by Greg Dragon
After that scary episode, the fight had gone out of the both of them. The subject of their leaving was dropped.
But the fall had been more serious than they’d realized. Jacques’ spleen had been ruptured, and he’d proceeded to lose blood over the course of the next several hours. If they hadn’t all gone out to dinner and been in the middle of the city next to a hospital when he collapsed, he would not have survived.
The fluid loss had been severe. And coupled with the concussion, he suffered a series of small strokes over the next three days which robbed him of much of his memory and physical control.
The recovery was long and difficult. It was still not complete, not psychologically anyway, and she feared that it might never be. The old Jacques was in attendance more often than not, as long as he kept to his strict regimen of self-medication. But every once in a while, he’d stop or forget a dose, and he’d become a different man. Then she’d have to intervene.
She had learned to recognize the early signs of these changes by reading his blog posts. The writing would shift, grow dark. A timely phone call to the service she employed to help watch over him would often be all that was needed. The blog was a convenient window into her brother’s mind, one which she kept secret from him.
But the posts weren’t an infallible oracle. Every once in a while, his writing would veer without warning onto some disturbing tangent, and she’d know that the madness had taken control of him.
She hoped that wasn’t what had happened to him now.
Chapter Ten
A loud crash startled Angel awake several hours later. It was raining hard, and the wind wrestled in the eaves. She could hear the torrents of water rushing down the roof and collecting in the clay gutters, rattling down the steel downspouts. Another ground shaking boom quickly followed, this one arriving almost immediately on the heels of a flash of lightning which lit up the darkened library where she’d drifted off, casting the old, dusty tomes and artifacts in stark shades of white and gray.
She had come in to use the computer but had gotten sidetracked looking over some old papers left out on the desk during her last visit. It seemed ages ago that she’d been in here, three or four months now. Jacques rarely, if ever, visited the room, and he certainly didn’t bother with the desk. She doubted he used any of the rooms other than his own, the bathroom, and the kitchen. And the once-a-week housekeeper would have simply left the papers where they lay, not knowing where to file them.
As for the computer, he had built his own from parts scavenged in second-hand shops in town. She knew that he constantly tinkered with it.
The papers were just medical reports. She remembered that she’d had them out to check on Jacques’ medications. She’d wanted to make sure he understood which dosages of which pills were to be taken at which time. It was all so very confusing, prompting her to buy him the plastic pill calendar now sitting on his bathroom vanity. He’d refused to use it at first, so she was glad to see that he’d relented.
The library’s wooden and leather desk chair was very large, very old, and much too luxuriant to have been of much practical use when her father had it made some four decades before. But then again, he had always been a large man. Now the abused cushion wheezed deeply whenever she sat in it, folding over the sides of her legs like it intended to swallow her up.
She pushed herself up with a grunt, unhappy that she’d fallen asleep, and made her way to the door.
The library sat at the terminus of a long hallway that branched off the left side of the front entryway, and as she passed along it, light from the lamps lining the walkway outside flung shadows against the wall. The sharp smell of the storm was fuller than she expected, and so she knew that it was in the house with her.
The entryway floor glistened with wetness, reflecting the glow which came in through the open door from the mock-gaslights outside.
She wasn’t scared. Not bodily, anyway. She knew, seeing the tracked puddles, that there was no physical threat to her. Of course, it was incongruous given how much this place threatened her. And considering how recently the intrusion at the hotel in Shanghai had been, and the consequence of it to DeBryan, she had every right to feel terrified. After all, a person had entered her house unseen while she slept unaware, had come in out of the dark night, and left the door wide open.
Unseen, perhaps, but not unknown. Anyone with malicious intent would not have deposited a sloppy trail of rainwater across the vestibule and up the marble stairs.
Brother Jacques is home.
Stepping carefully over the puddles, she made her way slowly up the stairs, gripping the railing so tightly that she could feel the bones in her hand compressing the thin flesh which sheathed them.
“Jacques?”
Frère Jacques, frère Jacques . . . ?
She knocked gently on his door. “It’s Angelique,” she told him in French.
Dormez vous? Dormez vous?
“I arrived this evening.”
There was a rustle of sound and something that might have been a cough.
“Je m’inquiète pour toi.” I’m worried about you.
She tried the knob but found it locked. She wasn’t surprised.
“Qu’est que c’est je te peux faire?” Is there anything I can do for you?
Non. Jacque’s thin voice. Vas t’en.
Go away.
“Est-ce que tu vas bien?” Are you all right?
Vas t’en.
She squeezed her eyes tight against the tears.
Go away.
Go away.
It was always the same between them.
She could hear the clack of his computer keyboard and knew that he was writing, probably exorcising another social evil he had newly encountered. Pushing him, especially when he was in such a state, would extract no information and only sharpen his resentment at her; he would talk to her only when he was ready.
She made a mental note to recheck his blog in the morning.
Outside, another clap of thunder shattered the steady rasp of the rain, but this one sounded farther away than the others. The storm was moving on.
“Make sure you dry yourself off,” she told him, and pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. This old house felt damp and cold. The sweater, from the closet in her room downstairs was one she rarely wore. It smelled of mothballs. She didn’t remember putting it on, but was glad she had it now. “You’ll catch your death.”
The grandfather clock at the end of the hallway chimed quietly: Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.
She knew the time it showed would be wrong. She always tried to remember to wind and reset it when she was here, but Jacques rarely bothered to do it. When she stepped over to it, she saw that the hands pointed at just past eleven. It felt later than that.
“I’m going to warm myself up some soup,” she told him, once more passing by his door on her way down. “Feel free to join me.” She paused, then added, “I’ll go shopping in the morning. There’s barely anything here to eat. You haven’t called for a delivery in a while.”
She was relieved that he had come home again, but not relieved enough to stanch that slow, simmering irritation that always came with worrying about him.
“You left the front door open and let the rain in.”
She waited several more seconds, but all she received back was the frantic rattle of his fingertips weaving his muddled thoughts and sending them out into the world for all but her to see.
* * *
The bread was dry, as was the cheese, but both softened up readily enough in the hot soup. Angel took the tray from the kitchen, pausing at the base of the stairs in the now-illuminated and mopped entryway and listened for a moment before heading back into the library. She couldn’t hear him writing.
Dormez-vous?
If Jacques was awake, he was probably reading.
Rain was still coming down, though the storm had moved on. The steady drone of it against the roof and running along the gutters w
as soothing. Through one of the floor-to-ceiling length windows, she watched it for a moment turning the drive into a flat gray sea. Had it not been for the unkempt hedges just beyond, one could easily imagine that the house had been lifted entirely from its foundation and floated away.
Everything beyond the drive was darkness. Even the town down below was invisible.
A chill still clung to the air in the library, despite her turning on the heater. It was much cooler after the warmth of the kitchen, and she wrapped the sweater around her again and shivered.
The loss of her laptop in Shanghai was not a significant blow; she was more irritated with the phone. With all the travel she did, she knew it was a matter of time before something like that would happen. Theft, confiscation, and hacking were constant possibilities. No matter how secure she tried to be, how aware of the risks, it was inevitable that she might find herself without the computer, which is why she always backed everything up into the cloud. And from there, she made sure to keep a separate backup on a server she rented from a company in Seattle.
The laptop she kept in the Lyon house was only a couple years old, but noticeably clunky by the standards of the day. The operating system and software appeared to have finished updating since she’d turned it on that afternoon.
She set the tray on the desk, sliding it to the left and out of the way of the auxiliary keyboard, then settled herself back into the overstuffed monstrosity of a chair. As always, it gave out a noisy puff of air and a dusty, slightly moldy odor. She carefully extracted the tiny memory disk from the roll of hygienic cotton and inserted it into the card reader slot in the front of the machine. A spinning hourglass icon appeared on the screen.
As she waited, scenes from the past few days tripped through her mind. It seemed such a senseless thing, DeBryan’s murder at the hands of some common street thug, not that she believed for a second that’s what he was. Nothing about the break-in felt random at all. So the question was, why had they been targeted? Her instincts told her that the government was hiding something at Huangxia, despite Cheong’s assertions to the contrary.
Finally, the spinning hourglass icon disappeared and a dialog box popped open asking her if she wished to view the photographs. She did.
There were only about a dozen picture files, and most appeared to have been taken from the window of DeBryan’s room on the island. The images accurately depicted the destruction which had been wrought on the island, proof of what she’d told the police. Would the Chinese government kill to keep them from being published?
What lengths would PRC officials go to in order to keep a secret? Would they murder an American journalist? Their failure to respond to the tragedy would have been an embarrassment in the international community, but no more so than so many of the other failures the press reported on year after year after year. What was different about this time?
She came to the last file and waited for it to open. Finally, it popped up onto her screen, and she realized why it took an inordinately long amount of time. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t a photo but a short video. It showed a sweeping view of the rubble in near-darkness, but according to the time stamp, it had been recorded in the pre-dawn hours the next morning, when the day’s first light was beginning to flush the darkness out of the sky.
She watched it once through, her chin resting on her hand, before straightening up in surprise. Now she leaned forward and stared hard at the lower left corner of the screen as she replayed it. This time, an icy cold chill passed through her, freezing the blood in her veins.
Three more times she watched the clip, each time focusing on the same corner. The quality of the video wasn’t great, and given the dim light it was shot in, the image was quite pixelated. But what she saw was unequivocal.
With shaking fingers, she removed the disk from the laptop and dropped it on the desk as if it were contaminated with some deadly virus. Then, after a very long time had passed, she picked up her cell phone and dialed. The call connected almost immediately.
“I’ll give you a week,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
An icy wind howled across the grasslands and knocked the car from left to right and back again. Between the gusts, the sorry state of the roads, and the inadequate shock absorbers, Angel felt her organs had traveled well beyond the land of the bruised. After Shanghai, they may have started out that way, but they’d since crossed over the border into the realm of the battered and abused, and were now solidly situated somewhere east of tenderized.
Twice she’d bitten her tongue, once when the right front tire slammed suddenly into an especially deep pothole which then launched her to the car’s roof, and once when the entire vehicle rode a swale that felt as if the tarmac had turned into a marshmallow the size of a swimming pool. After an hour of complaining, she gave up asking Jian, her driver, to slow down and settled back in her seat with her carry-on pack clutched tight against her chest and her teeth clenched until her jaw cramped. The peril to her tongue was too great to risk opening her mouth to speak.
She had never seen any landscape as monotonous as the eastern steppes, and she knew it was only going to get more desolate and more cold as the day wore on. She was glad she’d packed thermal underwear.
The temperature upon her arrival in Beijing had been moderate. It was a cloudy day, but without a breeze. Soon after leaving the city behind, however, the air grew chilly and the wind picked up. As the minutes ticked away toward late afternoon, the sun faded to a dull seeping pustule resting low on the skin of an albino sky. Ice formed on the corner of her window. Gray became the predominant color of the landscape.
“How much longer?”
“Two hour,” Jian said, holding up three fingers. Precise quantities seemed to defy him. His age was impossible to tell. As far as Angel could guess, he was anywhere from fourteen to forty. “We passing Bairin Zouqi,” he said, and he pointed at some low slung buildings off to the right. “One time was capital Chinese Liao Dynasty.”
The car skidded briefly on the shoulder, and he wrenched the wheel back until the tires hit pavement once again.
Angel took in the dismal scenery. They had passed what appeared to be a small town, some brick buildings and maybe more beyond, difficult to tell for sure in this low-contrast gloom. The few structures she saw closer to the road were made of cement and gray stone and appeared to be small shrines. There was also the occasional yurt or ger randomly situated, but little else. No people, lots of sheep and goats, a few camels. The variety of things to see was severely limited.
Bairin Zouqi.
The name whispered to her in her head, sounding vaguely familiar. She had a faint memory of an earthquake happening in the region, maybe ten, fifteen years before. If she remembered correctly, the event might have turned out to be one of those unremarkable things, of no particular interest to people elsewhere in the world, except that the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, had clashed with the government, not outright accusing but rather hinting that it was underreporting the severity of the trembler’s aftereffects. International news sources claimed that some twenty-five thousand homes had been damaged versus the sixty or so Beijing officially stated. The reasons for the discrepancy were never made clear, but it seemed to be yet another example of misrepresentation by the government, as if it were embarrassed by events it could neither have predicted nor prevented.
Such conduct had become so commonplace that the world had long since stopped taking the “official” reports at face value, which was why it was so important that people like her be granted access.
Was that the case with Huangxia? Until roughly sixteen hours ago, she had been sure the government was simply engaged in another cover-up of a natural disaster there. After what she’d seen on DeBryan’s video clip, she wasn’t sure it had even been natural, or even that the island had been hit by a rogue wave. By all appearances, it certainly seemed that way, but how could she trust anything now, even her own eyes?
“Wenbai coming next,”
Jian told her. “One hour.”
“That’s where the factory is?”
He nodded. “Goh Li Xhia factory.” He slipped a hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a photo and handed it over. Angel unfolded it and held it close to the window for light.
“This is recent?”
He nodded.
The three-story cement structure sat on a small hill. It had been built with modern construction materials. The corners were sharp and precise, almost painfully so. Angel made out a line of solar panels on the roof, their surfaces angled toward the bleak winter sun. The wall facing the camera was smooth and unbroken save for a single small door in the right-hand corner, and a lone window just above it. There was no parking lot, no signage. And the grounds around it had never been finished. Construction rubble and frozen dirt had simply been left in heaps all around.
“Not very inviting, is it?”
“Make secret parts for American company.”
Angel rolled her eyes. It was the same old story. Jacques had even written about it once, in fact, though he’d never actually been out here. He did the bulk of his research online from his room in Lyon.
Technology companies, he wrote, built their factories in the remote parts of China, exploiting the local cheap labor in their systematic rape of the land by removing rare earth elements, using the uneducated workers to staff their assembly lines. A few years would pass and people would start developing strange health problems or suffer from repetitive injuries. The worksite would be quietly shuttered and a new one would open somewhere else under a different name. No one would report these happenings. In its own drive toward economic superiority the Chinese government would be fully complicit, and so guilty of the abuses. The world simply didn’t seem to care enough to bring such atrocities to light.
“What kinds of parts?”
He shrugged. “Machines. Little computers.”
