“You think he came across, against orders, parachuting in with the Tibetan fighters.”
Yates nodded. “I am certain of it. I know it in my heart. And now you proved it with this cross.”
“Megan Ross knew about your father.”
“We were close friends. More than friends once. She found me with those old letters and we started talking-she loved the intrigue. It became a project for her. She helped me find some of the drop points.” He reached into a pocket of his parka and extracted a small handheld device. A cell phone, Shan thought at first, then the American turned its face toward him. “Global positioning. When the right satellites are overhead it tells your exact longitude and latitude.”
Shan remembered the pieces of the device he had found at the crime scene. “Megan had one,” he suggested. “And you were in a barley field with this one.”
Yates flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to damage the crops.”
“What did you expect to find at the drop points?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Maybe they died jumping, maybe I would find bones. Maybe one of them would be a place where some of my father lingered, left something of himself. It was the only hard evidence I had, that list of coordinates.”
“And the sign of the hammer and lightning.”
Yates nodded again. “It was drawn on one of those little rolled letters from my father, where he spoke of a new enemy arriving. A couple weeks ago I showed it to Megan, and she drew a copy of it, said she would ask some of the old Tibetans about it.”
“Suppose she did ask some old Tibetans about it. Not long after, she stepped into the car with Minister Wu.”
“Surely they are not connected.”
“You tell me. You knew why she went with the minister that day.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. We were going to meet, to wait up the road together and intercept the minister’s car so we could have a private conversation about Wu’s development plans. But Megan never showed up that morning. I figured she got some other ride.”
“What she got was a book,” Shan said, “a book she stole from the library in town.”
“A book?”
“It had photos of the leaders of the Red Guard unit that had destroyed all the local temples and gompas, and killed the local monks.” Shan pulled out the photo he had taken from the library and handed it to the American. Yates gasped as he saw the crossed lightning and hammer; his jaw dropped as Shan pointed to the woman at the center of the table.
“It can’t be!”
“Megan was helping you with your project but she had another project that was even more important to her, her Himalayan Compact. This photo, or one like it, provided Megan the preemptive strike she needed. The book had long ago been removed from the library, may even have gotten the prior librarian killed. But the new librarian is a fanatic about having a complete collection. She tracked down what may be the only remaining copy this year. Megan was there in the library, reading it, the day before the murder. That’s when she discovered that Minister Wu had been the commander of the Hammer and Lightning Brigade.”
Yates’s face darkened with despair. “The fool. She should have told me.”
“Wu is a common name. There is no reason that people would have connected the minister to the Red Guard who used to be in Shogo. If people here knew Wu had been the head of the Brigade she would have been totally discredited in the region, her reputation destroyed in the international community she wants to attract. It was Megan’s bargaining chip. But Megan didn’t know the minister had a gun. Wu was as relentless today as she was forty years ago. Megan thought she was going to change Wu’s mind about her new campaign. But Wu would have known it meant the destruction of her career.”
“Surely the minister didn’t kill Megan.”
“There was no sign of a struggle, by either of them. I think Wu did not protest when Megan was shot, may have done it herself. But someone else was there, who was given the gun by Wu.”
“Given?”
“There was no sign of a struggle,” Shan said again. “She handed the gun to the third person, who promptly shot her too. I think the photo got both of them killed.”
“But what does my father. .” Yates began in confusion.
“Megan was at the library because of your father, she thought she might learn more about the resistance fighters in the region. She never expected to find that photo. But when she did, it changed everything for her. No doubt she was going to give it to you but first she was going to use it against Wu.”
They sat in silence a long time, Yates gazing at the altar, fingering his father’s cross, Shan at the outer edge of the clearing, by the cliff. He too had not fully digested the truth. He let the ice-scented wind scour him, peeling away his misconceptions about the murders. There was no mystery in events, his old friend Lokesh had once told him, only mysteries of the people involved. Like many Chinese, every Tibetan he knew had grown a hard, impenetrable shell around memories of the Cultural Revolution, around the years when the Chinese had cleansed the land of all resistance. But Shan knew now that it was in that black, inaccessible place where the truth would be found.
Chapter Thirteen
Yates would not leave the shrine without searching every inch of the ground, hoping for some further sign of his father. Shan helped for a few minutes then sat on the stone bench, extracting the notepad from his pocket, and began writing events and dates, one line at a time in English, starting with the Religious Affairs office burns down, Tenzin murdered at the advance camp, Tan loses pistol, murder of Minister Wu, Director Xie killed, Gyalo attacked in Shogo. When Yates appeared at his side, finished with his futile search, Shan extended the notebook.
“What’s this?” the American asked.
“A wise man once said that if the true face of a mountain cannot be known, it is because the one looking at it is standing in its midst. I want to trade, what I know for what you know. I want you to look at what I know, because I am standing in its midst.”
Yates cast a skeptical glance at Shan, shrugged, then went to his backpack and extracted a tattered nylon pouch. He accepted the pad from Shan then emptied the pouch onto the bench. Several old letters, the photos Shan had seen at the base camp, a map, copies of pages from a book, a printed form.
The two men sat in silence for several minutes, Yates flipping pages in Shan’s notepad, writing his own notes. Shan read the form, an official copy of the military service record for Captain Samuel Yates, then the letters, which were nothing more than what Yates had already explained. The copied pages contained a description of Camp Hale from some annal of the Cold War, recounting how a small group of elite intelligence operatives and military experts had created a miniature world for Tibetan trainees in the Colorado mountains, teaching them about Western history, introducing them to hot dogs and hamburgers. The pages from the book included photos, showing American men in uniforms without insignia, some with pipes or cigars in their mouths, others with white khata offering scarves around their necks, traditional Tibetan offerings of friendship. There were a few quotes from some of the participants, recorded years later, reflecting deep admiration for the Tibetans. Shan paused over one passage, reading it twice:
Love of their land and their Buddhist faith burned like an intense fire in many of the trainees. It so moved the American trainers that several requested, and were promptly refused, permission to parachute into Tibet with them when the training was concluded; others requested transfer to the advance base in northern India so they could participate in airdrops and radio support for the missions.
Shan felt a flutter of excitement as he unfolded the map. It was an intricate rendering of the Everest region, in English. He stretched it out with stones on each corner, examining it closely then, noticing Yates’s curious gaze, handed the American his own Chinese map.