Zhu grinned. “It never went to Lhadrung. It was picked up by an Institute worker with four knob guards and taken to the Public Security office here in Lhasa, even though it was marked for the Lhadrung depot. The fools didn’t know that there were shipping papers taped to the back of the crate. The colonel told me to quietly remove them when we unloaded the military cargo. It was military cargo too.”

“The Institute had military goods?”

“It was not the first time. They don’t know that everything that gets loaded into the secure compartment goes through the hands of an army quartermaster back in Xining. I made a call. They had shipped military-grade explosives a few weeks ago. This time it was one of the army’s battlefield surveillance drones, one with four propellers and a video camera with a two-mile range.”

Shan recalled the rock fields around the top of the valley of the Five Claws. They provided perfect cover for someone worried about pursuit on the ground but anyone hiding in them would be conspicuous from above. The deputy director was raising the stakes in his fight against indigenous intruders.

“Then return to Lhadrung and check out that officer in Hong Kong who gave the statements against Metok. See if he had any connection to Huan.”

Zhu gave a reluctant nod of his head, and Shan watched the lieutenant wind his way through the thinning crowd on the square then called for another pot of tea. He was exhausted and had the long drive back to Yangkar ahead of him. Being in the city only made him appreciate his simple life in the remote town even more, and he pushed down the sense that he was on a path that would drive him out of the town forever. The more he asserted Tan’s authority, the more the gentle Tibetans of Yangkar would resent him. The more he resisted Tan’s efforts to make him one of the colonel’s key deputies, the more likely it was that Tan would recall him back to Lhadrung, which, like Lhasa, was rapidly becoming one more soulless Chinese enclave.

He noticed the little jar of toothpicks on the table and extracted one, then with his pen drew the numerals one through six in a circle on his napkin. He held the toothpick a few inches over the circle and dropped it four times, pausing each time to record on the corner of his napkin an inch-long line, a line divided in two segments, or a line divided into three segments, depending on which number it fell on. Together the four lines, stacked over each other in sequence, would combine to create a tetragram, used in Tao te Ching meditations.