As he did so a hand reached over the table and inserted another pin. "Five," Fat Mao said, and he inserted the pin at the head of a valley ten miles from Yoktian. "Not killed," he said quickly as Shan looked up in alarm. "Jakli and her-" he began. "Last night Jakli and others were traveling to the valley because they heard one of the zheli boys was there, with a shadow clan. It was getting dark. They heard a sheep crying in great pain."

They. Fat Mao meant Jakli and her cousins, Shan knew. She had joined the riders from her clan who were searching for the boys.

"They looked down into a pass, where a rough road entered, and saw a sheep tangled in a vine by a tree. Or, that was the way it was supposed to appear. When they got lower they used binoculars and saw that the sheep was tied with wire to the tree and was lying on the ground, bloody." Fat Mao touched one pin, then another, as he spoke. "Suddenly a boy appeared, running to help the sheep. But the moment the boy reached the sheep, a man dressed in black clothes leapt on him. The boy fought back. One of the men with Jakli had a rifle, and they shot the boy's attacker when he stood up for a moment. He was hit somewhere by the bullet and ran into the shadows. A moment later a black utility vehicle raced out of the trees. The boy had been beaten," the Uighur continued, "and his shirt was ripped open at the neck, but he was not seriously injured. The sheep's rear leg tendons had been cut. They had to shoot it."

"Who was it?" Jowa asked urgently.

Instead of replying, Fat Mao inserted a disc into the computer and tapped a key. A screen appeared, with a heading that read Yoktian People's Clinic. He shifted the cursor and a list of recent patients appeared. "See for yourself. Last night, three hours after the attack, admitted for a minor gunshot wound to the forearm."

Shan and Jowa leaned forward and read the screen. Major Bao Kangmei.

"I thought," Jowa said heavily, "that I would feel better when we knew for certain."

Shan nodded silently. The knobs were untouchable. The Ministry of Justice would never prosecute the knobs. It would be suicide for the purbas or the Maos to act against Bao. Jowa was right. It did not feel like closure. It felt like they had crept into the beast's lair and glimpsed it, only to see how huge it was. Moreover, Shan was convinced more than ever that Bao was only part of the answer. He gestured toward the map. "There is one more," he said in a taut voice, and pointed near the edge of the desert, where he believed Karachuk lay. "Lau. The ani. She was the first to be killed."

The boy hesitated, then drew a number on the spot. A zero.

"It's been too easy for Bao. Most of the boys lived with known economic units," Jowa said. "The herding enterprises. Each enterprise has a registered set of pastures, a known set of camps."

"Known to the knobs," Fat Mao said.

"And to the Brigade, and to the prosecutor, and to anyone who can access the software reports," Shan added with a look at the Uighur.

"You mean you think it is not only Bao," Fat Mao said.

"Sure," Jowa interjected. "It's not. There's lots of knobs. A barracks full of helpers in Yoktian."

Shan shrugged. "Seeing him attack a boy last night still doesn't tell us his goal. But it means he's not stopping with Khitai. It means," he said in a hushed voice, expressing the thought as it entered his mind, "that he did not get the Jade Basket. Khitai gave it to someone else. It's still out there with the boys. And the key is still the death of Lau. The boys could be found, once Lau was exposed. Once the killer knew that Lau was Tibetan, that she was an ani, then he knew that the boy he wanted was one of the zheli. After that, finding the boys was easy."

"But after all these years," Jowa said. "Why now, why would they suddenly suspect Lau?"

"Because there was a meeting with a general in Urumqi," Shan said. "Everything happened after that meeting. Kaju was assigned to Yoktian, Lau's political reliability was questioned. Ko began his campaign to buy out the clans."

Fat Mao looked up. "The Poverty Eradication Scheme?" He spat the words like a curse. "Surely it's not connected."

"I think it is. The memo you took back from Xu. Did you read it?"

The Uighur nodded.

The oldest of the Tibetans, a man with the hard-bitten features of a khampa, stood and poured himself some tea. "You know his name?" he asked. "This general in Urumqi?"

"Rongqi," Shan said. "That's all I know. From the army. Now vice chairman of the Brigade. But they still call him general."

The man glanced at the youth, who quickly rose and left the room. Moments later he reappeared carrying a thick, oversized ledger. He laid it on the table and began leafing through its pages, Jowa looking over his shoulder as he read.

Shan had seen such books before. The Lotus Book, the purbas called it, the unofficial compilation of crimes against the people of Tibet, the expanding chronicle of the people and places and treasures lost since the Chinese invasion. It was compiled and copied by the purbas primarily from interviews with survivors as information became available and thus was in no particular order.

As the young purba and Jowa scanned the pages, Shan spoke of Gendun and Lokesh with the others. People would watch, they pledged, on both sides of the border. It was too risky to send more Tibetans into Xinjiang but Fat Mao promised he would take word when he left in the morning. There were places that were always watched by the lung ma. Glory Camp. Knob barracks. And hospitals.

"How will you go?" Shan asked.

The khampa answered the question. No one was allowed to leave a vehicle anywhere near the silo sanctuary. Two hours away, by foot, was a road, or what passed for a road, that connected to the road through Kerriya Pass. Sometime between six and seven in the morning a truck would go by carrying six wooden barrels and three sheep in the back. It would stop if three rocks were placed in a line at a certain spot in the road.

"I will go too," Shan said.

As the khampa silently nodded, there was a rap on the door and a man and a woman, wearing the fleece vests of dropka, carried in food on a plank of wood. A large bowl of tsampa and pickled vegetables. Shan ate quickly, then lay on one of the pallets along the wall. He sat up for a moment and looked for Fat Mao. The Uighur was missing, and a door at the rear of the room was slightly open. Shan stood and stepped into the doorway.

"No!" Fat Mao called as he saw Shan, putting his hands up as though to push him back. Shan quickly retreated as the Uighur emerged through the door and shut it.

"One more thing," Shan said. "The silver bridle from Nikki. Someone gave it to a Mao, to get it to Jakli and Marco. Can you find out who it was?"

Fat Mao shrugged, as if not understanding the significance, then nodded and turned to the maps.

Shan returned to the pallet. He closed his eyes but did not sleep at first, for he was replaying the scene he had glimpsed in the adjacent room. Four figures at a long bench, in front of a large chalkboard filled with translated words and alphabets. Two of those inside, a man and a woman, were carving slabs of wood into wedges. The other two were inscribing them with black ink. He had inadvertently discovered at least one of the ways the Maos and purbas communicated to their networks, using the ancient Kharoshthi text on simulated tablets. Ingenious, he thought. The knobs would not be able to translate the extinct tongue and they were so full of resentment for the tablets that they would simply destroy any they found.