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"Lo A TiRCa#h." ("Thou shalt not murder.")

• Exodus 20:13

It was nearly four o'clock, the time Dan would be finished with his Physics exam, and I was supposed to meet him over at Van Allen Hall. But I also wanted at least to get started on the contacts. The men on my list were masters, who moved beyond barriers. They were intimate with Asian politics and had reliable inside tracks to the military through their experience training Special Forces. I was also sure that they had been on numerous covert assignments for one government or another, although I never knew any details. But these remarkable gentlemen also knew what was happening "on the street," so to speak, having wandered the "lakes and rivers" themselves. (Jiang-hu is the Chinese term for the flotsam and jetsam of society - itinerant monks, herbalists, martial artists, acrobats, singers, tinkers, and other craftsmen who made their living on the road. It also included the Chinese Mafia, beggars, pickpockets, gangs, and thieves - the riff-raff.)

I tapped out Brad's number in Hawaii on my cellular. His wife answered. He and his brother Norm (who was known as Stormin' Norman after the baseball player, long before General Schwarzkopf got his moniker from Operation Desert Storm) were on the stateside mainland in the Catskills, co-teaching a training course with Kang. The Path of the Warrior they called it. They taught the essence of Bushido in a few days. Having taken that little seminar, I knew what an intense survival course it was. They put you in situations where there was no alternative but to awaken the Warrior inside. I had survived the Bamboo Party, pinned at Death's Door by ten burly men. I had learned the secrets of how to break boards with a flick of the wrist, and dodge rubber knives thrown at me from behind. Having them together would make things much easier, but they would be unavailable for a few more days. So I jotted down the course location in my Daytimer.

Old Master Zhao was an advanced octogenarian recluse and had no phone, so I would have to visit him in person, after I talked with Kang first. Kang was what I imagine Zhao must have been like sixty years ago. He was a veritable fighting zoo. One weekend alone I counted him doing over 30 different martial forms at world-class level: all forms of Taiji (Chen, Zhang, Wu); Dragon, Tiger, Snake, Eagle, Mantis, Monkey, Crane; and of course Ba-gua, Xing-yi, Shao-lin, Qin-na - all of these either barehanded or wielding various weapons. He was even more deadly when drunk, and anything, even a daisy, was a formidable weapon in his hands. Yet he was a Taoist priest and a great Qi-gong healer.

Tuan was a genial, unassuming electrical engineer in his early forties. In his twenties he studied for three months with an old Grand Master, and, one day, he just got the essence of Taiji. From that moment on he was invincible. He never really learned any of the formal exercises and had no recognizable style. He just stood or walked casually like an ordinary person. But if you attempted to push him, there would be a slight vibration, and you would find yourself somewhere else. To get to Tuan, I had to find my friend Xiao Bo. Bo lived right in Iowa City, but had no phone. So I'd go over to his place that evening after dinner. Unfortunately, I never got there.

Satisfied that I had at least made a reasonable start on the project, I put away my chart pad, locked the office, and headed across Old Campus for the Physics Building. Along the way I stopped for a few moments at the Hancher box office in the Student Union to pick up some tickets for a play that weekend. Then I strolled up the hill, particularly enjoying the green canopy that was once again spreading above my head among the venerable trees.

The oldest part of campus, called the Pentacrest, was made up of five original buildings arranged as four limbs, with the golden domed Old Capitol in the center. I strolled in front of Jessup Hall, the administration building that formed the northeast limb of the Pentacrest, and was about to cut across to Iowa Avenue and Van Allen Hall. At that moment a Chinese man in his mid thirties, who looked like an older grad student, passed me and entered Jessup Hall. I remember noticing him because he was walking rapidly and had a very serious look on his face. He was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of the jacket.He reminded me of other Chinese students who came belatedly to study abroad after a ten year hiatus in their schooling during the era of the Red Guards when China's entire education system shut down. Imagine a country of over a billion people with a gap of ten years in the mental growth of their entire population! What a dislocation from the reality of the rest of the world that must give them! I had also felt that same sensation on Taiwan among retired soldiers who had campaigned for years with Chiang Kai-shek's KMT and the Republic. Then they found themselves living alone in their fifties on an island without any wife or family, and without any career skills or income beyond their pitiful military pension and whatever they scrounged from menial jobs, such as driving a pedicab. Well, at least the students from the Cultural Revolution gap now had a chance at education and a career, even if it was a late start for them.

Suddenly up in the direction I was headed, there was the sound of sirens. There were shouts. "Get away quick!" "Stop him!" "He's got a gun!" "He's killing people!"

I peered ahead and saw several students running my way. From the lanky semi-Asian lope I could tell one of them was my son, Dan. "Dad, dad," he shouted as he caught sight of me. "Watch out. There's a guy going around with a gun shooting."

At this point Dan ran up panting. "What do you mean - shooting people?" I asked, incredulously.

"Yeah. Right in the middle of our exam we heard weird noises upstairs, and then somebody came into the hall and told us to leave quickly. They said a Chinese graduate student went bonkers. He came into the Physics Department and shot a bunch of professors. I think he got away, too. Cops are swarming all over the building. One of my friends here said he saw the guy heading in this direction. So we came over to see if he was right. It's confused, man. And nobody seems to know for sure what's going on."

"Uh-oh," I muttered. "I just saw what looked like a Chinese student go into Jessup."

My common sense switched off. I turned and raced up the steps into Jessup Hall, followed by Dan, who shouted, "Hey, dad, what are you doing? The guy's nuts! And dangerous, too. Don't go in there! Oh, shit."

I found myself in the atrium, not knowing which way to turn. Suddenly someone came running down the stairs. I recognized the Chinese student I had seen before. He was carrying a handgun openly. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw us. Immediately he raised the gun, clenched it in both hands, and crouched into firing position.

We froze. There was no place to find cover, and he was ready to shoot. For a moment time stopped, and we just stared at each other. Suddenly the gunman turned his weapon on himself and pulled the trigger. We stared in a strange combination of surprise, horror and relief as the crazed gunman blew out the back of his own head, spattering blood and brains all over the staircase behind him. The body sank into a crumpled heap on the floor. The famous footage of Kennedy's head that fatal moment in Dallas flashed for a microsecond in my overcharged imagination.

Shouting - no screaming - came from upstairs, summoning us back into action. We edged around the motionless body and the mess on the staircase and rushed up to the second floor. There a quivering secretary mutely pointed up to the third floor. We raced on up to the next landing. Through the door to one of the offices I could see Dean Holcomb lolling sideways in his chair with multiple red wounds in his chest. Near the entrance to the office, slumped over her smaller desk was his secretary/receptionist, a coed named Stephanie McBride. I knew both Stephanie and the Dean vaguely from occasional business that took me to that office. The secretary was popular as a bright student and very attractive woman. Her long blonde hair, that normally bounced with an enticing mid-western tease, now spread about her head like an aureole on the desk, golden threads soaking in a pool of crimson. Both she and her boss looked very dead to me, but another secretary, Penny Howard, was leaning over Stephanie trying to take a pulse from her limp right wrist.

"It all happened so fast. He walked in, pulled the gun out, and shot Stephanie in the face. Dean Holcomb was not even out of his chair when that horrible man shot him three times in the chest. I'm afraid the dean is gone, but Stephanie may still be alive," she said in a wavering voice.

"Dan, call 911," I barked. "Tell them there are at least two dead here, one the gunman, and one other is seriously wounded. We need help right away." Dan got on the phone.

Then I moved over opposite Penny on Stephie's left side, motioning for Dan's classmate to help, too. "She's bleeding a lot," I said. "I know it's very dangerous, but we have to move Stephanie now or, with her face in all that blood, and bent over like this, she'll suffocate before help arrives."

As gently as we could, we lifted her head, slid the chair back, and slowly lowered her to the floor. Her body was limp, with hardly any detectable breathing, and she was clearly unconscious. But we discovered a problem. The bullet had smashed through her teeth - probably as she smiled up at him and asked sweetly, "What can I do for you?" At least her head was not blown off. The slightly downward trajectory of the bullet as the gunman stood and she sat must have sent it into her neck. I didn't see an exit wound. Her teeth must have slowed the momentum of the bullet, which was probably stuck in her neck. Now her mouth was filled with blood and shattered teeth. She was likely to drown by breathing in her own body fluids, if she could breathe at all. So we rolled her onto her side so her wounds could drain out onto the floor.

Several ambulances had already been dispatched to Van Allen, just a few blocks away. I guess they dispatched one of these with a team of medics, for they arrived on our scene of mayhem in less than five minutes. They carefully moved Stephie onto a stretcher, inserted tubes to protect her breathing, and whisked her off to the University Hospital emergency room. They also confirmed Holcomb's death and began the disposition of his body. In the meantime University and town police arrived and began photographing the scene and taking names and initial statements from various witnesses, including Dan, his classmate, and myself.

For over an hour we witnessed and participated in the aftermath of the rampage. We told detectives what we had seen and done. At the same time the full scope of the event continued to unfold. The lone gunman was a Mainland Chinese graduate student by the name of Shao Gan. He had nearly completed a Ph.D. degree in Physics and had an excellent academic record. Yet, that afternoon, for no obvious reason, he walked into the department office, shot to death three tenured physics professors, and one of the top TA's, who was a Ph.D. candidate like himself. After decimating the U of I Physics Department, he walked over to Jessup Hall to create the scene we had been a part of.

The theory that seemed to emerge over the next couple of hours was that Shao was disgruntled because he had not received the same amount of scholarship money granted by the department to the other outstanding Ph.D. candidate. He had taken revenge on his classmate and the Physics faculty that he held responsible for what he apparently felt was an unfair decision. To completely satisfy his anger, he also took out Dean Holcomb, the university official who administered the graduate student loans and scholarships. Poor Stephie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Penny explained to me with tears in her eyes that Stephanie had been on work-study in the office for two years, but was almost ready to graduate. Ironically, she had just recently left her job as Secretary to the Dean in order to complete her thesis work. She happened to be there today only because she came in to substitute for a few days. The new girl had some family affairs to deal with and asked a favor of the complaisant Stephie. And now the unfortunate coed was perhaps dying, and at the very least was seriously wounded and disfigured for life.

And this is happening in Iowa? I shuddered. Maybe in New York or California or Texas this could be. But who ever heard of mass murders in tranquil Iowa where life mostly consists of growing endless fields of corn, soybeans, and hogs.

Was this just a case of an overstressed student cracking under the strain, or was there some hidden connection to the things Noah was telling me? I decided to give him a call that night and find out.

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