“I’m not an officer, Sergeant,” Shan assured him. “Is it sergeant?”

“Corporal.”

Shan nodded. “All the officers from that day are gone, Corporal, disappeared deep into China.” He poured the soldier a glass of water from a pitcher on his bedstand. “It’s why no one has missed you yet. There are a lot of distractions right now. The new officers must assume you were reassigned too. All the ones who would know for sure are gone.”

“I wrote a note to my lieutenant but it came back saying he was gone,” the corporal ventured uneasily. “I’ll be back by payday.”

“I have no doubt,” Shan said. “And until then, who could deny that you needed some protracted sick leave?”

The soldier drained the glass. “I still get headaches. I have cuts in my scalp. The bandages need changing.”

“Your first bandage was from a lama’s robe. Do you remember?”

The soldier slowly nodded. “The old fool. He could have run, could have saved himself five years of misery. But he settled down beside me like some old yak. When I came to my senses and stood he didn’t even notice, just kept up that chant of his.”

“Before you stood, did you see anything?”

“My vision came and went. People were running. The guards ran down the road, shooting pistols. Something ran in and out of the bus.”

“You mean somebody.”

“A yeti,” the soldier offered in a tentative voice.

Shan leaned closer. “You saw a yeti jump into the bus?”

The corporal shrugged. “In the barracks some of the old sergeants say yetis throw stones at our trucks when they drive in the mountains. When things go missing at the barracks the men say a yeti took them, kind of a joke. Whatever it was moved fast, without fear of our guns. My vision was blurred. I saw something dark, the size of a man. I thought I smelled spices for a moment, and heard tiny bells.” He shrugged again. “They say strange things happen with concussions.”

Someone, Shan reminded himself, had taken the files from the prison bus, someone wise enough to know the files represented the primary connection the government had to the monks, someone brave-or foolhardy-enough to chance being shot by a guard.

“And then,” Shan asked, “after the lama tended your wounds you went up the road? Not to go search for the others in your squad?”

“That’s where they all were by then, around the bodies, shouting, calling on radios, all frantic, scared to death. They weren’t worried about the monks anymore. They barely noticed when I got there so I sat against a rock and watched. I was still bleeding. I was fading in and out of consciousness.”

“What did you see of the dead?”

The soldier shrugged. “Two corpses. Bloody down the front, propped against the rocks.”

“You’re sure it was two?”

“Of course it was two. I saw them. The lieutenant was on the radio, shouting that there were two dead people. Both women.”

Shan took a deep, relieved breath. At last someone else shared his perception of reality. “How do you know?”

“One was that minister. We had seen her the day before at a rally. The lieutenant started looking for identity papers on the other. Someone said it was one of those men from the climbing conference.”

Shan recalled Megan’s Ross’s closed-cropped hair, the blood on her sturdy, weathered face. It was a simple human reaction, that he had often had to fight early in his career. No one liked to look into dead, bloody faces.

“What happened?”

“The lieutenant opened the jacket, searched the pockets, found nothing, became frantic, and pulled open the shirt. He cried out and jerked backward like he had been bitten by a snake. The body had breasts.”

“Then what?”

“There was another problem, a man lying on the ground by the road. A tough bastard, he kept trying to get up. They used those electric sticks on him. I passed out.”

Involuntarily Shan’s hand grasped his own upper arm, which still twitched from the many sticks that had touched him that day, and the days after. He had not remembered resisting the knobs, but he had no doubt who was the bastard the soldier spoke about.

“I remember watching the lieutenant open the trunk of the car and pull out a quart of oil. He used it to outline the bodies.”

Shan’s head snapped up. “He what?”

“Those other fools didn’t know anything about investigations. He understood. I watch murder shows too. First thing you do, he told the soldiers, you mark where the bodies were found. Usually they use chalk or white tape or something. But he couldn’t find anything else to use.”

Shan nodded solemnly. “Excellent. And then you looked for evidence?”

The soldier frowned. “Who are you exactly? I don’t know if-”

“I am someone who so far has no particular reason to report your whereabouts to the garrison. It would be a shame to disturb your hard-earned vacation.”

The corporal swallowed hard. “I kept passing out, in and out of consciousness. I remember seeing that someone had closed the shirt and jacket of the younger corpse, and someone had pulled a blue cap low over her head. Someone was shouting to the lieutenant, pointing to a man standing on the road above at that sharp switchback curve, a hundred yards away. He had gotten out of his car and was looking down. When I came to again, the lieutenant was there, arguing with another officer, pointing at the man on the ground, who was covered in blood. Then my head exploded in pain and I blacked out again, for a long time. Next thing I knew, I was in a car bringing me here. The lieutenant had flagged it down, and ordered it to transport me here since all available military transport was being used to bring in teams to search for those damned monks. I passed out again. I woke up here. A doctor came in the next day, on his rounds out of Shigatse.”

“The bodies. What were they saying about them? Who carried them away?”

The young Chinese gazed thoughtfully at a stain on the opposite wall. “My memories jump around, like those movies where the camera keeps changing. There was an army truck. People were eating peaches. The bodies were on planks being lifted into the truck, the minister and the one in the blue cap. They have a place they keep bodies on ice at the spa in the mountains. The last thing I remember is the lieutenant sitting with his head in his hands, looking like his world had ended. That new officer was kicking dirt over the blood, saying all foreigners had to be kept away. Then he lit the oil that showed where the bodies were.”

“He burned it?”

The soldier nodded slowly. His eyelids seemed to be getting heavy, his head was sinking deeper into his pillow. “He had his own chant, like that old monk. Except he kept saying Ta ma de, ta ma de, ta ma de.” Damn, damn, damn. “I remember seeing the shapes of the bodies in flames. It was as if he were cremating their spirits.”

Shan watched as the corporal slept, replaying their conversation. There had been a witness, in the distance, who had seen two bodies. The knobs had carried away two corpses. But on the slope that particular day, at that particular hour, there had been three dead bodies.

The government of the People’s Republic often boasted of its achievements in bridging the gaps between disparate peoples, and discovering ways to push old traditions into the cause of modern socialism. Here, in this high, hidden corner of Tibet, at the gate of the People’s Institute for the Treatment of Criminal Disorders, the knobs’ infamous yeti factory, Shan encountered proof of this miracle. Half a dozen solemn Tibetans, four men and two women, slipped on frayed and faded laboratory coats, on the backs of which large black X’s had been marked. Two young knob guards nervously watched, hands on their rifles, as if expecting to be attacked. The six were ragyapa, fleshcutters, the peculiar, often shunned breed who traditionally disposed of bodies by cutting them up and feeding them to vultures. Public Security had reincarnated them for the twenty-first century, had reversed the polarity of their existence, had decided to supply them pieces of bodies out of which to make something whole. This particular clan of ragyapa was assigned to removal of infectious waste and body parts from the knobs’ special clinic.