Текст книги "Prayer of the Dragon"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Not fear but a deep melancholy grew within Shan, punctuated by waking visions of Gendun being tortured, being beaten in tamzing sessions to utter words he would never understand for reasons he could never comprehend. Shan had become the worm in the wood of Gendun’s safe hermitage, the parasite that had edged into the lama’s life. Through his own blind stupidity, through his naive assumption that he could become one of them, he had brought the horrors of the modern world to them.

He found another perch that offered a view of the summit and the quarter moon that illuminated it. His stomach growled, left unsatisfied by their sparse meal. He remembered that Dolma had given him a little pouch of rice. He reached into his pocket and held it in his palm.

It was an old prisoner’s trick. Grains of rice would fall from the sacks inmates were forced to haul into the guards’ mess hall. A single grain on the tongue would swell up into a digestible morsel after several minutes, so that half a dozen grains almost seemed to be a meal. He measured out half the bag onto his palm, returned the pouch with Hostene’s share to his pocket, then stared at the small mound in his hand as it glowed in the moonlight. His stomach growled again. It was the last of his food.

As he looked up at the moon, an owl hooted. He let the grains fall through his fingers onto the rock below, then swept them into a pile in front of him. Placing a single grain on his tongue, he counted out those that remained. Only sixty-three. He quickly, guiltily, pulled the grain from his mouth and placed it on the pile, then separated the grains into three smaller, uneven piles and began counting each of the piles. It was one of the ways he and his father had adapted the old stick-counting method for meditation on the Tao te Ching, one of the ways used by the devout in reeducation camps, where it was deemed a serious moral lapse to have traditional Tao throwing sticks.

Each round of counting yielded one of the lines of a tetragram, which he drew with a finger in the dusty soil at his side. When he had finished he had compiled a solid line over three lines of two segments each. It denoted Chapter Fourteen in a table his father had taught him. When they had first studied it together, his father had told him it was about the geometry of living correctly. Shan whispered the resulting verse to the moon:

The world is a mysterious instrument Not made to be handled Those who act on it, spoil it Those who seize it, lose it

He sat motionless, sensing that a door was opening to a carefully guarded chamber in his mind. He heard the distant voice of his father, a whisper down a long corridor. He forgot his fear, forgot his helplessness, and listened with his heart. Eventually, he became aware of a faint smell, the scent of the ginger his father always carried in his pocket.

He did not know how long he immersed himself in his memories, but the moon was high in the sky before the hoot of another owl brought him back. Abruptly, he lost the sensation of his father’s presence and the dim figures accompanying it who were the monks they had sat with when Shan was a child. He was alone again in the night on a cold, windswept perch, remembering the dangers that waited on either side of the mountain.

His stomach whined again, and he picked up several grains, ready to eat them, then looked at the moon and lowered his hand. He could not eat without reducing the number needed to cast. He tossed them down again to produce another tetragram. This time the pattern was a line broken in thirds over one broken in half, the pair repeated. It indicated Chapter Seventy-One, the verse that had seemed to come up more frequently than any other during his years in Tibet:

To know that you do not know is best To not know of knowing is a disease To be sick of the disease Is the way to be free of the disease

The lives of everyone on the mountain who meant something to him, including the Navajo woman he had never met, hung in perilous balance, and it was impossible that all would escape unscathed unless Shan could solve the terrible riddles of the mountain. But all he knew now was that he did not know. And soon they had to choose between going west, to those who wanted to kill Hostene, or east, to those who wanted to kill Shan. The owl, Hostene’s harbinger of death, landed thirty feet away and cocked its head, as if to remind Shan that he had known the answer to that particular riddle even before he had tallied the rice grains.

Even wolves halt to lick their paws. Well after midnight, as Shan watched from the rim again, figures appeared against the light of the bonfire, weary men who settled onto the rocks near the flames. He pushed back and found his way to the bottom of the chasm again and awakened Hostene with a brief touch on his leg. Without questioning Shan, the Navajo rolled up his blanket and followed. Shan handed him the full pouch of rice. “Keep this,” Shan said. “Put a few grains on your tongue as you walk.” He had returned his own sixty-four grains to the pouch. His hunger had disappeared during his final vigil with the owl.

When they stepped into the moonlight Shan explained his plan.

“But this side is where Abigail is,” Hostene protested. “You say there are soldiers on the east side,” he added in a plaintive tone. “If they arrest me they will deport me. I will never see her again.”

“We are doing this for two reasons. First, the miners are in a frenzy. They will execute you and march back to their camp, singing. Second, the key to finding Abigail is the hermit, who has fled from his cave.”

“Rapaki? He doesn’t even know her.”

“There are two people on this mountain trying to unlock the mystery left by the old monks. The hermit knows more about the pilgrim stations than anyone else. I think Abigail and he do know each other. It seems impossible that they never encountered one another.” Shan extracted the empty tin from his pocket. “I found this in Rapaki’s cave.”

The Navajo took the container, turning it over in his hand, holding it up to the moonlight. “Lemon Freshies,” he said in a bewildered tone. “She brought three or four of these from home.”

A bird flew up in the darkness overhead. Hostene put his hands up, palms out, to shield his face. The hands. It was, Shan abruptly realized, how Rapaki would have seen Shan the previous morning. As he walked, he replayed the encounter with the hermit in his mind. Rapaki’s jumble of mantras had had a theme. Honored by the waking deadwas part of the most common prayer to Tara. Face like the circle of the autumn moonwas part of a ceremony for invoking the presence of Tara. Even the cheating-death mantra the hermit had used was one that invoked Tara. And though Shan had raised his hands to protect himself from the flying stones, he had not understood until now Rapaki’s reaction. Shan’s thumbs had been touching, palms flattened, turned outward. He had unconsciously made a mudra, one that was a special offering to the goddess, invoking the Laughing Tara. Shan and Hostene had been looking for Abigail. Rapaki had been looking for Tara.

Shan said, “In one of her photos, Abigail wore a short necklace with a large turquoise pendant. Did she wear it often?”

“It’s one of her favorites. It was her mother’s. Why?”

“We have to find Rapaki,” Shan said urgently. “And the key to finding Rapaki is Thomas.”

“That boy from the other side?”

“There were other things in Rapaki’s cave-new pencils, a panda-printed quilt, clean paper. He didn’t get them from the miners, he didn’t get them from Yangke, and he certainly didn’t get them all from Abigail.”

Shan led them down the dark, treacherous path in short stages, stopping frequently to mentally revisit the terrain ahead, painfully aware of the jagged shards of stone, remnants of the earlier explosions, that waited below to impale them if they fell from the slippery rocks. Twice he lost his way and they had to backtrack. When they reached the makeshift ladder bridge Hostene balked. Shan waited for the moon to emerge from behind a cloud and, steeling himself, walked back and forth across it to reassure the old Navajo.

Much later, as they rested, looking at the stars, Hostene asked the question that had been often on Shan’s mind. “Why the hands? Why does the killer cut off their hands? Why does he want hands?”

But Shan had no answer.

“What that old miner said,” Hostene whispered later, “maybe he was right. About your hands being the proof of your life.”

They finally reached the opening to the eastern slope an hour before dawn. Shan pointed out the vague shapes of the buildings of Gao’s compound, singling out the little stone hut that stood perhaps fifty yards from the main house, partially dug into the slope. “The road from the base ends there,” Shan explained. “It was an old storage hut, a granary once. Now they keep supplies there.”

“Once we reach it, what?”

“We hide there. Thomas comes and goes. We know he steals supplies, probably from the hut itself. We will find a way to speak with him.” The long night with no more than an hour’s rest had taken its toll on Shan. “At least we can sleep safely for a few hours,” he said wearily.

After advancing on the hut in short bursts between taking cover behind rocks, Shan pressed a tentative hand against the plank door. Relief flooded him as it opened. He paused, noticing for the first time two small metal boxes sitting on the ground between the hut and Gao’s darkened dzong, then stepped inside. He was caught in the beam of a flashlight. Behind him Hostene uttered a startled gasp. Shan had only a glimpse of the green-uniformed figure pinioning Hostene’s arms before the butt of a rifle knocked him unconscious.

Of all the torments suffered by a gulag prisoner, the greatest was that once you entered, you never left. Long after their release, prisoners would cower in alleyways, flinch at the sight of a uniform, compulsively pace out the dimensions of their former cells within much larger chambers.

Since his first day of freedom Shan had fought that compulsion. Now as he lay on a metal cot in the blackness, helplessness washed over him like some dark tide. It was pointless to resist. He was a prisoner again and would be for years to come. Even if he was eventually sent back to his former camp, where he might at least be reunited with his wayward son, there would be the inevitable softening up inflicted on repeat prisoners. His upper arm twitched where the battery cables would be clamped. His fingernails began to ache, as if they remembered what the Public Security soldiers, the knobs, had done.

No! a voice shouted in his head. He had to escape, whatever the cost. He would knock down the soldiers and run, dodging their bullets. He would leap out of the helicopter as it rose from the ground. He would dive out the door if they flew over a lake. There was a murderer on the mountain and Shan had to stop him. Gendun was in the clutches of Chodron, and had to be saved.

He rubbed the bump on his head where he had been struck, realizing in sudden panic that he had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious. The cement floor and stone walls gave no clue as to where he was. He could have been drugged and transported miles away from the mountain. He searched his palate for the bitter tinge of the drugs that Public Security favored for prisoners. Nothing. Then a tiny vibration came through the ceiling, an intermittent, rhythmic rumbling. Rock and roll music.

A shadowy figure materialized at his cot without sound, holding a hand lantern, shaking him from a restless sleep. “They hit you too hard,” came the soft words in Tibetan, and a porcelain cup of steaming tea was extended toward him. “They’re just boys, most of those soldiers. Children with guns.”

Gao’s housekeeper helped him sit up and dabbed at his head with a damp cloth as he drank the strong brew. She answered his questions in quick whispers explaining that he had been brought here to the cellar of the tower by the soldiers, that he had been in the room for nearly half a day, that the other gentleman was being prepared, that a helicopter was coming that afternoon. Shan shot up and staggered to the door, where he clung to the frame a moment as his head cleared. Then he stepped into the hall.

Following a short corridor, he found himself in the austere chamber where he had seen Gao doing Tai Chi exercises. As he climbed the staircase to the sitting room, a figure in green fatigues leaped from a chair by the front door, hand on his pistol holster. Shan froze as he took in the unexpected scene. Thomas lounged in one of the overstuffed chairs, reading a Western magazine. Kohler stood at the telescope, watching the nest of fledgling lam-mergeiers. At a small table set before the long row of windows, Gao and Hostene were playing chess. The muted music of a string orchestra emanated from the hidden speakers.

Gao caught the soldier’s eye and raised a hand. The soldier frowned but retreated. When the guard reached the chair where he had been sitting, Gao made another gesture and he left the room.

“You missed lunch, Inspector,” Kohler declared with amusement.

“The metal boxes,” Shan said. “Some sort of surveillance device?”

“Motion detectors,” Kohler confirmed. “We told the army we were having trouble with predators.”

“Meaning that you want no more intruders from the other side,” Shan offered.

Hostene rose and inspected the raw patch on Shan’s temple, then nodded as if satisfied with what he saw. “It’s OK,” the Navajo said. “They know who I am.”

“We understand you saved our new American friend,” Gao said in perfect English.

“Again,” Hostene added.

“For now,” Shan replied, trying to eye the door inconspicuously. Thomas had said Gao wanted him to vanish, by means of a bullet if necessary.

“But he’s free now,” Gao said. “On this side of the mountain. His nightmare is over.”

“We left”-Hostene seemed to search for a word-“someone. Shan and I must go back.”

Gao sighed, a father losing patience with his children. “Surely you understand it is too dangerous.”

Kohler appeared between Shan and Hostene, pacing slowly, playing with the end of the white cashmere scarf draped over his collar. He looked at them. “An illegal foreigner and an outlaw investigator. Perhaps they are trying to decide which side is most dangerous for them. Over there they merely have a crazed murderer to deal with.”

“Heinz, perhaps you forget that Inspector Shan navigated the minefields of Beijing his entire career.”

“Half a career,” Shan inserted. “I prefer to think of it as a rite of passage.”

“What I don’t forget,” said Kohler, “is that he left us rather abruptly on his last visit.”

“We won’t be so careless this time,” Gao observed. “We have summoned reinforcements from the base.”

“I am going back,” Hostene said. “The miners will cool off and then I must return. No one is going to stop me.”

Gao shrugged. “I thought I mentioned the soldiers.”

“They were already here,” Hostene shot back. “You didn’t summon them because of me.”

Kohler rolled his eyes. Gao conceded the point with a nod.

“My niece is on the other side of the mountain. I will move heaven and earth to find her.”

Gao shot a confused glance at Kohler. “Your niece? You let a young girl roam the mountain?”

“She is thirty-four years old and a professor of anthropology. We were together, a party of four, doing research.”

Comprehension lit Gao’s face. “The other two were the murder victims.”

Hostene nodded soberly. “I think she believes that I am dead too. No one has seen her since the murders.”

“I may have,” Kohler declared. “Five days ago. With my binoculars.”

Hostene stepped closer to Kohler, his eyes bright with excitement.

“You were on the other side?” Shan asked.

“Hunting wolves. Does she have long black braids? A gray sweatshirt? The woman I saw seemed to be taking measurements on a rock face. She kept stopping to look over her shoulder.”

“But surely you went to investigate?” Hostene asked.

Kohler shrugged. “I was following a fresh trail. I planned to go back if I found the wolf or lost the trail. But I never saw him. And when I went back, she was nowhere to be seen. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Where was this?” Hostene asked.

Kohler withdrew a folded map from a bookshelf and laid it out on the dining table as Hostene and Shan pressed close. “Here.” He pointed to a spot two miles above Little Moscow. “She didn’t come down the slope or I would have seen her. And”-he gestured toward the set of undulating ridgelines, the steep terrain closer to the summit-“this is no man’s land. She should have known better. I’m sorry,” he added.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s too dangerous up there. Wolves. And the winds. Winds explode out of nowhere, strong enough to knock a man off a cliff. And as she goes higher, there is the lightning.”

“Lightning?” Hostene asked. “Everyone makes so much of the lightning here. Surely it is no different from anywhere else.”

“Wrong,” Kohler rejoined. “Scientific fact. Some kind of geologic anomaly, probably related to all the iron in the mountain. We studied it before we set up the base below, to understand any possible effects on our radio telemetry. There are more lightning strikes here than on any mountain for hundreds of miles, maybe more than on any other mountain in all of China. Storms sweep over the Himalayas filled with water from the ocean. The moisture is dumped on the southern slopes, which is why Tibet stays so dry. But they still retain a lot of energy when they reach the northern side of the range. Sleeping Dragon Mountain is where they discharge it. The configuration of the ranges funnels storms to us. Metallic deposits at the top do the rest.”

Hostene and Shan exchanged a worried glance. Lightning. Abigail was looking for the home of the mountain deity, the dragon that gave birth to lightning.

“I’m sorry,” Kohler said in a sorrowful tone. “I should have gone to save her.”

“Save her?” Hostene asked, alarmed.

Kohler left the room for a few minutes, returning with a rag in his hand. “I did try to look for her later, and the next day as well. I think I may have seen her once more. I think it was her. A figure in the distance, standing on a high ledge, in an impossibly dangerous spot. A squall struck out of nowhere. The wind would have scoured that cliff of anything that wasn’t tied down, even without the lightning. It was impossible to see what happened, with all the flashes. But afterward I went to the base of the cliff. I don’t know who it was for certain. This is all I found.”

Kohler tossed the rag onto the map. With a trembling hand, Hostene smoothed and straightened it. It was a piece of charred fabric from a gray sweatshirt. Despite several holes burned into it, the English words that encircled a small yellow sun rising over mountains were still legible. The surviving letters spelled The U ver ity of New Me ico.

Hostene buried his head in his hands.

“It could have been a miner,” Kohler said. “I don’t know. A miner could have found the shirt and worn it.”

“It was a miner,” came a voice from the kitchen doorway. “It had to be.” Thomas stood there, earphones around his neck.

“What haven’t you told us?” Gao demanded.

Thomas sank into one of the chairs. “I thought I could find her. A day before the murders, I went past one of those old paintings that had been overgrown with brush, so you could hardly see it. Three days ago I went by it again and the painting had been uncovered. Someone had cut the brush down, and there were the fresh marks of a tripod in the soil.”

Shan studied the boy as he spoke, remembering Thomas’s warning that Gao intended to kill him if he crossed the mountain again. Had Thomas lied to him deliberately? Or had Gao changed his mind?

“Then yesterday I met a miner working by himself, singing a song. He had a new Swiss watch. A woman had given it to him, he said. She had traded it for his horse, asked him for directions to the nearest town, to Tashtul, and galloped off. She spoke Tibetan, but no Chinese.”

Hostene hastened to Thomas and put a hand on his shoulder. “The watch, did you get a good look at it?”

“Silver. A red cross on the face. Little pieces of turquoise framed it.”

“It’s her! I gave her that watch! She finally realized her danger, and she left,” Hostene said, relieved.

“Thank God,” Kohler sighed. “I was going to town on business tomorrow,” he announced. “I will leave today. If the army has a helicopter available I can be there before dark, probably before she gets there. Tashtul’s a small town, and there’s only one trail leading to it from here. An American woman on an exhausted horse shouldn’t be hard to find.”

It was the safest course, they quickly decided. Hostene would have difficulty navigating the long journey to the city alone, and Shan would not leave the mountain until Gendun and Lokesh were safe. But Hostene traveling with Kohler on a military aircraft might raise questions with Public Security that could not be conveniently answered. Kohler would have to make the trip alone.

Hostene visibly relaxed as Kohler reappeared, ready for travel, a pack on his back. The German shook the Navajo’s hand energetically, assuring him his niece would be found safe. Then he took the trail that led to the base below.

The housekeeper brought bowls of soup. Shan and Hostene both consumed double servings before the Navajo accepted Gao’s invitation to use a spare bedroom at the base of the tower, behind the kitchen.

“What am I going to do with you, Shan?” Gao asked as soon as they were alone.

“Help me find a murderer.”

“No. That’s not my job. And it’s not yours either. Heinz is going to call Public Security when he reaches town. You haven’t brought justice. You bring grief. You bring chaos. You bring crowds,” he said. “You should leave the investigation to the authorities.”

“That’s what upsets you the most, isn’t it? Being disturbed.”

Gao’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t pick this site by happenstance. I demanded anonymity. Secrecy. Privacy. A rather substantial investment has been to assure that I have it.”

Privacy. It was, Shan well knew, the rarest treasure of all of China. “This is an elegant hermitage,” he concluded. “Some make do with caves.”

Gao ignored him. “The government can be tedious about protecting its investment.”

Shan’s stomach began tying itself into a knot. “What have you done?”

“I promised Kohler that you will dictate a transcript of what you know to Public Security when they arrive here tomorrow.”

“And you worry about medisturbing the sanctity of your retreat? Wait until the Public Security knobs arrive. They will rip the mountain apart. Your little castle will be on the front page of American newspapers by the time they are done.”

Gao studied Shan in silence, then frowned.

“Do you have any medical books?” Shan asked. “A dictionary of pharmaceuticals?”

Gao turned with a frosty gaze. “What do you wish to know?”

“Pencil and paper?”

Gao pointed to a drawer of the sideboard.

Shan quickly recorded the names of the medicines in Hostene’s bag and handed the paper to Gao, who took it and went into his office. Shan stood to follow, thought better of the notion, then took more paper from the sideboard. He stared at the blank sheet for a long time, then wrote shorthand phrases describing events. A miner dies. Bing is elected to lead miners. Old mine destroyed. Abigail constructs a skeleton. Young miner killed at blue demon painting. Sandpainting destroyed. Professor Ma and Tashi, the guide, murdered. Camp equipment looted. Corpses mutilated and their hands taken away. Abigail’s equipment removed from cave.

There were connections between each event he could not fathom. But did he even have the sequence properly? He studied the notes then added three more phrases. Yangke receives his canque. Hostene ventures into Bing’s camp. Thomas, the fledgling entrepreneur, begins giving valuable goods to Rapaki, for which Rapaki cannot pay.

A thick reference book was slid across the table to him. Pages were marked with tabs of paper.

“Cancer,” Gao declared. “These are drugs for someone who is in the advanced stages of cancer.”

A new ache entered Shan’s heart. He slowly opened the book and scanned the marked pages. “Could they be for something else?”

“No. They are highly specialized, very expensive. Not usually available in China,” he added pointedly. “In this combination they have no other purpose. Drugs like these forestall the cancer from debilitating the body until it is in the final stage.”

Shan stared without focusing, twisting the pencil that remained in his hand, reconsidering everything that had happened to Hostene: his coma, his fatigue, his having been passed over by the killer. The wise old Navajo, who reminded him so much of Lokesh, was dying, and, worse, knew he was dying. Shan’s confusion and sorrow took him to a dark, unfamiliar place, until suddenly the pencil broke and he snapped out of his trance.

“The motion detectors,” he whispered at last, “how do they work?”

“Infrared heat signatures,” Gao replied. “Solar powered cells with transmitters, all wireless.”

“Where does the data go?”

“It is transmitted to the computer in my office and stored on the disc drive.”

Five minutes later they sat at a small table in Gao’s office, fast-forwarding through data from the prior twenty-four hours, watching the movement of vague yellow shapes across the screen as numbers indicating the time of transmission scrolled across the bottom left corner. The smallest blotches of color were the little creatures that nested on the rocky slope. Bigger patches of color were humans, although Gao had been warned by the soldiers to disregard patches that appeared at dawn and dusk in and out of certain rock formations, which represented groups of pikas entering and leaving their nests. “Sometimes false positives occur,” he told Shan.

Gao pointed to a big shape moving up the slope from the house. “Kohler going hunting,” he said, then indicated the two shapes that represented Shan and Hostene arriving that morning. They watched movements back and forth from the house. “Thomas helps the housekeeper bring in supplies. In the summer dry goods are kept in the old granary.”

Shan noted the times of the movements to and from the little building. “Does Thomas go only around meal times?”

“Heinz and I made him responsible for keeping an inventory, a serious job since we can’t run out to a shop when we’re out of a necessity.”

“You could always call Public Security for salt and rice,” Shan observed. He was still resentful of what Gao was.

“The Party secretary would respond immediately,” Gao replied in a stiff tone. “But regional commanders are not always as accommodating.”

Shan stared at the screen as the display of the data entries finished, then asked Gao to run them again. He had missed the quick blurs of color on the upper left corner of the field on the first run-through but noted them on the second. He asked Gao for one more replay. A glow that, though fleeting, indicated a human, reappeared.

Gao took Shan to the main entrance and pointed out the location of the scanners. Shan noted blind spots; infrared light did not register through rocks. There were a lot of low spines of stone along which someone could have crawled undetected. Shan pointed out where the unknown intruder could have circled the house.

“Could it have been someone from the village?”

“No. They are not welcome here,” Gao replied.

“But they do come. Bearing gifts.”

“Nothing I ask for. That fool Chodron arrives every spring, kowtowing, bringing me tokens. I think he believes he keeps the soldiers away by doing so.”

“But recently he sent you something else. A gold beetle.”

“He sought my help in removing some intruders from the mountain,” Gao said. “I declined to get involved.” He studied the screen again.

“Could it be the guards?” Shan asked.

“No. They usually come twice a day, check the system, then walk around the perimeter of the house, and leave. I sent them away until tomorrow. If they knew a foreigner was here, so close to the base, it could be”-he paused to select a word-“problematic.” Gao frowned, stared at the now blank screen, then walked to his office window. Someone seemed to be watching his house. Someone who, knowing that the scanners were operating, was using the cover of the rocks to come and go, leaving only the most slender traces.

“Why did this American come here if he is dying?” the physicist asked after a moment.

“Perhaps to prove he is still alive,” Shan suggested.

But Gao answered his own question. “How many places on the planet are so completely removed from the eyes of any authority? Surely there are no more left in America.”

“Hostene did not come to Tibet to commit a crime.”

“We know he has already committed crimes. He achieved admission to the country under false pretenses, no doubt involving a lie on his visa application. He’s trespassing in a restricted region. We know he is a criminal, even if we don’t know the full list of his crimes.”

“I trust him.”

Gao stared at Shan, and shook his head in disappointment. “You live in a fairy tale, Shan. You will have to grow out of it.”

Shan searched Gao’s face. Another time he might have taken the remark as a bitter joke. But now Shan saw no mockery in Gao’s expression, which seemed to reflect his own sorrow.

“ Youlive a fairy-tale life, Gao,” he echoed. “A make-believe existence in a make-believe castle. You know you will have to grow out of it.”

Shan had been slapped in the face by such men for much less. But Gao merely left the room. Shan stared at the screen again, glanced at the door, then quickly closed the program, and scanned the pile of papers in the tray beside the fax machine. Thomas had sent several messages to Beijing recently, each confirming that he had dispatched a new package of evidence-photos, fingerprints, and, later, fibers from the bloody cloth stuffed in the mouth of one of the victims.

Shan found Gao at the telescope, gazing at the distant nest of vultures. “I’m worried about Albert,” Gao said. “He leans out of the nest too far. He does not have his flight feathers yet.”