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that the mountain had claimed Tenzin first and needed him back. They demand the body. I promised them you would get it for them.”
    “When?”
    Tsipon stuck his head out the door long enough to chide a Tibetan woman who had dropped a box of fuel canisters. “We have maybe three days, no more,” he snapped, and gestured Shan out the door into the cavernous main chamber of the warehouse. After locking the storeroom behind him, Tsipon lowered himself onto a crate and lit a cigarette.
    “Have the foreigners arrived yet?”
    “You met that Yates.”
    “I mean officials. From some embassy, over the other dead woman.”
    Tsipon cast a puzzled glance at him, blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “They must have hit your head pretty hard. There was no dead foreigner.”
    The announcement silenced Shan for a moment. He closed his eyes, again fighting his confused swirl of memories from the day of the murders. “What was the bargain you struck with Major Cao?” he asked at last.
    The Tibetan blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. “Bargain?”
    “What was your accommodation with Public Security?” Shan pressed. “If I wasn’t his prime suspect, I was the closest thing he had to a witness. He would have at least held me for having no papers.”
    “For this kind of case he needs to paint a very complete picture. He seems to want nothing more to do with you, though he knows you were on the fringe of the scene he is painting. I am to watch you and report back to him,” Tsipon admitted. “He might try to have you followed, though once in the mountains that should not be a problem for one of your capabilities.”
    “Why would he still think I am involved?”
    “Because of the paper in your pocket with the telephone number of our new hotel, where the minister stayed.”
    Shan lowered himself onto one of the crates. Cao had never asked about the paper, but of course he would not have forgotten it.
    “I can go to Lhasa,” Tsipon added in a speculative tone, “and come back with a bus full of workers. More Tibetans are being put out of work every day. That new train to Lhasa brings a hundred Chinese immigrants a day, each one poised to take a Tibetan’s job.” Tsipon fixed Shan with a meaningful stare.
    It was a threat. Tsipon would prefer to use seasoned mountain tribesmen but he could always sweep up two dozen desperate Tibetans in one of the cities who would leap at the chance of earning wages. Such men would be hopelessly unprepared for dealing with the dangers of the upper slopes. Some, perhaps a fourth or more, would die. It wasn’t simply that Tsipon would blame him, but that he would also send Shan to retrieve the bodies.
    “Why did you have that paper with the hotel number?” Tsipon demanded, anger abruptly entering his voice.
    “There’s a chance,” Shan said, not sure why his voice had grown hoarse, “that I can get my son out of the yeti factory, get him back to the prison in Lhadrung County where he came from, with lamas and monks, where he will stand a chance of surviving. He’s going to die if he stays where he is.”
    “That doesn’t explain the paper.”
    “Someone I know from Lhadrung is staying there for the conference— the colonel who administers Lhadrung county, who is responsible for the prison camp where Ko came from.”
    An odd expression appeared on Tsipon’s face, a mixture of confusion and glee. “His name?”
    “Tan. Colonel Tan. He’s the only real chance I have for saving my son.”
    The laugh that erupted from Tsipon’s throat grew so deep he had to hold his belly.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Tan is the one. He’s not in the hotel, he’s in Cao’s jail. Colonel Tan is the one who murdered Minister Wu.”

Chapter Three
    THEY SAILED IN a smoking junk over the mountains. Jomo, the mechanic who accompanied Shan from Tsipon’s compound, believed in the reincarnation of machines. The ancient, sputtering Jiefang cargo truck he was now teaching Shan to drive