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Westerner. The murder of a state minister might be big news in Beijing but the murder of a Westerner in the shadow of Everest would draw global headlines.
    The open, pleading face of the blond woman who had died in his arms kept leaping into his consciousness, the foreigner who, impossibly, had been traveling alone with the minister. Is it me?
    she had asked, as if she had been uncertain who was dying.
    “They say there is still a gompa in the mountains that uses these things,” an uneasy voice suddenly declared behind him.
    Shan spun about to see a tall Tibetan in sunglasses silhouetted in the doorway, looking at the peche plates.
    “With a printing press I mean, the last in the region.”
    Shan felt a rush of joy at the unexpected news. “Do you know where?” He had a sudden vision of himself carrying a bundle of the plates to the gompa, could almost see the joy of the old lamas when they saw what he had brought them.
    Kypo shrugged. “In the mountains. We have to go. Tsipon said the moment you could stand I was to bring you.” Tsipon’s lead manager for expedition support was always a man of few words.
    Shan rose from his stool. “Thank you, Kypo, for my—” he gestured to the stall that had been concealed with blankets—“my hospital room.”
    “Tsipon said to put you in one of the storerooms in the warehouse, or that cottage behind the warehouse. I said you would want to be here, with your—” Kypo glanced at the workbench— “things.”
    Shan had not hidden his work on the blocks from Kypo, but the Tibetan never once had asked about them, or seemed remotely interested. “He said make sure you were somewhere dark and warm.”
    “You brought the food and things?”
    “I brought the food and bandages,” Kypo replied pointedly, and stepped into the sunlight.
    Minutes later Shan walked through the open garage door at the side of the largest building in town, emblazoned with a sign for the Himalayan Supply Company. Workers were carrying boxes, loading trucks bound for the Chomolungma base camp. Tsipon, standing with a clipboard in the entry to a storeroom lined with shelves, gestured Shan through the door. Shan found himself glancing around the room, where he had conducted inventory a week earlier. The shelves then had been overflowing with cartons containing oxygen cylinders, flashlight batteries, pitons, harnesses, heavy ropes coiled over long pegs. Now half the supplies were gone.
    Tsipon tossed Shan an apple. “If you cost me this contract, Shan, you and I are done,” he growled. “And if I say goodbye, it’s not just goodbye to your son, it’s goodbye to the Himalayas.” Everything in Tsipon’s life was a negotiation. He had to be sure Shan knew that without his protection Shan would be picked up and detained for having no residency papers.
    “You should have wakened me,” Shan said. “I should have been in the mountains already.”
    Tsipon shook his head. “There were troops all over the mountains searching for those damned escaped monks. If some officer in the mountain commandos found you, without registration papers, how long do you think you’d last? And the shape you were in, you probably would have crawled off to some cave and died just to spite me.”
    Shan took a bite of the apple. “Who else came to the stable?” he asked. He knew Tsipon, one of the most worldly Tibetans he had ever known, was not capable of making the little altar or writing the mantra.
    Tsipon ignored the question. He stepped to the shelves, reached into a carton and tossed out clothing, kicking it toward Shan. “I’ve promised the American a dozen experienced porters next week. I went to Tumkot village yesterday,” he said, referring to the mountain village that supplied most of the porters and guides used by the foreign climbing parties. “I offered double wages. They practically threw me out. Their damned fortuneteller has them all worked up, telling them the signs say the mountain must be appeased,