Mandarin Gate (38 page)

As Cora looked up from her friend’s shoulder, a startled gasp left her throat. She began backing away, the color draining from her face.

“Cora, no!” Chenmo said to her friend. “Norbu, Norbu. The abbot!”

The lama snapped out an order for the monks to return to the gompa, then as they disappeared into the shadows he turned to Shan and sighed. “She was supposed to come alone,” he said in Chinese. He cast a puzzled glance at Dakpo as the monk disappeared into the rocks. “Dakpo was supposed to intercept her and leave her alone with me so I could console her.”

The American backed into one of the rock walls that enclosed the clearing, her face clenched in fear.

Shan replied in Tibetan. “She saw the monk who killed the three at the convent. But she couldn’t describe him in detail. She said she would recognize him if she ever saw him again.” Chenmo gasped and moved to Cora’s side.

Norbu sighed. “It’s not exactly courtroom testimony.”

“I was never expecting a courtroom,” Shan said. He inched forward, trying to get between Cora and the abbot.

“It could make for an awkward journey,” Norbu said conversationally.

He glanced at Jamyang’s pistol, now tucked into Shan’s belt, then back at Cora. Shan watched his hands move toward his own belt. A pen case hung there, and one of the bronze fire strikers issued to Peace Institute graduates. Not any fire striker, Shan knew, but the one that had killed the Lung boy.

“Major Liang had you in custody,” the abbot said with a peevish expression. “That makes you a fugitive.”

“The only one who could have told you that was the major himself,” Shan observed. “I do recall seeing him send a message. A secret message from a handler of undercover agents.”

Shan’s words brought a groan of despair from Chenmo. She tried to shield Cora with her body.

Suddenly there was movement at the back of the small clearing. Meng stepped into the light, the two Tibetan constables at her side. The lieutenant had a scrubbed, well-polished look about her. Her cap was cleaned, her uniform freshly pressed, her hair pinned back in a severe knot. She had become the knob Shan had first met at the convent.

Shan stared at her in disbelief. She would ruin everything. Purbas were nearby, probably approaching this very moment, ready for their passenger to India. They would flee at the first sight of her, taking Cora’s only hope of escape with them, leaving the killer in a desperate rage that he would turn against those left in the clearing. Shan tried to get her attention, to warn her away, but she would not acknowledge him.

Norbu too gazed at her in confusion for a moment, but quickly recovered. “Lieutenant Meng!” he greeted her. “For once you are a welcome sight.” He pointed at Shan. “This man is a fugitive criminal. He must have escaped from Major Liang.”

“Major Liang,” Meng explained, “has departed the region, back to his Peace Institute.” Norbu shot a chastising glance at Meng, then moved with surprising agility, feigning a move toward Meng before lunging at Shan and grabbing the pistol from his belt. “Lieutenant Meng,” Norbu said, speaking like a senior officer now, “you must take these two”—he gestured to Shan and Chenmo—“into custody. Contact Major Liang. Secure accommodations must be arranged for them. One of those institutions for the criminally insane would do nicely.”

Chenmo began a low, fearful mantra.

Meng dutifully stepped around Norbu and pulled the dazed novice from Cora, back to one of the constables. Shan stood frozen as he realized that Meng indeed was just a knob again. He had seen her changing, had seen her struggling with something inside. She had scared herself with her lies to Liang, had recognized the dangerous ground she had been treading and was retreating, making her amends to the government.

Norbu seemed to be enjoying himself. He examined the pistol with an amused expression. “Jamyang’s handiwork,” he said of the little symbols painted on it. “Even in our training classes he was always doodling, drawing these things. He spent too long building his cover, succumbed to it in the end,” he declared to Shan, speaking as if one professional to another. “We must recalibrate the training.”

Shan cast another worried glance at Meng. She could correct all she had done, could become a hero, even attain her former rank, by arresting them all. Shan the traitorous convict, the purbas who were no doubt lingering nearby, Chenmo the splittist, the American woman whom Public Security so desperately wanted to disappear. He pushed down his fears and turned back to Norbu. “It’s what happens when you train people to ignore their true selves.”

Norbu gave a hollow laugh. “True self, Comrade? We are all but clay to be shaped by the Motherland.”

“And what shape do you assume, Norbu, once you get across to India?” Shan asked. “Just a spy? Or is it to be assassin? The way you dealt with the Lung boy and those at the convent showed a natural talent.”

“No training is complete unless it is both mental and physical. The opportunities are endless. I am but an instrument to be aimed by the people’s will.”

“The instrument of a gang of old men in Beijing who lost touch with the people years ago,” Shan shot back.

“Spoken like the unrepentant criminal you are,” Norbu sneered. “Liang will find a cure for you.” He glanced back at Meng, standing behind him, and lifted the gun again. “Possession of a firearm by a former convict, Lieutenant. Make a note. Ten strings at least.” He noticed Chenmo, who had collapsed, sobbing, against a rock. “And search that damned hermitage of the nuns. The place reeks of splittism. Should have leveled it years ago.”

At last he turned to the American. Cora seemed to have lost all her strength. She had collapsed to the ground and was on her knees now, as if in supplication. But there was no surrender in her face. “You killed them,” she declared to Norbu in English in a quiet but steady voice. “You butchered them. I watched. You arranged the bodies like you were stacking wood. You enjoyed it.”

Shan had no notion whether Norbu understood. But then the abbot laughed and replied in perfect English. “When risks are presented I am taught to eliminate them. The deaths were an affirmation of my mission, a sign that I am destined to succeed. Even those photos I worried about, they were just waiting for me in those little cases, not even hidden, ready for me to destroy them. It’s my destiny,” he said, with a gesture to those gathered before him.

“What I never understood,” Shan said in Tibetan, “was how you knew, who warned you so that you suspected you would be confronted that day?”

Norbu was enjoying himself. “Loyal Dakpo of course. He told me how the old abbot was meeting some tall solitary lama who had begun asking questions about me. He was excited because the lama had a little lotus mark on his neck, called it an auspicious sign. But I knew that mark. Our wayward agent. Liang made a special trip all the way from Chamdo just to warn me that Jamyang was missing. It was just bad luck that fool Lung boy saw us together. I told Liang we should never have let Jamyang stop to see his elderly aunt. And the abbess was so straightforward, no sense of subterfuge. What did she expect when she asked me to come to the convent?” He shrugged. “I actually think she thought I would weep on her shoulder and ask forgiveness.”

“Murder!” Chenmo spat.

“No, my dear. Casualties in our glorious war.” Norbu cocked his head at the novice. “Look at you. You must have been pretty once. The Bureau could have found a good use for you. Now”—he shrugged—“after five or ten years they may trust you to scrub the toilets in their barracks.”

He suddenly swiveled, cocking the pistol and raising it in one swift motion, aiming at Cora’s head. “You should have stayed home,” he said in English, and pulled the trigger.

There was less than a second between the metallic click on the empty chamber and the sharp crack of a shot. Norbu looked in confusion at the pistol in his hand, then down at the swelling crimson blossom on his chest. He looked at Shan, opening his mouth as if in question, then collapsed to the ground.

In the awful silence that followed there was no movement except that of Meng as she returned her pistol to her belt. Shan was aware of nothing but her gaze. For an instant he saw desolation in her eyes, the look of one being swept out to sea without hope of rescue. Then she clenched her jaw and took command.

“Now,” she murmured to the constables. One of them whistled and two young Tibetan men materialized out of the shadows, followed a moment later by Dakpo and Trinle. They had been listening. She had been wiser than Shan, had known the audience had to be those most directly affected by Norbu’s violence. She turned to the two strangers. They were, Shan suddenly realized, the purbas who were to escort Norbu to Dharamsala. “You are going to take the American across the border,” Meng commanded, “but on the way, somewhere in the high mountains, you will lose Norbu’s body in a crevasse. As far as his superiors will know he went across to India. Take his identity cards. Find someone who can use them to check into a hotel in Macau or Hong Kong. In a few weeks when he doesn’t show up in Dharamsala they will begin a search and find the record. They will assume he has fled to the West. They will have to assume everything he touched is compromised, that no graduate of their Institute will ever be trusted again. They will have to roll up the operations at Chamdo and start over somewhere else.”

Another figure stepped out of the shadows as Meng backed away. Sansan clutched a flat black box to her breast. “It worked,” she said to Shan, excitement in her eyes. “We have a computer with all the knob clearances embedded in it.” Shan breathed a sigh of relief. He had not been certain if Sansan had had the time to dart out of the shadows of the holding cell and switch the computers when he had lured Liang into the outer office.

“She says we have to destroy it in two or three days but until then we—”

Shan did not hear the rest of the sentence, for Sansan had nodded toward the path that led to the road. He darted into the shadows and out onto the open slope. Meng was already at her car. She paused, seeing him, and for a long moment they silently gazed at each other. Then she climbed inside and drove away.

EPILOGUE

The long trail of dust gleamed silver in the moonlight, a cloud that seemed to be pushing them ever on, deeper into the new land. Shan and Lokesh stood on the ridge to watch as the three heavy vehicles that had been following them climbed the steep dirt track below. Like scouts in the wilderness Jigten and Rapeche the headman had stood in the back of Shan’s truck, guiding them for hours through the vast grassland, their night passage lit only by dim parking lights and the hand lanterns used when rocks had to be cleared from their path.

They turned at the sound of a low whistle from Jigten and climbed back into their own truck. Jigten and the old shepherd insisted now on walking in front of the weary column, leading the vehicles along the narrow track between tall, narrow stone formations that loomed like ghostly sentinels in the night. Half an hour later they stopped as Jigten and the old man conferred excitedly. Rapeche dropped to one knee and plucked some of the grass at his feet and chewed on it, then tasted the soil. As the headman turned his face was full of joy. He seemed to have discovered a long-lost friend.

When the clan patriarch had proclaimed that Shan had performed a miracle, Shan had quickly corrected the old man, insisting that the magic had all been in the young Chinese woman, explaining how Sansan had used the Public Security computer to confuse the government. Rapeche had listened patiently, then proclaimed again that Shan had performed a miracle. Not even Shan and Yuan had fully grasped Sansan’s passion when she first tried to explain the opportunities presented by having Liang’s computer but after several hours at their dining table, running through programs on the little machine, learning how the populations of the dropka camps were managed and assigned, they had begun to share her excitement. When Jigten had reported an unexpected, joyful reunion between Rapeche and his granddaughter, they had invited the headman to Yuan’s house and spent most of the night consulting maps and devising the plan. At dawn they had gone to see Lung and the Jade Crows.

Now, four days later, Shan was still in awe at the boldness of their plan. The manager at Clear Water Camp had expected his residents to be relocated, and although it had been sooner than he had anticipated Shan had seen the relief on his face as the trucks were being loaded with his unruly charges. Sansan had simply altered relocation schedules, vehicle records, and destinations. In fact, at her father’s urging, the destination of the clan was changed repeatedly in the system, then the last destination was linked back to the first so that the record would seem to disappear into a loop of reassignments. The administration of relocation and internment programs was notoriously inefficient. No one had time to reconcile the records and if they tried they would find neither the real destination of the missing shepherds nor the vehicles that had transported them.

Shan and Lokesh climbed out to join Jigten and the old headman in a clearing on what appeared to be one more rise in the endless hills. Before them the landscape was unknown, shrouded in fog. But as the trucks pulled up side by side, Rapeche threw up his arms and shouted what sounded like a mantra.

“Truly the gods shine on us this night!” Lokesh exclaimed. Shan turned to his friend in confusion then followed his gaze toward an increasingly bright patch of light ahead of them. The fog was shifting, quickly blowing away, leaving the landscape washed in moonlight.

Jigten dropped to his knees. They were not on just another hilltop, they were on the crest of a ridge that rose like a wall to protect a vast basin of grassland below. Small lakes dotted the land, patches of silver in a rolling sea.

“They say there is no paved road for nearly four hundred miles in that direction.” Professor Yuan spoke over Shan’s shoulder. “Not even the army has reliable maps. It’s a wilderness of grass.”

Lung Tso jumped out of the cab of the first truck and began shouting orders to the drivers, who backed their trucks to the edge of the ridge. From the last truck came eager bleats. The animals too seemed to sense where they were. The sheep had been the Jade Crows’ payment for joining their scheme. Sansan had provided the gang with the schedules of trucks traveling the central highway with cargos of livestock for the government abattoirs in the north. The smugglers had done the rest. By the end of the night the Jade Crows would be gone on the eastern highway, to some city in a distant province where they could buy false registrations for their trucks and themselves and start anew. All the bounty money left after outfitting the dropka for the trip Shan had given to Lung. When the police finally went to the Jade Crow compound they would find it abandoned, with a little Buddha sitting on the gatepost.