“Your safety would be an illusion, Tenno-san,” Jiang had said, standing under yet another Beijing bridge, the day before she flew to Kyushu with Wu Dao. “Where would you run?”
“Perhaps you’re right. It’s just hard to imagine leaving her in such a situation.”
“No one knows she even exists. She is on nobody’s radar. I think it will be safe enough… as safe as we can manage.”
He’d mollified her with such assurances, and she’d agreed to hand Li Li over at a food court attached to the the Coex Underground Mall. A public place, it would still be crowded in the early evening – so far, so good. Emily decided to scout the location three hours early, made Li Li study the station map by the main entrance, showed her the best escape routes, and where they would meet if things went south. The Bongeunsa Temple complex occupied a park outside the north entrance of the mall, and the Maitreya statue, a ninety-foot tall statue of the Buddha, would be both sufficiently open and crowded to be easy to find and relatively safe in a moment of need.
These neighbors, shopping mall and Buddhist temple, apparently incongruous, and yet somehow each icons representative of the cultural heart of Korea – perhaps this was an appropriate meeting place. Founded over a thousand years ago, during the reign of Wongseong, king of Silla, The temple had been brutally suppressed during a resurgence of Confucianism during the Joseon dynasty several centuries later. It wsn’t hard to see how a cult of individual meditation was bound to come into conflict with the bureaucratic theology needed by an expanding empire. The temple was restored several times in the subsequent centuries, and seemed now fully reconciled to the current, omnipresent bureaucracy. But the cost of this peaceful resolution might (in some bit of karmic balance) have required welcoming its mercantile counterpoise across the street. A sign of the rapprochement announced itself in one particular program – for the curious, fifty thousand won would buy the privilege of experiencing life as a monk for an afternoon.
Emily rehearsed the emergency protocols as they sat in the ‘Lake’ food court, with its water features and artificial palm trees, and again when they walked through a nearby aquarium’s water tunnel, and later while they browsed the Kimchi Museum. Of course, Li Li could hardly avoid raising an eyebrow, as any teenager would. – “I’ll be okay, Mom,” she said – though practically anyone could see the mix of excitement and trepidation that had only just begun to grip her heart. The pleasures of an enormous mall, larger than anything Charlottesville had to offer, or any place in Virginia, for that matter, only underlined the transformation of her world that was about to happen.
“Don’t hide in the aquarium tunnel, or any narrow place like that. You’ll just trap yourself.”
“I’ll just watch from the third floor walkway, okay?” Li Li pointed to a spot overlooking the food court.
“I’d prefer it if you watched from inside a store. That way, people will be paying attention to you, in case….”
“I know. Outside, I’m nobody’s concern, so no one will notice if anything happens.”
“Make fun of me if you like…”
“I’m sorry, Emmy. You’re right. Now, can we go to the gaming center?”
She had been patient, Emily had to admit, and her worrying might, perhaps, be verging on the oppressive. Li Li had been the soul of cooperation when she dragged her to a flea market in Hannamdong – if it hadn’t been for all the young people there, and the trendy clothes, she probably would have refused – and bought her a whole new wardrobe.
“But those were my favorite shoes, Emmy.”
“You can’t have any American clothes, or your uncle’s cover story will fall apart.”
“Is it really that dangerous?”
“Maybe not, but I’m not taking any chances, young lady.”
So, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to let her kill an hour or so in the gaming center, surrounded by a couple hundred other teenagers. It only took her a few minutes to find an open station in a circle devoted to a virtual role playing game. Emily watched over one shoulder as Li Li designed her character – some sort of elfin goddess with pointy ears and a skimpy outfit, but the handle of a long-sword peeked out over one shoulder and Emily couldn’t help smiling. “That’s my girl,” she whispered to herself.
“You’re distracting me.” Li Li tried to shrug Emily’s hands from her neck a few minutes later, in the middle of a battle with some sort of berserker and a cloaked wizard. The sword flickered in the twilight scene as her avatar used it to simultaneously fend off spells and blows from a mace. When she prevailed, butterflies fluttered from the end of the blade in a triumphant sort of rainbow, and two boys on the other side of the circle groaned.
“Sorry, sweetheart.”
Emily walked to the large windows at the front of the gaming center and scanned the food court for the umpteenth time. Choi wasn’t due for another hour, but she still wanted to watch for any suspicious activity. Two men in gray suits hovered by a fountain – they hadn’t noticed her, and she hardly knew if they were agents or just bored businessmen. She didn’t see any suspicious bulges under their jackets… and yet, they seemed familiar. Had she seen them before, in Kyoto, or Kyushu? Surely this was just paranoia brought on by the momentous transaction she dreaded.
She glanced back at Li Li, her long, straight hair waving as she maneuvered her avatar through one battle after another. Why hadn’t she chosen an avatar with black hair instead of this blond elf? Before she realized it, she was standing directly behind Li Li again, now braiding her hair. Halfway into a French braid, she caught herself – a rescued orphan would have something simpler, something she could do for herself – and made it into a basic braid, and draped the tail end over one shoulder.
“It’s time to move,” she whispered, and Li Li knew better than to argue. She handed her controller to a girl who’d been waiting for a turn.
“Is he here?”
“Not yet, I think. But I want to get you set before anyone sees what we’re up to.”
A side entrance to the gaming center led to a less crowded staircase, and a boutique on the third floor with large windows overlooking the food court served her purpose.
“I’ll be just down there, okay?”
Li Li nodded, and ticked off the protocols they’d settled on. “If anyone asks, I’m waiting for my mom, who’s in the dressing rooms, and if you text ‘two’ it means all clear, but ‘three’ means get out…
“… and don’t run, but move smartly along.”
“We meet at the statue outside the temple, right, Emmy?”
A kiss on the top of her head, and Emily was off, out the shop door and down the main escalator, to see what the future held in store. As she descended through the levels, scanning the food court for any likely looking individual, and any ominous ones, she spotted a middle-aged man in a business suit, sitting uncomfortably by an artificial palm tree. That must be him. She rehearsed the code words Jiang had told her – designed to be innocuous and identifying at the same time – and took a deep breath.
“Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how to find the donut shop?”
“It’s next to the movie theater, but the sushi stand in this food court is just as good.”
One thing this exchange made clear was that Jiang must have had no idea what a donut is, and Emily tried to keep a straight face. The man looked at her expectantly, but there was something else, an underlying jitteriness in his manner that caught her attention. She turned to scan the room reflexively, but aware of the danger all the same.
“I don’t care for raw fish, do you?”
“It’s the wasabi I like.”
“Choi?” Emily watched for a reaction, but he was practiced at remaining stone-faced… except for that jitter. What did he have to be nervous about?
“Why didn’t you bring the girl? I don’t have time to play games.”
“Surely you didn’t expect me to hand her over to you… sight unseen.”
The negotiations continued for several minut
es, with Emily pushing for specifics of his plan for transporting Li Li – though she was careful not to utter her name, in case he didn’t already know it – and Choi insisting on taking the girl with him on the spot.
“I’m risking a lot here,” Choi said. “The longer this takes, the more dangerous it is.”
“What sort of danger can there be in a shopping mall?” The question was disingenuous, and Emily knew it, since she’d taken the trouble to work out escape routes herself. Choi floundered for a moment, unable to explain himself, and she began to consider him in a different light. Was he working on Jiang’s behalf, or for someone else? She didn’t pretend to understand the crosscurrents that might run through the Korean intelligence service, and she’d already seen what they were capable of once before. That’s all it took to form her own resolution. “I don’t care about your problems, and I fully intend to be on the same plane as she is. If you can’t work with that, I’ll find some other way.”
“There is no other way.”
“There is always another way. Don’t try me.”
The crowd in the food court had thinned out a bit, and Emily began to worry that her cover had as well. She glanced around the room, checking again for operatives, and fought the urge to crane her neck towards the shop window where she’d left Li Li. She didn’t see anything to set off alarms, though her confidence in this judgment was not high. Once Choi gave her a flight number for a morning departure, she left him sitting there.
Getting back to Li Li seemed more dangerous now than earlier, since she didn’t want to lead anyone back to her. She took a quiet staircase on the far side of the food court to the second floor, and sent a brief text: “3.” It might frighten Li Li, but at least this way, Emily could follow at a discreet distance, and watch for any operatives along the way.
23
The Damsel in Distress
The area along the northern foothills of Loi Leng – the tallest peak in the Shan highlands, with a summit approaching nine thousand feet – had been laid out as a patchwork quilt, sporting the borrowed beauty human art can sometimes lend to nature. The fields were largely unspoiled despite the incursion of the Tatmadaw, since there was no point in burning them after the harvest, which showed that the Junta’s goal wasn’t conquest, but rather capture. They must have felt a surgical strike might net the principal leaders of the Shan State and end the insurgency, without destroying the economy. Otherwise, they’d have attacked before the harvest.
By now, all the villages and townships in the northern valley were denuded of people, who had taken to the hills in anticipation of battle. Ip sat forlorn on the side of a dirt road on the back of a broken scooter. A few stray hairs had escaped her habitual braid, and it gave her face a wistful, almost wizened expression, framing her brown eyes in a quite arresting way.
Here was nature’s child, awaiting the arrival of some cosmic or karmic assistance, in her crisp blue jeans and neatly tucked white blouse. At least, this must be how the soldiers pictured her, when they pulled their jeep over, two men probably not much older than her, conscripts from the suburbs of Mandalay. The older of the pair, sporting two stripes on his sleeve, approached brusquely and inquired about the problem, but Ip said nothing. Did she not understand him? The younger one stepped around the back of the jeep, probably fresh from his first training tour down south, and made a show of examining the scooter, while his partner made a move to box her in.
The moment they were committed, Ip darted into the foliage – she had rehearsed her steps with Connie before she left – six strides up a first incline and over a ridge into a shallow gully, then fifteen strides left along the path left by rainwater runoff. Around two more bends, and she ducked under a fallen tree and squirted out of sight. The older man waved his hands in disgust and turned back toward the road while his partner pursued a little further. The crack of a large branch and what sounded like a groan and a shriek caught his ear and he turned again to see if she’d been caught, and the butt end of a rifle struck him across the face.
Connie stood over the two unconscious men, now that they’d been more thoroughly concealed in the ravine, and sorted through the contents of their pockets, but found little of use: some worthless army scrip, a few hundred Thai baht, a bit more Chinese yuan, and the only thing of real interest – the keys to the jeep.
“I told you she’d come in handy,” Connie crowed, once she’d returned to the road.
“Did you remember to take their shoes?” Danko asked over one shoulder, while he and Ip strapped the scooters onto the jeep, one fastened to the front bumper, the other to the spare tire in back.
“I took more than that,” she said, waving their green-camo trousers over her head. “Those guys are gonna be in no hurry to report us.”
“Jeez, Connie, I hope you didn’t do anything nasty back there.”
“You mean like they planned for our little friend? Nah. They got off easy.”
Once they were moving again, Danko sat in the back eyeing a map, and let Ip and Connie share the driving duties. The dirt roads had been chewed up by some heavy equipment that must have moved through the region since the last torrential rains.
“We’re sitting ducks in this thing,” he said.
“Probably be shot as spies if we’re caught in it,” Connie said.
“I can’t imagine any scenario in which we wouldn’t be shot by the Tatmadaw.” Danko snorted at the thought, until Connie caught his eye and glanced meaningfully toward Ip. “I take your point,” he grumbled, and examined his map more closely.
“If they’ve taken Lashio, how do we know they aren’t already in Hseni… and everyplace between here and there?”
Ip brought the jeep to a halt at a crossroads. “Mong Ma,” she said, indicating the fork to the left. Danko exchanged some words with her, and she turned the wheel to the right and they lurched forward.
“What did she say?” Connie asked, taking the map.
“She thinks Mong Ma is unsafe.”
“Are there even any roads to the north?”
“We’ll be in the river for a stretch, and a few meadows, but she thinks the jeep can handle it.”
Progress was slow once they’d run out of road, and two hours later they climbed a promontory from which they could make out the central structures of Mong Ma two miles distant. No military vehicles could be seen, though they’d probably be concealed, and the town center was the most likely place for them to discourage artillery fire. More revealing was the absence of any other traffic, which suggested the residents had already fled. Ip had stayed below, to see if she could get the broken scooter running again, using a screwdriver and a couple of wrenches she’d found in the map console of the jeep.
The sixty miles to Hseni as the crow flies amounted to somewhat more than ninety with all the diversions and curlicues the mountains imposed on their route. Night fell before they made it as far as the Lashio trading post, which was roughly half way. Ip slept in the back seat, which she was small enough to fit, and Connie and Danko reclined against an embankment near the Thanlyin River.
“This incursion, does it seem larger than before to you?” Connie asked. “Haven’t they already overrun more than half the highlands?”
“Maybe… a bit, but the problem for the Junta is maintaining a stable presence up here. The Shan have learned to step aside and let the tide wash past and then out. When the winter comes, if the Tatmadaw is still here, they’ll make sport out of hunting them.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“The mountains make them tough, resilient. They haven’t resisted for all these decades by being soft.”
“What about her?” Connie tipped her head toward the jeep.
“She’s tougher than she looks… and she has the cleverness of her clan, everything her mother and father and her grandparents wanted her to know. She remembers.”
“Will they marry her off when she gets home?”
“If they can, I suppose. But don’t you wonder how she ended up thi
s far south in the first place?”
“Visiting relatives?”
“There are no Wa settlements down here,” Danko said.
“Do you think she ran away?”
“If there was no money for a dowry, they may have tried to sell her into China.”
“As what… a sex slave?”
“More like a bride. There’s a brisk trade in them, because of a shortage further north.”
The next morning, after careful observation, Danko determined that the trading post was safe, and they drove in to get food. Stores were still open here, and street-side vendors had lit their grills, and Ip was able to locate a replacement for the fouled plug. Once she’d demonstrated the viability of the scooters, Danko swapped the jeep for a mobile phone and a tent.
“Can you get a signal?” Connie asked.
“Nah. We’re like sixty miles from the nearest towers, assuming the Tatmadaw hasn’t taken them out already.”
“… and the tent?” Connie scowled at him, still grumbling about the jeep, until he gestured in the general direction of Ip, who was busy negotiating with a street vendor across the central square. “Okay, fine. But you’re lugging it on your scooter.”
“Besides, it’s too damn dangerous to be seen in that thing. If the Shan spotters outside Kutkai had marked our approach in a government vehicle, they might have called in a strike. The scooters are much safer.”
“Have we worked out a route, at least?”
“We head west and pick up the river again, and follow it north.” Danko unfolded the map and pressed it up against a nearby wall, and some of the locals gathered around to watch, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. “See how it turns northwest here? That points us more or less toward Hseni. When the river bends sharply east… here… that’s our cue to head into the hills. There’s a pass just about here, the scooters should be able to manage… though we may have to walk them over the steepest bit… and we’ll come out near Na-Ti, which is fifteen miles or so northeast of Hseni on Highway Thirty Four.”
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 25
