Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (19 page)

“My God. Then why would you want him freed?”

Perhaps it was the soothing warmth of the tea, or just his exhaustion, that caught him off guard. The words were out of his mouth as if of their own accord. “My son is in the Public Security mental hospital twenty miles from here. The only chance he has of survival is for me to get him out of there, get him transferred back to the camp he came from. It was my old prison. There I could see that he was looked after. Colonel Tan is in charge of the prison.”

“Christ!” Yates stared into his mug. “China!” he groaned, as if it explained everything, shaking his head back and forth. The American searched Shan’s face for a moment, drank deeply, then gazed back toward the hiding place inside the cartons. “Those monks have to be saved,” he declared.

“Those monks have to be saved,” Shan repeated. He decided not to push Yates into telling him how the monks arrived at his depot.

“Fine. I won’t tell the knobs you helped the monks escape, you won’t tell about me helping them. So finish your tea and get out of here. You depress me. You and I have an understanding, Shan, that’s enough.”

“No, we don’t. The people in the valley will be very upset with you, with all American climbers, when I tell them that you have been stealing their Yamas. The Lord of Death is tough enough on them without someone deliberately affronting him.”

“I don’t think you’ll tell them. I saw what you did with those monks in there. You’re not like that.”

“You weren’t listening. My son is going to die if I don’t get Tan out of jail. You think I am going to be upset about embarrassing some American?”

“You act as if the murders are connected to someone at the base camp, even connected to me. They are not. You are not going to solve the killings here.”

“It’s not the murders I’m looking to solve right now. It’s the mystery of the ambushed bus. The mystery of how that equipment got there, how someone expert in rigging rope set it up.”

The American said nothing. He drained his mug and stood.

“Likewise not connected to the murders.”

“It doesn’t matter if you know they are not. The government believes they are.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“At the scene of the murders they found a statue of Yama.”

Yates seemed to stop breathing for a moment. His brow creased with worry. “I had nothing to do with the murders.”

“Director Xie has begun investigating the monks and those who might help them. The Bureau of Religious Affairs office in Shogo was burned down and a figure of Tara left in the ashes. Even he can see such an obvious pattern. He will soon discover that the other old Yamas are being stolen, then he will convince himself that whoever stole the Yamas committed the murders. When Cao finds out, they will try to pick up the trail of the missing Yamas, interrogating all those innocent people in Tumkot, probably run fingerprint tests on those figures that were returned. In a few days they will declare that whoever stole the Yamas was Tan’s partner in the assassination.”

“The statues I collect are only of Yama.”

“A subtlety that will likely be lost on Xie, and certainly on Public Security.”

Yates’s face drained of color. “Are you saying someone is trying to make it look like it was me, to frame me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want to cast suspicion on traditional Tibetans. But once they find the trail of the stolen Yamas . . .” Shan didn’t finish the sentence. “Foreigners engaged in crime aren’t always deported. Some disappear into the gulag, though I have never heard of one lasting more than a year or two. If I were you I’d get in my car and not stop driving until I was in Nepal.”

Yates turned his head, back toward the hidden monks. “Those monks have to be saved,” he repeated in a hollow voice.

“Cao and Xie don’t have to wait for fingerprints. They will have discovered by now that a ministry film team was here for two days before the Minister’s visit, collecting background footage. Cao will isolate every frame that contains your red and black ropes, and every person who touched those ropes.”

“We have lots of rope. We are always moving it around, measuring lengths, testing it, cutting out frayed sections. So what if they catch me on film with those ropes?”

“You miss my point. For the knobs, a foreigner is an obstacle, something they just have to work around. They will look for every Tibetan who touched that rope. They will call in Constable Jin and Tsipon, and probably other leading citizens, to connect names to faces. They already have squads out, looking in public places in town.” Shan shrugged. “Tibetan porters faced with Cao know he has the power to send them away for a year, on his signature alone. They will talk, they will remember you driving away with the ropes in your truck, they may even be persuaded to state they saw you on the rocks setting up that ambush on the bus.”

“Damn your eyes!” Yates muttered as he dropped onto his cot. “It wasn’t like that. . . .” He sank his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. Shan lit the stove and began preparing two more cups of tea.

It had been a perfect confluence of events, Megan Ross had told Yates. The hotel opening, the conference, the visit of the minister with reporters and cameramen. Ross, Yates explained, had repeatedly asked to meet with the minister in Beijing and been rebuffed. “She told me I would have special impact, as the owner of the new trekking company coming to the Chinese side of the mountain, representing a victory for the minster’s policies, that if I told Wu I would bring a three or four new American expeditions a year the Ministry would agree to Megan’s Himalayan Compact. So she wanted me to be there, waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“There is a bend along the edge of a cliff that overlooks pastures and buckwheat fields below, the mountains in the background. Really beautiful, untouched by the centuries, a perfect example of what Megan’s compact seeks to preserve. She insisted that was the place to intercept the minister’s car. We would wait there, pretending to have a flat tire, blocking the road. The minister would have to stop. We would meet, she would learn who we were, and about the important opportunity we represented.”

“Megan was to be with you?”

“That was the plan. But Megan has never been big on keeping to plans.”

“But surely she expected the minister to have an escort. The closing of the road was a Public Security secret until that morning.”

“Megan knew. She never said how. She said they would stop all traffic from below but they wouldn’t think about the foreigners who might already be above, and those few of us who were around were invited to the minister’s big picnic reception closer to the base camp.”

“So you rigged the rock slide to block it, after the minister’s car went through.”

“No. I just helped her identify the place, a bend in the road with loose rocks above. That was it. She said the rest was too risky for me to be involved. Too many people depend on me as the head of the expedition company.”

“You never wondered where she was that day?”

“No. The night before she called from town, asking if she could use the room reserved for our company at the new hotel, said she would meet me the next day.”

“But she never called, never showed up.”

Yates shrugged. “Megan is impulsive. She’s behind on her life-list for climbs. She figures she has ten more good years of climbing, and she has thirty peaks left on her list. If she found a secret way to get to one of her mountains she would have jumped at it, and would know that I would understand. She always keeps a pack of climbing equipment ready. I left her in town at Tsipon’s little bungalow, where she keeps the pack.”

“Then how did she get to the hotel?”

“She never went to the hotel. She went climbing. She’ll be back any day now.”

“She’s not coming back, Yates. She died with the minister.”

Yates gave Shan a sour look. “What’s your game? She is alive. Why would you say otherwise?”

“She died in my arms.”

“It’s a nasty kind of game to play with me, Shan. She didn’t die. I had a message. A porter gave it to me that afternoon. A chance at one of her mountains came up. She said she’d be back in a few days.”

Shan leaned forward with new interest. “What porter? Was the message in her own writing?”

“Nothing was written. He told me and was off. I don’t know many of the porters by name.” Yates shrugged. “Megan’s been coming here for years. She knows most of them.” He fixed Shan with a challenging gaze. “It wasn’t her. I saw them put two bodies in an army truck. Neither was her.”

“You saw
what
?”

“I told you. I was waiting above. But after a while I got in the car and drove downhill. At a switchback I got out, a couple hundred yards above the minister’s sedan, close enough to see two bodies. I didn’t have my binoculars but I could see well enough. They were Chinese, or Tibetans. No blond American.”

“They put a wool cap on her. From a distance you wouldn’t have seen her hair. Then they switched her body for that of the dead sherpa.”

“You’re going to look like a fool when she comes walking in for a cup of tea.”

“What else did you see?”

“Enough soldiers to start a small war, scattering over the slopes. An army truck that took the bodies away. That was all. Later, I saw that she hadn’t even used my suggestions for triggering the rock slide.”

“You mean you went back there, afterwards?”

“The knobs had cleaned everything up. They’d left a few markers and some tape. It’s the only road in to the base camp, they couldn’t keep it closed for long. I stopped, started climbing the slope up to the ropes. A knob sergeant tried to stop me and I explained they were my ropes, stolen from my depot. He let me go under escort, on the condition that I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t have to touch a thing to see that she had not used the configuration I had sketched for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I sketched involved putting a log on the road to act as the release for the rock slide. A heavy vehicle hits the log, tied to a rope, and triggers the slide from above. She changed it, made it simpler. Except with her version someone had to be there to release it.”

Shan considered Yates’s explanation. “For the first week or so,” he began at last, “Cao was considering whether to ignore the rockslide, pretend the bus just had an accident, since adding an act of sabotage against Public Security might complicate his case too much. He’s a man used to quick, easy kills. But now he’s thinking this could be the one case he’s been waiting for, that with this case he can fire a shot that will be heard all the way to the Politburo itself. If he succeeds he’ll be a colonel in a month’s time, feted as a hero of the people in Beijing. A medal, a banquet with senior Party members, maybe a new job as secret investigator for the Party bosses. So he’s decided to raise the stakes. Which means whoever triggered that ambush had better find a new planet to live on.”

“There was something else, which they didn’t find at first. On a rock near where the avalanche was released there was an old sickle.”

“A sickle?”

“A reaping hook, for cutting grain. I climbed up to where the rocks slid from. It was jammed in a crack in a rock, deliberately left there. It had words etched on the blade, and what looked like the image of a range of mountains. I was thinking about hiding it when that sergeant came up to check on me and saw it. He took it down to his vehicle.”

Shan had seen such a blade, a stack of such blades, in the shed where old Gyalo kept his artifacts.

“Later I asked one of the older porters about it at base camp. It scared him, scared him a lot, not the blade but the writing I described. He said I should not speak of such a thing, that we should all pray the Chinese do not know what it is.”

“What were the words?”

“I don’t read Tibetan. I asked him what he thought it said, from my description. He knew, I could tell, but he wouldn’t say.”

“You keep telling me about other people,” Shan said after a moment. “I haven’t heard the truth about you. I haven’t yet heard why I shouldn’t warn the Tibetans that an American is raiding their shrines.”

Yates rose, paced back and forth, paused to study Shan, then paced again. “My father,” he finally said, “died somewhere near here, when I was three years old. He was a scientist, studied the anthropology of religions, was trying to piece together evidence of the various emigrations of the Buddhists across the Himalayas from India.”

“By chopping up religious statues?”

“By taking metallurgical samples of the metals used. You can date the statues that way, but you can also establish where the metal came from. The exact mixture of alloys is like a fingerprint.”

It did not have the ring of truth, Shan sensed, but it was a step in the direction of the truth. “And now you are continuing his work?”

“Right. I want to conclude his research. Maybe get something published, in both our names. I never really knew him. Doing this brings me closer to him than ever before.”

Shan touched the tool on the bed beside him. “So you do use this instrument, this borescope?”

“Sure. Sometimes its helps show the thickness of the metal, and internal structure of the casting, which also can be like a fingerprint.”

“You could have asked to borrow the statues, even asked a Chinese university to help.”