“This was not my idea, Shan,” Colonel Tan said. “I didn’t know until Amah Jiejie told me where you were. I came as soon as I heard.”

“You invited me.”

“To my office, not to this. This was Major Xun’s doing. It was a case run out of Lhasa, but they asked him for a quiet place for the execution. He heard you were coming and had her tell you to come here, then added an extra chair to the official witness gallery. He seemed to think it a good joke.”

“I wasn’t laughing.”

“No. I don’t suppose you were. I’m sorry. Major Xun is the most efficient adjutant I’ve ever had but he can be overzealous at times.”

Shan did not reply, but as he walked silently, a step behind Tan, he realized that in all their time together he could not recall ever hearing the colonel apologize to him. Tan led him outside toward his waiting car, a worn, boxy Red Flag limousine that should have been retired twenty years earlier. Once Tan got in beside Shan, the driver sped onto the paved road that led out of the expanding government compound and into a landscape of barley fields and grazing sheep.

Tan stared out the window and did not turn when he finally spoke. “I need you, Shan.”

Shan heard the unexpected worry in the colonel’s voice and realized Tan had sensed his desolation. Had he sensed the words that had been on Shan’s tongue since the moment Tan touched his shoulder in the execution chamber? I resign, Shan silently mouthed, then swallowed down the rest. I can no longer be a gear in Beijing’s monstrous machine. I can no longer be a law enforcement official in your soulless empire. He had practiced such speeches several times in recent months, but each time the words choked away with the grim realization that he could not walk away from Tan. He hated Tan for being the tyrant who ran the most infamous camps in the Tibetan gulag, but he owed the man his freedom, his job, his housing, his life. He would never be able to find another job, another place where he could legally reside or, most importantly, ensure the safety of his son Ko, an inmate in one of Tan’s brutal prisons.

“His name was Metok Rentzig,” Shan said at last. “I didn’t understand what the assembly was for. I thought it was just going to be one of those testimonials from a rehabilitated Tibetan. Charges must have been read. I wasn’t listening.”

“Metok was a senior official at the new hydroelectric project. He took bribes. It was in the papers.”