“If you are discovered,” Tsipon declared in a tentative tone, “I won’t even return the call when Public Security tries to reach me.”
“If they arrest me there,” Shan rejoined, “they won’t bother to make any calls.”
The thought seemed to encourage Tsipon. He waved the paper toward Shan. “These people you want to use for cover,” he added with a perverse grin, “they are like animals. They even scare the knobs.”
Shan had indeed been counting on the guards’ discomfort with the fleshcutters. The soldiers who handed out the lab coats seemed not nearly as interested in screening the workers as quickly getting rid of the shabbily dressed, low-caste Tibetans.
Moments later they were inside, retrieving stainless steel buckets and two large laundry tubs on wheels from a janitor’s closet before disappearing down a dimly lit corridor.
The Tibetans did their accustomed chore with silent determination, moving from one surgical room to another, emptying several sacks of bloody towels into one of the laundry tubs, then tossing in stained cloth bundles from canisters marked CONTAMINATED before looking to Shan with an air of anticipation. He had known several ragyapa before. They were people of few words and fewer fears. He had met them before dawn to explain his goal that morning, and had listened and agreed to their rules about touching even the smallest of mortal remains. Unknown to the knobs, the ragyapa did not burn the body parts as they were instructed to do, but took them to consecrated grounds for dispersal to the birds. Touching the dead was not taboo to them; it was a sacred duty.
The oldest of the men now took the lead, walking down a corridor marked Kitchens. A woman in a nurse’s uniform saw them and scurried away. A janitor with a broom muttered an oath, then ducked into an unlit room. Many in modern Tibet regarded the fleshcutters with disdain but others knew them to be special emissaries of the Lord of Death.
Four of the party took up positions at each of the kitchen entry doors as the others watched Shan enter the large walk-in refrigeration unit at the back of the room. He moved toward the heavy racks at the rear. Slabs of beef and pork. Boxes of fresh vegetables beside dressed chickens. Like sailors on submarines, the staff at such remote sites were well fed and well paid to offset the hardship.
He studied the pipes that carried the coolant, noting how they disappeared through the side wall, then spoke in low, urgent tones to his companions. Soon kitchen staff would arrive to begin fixing the morning meal. A minute later they stood at a set of double swinging doors in a short corridor behind the kitchen, secured not by locks but by a single small sign. Morgue, it said, in Chinese. Shan left two of the men at the entrance to the corridor, then gestured for the others with the empty laundry tub to follow, pushed open the door and trotted to the heavy metal door at the back of the chamber, an identical match to that in the kitchen. Turning on the light switch by the entry, he stepped inside.
There were four bodies under sheets in the huge refrigerator, laid out on long metal shelves that lined the walls. Shan hesitated a moment, knowing that two of the bodies must be inmates, then saw the red tags extending from the two bodies laid out at the rear wall, a warning not to tamper with Public Security evidence. One body was obviously female. He pulled the sheet from the face of the second.
Even though he had come expecting to find Tenzin, his gut still wrenched at the sight. The compact, swarthy Nepali was much grayer than when Shan had wrapped him in canvas the week before but he was still recognizable as the steadfast sherpa Shan had known at the base camp.
He whispered a greeting to his friend then stared at him awkwardly, thinking perhaps there were other words that should be said. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, and had extended his hand to untie the red tag when a hand grabbed his elbow. The old ragyapa whispered a reverent greeting to the dead man then pulled Shan back. Shan was about to protest when the Tibetan lifted Shan’s hands, palms upward. He placed his own fingertips on Shan’s palms as if passing something very fragile to him, then spoke words that were so fast and low Shan could not understand. The man nodded solemnly and motioned for Shan to continue. Shan pointed to the cardboard box under the shelf, which contained familiar clothes, but as one of the Tibetans lifted it away he reached out and extracted a blue wool cap, the cap the driver said had been pulled low on dead American’s head after she had died. He tossed it back into the box, turned to remove the sheet and froze. Tenzin had been shot.
He quickly bent over the two near-perfect circles in his chest, examining the flesh around them. They were positioned roughly where the wounds on Megan Ross had been, but the flesh had never been stained with blood. It was part of the disguise the knobs had given him. Witnesses from afar had seen two bodies; closer ones had seen two victims dead of gunshots, one with a blue cap on. Just as they had placed the cap on Tenzin, they had also put two bullet holes in his chest after his body had been switched for that of Megan Ross. He leaned over the holes once more, gauging the size with a fingertip. They were large, huge, compared to the holes made by the 9 millimeter bullets of most Chinese pistols.
Shan realized no one was moving behind him. He turned to see the ragyapa standing, staring at him. He motioned them forward.
The ragyapa worked with their usual silent efficiency, lifting Tenzin’s body to the floor, rolling him in a sheet taken from a stack by the door before dropping him into the large tub on wheels and covering it with the cardboard box of clothing and bloodstained refuse. As they began to wheel it away Shan stopped them and uncovered the box, pulling away an envelope taped to one of its flaps, marked Evidence. Inside was a Public Security form confirming that the contents had been removed from Unnamed Accomplice, and two heavy bullets. He closed it and left it on one of the rear shelves. Unnamed Accomplice. Tenzin had had quite a career since dying.
Shan stared uneasily at the two dead prisoners hidden by the sheets, then forced himself toward them. It seemed to take all his strength to lift the sheets and glance at each of the faces. Having confirmed that neither was his son, he stepped back, gasping. He did not realize he had been holding his breath.
Shan touched the shoulder of one of the ragyapa and the two of them lifted the nearest dead prisoner onto the shelf where Tenzin had lain. Shan fastened the red tag to the dead man, covered him with the sheet, then gestured for the Tibetans to move back into the corridor before he lifted the sheet covering Minister Wu’s upper torso. The bullet holes in her abdomen were puckered at the edges, the flesh stained, but the holes were much smaller than those in Tenzin. She had been an athletic woman but, he saw as he studied her hands and the little lines in her face, considerably older than he had thought. On the back of one hand someone had written her name in ink as if fearing she might be misplaced. On her shoulder someone had written something else. No, he saw as he bent over the mark, it was a tattoo. A hammer and a lightning bolt, crossed like an X.
The ragyapa waited for him in the kitchen, nervously glancing at their rolling carts, apparently heaped high with anatomical waste. He offered a nod, then gestured them toward the exit. An instant later the sound of running feet rose from a distant corridor.
“Guards!” he called to the Tibetans, who stared at him expectantly, not frightened but like steady soldiers awaiting orders. He turned, his mind racing. The lights. He had risked turning on the lights in the kitchen and the corridor beyond because they were not visible from the guard station at the entrance to the hospital. But he had forgotten the chance of patrols around the grounds. Shan cast about desperately then tossed a small bag of oranges onto the cart, covering it with a single layer of towels. “They will think you came to the kitchen to pilfer some food,” he explained. “Let them find this bag. They will have no appetite for digging farther into the cart. And they will certainly have no appetite for firing you since there is no one to replace you.”
“But if they check the morgue before we leave. .,” one of the women protested, her voice cracking with the fear of one who understood the ways of Public Security.
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p; “Go!” Shan ordered. “I will make it safe.” He watched as they hurried away, knowing the woman was right. If the guards suspected foul play they might search the morgue, and if they discovered a body missing, they would radio for the ragyapa to be detained at the gatehouse. He sprinted back to the morgue. He entered it in the dark, finding his way by touch, retrieved a sheet and climbed onto the shelf form which they had removed the prisoner’s body, contorting his own as he tried again and again to cover himself with the sheet, finishing only seconds before he heard angry voices approaching. Static from radio sets cut through the silence. From somewhere came a bell that, he suspected, signaled the beginning of the workday.
He began to shiver. A dozen thoughts swirled in his head. He was alone with his fears, unprotected, with no way out now. In such a place he might be considered a financial windfall, a man without a name for whom they would never have to account. If done right, in correct sequence, at least four vital organs, all highly valuable in China’s underground organ market, could be harvested before he died. They would simply lock the door and turn down the thermostat to assure he was nearly frozen, to incapacitate him. Disparate, wild thoughts pounced on him. They would discover the ragyapa were part of his conspiracy and send them all to the experimentation labs. They would lock the door, leave him to freeze solid and drop him off a cliff so he would shatter into a thousand pieces. They would make a mistake and bury him alive with the others.
He clenched his jaw, concentrating, remembering how the lamas had taught him that someone in the right meditation state could generate inward heat. This was nothing compared to what he had endured at some of the higher elevations the winter before. He conjured up memories of sitting with lamas in cold meditation cells carved out of living rock, tried to imagine he was with them again, listening to their soothing mantras.
When the guards entered the cooler-was it five or fifty minutes later? — they were quick and angry and vituperative. Shan heard at least three different voices and sensed through the sheet the beams of three different flashlights. Someone cursed the locusts, a favorite epithet for Tibetans because of their droning mantras. Someone else groused that they were going to miss breakfast. Then the heavy metal door clanged shut.
Panic seized Shan again as his sheet began to slide off him and his numbed hands could not move fast enough to stop the inertia. His last frantic effort caused his body to roll so hard he could not stop the inertia. He watched, his wits chilled, his reactions numbed, as his body fell off the shelf, striking the floor with a loud thud.
He lay there, torpid, wondering at the strange disconnect between his brain and body. The pain he had begun to feel in his extremities was gone. He was relaxed for once, feeling an unfamiliar, languid lightheadedness. He marveled at the impossible length of time it took to bend his fingers after consciously willing them to be bent, and recalled a training manual Tsipon had loaned him the day he had been hired, with a passage about frostbite. After losing just two degrees of temperature the body began shutting down blood flow to the limbs to conserve vital organs. A strange croaking sound rose from his throat, his best attempt at a laugh. Right now his most vital organs were his fingers.
A grunt of protest came from somewhere, as if from one of the dead, and he was up on his knees, then standing, staggering, before he realized he himself had made the sound. Holding the shelves for support, swaying, he turned and aimed himself for the door.
Moments later, free of the cold, he collapsed into the darkest corner of the empty outer chamber of the morgue, hugging his knees to his chest, contracting and relaxing his muscles. As his circulation mounted, so too did a grim realization. The fact that no alarms had sounded, no squad had returned to the morgue refrigerator, meant that the ragyapa had successfully left the facility. The villagers would at least have Tenzin’s body. The Americans could climb. Megan Ross would somehow know he had not forgotten her. But the time he had lost meant the workday had begun in earnest. It would be virtually impossible to leave the building undetected.
After ten minutes he rose, the intense aching in his joints making him nauseous for a moment. He stood before the double swinging doors. To the left lay the hall to the kitchen, busy with staff entering and leaving the adjoining cafeteria. To the right was the heart of the complex, with signs pointing the way to Labs and Containment Halls One through Eight. To the left he knew he would find more guards. To the right, for now, he saw only orderlies and nurses. He straightened his fingers, making sure he could freely move them again, then began stripping off his clothes.
There are parts of every life that never die, that you keep reliving, whether you choose to or not. It wasn’t fear of being caught as an intruder that now gripped Shan as he wandered down the hall in his tattered gray underwear, it was the old terror that sometimes erupted with a heart stopping gasp in the middle of the night, banishing sleep for hours, the memory of what these doctors could do, and once had done, to him.
He gazed into the middle distance, without focusing, without reacting, when an orderly snapped at him, still shuffling forward when someone else shouted that another damned fool had wandered away from his treatment.
“You! Monkey!” someone barked behind him. “What’s your damned unit?”
Shan, not looking up, stopped, pushed some spittle out of his mouth and let it roll down his chin onto the floor.
The man cursed again, then grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him into a small cubicle that served as a nurses’ station. He unlocked a cabinet and extracted a rack of preloaded syringes, setting it by a computer screen before impatiently seizing Shan’s arm and typing the number of Shan’s tattoo into a glowing box at the top of the screen.
He had entered all but the last two digits when Shan snatched a syringe and jammed it into the man’s thigh, slamming down the plunger. For one brief instant the orderly began to rise, began to protest, then his legs and voice collapsed. For good measure, Shan injected another syringe into the man’s bicep and he sank back, unconscious.
Shan worked fast, first deleting the number typed on the screen, then pulling the man’s blue uniform off and donning it himself. Slipping the man’s security card lanyard from his neck and draping it over his own, he quickly hid the limp form under the desk, stuffed another of the syringes into his pocket, then scanned the papers beside the computer screen. The list he was looking for was tacked to the wall beside it. He was only looking for a name, he told himself, and then he would leave, for every minute he lingered increased the likelihood of his capture. But the tide of emotion when he found the name was so sudden, so overpowering, it almost brought him to his knees. Shan Ko, it said, Hall Five. His son was alive.
Five minutes later he stood outside the door of the room marked for his son, a locked ward with six beds. Shan glanced up and down the empty corridor and looked down at his shaking hand. He closed his eyes a moment to calm himself then slid the card through the electric lock mechanism and pushed open the door.
The room reeked of urine and vomit. The first two inmates lay comatose on their metal frame beds, their skulls shaved and wrapped in bandages. Two others, older men, stared blankly at walls, another sat against the wall between two beds drawing with a pencil on a pad of paper, surrounded by sheets torn from the pad, all covered with precise penciled triangles, hundreds of triangles. The last inmate was tied to a corroded metal armchair facing the small, dirty window. Shan’s heart raced as he approached the chair and looked past the ragged, tangled hair. His son was alive, his son was intact. And completely oblivious to Shan and everything else in the chamber.
Ko stared, unfocused, toward a snowcapped peak on the horizon.
Shan tried to speak his son’s name but could summon only a hoarse moan. He put his hand on Ko’s arm. His son did not react, did not even blink. He began to untie the tethers, latex tubes knotted at his wrists and ankles, then reconsidered and only loosened them. Lowering himself onto one knee in front of the chair, he saw for the first time the fresh bruise
that ran the length of Ko’s jaw, the work of a baton to the face, and two broken fingers crudely bound with duct tape, a tongue dispenser used as a splint. He rolled up Ko’s sleeve. The skin inside his right elbow was perforated with syringe holes. A long ugly line along his forearm showed where one of his veins had collapsed. His chin was caked with dried salvia and grime. Shan wiped it clean and stroked his son’s cheek.
“It’s your father,” he whispered after scrubbing a tear from his own cheek. “I am here.” Words were useless, words were ridiculous. He found himself examining Ko’s body again, finding more bruises, old and new, checking his pulse, his fingernails and toenails. It could be worse, he told himself. If he had to be tied, Ko must still have use of his arms and legs, must still have some dim spark left that flared up from time to time. He found a plastic crate in a corner and sat on it beside his son, draping Ko’s limp fingers over his own hand, looking out with him through the smudged window to the same distant peak. Images flashed in his head of Ko as a laughing infant. This wasn’t how he had imagined it would be when he had strolled with his baby son through Bei Hai Park in Beijing.
He fought to stay in the moment, pushing away the world, but an incessant voice inside kept shouting that the alarms would sound at any moment, that he would never be able to help Ko if he was captured and tethered to another chair. There was a bus, he had been told, a shuttle bus that took workers through the gate, into town. He had to find the bus and board it using the stolen identity badge, before they discovered its true owner.
Shan rose and checked the empty bed beside Ko, finding another plastic crate under it with his son’s possessions. A worn denim prisoner uniform. A comb. A stick of plastic with a few bristles at one end, the remains of a toothbrush. A pencil. A red book of the sainted Chairman’s teachings, issued by the prison system, with several pages ripped out. In the pocket of the pants was another pencil, its end built into a bulge with layers of tape and paper. Shan recognized the device. It was used by diehard prisoners to vomit up drugs.
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