“Not until you return,” Shan said. “I will be at your office.” He waited until Tan and the doctor drove away with their escort, then walked the half mile to the old building in the center of the town. To his great surprise as he climbed the final flight of stairs to the top floor, Shan heard Amah Jiejie laughing. He found Tan’s assistant in a conference room, having tea with Cato Pike.

The American nodded at Shan, as if expecting him. “I was explaining to this lovely lady about a problem I had once in Beijing. We discovered that a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been delaying the visas for the family of one of our attachés for nearly a year, trying to pressure him into sharing secrets about some investment negotiations. So I managed to get a camera installed in his apartment. A few days later I had a video of a little ritual he performed every day after returning from the office. He propped a portrait of the Chairman on his kitchen table, took off all his clothes and folded them neatly on a chair, then put on an old Mao cap and paraded naked in front of the Chairman, calling out criticisms to the portrait. I showed him ten seconds of the footage and we got the visas in an hour.”

Shan offered an uncertain grin. “Why are you here?” he asked Pike as Amah Jiejie poured him tea.

“Call me an American tourist seeking to experience Tibet in all its glory.”

“Lhadrung County is off-limits to all tourists,” Shan pointed out.

Pike shrugged. “Like I said, all its glory.”

Amah Jiejie laughed again.

Shan was not amused. The American seemed more and more like a powder keg with a smoldering fuse. He switched to English. “Why are you are being so reckless?”

“You mean why would a father try to pry open the conspiracy that got his daughter killed?” Pike replied, his voice sharp as a blade.

“The conspiracy is not in Lhadrung town.”

Pike didn’t reply, just unfolded printouts of more of the emails Cao had intercepted. “I needed a seasoned set of eyes on these records, someone who understands the bureaucracy,” he said, gesturing to Amah Jiejie. It was an exchange between an anonymous “Five Claws Project” email address and another address used for the Lhadrung military depot.

Pike read the first out loud. Checking the order for equipment. Send timetable.

“Innocuous on its face,” Pike said. “But it is only the first of a dozen, and always between midnight and a quarter past midnight, on three successive nights. Special messages at prearranged times between two people using the addresses as cover.”

“They were arranging the shipment of the drone,” Shan said.

“No, this was weeks before the drone,” Pike countered, then pointed to an abbreviation that recurred in each message.

“FAE?” Shan asked.