“You saw what?”
“I told you. I was waiting above. But after a while I got in the car and drove downhill. At a switchback I got out, a couple hundred yards above the minister’s sedan, close enough to see two bodies. I didn’t have my binoculars but I could see well enough. They were Chinese, or Tibetans. No blond American.”
“They put a wool cap on her. From a distance you wouldn’t have seen her hair. Then they switched her body for that of the dead sherpa.”
“You’re going to look like a fool when she comes walking in for a cup of tea.”
“What else did you see?”
“Enough soldiers to start a small war, scattering over the slopes. An army truck that took the bodies away. That was all. Later, I saw that she hadn’t even used my suggestions for triggering the rock slide.”
“You mean you went back there, afterwards?”
“The knobs had cleaned everything up. They’d left a few markers and some tape. It’s the only road in to the base camp, they couldn’t keep it closed for long. I stopped, started climbing the slope up to the ropes. A knob sergeant tried to stop me and I explained they were my ropes, stolen from my depot. He let me go under escort, on the condition that I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t have to touch a thing to see that she had not used the configuration I had sketched for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I sketched involved putting a log on the road to act as the release for the rock slide. A heavy vehicle hits the log, tied to a rope, and triggers the slide from above. She changed it, made it simpler. Except with her version someone had to be there to release it.”
Shan considered Yates’s explanation. “For the first week or so,” he began at last, “Cao was considering whether to ignore the rockslide, pretend the bus just had an accident, since adding an act of sabotage against Public Security might complicate his case too much. He’s a man used to quick, easy kills. But now he’s thinking this could be the one case he’s been waiting for, that with this case he can fire a shot that will be heard all the way to the Politburo itself. If he succeeds he’ll be a colonel in a month’s time, feted as a hero of the people in Beijing. A medal, a banquet with senior Party members, maybe a new job as secret investigator for the Party bosses. So he’s decided to raise the stakes. Which means whoever triggered that ambush had better find a new planet to live on.”
“There was something else, which they didn’t find at first. On a rock near where the avalanche was released there was an old sickle.”
“A sickle?”
“A reaping hook, for cutting grain. I climbed up to where the rocks slid from. It was jammed in a crack in a rock, deliberately left there. It had words etched on the blade, and what looked like the image of a range of mountains. I was thinking about hiding it when that sergeant came up to check on me and saw it. He took it down to his vehicle.”
Shan had seen such a blade, a stack of such blades, in the shed where old Gyalo kept his artifacts.
“Later I asked one of the older porters about it at base camp. It scared him, scared him a lot, not the blade but the writing I described. He said I should not speak of such a thing, that we should all pray the Chinese do not know what it is.”
“What were the words?”
“I don’t read Tibetan. I asked him what he thought it said, from my description. He knew, I could tell, but he wouldn’t say.”
“You keep telling me about other people,” Shan said after a moment. “I haven’t heard the truth about you. I haven’t yet heard why I shouldn’t warn the Tibetans that an American is raiding their shrines.”
Yates rose, paced back and forth, paused to study Shan, then paced again. “My father,” he finally said, “died somewhere near here, when I was three years old. He was a scientist, studied the anthropology of religions, was trying to piece together evidence of the various emigrations of the Buddhists across the Himalayas from India.”
“By chopping up religious statues?”
“By taking metallurgical samples of the metals used. You can date the statues that way, but you can also establish where the metal came from. The exact mixture of alloys is like a fingerprint.”
It did not have the ring of truth, Shan sensed, but it was a step in the direction of the truth. “And now you are continuing his work?”
“Right. I want to conclude his research. Maybe get something published, in both our names. I never really knew him. Doing this brings me closer to him than ever before.”
Shan touched the tool on the bed beside him. “So you do use this instrument, this borescope?”
“Sure. Sometimes its helps show the thickness of the metal, and internal structure of the casting, which also can be like a fingerprint.”
“You could have asked to borrow the statues, even asked a Chinese university to help.”
“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan? An American working with Tibetans on a project that shows how Tibetan culture came from over the mountains and not from China? They would deport me in a second, and do much worse to any Tibetan who helped me.”
That much, Shan knew, was the absolute truth. But Yates had done nothing to close the biggest hole in his story: Why, if he was studying the metal of religious statues, was he only taking those of the Lord of Death?
Shan stood. It was late in the day. He still had a long drive back to Shogo. Yates followed him into the pool of sunlight by the entry, the worry on his face proof enough that he had finally grasped Shan’s point. He and Megan Ross had unleashed a chain of events that were endangering every Tibetan in the shadow of the mountains.
“When she comes back,” Yates said, “Megan will know how to patch things up. She’ll know where to take the monks.”
“She’s not coming back,” Shan said.
“Nonsense. I told you. I saw the bodies. No Megan.”
“She died in my arms,” Shan tried again.
Yates shook his head in disagreement, then turned his back on Shan.
“ ‘The raven,’ she said at first, then ‘is it me?’” Shan told him.
The American froze for a moment, but did not look back before disappearing into the shadows.
Chapter Ten
He stopped the truck at the crossroads where Xie had waited that morning, looking in the dusk for signs of the director’s watchers. The local people would descend on the ruins after Xie and his men departed. There would be prayer stones to retrieve. Even smashed prayer wheels would still be considered sacred. The Tibetans would know that the government tended to return to such sites, with excavators, to remove every stone, to scour the site to bare earth and salt it so nothing would grow. But that would be in the daytime, and in Tibet, everywhere but the cities, the night belonged to the Tibetans. He waited for five minutes, seeking signs of watchers, then turned onto the valley road.
The weathered, compact structures of the gompa were gone. Three thick stone walls alone remained standing, their soot-stained murals exposed to the elements. Everything else was leveled, reduced to a rubble of stone, plaster, and wood. Chairs and tables lay in splinters, smashed not only by the bulldozer but by what looked like sledgehammers. Shreds of old tangka paintings trapped in the rocks fluttered in the wind. There was no sign of any Tibetans. Then he paused, seeing why no one was salvaging anything. In the shadow of the trees at the far side he could see the low, dark shape of the director’s sedan.
He wandered into the rubble without conscious thought, numbed again by the devastation, vaguely aware of a rhythmic, metallic rumble, the sound of an engine straining, revving then ebbing. He walked past a patch of whitewashed stones that marked where the old chorten shrine had stood, passing a futile moment searching for the bronze or wooden box with relics that would have been secreted inside. Then he stepped toward the sound of the engine, past the three standing walls that had been too thick to topple, to the rock face that defined the back of the compound.