Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

The interrogation slogged on for another forty minutes, the prisoner becoming gradually more lucid. The detention facility there beneath Zhongnanhai in Beijing was unlike Qincheng and the rest of the Chinese gulag. Its cells were reserved for subversive or corrupt high-level cadres, dissidents particularly threatening to the perceived legitimacy of the Party. It was here that Mao Zedong had slapped into irons two of the Cultural Revolution’s most wronged national heroes, Liu Shaoqi and later, Deng Xiaoping. Tonight the six tiny hard cells, concrete corridor, and iron-barred infirmary adjacent to the interrogation vault were otherwise empty.

  Suddenly a woman’s scream filled the air with an intensity so shrill that Zhao convulsed, the skin of his ankles and waist bulging beyond the edge of the leather restraints—the muscles contorting his face tore free from the staples.

  “Comrade, you must stop.”

  “Meiling! What have you done!”

  “We ask the questions.”

  From far outside the vault came the sound of sobbing; a guttural cry. It ceased abruptly.

  “You snakes—she is innocent! I am the traitor! She is very ill. You must let me see her!”

  Minutes later came the scraping sound of approaching footsteps, the squeal of the door on its hinges while sloshing across the surface of water. The voice from the unseen face beyond the horizon of shadow was patient, almost congenial. “Comrade Zhao, we have decided to allow you to see your wife, after all.”

  A PLA soldier approached the prisoner carrying a folded white towel—and presented it to the prisoner, who strained his neck to look down. The young man unfolded the towel. Against the knuckle and just above the mutilated sever of a single finger was the gold glitter of a ring.

  “NO!” Tears of anguish streamed down Zhao’s cheeks.

  “You may see her, indeed. One piece at a time.”

  Ninety minutes later, two State Security officers left the nurse to her ministrations of the prisoner. Outside the entrance to the vault, the senior officer picked up a telephone and delivered a message confirming that the interrogation begun hours after his capture at Hong Kong’s airport was complete.

  * * *

  STATE SECURITY Deputy Minister of Operations Chen Ruihan received the text version of that message on his cell phone. The alert interrupted him from another unpleasant task, a grueling dispute with the Personnel Bureau over who he could appoint to head the Provincial Management Office—a vacancy created, coincidentally, as a result of the defection attempt for which he was now being paged.

  The defection attempt of a valuable physicist should never have occurred. Chen suspected that the security minister’s life might hang in the balance because of it, perhaps even his own. The Ministry of State Security, Guojia Anguan Bu, was the country’s premier intelligence body for conducting espionage and domestic counterespionage activities. It was simply not credible that blame be assigned to inadequate resources; Chen privately suspected it was more likely the result of having too many. Assigned to fulfill their tasks were many thousands of officials in each of China’s thirty-one provinces. Despite his invasive powers, the constant influx of foreigners, civil unrest over privatization reform, pro-democracy cells and a host of other concerns meant Chen’s domestic responsibilities all teetered beyond control: sifting through the daily profusion of wiretap, Internet and video surveillance, informant reports, and conducting investigation, apprehension, and preliminary hearings—on foreigners and citizens alike, for atrocities that ranged from waging peaceful revolution and economic crime to being active in toppling the socialist order. For all of his resources, Chen’s various masters nonetheless feared that the uncensored words of one single fugitive had threatened to drive China to her knees as she approached her pinnacle of global preeminence.

  Fortunately, Chen shared loose organizational overlap with his colleagues two blocks away at the Ministry of Public Security, whose ostensible role was administering the country’s two- and a quarter-million strong domestic police force, by far the world’s largest. The Ministry of Public Security administered surveillance that generated much of the data subsequently pored over by MSS officers. MPS had amassed a dossier for each of China’s one- and one-half billion citizens on a Cray XMP supercomputer and tracked their movements within and across their 20,000-kilometer border. Known by Chen and a handful of others, it was just this asset which last week had carried the day when within a period of minutes his office was bombarded by protests from the Premier, the vice chairman of Military Affairs, the office of the General Secretary and others on the Standing Committee including the state security minister. In these earliest moments of the physicist’s disappearance, it was clear to Chen that all matters including the capture would eventually pale beside the assignment of blame. Even with the Army’s help, Public Security had only narrowly succeeded in determining the whereabouts of the physicist and his wife—allowing Chen’s officers to step in and make the arrest. The debacle called for culling some unfortunate cadre from the ranks of China’s counterintelligence corps. By consensus of the Personnel Bureau, later approved by the General Secretary, this time the axe had been chosen to fall on the ministry’s chief provincial officer.

  The security minister had been firm that Chen involve himself directly in the interrogation, ordering that no other responsibility could be allowed to interfere with the counterintelligence effort to determine whether or not the physicist had passed information, and if so, how much and to whom. It was a rare opportunity that Chen could indulge himself in the technical craft of his trade, the roots of his career. Chen ascended the stair to his suite with a restored sense of vigor. His two interrogating officers had crossed the underground tunnel from Zhongnanhai and were already there.

  By four the next morning, the bronze ashtray awarded Chen Ruihan as a Youth League mentor over-flowed with cigarette butts; the carafe of hot tea thrice emptied. The deputy minister sat slumped with his head in his hands and stared down at the table as he focused on the prisoner’s recorded garble of words. It had been the second consecutive sleepless night for the interrogating officers; the prospect of an increase in grade did not deter the junior of the two from repeatedly bobbing his chin to his chest. Beside the small Sony recorder, Chen’s personal assistant sat poised over a laptop waiting to transcribe the next round of analysis.

  For perhaps the tenth time, Chen asked his mishu to reset the digital recording to the beginning. Their job was made easier by comrade physicist’s voice; often rambling and weary, Dr. Zhao was nonetheless Han and spoke the same dialect as the intelligence officers. Chen listened to the admission that his wife had handled virtually all of the arrangements for their defection. This she had apparently done through the open-air markets, retrieving forged danwei travel documents wrapped in plastic and hidden within layers of carp; their falsified passports retrieved from between leaves of cabbage, along with instructions for what and when to buy next as preparations evolved. China’s ubiquitous merchant bazaars were troubling to Chen, this exchange of information especially so, because it involved an intermediary, the prisoner’s wife, who would have provided them answers were she not still deep in the coma slipped into during the hours that followed her capture.

  As he listened again to the tape, the faint outline of a pattern slowly emerged. Chen turned to his senior officer. “The prisoner changed his story for why they headed north from Xichang?”

  “Yes.” The man pulled the unfiltered stub from his lips and ran his hand back over his hair. “First he tried to imply she had always been too sick to hazard the rugged terrain into Thailand. Then he dropped that story and admitted that their original plans actually did call for taking them south. According to Zhao, the plans changed suddenly without explanation. You can hear the frustration in his voice over the evident delay that it caused. Of course we learn this after the stinking traitor admitted his wife was in on the planning after all.”

  Chen next focused on that period of the interrogation after the prisoner was duped by their use of a cada
ver’s finger into believing his wife, actually untouched by torture, would be hauled piecemeal before him unless he confessed. Passports used by the fugitives to board the China Southern flight out of Chongqing had provided the first solid lead during the manhunt. The numbers matched the falsified travel documents, but a search of the danwei’s database failed to turn up a match. This in turn prompted Public Security to confirm them as forgeries. Yet the numbers were valid, the forging quality superior. From where and by whom were the numbers obtained?

  A point equally troubling to Chen was whether or not, and if so when, Zhao’s handlers really did change plans by deciding to go north. Was it simply to throw off the pursuit? Chen shook his head; so many possible links in the chain.

  Chen had his mishu advance the recording to the confession detailing the role of the prisoner’s wife. Comrade physicist’s words were spaced unevenly, heavy with emotion, his desire to protect her yielding uneasily. They listened again to the slurring of words, the anguish, the railing against the Party for condemning his wife to her drawn-out suffering, the physicist’s capitulation followed by his chronology of events.

  “All at once,” Chen said, narrowing his eyes, “it seems they quit badgering him for bona fides and word came to instead go north and they set the date for his defection.” Chen sensed this might be somehow important, perhaps indicating a discreet packet of actionable intelligence had been delivered to Zhao’s handlers. “Did you happen to ask him about that? Whether these events all culminated in one communication to his wife?”

  Chen’s mishu softly tapped the exchange into the laptop as his men looked at each other. They looked at Chen and shook their heads.

  IT HAD TAKEN LONGER than expected for the guards to rouse the prisoner, and fully two hours transpired before the weary trio trudged back through the tunnel from Zhongnanhai and returned to Chen’s office. An amphetamine injection had ensured that the physicist was fully awake, and would be for several hours. Shaken by the presence of a confident man spitting orders, and beholden yet to the prospect of his dismembered wife, the prisoner had proceeded to relay his wife’s correspondence in every detail.

  Chen sent the other men home and had his mishu order him breakfast, boiled turnips and pork with a fresh glass of orange juice and a hot mug of tea, then sent him home as well. It was a little before nine when he finally sat down to organize his thoughts and prepare his report. Outside his window, the daily profusion of commuters on bicycles was fully apace. Further away, the glints of automobiles were visible skirting the congested Beijing interior.

  The earlier hint of a pattern in the prisoner’s confession had strengthened. It was now Chen’s belief that a single source of information may have prompted Zhao’s handlers—undoubtedly MI6 or CIA, judging by the sophistication of the attempt—to simultaneously confirm the traitor’s bona fides, advise a change of route to the north, and establish the date of departure. At this time he had no evidence to suggest that sensitive classified information had been divulged, by either the traitor or any of the dozens of others interrogated in the aftermath of the defection attempt.

  In the closing paragraph of Chen’s report to the state security minister, which he planned to deliver himself, Chen made two recommendations. “First,” he wrote, “insofar as the investigation was still underway and, apparently, the risk of a breach of security tantamount to a national security disaster, all personnel associated with the classified Fourth Line Project in which the traitor was involved should be placed under twenty-four hour surveillance—regardless of cadre rank, class, security clearance, or Party stature. Second, a purge of the nation’s security apparatus might be in order, as there exists the possibility of a highly-placed informant within Beijing. A joint review of this matter should be conducted by the appropriate organs of the Second Department, the ministries of State and Public Security and the Political Leading Legal Committee to determine the correct course of action.”

  Chen drew another hot mug of tea to his lips and gazed out over a Tiananmen Square teeming with people. He knew it was a bad time to rattle the bureaucracy with rash allegations. Things were already unsettled over the upcoming succession of power. Depending upon whose toes he might step during the next few days, he could find himself either postured well for the change, or peddling a bicycle to work every day.

  17

  THE SUM OF MANY small things allowed Deng Zhen to cherish the evening with family and to forget the trials of day. Tonight, the windows were open into the courtyard to a warm southerly breeze, which instead of the Gobi’s irritating dust carried the ebullient chatter of children. Guangmei, Deng’s daughter-in-law, had prepared a sumptuous meal consisting of fresh carp caught locally and cooked his favorite way, steamed rice, boiled cabbage, turnip salad and fried pork fat—there would be no hunger in this house. His younger son had traveled across town with his pregnant wife to announce his promotion in grade and housing assignment at Polytechnologies Corporation. Unlike the many less fortunate employees of the State—millions of whom were caught in the downdraft of what seemed eternal reform—the chemical engineer would be moving his growing family to a four-room flat. Having finished luxuriant portions of mint-flavored sorbet and chowchow, the entire family congregated around the old oak table for banter and storytelling.

  Deng sat with his hands wrapped around a mug of green tea and listened to his two sons share a joke. Peifu, his elder son, tilted his head back in laughter and hurled clouds of smoke into the air. If anything threatened to darken Deng Zhen’s mood, it was his elder son’s tendency to lapse into spewing his unpatriotic dogma. Presently the radical Beijing University music professor rocked back on the legs of his chair, puffing Cambodian tobacco between sips of maotai. Like the roof over his head, the expensive indulgences were provided through the toils of his father.

  There was a reason Deng tolerated his son’s intransigence, and he was seated to his grandfather’s immediate left. Presently the small round face of Deng’s five-year old grandson was set in resolute determination, tongue protruding between teeth, his delicate hand gripping the fountain pen like a club as he struggled to master the art of calligraphy. Every few minutes the boy stopped, head cocked, bewildered by his inability to duplicate the orderliness of his grandfather’s hand. Deng thought the tortured ink characters had evolved admirably in recent weeks. But it was the boy’s fits of pouting frustration with the rate of his own progress that most satisfied the old cadre.

  “The answer is not on my nose,” Deng gently said. “You can do it. First, you must try.”

  Ping looked into his face and probed for signs of approval. Deng wondered at the child’s silk-smooth skin, fine fringe of eyelashes adorning the chestnut-brown eyes that shone with the promise of intelligence. Ping had inherited his grandmother’s eyes, my wonderful Chingling’s eyes—the woman whose eyes now visited Deng only in his dreams, where they projected a love so tangible and powerful as to affirm for him the eternity of individual existence.

  The boy smiled back at him. Deng reached out and tousled his hair when Guangmei’s din of hanging pots and pans in the pantry suddenly ceased. He turned to find her looking as if she had just witnessed a murder.

  “Military men have entered the courtyard,” she said softly, “and they are heading this way.”

  Deng Zhen frowned. There were standing orders to approach him any hour of the day or night should a problem develop. The failure of an important test would qualify, but he could not recall any such tests scheduled tonight. In any case, it was normally a civilian contingent that escorted him to work. There was one other troubling possibility.

  Deng glared at his son. “What is it this time, Peifu?”

  Peifu withdrew his pipe and stared indignantly at his father.

  Several hard raps sounded at the front door before it swung open. Two soldiers emerged from the darkness and entered the foyer with an air of authority.

  An officer of the People’s Liberation Army scanned the room. “Forgive the intrusi
on, Comrade Deng. Would you please come with us?”

  Deng noticed his grandson’s eyes blossoming wide. “Is there some sort of problem?” He patted Ping’s tiny forearm.

  “Fortunately, no.” The officer glanced self-consciously at the family members. “Your presence at Zhongnanhai is requested.”

  “Zhongnanhai? By whom?”

  “The Vice Chairman of Military Affairs.”

  Deng’s first impulse was to order the men from his home. Three times during the past week Deng had requested time with Rong Peng—all three times Deng had been snubbed. Why would Rong feel that he can summon me, as if some kowtowing lap dog, from the comfort of my family?

  Some years ago, Rong had skyrocketed from within the elite Beijing zhiwu mincheng biao a virtual stranger, the apparent beneficiary of very high-level quanxi, perhaps a relative pulling strings to land his position. Barely into his fifties and despite what Deng knew to be the man’s influence within the Central Committee, Rong now appeared to be deadlocked in a contentious battle for the successionary prize with another nomenklatura star, the finance minister. In a classic move to pit the wherewithal of one against the other, the aging General Secretary had awarded both men with positions of equally preferred status. As Vice Chairman of the Communist Party’s Military Affairs Commission, and de facto chairman in the shadow of the General Secretary’s illness, Rong Peng would appear to be a shoe-in to assume total control and yet, the core leader had issued ambiguous statements that could easily be interpreted otherwise. Until the day and hour that the National People’s Congress officially rubber-stamped his protégé, few individuals other than the General Secretary knew his identity.

  Deng’s expression hardened; he was not without high-level access of his own. “I am certain the priorities of Comrade Rong can wait until morning.”

  “Yes, however, the vice-chairman has arranged the audience of the General Secretary. In fact, I am here to escort you directly to the official residence.”