Soul of the Fire (22 page)

A ridge of the fresh snow packed around the body collapsed, spilling onto the floor. Shan rose and gathered the fallen snow, returning it to the coffin.

“He sought me out two nights before he died.”

“That's when he had you put the marks on his body.”

Dolma nodded.

“Why was he so scared?”

“He wasn't frightened for himself. He just said he had planted the greatest
terma
of all in the mountains of Taktsang and it wasn't time for it to be discovered.”

“He has to leave,” Shan said. “Put him in that cart and take him into the mountains. You'll be sent back to prison if he is found here.”

“You do not know our ways. He needs to be mourned in the traditional way. His spirit needs comforting.”

“I know the ways of Pao. I know the ways of Sung. Xie would never want to put you and the village at risk. Take him to the fleshcutters, the
ragyapa
. That's what he would want. The Tibetan way. Let him become alms for the birds.”

Dolma fixed her gaze on the nearest butter lamp and began to murmur a mantra.

“You don't understand the danger,” Shan pressed. “Pao will be furious if he discovers Xie's body here. He wouldn't think twice about ordering bulldozers to shove the village over the cliff. In twenty-four hours, there would be nothing left of Yamdrok but bare earth.”

She hesitated only a moment, then continued her mantra in a louder voice.

Shan stepped to the coffin. He looked into the dead man's face, still well preserved by the ice. Xie could have been a friend of Shan's. Shan suspected that he, like Shan, grew weary of Beijing's inexorable cruelty and had been growing reckless in his defiance. There was a special kind of pain reserved for people like Shan and Xie, who knew both the beauty of the Tibetan heart and the savagery of the Party's soul. Xie would have seen how traditional towns were annihilated for disloyalty, would have known how fragile the lives of people like Dolma and Tserung were.

Dolma did not react when Shan stepped past her. He stood silently at the entry, looking at the dead man and the devout mourner. Night had fully fallen, and the butter lamps cast a soft pool of light, encompassing Dolma and the dead man.

“Pao means to use Xie's death for some purpose,” he said to her back. “He is holding a service for him at Shetok.”

A deep melancholy seemed to overtake the former nun. “They have always taught us about self-realization. But Dawa always calls it honoring the life within you. She says that is the greatest of virtues. The older lamas may not all agree with her, but that is how she is able to bless the immolations.”

The chamber fell silent for several heartbeats. In the flickering light, Xie's face seemed to move.

“I was speaking of the funeral,” Shan said in confusion. “Xie's funeral.”

When Dolma finally spoke, her voice cracked. “She would honor her father even if it means her death.”

He opened his mouth for another question, then realization suddenly overtook him. Xie had hidden his greatest treasure in the mountains, the leader of the purbas.
“Ai yi,”
he murmured. “Xie was Dawa's father.”

 

CHAPTER NINE

The message from Amah Jiejie had been a brief, urgent scrawl.
He is dying
.

Shan looked up in alarm at the sinewy mountain commando who had sought him out at breakfast with the slip of paper, the sergeant who had escorted him to Longtou. “She wants me to come?”

“I have a car outside.”

It seemed impossible that Tan could be dying. The colonel, though battered, always seemed indestructible. He had been a fixture on the Tibetan landscape for decades, a piece of its unyielding granite. Some of the older Tibetans had begun referring to him as one of the eternal land demons who emerged every few centuries to wreak havoc. Tan had been a harsh, often brutal anchor in Shan's life, but he was an anchor nonetheless. In his own way, he had been a protector for both Shan and his son, Ko, and Shan fought a terrible foreboding about what his life, and that of Ko, would be like with Tan gone.

They had been driving for several minutes when Shan tried to push his despair away by picking up a map on the seat. He found Zhongje circled, and then traced the road that wound northward into the deep mountains.
SHETOK
was printed within parentheses, as if the mapmakers had only meant to hint at its existence. He recalled that on more recent maps, Tibetan towns that had not yet adopted Chinese names were treated this way. Dolma had spoken of the town and the sacred, hidden land of Taktsang in the hills above it. As the car turned and sunlight fell on the map, Shan noticed lines in red pencil lightly drawn through the terrain above the town. He held the map out for the soldier to see and pointed to the lines. “A military zone?”

The sergeant gave an amused grunt. “The opposite. The Tibetans call it the Tiger's Lair. We stay away from it. Too many accidents. Not worth the trouble, just a maze of cliffs and crevasses. The mountain structure there creates vicious gusts of winds, blowing up with no notice. A freak of geography. Four helicopters have been knocked out of the skies there, like some fist of wind slams them down. Avalanches fell on three different patrols. Half the time, fog covers the valleys. It's an angry, barren place with nothing but yaks and goats. In our barracks you hear rumors of sorcerers calling in storms and bewitching trespassers. Black magic or bad luck—either way, not worth the trouble.”

Shan studied the terrain, seeing now the topographical marks that showed many cliffs facing east, ridges shielding the land from the north, and the small sheltered valleys that would be thick with groves of juniper and crystal-clear streams. Beijing's troops might call it bewitched, but Tibetans would say it was blessed with geomantic power, an extraordinary concentration of spiritual power places.

They crested another ridge, and suddenly Lhasa sprawled before them.

After a moment, Shan spoke again. “Did you know Captain Lu?”

The sergeant clenched his jaw. “He was the best of us, a natural leader. A green corporal when he came to the colonel ten years ago. Came from the same farm valley as the colonel back in Hubei Province. But it wasn't that. The colonel saw his talent, spent time working with him, promoted him to sergeant and sent him to special training. Arranged for two years of college for him and promoted him to lieutenant. Went to some special institute and came back a Party member. Tan started sending him to meetings in his own place, made him captain and chief of his staff after three more years. They were close. Got drunk together last year on May Day. Lu took over for Tan in all the contacts with the civilian government.”

“So he knew Deputy Secretary Pao?”

“Knew him? Hosted a banquet for him when he visited Lhadrung last year.”

“Something the colonel would be expected to do.”

“Colonel Tan made a point of being on a training exercise. Came in late, in muddy fatigues, then offered a toast to Pao and left.”

The guards at the hospital nervously looked away as Shan and the soldier entered the lobby. When they stepped out of the elevator onto the top floor, Shan saw there were no nurses busily shuttling between rooms. A solitary orderly cast a terrified glance at them and scurried away. The door to Tan's suite was closed. The soldier guarding it saluted Shan's escort and motioned them inside.

A portable partition closed off Tan's bed. Curtains were drawn on the windows, leaving much of the chamber in shadow. Amah Jiejie sat in a chair along the wall, wiping her cheeks. She gestured toward the hidden bed, then reached out to squeeze Shan's hand as he approached her.

“He was already so weak,” she said. “You'll have to leave Zhongje, Shan. Go back to Lhadrung. Without him, you'll—” Her words were cut off as a drinking glass arced over the partition and exploded against the wall behind her. The voice that cursed from behind the partition was indeed weak, but the colonel's arm had regained its strength.

As Shan approached the bed, he recognized the lieutenant who had escorted him to Lokesh's cell. The officer nodded and stepped aside.

Tan was a pale shadow of himself. His face was ashen, almost skeletal. He seemed to have trouble focusing on Shan, but when he did, his lips curled into a thin grin. His words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Just the bastard I need,” he said, and with obvious effort pointed his hand. Shan followed it, along a jagged line of white crystals toward the bathroom door, which was guarded by another of Tan's security squad.

“A close thing,” the lieutenant said. “He instantly knew something was wrong and emptied the saltshaker into a glass of water. They can't believe he swallowed it all, with the incisions down his throat. It must have felt like his heart was being ripped out.”

The guard at the bathroom opened the door. The lieutenant and Tan looked at him expectantly.

A young doctor, stethoscope still around his neck, sat on the chair by the shower stall, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He did not look up as the door clicked shut behind Shan. “I told them I don't know anything,” the doctor groaned.

Shan sat on the edge of the tub. “He was given something that was going to kill him. But against all odds, he flushed his stomach with salt water and vomited it up.”

“He's not even supposed to be swallowing more than a few sips for his pills.”

“How did the salt get there if he's not eating?”

“The old woman who visits stayed for hours yesterday. We had a meal brought up for her.”

Shan weighed the news. Tan had a long list of medical conditions that could kill him. But someone had tried to murder him.

The doctor fidgeted.

“You know who he is,” Shan finally said in a soft, almost sympathetic whisper.

“The Governor of Lhadrung. Head of those prison camps. I didn't do anything!”

“I didn't do anything, and I spent five years in one of his camps.”

The little color left in the man's face drained away. “Please! No! I'm due to rotate back to Tianjin in two months!” Recently graduated doctors were given the opportunity to serve a year in the hardship post of Tibet, on the promise of a preferred position in the east.

Shan just stared at him.

“She wasn't on the duty roster! How was I to know!”

“A doctor would be welcome by the inmates,” Shan said conversationally. “Your fellow prisoners will pay you for your medical advice. A beetle, a worm, a corncob. You know, things you can eat.”

The doctor pressed a fist against his mouth as if he were suddenly nauseous. The stethoscope slipped to the floor and he made no effort to retrieve it. “I never noticed her. She wore a nurse's uniform, seemed to know her way around the wards. I can't be expected to know every face.”

“And knew her way around the medicine cabinets.”

“She didn't take it from our cabinets—we're certain of that. The drug cabinets are kept locked. Someone was nearby all the time. Whatever it was, she brought it with her. She knew what she was doing.”

“So you asked about her afterwards?”

“That old woman they call Amah and the lieutenant brought each of the other nurses here and made me speak with them. A nurse on a break was standing outside the building, smoking. The one who did this to him was young and good-looking, and left in a hurry. We checked the security camera. All we got was her back, and the black car. They drove toward the city.”

“A black car, like Public Security uses?”

The words seemed to strike the man like a physical blow. His hands began shaking.
“Ai yi!”
he moaned. “I didn't do anything!”

Shan stepped to the sink, feeling the need to wash his hands. He looked into the mirror. He did not like the person Tan was forcing him to become. He turned back to the terrified man. “What is your name?”

“Dr. Lihua.”

“A military doctor will be coming, Dr. Lihua. He will assume direct control of Tan's recovery. You will not speak about what we discussed. You will vacate the four adjoining rooms for that doctor and the colonel's guards. Immediately. I want a printout of that image of the woman from the camera. And set up a computer for us in one of the rooms. You are going to do some research.”

The doctor rose, relief flooding his face as he nodded agreement.

Shan stayed at his side as Lihua made arrangements using a phone in the hallway. When the computer arrived, he gestured the doctor to the chair in front of it, closed the door, and extracted a paper from his pocket. “First, tell me what you do in a lab with these,” he said, extending the list of chemicals that had been used by the intruder in Lam's lab.

The doctor shrugged. “Reagents. Used to detect drugs and chemicals.”

“As in analyzing the contents of a stomach.”

“Sure. One of the most common uses.”

“And how do you kill someone with a weak heart, say someone already on digitalis?”

“Easy—a massive dose of digitalis. It's commonly available. But your colonel wouldn't have fit that profile. He has the heart of a bull.”

Different drug, same plan, Shan told himself. He gestured to the computer. “Do the systems cover death certificates?”

“Of course.”

“Check a name from the past week. Deng Bao.”

Lihau worked the keyboard for several minutes and finally shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You searched everything in Tibet?”

“Everything official. Everything final.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning there can be classified reports. And there can be conditional reports.”

“Conditional death reports?”

“Pending final review. Sometimes there're questions about cause of death that await test results. Sometimes an authorized signer is not available right away, but the body has to be disposed of.”