by Barry Lancet
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll give you that. And so?”
“Some of your leaders are aware of this. But they are not moving as fast as they should.”
I nodded. “All good points I find easy to believe.”
Zhou’s look was triumphant. “Do you know why it is easy to believe? Because you and others in your government can sense it in your gut. They feel it, but they are confused because our leaders smile and bow and give in on the small things. Our leaders are clever. When an American or Western dignitary visits, my people often make small concessions, giving the visitor some minor triumph to take back home and wave in front of the people. These actions pull your instinctive feeling the other way. The Hundred-Year Marathon is why they wanted access to the NSA data. It would have cut ten years off the hundred. Now for a fourth reason, which I believe is the worst of all.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“There’s a dirty secret that frightens us Chinese to death.”
Just then Zhou’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, said he had to take the call, asked Chen to pull over, and stepped urgently from the car.
* * *
Chen and I looked at each other as we watched his cousin pace back and forth in front of a roadside rice paddy, out of earshot.
“What do you think it is?” I said.
“I don’t know. We can only wait.”
Which we did. The spy’s voice grew louder but the words remained indistinct. Then he was finished and trotted back to the vehicle and jumped in.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“No.” He turned to Chen, speaking in English for my benefit. “I have to get to a local government office to plug a leak if you two are going to make it to the border. How far are we from my car?”
“Less than fifteen minutes,” Chen said.
“Get me there as fast as you can.” The master spy turned to me. “We have until then. Where was I?”
“You were talking about the worst reason of all.”
“Yes, that’s right.” His eyes clouded over. “There can be no China as number one.”
I shot the master spy a skeptical look. “You have always struck me as a patriot.”
“I am a thinking patriot, not a blind one. I love my country and my people and I want what most of my people want. Which is freedom. Our living standard is rising and people are living better. We are making more money than ever before. But I come from the inside and have seen behind the mask. The dark, dirty secret is that we Chinese do not trust our leaders, and neither should you. Our leaders encourage the wishful thinking of the West that China will move to democracy or a semi-democratic system once Western-style capitalization takes hold, but this will never happen, because it means the Party would have to give up control and all the ‘goodwill’ money its members siphon off from State enterprises, which are cash cows.”
I nodded. “The money’s too good and it’s there for the picking.”
“Yes, and the power gives them a free way in, with discretion. The State runs forty percent of all Chinese ‘free enterprises.’ That is a lot of money and power. What they do is wheedle and blackmail and steal everything they can from Western companies to make State companies stronger, feeding off the outside companies as much as they can. But they know that is not endless. The Party has played out the leash, that is all. And when complaints grow too loud at home or abroad, it stages an anticorruption campaign or something similar, and chooses a few victims. To those of us in the system, this is laughable. But when the mask comes off, the Party will yank back the leash. Then they will be ruthless and none of us will be laughing.”
“Okay, I’ve got that. But what does this have to do with me?”
“I need you to convey all of this directly to your President Slater.”
I looked at Zhou in surprise. “You know about that?”
“I am a spy. It is my job. Why must I keep telling you that?”
I conceded the point with a shrug. “Then you know I have no clout, aside from my work to find Anna.”
“It is enough to whisper in his ear. He will consider your source. Whispers are powerful.”
I studied the man before me. He knew the power of intrigue. He knew the power of lies and secrets and deception. So it stood to reason he knew the power of rumors and whispers on the wind. Perhaps the most powerful tool of them all. A word in the president’s ear and Zhou’s message would surely spread.
“That I can do.”
“Good. Now for a bonus reason.”
“And what might that be?”
“I never meant for you to be executed.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where that played out as he said. Could this be the first of a new set of tricks? Was the landscape about to shift again? If so, I wasn’t buying.
“That makes no sense,” I said. “You let them torture me.”
“You need to keep things in perspective.”
I was on the edge of my seat. “I think I’m doing pretty well, all things considered.”
“No, you are not. The torture was simply business.”
I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it, stunned yet again.
In the grander scheme of things, he was right. Whether you condoned torture or condemned it.
CHAPTER 89
AS soon as Zhou left, I fell into a bottomless pit until we reached the Mongolian border and Chen called my name. I’d decided the master spy had arranged for my escape for the reasons he said, and they were strong and numerous enough to discount a double cross.
“You ready, Mr. Fabbri?”
I woke in an instant. “Yes.”
Chen straightened his hat. We’d arrived at the border crossing. Two entry lanes. Six or seven cars in each, engines idling, waiting to be processed.
The last barrier to freedom.
The Chinese section came first. A guard approached Chen in the front, questioned him but soon lost interest, and signaled me to roll down my window.
“Passport, please.”
“Ciao,” I said, and handed over my Italian document. The burgundy booklet was stamped with the emblem of Italy in the middle, unione europea, repubblica italiana in gold lettering above, and the obvious label PASSAPORTO below.
“Your visit to China was good, Mr. Fabbri?”
“I ’ad a ’appy time. Is good-a country, no?”
Nodding, he asked me a series of innocuous questions, including one about my accident in Beijing, which Chen must have mentioned. He flipped through the pages of my passport and glanced from the pages to me, or rather to my moustache, obliquely. None of the passport pages arrested his interest as much as my facial hair.
“Now you visit Mongolia?”
His first unnecessary query. He made eye contact, then his gaze dropped back to the document in his hand by way of my blond upper-lip ornament.
“Yes-a,” I said, and he nodded abstractly.
“Enjoy the rest of your trip.”
He stamped my passport, then handed it through the open window, his eyes lingering one last time on the moustache.
Chen put the sedan into gear and drove up to the Mongolian checkpoint, which we cleared in another few minutes, then drove on. Zhou had been right. The moustache had engaged most of the guard’s attention.
Relief rolled through me as we drove away.
I’d escaped China.
Which left one last hurdle on the other end and I saw no way around it.
* * *
I hurt all over.
My body throbbed and twitched and jiggled as I took my seat aboard the Turkish Airlines flight to Tokyo. Zhou had supplied a crutch along with a suitcase full of clothing I could check in. Passengers without baggage triggered alarms. I surrendered the crutch to the flight attendant and asked not to be disturbed for anything less than an emergency.
The attendant nodded politely, noted my seat number, and stole a furtive glance at the bandages on my face.
My body h
ad become sensitive to any movement beyond the ordinary. The unavoidable bumps as the plane gathered speed on the tarmac, the gravity pressing my body back against the seat, the sudden lifts and drops as the plane rose and tried to break free—all of them tormented me in fresh and inexplicable ways.
Why?
Because the rubber-coated bat had pounded the flesh at my back into something approaching a jelly-like consistency. My skin and muscles and every other tissue of my being that was wrapped around bone from calves to shoulders seemed to flex and shift in unfamiliar ways. Every little tick, twitch, and throb of pain rippled through the jelly like a wave over the ocean, moving rhythmically, evenly, kinetically. And that was before the burns and blisters from the two sessions in which they’d jacked up the juice of the electric prod.
Despite the distress, or perhaps because of it, I was asleep in seconds, but—unlike my respite in the car—my slumber was fitful rather than deep. Images and voices wafted by, as they had done back in the prison cell, but without any of the subconscious panic.
Jenny floated by, chatting gaily about judo and soccer and her favorite movies. I reached out for her hand but she faded from sight in the way that people in dreams do. She was followed by Renna and Noda and, finally, Rie. My girlfriend exited to the shadowy perimeters of my dreams far sooner than the others, with the same desolate look on her face I’d witnessed at our parting in Tokyo.
After landing at Narita Airport, I declined the offer of a wheelchair. I deboarded with a crutch under one arm and hobbled down the series of hallways toward Passport Control, wondering how long the process would take before officials pounced.
* * *
Once I stepped up to the inspector’s booth, I could see downstairs to the luggage area. At the far end were the Customs lanes and beyond them the charcoal-tinted exit doors leading to the arrival terminal, where Rie and Noda waited. I’d called them collect from the Mongolian airport.
The expression on the inspector’s face told me it was only a matter of moments now.
Minutes or seconds, then the how.
He wore a starched white shirt, a blue tie, and security ID on a long neck strap. I looked at his ID. He was who his ID claimed he was. The problem was his computer screen told him I was not who the Italian passport said I was.
I waited, resigned.
I found my mind straying back to Zhou’s last reason for masterminding my escape and, oddly enough, found some comfort there:
Zhou had repeated his claim. “I never meant for you to be sent to the executioner’s.”
Which is when my long-contained rage finally broke free. “My remains were scheduled to be displayed in the Bone Room. Have you seen that place?”
“I had the distinct displeasure of being given a guided tour by a very pompous local official.”
I shook my head, unconvinced. “Why should I believe you?”
“We are here, for one.”
I frowned. “That’s not enough.”
The master spy seemed disappointed. “It should be.”
I pushed on stubbornly. “So all this talk about the hundred-year plan is true, but the murder charge you saddled me with when you left me at the Farmhouse was a bluff?”
“Of course it was a bluff. I wanted Anna Tanaka’s escape route before it was too late. I was a touch saddened by what you would have to go through, but I saw no way around it. It is partly your fault, you know.”
“My fault?”
“Because of who and what you are. I knew from our very first encounter five months ago when you refused both of my bribes to give up the Chinese agitator that you would be hard to break, so I threw everything at you.”
Unfortunately, a credible comment. He’d initially offered me fifty thousand dollars to give up an old Chinese reformer hiding in Yokohama Chinatown. When I’d refused, he offered me an impressive chunk of real estate in San Francisco to “give my daughter a permanent home.” I had no doubt that he would have delivered, but I’d turned him down flat.
“So what changed your mind?” I asked.
“I never changed my mind. My plan was to drag the escape route from you, catch Anna Tanaka, and eventually release you to your embassy, with our bureaucrats voicing loud complaints about your subversive activities in China. That was my assignment. It was simply business. The problem was my plan was hijacked.”
“Hijacked how?”
He shrugged, as if to say some things were unavoidable. “I am required to file a report detailing my strategy. An idiot puppet master up the line decided that actually executing you for the traffickers’ deaths would be a good finger in the eye of your country. Of course, the plan would also earn him points with his bosses while doing almost nothing himself. He made a strong case and his proposal was approved.”
“Did you go along with it?”
“It is above my pay grade. But the idiot’s plan is just the sort I despise. If I were asked, I would have agreed to it and done just as I have done. I knew you did not slit those men’s throats. It is not your style.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Do not thank me. It is my job to know my adversaries.”
“Thanks, then, for getting me out.”
He turned away to look out the window, embarrassed. “Do not be so grateful. I nearly got you killed.”
His reaction pointed to what went unspoken but what we both knew to be a core truth. He hadn’t left me to die. Yes, he also used my escape to frame a political enemy, but he could have saved the Chen ruse for another time and place and left me at the Farmhouse, for the Bone Room. Inaction was the safer choice. It meant far less risk to him personally, not to mention his career. All he had to do was look the other way. Many men would have done just that.
He hadn’t.
My reverie was interrupted by a voice at my back.
“Would you mind coming with us?” it said.
CHAPTER 90
THE last phase had started.
I turned to find three immigration officers standing behind me in buttoned-down navy blazers. They ushered me into a small room with walls the color of a gravel pit. My fingerprints disgorged a name from their system that contradicted the one on the Italian passport, as I knew it would. Before Japanese officials could haul me off to some dark cell, I played my get-out-of-jail-free card: Ambassador Tattersill. The irritable diplomat would be indignant but would follow the president’s mandate and send an underling to vouch for me, after which the nightmare would be over. I’d be back with my friends and colleagues. Back in Rie’s arms.
My new minders nodded, listened, and left. Two hours later they returned with a command to follow them.
In Japanese. No apology. No English. No Italian.
I limped after the lead uniform, with the remaining two at the rear, cutting off any retreat. We traipsed down a long hallway and into another room with the same gravel pit walls but a new welcoming committee.
“Surprise, surprise,” said Thomas R. Swelley, Homeland Security agent and professional bastard. He wore a grin tight enough to crack a molar.
“Since when are you Tattersill’s errand boy?”
“Since never.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I had an alert out for you, so your return was routed through Homeland. I made an executive decision not to bother the ambassador with something so . . . inconsequential. You’re all ours.”
Two of Swelley’s goons from Washington, DC, leaned against a far wall. They wore black leather jackets far too hot for late May in Tokyo. The pair watched the exchange with undisguised glee. Their eyes glistened. Next to Swelley stood one of the Japanese-American undercover agents sent to Sharon Tanaka’s funeral. One of the ones who had watched without protest while Anna was taken away by Habu’s gang. My anger began to rise.
Swelley fixated on my battered features. “It looks like someone started the party without us.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” the Japanese-American said.
My polic
e escort had not followed me into the room, which was unfortunate. Instead, after listening from the threshold, one of them cleared his throat, made a comment about passing the baton, and closed us in.
Swelley turned to his Japanese subordinate. “What’d he say?”
“They gave us Brodie with no strings.”
“Nothing about the embassy or the ambassador?”
“Not a word.”
Rubbing his hands together, Swelley’s grin grew.
I didn’t waste another second. The crutch flew from under my arm. With a flick of the wrist, I grabbed the narrow end, hopped forward, and looped the shaft out and up and into the side of Swelley’s skull. Emitting no more than a clipped chirp of surprise, he crashed into his Japanese-American underling.
While the agent tried to steady his boss, I rocked back half a step and rammed the end of the crutch into the stomach of the errant agent. He released Swelley and grabbed his midsection, then sprung up in a howl of rage. By that time the crutch was coming around again. It caught him on the side of the head as it had Swelley. He crumpled in a heap alongside his boss.
As expected, the two goons in the leather jackets bounded off the wall across the room. But I’d calculated the distance between us beforehand. Now, I pivoted to meet their charge.
Or, rather, I gave the command to pivot. In my mind’s eye, my body had already begun the turn. I’d devised the next two moves and envisioned how I’d take down Swelley’s leather-jacketed backup.
But the pivot never happened.
Nor did the crutch swing around.
I’d exhausted my reserve and my body had shut down.
The largest of the pair connected with a brutal but predictable blow to my jaw. The full force of the punch flung me against the wall. I’d conceived a way of blocking the strike, but my arms dangled motionless at my sides like cut branches hanging by a last strip of bark.
I sagged to the floor.
The pair piled on.
What had I been thinking? I couldn’t summon up the strength to recall my reasoning. But whatever it had been, I’d turned a no-win situation into the perfect loss.
