The procession down from the Plain of Ghosts was not so much mournful as angry. Rikyu, upset that the grave of so obviously a holy man had been opened, was even more furious that it had been desecrated with other bodies. The remaining Tibetans, except the ever-steady Trinle, were most unhappy over being drafted by Shan to help carry the two bodies, now wrapped in blankets, down the path.
“Where is the ice cave?” Shan asked Rikyu as they reached the bottom. The nun answered only with a silent glare.
“Just a hundred paces down the ledge,” Trinle offered, nodding toward the north.
Shan glanced uneasily at Lieutenant Jinhua, who had lingered, studying the little plateau, before trotting down the embankment to reach Shan’s side. “To the cave,” he told the Tibetans, then turned back to the young nun. “Get help to carry Nyima down and make her comfortable in the back of my truck. I will take her to town.”
Jinhua gazed uncertainly at the bodies as they were carried toward a deep shadow in the face of the embankment. “There is no morgue in Yangkar,” Shan explained, then gestured toward the flat where their vehicles were parked. “And lots of room here for Public Security vehicles, even a helicopter or two.”
The officer seemed surprised. “Helicopters?”
“The word that Yangkar has discovered a dead Westerner will echo all the way to Beijing. It is going to be quite a circus. Dozens of Public Security officers combing the crime scene. Bureau of Religious Affairs demanding to control the tomb. Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisting on dealing with the body. And of course there will be an investigative team from his home country once we determine that.”
Shan hesitated, studying the young lieutenant, who sometimes seemed so arrogant, at other times just puzzled. He had been around enough murders, and enough knobs, to know that Jinhua should be excited, ecstatic even, over such a sensational find. It could easily earn him a promotion, and certainly reassignment to one of the glamorous eastern cities. But instead Jinhua seemed troubled by Shan’s words. He watched the Tibetans carrying the bodies along the grassy ledge.
“Westerners sometimes fall off Tibetan mountains and die, do they not?” Jinhua asked after a moment. “He had on climbing boots.”
“They don’t fall into ancient graves and cover themselves with granite slabs,” Shan pointed out.
“And that soldier died long ago. The liberation of Tibet was not bloodless.”
“Dangerous words for an ambitious officer, lieutenant. Our history books say the Tibetans draped Chinese soldiers with flowers to celebrate the end of their servitude.”
Jinhua ignored him. “He was no doubt reported dead decades ago. It seems impossible his body was even preserved like that.”
“The Tibetans would say it was the influence of the saint beside him. Like an attendant lying in the holy man’s aura.” Shan weighed his own words. The two dead men had indeed been laid out like attendants. Why would anyone go to the trouble of disposing of dead men in such a fashion? Why would it have been done twice, so many years apart?
“More like the cold and the dryness,” Jinhua observed. “Desiccation without decay. It happens in high altitudes. So we turned up an old soldier’s grave, the way a bulldozer turns up old bones when making a new apartment building. You drop the bones into a new hole and move on.”
“If you choose not to file a report, lieutenant, I will be forced to,” Shan pointed out. “If you prefer, just move on with your prisoners and forget about this.”
“Of course I will file a report, comrade,” the knob officer shot back. “And I forbid you from doing so before me. Just as soon as we know what to say. Or should we just compose it now? Some herders found some buried antiquities, which of course belong to the state. The bodies are already removed. No real evidence of crime other than mishandling of a corpse, and no doubt the Tibetans would want to avoid all that official fuss. Let Religious Affairs take jurisdiction.”
Jinhua saw the doubt on Shan’s countenance. “Fine,” the lieutenant offered, “tell the army a careless soldier fell into a hole decades ago. Tell the Foreign Ministry the foreigner was looting a grave and had an accident, then some of those hill people replaced the slab hoping to avoid government inquiries.” He frowned as he noticed Shan’s impassive expression. “You have a better theory, comrade?”
“They call it the Plain of Ghosts. Maybe we just say the same ghost killed all three, in different centuries.”
His words seemed to strangely disturb Jinhua, who turned away and stared down at his car.
“This will be taken out of my hands,” Shan explained. “I’d rather that happen sooner than later. I need to call Lhadrung. The governor’s office.”
“Somehow I didn’t peg you as the sniveling bureaucrat,” Jinhua challenged. An unexpected resentment had entered his voice. The lieutenant paused and studied Shan. “Look at you. A worn-out public servant wearing what looks like someone else’s uniform. You fell hard, didn’t you? You’re being punished. And from here there’s nowhere else for you to go except into your own hole in the ground.”
“Something like that,” Shan agreed.
“I will be glad to dig it for you if you are going to behave in such a spineless manner. The motherland needs us to show fortitude in times of crisis.”
“I’m confused, lieutenant,” Shan declared. “Is it a crisis, or is it a nonevent? You’re just a bystander. It was just coincidence you were here at all.”
Jinhua seemed oddly deflated. “I am Public Security,” he asserted in a voice that had lost its confidence.
Shan pushed past the knob. The herders carrying the bodies had disappeared into a crack in the side of the hill. The tall, jagged opening was barely three feet across, but it quickly widened into a broad passageway that led into a cavern. The temperature plunged as they stepped into the chamber. His hand lantern illuminated a glassy section in the center of the far wall. It was what the Tibetans called an ice root, an underground spring that had been frozen. Shan tried to recall the map on his office wall. There was a glacier nearby, perhaps a mile to the north, and this must be one of its underground tentacles.
In the center of the chamber several rock formations had been leveled off years earlier to create flat, table-like surfaces. The Tibetans laid the long bundles on the two largest, then hurriedly retreated out the passageway, leaving only Trinle and Lhamo. A flame flickered behind Shan. Jinhua had followed Jengtse inside and was lighting a cigarette.
Trinle whispered to his wife, who set off down the passage. “Lhamo will bring butter lamps and a brazier from Nyima’s cave.” Shan hesitated, then realized he should not be surprised that the two old Tibetans, who spent much of their lives hiding in the mountains, knew the hermit nun. “I can stay for a few hours,” he said in a pointed tone. Even for strangers the death rites should be spoken. The old herder stepped into the shadows and returned with a small tripod stool, shaking the dust off it, then, cocking his head, studied the walls of the cavern with new interest.
“Hold it still, damn you!” the lieutenant snapped to Jengtse, who was nervously holding a flashlight over the hideous remains of the soldier. Jinhua had opened the blanket, covered the face with a handkerchief, and was examining the uniform. He paused over a tarnished pin on the soldier’s pocket, a yellow enameled star inside a red wheel.
“A sergeant,” Shan said, pointing to the red rectangle with three stars sewn onto the soldier’s collar. He pulled at a corner of dusty paper that extended from the dead soldier’s pocket. It was a much-folded letter, the paper brittle and crumbling, the writing so faded it was almost invisible. Jinhua grabbed it out of Shan’s hand and stuffed it into his own pocket.
Trinle settled onto the stool between the two bodies and took up what sounded like a slow, cadenced prayer. “I think these two are long past saving,” Jinhua observed.
“He’s reciting the Bardo,” Shan explained. “The rites of passage for the release of souls. Those who suffer sudden deaths have difficulty finding their way to the next plane of existence. Their spirits could linger, confused, for years.”
Jinhua drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke over the dead soldier’s head. “I don’t think there’s much left of this one in this world or the next. Past helping.”
“Then why study his uniform? Why take his letter?”
“Three men in a grave. He was the only Chinese,” he said, as if it were an answer. There was challenge in his voice. He inhaled again and blew his smoke at Shan. His confidence had a tide, rising and falling from minute to minute. Shan had the sense Jinhua was performing, though he had no idea what his script might be.
“We have to take the old nun to a doctor. You’re welcome to stay.”
“Stay alone with two dead men and a senile Tibetan?”
“And the others.”
“Others?” Jinhua finally noticed that Trinle was staring intently toward the entry wall as he recited the ritual words. He followed his gaze, then grabbed Jengtse’s light and held it high, aimed at the wall over the entry, below the soot-stained ceiling. “Ta ma de! Damn!” Jinhua cursed and stepped closer to Shan.
The four images over the entry were very old, the plaster on which they had been painted chipped and cracked, but the fading colors only gave the monsters a more ghostlike appearance. They were what the Tibetans called wrathful deities, protectors of the faithful, and they explained why the rock formations in the cave had been chiseled into level surfaces. The stone tables were altars. The dead men had been brought into a gonkang, a secret shrine where senior nuns and lamas once kept spirit demons in check by paying homage through prayer and ritual.
“We should go,” the knob whispered uneasily, his eyes fixed on the demons. He held his cigarette behind him as if to hide it from them. “The old nun needs help, you said.”
“We are not stopping you,” Shan replied, still studying the protector demons. Even through the grime of centuries the images retained an unsettling power. Below them, on either side of the entry, smaller creatures were painted with the heads of monkeys and snakes, their attendants.
“I don’t know if I can find the way back to town,” Jinhua confessed. “I have to follow you.”
“Wait for me at your car,” Shan said and motioned for Jengtse to escort the knob. When the two men had disappeared down the passageway, Shan stepped to Trinle’s side. “I worry about leaving you and Lhamo alone. I can’t explain these deaths, and we don’t know who attacked Nyima.”
Trinle nodded toward the images on the wall. “We have an understanding with them. They are watching too now,” the herder said with a confidence that sent an unexpected chill down Shan’s back. The old man clearly had not been in the cave for many years, but he just as clearly knew of the demons. “We have been waiting all these years. Now the dead awaken them.”
* * *
Every mile he drove back toward Yangkar with Nyima brought Shan closer to the end of his short career as a constable. A small army of knobs would soon arrive, trucks and sedans filled with crime investigators and political officers who would filter all reports. Furious army officers would come soon thereafter. The Bureau of Religious Affairs would be summoned to haul off the gilded saint, and though they would promise to take it away for study, it was likely the body would be taken to a crematorium where the mummy would be reduced to ashes while the officials waited for the golden puddle on the furnace tray.
But all that agony paled by comparison to how Colonel Tan, the tyrannical governor of Lhadrung County and Shan’s reluctant patron, would react. Tan had elevated Shan as constable in the farthest point of his county to keep a tighter rein on Shan, who had too often dragged Tan and the county into scandal. Tan wouldn’t punish Shan, he would punish Shan’s son Ko, an inmate in the hard-labor prison where Shan had formerly been incarcerated. The only concession Shan had won in accepting the blue tunic was that for the first time in years his son would be allowed brief home paroles, five days in the custody of the Yangkar constable every three months. The thought of at last seeing Ko outside of his gulag prison had preoccupied Shan from the moment he had entered the dusty, worn-out constable’s station. Now Tan would cancel the parole.
“Can’t you hear her?” Jengtse asked, shaking Shan’s arm. “She’s been pounding on the window for half a mile!”
Shan shook away his gloom and saw Rikyu waving from the back, yelling for him to stop. He pulled over and watched in confusion as the young nun helped Nyima out. They were nearly a mile from town, and the only structure Shan could see in the fading light was a run-down farmhouse a quarter mile off the macadam, at the top of a grassy ridge that ran parallel to the road. Jinhua pulled his car in behind them and impatiently blinked his lights as Shan climbed out.
“There’s a nurse in town,” Shan said to the Tibetans. The farmhouse looked abandoned.
“Here is the healing she needs,” Rikyu replied stiffly, then she stretched the old nun’s arm over her shoulder and began walking with her up the path to the farmhouse. Shan watched for a moment, tempted to join them.
Jinhua began blowing his horn.
* * *
In the station the prisoners were lying on cots and pallets in their cells, some asleep, others quietly whispering their beads. Empty noodle bowls were stacked on a tray left on a chair by the door.
Mr. Wu, sitting vigilantly at the table in the cell room, saluted Shan and asked in a hopeful tone if the committee should order badges for its members to cover such occasions. Shan hesitated, reminding himself that the committee was the closest thing to an arm of the Communist Party that existed in the township. “There were some old army caps in the used clothing stall at the market,” he replied. “Less expensive. The chairman has called for austerity in public spending,” he reminded the town clerk, a plump, balding man who never spoke more than a few words about anything that did not relate to the township account books.
“For the motherland!” Wu affirmed with an enthusiastic nod and left the office with new vigor in his step. Like most other officials in Tibet, Wu had served in one of the vast bureaucracies of an eastern city and had been enticed to Tibet by hardship pay and the prospect of being a senior official in a small town.
“Get the lieutenant settled in the guest house,” Shan told Jengtse, then pulled a cellophane bag out of his desk. “Tell him I must have that phone from the grave. Put it in this evidence bag. Bring it to me and go home for some rest. I’ll take the first shift. Be back in six hours.”
Jengtse gazed at the bag uncertainly. “That was the bag you carried your lunch in yesterday.”
Shan took a marker from the desk and wrote EVIDENCE in big characters across the bag and handed it back to Jengtse. “Don’t come back without that phone.”
His deputy was back in five minutes, looking relieved. “He was asleep, passed out on the sofa. But fortunately he had taken off his tunic. It was in the pocket, with this,” Jengtse added in a grim tone, and laid a business card on the desk beside the phone before backing away. “Six hours,” he confirmed, and slipped out into the night.
Shan stared at the card. LIEUTENANT JINHUA GUO XI, it said, over the logo for the Public Security Bureau. The words at the bottom struck a chill in his heart. Office of Special Investigations, Central Branch, Beijing.
Most of the prisoners were asleep when he checked again. The woman with the green eyes lay curled up, her heavy felt dress draped around her like a blanket. But her hand was tightly clutching Nyima’s bloody rosary. On her dress was pinned her only identification, the number 12, meaning she had been the last prisoner taken. He had seen her plainly for only an instant when she had grabbed the mala, but her expression had not been the same as those of her cell mates. The eyes in her strongly featured face, the strangely green eyes, had been more watchful than fearful.
Shan turned out the lights in the cell room and closed the door, leaving it ajar for light to filter inside, then locked the station door and stared toward the cells. He had become one of those he had loathed for so many years, a jailer of Tibetans. After several painful moments he stepped back to the cell room door and stood there. The man he had become in Tibet, nurtured and taught by so many lamas and gentle men like his old friend Lokesh, wanted to go inside and speak with the prisoners, to comfort them, recite prayers with them, perhaps even help them escape. But there were soldiers and a knob officer just outside the back door. One phone call from Jinhua or the sergeant would end any chance of his son being released on parole, could even put Ko back in solitary confinement. He looked down at his hand, which had begun to tremble, then squeezed it with the other to stop the tremors, and went back to his desk. From a bottom drawer he extracted a stick of incense, dumped out the tin can he used to hold paper clips, lit the incense, and set it in the can. He stepped into the cell block just far enough to set the burning incense on the table. The fragrant smoke meant the spirits would be watching over the Tibetans.
He lifted the phone taken from the grave. It could have belonged to the dead Westerner, or to his killer. Setting the volume to the lowest setting, he played the ringtone again. Hallelujah, sung by a chorus. He knew it from his childhood, when his father had still been permitted to own Western books and recordings, from the Sunday afternoons when his uncle would visit just to listen to their phonograph. It was from Handel’s Messiah.
There was no cell phone service in Yangkar, and surely none in the remote mountains above the nun’s cave, yet somehow the phone had been activated in the tomb. The gilded lama had been a miracle of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The sound of a Western prayer had been a twenty-first-century miracle, summoning Tibetans to the deaths. They had somehow been waiting for word from the Plain of Ghosts, and the word had been from a long-dead German composer.
Although the colonel had sometimes insisted Shan carry a borrowed phone, he had never owned one of his own. They had come into use during his long years of imprisonment, and even today Tibet only had narrow pockets of reception around population centers and along its few major highway corridors. Most older Tibetans distrusted them, convinced that the Chinese government heard every word spoken over them, which, Shan knew from experience, was not too far from the truth.
Although the phone’s applications had been set to English, it was a domestic brand, purchased in China or Hong Kong. He experimented with the keys. There were a few games, simple games of the kind people played to while away time. There was a program that converted traditional English measurements into metric units. He pressed an unfamiliar icon of little stars and discovered an application that reported the location of stars, planets, and satellites. The list of recent calls numbered only a dozen and went back less than a month. Most were to one of two numbers, with exchanges for Lhasa and Hong Kong. He dialed the Lhasa number on the phone on his desk. “Palace Hotel” came the answer, first in Chinese, then in crisp English. He hung up. He stared at the phone for a long time, then, feeling fatigued, stepped out into the cool air. Night had overtaken Yangkar. Half the streetlights around the square were burnt out, giving the center of town a lonely, abandoned feeling. A scrawny dog ran from one shadow to the next. A broken gorse bush tumbled down the street in the rising wind. The lonely call of a nightjar echoed from the old stone tower by the entrance to the square. He sat on the steps of the station, his back against the door, and shut his eyes.
The future is what happens when you wake up from your dreams. The words had been spoken by an old man at the brutal reeducation camp where Shan and his parents had been sent when he was a young boy. His mother had been furious at the man, a professor whose university had been burnt down by Mao’s teenage mercenaries, the Red Guards, and chided him for trying to steal away Shan’s hope. For years now Shan had been unable to visualize the man, but he recalled perfectly the raspy voice that spoke the words now echoing in his mind. In his early years he had dreamed of so many futures, of a contented home with his parents, then of a happy life with his bride and son, then of success in his career as a Beijing inspector. But his parents had been branded intellectuals, enemies of the people, and he had lost them; then his wife had become a strident, ambitious Party member and left him; and he had finally investigated the wrong politicians and been condemned to the gulag.
He clung to much smaller dreams now, of a reverent, remote life with Lokesh. They would read old books and cut barley in a golden field. Most of all he dreamed of Ko being freed as Colonel Tan had promised, five days every three months. For weeks Shan had lain in the dark before sleeping, constructing those days, thinking of what they would do, and say, and eat. But Shan had awakened again. Ko would not come now. The town would be flooded with bullying knobs, who would, as always, be tempted to arrest more Tibetans. And everyone, from his son to Tan to every Tibetan in town, all would blame Shan.
Something nudged his knee. He opened his eyes to see a grinning Tibetan boy of perhaps ten years sitting at one side on the steps, a shaggy brown and black mastiff at the other. They were both staring at Shan.
“Raj pulled me away when those soldiers came,” the boy announced.
Shan reached out and stroked the dog’s massive head. “Raj is wise in the ways of the world, Lodi. Best do what he says.”
Lodi extended a small brown paper bag to Shan. “I told Uncle Marpa that you were working late.”
“Have you done your reading?” Shan asked before accepting the bag. He and the boy’s uncle had been teaching Lodi to read Tibetan script, which was banned in his school.
The boy beamed. “Twenty pages, like you said.”
Shan took the bag and opened it, revealing half a dozen large momos, meat dumplings. Lodi’s Uncle Marpa, who ran the noodle shop, had raised the boy since he was a toddler, after his parents had been arrested on suspicion of supporting the exile government. Shan carefully laid two of the momos on the boy’s knee, two on his own, and two in front of the dog. Raj was a cheerful, inquisitive creature, who for some reason always brought a smile to Shan’s face. The mastiff looked up to the sky. It never ate before doing so, as if offering a prayer. Shan suspected the boy had taught the dog to do so, but Lodi insisted it was the act of the reincarnate spirit who inhabited Raj. The people of Yangkar were deeply set in the old traditions of Tibet, and more than once Shan had noticed the unusual connections between humans and animals in the town.
“Full house tonight,” Shan said after taking a bite. The boy and his dog often slept in the guesthouse when there were no visitors.
“No problem. We’ll go to the stable up above the carpet factory. Sometimes Trinle’s old bull wanders down and lies with the other yaks. He lets me curl up against him. We call him the lama yak, since his gaze seems so wise.”
Raj’s head shot up, and the three of them watched a solitary sheep trot across the square. From an apartment window down the street came the sound of a Chinese rock-and-roll singer. A motorcycle sped along the far side of the square, its headlight illuminating for an instant a young couple on a bench.
“The moonrider!” Lodi exclaimed.
“Moonrider?” Shan absently asked. His gaze was fixed on the pay phone box in the shadows beyond the couple.
“He only rides at night. I bet it’s the best motorcycle in town. Probably doesn’t have a permit, so he rides in the shadows,” the boy added with an awkward glance at Shan.
“Lodi,” Shan asked, “did you see the man in the gray car?”
“You mean the knob?”
“The officer of the Public Security Bureau,” Shan corrected. He reached into his pocket and handed the boy a few coins. “If you are sleeping in the stable you’ll be up at dawn. Come back to the square and watch the phone.”
The boy’s eyes lit with excitement. “You mean another job, like Mrs. Weng’s onions?” The month before, Shan had asked Lodi to watch the garden of Mrs. Weng, who had loudly complained of a Tibetan thief raiding her garden. After a few hours Lodi had discovered the culprit, a rock squirrel that was building its winter larder on the slope above town. They had patched the hole in the fence and saved her garden.
“Right, without the vegetables and rodents. I want you to tell me if that officer makes a call on it.” Jinhua would be leaving with the prisoners in the morning, so he would not have much time to report to his superiors. He could not use his cell, and if he used the station phone Shan would know, and know what he said. That left the pay phone.
He sent the boy and his dog on to the stable and stayed on the steps, studying the night sky. The lights of Yangkar were so dim he could clearly see the spectacle of the sky even from the center of town. The stars seen from Tibet were like nowhere else in the world, the thin, high-altitude atmosphere making them so bright and so crisply defined Shan sometimes thought he could reach out and touch them. From the window of his barracks behind the razor wire of the 404th People’s Construction Brigade, nearly a hundred miles to the south, he knew Ko often tried to look up at the sky before sleeping. From his remote hidden sanctuary where he served the exiled government, Lokesh would often do the same. Every devout, loyal Tibetan had his or her own secrets, little personal rituals that defined their world, Lokesh had once told him, and this was one of Shan’s. He imagined that they were looking up at the same stars. Shan would sometimes catch himself pointing at a meteor as if one of them were beside him.
When Jengtse finally returned for his shift, Shan drove up to the old farmhouse above town that he now called home, one of the many abandoned structures that dotted the Tibetan landscape. Although he was entitled to quarters in the government house, he preferred the quiet of the orphaned farm, and he knew neither Ko nor Lokesh would be comfortable visiting him by the jail. In his spare time he had patched the stucco, painted the outside walls the traditional maroon, and was coaxing the shriveled garden back to life. He made tea on his brazier, then tried to read one of his books, Sung dynasty poetry, but his gaze kept drifting toward his constable’s tunic hanging on a peg by the door. He had been so worried about telling Lokesh of his new job when the old Tibetan had first visited that he had worn civilian clothes to meet him. Only after a long meal, filled with exuberant descriptions of Lokesh’s work at his secret monastery deep in the mountains, and an hour of stargazing, had Shan explained the bargain Colonel Tan had forced him into.
“A father needs to see his son,” was all his old friend had said, and had spoken no more of it that night. But Shan had awakened in the small hours of the morning and discovered Lokesh at the peg, forlornly fingering the brass buttons of the tunic. Each was embossed with Beijing’s seal. The same buttons had adorned the uniforms of the guards who had made life so miserable for them and the other inmates of their hard-labor prison. The disappointment on his friend’s face had been like a blade in Shan’s heart. He had crept back to bed before Lokesh noticed him.
Twice since Lokesh’s visit Shan had thrown the tunic on the table and cut off every button. Twice, in the light of the next day, he had sewn them back on. Now he rose, threw the tunic into the shadows, and dragged his pallet out to gaze at the stars.
* * *
When Shan arrived at the station at dawn, Jengtse had already made barley gruel on the jail’s hot plate for the prisoners’ breakfast and was serving it to them. Shan whispered to his deputy, who rolled his eyes and then went into the outer office to keep watch as Shan spoke to the Tibetans about what to expect when they reached their internment camp. They would be kept together as families for two or three weeks of political indoctrination, he explained, and he begged them to submit to the lectures without resistance, or risk being sent to a real prison. The three children in the group were clutched by their parents as he explained that the children would then be sent to boarding schools, and no amount of protest would prevent it. But he told the children to be brave and to find ways to secretly speak Tibetan to their friends, to keep their language alive. He did not have the heart to explain that the children would receive new Chinese names and many would have difficulty speaking Tibetan with their parents when they were reunited years later. He did warn that the schools would not allow prayer amulets, but in a whisper, holding the shoulders of the youngest child, he suggested they could hide prayers inside candy wrappers or pieces of foil and keep them inside their shirts like secret gaus.
He explained that the factory complexes in Lhasa and Shigatse were expanding, and if the adults proved submissive there was a chance they would be assigned there instead of some distant Chinese city. Finally, Shan passed out cards with his address. The last day together, when internees were sent to their new assignments, was often confusing, and they might not learn where other family members were sent. If that happened, he told them, they could send word to him and he would coordinate as best he could. One of the women immediately opened her gau and stuffed his card inside.
As he finished, Jengtse rapped on the door and Shan opened it just as Jinhua and the sergeant entered the station. The army truck was parked at the front entrance, the soldiers waiting to load their prisoners. The frightened Tibetans filed out, several of the older ones offering worried nods as they passed Shan, the mothers fiercely gripping their children. One of the soldiers called out their assigned numbers as they climbed into the truck, and the sergeant kept tally on a clipboard. When the sergeant confirmed all twelve were loaded, he gave a sharp command and the guards jumped into the back. Moments later the truck pulled away in a cloud of exhaust smoke, Jinhua closely following in his gray sedan.
As they left the square Shan darted back into the cells, saw they were empty, and returned to watch the little convoy disappear down the road. Twelve prisoners had boarded the truck, but the woman with green eyes had not been one of them.