"Who is Niya?" Shan asked again. "What does she have to do with the boy?"

"My cousins reached four of the zheli families and warned them away," she said, looking at the floor. "Malik brought a second boy to hide at Red Stone. The boy had tied two mastiffs to him, as if they would stop the killer. Some Maos are there at Akzu's camp now, guarding the boys. Other Maos are looking in the mountains too. The children are so hard to find."

"Are the boys connected to this Niya?"

But Jakli seemed not to hear again. She turned and walked, more slowly, stopping at a door near the end of the hall. Someone sat on the floor beside the door. The Mao with the gold teeth, who had brought the shoes. As Jakli bent to speak with him, Shan pushed the door open.

Inside, Lokesh looked up from a simple wooden table and offered a silent nod of greeting. It was a small room, with a window that looked over the schoolyard toward the south, toward the snow-capped Kunlun. Its walls were lined with photographs, at least two dozen. There were horses, many pictures of horses. There was a picture of a large Buddha statue, photographs of mosques, and even a reproduction of an old painting of Lao Tzu, the sage of Tao, riding an ox. At the top of a tall metal bookcase a string of prayer flags had been fastened, which draped down the side of the shelves.

Lokesh held a bell in his hands, an old bell cast of bronze, the tip of its handle ending in a familiar scepter-like shape. It was a dorje bell, used in Tibetan ritual.

"She forgot her bell," Lokesh said grimly, with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The peal of a dorje bell was said to drive away evil. Beside the bell on the table was a ball of thread, perhaps three inches in diameter, with red, green, and yellow threads intertwined. Not thread, really, Shan knew, but a sacred emblem used by some Buddhists to wrap around ritual implements as a means of invoking wisdom. One of Lokesh's hands left the bell and stroked the ball of thread. Further down on the table was a large book, a Koran, and a black dopa, one of the Muslim skullcaps.

"What is it you seek, my friend?" Shan asked the old Tibetan. His words came out almost as a sigh, cast out on the wave of emotion he still felt from seeing the third boy. He knew Lokesh had come down from Senge Drak, had chosen not to go back to the safety of Lhadrung, because he was looking for something, something he had hoped to find at the school.

"It is hard to put into words," Lokesh said in a hoarse voice, shaking his head, as if something was telling him not to speak. He gripped the bell with both hands. "In its physical emanation it is the Jade Basket. But it is said to be able to transform itself, if it needs to, for protection."

"Protection of what?" Shan asked.

Lokesh's brow wrinkled. "On the outside," he said with difficulty, as though the words caused him pain, "the last time anyone saw it, it looked like a silver gau. Open it and there is a finely carved basket of jade, and inside that a place for a prayer."

The last boy's shirt, Kublai's shirt, had been torn, he remembered as he played the image from the Ministry steps over in his mind. Like that of Alta and Suwan.

"That's what you came for?" Shan asked. "This Jade Basket? Is that what you must take back?" Is that what Lau died for? he almost asked. For an artifact? There were symbols, he knew, objects of great power, of great veneration, for which devout Buddhists would gladly give their lives to protect. Indeed, dying for such objects would add great merit for the next incarnation.

"It's not safe to speak about it," Lokesh said, still shaking his head. "If you don't know how to approach it, then the closer you get, the farther it is." He looked up at Shan, clearly struggling painfully with something inside. "Don't-" His voice choked off and he stared at the bell with a doleful, perplexed expression.

"Did Lau have it? Is that why you came here?" Shan asked.

But Lokesh just stared intensely at the bell in his hands. He seemed beyond hearing again.

Shan walked about the office, then stood in the doorway, surveying it. Xu had been here. Public Security had probably been here. Managing Director Ko had certainly been here. Xu had taken what seemed to be Lau's personal effects. But Lokesh had found two more, he believed, the ball of thread and bell. They had been hidden in plain sight, camouflaged with her cultural instructional materials. From behind him in the hallway he heard the Mao speaking to Jakli, pointing to something on the office opposite Lau's. He stepped to the other side of the hall to investigate. The Mao was pointing to a handwritten sign taped to the glass on the door. In two-inch characters someone had written one of the Great Helmsman's most famous slogans. Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. There was a nameplate on the door. Committee Chairman Hu, it said. Shan remembered the plump, worried Han teacher he had met at Glory Camp.

Shan wandered back into Lau's room. From the end of the table he picked up a piece of paper. A printout of names.

"The zheli," Jakli explained over his shoulder. "A list from the computer of all the orphans she worked with, and the zheli class schedule" She pointed to three names on the list. Suwan, Alta, and Kublai.

"Did Lau use the computer?" Shan asked.

Jakli paused and pulled the list closer. "No. She didn't like computers."

"Or, at least, didn't trust them," Shan suggested.

Jakli nodded as she examined the list. "Someone else did this."

"It makes it easier," Shan said in a low voice and saw the question in Jakli's eyes. "For the killer." The killer had the list, available at any Brigade computer, and only needed the location of the zheli members. Which was why he had tortured Lau. He studied the schedule. The zheli had two class meetings left for the year, one in a week, and the other five days later, both at a place called Stone Lake. He pointed at the entries.

"At the edge of the desert," Jakli explained. "It was a tradition of Lau's, to end the season of classes with two sessions there. To understand the desert better, she said. It's too hot to go there in the summer."

"The boys," Shan said. "Which are the boys? I wasn't certain before, but now it seems clear. The killer is only attacking boys."

Jakli studied the list and pointed out nine more names. She held her hands together and twisted her fingers as she stared at the names, as though she had seen a ghost. It was not a student directory. It was a death list.

There were notes fastened on the wall, torn from student workbooks. Thank you, auntie, one said, for showing me that the desert is still alive. My baby bird sang a song today, another said. Two seemed to be poems. While my horse drank, it said, I saw an old farmer, so asleep a mouse nibbled at his whiskers. Another was written with a more mature, artful calligraphy. In the mountains, it said, old men wait, with the wisdom of snow.

Shan looked out the window. The building across the courtyard to the south had low drifts of sand along its walls. Beyond them, he gazed at the Kunlun, toward Senge Drak. Jakli had left Gendun there that morning, sitting on the sentinel stone on top of the mountain.

He sensed someone step behind him. He did not turn but saw the tumble of long dark hair from the corner of his eye. Jakli silently reached onto the wall and removed the second poem that he had admired, the one about wise old men. She folded it, and put it inside her shirt. He watched as she retrieved a chair from the table and studied the montage of photographs on the wall. After a moment she set the chair down in front of the wall, climbed it, and pulled down a photograph of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. She handed it to him with sad smile and stepped down. The photograph was stiff and heavy. He turned it over. On the back was affixed a photograph of a red-robed, balding man with spectacles, wearing a serene smile. The Dalai Lama. Jakli used her fingernails to slit the tape that held the secret photograph and put it in her pocket.