He paused, then searched again for a file on Kaju. Nothing. He pulled the folder on Wangtu. Ten pages long, filled with routine entries. He dug deeper into the Citizen files. There was a file for Akzu, thicker than that for Lau. An ink stamp had been used on the cover. Cultural Agitator, it said in red ink. He scanned the file. It told the story of a peasant landowner who, like thousands of others, had been stripped of his property, then gradually rehabilitated. A memo dated six months earlier reported that Akzu had been singled out in a criticism session for failing to produce his clan's quota of wool. An agricultural expert had even testified that Akzu's stubborn adherence to outdated production techniques deprived society of valuable meat and wool. The most recent entry, dated a month earlier, was a memorandum from Brigade headquarters in Urumqi listing over fifty names of Kazakhs slated to go to a special year-long political education program upon implementation of the Poverty Reduction Scheme. Shan found Akzu's name halfway down the list.

He returned the file and stood sipping the tea that the nervous secretary had delivered to him. He had hoped for more, but what? A file on an anonymous American executed at Glory Camp? He opened the drawer on Citizen Reviews and found, to his surprise, one marked simply Mei guo ren. Americans. Inside were half a dozen memos from the prosecutor, all of them short, formal approvals for travel plans for American tourist groups. No, he saw, one was not a tourist group but a scientific delegation. Two years earlier a group of American archaeologists and anthropologists had come to the region under the wing of the Museum of Antiquities in Urumqi. There was a list of names and credentials attached to the memo, as well as a handful of photographs. Nothing that could be linked to the young blond American he had seen at Glory Camp. Shan recognized one name. Deacon. But it was a woman, Abigail Deacon, from Oklahoma, author of a book on ancient textiles. The files on the Americans ended with a date one year earlier. Stapled to the front cover was a stern note from the Public Security Bureau ordering that all reports on Americans henceforth be forwarded, without retention of copies, to Bao Kangmei.

He pulled another file, under Proceedings, for Jakli. There was a strip of yellow tape affixed to the edge of the file so it could be flagged easily when searching the drawer. There were other strips of yellow tape, not many. He quickly checked several. One was for a man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for assaulting a birth inspector and who had escaped the year before. Another was for a man convicted and sentenced to ten years' lao gai for conducting a Lui Si remembrance ceremony. Lui Si, Six Four, was a reference to the 1989 disturbance in Tiananmen Square which occured on June 4. The yellow tape meant criminals with particularly dangerous politics.

He looked back at Jakli's file. It held copies of school files reporting classroom disciplinary infractions. A long report had been written by a political officer indicating that she had been a model student and targeted for communist youth camp. But then at age twelve that had changed. At age twelve, the officer wrote, she had come under the influence of reactionary culturalists. Meaning Kazakh sheepherders. When Jakli was twelve, Shan recalled, the army had shot her horse. The story ended two years earlier. No copy of Lau's letter to the prosecutor. He looked at the label again. Part One of Two, someone had scrawled on the file cover. But part two was not in the drawer. He looked on the table where a few files awaited refiling, then the Citizen Records in case it had been misfiled. Nothing. Someone else was interested in Jakli's current file.

Quickly he searched for one more file in the Citizen Reviews. Marco Myagov. Nothing. Then at the end of a drawer he saw a red-marked file, just labeled Eluosi. Six pages dealt with others, a form for each man and woman mentioned, rejecting requests for external passports. The remainder of the half-inch file was on Marco. Several applications for internal travel and work permits. He read the first one, dated nearly sixteen years earlier. Marco had applied for his young son and himself to travel north to Yining, to see an uncle who was dying. A large red stamp had been affixed to the front. Denied. Another, six months later, to attend the funeral. Denied. And another, to investigate a special school for his son. Denied. Request for a work permit. Denied. A dozen more requests, for a variety of reasons, all denied. The last was dated over ten years before. After that the material was all reports from Public Security suggesting his political unreliability, even suggesting smuggling activity. But nowhere was there mention of Marco being sentenced, not even to a rice camp, or any suggestion of hard evidence against the man. Shan moved to the most recent entry, a memo from Lieutenant Sui, copied to Prosecutor Xu. Interviews suggested Marco had organized one of the caravans that were still used to supply the high mountain villages at the top of the Kunlun and beyond, in Aksai Chin. Aksai Chin. Shan stared at the words. It was the disputed border zone, a barren, windswept territory claimed by both India and China, although controlled by the Chinese military. But Marco's caravan had gone out with eight riders, an informer reported, and returned with only four riders.

Shan quickly finished his notes and opened the door. The nervous secretary was at the nearest desk now, working at a computer console. A young man with the look of a soldier, though dressed in a business suit, sat at another desk reading a magazine. A bald man stood by the wall with a cup of tea, the man Shan had seen sleeping in the lobby. Shan hesitated, then pulled his notepad out and wrote on a clean sheet the name of Kaju Drogme. He stepped to the console and bent over the shoulder of the secretary, showing her the name. "I need to know who this man works for," he said.

The woman's face flushed, and her eyes flickered toward the man at the adjacent desk. "From the Brigade," she said in a self-conscious whisper. "Urumqi, I think. But here, it is Ko he reports to. Ko Yonghong." She looked up with a new air of self-importance. "Everyone knows Ko. He gives me rides in his new red car, one without a top. You know, like on American television."

Suddenly the arched outer doors burst open and Prosecutor Xu appeared, framed in the doorway. Shan bent lower, trying to hide his face behind the computer monitor. "Loshi," Xu called out as she stepped toward the secretary. "I need-" she stopped in midsentence. She had seen Shan.

He slowly straightened. She stared at him coldly, then looked at the young man at the desk, who had dropped his magazine and stood, suddenly alert, watching Shan with a predator's eyes. Shan realized he had seen the man before, driving the prosecutor's car at the motor pool.

"Thank you, Miss Loshi," Shan said. He returned the stare of the man he took to be the prosecutor's enforcer without blinking, then waited as Xu stepped toward the heavy wooden door at the rear and held it open. He turned and silently marched into the prosecutor's office. Xu stood aside to let him enter, stepped to Loshi's desk, and asked a question Shan could not hear. Loshi raised a sheet of paper to her chin, like a shield, as she nervously responded, then Xu returned to her office, closing the door behind her.

The room had been built as a sleeping chamber. Prosecutor Xu's desk was on a short platform that rose out of the rear center of the mosaic floor, extending in a broad rectangle to the back wood-paneled wall, just the size for a large bed. Several chairs were arranged in a semicircle on the platform in front of the desk. Not exactly a desk, Shan saw, but a heavy table of dark wood, its edges carved with the shapes of birds and flowers, similar to the designs on the floor. Another artifact of the building's past, the kind of remnant that would have been thrown onto a bonfire years earlier if it had been found in the eastern cities. Shan settled into the center chair.