Текст книги "Water Touching Stone"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Shan watched the haggard woman in silence, then pushed back from the pile of earth to stand beside Akzu. "You mean he lived here, but Lau was his teacher."

Akzu nodded. "Lived here for a short while. Some children have to be taken care of by everyone. He wasn't any trouble," Akzu said. "One of the zheli often comes and stays a month or two. Lau didn't like them staying in the town all the time. In the warm weather she arranged for them to go to the clans."

"But Khitai, he was new?"

"New to us. He had not stayed with the Red Stone before. But sometimes, when we took one of the orphans to Lau's meeting place, we would see him. Always smiling. He was luckier than most, because he at least had his companion, this man Bajys." He winced as he spoke, as if understanding the irony of his words.

"So Bajys was an orphan too?" Shan asked.

"Yes. But older, so he didn't go to school. They said the two of them had discovered years earlier they were from the same clan in the north and had promised to watch over each other. Bajys taught Khitai things."

"What happened to their clan?" Shan asked, remembering Akzu's words at the trailhead. Maybe the demon was finishing something started years before.

Akzu shrugged and stepped away from the grave as if leaving, then stopped in the center of the clearing and stared out over the hills to the south, toward the high plateau of Tibet. Shan followed him. "All the clans have been troubled since it began," Akzu said.

"The murders, you mean."

Akzu did not look away from the hills. He offered a sour smile, as if Shan had made a joke. "Sure, the murders. All the murders. All the arrests. Since I was a boy, when all the green shirts arrived."

Akzu was speaking of the People's Liberation Army and their invasion of the western lands fifty years before, when the region had been absorbed into the People's Republic. The story had been spoken of so often by some of Shan's former cellmates, the captured warriors, that it had been turned into a song which they whistled sometimes in front of their guards. The PLA had taken Xinjiang; then, after training on the Muslims, they had started on Tibet. Xinjiang had taken a year to subjugate, Tibet nearly a decade.

"Many old clans disappeared entirely," Akzu said, "lost forever. Others were broken up, separated by lines on Chinese maps." He looked back to Shan. "Emperors from Beijing had come to Xinjiang many times. They wanted to buy our horses. They wanted to guard their own frontiers with advance garrisons. Their armies stayed a few years and went home. It didn't affect the Kazakhs or the Uighurs who lived here. But Emperor Mao was different." He shook his head. "We have always been nomads. The greenshirts sent by Mao drew boxes on maps and gave us papers that permitted us to live only in those boxes. We laughed. Obviously the Chinese didn't understand the way of the herds, or of our people. But when we traveled outside their boxes they sent us to prison. Or worse."

"You're saying the boy was displaced somehow."

"Displaced," Akzu spat. "You sound like Beijing." He sighed and looked toward Jakli, as if reminding himself that he had to get along with Shan. "The restrictions are not being enforced as much today," the headman offered. "We get visitors now, people roaming in search of family they haven't seen for twenty, thirty years because they were assigned to live in different boxes on the Chinese maps. Lau was like that at first, but she decided to stay in Yoktian County to help all the others that wandered through."

"Khitai and Bajys came like that, looking for family?"

"Mostly, now, the orphans just try to find places to fit in, try to make a new life. Auntie Lau said maybe we should get to know Khitai. She said he was better suited for the smaller clans, the ones that stay in the higher pastures away from town. We said of course he and Bajys could come. Many such people never find their home hearths. Things have changed so much. The children are not permitted to learn the old ways." He shook his head slowly. "I got a letter last year from a cousin who married into a clan in the north. She said things were so much better that Chinese come to their camp and pay to sleep in their yurts and eat food from a wood fire. Tourists. I wrote a letter to say that doesn't mean it's better, that if it feels good to have them come and treat us like their pets, like a circus show, then you have lost the why of it, you have forgotten what being Kazakh is supposed to feel like." Akzu shrugged. "I didn't mail it. Sometimes Public Security stills reads letters.

"But when travelers like Khitai come, we must make room for them. We lost many from our own clan in the struggles. Maybe some are still alive, in the north perhaps, or even in Kazakhstan," he said, referring to the independent Kazakh nation to the west of China. "Sometimes broken clans go to a town to start a new life, like Lau. But some just wander. Maybe we have family wandering too. We would want them to find friends along the way." Shan looked to Jakli. Her father had disappeared, she said. Akzu's brother. The headman sighed heavily. "We will know ourselves what it is like soon enough, what it is to be orphans."

Shan was about to ask him what he meant when Jakli stepped to his side. "Uncle, how long was this boy here?"

"Nearly three weeks. Before the last full moon. Khitai was quiet. A good boy. Mischievious sometimes. Once he climbed a tree near camp and threw nuts down on everyone who passed, making sounds like a squirrel. Always wore a red cap, his dopa, like a good Muslim. Stayed with Bajys working in the hills except when he played with Malik. We were glad to have them for the autumn chores. We were cutting hay for the winter." He cast a bitter glance at Jakli as he spoke the last words, as if cutting hay for the next winter had come to represent a cruel joke.

"How did the boy die?" Shan asked abruptly.

Akzu sighed again. "One of the old families visited that day, not a clan, the remnants of clans. The shadow clans, we call them. They're distrustful of everyone, wary as deer. They stay off roads whenever possible, just herd enough sheep to feed themselves. Usually stay in the highest pastures where no one else ever goes, near the ice fields. If they need supplies they come to one of the small camps like ours to trade. Some took children from Lau too. She said it helped keep the shadow clans connected to the world," Akzu added, gazing back at the woman at the head of the grave. "We made a meal together, then they moved on at dusk. Malik was away, so Khitai played with the boy from the other family, one of his friends from the zheli. They played in the hills most of the day. The other zheli boy was happy, he told me at the meal, because his shadow family didn't speak the Turkic tongue so well, or Mandarin."

"They weren't Kazakhs?"

Akzu shook his head. "Dropka, Tibetans. One of the border families. Many of the dropka on this side of the border worked with Lau."

Shan closed his eyes as a new surge of grief swept through him. To stand at two children's graves in just two days was as hard as anything he had faced in the gulag. "We saw them," he announced after a moment, having a hard time forming the words. "We buried their boy," he said, and explained what had happened on the changtang. Jakli gave a small moan. Akzu lowered his eyes and spoke several words in his native tongue that sounded like a prayer.

"Where was Bajys that day?" Long ago Shan had learned not to believe in coincidence. The killer had targeted both boys and killed both, two days apart. "Why would he turn on Khitai this way? And why Alta, afterward?"

Akzu looked solemnly at Jakli before speaking. "The day before, Fat Mao was here, to ask if we would help when people came from Tibet to help about Lau." As he spoke, the headman glanced at Lokesh, looking old and frail at the edge of the grave, then glanced at Shan, and finally Jowa. An aged Tibetan, a Chinese exile, and a sullen, unhappy warrior. Not, Shan suspected, the help Akzu had anticipated.

"Bajys was there? He knew about Lau's death?"

"No, Lau's death was kept a secret from the zheli. At most they just heard the rumors from town, that she had disappeared. But Bajys came into the tent and stared at Fat Mao. We asked him what he wanted, but he just stared at Fat Mao, then turned and ran away. He must have understood, must have eavesdropped, maybe he knew Fat Mao from town. It's the kind of information that could change a man's life. For certain men it would be like finding gold lying on a trail. Go to the prosecutor, tell about the secret resistance, give some names. Get a reward, get a new job somewhere, a new life. I think Bajys told the boy that day what he was going to do, and Khitai resisted it, said he would tell Fat Mao, that he would stop him. But Bajys had no kind of life. It was the biggest opportunity he might ever hope for. That other boy, he must have heard too."

"Did Bajys have a gun?"

"Apparently. Lots of Kazakhs keep guns for hunting."

"Where did it happen?"

"Here, in this same clearing. We found the boy sitting against the rock, not far from where he is buried."

"Who, exactly, found him?"

"The next morning Malik went to look for him when he didn't come for breakfast. The boy passed much of his time here. It's quiet. He had lessons here with Bajys. Malik went up the path at dawn and came back running, shouting for us. It had to be some sort of terrible accident, I thought at first. He had found a gun and was playing with it."

"But there was no gun," Shan stated.

Akzu shook his head slowly.

"Did anyone examine his body?"

"We have no holy man nearby. No mullah. We must bury our dead quickly, before sunset. My wife came up here and washed him and placed him in a shroud. She didn't know Khitai well." Akzu sighed. "But she knows how to bury children. We sang songs, but such songs should be sung about the dead one's life, and no one knew what to sing." He looked at Jakli, as though to reassure her. "So we sang about riding horses in the high pastures and how eagles fly." He cast a meaningful glance at Shan. "It was one bullet in the center of the forehead," he explained in a lower voice. "A small gun. The bullet did not have much velocity. Quiet. No one heard the shot." Akzu gazed at Shan, as though challenging him to ask how the headman had knowledge of weapons. "No wound in the back of his skull. The bullet stayed inside."

"Nothing else? Any sign of a struggle?"

"His clothes were torn. Shirt ripped open, and one of his pants legs got torn. A shoe was missing." Akzu's eyes shifted toward the hills, his gaze returning tinged with worry. There was something else on his mind. Akzu had intended to bring only Jowa to his camp, Shan recalled. Because he knew about Public Security.

"But you said Bajys and Khitai were related, the last of their clan. They had been together so long."

Akzu shook his head slowly. "Bajys was unsettled. Some people are always nervous around children. Sometimes he was like an uncle to the boy. When we ate, he would remind Khitai of his manners. Sometimes he was like a teacher. But sometimes it was like he was scared of the boy."

"Scared?"

"Not scared." The headman frowned. "I don't have words. Sometimes it was like Khitai was the older brother. Bajys was nervous about pleasing him." Akzu stared at the sky a moment, then shrugged. "When a colt grows up without a herd, it is always skittish."

"Orphans have reasons to be skittish," Shan suggested.

Akzu nodded. "But the dogs liked Bajys," he added in a confused tone, as if that were the greatest mystery of all. He shrugged again. "We will find him if he ever leaves the Chinese town. The clans won't go to the government about it. We find our own justice. But he knows we can't go to town to take him. Too many knobs there."

"Your own justice?"

"We know the killer," the headman said with a chill in his voice. "He will be found eventually and he will pay the price of all killers."

The words surprised Shan, who had lived in Tibet for so long. Revenge was not something that Buddhists sought. But they were in a Muslim land now, and Muslims believed in retribution.

"What about Lau's other children, the rest of the zheli?" Shan asked. "Have they been warned? Until the killer is found, until we understand why he is killing they are all in danger." Akzu's words from the trailhead still haunted him. Maybe the demon is going to kill them all, the headman had said. Twenty-three orphans, and only twenty-one left.

Akzu and Jakli exchanged a worried look. "Word has gone out," Akzu said in a pained tone. "We do what we can."

"It's not easy," Jakli said. "It's why Lau called them her zheli. Those children are like wild horses, scattered over the mountains, always moving, always wary."

"But surely their homes are known. Their foster families."

Akzu shook his head. "Homes? They're with nomads, traveling with their flocks until winter, bringing the children together only for Lau's classes. Sometimes they pick up mail at farms, or in town. People know the names of the clans, maybe know the pastures they traditionally use. We knew where two zheli girls were staying, in a valley near here. They're being kept in their tents now, with someone always watching." Akzu looked out over the mountains. "Since she retired from the Agricultural Council, Lau was going out alone into the ranges, giving the children medical exams, bringing food to the poorest families, teaching special lessons. I think only Lau would know where all the children might be at any one time. Maybe that will save them, their secrecy."

"So Lau knew Red Stone clan was here, at this camp?"

Akzu nodded. "She knew we come here in the autumn, knew we use it as a base to gather our flocks for the winter. But it's not important what Lau knew. Bajys was here." Akzu gazed back at the mound of fresh earth. "The only children killed were one at Red Stone camp and one who visited Red Stone camp," the herder said somberly, and began walking back down the trail.

The front flap of the center tent had been tied back when they returned to camp, and as they approached a grey-haired woman appeared at the flap. She studied them with strong, proud eyes, then gestured them inside. Shan followed the example of Jakli and her uncle, rinsing his hands in a basin of water by the front flap, then sitting on a cushion near the center of the heavy carpet that served as the floor of the tent as the woman handed them small, chipped porcelain cups filled with steaming liquid.

"My wife is baking today," Akzu announced as the woman leaned over a brazier where a kettle simmered. Beside the brazier sat a clay pot of yogurt and, on a large flat stone, a stack of nan, the flat bread favored by China's Muslims. "You will sleep with our clan, in the tent near the stables."

The woman smiled shyly as Shan nodded in greeting and sipped his cup. It was not tea, as he had expected.

"Warm goat's milk," Jakli explained. From behind a rug suspended at the back of the tent Shan heard voices. The two other women he had seen earlier peered out from the edge of the carpet and looked at Jakli with small, expectant smiles, then disappeared.

The milk was surprisingly bitter, but the liquid filled him with warmth as it hit his stomach. "Had he been away, this Bajys?" Shan asked.

"Away?" the headman asked. He drained his cup, then reached behind him and produced a small drinking skin. With a slight bow of his head he extended it to Shan with both hands.

Shan held the skin without looking at it. "Auntie Lau died more than a week before. Could Bajys have killed her as well?"

Jakli's head snapped up with sudden interest, as if she had not considered the possibility.

"No," Akzu said after a moment. "He was with the clan for the past month. That place in the desert where she died, Karachuk, to go there and back would be more than a day. He was never gone more than four or five hours, when he went with Khitai to the high pastures." The headman nodded at the skin. "Kumiss," he said. "Drink."

So there were two killers, Shan thought. And Bajys was only part of the answer. "Karachuk?" he asked. "Why was she there?"

Jakli and Akzu frowned into their cups and exchanged a glance. "An oasis place, that's all," he said enigmatically, then steered the conversation away from Lau and the dead boy, speaking instead as a host spoke to his guests, following the code of hospitality Shan had experienced in nomad tents in Tibet. He showed Shan how to twist the wooden plug off the skin and raise it to squirt into his mouth. Shan did so uncertainly, for he had not seen such skins in Tibet, then nearly choked as the acrid liquid hit his pallet.

Akzu grinned. "Fermented mare's milk," he explained, then accepted the skin back from Shan and took a long swallow of the pale white liquor. He sighed with satisfaction, then spoke of how the horses were growing heavy coats, the sign of a harsh season to come. After a quarter hour Jakli rose and stepped behind the carpet partition at the rear, triggering a hushed, excited chatter from the women behind it. After a few minutes she reappeared, flushed with color, as though embarrassed, then retrieved Shan's drawstring bag where it sat by the entrance. Shan offered his gratitude to Akzu's wife, then followed Jakli to the tent by the animals.

Malik appeared, holding the flap open as if he had been waiting for them. But Jakli lingered, looking toward the tent on the opposite side of the camp, then handed Shan's bag to the boy and silently moved into the third tent. Shan hesitated, wondering if Malik would explain. But the boy shrugged and moved back behind the flap. Shan followed Jakli and heard a strange, irregular clicking sound as he approached the third tent. Five faces looked up at him as he stepped inside. Jowa, Jakli, Fat Mao, and Akzu's sons.

Jakli sat with Jowa near a small smoldering brazier. The Uighur and the two Kazakh men were kneeling behind them, a sheen of excitement on their faces, looking at a small portable computer in Jowa's lap.

Jakli looked up, startled. "By the stable. There is a pallet for you in the tent with Lokesh."

But Shan stepped closer. One of the Kazakhs muttered a curse as he approached. Jowa seemed undisturbed. He glanced at Shan and kept working, tapping the keyboard, reading the screen with intense curiosity.

Jakli stood, uncertainty on her face. "It's only some records about agricultural production units. Jowa is helping with the computer."

Shan stepped to Jowa's side and studied the screen as the purba slowly scrolled through a computer file. The data was in Chinese, with the same heading on each screen, "Agricultural Production Inventories, Yoktian County." There were subheadings for cotton, wool, barley, and wheat, each with production records. Over seventy percent of the production was credited to the People's Construction and Development Corporation. Other, smaller entries, were for the patchwork of collectives and family enterprises comprising the remaining participants in the local industry.

Jowa stopped at the screen for wool production. One of the Kazakh men hovering over his shoulder pointed to an entry at the bottom of the screen. "Red Stone," it read. "That's us," the man said. "Red Stone Herding Enterprise. The clan enterprise."

Jowa highlighted the name and tapped a button. A five-year record of production from Red Stone appeared, with a graph at the bottom. The clan's wool production had steadily declined. Jowa tapped another button, producing a screen for five-year comparisons with others in Yoktian County. Red Stone had the lowest productivity in every year and by far the lowest cumulative total.

Jakli leaned over Jowa and translated what the screen said. While most of those present clearly understood Chinese, few, apparently, could read it. When she had finished, one of the Kazakh men spat a curse. "The Brigade," he said. "They beat us down for years, treat us like slaves in our own land, and still they are not satisfied."

"The People's Brigade, they call it," Jakli explained to Shan. "It was Beijing's first stage of settlement. Many of the soldiers sent here as occupation troops were given economic incentives to stay and develop the land. A company was formed for them and land grants made to the company. They took prime pastures and plowed them under for cotton and other crops. They became bigger and bigger. Now the Brigade is practically as powerful as the government. Runs schools. Runs local clinics. Even operates some of the prisons, on contract to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Thousands of workers. Hundreds of enterprises. We could never compete."

"The Brigade and the army, they are the same?" Shan asked. China's military had a long tradition of investing in commercial companies.

"Five years ago the Brigade was privatized," Jakli explained. "But it's still run like the army. Run by Han Chinese who used to be generals."

"Like a kingdom," someone said in a bitter tone from behind them. Akzu had entered the tent. "A separate kingdom within the country, supported by Beijing."

"But what are you-" Shan began.

"They say production must be more efficient," Akzu said bitterly. "They say small clans are no longer cost effective."

"Cost effective?"

"The Poverty Eradication Scheme, they call it," Jakli said. "A government policy, implemented by the Brigade."

"But what does it have to do with your clan?"

Jowa interrupted by closing the screen with a loud snap. "The smallest producers are being bought out," he explained. "The Brigade is identifying the least efficient producers and will integrate those workers into more efficient production. Higher value added, they call it."

"You mean the clan is getting new lands?"

"No," Akzu said. "Our clan runs its business through a company with shares, something the government established several years ago. Now the Brigade is buying all the shares."

"But if you didn't agree to it-" Jowa began.

"There's a term I heard in the town," Jakli interjected. "A hostile takeover. Everyone kept repeating it, like they thought it was funny, like something you read about in American magazines."

"But just having its shares bought shouldn't affect the clan," Shan suggested.

Jakli grimaced. "To them, we aren't a clan, just new employees. The Brigade already has plans for Red Stone. Everyone will be assigned to towns, different towns, to break up the clan. Apartments will be given to parents with a child. Others will live in workers' dormitories." As she spoke a shudder seemed to move through her. She clutched her chest as though short of breath.

The headman pulled a folded envelope from inside his coat as he sat by his sons. "We received a letter last week. We are to deliver our herds, our horses, our dogs, even our tents to the Brigade by the end of the month. In ten days, just after our autumn horse festival, our nadam. All members report for reassignment." He gestured toward a stack of papers by the computer. "Final inventory of assets required. Every sheep, every lamb, every damned spoon and pot."

"Poverty Eradication Scheme," Jowa said in a hollow tone. "The bastards are liquidating the clan."

In the heavy silence that descended over the tent, nothing could be heard but the breath of the horses tethered outside.

"No one's said it like that before," Akzu said.

Fat Mao stood. "But it's the truth. This Tibetan speaks the truth. They've done it to Uighur farms. They've done it to Kazakhs in the north." His eyes narrowed and he looked at Shan. "Poverty Eradication Scheme." He spat the words and grimaced. "It's not about economics. It's about politics. People in Beijing planned it all. They want to make it impossible for a Uighur to be a Uighur, or a Kazakh to be a Kazakh." The man's eyes drifted toward Jowa. "The Chinese are very clever. They study a people and determine what is most important of all to that people, then they find a means to hollow that thing out, to first take away its power, then eventually remove it completely. In Tibet they take your holy men. Tell me, friend, without your holy men can a Tibetan be a Tibetan?"

Jowa looked away, then his eyes met Shan's. They had already lost their holy man. Jowa's hands closed tightly around the corners of the computer screen. "I grew up in the grasslands, with the herds," he said suddenly. Everyone stopped and looked at him, surprised by the sudden anguish in his voice. "It was like that in the valley where my family lived. They came in big trucks one day. They loaded everyone in two trucks, about fifty of us. Said that because our family owned land we were reactionaries. Said that the land needed Chinese technology, that they were going to bring tractors and plant Chinese wheat. They sorted through everything in the camp as we watched. Anything that was used for taking care of the herds or moving camp, even the carpets used in my family for eight generations, they put inside the main tent. They collapsed all the other tents and threw them on the big one. Then they set it on fire.

"My mother screamed. A soldier hit her with the butt of his rifle and knocked out four teeth. My sister ran to embrace her pony so they shot the pony. My father said a mantra to the compassionate Buddha and they grabbed his rosary, a coral rosary from the time of the Seventh Dalai Lama, and cut it so the beads were lost in the grass. My aunt jumped on the back of a soldier, screaming, scratching at his face." Jowa's voice drifted off.

"If your enemy leaves you only your hands," Akzu observed with a chill in his voice, "then you scratch them with your hands. If they take your hands and only leave your teeth, then you bite them." The words had the tone of an old war song.

Jowa nodded slowly. "But some soldiers took her out in a pasture." The anguish was back in his voice. "They did things to her, and then she died. They threw her body in the fire and then they drove us away. In the trucks they sang songs in praise of the Chairman. They hit us with rifles until we sang too."

"It's not so bad now," one of the Kazakhs said, but his voice lacked confidence. "Not so violent."

Jowa gave an angry snort. "Now they do it with computers and bureaucrats. And corporations." He turned to Akzu. "You think they'll send all of you to one place, mothers and fathers with their children? It didn't happen that way in Tibet. The families would arrive at a new apartment and the next day a Chinese comes for your child. Has to go to a special school, they say. A boarding school, far away. They learn to sing out of a little red book. And when they come back they all have Chinese names and mock all your old ways."

Akzu looked like he had been kicked in the belly. He held his hand tightly over his abdomen and slowly rose, as if with great effort. Without looking back, he walked out of the tent.

"Until last night," Shan said in the silence that followed, "we had a holy man with us. Then he disappeared."

Jakli sighed heavily. Fat Mao seemed to visibly stiffen. "Who took him?" he demanded.

But Shan could not reply. Just saying the words had filled him with fear again. He felt a desperate compulsion to run, to return to the mountains and find Gendun. The lamas hadn't understood, had expected too much of him. He didn't know the Muslims. He didn't know Xinjiang. He could do nothing about these Kazakhs who were being killed. Someone had been mistaken. None of this was about Tibetans.

Jowa quietly explained what had happened the night before.

"Uniforms?" Fat Mao asked.

"None."

"What color was the truck?"

Jowa looked at Shan. "Hong," the purba said. Red.

The Uighur and Jakli exchanged a glance of alarm. Fat Mao spat a curse.

Jakli looked at Shan. "The Brigade," she said slowly. "They drive red trucks." She looked back at the Uighur with question in her eyes. "But they can't be in Tibet. They're not authorized." She grimaced, as if realizing as she spoke that formal authority was unimportant to the Brigade. "I mean, they've never been there before."

Shan found his voice again. "If they took him," he said urgently, "if the red truck drove Gendun Rinpoche back to Xinjiang, where would they go? Where would they hold him?"

The Uighur slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, from which he produced a computer disc. "On to Glory," he said with a sour smile.

As Shan watched in confusion, Jowa accepted the disc and inserted it into the machine. When the screen lit again, it was dominated by huge Chinese characters that had once been part of Shan's daily existence as an investigator in Beijing. Nei Lou, it said. Classified. Internal government use only. A fire seemed to grow in Jowa's eyes as he stared at the screen.

The Uighur leaned forward and tapped the keyboard several times.

"Glory to the People Reeducation Facility," Jowa read out loud as the screen changed. "Lao jiao Camp 947." Lao jiao facilities were reeducation camps, jails for lesser offenders than those sent to the gulag, used to punish minor political sins. Admission to lao jiao was administrative, meaning that citizens could be sentenced on the authority of a single official, without a judge, without a trial.

"The Jade Bitch," Fat Mao said in a low voice.

Shan looked up at him.

"The prosecutor in Yoktian. Xu Li," the Uighur explained. "As cold and hard as jade. Glory Camp is her personal dungeon. Pass gas near her and off you go to eat rice for a few months in Glory Camp."

"Recent admission records," Jowa read off the screen. "But it's too soon," he said. "The disc is-"

"Up to date as of six o'clock last night," Fat Mao announced in a conspiratorial tone.

"Gendun was only taken last night."

"Keep looking," the Uighur said, nodding toward the screen.

"Unassigned numbers," Jowa read in a puzzled tone.

"Right. She always has a few numbers assigned to the others authorized to use the camp. The knobs. The army. The Brigade security teams. Her obsession with efficiency. Open prisoner registration files without names, based on anticipated arrests. They order food, arrange bedding, and staff assignments based on all the files. The Brigade can just take someone there and fill in the name at the gate. Sometimes she lists the reasons in advance. Youth gangs. Cultural recividists."