Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation by Eliot Pattison Page A

into wayward citizens.
    “What do they say in the village about the trap set for that bus?”
    “Nothing. The only thing we know for certain is that it was set by someone who doesn’t understand what the knobs are capable of doing to us.”
    “Those monks must have been from local farms and villages,” Shan suggested. Like in the old days, he almost added. Once, Tibetan families had always sent their oldest son to the local monastery. “That’s where they would search first.”
    “Funny thing,” Kypo replied. “The government doesn’t know who they were, don’t have any names for those monks. The only files the knobs had about those monks were on that bus. They disappeared in the confusion.”
    “How would you know that?”
    “There aren’t many qualified mechanics in these mountains. Jomo sometimes gets asked to help at the government garage, where they towed the bus. Tsipon sent me to pick him up when he was finished. I asked to see inside the bus. Those prison buses have a little lock box bolted under the dashboard for records being transported with the prisoners. This one had been pried open.”
    Shan felt a stir of excitement. With the records gone, the missing monks had a real chance of freedom. “Why did you ask him to look?”
    “Like you said,” Kypo replied in a taut voice, “the monks had families.”
    Shan looked up in surprise, with a surge of fear. Was Kypo saying he had meant to steal the files himself? The offense would have guaranteed him years in prison had he been caught. “If things don’t go well in Cao’s investigation, Kypo, he will have to cover himself with a politically foolproof explanation.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “He will say that the ambush and the assassination were one and the same act, that it would have taken many people to coordinate, that what happened that day was an act of organized rebellion by the mountain people. He will have martial law declared, call in hundreds of troops—”
    A frightened gasp, a shattering of pottery interrupted Shan. Kypo’s wife, listening in the shadows, had dropped the dishes she’d held. Shan did not complete his sentence, did not mention that the very existence of a village like Tumkot would stick in the craw of any military commander trying to subdue the region.
    “And have you decided what to say when the knobs finally come to ask you about the ropes?” Shan continued.
    Kypo feigned a look of confusion then, as if to hide his true reaction, rubbed his eye. He was one of the only Tibetans Shan knew who wore contact lenses.
    “It’s only Religious Affairs for now because Public Security is obsessed with the assassination. But they can’t ignore the coincidence much longer.”
    “Coincidence?”
    “Between the ambush on the bus and the murder of Minister Wu.”
    Kypo buried his head in his hands a moment. “Cao already came to the warehouse, asking about the stolen equipment.”
    Shan pressed his hand over his arm. The patch on his bicep where the knobs had connected the electrodes had begun to quiver. “What did he ask?”
    “Not much. I explained we are a climbing support company owned by the leading Tibetan in the local Party organization. We have strict inventory controls. The rope had been ours, yes, but was ordered by a foreign expedition, put on a truck going up to the base camp, and delivered days before the killing.”
    “What expedition?”
    “The Americans. Yates and that woman who works with him.”
    Shan’s head shot up. “What woman?”
    “I don’t really know her. Ross is her name, a famous female climber apparently. His climb boss, Yates calls her.”
    Shan drank his tea in silence, trying again to piece together the puzzle of the Western woman who had died in his arms. No one had mentioned her disappearance. If she was Yates’s partner, why hadn’t he reported her missing? “Where is this woman now?”
    Kypo shrugged. “Sometimes she sleeps in the bungalow behind the depot, sometimes at