“Damn your eyes!” Yates muttered as he dropped onto his cot. “It wasn’t like that. . ” He sank his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. Shan lit the stove and began preparing two more cups of tea.

It had been a perfect confluence of events, Megan Ross had told Yates. The hotel opening, the conference, the visit of the minister with reporters and cameramen. Ross, Yates explained, had repeatedly asked to meet with the minister in Beijing and been rebuffed. “She told me I would have special impact, as the owner of the new trekking company coming to the Chinese side of the mountain, representing a victory for the minster’s policies, that if I told Wu I would bring a three or four new American expeditions a year the Ministry would agree to Megan’s Himalayan Compact. So she wanted me to be there, waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“There is a bend along the edge of a cliff that overlooks pastures and buckwheat fields below, the mountains in the background. Really beautiful, untouched by the centuries, a perfect example of what Megan’s compact seeks to preserve. She insisted that was the place to intercept the minister’s car. We would wait there, pretending to have a flat tire, blocking the road. The minister would have to stop. We would meet, she would learn who we were, and about the important opportunity we represented.”

“Megan was to be with you?”

“That was the plan. But Megan has never been big on keeping to plans.”

“But surely she expected the minister to have an escort. The closing of the road was a Public Security secret until that morning.”

“Megan knew. She never said how. She said they would stop all traffic from below but they wouldn’t think about the foreigners who might already be above, and those few of us who were around were invited to the minister’s big picnic reception closer to the base camp.”

“So you rigged the rock slide to block it, after the minister’s car went through.”

“No. I just helped her identify the place, a bend in the road with loose rocks above. That was it. She said the rest was too risky for me to be involved. Too many people depend on me as the head of the expedition company.”

“You never wondered where she was that day?”

“No. The night before she called from town, asking if she could use the room reserved for our company at the new hotel, said she would meet me the next day.”

“But she never called, never showed up.”

Yates shrugged. “Megan is impulsive. She’s behind on her life-list for climbs. She figures she has ten more good years of climbing, and she has thirty peaks left on her list. If she found a secret way to get to one of her mountains she would have jumped at it, and would know that I would understand. She always keeps a pack of climbing equipment ready. I left her in town at Tsipon’s little bungalow, where she keeps the pack.”

“Then how did she get to the hotel?”

“She never went to the hotel. She went climbing. She’ll be back any day now.”

“She’s not coming back, Yates. She died with the minister.”

Yates gave Shan a sour look. “What’s your game? She is alive. Why would you say otherwise?”

“She died in my arms.”

“It’s a nasty kind of game to play with me, Shan. She didn’t die. I had a message. A porter gave it to me that afternoon. A chance at one of her mountains came up. She said she’d be back in a few days.”

Shan leaned forward with new interest. “What porter? Was the message in her own writing?”

“Nothing was written. He told me and was off. I don’t know many of the porters by name.” Yates shrugged. “Megan’s been coming here for years. She knows most of them.” He fixed Shan with a challenging gaze. “It wasn’t her. I saw them put two bodies in an army truck. Neither was her.”

“You saw what?”

“I told you. I was waiting above. But after a while I got in the car and drove downhill. At a switchback I got out, a couple hundred yards above the minister’s sedan, close enough to see two bodies. I didn’t have my binoculars but I could see well enough. They were Chinese, or Tibetans. No blond American.”

“They put a wool cap on her. From a distance you wouldn’t have seen her hair. Then they switched her body for that of the dead sherpa.”

“You’re going to look like a fool when she comes walking in for a cup of tea.”

“What else did you see?”

“Enough soldiers to start a small war, scattering over the slopes. An army truck that took the bodies away. That was all. Later, I saw that she hadn’t even used my suggestions for triggering the rock slide.”

“You mean you went back there, afterwards?”

“The knobs had cleaned everything up. They’d left a few markers and some tape. It’s the only road in to the base camp, they couldn’t keep it closed for long. I stopped, started climbing the slope up to the ropes. A knob sergeant tried to stop me and I explained they were my ropes, stolen from my depot. He let me go under escort, on the condition that I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t have to touch a thing to see that she had not used the configuration I had sketched for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I sketched involved putting a log on the road to act as the release for the rock slide. A heavy vehicle hits the log, tied to a rope, and triggers the slide from above. She changed it, made it simpler. Except with her version someone had to be there to release it.”

Shan considered Yates’s explanation. “For the first week or so,” he began at last, “Cao was considering whether to ignore the rockslide, pretend the bus just had an accident, since adding an act of sabotage against Public Security might complicate his case too much. He’s a man used to quick, easy kills. But now he’s thinking this could be the one case he’s been waiting for, that with this case he can fire a shot that will be heard all the way to the Politburo itself. If he succeeds he’ll be a colonel in a month’s time, feted as a hero of the people in Beijing. A medal, a banquet with senior Party members, maybe a new job as secret investigator for the Party bosses. So he’s decided to raise the stakes. Which means whoever triggered that ambush had better find a new planet to live on.”

“There was something else, which they didn’t find at first. On a rock near where the avalanche was released there was an old sickle.”

“A sickle?”

“A reaping hook, for cutting grain. I climbed up to where the rocks slid from. It was jammed in a crack in a rock, deliberately left there. It had words etched on the blade, and what looked like the image of a range of mountains. I was thinking about hiding it when that sergeant came up to check on me and saw it. He took it down to his vehicle.”

Shan had seen such a blade, a stack of such blades, in the shed where old Gyalo kept his artifacts.

“Later I asked one of the older porters about it at base camp. It scared him, scared him a lot, not the blade but the writing I described. He said I should not speak of such a thing, that we should all pray the Chinese do not know what it is.”

“What were the words?”

“I don’t read Tibetan. I asked him what he thought it said, from my description. He knew, I could tell, but he wouldn’t say.”

“You keep telling me about other people,” Shan said after a moment. “I haven’t heard the truth about you. I haven’t yet heard why I shouldn’t warn the Tibetans that an American is raiding their shrines.”

Yates rose, paced back and forth, paused to study Shan, then paced again. “My father,” he finally said, “died somewhere near here, when I was three years old. He was a scientist, studied the anthropology of religions, was trying to piece together evidence of the various emigrations of the Buddhists across the Himalayas from India.”

“By chopping up religious statues?”

“By taking metallurgical samples of the metals used. You can date the statues that way, but you can also establish where the metal came from. The exact mixture of alloys is like a fingerprint.”