"My brother Matt was living there," he said simply.

"Was?"

The driver was now shouting on his cellphone, clearly enraged about some issue. One hand clamped the device to his ear, and for an instant he seemed to be about to shake a fist in the air, as if in remonstration. The bus was skirting the side of the road by inches. If the driver lost concentration the passengers could expect a dizzying plunge into the valley below. Harel waited until the man was calm again, then he spoke. "He died."

"Died? That's awful. What happened? Some disease?"

Again Harel was silent for a while. "It seems that someone killed him?"

"Wow."

Harel looked back out the window.

"I mean - wow - that's murder," said the girl. "How did it happen?"

Harel knew more questions were coming. "He was a missionary. He..."

"A Christian missionary?"

"Yes, he..."

"A Christian missionary?" The girl laughed, a high-pitched, melodic sound like Christmas bells. "Here in Dharamsala? Where the Dalai Lama used to hang out. And all the Tibetan priests. That's a pretty thankless job."

Yes, you could put it like that, thought Harel. Matt wasn't thanked. Quite the opposite. He was murdered.

The girl seemed to be about to speak again. But then she pulled from around her feet a grey canvas travel bag and unzipped it. From inside she retrieved an English-language newspaper. "I read about him on the airplane," she said. "Look." She turned to an inside page and pointed. "That's him?"

With reluctance Harel glanced at the newspaper. Under the headline, "Police Hunting Killer of US Missionary" was a grainy black-and-white photo of his younger brother. It showed a handsome, wide-eyed young man with freckles, blonde hair and a toothy, chipmunk grin. A news service had apparently lifted it from Matt's college yearbook. "Yes, that's him."

She skimmed through the short article. "It says here that he was part of a gang that was smuggling art treasures from temples out of India." She looked up at Harel. "A missionary smuggling artworks. I guess that's better than being a pedophile." The smirk on her thin lips said it all.

"He was not smuggling artworks," objected Harel. Actually, he could not be sure about that. In recent years he had not enjoyed a lot of contact with Matt, or with anyone else in his family. But he absolutely refused to believe that his brother was involved in smuggling art.

He recalled the anguished phone call from his mother, begging him to fly immediately to Dharamsala to investigate. "The Indian police are telling us hardly anything," she said. "It's your summer vacation. We'll pay. I know you still hate your dad, but please do it for me. And for Sue."

I don't hate Dad, he wanted to say. I just don't want to be in the same half of the country as him.

But he knew it was not the occasion for an argument. "I can pay," he said. Harel enjoyed a professor's salary, and since the bitter divorce was living alone. Money was hardly a problem. And, with Matt's wife Sue about to give birth to the couple's second child, she would not be able to make the long journey.

But he resented the imposition all the same. It might be the summer vacation, but he had a book overdue with his publisher, on top of a couple of journal articles that he still hadn't even started writing. Meanwhile, his department head was berating him for not publishing enough.

"Are you a missionary too?" asked the girl.

He sighed at the question. "I used to be." And my parents before that, he almost said. It's the family trade, you know.

He braced for further interrogation, but then he glanced out the window and realized that the bus was arriving in the township of McLeod Ganj. This was Upper Dharamsala, the actual place where the Dalai Lama had lived and died. And, when he thought about it, this was also the place where his younger brother Matt had lived and died.

The hippie was no longer interested in murdered missionaries. She and her companion were looking excitedly out at a vivid kaleidoscope of rickety, multi-colored buildings that were jammed into narrow, winding streets, lines of washing dangling from verandahs, gaudy Tibetan prayer flags flapping from roofs.

The base of the buildings held rows of shops, and Harel's heart sank as he surveyed these - the internet cafe, the organic, vegetarian pizza store, the celestial cosmic souvenir stall, whatever that was. Billboards promoted yoga classes, fortune tellers, courses in herbal medicines and meditation sessions. The fake-Rolex and pirated-DVD outlets were presumably lurking just around the corner.

But he was a professor in California, and could handle all that. He even knew that as a professor of spiritual art he should be excited about this first-ever trip to Little Lhasa. However, he had been to the real Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, now occupied by China, and had been privileged to view many of the magnificent treasures there. He doubted that anything was about to stimulate his intellect in this outpost of hippie colonialism. He planned to make his visit as short as possible.

No, it was something else that sent Harel further into despondency. He stared at the buildings. Most looked as if a strong wind would knock them down. It was the monsoon season, and small streams ran down the streets. He looked at the people walking through the mud - many were bent and bowed, as if they were carrying a load of rice on their backs.

Then he imagined the homes. Already he could see the pale brown water that emerged when you turned on the taps, the lavatories that didn't flush properly, the neighbors in the apartment above yours who drank and played mah jong - or whatever the local equivalent was - all night, and the kids outside your front door who were skilled in picking your pockets.

This place screamed out two words: "Mission Field." It reminded him of his upbringing and of his early adult life, until he "went native," as the saying went, married a local girl and became a professor instead. To be followed by the bitter divorce and the abject humiliation in his father's church, at the hands of his own father. But he knew how attractive this place would be to his parents, and how excited Matt undoubtedly felt at coming to live and work here.

There was indeed a time when he relished all this, took pride in living in towns like this. But now he preferred a comfortable California duplex, gourmet cooking, a glass of wine and some soft music. He didn't want to be a missionary any more. This town transported him to his past. And that was a place he no longer wished to visit.

Military Orders is available for download at the Amazon Kindle store.

About the Author.

Martin Roth (http://www.military-orders.com) is a veteran journalist and foreign correspondent, and the author of many books.

He has worked on daily and Sunday newspapers in England, Australia, New Zealand and Greece. For seventeen years he lived in Tokyo, and his reports from Asia have appeared in leading publications around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun.

He has also spent six months working on kibbutzim in Israel.

The first three books in his Johnny Ravine private detective series are:.

* Prophets and Loss.

* Hot Rock Dreaming (Australian Christian Book of the Year finalist).

* Burning at the Boss.

He is also the author of the "Military Orders" series of novels, the first four of which are:.

* Brother Half Angel.

* The Maria Kannon.

* Military Orders.

* Festival in the Desert.

He lives in Melbourne, Australia with his Korean wife and three sons.

Learn more, and check for new releases, at Amazon's Martin Roth author page or at the author's own website. Check the author's Facebook page for special promotions.

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