves as the doctor opened his bag.
He fell into a strange torpor, unaware of the activity around him, roused only by a new, shooting pain in his right arm. His gaze followed the needle in his vein toward the hose that led to an intravenous feed. A technician was injecting something into a valve in the tube. With effort he focused on the bottle of clear liquid the man left on the table. He would know in a moment, from the taste in his mouth, whether it was one of the knobs’ truth serums or one of the solutions designed to set the muscles on fire. He gazed at the bottle numbly, not comprehending at first as a soothing warmth oozed through his limbs. Then abruptly he was fully awake, searching the resentful faces of the team for an explanation. They were giving him a painkiller and a bottle of glucose. They were silently bandaging his wounds.
Ten minutes later the team was gone, the glucose tube still in his arm, nothing left on the table but a steaming mug of tea. Shan had barely taken his first sip when Cao materialized out of the shadows.
“I understand there are hundreds of miles of wilderness above here,” the major observed in a sour voice.
Shan’s answer came out in a hoarse croak. “Thousands.”
“Good. Get lost in them.” There was a cold vehemence in the major’s words. “If I ever see you again I will find a meat cleaver and a plane, and I will drop pieces of you over the mountains as you watch.”
Shan silently sipped his tea, calculating the ways Cao could be setting a trap for him, then recalled the gap of hours when the team should have been working on him. “You found the pistol,” he concluded.
Cao answered by stepping to his side, jerking the glucose needle from his arm and pointing to the door.
Shan stood blinking in the briliant morning sun as the door slammed shut behind him. Shogo town was still waking up. A small flock of sheep wandered along the cracked pavement of the street. A group of shiny sport utility vehicles sped by filled with tourists bound for the Himalayas after a side trip to see the center of commerce at the top of the world. Somewhere someone burned incense, an offering to the gods for the new day. He had taken two stumbling steps before he noticed the well-dressed Tibetan sitting at a table outside the tea shop across the street. He paused as two army trucks, packed with border commandos, sped past in a cloud of dust. Then he limped across the road.
Tsipon, the leading businessman in Shogo, preeminent local member of the Party, was the only man in the town who ever wore a tie. In his suit and white shirt he looked as if he were attending a business meeting.
“I am grateful that you tried to get me transferred to the hospital,” Shan offered as he dropped into the chair beside him.
“It’s the climbing season, damn it. I can’t afford to lose another worker. The fool knobs don’t have a clue about economics.”
Another man appeared, holding three mugs of black tea, which he placed on the table, sliding one toward Shan, before settling into a third chair. He was tall and athletic looking, his skin bearing the weathered patina of one who spent long days in the high altitudes. With his black hair Shan might have taken him for a Tibetan waiter at first glance. Except that his features were Western and his clothes and boots would have cost a year’s income for the average Tibetan.
“Look at him,” the man groused in English to Tsipon. “He’s in no shape. The deal’s off.”
Shan glanced back at Tsipon, who stared at him expectantly. Apparently they were at a business meeting after all.
Tsipon offered a sly smile, then motioned to a woman standing inside the open door. She leaned over him, listening as he whispered, then hurried away.
“What day is it?” Shan asked in Tibetan.
“I’m sorry. It’s Saturday.”
Shan shut his eyes. For a moment he lost his grip on his pain, every synapse seeming to scream in agony.
“The region leading to the climbing trails on the Nepal side of the mountains has been sealed off by the Nepali military,” Tsipon said, switching to English. “Problems with the rebels who want to take over Katmandu. No Westerners are allowed to climb the south slope this season. Mr. Yates here has three groups of climbers already signed on for the season, expecting to be taken to the summit in the next six weeks. He needs to put them up the north face instead.”
As the stranger drank his tea, Shan saw the discolored flesh on two of his fingers, one of them missing its top joint, the mark of frostbite at high altitudes.
“Impossible,” Shan said. “You know it is impossible.” Putting an expedition on the slopes meant weeks of planning, permits, surveying advance campsites, staging supplies.
The stranger pushed a small stack of napkins toward Shan, motioning to a wet spot of crimson on the table. Blood was dripping from the bandage on Shan’s temple.
“Damn it Shan,” Tsipon snapped, switching to Tibetan, “this American is fat with cash. His company has three expeditions already paid for. Do you have any idea how much money that means? He is going to charge them another twenty percent for coming to China, which I’m to get a quarter of.”
As Shan pressed a napkin to his head the woman reappeared, setting a plate of steaming momo, Tibetan dumplings, in front of him. His free hand seemed to act of its own accord, darting out, stuffing one into his mouth.
“I need sherpas,” Tsipon said, “mountain porters, mules, and horses. New camps have to be laid out, supplies staged, new safety lines rigged.”
Shan glanced back and forth from one man to the other. “Just go up to the villages,” he said as he gulped down another momo. “Enough cash can work miracles.” He was suddenly ravenous, and recalled he had eaten only a few mouthfuls of cold rice during the past three days.
“Not this time,” Tsipon explained. “There is a complication. The sherpas blame me. I blame you.”
Shan glanced at the American, who sipped at his tea with a confused, self-conscious expression, obviously not understanding their Tibetan words but not missing the tension between the two. “For what?”
“That sherpa you were carrying. Tenzin. He was well liked, came from a big family living on both sides of the border, famous for having reached the summit as a teenager years ago. They want his body.”
The momo in Shan’s hand stopped in midair. “Surely someone found the mule. It wouldn’t wander far.”
“No. Nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me spell it out,” Tsipon said, still in Tibetan. “This fool American and his partner are offering the best opportunity I’ve ever had, the best this town has ever had. You agreed to work for me because I could get you into the yeti factory to see that worthless son of yours.”
Shan’s head snapped up, strangely fearful over the mention of his son, even more alarmed that someone might overhear and guess the secret that had brought him to the region. A wild hope had nurtured him through the dreadful hours in the jail and many dark nights before, a dream, a fantasy, that somehow he would not only reach his son in the knobs’ secret hospital, but discover some means to get him out, at least back to the gulag camps in Lhadrung where Shan and his friends could help him.
“I agreed to hire you because of your magic at fixing problems with those old-fashioned ones, up in the mountains.”
Shan stared at his momo, shaking his head from side to side. “You were supposed to get me in. I’ve waited two months.”
“That was Thursday, when you were going to join me on an official Party delegation to inspect the place. You missed your date.”
The desolation that gripped Shan was so overpowering he had to brace himself with a hand on the table. “Then when’s the next one?” he asked in a hollow voice.
“Find me that dead sherpa,” Tsipon said in a matter-of-fact voice, “or forget about seeing your son.”
Shan stared at Tsipon in disbelief. He hadn’t been released from captivity. Tsipon and the knobs had just found a new form of torture.
He gradually became aware that more napkins were being pushed toward him by Yates. Blood was dripping onto his dumplings. He pushed away his plate, nauseated, and with great effort rose. He swayed, took a single faltering step, and collapsed to the ground unconscious.
He was not aware of being moved, only of the pain coursing through his body then, later, of dim lights in the blackness, and more nightmares. The pain rose in tides, ebbing and surging, making it impossible to focus, to try to make sense of the events that had occurred since he’d left Tenzin’s body on the mountain. Faces from his past in Beijing mocked him. Visions of Ko being tortured intensified, mingled with questioning, lifeless faces: of the blond woman on the mountain asking why she had to die, of Tenzin asking why Shan had abandoned him in the hour he needed him the most. When Shan woke, in the blackness, a single thought sustained him. Tsipon did not understand. Shan had another way to reach his son. He simply had to reach the new hotel at the base of the mountain, and he could leave Tsipon and Cao and the murders behind. Before he passed out again he heard himself call out for Ko, pleading with him to survive, to endure the tortures of the clinic.