Metok had made a gesture with his hand before his death, then offered a mantra. Shan recalled the scene in his mind’s eye, focusing on Metok’s hand and his words. Shan had mistakenly thought the engineer had made a mudra, a Buddhist sign of devotion, when he had curled his fingers. But he had been imitating claws with his fingers and thumb. He had been signaling the Five Claws Dam. His words, moreover, had been a very special, very old mantra directed at the central deity on the wall of the former chapel. He had summoned the fierce red protector goddess.

Shan stood at the window gazing toward the government complex at the edge of town. Once there had been a temple there. His gaze drifted toward the northern mountains, toward the hydro project, then toward Yangkar.

Shan returned to the ever-attentive Amah Jiejie and asked if that morning’s security video footage from the station could be electronically sent to her computer, and whether she had the file on Yankay Namdol, the Tibetan recently released from the Shoe Factory.

“The sorcerer?” she asked with a mischievous smile. “Of course. I can’t tell you how many times the colonel has read it.” She disappeared into Tan’s office and moments later put the file in Shan’s hand, then picked up the phone for the call to Lhasa.

The file on the soft labor prisoner Yankay Namdol was much thicker than that of the executed engineer. It held the service records of the two dead soldiers from the convoy in the mountains, a lengthy statement by the Public Security officer in charge which read like a prosecutor’s opening in a trial, an investigative report into the hail chaser’s background, and even a bizarre statement that the officer had obtained from Bureau of Religious Affairs saying that, based on historical records, it seemed there were individuals in Tibet who knew secrets for controlling the weather and the Bureau had no way to prove that they could not. Shan paused over the conclusion of the Public Security officer, who stated that he had witnessed murder by “remote means.” The officer, Shan recalled, had been taken off the promotion lists for three years and transferred to a desk job in Lhasa, both at Tan’s insistence. Lieutenant Huan Yi had effectively been demoted and exiled from Lhadrung.