The candidate nodded as she took a call. Bill Doran leaned back in his seat and glanced at his phone, scrolling through to the place where he had saved his draft of the memo he planned to send out after this conversation. And there it was, his main action point. Candidate to author an op-ed: Ten questions the President of China must answer if he’s to be welcome in America.
Always make the client think it’s their idea. The golden rule of all political consultancy. Lead them to water and they shall drink – but only if they think they put the goddamn stream there themselves.
He polished off the memo, beginning as ever with the bulletproof opening: ‘The candidate has just instructed me to do the following …’
They would be back in the comfort zone within the next few hours, training their guns on Richard Berger by aiming for the more immediate target: the Chinese military presence in Los Angeles.
Leo had lost track of how many times he had tried to call. Upwards of three dozen, along with perhaps twenty texts and a dozen emails. It wasn’t Maddy’s usual style. She could be a door-slammer and a shouter, but never a non-speaker. She was either unprecedentedly furious with him (possible after the piece-of-shit file he had given her), consumed with regret after they had slept together (not just possible, but likely) or she had gone to ground. At his lowest moment, he had thought about calling that cop with a crush who was always hanging around. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He was staring at his phone, as if mere willpower could make it spark into life, when a text arrived. It was from Berger: KTLA now.
Leo already had it on, albeit on mute, but now pushed the volume button on the remote. It was Sigurdsson being interviewed on the set of the evening news, a departure from the usual grammar of both TV and politics.
‘… published tomorrow, and you’re saying you want answers from the very top.’
‘That’s right, Dana. My campaign is making no accusations. But Californians want to know, have the senior team at Garrison 41 been as candid with our law-enforcement authorities as they should have been?’
Shit. They should have seen this coming. Truth is, they should have done it themselves, got in ahead of Sigurdsson.
‘We want to know very simply whether commanders at Garrison 41 have done a full search of the base for any evidence which could be relevant to this inquiry. Bottom line, do commanders there know who is behind these killings? Are they harbouring a fugitive from American justice?’
Shit, shit, shit.
‘The people of California have a right to know these things. So tonight I’m calling on the president to make clear that he wants answers to these questions from his Chinese counterpart when he visits our country next week. I know my opponent believes in staying quiet and bowing politely, if you will. But we’ve tried that approach and the verdict is in: it doesn’t work. I have more respect for our Chinese friends than that. I know they respond best to people who are as proud and strong as they are. Mayor Berger thinks bowing and scraping gets results. Well it doesn’t. I’m tougher than that. And in November, if I have the privilege of serving as Governor of the great state of California, you, Dana, the people of this state and our Chinese friends are all going to see that for themselves.’
‘Elena Sigurdsson, thank you for being with us here on KTLA. Appreciate it.’
The phone was already ringing. On the screen: ‘Unknown.’
‘Mr Mayor.’
‘Did you hear that, Leo? Did you fucking hear that? “Bowing politely.” “Bowing and scraping.” Did you hear what she just did there? She’s trying to make me out to be some geisha girl who’s getting fucked in the ass by the Chinese. Bowing!’
‘That’s not even a Chinese thing,’ said Leo, regretting the words as soon as they left his mouth.
‘It doesn’t fucking matter, Leo. She’s killing me on this. Now she’s “calling on the president”. Who the hell does she think she is? I tell you, I’m not going to take this any more, Leo. I’m fighting back, you hear me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Listen, Leo. I want a strategy meet tonight. At the residence. OK? And listen, I need you to bring my phone. I left it at an event. One of the girls has left it on your desk. OK? Leo. I need you on this, man. Need all that Ivy League brainpower I’m paying top dollar for, every last ounce. OK? We good?’
Leo hung up, noticing for the first time the padded envelope placed on his desk. He ripped it open to see his boss’s phone inside. He put it in his breast pocket, then pulled it out again, punching in the numerical combination he knew would unlock it: the most important date in Berger’s life. Not his wedding or the birth of any of his kids. But the date of his first election victory.
He scrolled through the texts and emails, half of which were from him. He read the ones from Ross, scanning them for any signs of conspiracy or betrayal. One of them included an attached photo, which Leo clicked on: a proposed new-look logo for the website. Hmm, no one told him about that.
It brought him to the ‘gallery’ section of the phone, where Berger had stored a handful of downloaded images. What Leo saw there filled him with dread. Staring out was a series of faces of young women, all blonde and attractive. Oh, Christ no, please no. Not a bimbo eruption. That was the last thing this campaign could handle, not now.
But as he enlarged the images, the third one especially, Leo felt his body temperature lower. For what he was looking at, stashed away on the private phone of the mayor of Los Angeles, were close-up, apparently intimate portraits of Rosario Padilla, Eveline Plaats, Abigail Webb and now, joining them, Mary Doherty. The four victims of the heroin killer, at their sexiest and most alluring in life – and now secretly preserved in death.
Chapter 45
In her apartment Maddy felt as watched as she had in that lightless cell. The camera in the bathroom mirror seemed to have gone, just as Dr Lei said it would. She tested it, running the shower for five unbroken minutes and filling the room with steam. This time the glass misted over as thoroughly as it used to.
Still, that offered scant reassurance. It probably just meant they had hidden their lens somewhere else. So she avoided the shower, filling the tub instead, foaming it up with bubble bath and remaining covered up until the last moment, primly stepping out of her robe and into the water like a nun at the seaside.
As it happened, it helped. The hot water soothed her aching, pounded flesh. Her ankles were raw with pain, though their outward appearance suggested little of the agony within. Her thighs, shins and stomach were all bruised and were now purpling. Everywhere else, including between her legs, remained tender.
She stayed in the tub for nearly an hour, topping up the hot water regularly, allowing herself to drift into sleep for fleeting naps, never more than thirty seconds at a time.
Once out, she felt readier to return to battle. She picked up her landline phone, its shape unfamiliar in her hand through lack of use. The display told her there were approximately thirty missed calls from a number she recognized as Leo’s. Quincy had called just as often. She pressed the voicemail key, pre-emptively jabbing at the volume control so that the messages would not be overheard by any electronic ears. A futile gesture, she knew: as if they wouldn’t have had a tap on this line the instant she posted the initial story naming the garrison. The first message began to play.
Where are you, Madison? When I didn’t hear from you, I went to the hospital but you weren’t there. They said you’d discharged yourself. What’s going on? Please tell me where you are. Mom really needs you, I need you. There are a hundred practical things to do. I don’t want to have to go to the funeral home alone.
The next six or seven continued in that vein, sympathy laced with guilt-trip. But then the tone began to change, gradually at first, culminating in the most recent one, left barely an hour ago:
Maddy, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please just talk to me. I’m going out of my mind with worry. Just let me know you’re safe. I’m worried that something’s happened to you
. Please.
And then, through tears:
I can’t lose you too.
Madison went into the kitchen, reaching into the very back of the oven, where she had hidden the pay-as-you-go phones, in the hope that was one place where her PLA stalkers would not have thought to check. She thumbed out a quick message to Quincy.
I’m OK. I was off radar for a bit. I wish I could explain and I will, soon. But I’m doing what I can for Abigail. She deleted that last sentence, knowing it would look strange. But it was only the truth. I’ll be in touch soon, just as soon as I have this cleared up. Don’t try replying to this phone or my usual one or my landline: I’m afraid I’m not using them for a while. She typed out the words, ‘Much love’ but couldn’t do it. She changed it to ‘Speak soon, M’. Next she added an ‘x’ in recognition of the hand her sister had reached out towards her in her last, pleading message, before dumping the phone into the trash can under her desk.
Now she went to an old laptop she kept in a drawer. She built a stack of books around it, hoping to obscure the view of the screen from almost every angle but hers. Next she connected the machine not to her own wireless router but to the one next door, remembering the password her neighbour had given her on that day last summer when her own device had apparently melted from the heat or, more likely, sheer pressure of use.
Thankfully the inertia principle so often cited by Katharine Hu – people never, ever change their passwords unless they are forced to – held good. She was connected. Next Maddy routed herself through a VPN, not failsafe but the closest you could get to wearing a mask and gloves online. Whoever was following her would, she hoped, find it a tad harder now.
So equipped, she plunged into the othernet, heading immediately for the underground version of Weibo. Jane Goldstein was nearly right: Maddy was almost entirely alone. But there was one last ally she could turn to: the human flesh search engine.
Her request broke the regular pattern, she knew that. Usually, you threw in a name and the worker bees got searching, turning over every stone relating to that one person. This request would necessarily be vaguer.
Anything on the Princelings, the elite junior officers of Garrison 41? Names, résumés, history of specific indivs, esp. anything, um, suspect?
Within a few minutes it was spreading, re-weibed into the furthest reaches of the othernet. She sat back in her chair. How strange, she thought. She could not trust her colleagues or her boss or her ex-lover; she could barely talk to her mother or her surviving sister. But somehow the people of this unseen crowd felt like allies. She had faith in them.
She whiled away the next hour attempting to turn the detritus in her fridge into food. She ate toast, some tuna out of a can and a soya yoghurt once recommended by Abigail. She savoured the taste of each mouthful, marvelling at how recently, at the start of this week in fact, her younger sister had been alive.
When she returned to the machine, pulling a towel over her head to further obstruct any view of the screen, she was gratified to see that there had been a fairly decent flow of replies. Mainly, though, these consisted of links to photographs of passing out parades, whose captions featured long lists of names; or gazetted records of military commissions, again packed with names. There was one odd nugget about a junior officer who had been pulled over for speeding, but let go thanks to diplomatic immunity and the principle of extraterritoriality which, the article helpfully explained, held that Garrison 41 was sovereign Chinese territory, entirely beyond the reach of US law. But that one individual apart, there was next to nothing specific.
She scrolled back to the top where a new weib had arrived.
Can you follow me so I can DM you?
This was common enough; not everyone wanted to communicate publicly. Maddy did as she was told, then opened the private channel by sending a direct message. I’m here.
A minute passed and then a reply, sent just to her.
Here you go. Lots of links to come. May be more than 140 characters, so be patient.
Madison waited as a half-dozen DMs arrived in quick succession. Each one contained a link, which led her to a mixture of websites and PDF documents, which opened up instantly.
She only had to read for a few moments to be stunned by what she saw.
Chapter 46
The first was a link to a Chinese dissident website operated outside the country in both English and Mandarin. The story was dated two years earlier and told of the son of a leading party official who had been out driving in Beijing late at night. The nineteen year old had swerved into an oncoming car, damaged both vehicles and badly injured the other driver. When the police came, he had tried to get away but was so drunk he fell over. Surrounded by motorists and onlookers, he started screaming at the police, telling them it was no good trying to arrest him because of his powerful father. He kept shouting his father’s name, again and again. The story had spread by word of mouth among young Chinese and especially on social media, capturing perfectly the arrogance of the Princeling class.
The next item was a PDF of a letter, apparently written by the young man’s British-born tutor and addressed to his direct superiors at the prestigious Tsinghua University. The tutor was complaining of ‘serious disciplinary issues’, which, understanding the need for discretion under the circumstances, he would not spell out. Suffice it to say, he had found compelling evidence of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour towards female students, especially towards those on the overseas programme, including young women from the United States and Europe.
He has shown an over-zealous interest in several students, who allege that he has followed them to and from classes or appeared suddenly in their accommodation quarters. He is causing them great discomfort. I am aware of his family’s high standing, but nevertheless suggest that he be issued with a formal reprimand.
Next came a page that had been screen-grabbed from Weibo, which Maddy strongly suspected had been taken down within minutes of appearing. The messages were in English, but that was no surprise. Plenty of Chinese thought they had a better chance of slipping past the censors if they did not write in their mother tongue. The weibs were all variations on a common theme, expressed through different euphemisms. The gist was the allegation that this same young man, who had already had problems with drink, had also developed a liking for other, harder ‘substances’. Several dropped coded references to heroin.
The last link led to another underground site, though this one had a trashier, more celebrity design. In its ‘whispers’ section, it reported the rumour that the same Princeling, now twenty-one, had crashed a black Ferrari outside a Beijing nightspot, killing one of his two young, female passengers. ‘Insiders’ had told the website the driver had become distracted because one, or even both, of these two women were engaged in a ‘lewd act’ with him at the time. He had not been prosecuted for this fatal accident, however. Instead the young man had been quietly packed off to one of China’s many military bases around the world, though no one was saying which one.
Something tells us that, with the guanxi this young man has at his disposal, he won’t be digging trenches in Angola or doing a hundred press-ups in Mali. We suspect he’ll have found a cushier place to make the transition from drugged-up road pest to respected officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Officially though, it remains a mystery where exactly in the world this young tearaway is doing his military service.
But not a mystery to Maddy. There, in the last DM, was a link to a PDF. The first page was the original, in Mandarin, complete with the grand, martial emblem of the PLA. The next was a translation, which confirmed that the Princeling in question, having completed a spell at an elite military college in Beijing, had won a place among the officer class of Garrison 41 at Terminal Island, the Port of Los Angeles.
All of which would have been fascinating enough. Here was a man who fit the profile she had been building up, piece by maddeningly elusive piece, ever since Abigail had been found dead. He was a drug user and a stalker, with
an obsessive interest in American and European women. At that moment, she’d have been ready to wager good money that every single one of those foreign, female students who had complained about him to their tutor was white, fair-skinned and blonde.
But that was not what had left her agape. It was not what he had done but who he was that stunned her. She returned to the tab open with the first story, of the drunk driving episode, and read the key sentence again and then again. But the letters on the screen had not changed. There it was, as shocking as when she read it the first time.
He fell over and was then heard shouting, ‘Arrest me if you like, it won’t mean anything! My father is Yang Zheng!’
There it was again in the string of screen-grabbed weibs. They had been coy about mentioning heroin, but not about naming the suspected drug user. He was Yang Zhitong, son of Standing Committee member and then rising star, Yang Zheng.
The name stared at her from the screen the way it would have stared at any person on the planet who kept even half an eye on the news. For Yang Zheng was set to take over the most powerful office in the world in the once-a-decade transition due later that year. He was the man universally tipped to become the next President of the People’s Republic of China.
Chapter 47
She snapped shut the lid of the computer and stood up, anxious to escape the cocoon she had made for herself. She went to the kitchen, then back to the desk, then back again, trying to make sense of what she had just seen. It was impossible to believe and yet it explained so much. Of course the Chinese had followed her, had her beaten up and given her the full ‘enhanced interrogation’ treatment, supervised by the base commander himself. To them, this story, her story, could not have been more menacing. It went to the very top.
Maddy wanted to go to the window, just to see the sky. But she knew there would be eyes down there, eyes on her. Even a flicker of curtain would alert them. Not that it made much difference. There were almost certainly eyes in here too.
The 3rd Woman Page 35
