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 have 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?”
Abigail looked from Gao to Thomas, her quick, bright eyes taking everything in. “It was for me,” she declared. “The murderer took all my food supplies. I will gladly pay you back.”
Gao’s steady gaze shifted from his nephew to Abigail. “You misunderstand me. I refer to the goods he has been selling on the other side,” he said. Thomas cast a confused glance at Shan then, understanding, shut his eyes. There was only one way Gao could have found this out. Thomas’s other uncle had told him. Gao, still gazing at the Navajo woman, suddenly became self-conscious about the rifle. He lowered it, putting it behind him. “We have not been properly introduced, Miss Natay.”
“You are Gao Hu Bo, the most famous phantom physicist on the planet.”
Gao seemed unable to restrain his lips from momentarily curling upward. He glanced back at Thomas. “This must stop,” he said to the youth. “Everything. Keep up the playacting and I will arrange for a sergeant the size of a yak to escort you back to Beijing.” He bowed slightly to Abigail and Hostene. “If it is not inconvenient we will dine in thirty minutes. Enough time for a hot shower if you like,” he added to Abigail. Then, still awkwardly keeping the gun out of sight, he gestured Thomas and Shan to the door.
Abigail was radiant when she walked into the candlelit dining room, greeting her uncle with another long embrace and affectionate words in their tribal tongue, smiling at Shan, then asking a surprised Gao where the altar had been in the old dzong before it was converted since, as all Tibetans knew, such places had been garrisoned by warrior monks. She guided the conversation as if she were a hostess to old friends, expressing her regret at not meeting Thomas’s German uncle, entrancing Gao by describing a workshop she had once attended on the cultural aspects of space travel-Russians always insisted on bringing some form of borscht into space, Americans always wanted more privacy in the living quarters. She looked forward to seeing what the Chinese would introduce to the mélange. Gao was fascinated by the theories behind Abigail’s work on the mountain, though quick to point out what a simple thing it should be to compare the writings, the social structure, the dress, and even architecture of the two peoples.