“I’m sorry,” Kohler said in a sorrowful tone. “I should have gone to save her.”
“Save her?” Hostene asked, alarmed.
Kohler left the room for a few minutes, returning with a rag in his hand. “I did try to look for her later, and the next day as well. I think I may have seen her once more. I think it was her. A figure in the distance, standing on a high ledge, in an impossibly dangerous spot. A squall struck out of nowhere. The wind would have scoured that cliff of anything that wasn’t tied down, even without the lightning. It was impossible to see what happened, with all the flashes. But afterward I went to the base of the cliff. I don’t know who it was for certain. This is all I found.”
Kohler tossed the rag onto the map. With a trembling hand, Hostene smoothed and straightened it. It was a piece of charred fabric from a gray sweatshirt. Despite several holes burned into it, the English words that encircled a small yellow sun rising over mountains were still legible. The surviving letters spelled The U ver ity of New Me ico.
Hostene buried his head in his hands.
“It could have been a miner,” Kohler said. “I don’t know. A miner could have found the shirt and worn it.”
“It was a miner,” came a voice from the kitchen doorway. “It had to be.” Thomas stood there, earphones around his neck.
“What haven’t you told us?” Gao demanded.
Thomas sank into one of the chairs. “I thought I could find her. A day before the murders, I went past one of those old paintings that had been overgrown with brush, so you could hardly see it. Three days ago I went by it again and the painting had been uncovered. Someone had cut the brush down, and there were the fresh marks of a tripod in the soil.”
Shan studied the boy as he spoke, remembering Thomas’s warning that Gao intended to kill him if he crossed the mountain again. Had Thomas lied to him deliberately? Or had Gao changed his mind?
“Then yesterday I met a miner working by himself, singing a song. He had a new Swiss watch. A woman had given it to him, he said. She had traded it for his horse, asked him for directions to the nearest town, to Tashtul, and galloped off. She spoke Tibetan, but no Chinese.”
Hostene hastened to Thomas and put a hand on his shoulder. “The watch, did you get a good look at it?”
“Silver. A red cross on the face. Little pieces of turquoise framed it.”
“It’s her! I gave her that watch! She finally realized her danger, and she left,” Hostene said, relieved.
“Thank God,” Kohler sighed. “I was going to town on business tomorrow,” he announced. “I will leave today. If the army has a helicopter available I can be there before dark, probably before she gets there. Tashtul’s a small town, and there’s only one trail leading to it from here. An American woman on an exhausted horse shouldn’t be hard to find.”
It was the safest course, they quickly decided. Hostene would have difficulty navigating the long journey to the city alone, and Shan would not leave the mountain until Gendun and Lokesh were safe. But Hostene traveling with Kohler on a military aircraft might raise questions with Public Security that could not be conveniently answered. Kohler would have to make the trip alone.
Hostene visibly relaxed as Kohler reappeared, ready for travel, a pack on his back. The German shook the Navajo’s hand energetically, assuring him his niece would be found safe. Then he took the trail that led to the base below.
The housekeeper brought bowls of soup. Shan and Hostene both consumed double servings before the Navajo accepted Gao’s invitation to use a spare bedroom at the base of the tower, behind the kitchen.
“What am I going to do with you, Shan?” Gao asked as soon as they were alone.
“Help me find a murderer.”
“No. That’s not my job. And it’s not yours either. Heinz is going to call Public Security when he reaches town. You haven’t brought justice. You bring grief. You bring chaos. You bring crowds,” he said. “You should leave the investigation to the authorities.”
“That’s what upsets you the most, isn’t it? Being disturbed.”
Gao’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t pick this site by happenstance. I demanded anonymity. Secrecy. Privacy. A rather substantial investment has been to assure that I have it.”
Privacy. It was, Shan well knew, the rarest treasure of all of China. “This is an elegant hermitage,” he concluded. “Some make do with caves.”
Gao ignored him. “The government can be tedious about protecting its investment.”
Shan’s stomach began tying itself into a knot. “What have you done?”
“I promised Kohler that you will dictate a transcript of what you know to Public Security when they arrive here tomorrow.”
“And you worry about
Gao studied Shan in silence, then frowned.
“Do you have any medical books?” Shan asked. “A dictionary of pharmaceuticals?”
Gao turned with a frosty gaze. “What do you wish to know?”
“Pencil and paper?”
Gao pointed to a drawer of the sideboard.
Shan quickly recorded the names of the medicines in Hostene’s bag and handed the paper to Gao, who took it and went into his office. Shan stood to follow, thought better of the notion, then took more paper from the sideboard. He stared at the blank sheet for a long time, then wrote shorthand phrases describing events. A miner dies. Bing is elected to lead miners. Old mine destroyed. Abigail constructs a skeleton. Young miner killed at blue demon painting. Sandpainting destroyed. Professor Ma and Tashi, the guide, murdered. Camp equipment looted. Corpses mutilated and their hands taken away. Abigail’s equipment removed from cave.
There were connections between each event he could not fathom. But did he even have the sequence properly? He studied the notes then added three more phrases. Yangke receives his canque. Hostene ventures into Bing’s camp. Thomas, the fledgling entrepreneur, begins giving valuable goods to Rapaki, for which Rapaki cannot pay.
A thick reference book was slid across the table to him. Pages were marked with tabs of paper.
“Cancer,” Gao declared. “These are drugs for someone who is in the advanced stages of cancer.”
A new ache entered Shan’s heart. He slowly opened the book and scanned the marked pages. “Could they be for something else?”
“No. They are highly specialized, very expensive. Not usually available in China,” he added pointedly. “In this combination they have no other purpose. Drugs like these forestall the cancer from debilitating the body until it is in the final stage.”
Shan stared without focusing, twisting the pencil that remained in his hand, reconsidering everything that had happened to Hostene: his coma, his fatigue, his having been passed over by the killer. The wise old Navajo, who reminded him so much of Lokesh, was dying, and, worse, knew he was dying. Shan’s confusion and sorrow took him to a dark, unfamiliar place, until suddenly the pencil broke and he snapped out of his trance.
“The motion detectors,” he whispered at last, “how do they work?”
“Infrared heat signatures,” Gao replied. “Solar powered cells with transmitters, all wireless.”
“Where does the data go?”
“It is transmitted to the computer in my office and stored on the disc drive.”
Five minutes later they sat at a small table in Gao’s office, fast-forwarding through data from the prior twenty-four hours, watching the movement of vague yellow shapes across the screen as numbers indicating the time of transmission scrolled across the bottom left corner. The smallest blotches of color were the little creatures that nested on the rocky slope. Bigger patches of color were humans, although Gao had been warned by the soldiers to disregard patches that appeared at dawn and dusk in and out of certain rock formations, which represented groups of pikas entering and leaving their nests. “Sometimes false positives occur,” he told Shan.
Gao pointed to a big shape moving up the slope from the house. “Kohler going hunting,” he said, then indicated the two shapes that represented Shan and Hostene arriving that morning. They watched movements back and forth from the house. “Thomas helps the housekeeper bring in supplies. In the summer dry goods are kept in
