Shan touched the shoulder of one of the ragyapa and the two of them lifted the nearest dead prisoner onto the shelf where Tenzin had lain. Shan fastened the red tag to the dead man, covered him with the sheet, then gestured for the Tibetans to move back into the corridor before he lifted the sheet covering Minister Wu’s upper torso. The bullet holes in her abdomen were puckered at the edges, the flesh stained, but the holes were much smaller than those in Tenzin. She had been an athletic woman but, he saw as he studied her hands and the little lines in her face, considerably older than he had thought. On the back of one hand someone had written her name in ink as if fearing she might be misplaced. On her shoulder someone had written something else. No, he saw as he bent over the mark, it was a tattoo. A hammer and a lightning bolt, crossed like an X.

The ragyapa waited for him in the kitchen, nervously glancing at their rolling carts, apparently heaped high with anatomical waste. He offered a nod, then gestured them toward the exit. An instant later the sound of running feet rose from a distant corridor.

“Guards!” he called to the Tibetans, who stared at him expectantly, not frightened but like steady soldiers awaiting orders. He turned, his mind racing. The lights. He had risked turning on the lights in the kitchen and the corridor beyond because they were not visible from the guard station at the entrance to the hospital. But he had forgotten the chance of patrols around the grounds. Shan cast about desperately then tossed a small bag of oranges onto the cart, covering it with a single layer of towels. “They will think you came to the kitchen to pilfer some food,” he explained. “Let them find this bag. They will have no appetite for digging farther into the cart. And they will certainly have no appetite for firing you since there is no one to replace you.”

“But if they check the morgue before we leave. .,” one of the women protested, her voice cracking with the fear of one who understood the ways of Public Security.

“Go!” Shan ordered. “I will make it safe.” He watched as they hurried away, knowing the woman was right. If the guards suspected foul play they might search the morgue, and if they discovered a body missing, they would radio for the ragyapa to be detained at the gatehouse. He sprinted back to the morgue. He entered it in the dark, finding his way by touch, retrieved a sheet and climbed onto the shelf form which they had removed the prisoner’s body, contorting his own as he tried again and again to cover himself with the sheet, finishing only seconds before he heard angry voices approaching. Static from radio sets cut through the silence. From somewhere came a bell that, he suspected, signaled the beginning of the workday.

He began to shiver. A dozen thoughts swirled in his head. He was alone with his fears, unprotected, with no way out now. In such a place he might be considered a financial windfall, a man without a name for whom they would never have to account. If done right, in correct sequence, at least four vital organs, all highly valuable in China’s underground organ market, could be harvested before he died. They would simply lock the door and turn down the thermostat to assure he was nearly frozen, to incapacitate him. Disparate, wild thoughts pounced on him. They would discover the ragyapa were part of his conspiracy and send them all to the experimentation labs. They would lock the door, leave him to freeze solid and drop him off a cliff so he would shatter into a thousand pieces. They would make a mistake and bury him alive with the others.

He clenched his jaw, concentrating, remembering how the lamas had taught him that someone in the right meditation state could generate inward heat. This was nothing compared to what he had endured at some of the higher elevations the winter before. He conjured up memories of sitting with lamas in cold meditation cells carved out of living rock, tried to imagine he was with them again, listening to their soothing mantras.

When the guards entered the cooler-was it five or fifty minutes later? — they were quick and angry and vituperative. Shan heard at least three different voices and sensed through the sheet the beams of three different flashlights. Someone cursed the locusts, a favorite epithet for Tibetans because of their droning mantras. Someone else groused that they were going to miss breakfast. Then the heavy metal door clanged shut.

Panic seized Shan again as his sheet began to slide off him and his numbed hands could not move fast enough to stop the inertia. His last frantic effort caused his body to roll so hard he could not stop the inertia. He watched, his wits chilled, his reactions numbed, as his body fell off the shelf, striking the floor with a loud thud.

He lay there, torpid, wondering at the strange disconnect between his brain and body. The pain he had begun to feel in his extremities was gone. He was relaxed for once, feeling an unfamiliar, languid lightheadedness. He marveled at the impossible length of time it took to bend his fingers after consciously willing them to be bent, and recalled a training manual Tsipon had loaned him the day he had been hired, with a passage about frostbite. After losing just two degrees of temperature the body began shutting down blood flow to the limbs to conserve vital organs. A strange croaking sound rose from his throat, his best attempt at a laugh. Right now his most vital organs were his fingers.

A grunt of protest came from somewhere, as if from one of the dead, and he was up on his knees, then standing, staggering, before he realized he himself had made the sound. Holding the shelves for support, swaying, he turned and aimed himself for the door.

Moments later, free of the cold, he collapsed into the darkest corner of the empty outer chamber of the morgue, hugging his knees to his chest, contracting and relaxing his muscles. As his circulation mounted, so too did a grim realization. The fact that no alarms had sounded, no squad had returned to the morgue refrigerator, meant that the ragyapa had successfully left the facility. The villagers would at least have Tenzin’s body. The Americans could climb. Megan Ross would somehow know he had not forgotten her. But the time he had lost meant the workday had begun in earnest. It would be virtually impossible to leave the building undetected.

After ten minutes he rose, the intense aching in his joints making him nauseous for a moment. He stood before the double swinging doors. To the left lay the hall to the kitchen, busy with staff entering and leaving the adjoining cafeteria. To the right was the heart of the complex, with signs pointing the way to Labs and Containment Halls One through Eight. To the left he knew he would find more guards. To the right, for now, he saw only orderlies and nurses. He straightened his fingers, making sure he could freely move them again, then began stripping off his clothes.

There are parts of every life that never die, that you keep reliving, whether you choose to or not. It wasn’t fear of being caught as an intruder that now gripped Shan as he wandered down the hall in his tattered gray underwear, it was the old terror that sometimes erupted with a heart stopping gasp in the middle of the night, banishing sleep for hours, the memory of what these doctors could do, and once had done, to him.

He gazed into the middle distance, without focusing, without reacting, when an orderly snapped at him, still shuffling forward when someone else shouted that another damned fool had wandered away from his treatment.

“You! Monkey!” someone barked behind him. “What’s your damned unit?”

Shan, not looking up, stopped, pushed some spittle out of his mouth and let it roll down his chin onto the floor.

The man cursed again, then grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him into a small cubicle that served as a nurses’ station. He unlocked a cabinet and extracted a rack of preloaded syringes, setting it by a computer screen before impatiently seizing Shan’s arm and typing the number of Shan’s tattoo into a glowing box at the top of the screen.