"They told me you need a ride. To wait with my car. Okay, I thought. A ride. I could ask you about the skull shrine. Suddenly one of them runs by. Tosses me a key. For you, he says. Then this Public Security van races down the alley and they throw you inside. Who are you? Why does everyone want you?"

"For me, he said. Did he use my name?"

"No. Not exactly. He said for the pilgrim."

"The pilgrim?"

"The name the purbas are using for you. Tan's pilgrim."

No, Shan was tempted to say. A pilgrim moves toward enlightenment. All I move toward is darkness and confusion. But suddenly a tiny flicker of light appeared. "You said you drove an old man from Shigatse? To Lhadrung?"

Jansen nodded distractedly. He was nervously watching the rearview mirror. "His wife had just died. He sang me some of the old mourning songs."

Rebecca Fowler and Tyler Kincaid were waiting fifteen miles out of the city, parked at a flat stretch of highway along the Lhasa River where truckers gathered to sleep. Jansen pulled in behind a decrepit Jiefang truck, from which four young men instantly emerged and escorted Shan to the Americans. Shan turned to thank Jansen, but the Finn just nodded nervously and sped back down the road.

The Jiefang pulled out in front of Kincaid and the driver motioned for the Americans to follow.

Fowler was silent in the front seat. At first he thought she was sleeping but then he saw her hands. They were twisting the road map, their knuckles white.

"It's like free-falling," Kincaid said, with unexpected excitement in his voice. "A hundred feet a second. Your heart's in your throat. The world's flying by." He glanced back at Shan. "It's them, right?" he asked with a huge grin.

"Them?"

"In the truck. The real thing. It's gotta be purbas."

"I'm sorry." Shan felt his forehead. The blood was clotting now.

"Sorry? For this day? The whole damn day, it's been like rappelling down a mountain. You just jump off the cliff and let it happen."

"I never meant for you to be in danger," Shan said. "You should have just left."

"Hell, we made it out alive, didn't we? No sweat. Wouldn't have missed it. We got 'em good, the MFCs. You sent me to search for what isn't there. Perfect. Playing games with their minds." He filled the truck with another of his cowboy whoops.

"Dammit, Tyler," Fowler said. "Get us out of here. It's not over until we're home."

"What do you mean, 'seeking what isn't there'?" Shan asked.

"At the Ministry of Ag. Water resources office moved away in a reorganization. All the files were shipped to Beijing five months ago."

Going to seek what wasn't there. Shan had forgotten the card from the archives. He pulled it from his pocket slowly, as if it would shatter if it moved too fast.

Tamdin, the card said. Saskya gompa. But there was more. On loan, with a date fourteen months earlier, the same date it had been discovered. On loan to Lhadrung town. There was a name, written hastily and smeared. But the chop at the bottom was clear. The personal chop of Jao Xengding. Below it was scrawled "Confirmed," followed by a final ideogram, the inverted, double-barred Y. The same one he had seen on the note from Jao's pocket. Sky, it meant, or heaven.

Twenty miles past the airport the Jiefang truck stopped on a sharp curve and Kincaid pulled in behind it. A man jumped out, ran to the Americans' vehicle, and whispered urgently with Kincaid, pointing to a side road ahead of the truck. The Jiefang turned around and the purba jumped on as it passed by.

Kincaid eased their vehicle into four-wheel-drive and moved onto the side road. "The knobs have road blocks on all roads out of Lhasa, at repeating intervals. They are steaming. They probably have a special reception committee waiting at the Lhadrung County checkpoint. So we have to detour."

He drove recklessly over the rough route, toward the setting sun, then abruptly stopped as the distant flickering lights of Lhadrung valley came into view. "We could go back, you know," Kincaid announced to Shan with a meaningful gaze.

"Back?"

"To Lhasa. The road blocks are checking vehicles leaving the area, not entering. We could do it. You're too valuable to go back to prison when this is over. You know so much. I can help you."

"Help me how?" Shan sensed the American's khata that still hung around his neck.

"Talk to Jansen. We'll calm him down. Hell, he'll want to pick your brain for weeks himself. He knows people who can get you out of the country."

"But Colonel Tan. And if Director Hu-" Fowler protested.

"Hell, Rebecca, they don't know Shan is with us. He just disappears. I could get that tattoo off. I've seen it done. You could be a free man."

A free man. They were such pale words to Shan. It was a concept that Americans always seemed infatuated with, but one which Shan never understood. Perhaps, he reflected, because he had never known a free man. His hand drifted to the khata and slid it off. "You are very kind. But I am needed in Lhadrung. Please, could you just return me to Jade Spring?"

Kincaid saw the scarf in Shan's hand and shook his head in disappointment.

"Keep it," he said admiringly, pushing the khata back. "If you're going back to Lhadrung, you're going to need it."

Chapter Seventeen

Colonel Tan seemed to read the messages from Miss Lihua and Madame Ko simultaneously, his eyes ranging back and forth from the one in his hand to the one on his desk. In the fax from Hong Kong, Miss Lihua reported that she was urgently trying to book flights for her return, but meanwhile wanted to confirm that Prosecutor Jao's personal seal had indeed been taken the year before. No one had been arrested for stealing the chop, although it was the sort of minor act of sabotage typical of monks and other cultural hooligans. A new seal had been fabricated, and a notice sent to alert Jao's bank.

Madame Ko's note reported that she had made inquiries at the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, finding a man named Deng who was responsible for the recordkeeping of water rights. Deng knew who Prosecutor Jao was; they had spoken by phone the week before Jao's death, Madame Ko explained. And Deng had an appointment to see the prosecutor during his stopover in Beijing, at a restaurant named the Bamboo Bridge.

"So one of the monks stole Jao's chop and got the costume. Maybe Sungpo, maybe one of the other four," Tan asserted.

"Why his personal seal?" Shan asked. "If I went to all that trouble, and wanted to sow confusion in the government, why not steal his official seal?"

"Opportunistic. A monk saw a chance and broke into the office. An open door or window, and the first thing he found was the personal seal. He got scared and fled. Miss Lihua says it was a monk."

"I don't think so. But that's not the point." Shan found himself gazing out the window toward the street, half expecting to see a truck of knobs arrive to arrest him. There was only the empty car of the officer he had driven to town with. The knobs in Lhasa had known who he was. But they were not coming for him. What had been their orders? Merely to scare him away from Lhasa? To eliminate him if he could somehow be snatched beyond Tan's reach?

"What are you saying?"

Shan turned back toward Tan. "What's important is that the Director of Religious Affairs lied about it. He told us the costumes were all accounted for. He said he checked."