“How would they know when to go meet someone?”

“Some kind of signal I think. Sometimes just before dusk I see a yellow bucket turned upside down at the side of the road, a hundred yards before the turnoff. They’re always angry, often drunk. They’d rather stab you than look at you.” He turned back toward his makeshift altar and touched the top of the Buddha as if for a blessing, and said no more.

Yates, restless as ever, did not need to hear Shan’s news. As Shan passed the closest truck to the teashop entrance the American pulled him into the shadows and pointed toward the fuel pumps. Two tall, square men clad in black sweatshirts were fueling and cleaning the cab of a large green truck.

“Christ, they’re huge,” Yates muttered.

“Manchurians,” Shan ventured. One of the men paced along the tires, hitting them with a wooden baton.

“So now what?” Yates asked. “Make a citizen’s arrest? Stand in front of their truck until they confess?”

“You are going to wait while I go inside,” Shan replied. “And when I return you are going to cover your face, walk behind me, and not say a word.”

The man with the baton jumped on the running board and the truck began to move, easing into the ranks of vehicles parked for the night.

Yates did not protest, kept his eyes on the men who climbed off of the truck as Shan darted toward the teashop. Inside, he checked through a window that Yates had not moved then asked for a telephone. Five minutes later the American followed Shan in the direction of the green truck. Shan did not aim directly at the truck, but at two strangers who sat at a concrete table at the edge of the gravel parking lot, playing mah-jongg by the light of a lantern. Shan stepped into the circle of light. “We’ve got good artifacts,” he announced in a loud voice. “The real thing. Triple your money in Shigatse or Lhasa.”

The men at the table looked up in surprise then cast worried glances toward the green truck. “The real thing,” Shan repeated. “We control the artifact trade in this town.” He watched the truck, saw movement in its shadows. When he looked back the two men had disappeared, leaving their tiles and lantern still on the table.

A rough, seething voice emerged from the darkness before Shan could make the black shape moving toward him. “You have shit,” the man spat. “You have nothing for sale!” Another shape appeared, brandishing a tire baton.

“Everything is for sale,” Shan replied, “Opportunity abounds, for one yellow bucket. What’s the price of bulldozing a man into a stone wall?”

They sprang like cats, swinging their batons. Shan sidestepped the first assault and Yates charged into the second man with a shoulder to his chest, knocking him to the ground. But the batons moved with determination. A blow to the back of his head knocked Yates to his knees. For every swing Shan dodged, another connected with his arms and back. Yates was on the ground, the second man straddling him, the baton swept back for a bone-crushing blow, when the headlights of a moving truck illuminated the American’s head, no longer covered by his hood.

“Bai ren!” the man spat. Foreigner! The baton froze in midair, the man’s partner muttered a curse, and as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone.

Shan and Yates, numb from the encounter, sat on the gravel, blood trickling down the American’s cheek as the green truck, its trailer unhitched, revved its engine and began rolling away.

“That went well,” Yates observed dryly in English as he rubbed his head.

Shan, looking up as he finished writing the license plate number of the truck on his forearm, wanted to say it had gone as well as could be expected, when he saw the green truck stop. The driver spoke with a man at the fuel pumps. A figure moved in front of Shan, blocking his view. It was Jomo, his face full of fear, his mouth opening and shutting as if he could not find the words he meant to say.

“Christ! No!” Yates shouted and staggered to his feet as the green truck made a U turn and began speeding in reverse toward Yates’s utility vehicle. Shan leapt up, grabbing the American’s arm as he took a step forward. Yates’ resistance lasted only a moment. They stood, transfixed, as the rear of the truck slammed into Yates’ vehicle, crumbling the fender, jerking forward and back again, pushing the vehicle into the boulder behind it. Then suddenly it was on fire. The green truck swerved away, steering toward them as it gained speed, blaring its air horn as they leaped to the side. It roared past them, out onto the highway.

The American took a step toward his burning truck.

“Yates, wait!” Shan insisted.

“For what?” the American shot back. “I have things in there. I have got to-” But his protest died away as he heard the sirens coming down the road from town.

“Let bystanders tell them what happened,” Shan said.

“What the hell did you do inside?” Yates growled at Shan. “They never could have gotten the alarm this fast.”

His question was answered a moment later. Two black utility vehicles with blinking lights sped into the compound, spraying gravel as they slammed on their brakes and Public Security soldiers poured out of the first. From the second stepped Major Cao and the diminutive Madame Zheng. Shan watched as a witness spoke excitedly with Cao, then pointed at Shan and Yates.

“You must have a death wish,” Yates muttered as the major marched toward them.

Shan said nothing as Cao erupted, demanding to know what Shan had done, did not react when Cao slapped him. He extended his forearm with the license numbers written on it toward the knob officer. “A green truck left here minutes ago. In it you will find the men who killed Director Xie.”

“Idiot!” Cao snarled. “You don’t think I see that everything you do is to distract me from the truth?

“Then why do you suppose they destroyed this American’s truck?” Shan asked in a level voice.

Madame Zheng was behind Cao now, staring toward the burning vehicle. A soldier ran up to her with a section of the shattered bumper, bearing a bumper sticker, with the words, in English, Climbing Rocks! She stared at it, as if it were a vital piece of evidence, and was still staring at it when two knobs appeared from the shadows of the parked trucks dragging a limp body between them.

“Trying to sabotage the fuel pumps as well,” one of the soldiers declared.

Shan’s heart leaped to his throat as he recognized Jomo, his face battered and bleeding, a dark stain down his shirt. The knobs too had batons.

“Who else is with you?” the knob demanded, raising his stick at Jomo.

Shan sprang forward, covering the Tibetan, taking the blow to his own shoulder as the knob struck.

“It wasn’t like that,” Jomo cried as the soldiers tried to pry Shan away. “The man at the fuel station shoved me against a pump. I threw a can of oil at him and it burst open.” Shan saw now that the stain was indeed oil. “I only wanted to stop him.”

“Stop him from what?” Shan asked, dropping to his knees by the Tibetan.

Jomo pulled several sheets of paper from inside his shirt. “He paid me to draw a map of the roads between here and Everest, with the villages and old shrines marked. I thought he wanted to make offerings.” He spoke only to Shan, his face contorted not with pain but with shame. “But then I found him selling copies, selling them to some of the truckers. I threw his money back at him, demanded he give me the maps.”

Cao took a step forward, then halted as he saw the attentive way Madame Zheng listened.

“Why?” Shan asked. “Who needs maps?”

“It’s those monks. The truckers in the dormitory are all excited. Word spreads fast among those kind. Someone is paying a bounty for the escaped monks, or their gaus, those unique ones with lotus flowers from Sarma gompa.”

“Why the gaus?”

“Because the monks will never give them up. If someone brings in one of those gaus the monk will be dead. It’s the proof, for the bounty.”