6:37 p.m.
Another ping comes from the elevators. Before the men inside even step out, Ben hears the harsh squawk of walkie talkies, “kksssshhhh-t”, a crackling, disembodied voice barks an order, followed by another “kksssshhhh-t”, and he realizes he’s now facing the end of his gambit.
The progress bar on his screen is about three-quarters of the way to the end. It chugs across, pixel-by-pixel, and Ben stops breathing as he turns to see three police officers spot him and start approaching. Two other men in suits follow the police.
“Cai-De, ni bie dong ni de dian nao xitong,” one officer says, using Ben’s Chinese name. Cease all operations on your computer system.
The progress bar, close to the end, stops.
“Fuck.”
Ben hears some voices come from the room next to where he’s standing, a couple of guests preparing to leave. They open the door and step outside, looking confused by the presence of police officers heading down the corridor. Ben puts his foot in the door, pushes it open, jumps inside and locks the door.
“Hey!” one of the guests shouts. “Xiao tou!” Thief!
A moment later the police begin pounding on the door. Ben refreshes the upload, restarting the progress bar which appears to be moving faster this time.
Through the door Ben hears the police calling assistance from management while two others continue to pound on the door. He hears the words “intrusion” and “criminal”.
The progress bar is now halfway through to its finish. “C’mon, baby. Do this for me. C’mon.”
Three quarters.
Four fifths.
The signal is stronger in this room.
Bing.
6:40 p.m.
Officers on either side of Jake grip his wrists as the elevator begins its ascent to the seventh floor. It stops on the third and, when the doors open, three officers escort Ben in, two on either side holding him by the wrists, and another behind. The two men in suits are the last to step into the car, one wiry with gray hair, somewhere in his fifties and another, thirty-something and stocky. They have identical crew cuts.
Jake begins speaking. “Did you..?”
“Zhu kou!” the officer not holding either of their wrists says. Shut up. He hands over the papers that Ben and Jake had in their pockets to the older man wearing a suit. The documents contain the maps of money from Beijing to IOC members.
Ben looks at Jake and nods his head.
6:42 p.m.
Zhihong watches the last of the police cars drive away from the front of the American journalist’s building. The maintenance workers are maneuvering the large pane of glass into its tracks to make the entrance whole again.
They’d never fix things this quickly in Zhihong’s building, he thinks. This is something Yue Tao would point out to him. This development is full of foreigners and the newly affluent Chinese. Not the super-rich Chinese, with their connections to the biggest state-owned firms. It’s the kind of place that would be just within his and Yue Tao’s reach if they somehow earned maybe fifteen or twenty percent more.
The security guard steps in to help when the workers have trouble balancing the large glass pane. Sensing an opening, Zhihong starts walking towards the building.
Once he arrives, a group of foreigners move in from behind him. They’re dressed in jeans and t-shirts, laughing, two of them a couple, walking arm-in-arm.
With the security detail gone, the remaining guard on duty seems less interested in who’s coming and going. Zhihong slips in with the foreigners.
6:45 p.m.
“This information is now sitting in isolated servers in the U.S.,” Ben says, in perfect Mandarin, as the two men in suits examine the diagrams he and Diane constructed. “All of the connections have been verified. Copies of the data have been made and stored on standalone hard drives that your best hackers won’t be able to find.”
Some of the terms are lost on Jake but he figures out what Ben’s saying through context.
“Thirty-four million dollars,” he continues. “That’s all it took for you to buy the decision from the IOC members? Imagine how often that number will be repeated as the opening ceremony starts here next year, not to mention every single day until then?”
“You think this means anything to us?” the officer asks as he waves the papers in front of him like he’s about to throw them into a trash bin.
“I know you’re with the Ministry of State Security and it might not mean too much to you. But there’s also the Foreign Ministry, the Culture Ministry, the Olympics Committee. I could go on, but I suspect you have a better idea about whom you’ll need to consult with before disregarding what we’ve done.”
“It doesn’t really matter what we think,” Diane says. “What matters is what those above us think.”
She enunciates “us,” aligning herself, as far as Jake is concerned, with the Chinese side, all the way up to the Central Committee of the State Council. She’s standing with China and against its leaders at the same time.
“I’ve set a mechanism in motion to have all of this data distributed to every news bureau worldwide unless I’m back in the U.S., with Sun Qiang, within forty-eight hours,” Ben says. “My fingerprint and his simultaneously on a scanner in Boston is the only way to stop the countdown.”
To Jake, this exchange is barely comprehensible. As long as he’s been in the country, the authorities have the final word. There’s no negotiation. No one dictates terms to anyone in power in China. He wants to chime in. He wants to reinforce the stakes they’re playing with. He wants to remind the police that everything taking place in Beijing – the many billions of dollars spent on an urban transformation of unprecedented scale – has been for the Olympics. You can’t walk more than 100 metres without a reminder about how important the Games are for the country. But Jake can’t open his mouth because, once again, in the relative calm of this endgame, the thought of what transpired with Dawei deflates him. Whatever happens, Jake won’t be a victor. Qiang is now closer to his freedom than anytime since he was detained.
What would Jake say to him now, anyway? “I left someone bleeding on the ground, unconscious, maybe dead, to save you.” How is that heroic in Qiang’s world? If Jake wasn’t worthy of Qiang before, he’s even less so now.
The younger of the two state security operatives grabs his walkie-talkie and steps outside, into the corridor. His speech is too fast and muffled for Jake to hear anything he says.
“Collect their equipment and all of their files,” the older official tells two of the police officers. “And take them away, separately.”
“Two more things you need to know as your higher ups confer about how to deal with this,” Ben says.
“Nothing you say matters to me,” the operative replies as he watches the police officers pack Ben’s and Diane’s laptops into a large reinforced metal briefcase.
“I will reveal my identity and my undercover work over the past ten years for the Chinese government and the identities of others doing the same work,” Ben says.
With this threat, Jake understands how Ben is so fluent in Chinese. This also makes it clear how well he seems to be able to navigate the PSB’s network, answering questions that reside in the shadows of the bigger problems they’ve faced over the past few weeks.
“You just need to know how much you have to lose by holding Qiang,” he says as the police officers holding him lead him out to the corridor.
7:25 p.m.
“I know you see me as nothing more than a gangster now,” Ben says, sitting across from two officers in a white room in the basement of a building with white and institutional blue corridors. He hasn’t seen any daylight since the police escorted him to a windowless van. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. An hour already? Two?
“But consider how much I’ve done for China in the past few years.”
The officers look at Ben, stone-faced.
“Do you know why Qiang left me?”
No response.
“He discovered what I was doing and he felt it was morally wrong. And he left me. Yes, he’s known all this time and never said anything to anyone else. There’s your proof that he’s never been looking to harm the interests of this government, a government that all three of us have been serving.”
The officers stop taking notes.
“I’ve sacrificed a lot for this government and all I ask is that you send Qiang to safety. This is so important to me that I’m willing to take myself down and suffer the biggest consequence if you don’t.
They sit silently for a few moments.
“I’ll be a criminal in both countries.”
“We don’t serve the same government anymore,” one of the officers says, breaking the silence on their side.
Ben lets the comment fill the room.
“What if I did one more job for Beijing? What if I said I had the means to erase all evidence of the records we pulled for our report? It would be as if none of those payments ever took place.”
7:40 p.m.
“Did you even review the footage that my brother shot for his documentaries?” Diane asks the officers sitting across from her, in a building to which she was driven in the back of a van with no windows. She could be anywhere in Beijing.
“We’re asking the questions, not you,” one of the officers says.
“I can’t help but feel some optimism here because I know my brother is no enemy of the state. That must have become clear to anyone who’s on this case.”
“We’re not finished with our questions, Ms. Sun,” the other officer says. “Tell us, were we to release your brother, what guarantee do we have that someone, perhaps the American journalist or maybe someone else who’s in possession of the data, won’t release the report you’ve helped to construct?”
“You are both aware that I have a high-paying job in international finance. You also know I have a daughter. I love her very much. I’ve been kept from her for much of this past month and I don’t want to lose another hour with her. I also have a husband. I want all of us to be together again.”
“Of course, we know the details of your life, Ms. Sun,” one officer says while the other takes notes.
“Well then. I’m your insurance. I have no intention of leaving this country. By all means, invalidate my passport. You have the power to do that. I suppose that measure has already been taken.”
The officer continues taking notes.
“Despite all of this, I love my country,” Diane says. “I want to go back to Shanghai and resume the life I had until you detained Qiang. If Jake or Ben or anyone else allowed someone to publish these records, you could take my life away. I trust them enough to know they won’t let that happen to me.”
7:50 p.m.
“If you’ve been monitoring all of my personal communications, you know I’m no American nationalist,” Jake says to the officers across from him after recounting all of the details of his relationship with Ben, Diane and, of course, Qiang.
The officers speak perfect English. They don’t want a language barrier interfering with the clarity of his answers.
“You also know that I’m no U.S. government operative. I’m just an idiot who fell into journalism and this is where I wound up. You must know by now that foreign news bureaus are your last place to look for spies or people trying to undermine the government. We gather intelligence all day, all of which you can monitor, and then we publish what we know on websites that you all read. Let’s be honest. We don’t write anything that would surprise you. The spies are probably the wives of investment bankers.”
One of the two officers sitting across from Jake continues taking notes while the other one checks levels on the recording device.
Jake has more to say but doesn’t know whether it will help. Something that will be awkward for him to hear in any setting, let alone a sterile PSB interrogation room. Given what he might be facing, Jake figures there’s no point in holding anything back. Who knows how long he’ll be interrogated, how many times he’ll need to write out his side of the story. He may as well say everything exactly as it’s happened.
“You also probably know that I fell in love with Qiang.”
The officer taking notes stops and rubs his eyes. The other one, who’s asking the questions, leans back in his chair.
“Assuming we let your friend Sun Qiang go, what will you do?”
Unsure how to answer, Jake hesitates.
“I think I’m in a lot more trouble than the others, right?”
The officers stare back, expressionless.
“Why would you be in more trouble than them?” one asks.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course we’re serious. What sort of jokes do you think we’re playing, Jake Bradley?” the other asks.
“I got into a fight with someone earlier today. I ran out of my building, screaming my unit number to the security guard. I broke the door as I left. The whole thing shattered behind me. Someone must have reported this. I think the individual I fought with was hurt very badly.”
One of the officers flips through a few pages of the dossier in front of him.
“We know nothing about any such incident,” he says. “Maybe whomever you got into a fight with must have got up and left.”
Jake doesn’t know whether to believe him. What if Dawei has been lying in his doorway, bleeding, for the past who-knows-how-many hours? Is that possible? He screamed out his unit number as clearly as he could. He left his door wide open. There’s no way the security guard wouldn’t have investigated.
The officers seem completely disinterested in this sudden confession. What about the bruise on the side of his forehead? Jake wonders if he should point it out as evidence of “the incident” but stops himself.
“Getting back to the matter at hand, you need to know that Qiang will be released this evening,” the first officer says. “He’ll be on a midnight flight out of the country.”
The other officer picks up.
“We’re releasing you now. We won’t stop you from seeing Qiang before he leaves but you need to know that there will be consequences for you if you mention anything about what has transpired today. As for the report you, Ms. Sun and the other one prepared, we’ve been assured that it won’t be published. If it is, you’ll be agitating for the release of Ms. Sun and you won’t get an outcome as good as you’re getting now.”
A female officer enters the room and places Jake’s cell phone in front of him.
“Don’t turn this on until you’re back at your apartment,” she says in Mandarin.
8:20 p.m.
The windowless van transporting Jake veers frequently between lanes as the siren screams. The motion induces a bout of nausea which reminds him that he hasn’t eaten since sometime in the morning when he was sitting at his desk munching on a warm sesame biscuit while pulling data on companies connected to IOC members. He also hasn’t showered since yesterday. All of the running around, releasing sweat infused with the pheromones of fear, has produced a stench that rises up from his armpits.
The van turns a corner and stops. Jake feels someone in the front of the van step out and hears him walk to the back of the vehicle. The doors swing open, and Jake recognizes a new residential tower rising above the trees in front of him. He’s across from a police sub-station between Qiang’s building and his own. Bathed in pale orange light from a setting sun, the building is nearly complete.
“Thank you,” Jake says, not knowing why, to the officer as he steps onto the street.
Getting no response, he turns on his phone to check the time.
“Shit,” he says, calculating back from midnight. Less than three hours before Qiang’s flight out. He’ll need to be on his way to the airport in less than half an hour. Maybe sooner. There’s hardly any time to see him. But, Dawei. Their altercation has blended with the subsequent capture at the China World Hotel and the confusing interrogation at the police station into an otherworldly farce, as though
all of it was a dream that would dissolve into nothing with a shake of his head, like sunshine disperses fog. But the bruise on his forehead reminds him otherwise.
Jake knows which direction to run, and it requires his full determination to start jogging towards his apartment and away from Qiang’s building. The effort feels like shedding skin, each step transforming him further into someone else, someone who never longed for Qiang.
8:31 p.m.
Out of breath, Jake steps onto his floor. He dashes around the corner to his unit and stops. The door is shut. He gulps while reaching into his front pocket for his keys.
“Jake Bradley?”
The voice, speaking his name in a heavy Chinese accent, comes from behind him. Jake turns and sees a man somewhere about his own age. Pale but handsome in a boyish way and dressed in the kind of nondescript suit worn by everyone vaguely professional, the man looks like just another of the many undercover operatives he’s been answering to all day. But why would he be by himself?
“Have you come to investigate something?” Jake asks.
“Wo bu dong Yinwen,” the man says. I don’t speak English.
Jake repeats the question in Mandarin and the man lets out a small chuckle, full of fatigue and despair.
“This place was full of investigators—inside your unit, in the fire stairs, downstairs in the lobby,” he says.
Jake looks at the door, wondering why the authorities are not still here looking for him, with handcuffs.
“Who are you?” Jake asks.
“I’m a friend of Dawei’s.”
Caught between his concern about what’s behind the door and the time that’s ticking down ahead of Qiang’s flight, Jake doesn’t know what to say. With nerves raw from weeks of overload followed by a day of madness and violence, he’s only able to put his key in the lock and turn.
“I see.”
“My name is Zhihong.”
Jake can’t continue this conversation until he knows what’s behind the door. The tension silences both of them. Jake pushes it and nothing obstructs its arc. The lights inside are on. They weren’t when he fled hours earlier. Jake steps inside. Zhihong follows.
The Wounded Muse Page 29
