The prisoners, fifteen in all, were marched twenty feet into the heather and ordered to form a line. Two knob officers appeared from behind the truck with submachine guns and took up positions on the road, facing the monks.

"No!" Shan moaned. "You can't-"

"I have the authority," Tan said with a chill. "Their strike is an act of treason."

Shan stumbled forward. It was just another of his nightmares, he told himself. He would wake up any moment in his bunk. He fell to his knee. A piece of gravel painfully pierced his skin. He was awake. "They did nothing," he groaned.

"You will stop your masquerade. I will have a prosecutor's report on the murderer Sungpo. In one week."

The prisoners began a mantra. They fixed their eyes over the heads of the executioners, staring toward the mountains.

Tan still did not move his gaze from Shan.

Shan's tongue seemed unable to move. He fought a rising nausea. "I will not help to kill an innocent man," he said in a cracking voice. He shook his head, hard, to clear the pain, and looked up at Tan with new strength. "If that is what you want, I request to join these prisoners."

Tan did not reply.

The officers cocked their weapons. Shan sprang forward. Someone grabbed him from behind and held him as they fired. The roar of the weapons echoed down the valley.

When the smoke cleared, three of the prisoners were on their knees, sobbing. The others were still staring into the distance, chanting their mantra.

The knobs had used blanks.

"You breached security at the South Claw!" Tan barked. "Who authorized you to enter a restricted zone?"

Shan met Tan's gaze now. "The murder scene is now off-limits to your murder investigator?"

"You said you were going to the monastery of Sungpo." Tan narrowed his eyes. "A prosecutor's report against the accused. Do you understand me?"

"Cruelty is never to be understood. It is to be endured." Shan closed his eyes. He felt something new rising. Anger. "Li Aidang would doubtless like my notes. I am going to tell one of these Public Security officers I need to speak to Li. Then I am going to climb into this truck"- he indicated the prisoners' vehicle-"and return to my work unit."

Tan lit one of his American cigarettes and moved silently around Feng's vehicle. He paused at the right rear, where the hubcap was missing and a mismatched tire was on the wheel. "Tell me about it," he growled as he returned to Shan.

Shan watched the prisoners being loaded as he spoke. "I was on the ridge, trying to understand what happened that night. Perhaps the hour was important, the hour he was killed. I wanted to know. There was a strange sound, like a large animal, then shots from the truck. I ran down. Sergeant Feng said there was a demon."

"Your demon Tamdin," Tan said tersely.

"He was hysterical. He said the demon was close, that he heard it speak. I was afraid for him. I asked for his gun."

Tan sneered. "And just like that, Sergeant Feng surrendered it to you."

"I returned it to him later, at the barracks."

"I don't believe you."

Shan fumbled in his pockets. "I kept the remaining bullets, to be safe." He dropped five cartridges into Tan's hand.

Tan stared at the bullets so long his cigarette burned to his fingers. He flinched and angrily threw the butt to the ground, then studied the dust of the convoy. "Everything's going to hell," he muttered, so low Shan was not certain he had heard correctly.

When he looked up there something new in his eyes, something Shan had not seen before. The barest glimpse of uncertainty. "It's all about the same thing, isn't it? The 404th strike and the trial of Sungpo. There's going to be a bloodbath and I am powerless to stop it."

Shan looked at him in surprise. "Do you want to stop it? Do you have the will to stop it?"

"What do you think I-" Tan began, but stopped as he looked down at the bullets. "Feng was scared. He and I served together for many years. He came to Lhadrung because I was here. I never saw him scared." Tan clenched his hand around the bullets and looked up. "Jao understood. In criticism sessions he used to say my only mistake was to think the old causes would have the same old effects in Tibet."

"Old causes have not done well here."

Tan gazed at the line of prisoners and sighed. "I am going to tell Zhong to allow them to be fed. To let the Buddhist charity in to feed them once a day."

Shan looked at him in disbelief, then slowly nodded. "It would be the right thing to do."

"Americans are coming," Tan said absently, then looked back at Shan. "You're bleeding."

Shan wiped the blood from his lip again. "It's nothing."

Tan extended a handkerchief.

Shan looked at it incredulously.

"I never told them to hit you."

Shan accepted it and held it to his lip, watching as Sergeant Feng appeared at the rear of the truck, stretching and yawning. Catching sight of Tan, Feng leaned back as if to hide, then straightened and solemnly marched to the colonel.

He looked awkwardly from Shan to Tan. "Request reassignment sir," he said, dropping his eyes to his boots.

"On what grounds?" Tan asked gruffly.

"On the grounds that I'm an old fool. I failed to remain vigilant in my duty. Sir."

"Comrade Shan," Tan said, "did Sergeant Feng lose vigilance at anytime last night?"

"No, Colonel," Shan observed. "His only fault perhaps was being too vigilant."

Tan began to return the bullets to Feng, then reconsidered and handed the bullets to Shan, who handed them to Feng. "Return to duty, Sergeant," Tan ordered.

Sergeant Feng accepted the bullets sheepishly. "Should've known," he muttered. "Can't shoot a demon." He saluted the colonel and wheeled about.

Tan looked again at the dust of the convoy. "There's too little time."

"Then help me. There's too much to do. I have to try to speak to Sungpo again. But I also have to find Jao's driver. Help me. He's the key to everything."

"Not a bowl touched. Not a kernel," the guard announced as Shan entered the cell block. There was a strange pride in his voice, as though his prisoner's starvation was a personal victory of some kind. "Nothing but tea."

Sungpo did not seem to have moved since Shan had seen him three days earlier. He sat erect and alert, wearing his thousand-mile stare.

"My assistant," Shan said, looking around the cellhouse. "I thought he would be here."

"He's with the other one."

"You have a new prisoner?"

The man shook his head. "Climbed the fence. Lucky bastard. Ten minutes earlier, ten minutes later, the perimeter patrol would have shot him down."

"An escapee?"

"No. That's the joke. He was trying to get in. Had to be taught that citizens may not freely enter military installations."

Shan found Yeshe in the building next door. He was wringing out a towel in a basin of blood-tinged water. Shan watched for a moment, noticing something different in Yeshe's face. He looked calmer somehow. It wasn't peace of mind he had found, but maybe a new deliberation.

Shan followed Yeshe into the interrogation room. At first he did not recognize the figure sitting on the table. One side of his face looked like a melon that had fallen off a speeding truck.