Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

"Them?"

"In the truck. The real thing. It's gotta be purbas."

"I'm sorry." Shan felt his forehead. The blood was clotting now.

"Sorry? For this day? The whole damn day, it's been like rappelling down a mountain. You just jump off the cliff and let it happen."

"I never meant for you to be in danger," Shan said. "You should have just left."

"Hell, we made it out alive, didn't we? No sweat. Wouldn't have missed it. We got 'em good, the MFCs. You sent me to search for what isn't there. Perfect. Playing games with their minds." He filled the truck with another of his cowboy whoops.

"Dammit, Tyler," Fowler said. "Get us out of here. It's not over until we're home."

"What do you mean, 'seeking what isn't there'?" Shan asked.

"At the Ministry of Ag. Water resources office moved away in a reorganization. All the files were shipped to Beijing five months ago."

Going to seek what wasn't there. Shan had forgotten the card from the archives. He pulled it from his pocket slowly, as if it would shatter if it moved too fast.

Tamdin, the card said. Saskya gompa. But there was more. On loan, with a date fourteen months earlier, the same date it had been discovered. On loan to Lhadrung town. There was a name, written hastily and smeared. But the chop at the bottom was clear. The personal chop of Jao Xengding. Below it was scrawled "Confirmed," followed by a final ideogram, the inverted, double-barred Y. The same one he had seen on the note from Jao's pocket. Sky, it meant, or heaven.

Twenty miles past the airport the Jiefang truck stopped on a sharp curve and Kincaid pulled in behind it. A man jumped out, ran to the Americans' vehicle, and whispered urgently with Kincaid, pointing to a side road ahead of the truck. The Jiefang turned around and the purba jumped on as it passed by.

Kincaid eased their vehicle into four-wheel-drive and moved onto the side road. "The knobs have road blocks on all roads out of Lhasa, at repeating intervals. They are steaming. They probably have a special reception committee waiting at the Lhadrung County checkpoint. So we have to detour."

He drove recklessly over the rough route, toward the setting sun, then abruptly stopped as the distant flickering lights of Lhadrung valley came into view. "We could go back, you know," Kincaid announced to Shan with a meaningful gaze.

"Back?"

"To Lhasa. The road blocks are checking vehicles leaving the area, not entering. We could do it. You're too valuable to go back to prison when this is over. You know so much. I can help you."

"Help me how?" Shan sensed the American's khata that still hung around his neck.

"Talk to Jansen. We'll calm him down. Hell, he'll want to pick your brain for weeks himself. He knows people who can get you out of the country."

"But Colonel Tan. And if Director Hu-" Fowler protested.

"Hell, Rebecca, they don't know Shan is with us. He just disappears. I could get that tattoo off. I've seen it done. You could be a free man."

A free man. They were such pale words to Shan. It was a concept that Americans always seemed infatuated with, but one which Shan never understood. Perhaps, he reflected, because he had never known a free man. His hand drifted to the khata and slid it off. "You are very kind. But I am needed in Lhadrung. Please, could you just return me to Jade Spring?"

Kincaid saw the scarf in Shan's hand and shook his head in disappointment.

"Keep it," he said admiringly, pushing the khata back. "If you're going back to Lhadrung, you're going to need it."

Colonel Tan seemed to read the messages from Miss Lihua and Madame Ko simultaneously, his eyes ranging back and forth from the one in his hand to the one on his desk. In the fax from Hong Kong, Miss Lihua reported that she was urgently trying to book flights for her return, but meanwhile wanted to confirm that Prosecutor Jao's personal seal had indeed been taken the year before. No one had been arrested for stealing the chop, although it was the sort of minor act of sabotage typical of monks and other cultural hooligans. A new seal had been fabricated, and a notice sent to alert Jao's bank.

Madame Ko's note reported that she had made inquiries at the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, finding a man named Deng who was responsible for the recordkeeping of water rights. Deng knew who Prosecutor Jao was; they had spoken by phone the week before Jao's death, Madame Ko explained. And Deng had an appointment to see the prosecutor during his stopover in Beijing, at a restaurant named the Bamboo Bridge.

"So one of the monks stole Jao's chop and got the costume. Maybe Sungpo, maybe one of the other four," Tan asserted.

"Why his personal seal?" Shan asked. "If I went to all that trouble, and wanted to sow confusion in the government, why not steal his official seal?"

"Opportunistic. A monk saw a chance and broke into the office. An open door or window, and the first thing he found was the personal seal. He got scared and fled. Miss Lihua says it was a monk."

"I don't think so. But that's not the point." Shan found himself gazing out the window toward the street, half expecting to see a truck of knobs arrive to arrest him. There was only the empty car of the officer he had driven to town with. The knobs in Lhasa had known who he was. But they were not coming for him. What had been their orders? Merely to scare him away from Lhasa? To eliminate him if he could somehow be snatched beyond Tan's reach?

"What are you saying?"

Shan turned back toward Tan. "What's important is that the Director of Religious Affairs lied about it. He told us the costumes were all accounted for. He said he checked."

"Someone at the museum may have lied to him," Tan suggested.

"No. Madame Ko checked this morning. No one ever called the museum about the costumes."

"But Jao would never have ordered the costume sent back from Lhasa to Lhadrung. There would be no reason," Tan said tentatively.

"Did you ever hear that his chop was stolen? It would be very disturbing for a prosecutor to lose his seal. Something the military governor should have known about."

"It was only his personal seal."

"I think his personal seal was accessible to someone here in Lhadrung, and they used it to stamp the card that was later put on the museum box."

"You're saying Miss Lihua is lying?"

"We need her back here, right away."

"You saw her note. She's coming." As Tan dropped the fax on the desk, they became aware of Madame Ko standing excitedly at the door, uninvited but apparently unwilling to leave. She raised her hand and made a quick, victorious fist in midair. Tan sighed and gestured for her to enter.

"So Jao was to meet this man Deng in Beijing. For what?" Tan asked.

"To review water permits in Lhadrung," Madame Ko reported. "Jao wanted to know who held the rights before the Americans."

"And Comrade Deng of the Ministry of Agriculture. He had the answer?"

"All the records were still in the original boxes from Lhasa. That's why he was so unhappy that Jao never arrived. Said he had spent hours sorting through them."

"For some stranger from Tibet, he did all that?"

Madame Ko nodded. "Comrade Jao said that if they found what he expected that he would want Deng to go with him straight to the Ministry of Justice headquarters. A big case, he said. Deng would be commended to the Minister himself."

Tan moved to the edge of his seat. "It would have been one of the agricultural collectives," Tan asserted.

"Exactly," Madame Ko confirmed.

"You asked him?"

"Of course. It's part of our investigation," she said with a small conspiratorial nod to Shan.

Tan cast an impatient glance at Shan. "And?"

"Long Wall Farm."

Tan asked for tea. "She acts like she just solved our mystery," he sighed as Madame Ko left the room in an excited bustle.