Shan and Jowa jogged along the valley floor toward the trail the monks had described as the route of the herders. There was time if their visitors had to flee, the assistant abbot had confirmed, for the ravens always sensed the approach of the cloud riders from a great distance, in enough time for some of the monks to walk to the lake to meet the machine when it arrived. But there was nothing to fear from the men in the machine, he had insisted. What's more, there was no place to go. They had no more than two hours of light left and in the autumn night of the high Kunlun they would be blind, they would freeze. Sometimes travelers just shriveled in the cold, dry wind and blew away.
But Jowa and Shan knew there was danger. The Brigade knew their faces, and if the two of them were captured at the Raven's Nest the monks too would be in jeopardy. The assistant abbot had reluctantly shown his three visitors the ancient stairway cut in the rock face that was the only path to the valley floor and at the last minute had handed Jowa a battered old candle lantern, a small tin box with a handle of wire and a small glass window on one side.
When they had descended the stairs Bajys had collapsed on the last step with a forlorn expression. Jowa had impatiently urged him on but Shan had motioned for the purba to continue down the path, then turned to Bajys.
"It's a long climb back," Shan said after a moment, looking at the steep, narrow stairs that led up to the Nest. The Brigade knew Shan and Jowa, but they had never seen Bajys. One more unlicensed Tibetan in the gompa would make little difference to Managing Director Ko.
When Bajys looked up, the confusion had left his face. There was something new, a glimmer of gratitude in his eyes. "When we came out of that snowstorm," Bajys said, "it felt like my world had changed."
Shan sighed and looked up at the monks. They had gathered on the lower terrace. They were all wearing red nylon jackets over their robes and waving. Shan offered his hand. "I'd like to come back some day," he said, "and help you fix that window."
Bajys took his hand and smiled again, then began climbing back to the old monks.
Shan caught up with Jowa at the lake, which was as brilliant blue seen from its shores as from the gompa perched in the rocks above. But he paused as Jowa disappeared around the front edge of the ridge. He stepped to the shoreline, dropped to the water, and drank, then cupped both hands and washed his face. It was strangely sweet and caused a tingling sensation on his tongue. The holy water of the Yakde.
For a quarter hour they jogged down the face of the massive escarpment on which the Raven's Nest perched, then suddenly the sound of rotor blades filled the air. Shan lay beside Jowa on the path, the blanket thrown over them as the helicopter sped by and disappeared into the hanging valley above them. Then they sprang up and dashed recklessly along the narrow goat path, risking a plunge of five hundred feet with any misstep, until they reached a fork in the trail. Without hesitating Jowa chose the one that led to the south. Minutes later they crossed a narrow pass. Jowa paused to study the peaks once more, then, with the setting sun in front of them, cut a path to the crest of a long low ridge that descended to the west of the pass.
Jowa did not speak but jogged on, never once glancing back to see if Shan was there. After an hour, with the sun lost in a pink blush to the west, he stopped and stared at the terrain ahead, memorizing it in the last light. In another quarter hour he paused and lit the lantern. They could travel at no more than a fast walk in the dim light it threw, and finally Jowa stopped and said they would wait for the moon. They sat silently against a rock, huddling against the cold, each eating a handful of tsampa, until after nearly an hour the moon blinked over the eastern peaks. Jowa stood and studied the nearby hills, then moved briskly away.
Jowa extinguished the light as they began climbing down into a narrow valley, seeming more confident as he led Shan along the rugged terrain. He left Shan in the shadow of a large boulder by the bottom wall of the valley, handing him the blanket and instructing him in a grave tone not to move, not to leave with anyone but Jowa, as if danger lurked near.
Shan sat in the dark, clutching the blanket to his neck, watching the stars, shifting his view to the north, where Gendun and Lokesh roamed. Did they have shelter from the wind? he wondered. Had they found someone to give them light in the black of the night?
He had not heard the helicopter leave from the Raven's Nest, though it easily could have gone in the opposite direction without detection, back to Ko's home in Yoktian. What was it Ko was doing at the Nest? The question raged in his mind, it defied him, it filled him with a foreboding nearly as great as that he felt over the fate of Gendun and Lokesh. Ko had no authority in Tibet, no sponsor. In Tibet he would be as illegal as the monks at the Nest. But Ko was not like others Shan had known in authority. He was part of the new China. He did not yearn for higher government office, which had always been the source of power in the People's Republic. He wasn't interested in killing boys. He was interested in business, had perhaps been in the Kunlun that night in the truck, on some Brigade business Shan still did not comprehend. Ko saw gain elsewhere. He saw gain from a handful of old, illegal monks in a forgotten wilderness gompa.
He became aware of a noise and of movements in the shadows. He heard Jowa's voice through the darkness. "This way."
Two dark shapes, Jowa and a figure wearing a hooded cloak, emerged from the night and led him through a maze of rocks, wary of the moonlight, as if even in this high wilderness, in the black night, they feared being seen. They entered a cave, where Jowa's companion lit a butter lamp, and they walked for thirty feet in its dim light before the lamp was abruptly extinguished. There was the sound of a knock on a door and creaking hinges, a hastily blurted syllable that Shan could not understand- a password, perhaps- then a hand was on his back, pushing him through.
The door closed with a metallic groan, and Shan sensed that they had entered a new place. There were unexpected smells of metal and incense and damp fleece and onions. The lamp was lit once more, and to his great surprise Shan saw walls of concrete. Jowa and their guide moved rapidly away, and as Shan followed at a brisk walk he saw that the floor too was constructed of concrete. They passed sleeping forms on pallets of dried grass, then silent men and women sitting alone, bolt upright, at the intersections where other tunnels met their own, as if they were sentinels in some vast labyrinth. Several of the silent figures nodded to Jowa, then looked uncertainly at Shan as he passed.
It was an impossible place. It was a purba place, but it could never have been built by the purbas. As they passed through a central room that had wires hanging from the ceiling and cold, lifeless electric lamp fixtures on the walls, he saw dogs and children and several tables with small statues of Buddha and other teachers.
They went down a long stairway, not carved of the mountain rock but made of metal grating with rusty piping for railings, then followed a corridor that seemed to reverse their direction, as if they were now traveling under the valley floor. Jowa's face was fixed in a grim expression. Then, just as Shan was about to stop and insist on an explanation, they moved through a heavy metal door, spotted with rust. Old rubber seals, dried and cracked, hung from the door frame. They entered a circular chamber twenty feet in diameter, which Jowa walked through quickly, as if anxious to be away from it.
In the chamber was a ring of iron railing around a ten-foot-wide circle of deep shadow. Shan took a hesitant step forward and put a hand on the railing. A cold, hard thing grew in his belly, and he understood the essence of the place. It was not just a hole inside the ring. It was a concrete-lined silo.
"How is it possible?" he gasped, both hands on the rusty pipe as he stared down into the darkness.
"The first generation of missile bases," Jowa said in a low, unsettled voice. "Now the missiles are much bigger. Multiple warheads. Huge bases, like the Mushroom Bowl. But thirty years ago they built smaller facilities, as close to India as possible, half a dozen silos apiece. A small crew. Some, in the bigger valleys, were expanded for the new systems. Others like this were abandoned. They sealed the tops. They blew up the entrances to fill them with rubble. But a herder was watching here. He cut the fuse to the explosives in the one tunnel, so he could use it for his sheep in the winter. But later the Chinese made him surrender his herd to a collective."
"So he told the purbas."
"He became a purba. Not because of the sheep. Because they put his brother in prison on flour charges. Some July sixth, years ago."
Shan grimaced. For centuries throwing roasted barley flour into the air had been a traditional Tibetan expression of rejoicing. But July 6, the Dalai Lama's birthday, had been outlawed as a holiday, and those caught celebrating it with flour, even sometimes those caught carrying bags of flour on the day, were subject to criminal charges.
"But all these people," Shan said. "Not just purbas use it."
Jowa opened another heavy door and gestured Shan through it. "I was one of those who opened it years ago. It is one of the few safe places we have in the region. It became something of a sanctuary, for people in transit. They come usually at night, with a purba guide. Few know exactly where they are. Most stay only a few days and move on."
"Transit?" Shan asked as they started down the corridor.
"Sometimes people have to leave quickly," Jowa explained, "cross the mountains before they are arrested. Sometimes they can't take their families. But their families are known to Public Security, so their families must be protected." Public Security would use the families, Jowa meant, would take them as hostages for the return of the fugitive or just punish them in retribution.
"So, all these people- they are waiting to cross the border?"
"Some are. Some just come to help. Some come to rest or recover from injuries that can't be taken to a Chinese hospital. Others come for the quiet, to make plans."
As they walked past another group of reclining figures, a woman sat up and called to Jowa. "Thank you, thank you again," she said in a soft, shy voice, then looked at Shan with a tentative expression, as if she recognized him. As she raised her bandaged wrist, Shan realized who she was and halted.
"They were still very frightened when our people found them," Jowa explained. "Just sitting at the boy's grave, waving that charm. I said, at least give her time here, in safety, to heal her wrist. We sent people to watch their sheep."
It was the dropka woman, the foster mother of the dead boy Alta.
Shan stepped across a collection of sleeping forms to squat by the woman's side. "I hope your hand is better," he offered.
"Soon I will be able to use it, the healer here says," the woman said, bracing her broken wrist on her knee. She placed her uninjured hand flat onto something beside her as she spoke, as if she needed support. Shan glanced down. She was leaning on the charm, the sacred writing left by Gendun the day Alta had died.
"I wanted to ask you something important," Shan said. "I am sorry if the memory is still painful. But we are still trying to understand. The day when you found the killer, was the killer speaking to the boy? Asking him questions?"
The woman's brow knitted as she struggled to remember. She shook her head gradually. "Nothing. No words. Just noises."
"You said he was called away by lightning. Are you sure? Lightning is rare in the mountains this time of year."
"Of course. He saw the lightning and ran away with the boy's shoe."
"Did you recognize the noises he made?" Jowa asked her over Shan's shoulder. He spoke in Mandarin.
The woman looked at Jowa with a blank stare.
Shan glanced at Jowa and nodded. She didn't understand Mandarin.
"He did not speak," the woman said again. "Not in any language. Just noises, like an animal, when he saw the lightning."
"Can you remember the exact sound the killer made?" Shan asked.
The woman grimaced and hung her head. "I will always remember. I hear it in my nightmares now. One of the barking noises that demons make. Kow ni," she said, looking into the shadows now. "Kow ni ma swee. Like that."
"Cao ni ma," Jowa whispered. It was a curse in Mandarin. Fuck your mother. Fuck your mother, Sui.
They nodded their thanks to the woman and began to walk away.
"We should have taken him to the other place," the dropka woman said in a hollow tone behind them. "Alta wanted to go there. Maybe he would be safe there."
Shan turned back. "The other place?"
"Where the shadow clans sometimes meet. The lama field, the children call it, but only the ghosts of lamas live there."
Khitai had shown the place to the zheli, Shan recalled. It was why Batu had insisted on going there. "Why did Alta want to go there?"
The woman shook her head with a sad smile. "Lau had given them work to do, a collection of autumn flowers. Some other boys told him many flowers grew there, that Lau would be pleased with flowers from the lama field. He said the boy Khitai liked to go there, that he often persuaded his foster families to take him to the lama field for a day, that Khitai would meet the new boy with the strange accent and play in the rocks there." She meant Micah, Shan knew. Khitai liked to meet the American boy at the lama field. When the dropka looked up at Shan he thought she was going to burst into tears. "It was for Lau. They thought they had to complete their last assignment from Lau, so she could rest in peace." She looked away, and her head dropped almost as if she were falling asleep. Jowa pulled him away.
"The ghosts of lamas," Jowa repeated in a haunted voice. Shan took a moment to understand. The lama field had another dead lama now. The Yakde Lama.
"There was no storm that night Aha was attacked," Shan sighed. "We were only a few miles away."
"No," Jowa said slowly, as if fitting the pieces together as he spoke. "But the killer saw something like lightning, cursed Sui, and ran away. Which means it wasn't Sui who attacked Alta."
"She could have the words wrong," Shan suggested.
"I don't think so," Jowa said. And neither did Shan.
Jowa led him through another of the heavy security doors to a small room where four men sat at a wood plank table, studying maps. Planning. Shan recognized the young purba who had met them on the trail and driven away their truck. The youth looked up and nodded at Shan without rancor, a conspiratorial nod. The others looked at Jowa, not Shan, with unhappy, impatient expressions. A fifth man, at a table with thermoses, turned as they entered, a thin Uighur with a crooked nose. Fat Mao. Explaining that he had just arrived from Yoktian he filled two mugs with tea and handed them to the two new arrivals. Shan studied the room. Wires hung loose from several conduits along the ceiling. A tangle of pipes ran overhead, some painted red. There was a yellow sign warning of radiation exposure painted on the back of the door. The walls were almost covered with more maps, many bearing the legend Nei Lou across the top. Scattered across the maps were colored pins and bits of paper taped to their surface. Beside the maps on the table sat a portable computer.
"I told them about the boys," Jowa said. "About Gendun and Lokesh. They want to know where the murders took place, on the maps." As he spoke, one of the Tibetans pulled his chair back and gestured for Shan to join them. Together Jowa and Shan studied a map of the region and agreed on the location of the Red Stone camp, the road where Alta had been attacked, the canyon where Kublai was killed, and the lama field where Khitai was buried. The young purba inserted pins on penciled numbers on the spots, one for Suwan, two for Alta, three for Kublai, and four for Khitai. He ran the point of his pencil in the air over the pins as though to outline the route taken by the murderer, a pattern.
As he did so a hand reached over the table and inserted another pin. "Five," Fat Mao said, and he inserted the pin at the head of a valley ten miles from Yoktian. "Not killed," he said quickly as Shan looked up in alarm. "Jakli and her-" he began. "Last night Jakli and others were traveling to the valley because they heard one of the zheli boys was there, with a shadow clan. It was getting dark. They heard a sheep crying in great pain."
They. Fat Mao meant Jakli and her cousins, Shan knew. She had joined the riders from her clan who were searching for the boys.
"They looked down into a pass, where a rough road entered, and saw a sheep tangled in a vine by a tree. Or, that was the way it was supposed to appear. When they got lower they used binoculars and saw that the sheep was tied with wire to the tree and was lying on the ground, bloody." Fat Mao touched one pin, then another, as he spoke. "Suddenly a boy appeared, running to help the sheep. But the moment the boy reached the sheep, a man dressed in black clothes leapt on him. The boy fought back. One of the men with Jakli had a rifle, and they shot the boy's attacker when he stood up for a moment. He was hit somewhere by the bullet and ran into the shadows. A moment later a black utility vehicle raced out of the trees. The boy had been beaten," the Uighur continued, "and his shirt was ripped open at the neck, but he was not seriously injured. The sheep's rear leg tendons had been cut. They had to shoot it."
"Who was it?" Jowa asked urgently.
Instead of replying, Fat Mao inserted a disc into the computer and tapped a key. A screen appeared, with a heading that read Yoktian People's Clinic. He shifted the cursor and a list of recent patients appeared. "See for yourself. Last night, three hours after the attack, admitted for a minor gunshot wound to the forearm."
Shan and Jowa leaned forward and read the screen. Major Bao Kangmei.
"I thought," Jowa said heavily, "that I would feel better when we knew for certain."
Shan nodded silently. The knobs were untouchable. The Ministry of Justice would never prosecute the knobs. It would be suicide for the purbas or the Maos to act against Bao. Jowa was right. It did not feel like closure. It felt like they had crept into the beast's lair and glimpsed it, only to see how huge it was. Moreover, Shan was convinced more than ever that Bao was only part of the answer. He gestured toward the map. "There is one more," he said in a taut voice, and pointed near the edge of the desert, where he believed Karachuk lay. "Lau. The ani. She was the first to be killed."
The boy hesitated, then drew a number on the spot. A zero.
"It's been too easy for Bao. Most of the boys lived with known economic units," Jowa said. "The herding enterprises. Each enterprise has a registered set of pastures, a known set of camps."
"Known to the knobs," Fat Mao said.
"And to the Brigade, and to the prosecutor, and to anyone who can access the software reports," Shan added with a look at the Uighur.
"You mean you think it is not only Bao," Fat Mao said.
"Sure," Jowa interjected. "It's not. There's lots of knobs. A barracks full of helpers in Yoktian."
Shan shrugged. "Seeing him attack a boy last night still doesn't tell us his goal. But it means he's not stopping with Khitai. It means," he said in a hushed voice, expressing the thought as it entered his mind, "that he did not get the Jade Basket. Khitai gave it to someone else. It's still out there with the boys. And the key is still the death of Lau. The boys could be found, once Lau was exposed. Once the killer knew that Lau was Tibetan, that she was an ani, then he knew that the boy he wanted was one of the zheli. After that, finding the boys was easy."
"But after all these years," Jowa said. "Why now, why would they suddenly suspect Lau?"
"Because there was a meeting with a general in Urumqi," Shan said. "Everything happened after that meeting. Kaju was assigned to Yoktian, Lau's political reliability was questioned. Ko began his campaign to buy out the clans."
Fat Mao looked up. "The Poverty Eradication Scheme?" He spat the words like a curse. "Surely it's not connected."
"I think it is. The memo you took back from Xu. Did you read it?"
The Uighur nodded.
The oldest of the Tibetans, a man with the hard-bitten features of a khampa, stood and poured himself some tea. "You know his name?" he asked. "This general in Urumqi?"
"Rongqi," Shan said. "That's all I know. From the army. Now vice chairman of the Brigade. But they still call him general."
The man glanced at the youth, who quickly rose and left the room. Moments later he reappeared carrying a thick, oversized ledger. He laid it on the table and began leafing through its pages, Jowa looking over his shoulder as he read.
Shan had seen such books before. The Lotus Book, the purbas called it, the unofficial compilation of crimes against the people of Tibet, the expanding chronicle of the people and places and treasures lost since the Chinese invasion. It was compiled and copied by the purbas primarily from interviews with survivors as information became available and thus was in no particular order.
As the young purba and Jowa scanned the pages, Shan spoke of Gendun and Lokesh with the others. People would watch, they pledged, on both sides of the border. It was too risky to send more Tibetans into Xinjiang but Fat Mao promised he would take word when he left in the morning. There were places that were always watched by the lung ma. Glory Camp. Knob barracks. And hospitals.
"How will you go?" Shan asked.
The khampa answered the question. No one was allowed to leave a vehicle anywhere near the silo sanctuary. Two hours away, by foot, was a road, or what passed for a road, that connected to the road through Kerriya Pass. Sometime between six and seven in the morning a truck would go by carrying six wooden barrels and three sheep in the back. It would stop if three rocks were placed in a line at a certain spot in the road.
"I will go too," Shan said.
As the khampa silently nodded, there was a rap on the door and a man and a woman, wearing the fleece vests of dropka, carried in food on a plank of wood. A large bowl of tsampa and pickled vegetables. Shan ate quickly, then lay on one of the pallets along the wall. He sat up for a moment and looked for Fat Mao. The Uighur was missing, and a door at the rear of the room was slightly open. Shan stood and stepped into the doorway.
"No!" Fat Mao called as he saw Shan, putting his hands up as though to push him back. Shan quickly retreated as the Uighur emerged through the door and shut it.
"One more thing," Shan said. "The silver bridle from Nikki. Someone gave it to a Mao, to get it to Jakli and Marco. Can you find out who it was?"
Fat Mao shrugged, as if not understanding the significance, then nodded and turned to the maps.
Shan returned to the pallet. He closed his eyes but did not sleep at first, for he was replaying the scene he had glimpsed in the adjacent room. Four figures at a long bench, in front of a large chalkboard filled with translated words and alphabets. Two of those inside, a man and a woman, were carving slabs of wood into wedges. The other two were inscribing them with black ink. He had inadvertently discovered at least one of the ways the Maos and purbas communicated to their networks, using the ancient Kharoshthi text on simulated tablets. Ingenious, he thought. The knobs would not be able to translate the extinct tongue and they were so full of resentment for the tablets that they would simply destroy any they found.
He had finally drifted into slumber when the young purba cried out. Shan shot up and stood at the Tibetan's back as he read out loud. "The first entry says Colonel Rongqi, but that was twenty-five years ago." The purba read quickly at first, then more slowly, pausing more and more frequently as the words sank in. Rongqi had three tours of duty in Tibet, the last two especially requested due to what one file glimpsed in Lhasa said was his extraordinary patriotism and, perhaps, the fact that his father had been killed in 1961 by khampa guerrillas. He had become renowned in the People's Liberation Army for subjugation techniques, even to the extent of becoming a special lecturer on the topic at one of the PLA's training academies. During his first tour he had been notorious for forcing public copulation between monks and nuns, typically in the courtyards of gompas before they were leveled by his explosives experts. By forcing them to break their vows of celibacy, he forced them out of the church. Thirty-six gompas in central Tibet, north of Lhasa, had been looted and leveled on his orders, usually under his personal supervision. Pieces of two huge bronze Buddhas from one of the gompas had been seen by witnesses at a foundry in Tientsen, near Beijing. During his cleansing program, six hundred ninety-six monks and nuns had disappeared. Shan asked if Lau's nunnery, built beside the small gompa of the Yakde Lama near Shigatse, was on the list of those destroyed by Rongqi. The purba read silently, then looked up with a slow nod.
"She recognized him that day in Urumqi," Shan said with a chill in his voice. "The butcher had come back from her past." He shuddered, thinking of the horror that must have shaken the sturdy Lau, the momentary reaction that had given everything away.
The purba read on. During his second tour Rongqi had been commended by the Chairman himself for an initiative he called Sterilize the Seed, based on the principle that the Tibetan religious establishment was held together by its reincarnate lamas and that the death of every such lama represented a political opportunity for the people's government. Ideally, the government should assure the extinction of the reincarnate line by preventing the identification of the new incarnation. Rongqi accomplished this in over thirty documented cases, by destroying the tokens used to identify the new incarnation, imprisoning the lamas who traditionally were charged with the process of identifying new lamas, and, in one case, dynamiting and permanently draining the oracle lake consulted for the new lama.
During his third tour Rongqi, newly promoted to general, institutionalized his campaign by developing a catalog of all reincarnate lamas surviving in his military zone and all the identification artifacts, the signs- the favorite gau, the special robe, the ancient rosary- so that seeds could be sterilized not just in his immediate command district but in a region of hundreds of square miles in central Tibet. Where identification could not be blocked, Rongqi seized the incarnate child and dispatched him to special party schools in eastern China. In the process the general had turned the Bureau of Religious Affairs in his district into a paramilitary organization, staffed with his own soldiers. The few local lamas who escaped sterilization were neutralized with riches: he offered military doctors to peasants, military equipment for working nearby fields, and an increase in the licenses granted to monks so long as the lama agreed to leave and to attend special Chinese schools for four or five years. Party bosses enthusiastically embraced the idea. A special institute for Tibetan studies had been opened in Beijing for this sole purpose.
Finally, the general had convinced Beijing of a new tactic for special cases, especially when lamas had a potentially important role in influencing economic activity: preempt the designation by declaring a new lama, one of the state's own choosing. By the end of his tour twelve years earlier, only four lamas had held out, keeping their independence- and of those, only one, a lama of a very old school with only a handful of gompas in all of Tibet, had passed on and was undergoing reincarnation. The Yakde Lama. The Ninth Yakde had died just before Rongqi had been reassigned to Xinjiang. His request to stay to finish his work, to stay and capitalize on the death of the Yakde, had been denied because his special skills in economic development had been needed in Xinjiang. But he had not given up. A copy of a memorandum sent by Rongqi in Xinjiang had been taken from a knob office in Lhasa five years earlier, asking Public Security to watch for evidence of a new Yakde Lama, for old informers had reported to him that a Tibetan nun was secretly nurturing a new incarnation.
Shan lay back on his pallet, feeling a strange numbness. What agony she must have felt, being thrown by happenstance in front of Rongqi, unprepared, knowing that Rongqi's involvement would mean the beginning of the end. Who would be able to hide their reaction on recognizing such a butcher? It would not have taken much to make the general suspicious. Rongqi might not even have known with certainty about Lau's connection to Khitai, might have simply suspected she was a disguised Tibetan. But a disguised Tibetan woman could be a secret nun, and a nun would be the link he sought to the new Yakde Lama. She had not been surprised when Wangtu had informed her that she was being replaced, just quietly made her arrangements to protect the Yakde Lama. But Rongqi had reacted much faster than she had expected, faster than Shan would have expected. Because, Shan realized, the Brigade was a much more efficient resource for Rongqi than the army. Lau's secret had been penetrated and the Yakde Lama finally had been killed, only weeks after she had met the only man in the world pledged to destroy the Yakde.
But Rongqi wasn't just after revenge. He was implementing his policies. Eliminate the line by eliminating all the indicators of the new incarnation, which meant the boys would still be stalked, for Khitai had given one of them the Jade Basket. Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Now he had to discover who was serving as Rongqi's instrument in Yoktian. Ko was a businessman, too young to feel the enmity for Tibetans the killer must possess. Was it Xu, or did she just hate Tibetans for all the usual reasons? Or had it only been Bao all along? No. Bao was a knob, driven by knob ambitions and knob arrogance, unlikely to take orders from the Brigade, even its second-highest manager. Bao was following the trail of boys to find the Americans, a trail he had detected before Lau had been killed. Rongqi's agent was following the boys to find the Yakde Lama. Another piece of Shan's puzzle had fallen into place. But all the others were as obscure as ever. The only thing Shan knew for certain was that the killers still stalked the boys. And if Gendun and Lokesh got in their way, the two old Tibetans had no hope of surviving.
Suddenly he looked up and searched the faces of Jowa and Fat Mao. "Micah," he gasped with sudden realization. "The American." The boys were still being stalked, and the dropka woman said Micah may have been at the lama field with Khitai. Xu herself had confirmed that a second clan had been at the lama field. Micah had been given the Jade Basket. Bao and the boot squads were searching for the Americans. Another killer, sent by Rongqi for the Jade Basket, roamed the mountains. The paths of the killers had converged. And the American boy was their target.