Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (3 page)

So the real torture had begun. Cao undoubtedly had the authority to send him to the knobs’ experimental medical units. Shan had spent time in one before being dumped into the Tibetan gulag over five years earlier. Any sane man who knew about them would rather take a bullet in the skull than be sent to such a place.

Cao rose and circled the table. He was older than Shan had thought at first, and had a gutter of scar tissue along the top of one hand that could only have been made by a bullet.

“Surely, comrade,” the major stated, “since the day you left Beijing in chains, you must have expected that your life would ultimately be claimed by the government.”

Shan stared into his empty cup. “I remember an old uncle telling me I would end my days writing poetry at some mountain retreat, surrounded by singing birds.”

Something low and guttural escaped Cao’s throat. It might have been a laugh. “I have read and reread your background. Especially your early career, when you grew famous for sending high officials to jail for corruption. I even spoke to some of your former colleagues. I begin to understand you. Your defining characteristic is completeness. You must have all the loose ends connected. For you, justice has little to do with judges and courts. Your justice must be absolute, must be cathartic. You must have redemption. It is what I offer you now. Help me avoid calling in the team that waits outside. Make a clean end of it.”

Cao paused, then stepped to the blackboard, tossing a piece of chalk from hand to hand for a moment before quickly writing. “I always enjoy the Japanese verses,” he declared. “Simple, absolute words.” He stepped to the side for Shan to see.

Confession to release the heart, bullet to release the soul,
Cao had written. Then
Blood spatters on small birds
.

“I will take you to the mountains, Shan,” Cao offered in a near whisper. “I will find a place with songbirds.”

Shan read Cao’s strange haiku several times before responding. “Major,” he said at last, “you strike me as vastly overeducated for your job.”

Cao glared at Shan then spun about and disappeared into the shadows. Shan did not look, just listened as the door opened and shut, twice. Guards appeared, unlocking his chains, escorting him to an interrogation room in another hallway off the cell corridor, chaining him to another metal chair. Moments later three men appeared, all wearing white laboratory coats, the oldest one carrying a doctor’s bag. He extracted his instruments slowly, fastidiously laying them in a line on the table. A small stainless-steel hammer. Four dental probes of various sizes. Two pairs of pliers. Several long, very thin, stainless steel needles. Short lengths of latex hose. A tooth extractor.

As they stood staring at him in the odd silent prelude with which such sessions always commenced, Shan grabbed one of the oversized needles. The three men stiffened, stepping back as Shan wielded it like a knife, leaning forward in his chair, swinging the treacherous-looking needle toward them until the chain on his wrist tightened and halted the movement. “Not to disappoint you,” he declared, “but I am no virgin.” With a single swift motion he buried the needle halfway into the bicep of his left arm.

One of the technicians gasped and threw his hand to his mouth as if about to lose the contents of his stomach; the other’s face drained of color. The doctor smiled.

SHAN DOUBTED THAT in all the history of the world anyone had organized the administration of misery and fear as efficiently as Beijing’s Public Security Bureau. The knobs had manuals, charts, entire six month training programs on what they termed physical interrogation. Like all mature sciences, it had its own jargon. Shan, in the hands of a master, had been given what the knobs called a ranging exam, a quick application of each of the primary tools, to gauge which he seemed to be most responsive to. As he had learned from the lamas with whom he had been imprisoned, he had gone to another place, had removed himself from his self.
Let it be a storm
that rages outside,
a lama had once told him,
over which you have no
control
.
Stay on the inside, where the storm cannot reach.

He lay on the cell floor where they had thrown him afterward, unaware of anything except the pain that rose and ebbed, gradually becoming curious about the strange white pebble clutched in one hand, until he finally remembered. The knobs, becoming frustrated when he had responded only with silence, had rushed the rest of the session, knowing they would need Cao with them before they began in earnest, reacting only with disgust when, as they had lifted him from the chair, he had vomited onto the table, sending them reeling backward so that they did not notice him palm the tooth they had extracted.

He spat out blood then, steadying his shaking hand, stuffed the tooth back into the socket with a hard shove to seat it. His years in prison had taught him that a tooth so recently removed had a good chance of reattaching to the jaw. Stretching the fingers of his left hand, he rubbed the place where he had punctured his arm. The knobs had not recognized the trick taught to him by an old prisoner years earlier. If you were careful, and lucky enough, you would not only put your interrogators off their pace, you could also achieve a crude acupuncture, blocking the nerves from the left hand, a favorite target of interrogators, who preferred to keep the right one intact for penning confessions.

He crawled to the pallet by the back wall and collapsed on it, losing consciousness. When he awoke again night had fallen. He struggled into the meditation position and stared into the dark. Bits of his life outside again mingled with nightmarish visions. The serene faces of the two old Tibetans he loved like family, whom, for their own safety, he had left months earlier in the mountains east of Lhasa. The screams of other prisoners coming from behind closed interrogation room doors. Again and again, he ventured toward a chamber in his mind whose door had come ajar during his interrogation, not daring to look inside for fear of what he might see. But then a new storm of pain erupted, the door swung open and he could not stop the nightmare, seeing in his mind’s eye his son Ko, gulag prisoner Shan Ko, lying in his bed at the yeti factory, being tortured by the same team that had worked on Shan.

IN THE MORNING a slip of paper lay on the stool beside his pallet. It was a notification on a printed form. Unless directed otherwise by a signed statement, witnessed by a magistrate, a prisoner’s organs would be harvested for medical purposes immediately after execution. Not a prisoner, he saw,
the
prisoner. The form was made out in his name.

HE DID NOT acknowledge the team when they arrived, he just stared at the symbolic circle, the mandala he had drawn on the wall with his blood. The day before he had had the strength to make a show of resistance. Today it was all he could do not to cry out in pain as they pulled him to his feet. He tried to withdraw, to remove himself from the prisoner who shuffled down the corridor, raging at the voice inside that kept recounting to him the dozen ways a clever prisoner could bring about his own death during interrogation. His body reacted involuntarily, wretching in dry, shuddering heaves as the doctor opened his bag.

He fell into a strange torpor, unaware of the activity around him, roused only by a new, shooting pain in his right arm. His gaze followed the needle in his vein toward the hose that led to an intravenous feed. A technician was injecting something into a valve in the tube. With effort he focused on the bottle of clear liquid the man left on the table. He would know in a moment, from the taste in his mouth, whether it was one of the knobs’ truth serums or one of the solutions designed to set the muscles on fire. He gazed at the bottle numbly, not comprehending at first as a soothing warmth oozed through his limbs. Then abruptly he was fully awake, searching the resentful faces of the team for an explanation. They were giving him a painkiller and a bottle of glucose. They were silently bandaging his wounds.

Ten minutes later the team was gone, the glucose tube still in his arm, nothing left on the table but a steaming mug of tea. Shan had barely taken his first sip when Cao materialized out of the shadows.

“I understand there are hundreds of miles of wilderness above here,” the major observed in a sour voice.

Shan’s answer came out in a hoarse croak. “Thousands.”

“Good. Get lost in them.” There was a cold vehemence in the major’s words. “If I ever see you again I will find a meat cleaver and a plane, and I will drop pieces of you over the mountains as you watch.”

Shan silently sipped his tea, calculating the ways Cao could be setting a trap for him, then recalled the gap of hours when the team should have been working on him. “You found the pistol,” he concluded.

Cao answered by stepping to his side, jerking the glucose needle from his arm and pointing to the door.

SHAN STOOD BLINKING in the briliant morning sun as the door slammed shut behind him. Shogo town was still waking up. A small flock of sheep wandered along the cracked pavement of the street. A group of shiny sport utility vehicles sped by filled with tourists bound for the Himalayas after a side trip to see the center of commerce at the top of the world. Somewhere someone burned incense, an offering to the gods for the new day. He had taken two stumbling steps before he noticed the well-dressed Tibetan sitting at a table outside the tea shop across the street. He paused as two army trucks, packed with border commandos, sped past in a cloud of dust. Then he limped across the road.

Tsipon, the leading businessman in Shogo, preeminent local member of the Party, was the only man in the town who ever wore a tie. In his suit and white shirt he looked as if he were attending a business meeting.

“I am grateful that you tried to get me transferred to the hospital,” Shan offered as he dropped into the chair beside him.

“It’s the climbing season, damn it. I can’t afford to lose another worker. The fool knobs don’t have a clue about economics.”

Another man appeared, holding three mugs of black tea, which he placed on the table, sliding one toward Shan, before settling into a third chair. He was tall and athletic looking, his skin bearing the weathered patina of one who spent long days in the high altitudes. With his black hair Shan might have taken him for a Tibetan waiter at first glance. Except that his features were Western and his clothes and boots would have cost a year’s income for the average Tibetan.

“Look at him,” the man groused in English to Tsipon. “He’s in no shape. The deal’s off.”

Shan glanced back at Tsipon, who stared at him expectantly. Apparently they were at a business meeting after all.

Tsipon offered a sly smile, then motioned to a woman standing inside the open door. She leaned over him, listening as he whispered, then hurried away.

“What day is it?” Shan asked in Tibetan.

“I’m sorry. It’s Saturday.”

Shan shut his eyes. For a moment he lost his grip on his pain, every synapse seeming to scream in agony.

“The region leading to the climbing trails on the Nepal side of the mountains has been sealed off by the Nepali military,” Tsipon said, switching to English. “Problems with the rebels who want to take over Katmandu. No Westerners are allowed to climb the south slope this season. Mr. Yates here has three groups of climbers already signed on for the season, expecting to be taken to the summit in the next six weeks. He needs to put them up the north face instead.”

As the stranger drank his tea, Shan saw the discolored flesh on two of his fingers, one of them missing its top joint, the mark of frostbite at high altitudes.