Текст книги "Water Touching Stone"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

Chapter Four

The rising sun washed the peaks in a blush of gold and pink as they rode down the rough northern slope of the Kunlun mountains. The light seemed to revive Lokesh, and he broke into one of his traveling songs, praising the deities who preserved mountains. Akzu and Jowa rode ahead, out of earshot, speaking in the same urgent tones they had used in the yurt with Fat Mao the day before. Every few minutes Jowa stood in his stirrups, looking ahead as if searching for something. Fat Mao, perhaps. The Uighur had been gone when they awoke.

Suddenly Akzu raised his hand in warning. As they stopped, the sound of hoofbeats came from higher on the slope, from a trail that ran along the crest of the ridge above them. A small rider appeared on a loping grey horse. Shan heard Akzu curse, then call out to the rider, who wheeled the horse to a halt fifty feet above them. It was Malik.

"The zheli have to be warned!" the youth called out to his uncle. "Khitai is still alive. The thing that is Bajys will come for him too, and maybe the others!"

Akzu cast a worried glance toward Jakli. "We need you, boy," he shouted in reply. "You don't know where to seek. This is not the time." Anger seemed to enter his voice as he spoke. "I am head of Red Stone clan. I tell you no."

The young Kazakh gazed out over the mountains for a moment. When he turned back toward his uncle Shan saw pain in his eyes. "And I tell you I am tired of digging graves," he called back, then kicked his horse into a sudden gallop.

Shan watched Akzu as the headman gazed toward the boy and saw his face shift from anger to fear and then pride. "Go with God, boy," the old man offered quietly, then muttered to his horse and continued down the trail at a fast trot.

Half an hour later, at the top of a ridge that descended sharply in a series of switchbacks, Jakli pointed to a ribbon of grey on the northern horizon. "The highway," she said, "four hundred miles west to Kashgar."

Shan leaned forward in his saddle and pointed toward a huge rock formation a quarter mile to the west. It stood like a massive sentinel, towering three hundred feet above the ridge. At its top, fastened to a long pole held fast with a cairn of rocks, was a large square of ragged red cloth, perhaps six feet to the side. It was a huge lungta, a Tibetan prayer flag. In front, Lokesh stopped singing and stared toward the cairn, his hands cupped around his eyes. As he recognized the flag he began to wave, first at Shan, then toward the flag.

Shan studied the towering rock. It seemed impossible to climb. But someone had done so, as if daring the Chinese to risk their own lives to take it down. Not just someone. A Buddhist. It was a border land. Many different peoples lived here, Jakli had said. But Tibetans, Malik had warned, were singled out by the prosecutor for special treatment. Border lands had people of mixed blood. Like Jakli herself, part Kazakh, part Tibetan. Mixed blood and perhaps mixed allegiances. Like Lau, perhaps– the mysterious woman with a Han name whose death had so stirred the lamas, the dead woman Jakli was taking him to visit.

"Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out in his loudest voice, causing Jowa to spin about with an angry glare. The old Tibetan ignored the purba. "Lha gyal lo!" he repeated. "May the gods be victorious!"

"Your friend," Jakli said, looking at Lokesh, who waved at the flag again. "Is he crazy? I'm sorry– is he touched from old age, perhaps?"

"Senile?" Shan smiled as he studied his old friend. "If senile is being unaware and lost and unable to connect things, then Lokesh is the opposite of senile. He has seen too much. All he wanted was to be a monk, a monk healer. But he so excelled at his lessons that his gompa sent him to work for the government. Then Beijing came and said he couldn't be a monk anymore. After a few months he got married, to a nun who had also been expelled. Two weeks later he was thrown into prison for being a government official."

"For thirty years," Jakli recalled.

Shan nodded. "Every visiting day his wife would come. Usually she wasn't allowed close enough to talk, so they would wave at each other, just wave for hours. And two days after he got home his wife died."

Jakli's eyes had grown moist as Shan spoke. She looked at Lokesh, then turned away, into the wind, and urged her horse forward.

They rode for another hour, descending constantly, until they reached the junction of several horse trails behind a long narrow structure at the head of a gravel road. The three-sided building was constructed of cinder blocks that had begun to crumble into dust. At one end the wall had partially collapsed, causing a sharp dip in the corrugated tin roof. To avoid total calamity, stout logs had been braced on sheets of plywood that pressed against the exterior walls. As they dismounted and walked around the end of the building, Shan saw half a dozen trucks in various states of disrepair, sitting in the shadows of the building. The garage and its motor pool was operated on Ministry of Agriculture subsidies, Akzu explained, for the small farming and herding enterprises in the region.

A small cubicle had been constructed of plywood in the rear corner of the building, at the end where the wall was intact. On a crude door cobbled together of wood and cardboard was a faded poster of a dozen young men and women representing some of the scores of ethnic groups that had been liberated by Beijing. Clad in the blue uniforms of the proletariat, they all joyfully raised wrenches and hammers toward the sky. Cultivate the Wealth of the Minorities, the caption read.

Past the door sat an emaciated short-haired dog and a short dark man with several days' growth of beard and stains of motor oil on his hands and arms. Reading a newspaper at a rusty metal desk, the man glanced up as Akzu appeared, offered a grunt of greeting and pointed to a board from which five nails extended, each holding a ring of keys.

"Leave quickly, uncle," Jakli said softly as she approached the door. "The clan needs you."

The man's head snapped up at the sound of her voice. He looked at Jakli with a frown, then back to Akzu. "Checkpoints," he muttered. "Four miles up the road to Yoktian, then out on the main highway, going west."

"Jakli is taking them-" Akzu began.

The man interrupted Akzu with an upraised hand. "Don't want to know where, old friend. Too many people asking too many questions these days. Just a mechanic, that's all I want to be." He picked up the paper, revealing an open ledger book underneath, then slammed the ledger shut and gazed at the board of keys.

"Take the turtle," he said, pointing to the last set of keys in the row. "We never officially acquired it, so it's not on the books. Don't have to record anything."

Akzu tossed Jakli the keys and pointed toward the last bay, which held a small sturdy truck that appeared to have been assembled from parts of other vehicles. It had wide tires, a short cargo bay constructed of rough cut lumber, an oversized gas tank that extended along the frame, and a long cab, so large it accommodated a narrow rear seat. The high, rounded lines of the cab did indeed resemble a turtle shell.

"Who?" Akzu asked the man.

The man frowned again. Too many questions, he had said. "Grey," he offered with a tone of resignation, and Shan realized Akzu meant, whose checkpoint? Grey was the color of the Public Security troops, the knobs. The army wore green. Traffic police wore blue. "But she's not there. Too busy elsewhere. Grabbed four yesterday. Three the day before, I hear, from town. Some teachers from the school. Motor pool. That's how I heard. They took a driver."

Jakli, who had just gestured for Shan to join her at the truck, stopped abruptly at the announcement. She stepped back toward the cubicle. "On what grounds?" Jakli asked in a raised voice. Shan had begun to under stand something about the spirited Kazakh woman. If Lokesh sometimes unexpectedly overflowed with sorrow, then Jakli was subject to attacks of defiance in a similarly unpredictable manner.

"On the grounds that she is the prosecutor," the man replied, but he looked at Akzu, as if he were not inclined to converse with Jakli. "It's about that woman, Lau, someone said. They're taken for questioning about her disappearance. You knew Lau. They could take you too."

"But she drowned," Akzu said, exchanging a worried glance with Jakli. "People say she drowned."

"So I heard. But no body was found. Anyway, must have been a slow time in town."

"What do you mean?" Shan asked.

The mechanic looked at him with the same reluctance he had shown with Jakli. "Army shoots someone, that's national defense. Public Security knobs shoot someone, that's for public security, by definition. We shoot one of them, that's assassination. Simple. Like inserting pegs on a board. They have forms all printed up. But this one, just an old Kazakh woman disappearing? A Kazakh or Uighur here or there, usually she doesn't care."

"But this time," Shan observed, "the Prosecutor is putting up checkpoints and picking up witnesses."

"Not witnesses," the mechanic shot back. "The actors in her latest production. The political gallery."

Shan studied the man. He suspected the man had not always been a mechanic. "The prosecutor is using it," he said, nodding his agreement.

The mechanic held up his hand again, as if signaling that he would hear no more of such dangerous talk. Akzu gently pushed Jakli out of the cubicle as the mechanic went back to his paper.

Moments later Jakli stood at the driver's door as Akzu showed her a map pulled from the visor of the truck and pointed to several dotted lines that wandered back and forth across the dark line that represented the Kashgar highway. "Go with speed, niece," the headman said. "Then back to town. You will be missed at the factory. You take too many risks. Remember Nikki. Remember your aunts."

Nikki. Shan remembered Malik, speaking of the present he was carving. There had been another name which the boy had been wary of speaking.

"Always," Jakli said with a shy smile that encompassed both Akzu and Shan. "Watch for Malik, Uncle," she added. "Watch for the children." She gave Akzu a quick embrace, then froze.

A bright red truck was skidding to a halt in the loose gravel in front of the garage. Shan recognized the gleaming vehicle as one of the four-wheel-drive trucks produced by an American joint venture in Beijing, a factory he had audited once in his prior incarnation. On the front door of the truck was a large insignia in gold, a representation of the head and shoulders of a man and a woman, their arms crossed over a rising sun, one hand holding a hammer, the other a wrench. Below the sun was an oil derrick, a tractor, and an animal that may have been a sheep. Shan realized he had seen it before, two nights earlier, on the truck that had stopped them in the Kunlun. The Brigade had arrived.

Akzu quickly stepped out of the garage, into the sunlight, in front of the red truck, as if to distract the new arrivals. As he did so a Han Chinese emerged from the rear seat, a man of perhaps thirty years, wearing a red nylon parka that bore a minature version of the same emblem on its breast and sunglasses under an American-style front brimmed hat. He rapped a knuckle on the window of the front passenger seat and pointed toward the cubicle in the shadows. The two men in the front emerged, the driver holding a clipboard, the other a small calculator, and stepped briskly toward the cubicle.

Shan felt a tug at his sleeve. Jakli was pulling him back, behind the turtle truck. He let himself be eased into the shadow as he watched a second figure climb out of the back seat, a tall, lean man with a thin face and high cheekbones, wearing a brown suitcoat, at least two sizes too small, over the blue pants of a factory worker. Shan glanced at Lokesh and saw from Lokesh's sudden interest that his old friend had also recognized the man's features. The tall man was unmistakably Tibetan.

"Akzu," the man in the cap said as the headman approached. "An unexpected pleasure!" His voice was as smooth and polished as his face. An eastern voice. A university-trained voice.

"Ko Yonghong," Jakli whispered to Shan. "District manager for the Brigade."

Akzu greeted the younger man affably but slowly stepped around the red truck, even as Ko put his hand on the Kazakh's shoulder. Akzu wanted him away from the garage, away from Jakli and her companions.

The wind caught Ko's parka as he walked and opened it. He was wearing a white shirt. Only then did Shan notice that the two men who had gone to the desk wore light brown shirts, clean shirts with collars and cuffs, like uniforms, like those he had seen on the high road in the Kunlun. He glanced into the windows of the red truck, as though hoping for a glimpse of Gendun, then studied the district manager carefully. Ko Yonghong. Ko Forever Red. It was a name favored by parents who were ambitious Party members. The man who was liquidating the Red Stone clan.

Suddenly, before Shan or Jakli could restrain him, Lokesh stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand toward the tall stranger.

"Tashi delek," Lokesh said in an affable voice. Hello, in Tibetan.

Though softly spoken, as if not to be overheard, the words stopped Ko Yonghong, twenty feet away. He spun about and stared at Lokesh with intense interest for a moment, then paused to light a cigarette with a gold lighter and grinned at Akzu, as if the herdsman had presented him with an unexpected gift.

"Ni zao. Ni hao ma?" the Tibetan replied with an awkward smile and a quick glance at Ko. Good morning. How are you? in Mandarin. "I am called Kaju. Kaju Drogme."

The announcement instantly brought Jakli out of the shadows. At the same moment Ko stepped to Kaju's side, still studying Lokesh. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then gazed slowly down the line of trucks in the garage, as if looking to see what other surprises lurked in the shadows.

He wasn't the man who had challenged them two nights before in the Kunlun, Shan knew, but he could have been the man in the seat, smoking in the dark. Why would the Brigade be inside Tibet, why would it be waiting on a deserted road in the middle of the night? What had they done to Gendun, he wanted to shout. But why, he wondered in the same instant, why had they not just taken all of them, Jowa and Lokesh too, if the Brigade was so interested in Tibetans? Shan slipped around the front of the truck, into the light, suddenly feeling the need to protect Lokesh.

"Red Stone has no vehicles," Akzu said suddenly, and Shan understood what the men in the garage were doing. Taking inventory.

Two streams of smoke snaked out of Ko's nostrils as he stepped around Kaju to the front of the red truck, where he could see all of them at once. "You will be pleased to know the enrichment program has been expanded. We're privatizing the motor pool as well."

"Enrichment?" Akzu asked tersely. Shan could see that he was restraining himself, trying not to antagonize the Brigade manager.

"Poverty Eradication seems such a demeaning term," Ko said, sounding more like a political officer than a businessman. "Think of all the shares in the company you'll have, comrade. You'll be an owner of the garage now too. We will be launching stock exchange shares soon. We have special advisers working on it from Beijing. Consultants from America, even."

One of the men, Ko's driver, suddenly ran out of the end of the garage. A wrench flew past his head. Ko pretended not to notice. The man stopped and glared back into the shadows a moment, then moved to the rear of their vehicle and opened its hatch window. He rummaged through a large cardboard box and pulled out a carton of cigarettes, then ventured back into the garage.

"I'm so pleased that you have acquired your own consultants, comrade," Ko declared with a narrow smile, sweeping his hand toward Shan and his companions. Shan watched the man's eyes as he studied them with an unsettling air of satisfaction. Ko Yonghong, Shan decided, was a man who constantly looked for personal benefit, who sought to identify advantage or leverage in every new relationship. The director stretched his arms languidly and nodded slowly, as if making the point that he did not want to learn the identity of Akzu's companions. As if he had already decided who they were and had more to gain by not challenging them.

"You're the new teacher," Jakli said suddenly, looking at Kaju. "For Auntie Lau."

The Tibetan seemed relieved by the question. "We are expanding her good works, yes," he said in a thin voice, nervously glancing at Ko. "The Brigade has made a contribution to funding. Comrade Director Ko wants to bring the orphans into a more formal program. An official cultural integration program at the school in town. An assigned classroom."

"What she did for them no school could provide," Jakli shot back.

Ko stepped closer and raised his hands as if in surrender. "Not traditional school," he offered in an earnest tone. "Just make the Brigade resources available."

"It's not Brigade resources they need," Jakli said with a spark in her eyes.

Ko cocked his head as he examined Jakli, and leaned forward. "You're very pretty," he offered, still in his earnest voice. "I could get you a job."

Jakli ignored him. "The Kazakhs and Uighurs can take care of their own orphans."

Ko raised his hands in surrender again. "Please. I am a friend of your people," he said with a smile. "We could organize a sports team for them, be sure they receive necessary testing. Put them on the rolls for eligibility in our special youth programs." Ko patted Kaju on his back. "But it's all up to our new teacher. We don't want to scare them off. Whatever they're comfortable with. Above all, it must be a process of consensus. It will be traumatic for them at first, when they learn of our loss."

"Our loss?"

"Surely you understand that Lau was valued by all of us. A treasure. We can offer special counselors, if they need them."

"We're going ahead with the classes. I don't want them to miss a session," Kaju said softly. "They need to keep progressing, keep learning about the new society. It's what she would want."

Jakli appeared surprised at the man. She had wanted to be angry, Shan sensed, to resent Lau's replacement. But the young, nervous Tibetan seemed genuinely concerned about the children.

"You came quickly," she observed.

"I was already here."

The mechanic emerged into the sunlight, holding the carton of cigarettes. He retrieved his wrench from the dirt and sat against a tree at the end of the building, opening the carton with obvious relish and lighting a cigarette.

"I don't understand," Jakli said.

"Kaju graduated from a special university program in Chengdu. A facilitator in intercultural relations," Ko explained. "We're very proud of his work. The way of the future. Privatization, integration, the path of a strong nation."

Shan began to recognize a new species in Ko. Shan had been raised in a world which revolved around Party rank, a world so structured around political rank that officials sometimes carried their office chairs into meeting rooms as a form of intimidation, because even office furniture was allocated according to which of the twenty-four grades of the Party a cadre belonged to. But Ko was not in the government. The cool sneer of a Party official seemed to lurk behind his every expression, but he was a businessman.

Akzu was staring at the ground. He had seen the path mentioned by Ko. The liquidation of Red Stone clan. Shan remembered the agony on his face when he had heard how their children would be sent to memorize Party scriptures.

"You'll see, comrade. We only want to help. If the Poverty Scheme doesn't work, come and tell me," Ko said, resting his hand on Akzu's shoulder again, then stepped to the vehicle that Jakli had been about to drive away. He opened the door and gestured for Shan to step inside. "Meanwhile," he said, looking at no one but Jakli. "You and your special friends no doubt have important business. Do not let us delay you."

Ko kept smiling. He seemed very pleased to have discovered Shan, Jowa, and Lokesh. Pleased, and not at all interested in stopping them or intimidating them. And that, more than anything, scared Shan.

As Jakli and Jowa moved around to the driver's side, the Tibetan teacher followed them, wearing an uncertain, nervous expression.

"Why are you here?" Jowa growled to the man, in Tibetan.

"I am a teacher. I told you," Kaju replied in Mandarin.

"I mean here, today, in this garage."

Kaju looked back at Ko. "I asked to come," he said in Mandarin, refusing to reply in the language in which Jowa addressed him. "Here, in the shadow of the Kunlun, there are places to hide. I want to explain how hiding helps no one."

Jowa's eyes narrowed, more suspicious than ever.

"Who's hiding?" Jakli asked, watching Ko, who was leaning against his own truck now, out of earshot, still wearing his satisfied smile.

"Maybe not hiding. Running away, perhaps. Maybe you could help."

"Who?" Jakli pressed.

"The children, of course. The orphans," Kaju said. "Lau's children. My children now. We have to reach out to them, help them understand why they have a new teacher, why they must move on. Dealing with death is a learning experience too."

The flash of anger in Jakli's eyes was unmistakable.

"I want to help them," Kaju offered, "We can't stop the classes, or we will lose them, lose all her good work. But only half came to the last session after her disappearance. We must all strive against distrust."

A special university program, Ko had said, Shan recalled as he watched the Tibetan. Kaju had clearly mastered the vocabulary. He wondered if the Tibetan was capable of conducting a conversation without resorting to political slogans.

Jowa pushed Jakli into the driver seat and shut the door behind her. He stared at Kaju. "Because they're being killed, you bastard," he said under his breath, in Tibetan, so low that Shan barely heard.

But Kaju had heard. His jaw dropped open. His face paled. He stood there, confusion gripping his face as Jowa and Lokesh climbed into the back of the truck. Jakli eased the vehicle out of the bay and was halfway across the garage yard when she slammed on the brakes. Another vehicle was emerging from behind the poplars that lined the road, a boxy black sedan. With a sinking heart Shan recognized the car. A Hong Qi, a Red Flag limousine, perhaps fifteen years old, the kind passed on to senior officials in remote corners of China after being retired from use in the eastern cities. Jakli made a small choking sound and her hand jerked to the door handle as if she were going to run.

They watched as the limousine stopped directly in front of the Brigade truck, as though to block it. A brawny young Han man climbed out of the driver's seat, then opened the rear door. A woman wearing a dark blue business suit emerged. She was in her forties, with the high cheekbones and broad face of northern China. Her eyes were hard, her mouth set in what looked like a well-used expression of disdain, and her hair was tied in a tight knot at the back of her head, underscoring the severe cast of her face.

Shan watched Ko Yonghong as he stared sourly at the new arrivals and uttered something to Kaju that caused the Tibetan to disappear into the shadow of the garage. Then, as the woman turned toward him, a cold smile rose on his face and he gave a small nod of greeting.

Shan looked back at Jakli, who still stared nervously at the woman. He did not need to ask her who the woman was. The Jade Bitch. Prosecutor Xu Li.

"You said she was using Lau's death," Jakli whispered. "What did you mean?"

"Picking up Lau's acquaintances. Erecting checkpoints. It's a campaign, not an investigation. I knew a senior Party member in Beijing who said that crime should never be seen as a social problem but as a political opportunity, and that murder was the best opportunity for any law enforcement official."

"Opportunity?"

As they spoke neither moved their gaze away from Prosecutor Xu. She stood beside her car, looking at Ko Yonghong expectantly, waiting for him to come to her.

A third figure climbed out of the Red Flag. A lean man with a pockmarked face, wearing a trim grey uniform bearing four pockets on his jacket. A officer of the Public Security Bureau.

"Sui," Jakli hissed. "Lieutenant Sui. From the barracks in Yoktian."

"There was a murder in Beijing years ago," Shan continued, watching the knob officer as he spoke, "a youth without a job who stabbed a street vendor, an old man who sold noodles. The killer was arrested at the stand, eating a bowl of noodles beside the body, blood on his shirt. But after a week of analysis Public Security announced that the vendor had been from a family of landowners and that he had failed to state this when his family background was requested on his license application. A political review had been conducted, and it was concluded that the vendor had still been victimizing society by lying to get a license, that his antisocial deception inevitably attracted violence. Citizens were invited to amend their registration forms to correct incomplete data or, better still, to inform on any other former landlords who tried to conceal their class history. Long essays in party newspapers, speeches on television. Thirty or forty were arrested and sent to prison."

His gaze drifted toward Ko. The sour expression was gone. He was glaring at the knob officer with obvious resentment. Ko did not like Public Security, or at least did not like Lieutenant Sui.

The knob officer stood at Xu's side for a moment, surveying the compound with a predator's eyes, then stepped into the shadow of the garage.

"But the killer was punished, surely," Jakli said.

"Sent to work camp for a year, for not having a residency permit."

"This is different. Lau's death was not political."

"Her death?" Shan asked. "You said the prosecutor doesn't even know she's dead for certain. All she has is a report of her disappearance." A movement at the end of the garage caught Shan's eye. Akzu was quietly leading his horse around the building, behind Xu's back. "What is her biggest political complaint?"

"The border clans. She says they are irresponsible. They foment unrest. They're reactionary."

Shan nodded his head grimly. "Lau was a teacher. A moderating influence. Trying to bring the orphans of the clans into the social fold. So the border clans thought of her as an enemy."

"Impossible! She was one of us. Never did we-"

"By failing to engage in the socialist dialectic," Shan persisted, explaining the likely mindset of the prosecutor, "the border clans have cut themselves off from the moral nourishment of the state. They breed animosity and social irresponsibility." As he spoke Shan continued to look at Xu. "She must hope Lau is dead. Proof that the clans are destructive of society and must be eliminated."

Jakli said nothing. He looked at her. She was biting her lip, her eyes moist, still staring at Xu.

Ko also wanted the clans gone. The Poverty Eradication Scheme was accomplishing that goal. But somehow the prosecutor and Ko seemed to have little in common, as if they wanted the clans gone for entirely different reasons, or perhaps in entirely different ways. The Prosecutor's way, Shan suspected, was much more absolute than Ko's. Ko might be little more than a good soldier in the former army brigade. But the prosecutor had more authority. Ko answered to a corporate office in Urumqi. Xu Li answered to Beijing.

Suddenly there was a tap on the driver's door. Jakli turned and gasped. Lieutenant Sui glared at her through the glass, his face as thin and hard as an ax. As her arm shot forward to lock the door, Shan reached out to restrain her. She resisted a moment, then relented and opened the door as Sui pointed toward the front of the truck.

Moments later Lokesh, Shan, Jowa, and Jakli had been herded into a line before the knob lieutenant. He didn't ask for papers but simply wrote in a tablet, wearing a victorious expression, looking up to study each of them in turn, as if meticulously recording their descriptions. Shan turned his head to see Akzu with his horse, standing by the end of the garage, his face drained of color. The mechanic sat nearby, shaking his head grimly.

"Public Security has amended the Poverty Scheme," Sui suddenly announced. His voice had a hollow, metallic quality to it. "The wild herds are to be rounded up. The horses represent a security threat." He swept them with the cool, slow stare that seemed to be a trademark of every Public Security official Shan had ever known. "They are to be rounded up and brought to Yoktian with the remainder of the livestock." His gaze settled on Shan for a moment, examining him in pieces, settling for a moment on Shan's close-cropped black and grey hair, then the loose end of the frayed belt, several sizes too big, that protruded from his narrow waistband, then finally his cheap vinyl shoes, cracked and caked with dust.

"They're not yours," Jakli said in a brittle tone, looking at Sui's chest, as if she were trying to detect a heart. "The horses belong to the Kazakh tribes; they always have since the time of the great khans."

"Exactly," Sui said with a lightless smile, as if Jakli had proven his point. "We know what the khans did to China."

Shan stared at the man in disbelief. It had been a thousand years since the khans, progenitors of the modern Mongols and Kazakhs, had invaded China, displacing the Sung dynasty and establishing the Yuan court. He saw movement from the edge of his eye and turned to see Akzu edging forward, leading his horse toward the knob with fire in his eyes now, as if the leathery old Kazakh was going to attack Sui.

"You'll never find all our horses," Akzu said in a venomous tone from ten feet away.

"Not so hard to round them up with helicopters," Sui answered with a sneer that exposed a row of yellow teeth.