"Where you headed?" Winslow asked.

"Camp Nine. Southwest. The British team."

"Perfect," Winslow said good-naturedly. "We're going southwest, too. Near Yapchi."

"Not Yapchi. Not today. Yapchi field drop is tomorrow." The pilot seemed unruffled by the strangers in his craft, but Shan saw that his hand was hovering over the microphone on his control panel. At the side of the hanger were two men in the brown jackets of venture security, their backs turned to the aircraft. The engine was beginning to whine as it warmed up.

"Change in plans," Winslow announced.

The pilot looked back and sighed, lifting the microphone as he did so. "Sorry. I have to get in the air. You want Yapchi, check with Personnel to get the paperwork done. I'll lift off after breakfast." He touched a switch on the microphone and it hissed with static.

"But it's an emergency," Winslow said, still smiling at the man.

"I don't think so," the pilot shot back, impatient now, and raised the microphone to his lips.

"In the name of the U.S. government I requisition this aircraft," Winslow announced in a new, sterner voice. He raised his passport out of his bag.

The pilot lowered the microphone. "Good joke," he said with a shrug. "I like Americans. Just go now and no one knows anything. If I call security it will go badly. Reports have to get filed. Security," he said slowly, examining them more carefully now, "is already really pissed about something."

Winslow pulled out his map and pointed out the coordinates, holding his passport with his fingers against one corner of the map. "A fast chopper like this, wouldn't take much longer for you to slightly change course."

The pilot looked at the passport, frowned, and lifted the mike again.

Winslow pushed it down. "Listen to me," he said in English. "Someone's going to get killed."

"That's it," the pilot said, and pulled away from the American, his hand now on the cockpit door handle.

Winslow sighed and looked at his backpack, sitting at his feet. With a chill Shan remembered that the American had Lin's gun. He glanced at Shan, then extended his passport toward the pilot. "I am an American diplomat- look." He opened the passport to the information page on the inside. "In Beijing, at the embassy, we get memos from security warning us to watch out for pickpockets, because American diplomatic passports are so valuable on the black market in China. Smugglers pay a fortune for them. A good embassy passport, one with five or six years left, can go for ten thousand U.S."

The pilot's hand drifted away from the door, and he accepted the passport for closer inspection. "Seven years left on mine," Winslow said. "I just go back to the office, say it was stolen, and they give me a new one."

"Then they invalidate this one," the pilot rejoined.

"Doesn't affect the value. Black market buyers know they can still use it anywhere that doesn't have automated clearance systems, any border station without a computer uplink to the centralized files. Meaning eighty percent of the world."

The pilot stared at each of them a moment, then grinned, put the passport in his pocket, and engaged the rotors.

You will sense a great rushing like a strong wind when you die, with a floating sensation, and the world will soar around you. The words of the death rite echoed in Shan's mind as they shot over the rough, dry landscape. Wearing the earphones that hung on the back of the seat in front of him, leaning on the small window, Shan found a distant place within and simply experienced the rushing of the land beneath. Riding in a helicopter could be a meditation exercise, he mused, to understand how vast, and transitory, the world was.

The pilot did not argue when Winslow asked him to bypass Yapchi's main camp, coming in low from the west so as not to be seen. He would not, Shan realized, want anyone to know he had departed from his assigned route, which would have been west of Yapchi in any event. As they approached the site Winslow had marked on the map the pilot guided the helicopter low over the mountains, hugging the contours of the ridge, until suddenly Shan realized they were hovering. Winslow and the pilot were pointing to a clearing near the top of the ridge and glancing at the map. Then abruptly, the machine tilted forward a hundred yards, straightened and sank. They touched down hard, Winslow flung open the door and they leapt out. The pilot offered a mock salute, hesitated, looking around the bleak terrain, then examined the three figures beside his machine. He unbuckled his harness and rummaged around the cargo compartment. Moments later he began tossing things out of the open door. Two blankets. A first aid kit. A down vest and, finally, a bag of American potato chips.

Seconds later the machine was gone and they stood alone in the wind on the high ridgetop clearing. Winslow handed the vest to Somo, as Shan gathered up the other items in one of the blankets and slung it over his shoulder, then trotted to the nearest outcropping. He felt strangely uneasy being in the clearing.

"You want to find Miss Larkin," Shan said to the American when Winslow had caught up with him. Somo and I want to find the purbas. I think they may be at the same spot."

"You don't know that," the American asserted. "Christ, everything is a conspiracy with you."

Shan sighed. "In the helicopter I realized something. When Somo told me what Larkin had done with the computer I asked why would anyone speak with Somo about what Larkin did. That was the wrong question. I should have asked why would Somo's contact know what Larkin did, if she had gone so far to preserve her secrecy. There can be only one answer. Because she was with purbas, because purbas are working with her for some reason. That explains why Zhu is so interested in her. A foreigner helping the resistance, the government would-" Shan stopped in mid-sentence. Winslow grinned back at him.

Somo gave a reluctant shrug, but nodded slowly as the two men studied her. "I don't know any details. It's a different project, a different team. Bad security, for everyone to know what the others are doing."

Shan nodded agreement. "Rivers," he said. "We know she is marking rivers. We know Tibetans are collecting water from rivers." He asked Winslow for the map, and traced with his finger each of the blue lines that radiated out of the mountains. He climbed to the top of the outcropping. They could see two of the small rivers, emerging from narrow canyons to flow to the west and south.

"She's expected to be here tomorrow," Winslow said. "She's not here now. And she wouldn't be likely to travel all night in the mountains. So say she's no more than half a day's walk from here." He made a wide circle with his finger on the map. "But to the west she would be out of the Yapchi oil concession," he added.

"Sky birthing," Winslow said. "That man taking the bottle to the Green Tara, he said something about going to the sky birthing." He frowned and searched the horizon.

Suddenly Shan looked up and pointed to the main peak of Yapchi Mountain. "We know where the sky is born," he declared with a grin.

They had been walking for three hours, feeling increasingly uncertain that they could find the place they sought, when suddenly a Tibetan youth appeared, jogging along a trail that ran laterally below them on the slope they were descending. He had no pack, not even a heavy coat, but he clutched something in his hands. Shan looked at Winslow, who was rubbing his temples with a grimace, then at Somo. She grinned, tightened the laces of her shoes, grabbed the bag of potato chips and leapt down the slope.