by Noel Hynd
Peter, at forty-one, was maybe five years older than the other two men. But right before her eyes, China’s first generation of only-children were waving good-bye to the old line Communist Party and saying hello to Moet, Prada, and Rolex. To listen to Peter and his two friends, laughing more heartily as the evening went on, was to believe that Shanghai was becoming the biggest boom town in history since Las Vegas. Around the table, they began swapping one-upsmanship stories of the prosperity of their new nation.
“Hey, my sister was in Chinese Vogue last month,” Peter said. Quickly and proudly, he reached in his wallet and pulled out a clipping, cut neatly from a magazine. He produced a picture of an Asian gazelle who had his face and his features. Everyone leaned forward to check out the picture of Peter’s sister.
Her name was Jennifer, Peter said, and she worked for IBM in Shanghai. Like all young Chinese on the cutting edge of fashion and trends, she had adopted an English-language first name, as American-like as possible.
The picture, in color, showed a world-class babe in her early twenties, done up in a white cashmere sweater, a raspberry leather miniskirt, and designer leather boots.
“Jennifer loves Chanel,” Peter said with brotherly pride. “Ten years ago in China no one knew what Chanel was. Now my sister is addicted. She shops forever.”
“She’s very pretty,” Alex said.
“Look at her,” Peter said. “Immaculate hair. Perfect teeth. Manicured nails. Fluent in English, Japanese, and Cantonese, and she is feminine as feminine can be. She is the new Chinese woman in miniature,” he laughed. “The economic miracle made flesh.”
“Very nice looking flesh,” Ming chipped in.
“Is she married?” one of the other girls asked.
Peter laughed. “Married? No, no! She’s having too much fun. She has five boyfriends at the same time, and they all spoil her mercilessly!”
“Five?” Alex said. “ Five! I don’t think I’ve had five in my life!”
Alex’s remark set off laughter around the table.
“Peter is just showing off because he has a sister,” Wong said. “Peter was privileged. Hong Kong born. The rest of us are from one-child families.”
“Because he’s from Hong Kong he thinks he’s better than the rest of us,” Ming added.
“I know I am,” Peter said, halfway through his second drink, an oversized gin and tonic.
“Peter already owns seven cars,” Ming volunteered to Alex, as more drinks went around. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, he didn’t,” Alex said. “Are you kidding me? Is that true? Seven?”
“It’s true,” Peter acknowledged with a grin.
“What do you own?” she asked.
“Not much,” he answered. “A few old wreckers.”
Around the table, the lie didn’t fly.
“Ha!” Ming said.
“Peter owns a Porsche 911, a Mercedes, a BMW X5, a Mitsubishi Evolution, and a Toyota Yaris,” said Wong, lighting a cigarette. “And that doesn’t include the company Jaguar that’s at his disposal in Europe.”
Peter shook his head with a grin and tried to dismiss the subject. But he confirmed it was true about all the cars.
“That’s only five that you named,” Alex said to Charles Ming. She turned to Peter. “What else do you have back in the ‘worker’s paradise’?”
“Okay, okay,” Peter said. “I also have a Peugeot, which I bought a year ago when I was in France, and I have an American ‘collectible.’ My favorite.”
“What’s that? Some hot Corvette or Mustang?”
“No, it’s a 1970 Ford Colony Park station wagon.”
“You drive around Shanghai in a Colony Park station wagon?” she asked.
“When I can,” Peter said.
“He’s never home to drive them, but he owns them,” Ming taunted. “So his six-dozen girlfriends borrow them.”
Wong added that Peter had inherited wealth. “His father owned five merchant ships, five hotels, and two hundred apartments. Some Communist!”
Again Peter brushed things off. “You know what they say about communism,” Peter said. “It’s the longest and most difficult route between capitalism and capitalism.”
“You’re going to get into trouble for giving away state secrets,” Wong warned.
Again, the table laughed although Holly and Sabrina seemed a little left out. “Peter needs to be ‘reeducated’,” Ming taunted in good humor.
Peter, meanwhile, was making a hand signal to the waiter, who gave a quick nod of understanding.
“China today is crazy,” Peter said, turning back to Alex, and explaining. “The money. The poverty. The urbanization. The exhaustion of our natural resources. The opportunities in China are beyond anything that anybody in Europe or America has ever seen. It’s insane, but everyone goes along with it.”
“My family was happy if we had food,” Ming added, but less jokingly. “You in Hong Kong were already wealthy. Many of us in China were still struggling.”
Ming continued. “My cousin is nine years older than me. She grew up during the Cultural Revolution. I grew up after it. She works in a factory that builds coffeemakers and sells them to the West. I cannot even imagine how hard her life has been. And she is my cousin. Peter’s sister is what’s known as a ‘Shanghai princess,’ a girl who has been raised in wealth and privilege.”
Ming, it turned out through further conversation, was moving up in the world. He had just moved in Shanghai from a scrappy little neighborhood to a place named New California Estates. It was a private Western-style compound with huge villas made of fake adobe and a whole miniarmy of private guards. He showed Alex a picture of his home. Ming’s minivilla had a manicured lawn, a deck overlooking a man-made lake, a barbecue pit, an ornamental well, and a perfectly groomed Labrador retriever.
“My dog’s name is Clinton,” Ming said.
“Named after the American president,” Wong chided.
“The dog is a female. It’s named after the ex-president’s wife,” Ming said. Ten years earlier, Ming said, his family had nothing; now not only did he have this house but he also bought an apartment for his parents. The economic thaw had started during the Clinton years in America, and so many young Chinese felt gratitude. Naming a pedigreed dog after the ex-first lady, to Ming’s way of thinking, was the very least he could do. Alex thought of several smart remarks but didn’t make any of them.
The waiter, responding to Peter’s hand signal, appeared suddenly with a bottle of champagne and six glasses. He opened the bottle and poured drinks all around. Alex watched as Peter slipped the waiter an American hundred dollar bill and declined change. A tip. The waiter, his evening an instant success, gave Peter a low bow.
Wong’s background was closer to Ming’s than to Peter’s. He had been brought up in Xinjiang, in the far northwest near the old Soviet border. His parents had been forcibly relocated there in the seventies. The Cultural Revolution had been the greatest disaster of their lives. Before the Civil War, he explained in a side conversation to Alex, his grandparents had been landlords, so they were considered capitalists. The Red Guard had come around one day with a vengeance and ordered them to the remote countryside.
“They didn’t want to go work in the fields,” he said, “but they were taken there and then left in the middle of the countryside. They had to build their own house. We were miles from anywhere. The government wanted to keep us apart from the local people. The nearest village was a two-hour cycle ride away, and it had nothing, only a little market.”
Alex’s curiosity was piqued. “That must have been terrible beyond belief,” she said.
Her comment allowed Wong to open up even more.
“My parents were at the Shuanghe Labor Reeducation Camp,” Wong said. “It was a prison farm near the Russian border. The other inmates were mainly young pickpockets, burglars, and brawlers. In the camp, guards and prisoners used the word ‘reeducation’ to mean you’d be locked up in a small cell and struc
k with electric prods or beaten. Afterward, you’d have to write a self-criticism. Then there was another form of daily torture. During the hours between breakfast and the second and final meal in the late afternoon, no one was allowed to use the toilet. My parents told me little more than that about the camp. I never wanted to know more. How could I?”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. She was.
“The same government apparatus that tortured my parents today makes me rich,” he said. “Some days I find it confusing. Most days, I don’t think about it.”
He shrugged. Then he buried the thought with a long gulp of Moet and Chandon.
A wave of culture shock flowed through Alex. In almost everything she had read on China, sooner or later the phrase human rights turned up, coupled with the terms policeman, linked with words such as torture or brutality. And yet here was David Wong in Versace with a Polish babe in a slashed-to-the-thigh Liz Hurley. Next to him, Ming was a David Beckham look-alike-wannabe with pouffy hair, hanging all over his knockout French bimbo. These days, the iconic image of a lone figure standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square was a relic of the past.
More champagne went around the table.
“So,” Alex said, “does anyone ever criticize the government?”
“Of course,” Peter answered. “It’s common knowledge that the government is corrupt and is hiding scandals. And that they don’t tell the truth. Everyone knows.”
“What about democracy?” Alex asked.
“We can vote for representatives,” Wong said quickly. “But in China there are too many people. True democracy is not possible.”
“Why would anyone want nine hundred million unwashed, uneducated peasants from the countryside telling the government what it should do?” Peter added with dismay. “That would be absurd! The decisions of state are best left to the educated elite.”
“Fine for you since you’re part of it,” Alex said.
“Of course. But look at the economic miracle of the last two decades. We are obviously doing a lot that is right. Our system might not be like yours, but for China it has worked.”
“What about human rights?” Alex said. “Like detaining prisoners without trial? Like torture.”
“Like Guantanamo?” laughed Ming. “One cannot always control the excesses of our government.”
“So,” Alex finally said, “is this really what Deng Xiaoping meant when he talked about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ almost thirty years ago?”
“It might not be what Chairman Deng meant,” Peter answered quickly, “but it’s what it has become, for better or worse. A lot of business success is through the traditional virtue of guanxi, through elaborate social relationships.” Well educated, male, and born in Hong Kong, he had been in a perfect position to profit.
“Okay then,” Alex finally said. “You have all these luxuries and material successes,” she said. “What about spiritual stuff?”
“Of what sort?” Wong asked.
“Maybe inner beliefs,” she said. “A personal creed or a set of morals or a code?”
“Like a religion?”
“Call it that if you like,” she said.
“You mean like Lee Yuan?” one of the younger two men said.
Alex wasn’t sure who had mentioned the name, but conversation at the table stopped cold. It was as if someone had fired a shot. Peter’s eyes widened slightly, as if to admonish whoever had crossed a line. And a line definitely had been crossed because both Wong and Ming, well lubricated as they were, had a regretful look to them.
“I’ve never heard that name before,” Alex said. “Who’s Lee Yuan?”
More of a pause. “Lee Yuan is why we’re here,” Peter said.
“Why’s that?” she asked. “I’m not following.”
Peter began to explain, obviously taking great care with his words.
“Lee Yuan was a wonderful man,” he said. “He was a mentor to the three of us. A mystic perhaps. A great teacher and friend. He recruited all three of us into the current positions we now hold.”
“I see.”
“We would not be where we are today,” Wong said, “if he had not handpicked and groomed us.”
“He is no longer with us,” Peter said. “He died recently. To honor him, his memory, his spirit, we are attempting to complete his final mission. There is a tradition. If a person perishes from this earth and an important part of his life’s work is left unfinished, those who held that person in high regard are honor bound to pick up the fallen standard and finish that task. Sometimes such things are very small. Other times the task is great and may take a lifetime. The three thousand mile march begins with a single step, after all.”
“That’s a noble tradition,” she said. “I can’t argue with it.”
“Thank you,” he said. “But that’s why I’m here, it’s why my associates are here. Lee Yuan was a spiritual man. So we wish to accompany his spirit down his chosen path.”
“So his soul can rest?” she asked.
“Think of it that way if you wish,” Peter said.
Peter’s eyes flicked away from Alex and onto the two other women at the table. The gesture was so quick that she would have missed it if she hadn’t been looking directly at him. But she caught it.
“That’s really all I can tell you for right now,” he said. “I won’t hide anything important from you. Maybe I’ll think of more later. Or on another day. But that’s all you need know for now.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. Then his serious expression gave way to a smile. The waiter returned and the conversation went back into Spanish. Orders for food were taken and another bottle of Moet replaced the dead one on the table.
Dinner was excellent. A live band started playing toward midnight, and the two younger Chinese agents pulled their partners out onto a small dance floor. Chang watched them go, turned back to Alex, smiled, and extended a hand to her. He motioned to where people were dancing.
“You have to be kidding. I haven’t danced for quite some time,” she said.
“Let’s change that now,” he said. “Please? I’d be honored.”
She drew a breath. The images of her personal tragedy flashed in front of her. She thought of Robert and thought of the discussions they’d had before he died. If anything happened to either of them, the other could go on and create a new life.
“Okay,” she finally said.
Out onto the floor they went.
The name of Lee Yuan did not come up again that evening.
Alex did not weave back into her hotel suite until well past 2:00 a.m.
FORTY-SIX
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, MORNING
O n fewer hours of sleep than she might have preferred, Alex rose the next morning later than the previous day. It was almost nine when she opened her eyes. She checked her email, the personal account first.
There was something from Ben back in the States, which she opened first. Then she quickly switched into her secure account for Treasury. She wished to read everything in her Inbox before sending anything.
There was nothing from Floyd Connelly, who this morning was neither Pink nor Pretty Boy. She prowled through the latest links from her associates at Scotland Yard, Interpol, the Spanish and French police agencies, as well as Rizzo in Rome. Rizzo was in a newly explosive and churlish mood. He’d had DNA tests run on the tissue sample beneath his fingernails and was fuming that there had been no matches yet.
She scanned some new attachments from her contacts. Nothing good.
Hunched over the laptop in a T-shirt and navy track shorts, her dark hair hanging carelessly to the side of her face as she inclined over her work, she again looked more like a graduate student than a skilled investigator from the United States Department of Treasury. And a funny bit of doggerel rebounded from her own youth years ago. A phrase her mother used to say: A fool can ask more questions than a wise woman can answer.
So what was she this morning, Alex w
ondered in a little pang of self-criticism. A fool or a wise woman, dancing into the early morning hours at a Spanish tavern with an agent of Chinese state security whom she had just met a few days ago? Did a fast and loose social life fit her current mood and lifestyle?
Well, it had been most enjoyable. And Peter hadn’t made any move toward her at the end of the evening. Was she disappointed by that? The mood had loosened between them…
Hey! She said to herself. Reality check: you’re on duty! Behave!
The previous evening, Peter had revealed something of interest, something perhaps that he might have otherwise not wished to mention. Lee Yuan. Maybe it was something she could parlay.
She went back to the attachments from Colonel Pendraza. She had become adept at skimming them quickly. She worked her way through them.
Two Germans who belonged to neo-Nazi skinhead groups in Munich had been arrested in Luxembourg, charged with illegally selling to police informants twenty pounds of dynamite to be used against synagogues across Europe. Policia Nacional agents in Tunisia had arrested another neo-Nazi after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C-4 plastic explosives from an Interpol undercover agent. A key tip had come from an Israeli born prostitute. Then a biggie: members of the Irish National Police had raided the Antrim county home of a former Provo and discovered an arsenal of more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition, fifty pipe bombs, and ten remote-control briefcase bombs. No longer useful for the conflict in Ireland, the old IRA gent was trying to move the stuff to the Middle East. Then there was something about the movement of HDX explosives from Iraq through Cyprus. Interpol had been on the case and had lost track of the HDX shipment there. The explosives may have moved east, they might still be in some mountain hideaway. Who knew until someone set them off? This dead-end tale gave way to two stories about the same “honor killing” of an Iraqi girl in Naples who had gotten pregnant by an Italian boy. The girl’s uncle had killed her before killing himself.
Alex blew out a long breath. But her fingers busied themselves at the keyboard again. Something had occurred to her while she was asleep, and she had now formulated her approach to it.
