Suddenly Huan recognized Lhakpa. “You! The damned professor! I suspected you had escaped, damn you, but only confirmed it in our recent interrogations at the 404th. You’re the bastard who slipped from my custody in that hail storm!” He lifted his pistol, aiming at Lhakpa’s chest.

Jiao pushed down Huan’s gun. “You know nothing about our relations with Beijing,” he said to Shan.

“Of course we do. We had to think like Public Security. Watch when your subject least expects it. Intercept emails. Emails sent over many weeks, with glowing reports of progress. Never a mention of all the accidents, and wholesale lies about foundations being poured and the control room being almost complete. Sounded like an entirely different project when I read them. There was even one about a parade of grateful Tibetans showering you and the director with flowers on May Day. I doubt even Beijing believed that one.”

“Shut up!” Huan shouted. “You are finished! No one will listen to you! You will all be gone! You’re as good as dead already!”

Shan ignored him and kept speaking to Jiao. “I didn’t mean to confuse you,” he said. “The evidence won’t be presented by me or the colonel. We have collected all the proof of your crimes in one file, so it reads like a story. All except that of your murder of Tara in Larung Gar. We’ll keep that among us. The proof will be presented by another old relic. He was most unhappy to find you had forged his chop and used it on several critical documents. And to usurp the name of the amban—that was sacrilege. Just how accurate is the Commissar with his crossbow?”

Jiao went very still.

Huan stepped closer to Lhakpa, aiming the gun at his head now. “Give us the phone!” he screeched.

Jiao ignored the Public Security officer. “The Commissar understands the need to cut corners from time to time, in the interest of the motherland.”

“Too late. He probably would have taken a bribe if you had offered one.” Shan shrugged. “But you hurt his feelings. You may not believe in the mountain god, Comrade Jiao, but the Commissar is a god of the Party. As old as the hills but revered almost as much as the Great Helmsman. There is no one in Beijing who will not take his call, no one who will not accede to his wishes.”

“How could you have known about the signatures?” Jiao growled.

“The governor wasn’t even in Tibet when he supposedly signed Metok’s death warrant. And why would the Commissar put his chop on it when the project wasn’t his?” Shan asked. “Major Xun didn’t realize that when he started stealing glances at Colonel Tan’s mail that the colonel’s assistant would start stealing glances at his. You were using faxes because the email service was unreliable. You probably shredded yours. Xun did not.”