'He stole things from us.'
'A piece of rock.'
'And military secrets,' Lin said in a low voice, toward the tree.
Shan paused. Lin had at last confessed his real interest in Tenzin and the stone. At last confirmed what Shan and Winslow had suspected. 'Tenzin has no interest in military secrets.'
'What would you know of such things?' Lin shot back. 'The traitors who help him do,' he added. 'Maybe it was the price of the purbas for helping him. Steal information from me for them to use against the government.'
'Tenzin would not make such bargains.'
'Motive is unimportant. He took secrets. It's treason.' Lin looked at him with a gloating smile. 'You know how treason proceedings work. Short trial, quick bullet. I can do it with a military tribunal. Secret. The others will keep looking for him along the Indian border long after I have him in a hidden grave in the mountains.'
Shan did not reply, but studied the lichen growing at the tip of the branch. 'When you go back, colonel,' he said at last, 'will you try to find him?'
'Of course. I will find him, I will take him from whomever has him. He's mine. The moment he stole from me his life was forfeit. The howlers can't hide him for long. The howlers are playing in a world they don't understand. They'll have to find another tame abbot.'
Shan stared at him, weighing the words. Lin could be right, he suddenly realized. It would explain the strange actions of Khodrak and Tuan and the argument between the howlers and the knobs, then the howlers and the soldiers, at Yapchi. They were delving into the world of public security and state secrets, realms that were normally closed to the Bureau of Religious Affairs. Modern China had its hidden worlds, too.
'When you can walk again without falling off the mountain, you may go,' Shan said wearily. 'But it could be several more days, even a week.'
Lin stared at Shan again, rubbed his temple, and blinked. As if, Shan thought, like Jokar struggling to keep control of his body, Lin was struggling to keep the malevolent colonel in control.
'So you should write a letter,' Shan suggested.
'No deals. I told you. Kidnapping an officer means lao gai. Or a firing squad. No forgiveness.'
Who will forgive us for keeping you alive, Shan wanted to ask. 'Perhaps you would want to tell someone you are alive.'
'I have no family.'
'Soldiers from your unit are searching, thinking you must be dead. Perhaps you would want to give instructions to Director Tuan and the howlers who have Tenzin.'
The suggestion caused Lin to pause. An icy glint returned to his face. 'Why would you want this?'
'Because it would be the compassionate thing, to relieve the anxiety of your soldiers,' Shan suggested. 'Because their reaction to such a letter may tell me where my friend is, the one who was arrested with Tenzin.' Because I need to reach them before the army does, Shan told himself, because such a letter might stop Tuan from sending them away.
Lin offered a thin smile that hinted of grudging respect. 'You weren't always in Tibet.'
'I worked for the people's government for twenty years in Beijing,' Shan said. 'For the party members who ran the government.'
'But then you made a pilgrimage to Tibet,' Lin said in a taunting voice.
Shan stared at him, then slowly unbuttoned his sleeve and silently showed Lin his lao gai tattoo. 'I went to live with a better class of people,' he said softly.
Lin's eyes narrowed as he stared at the tattoo. He gazed a long time at the line of numbers, and his expression shifted several times, with anger, suspicion, disdain, and confusion all crossing his countenance. His eyes did not move, but just stared at the empty air, when Shan pulled back his arm.
After a moment Shan rose. 'I'll send some paper out. You know we will read the letter before we deliver it. Say anything you wish. Just nothing about Jokar, and nothing about this place.' He had taken five steps when he paused and looked back at Lin, who still stared into the air. 'That girl, Anya,' he said to Lin's back, 'she has no family either.'
Lin's head pulled up but he did not acknowledge that he heard.
Unexpectedly, there was laughter at the entrance to the hidden rooms when Shan approached it. Winslow was there, with Anya and Nyma, showing them tricks with one of the braided leather ropes the purbas carried. Having made a loop in one end, Winslow was waving the rope over his head and releasing it to catch things. A narrow rock set on its end twenty feet away. A small boulder on the slope above. Anya, standing still, arms at her side, giggled as the rope dropped over her head and closed about her waist. Shan smiled then stepped inside for Lin's paper, which Lhandro offered to take to the colonel when the rongpa learned what it was for. The young purba challenged Shan's judgment at first, but Somo raised her hand to silence him.
'What it means,' she declared with a dangerous gleam, 'is that Lin will demand the howlers give up Tenzin and Lokesh.'
When Shan wandered back outside, another figure had joined Winslow. Jokar, a playful expression in his eyes, stood perfectly erect as the American lassoed him once, twice, then again. Each time the lama nodded his head approvingly, then finally he asked if he could learn the use of the rope. Shan, Anya, and Nyma watched in amusement as the lama fumbled with the rope, slowly twirled it over his head. He missed his target the first three times, then missed no more, finally asking Winslow himself to stand, laughing as he brought the rope down over the American's shoulders.
'It is like archery,' Jokar smiled with an approving nod, 'without the bow.' Then the old lama asked Anya and Nyma to try to lasso him, which they tried lightheartedly for a quarter hour, until the lama suddenly pointed to a rock in the rubble with lichen in the outline, he insisted, of a horse's head, the sign of Tamdin, the horse-headed protector demon.
Shan and Winslow lingered at the rock wall long after the others were called away by Lepka's announcement that fresh tea had been churned.
'I'm going with you,' the American declared suddenly. 'To Norbu.'
Shan sighed. 'It was your passport that protected you. After you gave it up, you have no-'
The American woman stepped out of the door. 'For what?' Larkin asked Winslow. 'Why would you give someone your State Department passport?'
Winslow grinned at her. 'Lost it, that's all. I always lost my homework in school.'
Larkin stared at him uncertainly. Her face flashed with color and she bit her lower lip. 'We're going to find our friends who were arrested,' Winslow said quietly.
'At Norbu,' Larkin said. 'I heard the purbas say they're at Second House.'
'You know the gompa?' Shan asked.
'Some of the purbas speak of it. They say it's where the howlers take sick monks to be healed.'
The words sent a chill down Shan's back.
'Some of us were in the mountains last month and saw a monk from Norbu. A monk, and a doctor in a blue uniform. With men who looked like soldiers, in white shirts, carrying small tanks of kerosene on their backs. I joked with them and told them they'd save a lot of trouble if they just used yak dung. But they didn't want to joke.'
Shan stared at her and was about to ask what they could possibly have been doing with so much kerosene when someone else emerged from the shadows of the doorway. 'We can't just march into that gompa,' Somo said in a pained voice, as if she had been arguing with them about going to Norbu.
Shan was about to protest. He wanted no one else to go with him, no one else to expose themselves to the near certainty of arrest by the knobs. But Somo had come from Lhasa to help the fugitive lama, had lost Drakte in the struggle to keep Tenzin safe.
'You'll need people who were there before,' Nyma said over Somo's shoulder. She was carrying two bowls of tea, which she extended to Shan and Winslow.
He sighed. Nyma, too, could not be refused. 'We must make Director Tuan worried,' Shan said. 'Make him react somehow,' he added and, as Lepka appeared, sipping from his bowl, he explained the letter he expected Lin to write.
'A start,' Winslow agreed, 'but what else is there at this gompa?'
Nyma spoke of the Public Security medical teams they had seen there, and Lhandro spoke of the nervous monks and the frightening, ruthless manner of the chairman.
