"Hello, your excellency," the Westerner said in a mocking tone. He spoke in English, with an American accent. "Did you bring me some tea and cakes?"

As Shan took another step forward a hand closed around his upper arm, a rough painful grasp that pulled him backward so hard he almost fell. Shan turned to look into the face of the beefy Public Security guard, who had clearly awakened in a surly mood. His weapon hung forward from his shoulder, his fingers resting near the trigger.

"No damned access!" the knob snarled. "No one! No time!" he barked, then roughly pulled Shan toward the sunlight.

"Yo!" the tall Westerner shouted in farewell, with a mock salute. "Let's do lunch sometime!"

Shan let himself be led toward the center of the yard, craning his neck to watch the American as the man made an exaggerated shrug of disappointment toward the men at the coal pile, who laughed, then lowered his cap and resumed shoveling the coal.

As Shan turned back to the guard his face tightened in fear. He had not simply been stopped in his investigation of the men working at the boiler, he had been exposed. He was being escorted by a knob. Knobs did not take you where you wanted to go. They took you where Public Security wanted you.

But as they proceeded across the empty yard the guard's resolve seemed to dissipate. His steps became shorter, and he released Shan's arm. He looked at the shed where he had been posted, then glanced back at the administration building and turned uncertainly toward Shan. Suddenly his head snapped back toward the office building. A figure had appeared on the steps of the building, a woman in a black suit. Prosecutor Xu Li.

The guard looked from the woman back to Shan, then spoke nervously. "No one is to go near the boiler house crew, that's all," he said, then brushed the shoulders of Shan's threadbare jacket with a sheepish, deferential look, and jogged back toward his shed.

The woman stared at Shan in expectation. She was waiting for him. She did not need to summon him with a guard holding a submachine gun. Her severe stare was weapon enough.

With a quick glance he saw that no one was stirring at the repair shed. Would he at least be given a chance to say goodbye to Jakli, to get a message to Lokesh? No, he realized, he could do nothing that might implicate Jakli and the others. His mind raced. He would have to say he tricked Jakli and Fat Mao, that they knew nothing about him.

He put his hand on his chest, over the gau around his neck, then took a deep breath and with small steady steps went to surrender to Prosecutor Xu. He let his prisoner's instincts take over, as a way of fighting the cold fist of fear in his belly. Would they take him back to Tibet? Would they send him to the special interrogation place he had visited in the desert? Or would they decide he wasn't worth the trouble and dispose of him right there. At least, a detached voice called out from somewhere in his mind, you'd get a real grave.

As he approached her he studied the woman's spare, stern face. Surprisingly it didn't show the contempt of a jailer for a prisoner. It didn't show suspicion. It only showed impatience.

He was almost at the stairs when she spun about and stepped inside, leaving the door open for him. He followed her.

The interior was like a thousand other government offices Shan had seen. Most of the space was devoted to one large open chamber with two rows of metal desks, the majority of which were unoccupied. A young woman of Kazakh or Uighur blood, her hair bound into two small pigtails, looked up from a computer terminal, then quickly, nervously, averted her eyes. Someone called out a whispered warning, and Shan saw two other office workers scurry away from their desks, toward another woman who motioned them into a back room. As if they had detected volcanic signs in Xu and were expecting an eruption.

Xu Li waited for him at the door of a meeting room, pointing to a chair at a large metal table.

He sat. She stepped to a thermos and poured two mugs of tea, placed one on the table barely within Shan's reach, then sat opposite him.

"I know what you're doing here," she said brusquely.

It was over, before it had really started. Children were still dying. Gendun was lost. The waterkeeper lama was imprisoned. And Shan would never have his chance to help them, nor his chance to leave China. He locked his hands around the steaming mug. There were tricks prisoners played, to endure. Many of them had to do with simply getting through the next moment, not thinking about the suffering to come, only dealing with the present suffering. Had his hands instinctively begun playing the old game, he wondered, fixing on the searing heat from the mug, focusing on one sense in order to evade as long as possible the flood of pain to come? The monks in his gulag barracks had taught him that such concentration was not the best answer, that he shouldn't seek concentration but mindfulness, to steer his mind to a place interrogators didn't occupy. But he had no time to prepare, and if such concentration was the only crutch he could find, he would use it. His eyes lost their focus as he stared into the mug, absently considering how it would be years before he had real tea again if he were being returned to the gulag. Sometimes, when there was hot water, he would put a weed in it and call it tea.

"My name is Xu Li," the woman announced. "From the Ministry of Justice. I am the prosecutor for this county."

Jade Bitch. Shan almost said the words out loud. There was another trick he had learned for interrogations, not from the monks but from the khampa warriors who had shared his gulag barracks. Preempt the fear. Preempt the pain. If they were going to threaten something awful, imagine something even more terrible. If they were going to hurt you, then try to inflict greater pain on yourself. He raised the mug to his mouth and swallowed half the scalding liquid, raising a long stab of pain from his tongue to his belly. He lowered the mug and stared at the prosecutor without expression.

The action seemed to unsettle the woman. She raised her own mug, then put it down quickly as the heat singed her tongue. She frowned. "I know you are from Beijing. I don't know your real name." Her voice was smooth and supremely confident, a voice long accustomed to being in complete authority. "I don't want to know your name."

It seemed impossible. How could she have known his background already? Had he been so careless? Had everything since he arrived in Xinjiang been an elaborate trap?

"Nobody asked me if I approved of what you are doing. No one is going to. It's all Beijing, I can smell Beijing all over it," she added, as if it explained much.

Shan looked around the room. There was a chalkboard on one wall, with a number scrawled near the top. Nine hundred forty-eight, no doubt the number of citizens undergoing reconditioning at Glory Camp. There was a faded poster with a collage of bright young Chinese faces, with the caption Destroy the Four Olds. It had been one of the more enduring campaigns started by the Red Guard many years earlier, part of the insanity that had swept his father away. Destroy old culture, old ideology, old customs, old habits. It had been a particularly intense spasm of pain inflicted on the Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Old books, traditional clothes, and religious artifacts had been consigned to bonfires. Entire fires had consisted of nothing but braids of hair worn in the old fashion.

Fire. If he set a fire, he thought, looking at a trash basket overflowing with paper, maybe in the confusion Jakli and the Kazakhs would be permitted to evacuate without questioning.

"But," Xu Li said tersely, "I am still the prosecutor."