Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Norbu seemed to be enjoying himself. He examined the pistol with an amused expression. “Jamyang’s handiwork,” he said of the little symbols painted on it. “Even in our training classes he was always doodling, drawing these things. He spent too long building his cover, succumbed to it in the end,” he declared to Shan, speaking as if one professional to another. “We must recalibrate the training.”

Shan cast another worried glance at Meng. She could correct all she had done, could become a hero, even attain her former rank, by arresting them all. Shan the traitorous convict, the purbas who were no doubt lingering nearby, Chenmo the splittist, the American woman whom Public Security so desperately wanted to disappear. He pushed down his fears and turned back to Norbu. “It’s what happens when you train people to ignore their true selves.”

Norbu gave a hollow laugh. “True self, Comrade? We are all but clay to be shaped by the Motherland.”

“And what shape do you assume, Norbu, once you get across to India?” Shan asked. “Just a spy? Or is it to be assassin? The way you dealt with the Lung boy and those at the convent showed a natural talent.”

“No training is complete unless it is both mental and physical. The opportunities are endless. I am but an instrument to be aimed by the people’s will.”

“The instrument of a gang of old men in Beijing who lost touch with the people years ago,” Shan shot back.

“Spoken like the unrepentant criminal you are,” Norbu sneered. “Liang will find a cure for you.” He glanced back at Meng, standing behind him, and lifted the gun again. “Possession of a firearm by a former convict, Lieutenant. Make a note. Ten strings at least.” He noticed Chenmo, who had collapsed, sobbing, against a rock. “And search that damned hermitage of the nuns. The place reeks of splittism. Should have leveled it years ago.”

At last he turned to the American. Cora seemed to have lost all her strength. She had collapsed to the ground and was on her knees now, as if in supplication. But there was no surrender in her face. “You killed them,” she declared to Norbu in English in a quiet but steady voice. “You butchered them. I watched. You arranged the bodies like you were stacking wood. You enjoyed it.”

Shan had no notion whether Norbu understood. But then the abbot laughed and replied in perfect English. “When risks are presented I am taught to eliminate them. The deaths were an affirmation of my mission, a sign that I am destined to succeed. Even those photos I worried about, they were just waiting for me in those little cases, not even hidden, ready for me to destroy them. It’s my destiny,” he said, with a gesture to those gathered before him.

“What I never understood,” Shan said in Tibetan, “was how you knew, who warned you so that you suspected you would be confronted that day?”

Norbu was enjoying himself. “Loyal Dakpo of course. He told me how the old abbot was meeting some tall solitary lama who had begun asking questions about me. He was excited because the lama had a little lotus mark on his neck, called it an auspicious sign. But I knew that mark. Our wayward agent. Liang made a special trip all the way from Chamdo just to warn me that Jamyang was missing. It was just bad luck that fool Lung boy saw us together. I told Liang we should never have let Jamyang stop to see his elderly aunt. And the abbess was so straightforward, no sense of subterfuge. What did she expect when she asked me to come to the convent?” He shrugged. “I actually think she thought I would weep on her shoulder and ask forgiveness.”

“Murder!” Chenmo spat.

“No, my dear. Casualties in our glorious war.” Norbu cocked his head at the novice. “Look at you. You must have been pretty once. The Bureau could have found a good use for you. Now”-he shrugged-“after five or ten years they may trust you to scrub the toilets in their barracks.”

He suddenly swiveled, cocking the pistol and raising it in one swift motion, aiming at Cora’s head. “You should have stayed home,” he said in English, and pulled the trigger.

There was less than a second between the metallic click on the empty chamber and the sharp crack of a shot. Norbu looked in confusion at the pistol in his hand, then down at the swelling crimson blossom on his chest. He looked at Shan, opening his mouth as if in question, then collapsed to the ground.

In the awful silence that followed there was no movement except that of Meng as she returned her pistol to her belt. Shan was aware of nothing but her gaze. For an instant he saw desolation in her eyes, the look of one being swept out to sea without hope of rescue. Then she clenched her jaw and took command.

“Now,” she murmured to the constables. One of them whistled and two young Tibetan men materialized out of the shadows, followed a moment later by Dakpo and Trinle. They had been listening. She had been wiser than Shan, had known the audience had to be those most directly affected by Norbu’s violence. She turned to the two strangers. They were, Shan suddenly realized, the purbas who were to escort Norbu to Dharamsala. “You are going to take the American across the border,” Meng commanded, “but on the way, somewhere in the high mountains, you will lose Norbu’s body in a crevasse. As far as his superiors will know he went across to India. Take his identity cards. Find someone who can use them to check into a hotel in Macau or Hong Kong. In a few weeks when he doesn’t show up in Dharamsala they will begin a search and find the record. They will assume he has fled to the West. They will have to assume everything he touched is compromised, that no graduate of their Institute will ever be trusted again. They will have to roll up the operations at Chamdo and start over somewhere else.”

Another figure stepped out of the shadows as Meng backed away. Sansan clutched a flat black box to her breast. “It worked,” she said to Shan, excitement in her eyes. “We have a computer with all the knob clearances embedded in it.” Shan breathed a sigh of relief. He had not been certain if Sansan had had the time to dart out of the shadows of the holding cell and switch the computers when he had lured Liang into the outer office.

“She says we have to destroy it in two or three days but until then we-”

Shan did not hear the rest of the sentence, for Sansan had nodded toward the path that led to the road. He darted into the shadows and out onto the open slope. Meng was already at her car. She paused, seeing him, and for a long moment they silently gazed at each other. Then she climbed inside and drove away.

The long trail of dust gleamed silver in the moonlight, a cloud that seemed to be pushing them ever on, deeper into the new land. Shan and Lokesh stood on the ridge to watch as the three heavy vehicles that had been following them climbed the steep dirt track below. Like scouts in the wilderness Jigten and Rapeche the headman had stood in the back of Shan’s truck, guiding them for hours through the vast grassland, their night passage lit only by dim parking lights and the hand lanterns used when rocks had to be cleared from their path.

They turned at the sound of a low whistle from Jigten and climbed back into their own truck. Jigten and the old shepherd insisted now on walking in front of the weary column, leading the vehicles along the narrow track between tall, narrow stone formations that loomed like ghostly sentinels in the night. Half an hour later they stopped as Jigten and the old man conferred excitedly. Rapeche dropped to one knee and plucked some of the grass at his feet and chewed on it, then tasted the soil. As the headman turned his face was full of joy. He seemed to have discovered a long-lost friend.