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 me disturbing 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.
“You live 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.”
“Before you learn to fly,” Shan observed, “you must learn to fear.”
Gao continued to study the young birds of prey. “We can take a day or two and delay sending Hostene away,” he said. “It would give me time to get a doctor to look at him. Neither of us wants him to die while he is on this mountain.”
“If he dies on this mountain,” Shan replied, “it will not be from cancer.”
Gao shrugged and stepped toward his sand garden below. “For now we shall let sleeping Americans lie.”
But Shan couldn’t let things rest. He found the Navajo’s pack and recharged the battery of the video camera. He had spent a quarter hour reviewing Abigail’s videos when Thomas appeared from the kitchen, carrying an empty basket, wearing a black linen shirt. “Let’s discuss the evidence,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “After I finish my chores,” he added.
Shan hurried to Hostene’s side and shook him, gesturing for him to keep silent. He lifted the camera and pointed to a long silver object lying on a rock. “Whose is that?” he asked in a whisper.
“Tashi’s,” Hostene said with a yawn. “His pen case. He kept little drawings and things in it. You woke me up for that?”
“No,” Shan replied. “You must come with me to the granary,” he said urgently.
Hostene stretched. “That old stone ruin? Why?”
“Because of a ghost in the motion detectors,” Shan said. “And because Thomas put on a clean shirt to go get groceries.”
Chapter Seven
They approached the granary as they had before, running together from rock to rock, using the shadows for cover until they reached the plank door of the low stone structure. If Gao happened to open the monitoring program, he might assume the movement on the screen was caused by Thomas. Shan glanced at the padlock that hung open from the door’s hasp and peered inside. He saw a second door beyond a stack of rice and onion sacks, on top of which sat a small lantern. There was no sign of Thomas. He withdrew, whispered to Hostene, then both men slipped around the side of the structure.
Thomas emerged fifteen minutes later, setting his basket, now filled with foodstuffs, on a rock in front of the door before he turned to fasten the padlock.
“Did you know the miners tried to kill us yesterday?” Shan asked as he came around the corner.
For a moment Thomas looked as if he was going to attack Shan. Then he shrugged. “That Bing,” the youth said, “he tells people that they should still consider him to be Public Security, but without all the red tape.”
“They’re not hard to beat, Thomas,” Shan observed, pointing to the nearest motion detector. “By shifting each a quarter turn you could create a corridor where they are blind. Or if you set a lighted candle in front of one, you blind that sensor.”
Thomas cast an uncertain glance toward Shan. Then, acting on Shan’s suggestion, he began turning the little metal box. Shan sensed Hostene behind him, going inside. Thomas paused, as if he too had sensed something. They heard a low moan from within the building.
Thomas sagged, and for a moment looked as if he was about to flee. “You tricked me,” he said, wounded.
The sounds from inside turned to muffled cries of joy, then a low, feminine sobbing.
Thomas lowered himself onto a rock. “You wouldn’t believe what she knows about rock and roll,” he said. “She drives a car with satellite radio. It receives two hundred fifty stations. She says when I finish in Beijing she’ll help me gain admission to a graduate program in America.”
Shan gave Hostene five more minutes. Inside, Abigail Natay was crying on her uncle’s shoulder. She scrubbed away her tears with the sleeve of her denim shirt and extended a hand to Shan, shyly smiling. “Some of the old Tibetans have told me there are things too important to be put into mere words,” she said in a voice husky with emotion. “I guess one of those would be how I feel about your bringing my uncle back from the dead.”
A remarkable opening from a stranger, Shan thought. But she wasn’t a stranger, he reminded himself. She was the familiar image on the video camera screen. He self-consciously accepted her hand. “The old Tibetans would say he still has a destiny in this incarnation,” he said.
Abigail replied, “Your mountain is the most beautiful and terrifying place I have ever known.”
“One thing I have not been able to figure out,” Shan replied, “is just whose mountain this is.” He almost added that sometimes it seemed that if he could only solve that mystery all the others would fall into place.
Hostene and his niece began speaking, sometimes reverting to their native tongue. Abigail showed her uncle the cozy nest of blankets among the stores of supplies where Thomas had hidden her in the inner chamber. A blue nylon backpack lying open near the door revealed a small digital camera, a plastic bag of toiletries, and half a dozen ketaan sticks.
Thomas, downcast and silent, ventured into the granary and settled onto a wooden crate near Shan. “You tricked me,” he repeated.
“You tricked all of us,” Shan rejoined.
Thomas clasped his hands together and stared at them.
Strangely, Shan felt sorry for the youth. “I still need to review your investigation notes,” he ventured, “and I still need to hear how you met her, and when. Was it with Rapaki?”
“I take things to him. Uncle Heinz thinks he’s a good-luck charm, like when a singing bird nests in your eaves. We communicate in pantomime, since I know no Tibetan.”
Shan paused. “But you speak English with Abigail?”
“Sure. Anyway, I saw him a month ago and pulled out a box of sweet biscuits to give him. He started waving in another direction, singing one of his songs. He was showing me Abigail coming up the trail. Like some kind of goddess. Who would hav
e thought of seeing someone like her on this mountain?”
“Then you’d met her before the murders?”
Thomas nodded. “But she won’t speak about them. Maybe knowing her uncle is alive will make a difference.”
Shan asked, “Did you see her this morning?”
“Early this morning, on the way to Little Moscow.”
“You ran away from there to warn her?”
The youth nodded again. “You made sure all of the miners knew she was still alive,” Thomas pointed out.
Shan studied him, worried now. “You mean you’re convinced the killer was there, among the miners?”
“He must be,” Thomas said. “At least that’s my hypothesis. I need a credible theory or my project is a failure.”
Tears starting flowing down Abigail’s cheek as she uttered two names: Tashi and Dr. Ma. She leaned against Hostene’s shoulder again, then gasped as she gazed past Shan.
A figure had materialized in the doorway. Kohler’s hunting rifle was cradled in one of Gao’s arms, and he held one of the small radio units he used to summon soldiers from below. His face, which had at first displayed a mixture of emotions, now showed cold anger. As he neared his nephew, Abigail stepped between Gao and Thomas. “I asked him to hide me,” she said in a level voice in English. “He said he had a safe place where I could rest for a while. I said I would go only if I could remain invisible. He was trying to help me, to protect me.”
Gao studied the Navajo woman in silence, taking in her heavy hiking boots, her scuffed blue jeans, the belt pack from which ink pens protruded, the turquoise pendant hanging from her neck on a silver chain, her long braided hair, her dark, intelligent eyes, full of challenge. “Invisible?”
“I have to finish my work, for which I must stay on the western slope without being noticed.”
Gao looked past the American woman to his nephew. “You deceived us, Thomas,” he said. “You have stolen from me and from the government, which pays for everything here. For what, to be a black marketeer? To disgrace us and never be allowed back to the university?”
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