It was, Shan knew, the code, and tone, of a man who had suffered disappointments in his career. “Did you at least search the rocks?”

“For what?”

“The murder weapon. The murderer obviously knew that Public Security had closed the road and was focused on that bus of monks. He apparently even knew it meant that Public Security had decided the minister didn’t need her usual security detail. He knew he could get close to her as long as he avoided that bus. He also knew he could not afford to be found with the gun.”

“What are you admitting?”

“I am admitting how incompetent Public Security has been. The pistol is in the rocks there, probably no more than two or three hundred feet away.”

“In twenty-four hours you will be begging to show us where it is.”

Shan returned Cao’s stare without expression. “Public Security interrogation is such an inexact science, Major. What you might have in twenty-four hours is either a dead prisoner with no confession or the murder weapon, fresh enough that the elements haven’t damaged its evidentiary value.”

Cao closed the file and covered it with a fist. “Who the hell are you, Shan?”

“I am the sour seed that Public Security always spits out,” Shan said in an earnest voice.

Cao lifted a new folder from the table. “A leading local Party cadre has submitted a petition. He reminds us that the bureau operates a hospital for the criminally insane not far from here. A famous hospital, at least in Public Security circles. The spa, we call it in Lhasa.”

“The yeti factory,” Shan murmured. “The Tibetans call it the yeti factory.”

“No doubt because the spa is producing superhumans.”

“Because inmates sometimes escape and are found wandering aimlessly in the mountains, usually naked, in the snow, with the mental faculties of a large ape.”

Cao’s thin lips did not move but his eyes lit with amusement. “This cadre suggests we owe a duty to the people to cure you before we shoot you, so you can explain to the inhabitants of this county why you shamed them so. I called him in. I asked him what proof he has of your insanity. He said every conversation with you is proof enough.”

So the real torture had begun. Cao undoubtedly had the authority to send him to the knobs’ experimental medical units. Shan had spent time in one before being dumped into the Tibetan gulag over five years earlier. Any sane man who knew about them would rather take a bullet in the skull than be sent to such a place.

Cao rose and circled the table. He was older than Shan had thought at first, and had a gutter of scar tissue along the top of one hand that could only have been made by a bullet.

“Surely, comrade,” the major stated, “since the day you left Beijing in chains, you must have expected that your life would ultimately be claimed by the government.”

Shan stared into his empty cup. “I remember an old uncle telling me I would end my days writing poetry at some mountain retreat, surrounded by singing birds.”

Something low and guttural escaped Cao’s throat. It might have been a laugh. “I have read and reread your background. Especially your early career, when you grew famous for sending high officials to jail for corruption. I even spoke to some of your former colleagues. I begin to understand you. Your defining characteristic is completeness. You must have all the loose ends connected. For you, justice has little to do with judges and courts. Your justice must be absolute, must be cathartic. You must have redemption. It is what I offer you now. Help me avoid calling in the team that waits outside. Make a clean end of it.”

Cao paused, then stepped to the blackboard, tossing a piece of chalk from hand to hand for a moment before quickly writing. “I always enjoy the Japanese verses,” he declared. “Simple, absolute words.” He stepped to the side for Shan to see.

Confession to release the heart, bullet to release the soul, Cao had written. Then Blood spatters on small birds.

“I will take you to the mountains, Shan,” Cao offered in a near whisper. “I will find a place with songbirds.”

Shan read Cao’s strange haiku several times before responding. “Major,” he said at last, “you strike me as vastly overeducated for your job.”

Cao glared at Shan then spun about and disappeared into the shadows. Shan did not look, just listened as the door opened and shut, twice. Guards appeared, unlocking his chains, escorting him to an interrogation room in another hallway off the cell corridor, chaining him to another metal chair. Moments later three men appeared, all wearing white laboratory coats, the oldest one carrying a doctor’s bag. He extracted his instruments slowly, fastidiously laying them in a line on the table. A small stainless-steel hammer. Four dental probes of various sizes. Two pairs of pliers. Several long, very thin, stainless steel needles. Short lengths of latex hose. A tooth extractor.

As they stood staring at him in the odd silent prelude with which such sessions always commenced, Shan grabbed one of the oversized needles. The three men stiffened, stepping back as Shan wielded it like a knife, leaning forward in his chair, swinging the treacherous-looking needle toward them until the chain on his wrist tightened and halted the movement. “Not to disappoint you,” he declared, “but I am no virgin.” With a single swift motion he buried the needle halfway into the bicep of his left arm.

One of the technicians gasped and threw his hand to his mouth as if about to lose the contents of his stomach; the other’s face drained of color. The doctor smiled.

Shan doubted that in all the history of the world anyone had organized the administration of misery and fear as efficiently as Beijing’s Public Security Bureau. The knobs had manuals, charts, entire six month training programs on what they termed physical interrogation. Like all mature sciences, it had its own jargon. Shan, in the hands of a master, had been given what the knobs called a ranging exam, a quick application of each of the primary tools, to gauge which he seemed to be most responsive to. As he had learned from the lamas with whom he had been imprisoned, he had gone to another place, had removed himself from his self. Let it be a storm that rages outside, a lama had once told him, over which you have no control. Stay on the inside, where the storm cannot reach.

He lay on the cell floor where they had thrown him afterward, unaware of anything except the pain that rose and ebbed, gradually becoming curious about the strange white pebble clutched in one hand, until he finally remembered. The knobs, becoming frustrated when he had responded only with silence, had rushed the rest of the session, knowing they would need Cao with them before they began in earnest, reacting only with disgust when, as they had lifted him from the chair, he had vomited onto the table, sending them reeling backward so that they did not notice him palm the tooth they had extracted.

He spat out blood then, steadying his shaking hand, stuffed the tooth back into the socket with a hard shove to seat it. His years in prison had taught him that a tooth so recently removed had a good chance of reattaching to the jaw. Stretching the fingers of his left hand, he rubbed the place where he had punctured his arm. The knobs had not recognized the trick taught to him by an old prisoner years earlier. If you were careful, and lucky enough, you would not only put your interrogators off their pace, you could also achieve a crude acupuncture, blocking the nerves from the left hand, a favorite target of interrogators, who preferred to keep the right one intact for penning confessions.

He crawled to the pallet by the back wall and collapsed on it, losing consciousness. When he awoke again night had fallen. He struggled into the meditation position and stared into the dark. Bits of his life outside again mingled with nightmarish visions. The serene faces of the two old Tibetans he loved like family, whom, for their own safety, he had left months earlier in the mountains east of Lhasa. The screams of other prisoners coming from behind closed interrogation room doors. Again and again, he ventured toward a chamber in his mind whose door had come ajar during his interrogation, not daring to look inside for fear of what he might see. But then a new storm of pain erupted, the door swung open and he could not stop the nightmare, seeing in his mind’s eye his son Ko, gulag prisoner Shan Ko, lying in his bed at the yeti factory, being tortured by the same team that had worked on Shan.