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.