The roof terrace of the Red Palace, the maroon-colored core of the complex, was nearly empty when he arrived, and he turned to the astounding view over Lhasa and beyond, gazing out toward the river, the train station, and the snow-covered mountains in the far distance. In the few years since Shan had begun visiting Lhasa, the city had become unequivocally Chinese, but here and there a few traditional neighborhoods survived, and the Jokhang Temple in the old Barkhor district stood like a defiant symbol of the Tibetans, surviving the onslaught of the centuries. The Dalai Lamas, whose personal living quarters had been only a few steps from where Shan now stood, doubtlessly had enjoyed this same perspective over a different, simpler world. At least here in the austere stone palace, some of that world endured.

The woman he had known as Metok’s wife appeared at his side a quarter-hour after he arrived. Her hair was pinned in a tail behind her neck. She wore makeup and gold earrings. She had become more stylish, even attractive, looking more like the tour guide that was her cover story. It could well be her work when not on special assignment, Shan realized, for appealing young guides were often used to troll for information from Western tourists, sometimes even tempting them into overnight trysts. Shan unexpectedly recalled a tour guide from when he had first arrived in Beijing years earlier as a naive twenty-year-old. She had not really explained anything of historical interest, only spouted scripted observations about the hordes of slaves who died building the structures and the unforgivable, wasteful greed of the aristocrats. Her name had been Jiang, he recalled now, remembered because it was the same as Mao’s ruthless wife, who then dominated the government as part of the Gang of Four. Now, staring out at Lhasa, Shan decided to think of the treacherous woman beside him as Madame Jiang.

“The Red Palace was started during the life of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century,” Madame Jiang abruptly declared, “though there had been fortresses and temples here for a thousand years before that.”

“Spoken like a savvy tour guide,” he observed.

The woman nodded and used the push of a crowd of tourists to press against him, apparently following the instincts of her training. “It was still under construction when the Fifth died, but the Regent kept the Fifth’s death concealed until the work was completed twelve years later. The fiction was kept up by saying the Dalai Lama was on a retreat or a pilgrimage or in spiritual consultations. A fraud on the Tibetan people, for twelve long years.”