"Wasn't hard to figure," he heard Winslow saying. "You were going north from the lake and suddenly veered east, to the road. If you had been intending all along to go east you would have taken the road from the lake to the east. So you were blocked unexpectedly from going further north. The pass you intended to take got blocked by a snow avalanche or rock slide, I figure. If you were on the road it was just to get to the next pass." He gestured toward the high northern peaks. "Up there. The Tangula Mountains they call them, a spur from the Kunlun."

"I don't understand," Shan said.

"My government will pay a transportation fee if you want," Winslow said, and grinned as he saw Shan's confusion. "I'm going with you."

Lhandro stared woodenly at the American, then quietly asked the scout to make sure the caravan kept moving.

"You don't know where we're going," Shan pointed out.

"Sure I do. North. Same direction I'm going."

"To look for the missing woman," Shan said.

"They say she's dead," Winslow said, and left the words hanging like an unfinished sentence.

The announcement silenced Shan and his friends. Shan took a step back, as though to better see the American. He glanced at Lhandro, who shrugged, as if to say he knew nothing of dead Americans.

"He saved us from that colonel," Lhandro observed to Shan after a long silence.

"With a piece of paper," Shan recalled. "Could I see it again?"

The American stared at Shan coolly for a moment, unzipped the breast pocket of his nylon coat and produced the passport. Shan studied the document, not knowing what he was looking for. Benjamin Shane Winslow, it said, with a home address in the state of Oklahoma. It had over twenty entry stamps for the People's Republic of China, and many more for countries in South America and Africa.

Winslow took the mug, now empty, from Lhandro and refilled it from a pot on his tiny stove. "Just how would you go about identifying a fake diplomatic passport, tangzhou?"

Tangzhou. It meant comrade. It was the American's way of taunting Shan, he suspected, or perhaps any Chinese he met.

Shan handed the passport back to the American. "I've met several diplomats in my life, Mr. Winslow. None were remotely like you. And my name is Shan, not comrade."

Winslow made a great show of looking into his pack and rummaging through its contents, then looked up. "Damn. Forgot my black tie and patent leather shoes," he declared with exaggerated chagrin.

"Perhaps you would share with us what's in the bag," Shan said.

"You want my dirty underwear? Sure, welcome to it. Light on the starch please." Then Winslow studied Shan's stern countenance and his face hardened. "I've taken enough shit off Chinese today," he said. "You don't even have a uniform."

"You're the only one claiming to work for a government." As Shan spoke the herd of sheep appeared around the outcropping and the caravan began marching past the rocks. Moments later Lokesh appeared, then Nyma and Anya. They stepped toward the American with uncertain expressions, sensing the tension in the air.

"You had a driver and a truck. Where are they?" Shan asked.

"Sent them back to Lhasa. I didn't like him. When the embassy asks the Chinese government for drivers you can be sure they work for Public Security."

Shan considered the American's words and realized he was right, which meant the knobs would soon know all about the confrontation at the village, and the caravan.

"This man saved us at the village," Nyma said to Shan in a low voice that had a hint of pleading. "You especially should know what it would have meant if that colonel had taken us back with him."

The nun's words caused Winslow to look at Shan with a sudden intense curiosity.

"I only asked him to show us what he is carrying in his bag," Shan declared quietly.

"He's American," Lokesh said.

"He works for the American government. The government in Washington cultivates relations with Beijing, not with Tibetans."

The American seemed pained by Shan's words, but he offered no argument. He raised his open palms to his shoulder, then extracted an expensive-looking camera and a compact set of binoculars before turning his rucksack upside down, spilling its contents onto the ground. Shan squatted to study the items. A large plastic bag of raisins. A grey sweatshirt rolled into a ball. A box of sweet biscuits. A small blue metal cylinder that matched the one fueling the stove. Two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, knotted together. Half a dozen bars of chocolate. A one liter bottle of water. A tattered guide book on Tibet, in English. A tiny first-aid kit. And a small black two-way radio.

"You could call your driver on that?" Shan asked, pointing to the radio.

"The driver, or the office he is assigned to. It's how I get back."

"You said the driver works for the knobs."

Winslow grimaced.

Shan realized that Nyma had stepped behind him now, with Lhandro. They were frightened of the little black box.

"It's my lifeline for Christ's sake," the American protested. "You think I'm trying to interfere with your caravan, maybe steal your animals?" he said impatiently, then studied Shan and the others for a long moment. His eyes widened. "Christ. You're illegal. That's why you were so scared about Colonel Lin. You have no papers or-" the American looked back at the animals as they wound their way up the slope "- you're carrying something illegal."

No one spoke, which was answer enough. The wind moaned around the corner of the rocks. The little stove continued its low hiss. In the distance sheep bleated.

The American looked into his hands with a pained expression. "The missing woman is named Melissa Larkin," he explained. "People seem to have given up on her. She is presumed dead. You'd be surprised how many Americans die in Tibet," he added. "For tourists, it's an expensive destination that takes a long time to see, which means many of the tourists are senior citizens. Then there's the dropouts who don't understand about bandits in remote places or the diseases they would never catch at home, or how altitude sickness can kill them overnight. You can die of things here that would never kill you in the States, because medical treatment can be so far away." He looked up with a frown. "It's the embassy that has to get the bodies home for burial."

"But surely the Chinese authorities must help when foreign bodies have to be collected," Shan stated with a pointed glance at the American.

Winslow bent to turn a knob on the stove. The hissing stopped. "This Larkin woman is different. Thirty-five years old. A scientist. Geologist, seismologist. Worked in the North Sea, Alaska, Patagonia. Someone who can handle herself."

"You mean she was working in Tibet?"

"In old Amdo for the past year," Winslow nodded. "Southern Qinghai Province, just across the border from the TAR," he said, meaning the Tibet Autonomous Region, Beijing's misleading name for what had been the central Tibetan provinces.

"A snow avalanche. Rockslide. Bandits," Shan said. "Just because she was independent didn't mean she could avoid bad luck."

"Right. That's what they all say. I had to argue with my boss just to get the right to look for her." Winslow spoke with an odd note of challenge in his voice. "I have two weeks, then off to a conference in Shanghai."