by Lisa See
Hulan pushed the button for the elevator. “What you did in there…” She was having trouble finding the words.
“I was only doing my job.”
Hulan met his eyes. “Thank you,” she said, then extended her hand. After a moment he took it and they shook.
By the time Hulan and Peter got down to the magistrate’s court, the FBI agents had already settled into the first two pews on the right side of the aisle. They looked formidable, and David worried that Judge Hack would be less than pleased to see such a show of force in his courtroom, but there was little to be done about it. The agents were, in fact, here to be intimidating. Nothing David could say would induce them to leave the courtroom. On the defense’s side of the aisle sat four extremely beautiful Chinese women in their early twenties. Girlfriends of Spencer Lee or women simply hired to look innocent and sympathetic, David did not know.
Inside the bar on the left-hand side, Spencer Lee sat with his attorney. Lee had changed from his prison uniform into an exquisitely cut three-piece suit of the finest Zegna wool. His tie was a deep red and his breast pocket held a matching silk handkerchief. He appeared rested and happy, smiling and chatting amiably with his new attorney. Since last night, Lee had replaced the triad lackey with Broderick Phelps, one of the highest-priced attorneys in the country, having defended dozens of well-known and well-heeled miscreants in the last two decades.
Judge Hack called on David. He needed to stick with the main case—the smuggling of a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of bear bile, which violated the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Knowing how foreign this crime had seemed to him when he first heard about it, David explained at some length about the importation of bear bile, that its street value was greater than cocaine or heroin, and that it was taken from endangered species protected by international treaty.
He played the tape of Spencer Lee accepting the bile from Zhao. David used the charts from his office outlining Asian organized crime in Los Angeles to explain where Spencer Lee fit into the organization and to delineate the Rising Phoenix’s activities in Southern California. He gave a brief synopsis of the murders in Beijing, the hiring of the China Peony, and the dates of travel for Spencer Lee. He ended by saying, “I’m sure Your Honor is aware of the terrible tragedy that transpired last night in this city. The persons who were killed in the Green Jade Café were the FBI agent assigned to this case and the man who volunteered to deliver the bear bile to Mr. Lee.”
Then Broderick Phelps stood to make his case, which was simply that the government had entrapped poor Spencer Lee who, as the judge could see, was an upstanding pillar of the community. To prove his point, Broderick Phelps produced several letters from other upstanding Angelenos willing to testify on Spencer Lee’s good character and a copy of the deed to his $2.5 million house in Monterey Park. “Spencer Lee is neither a threat to the community nor a flight risk,” Phelps opined in resonant tones.
Phelps then asked if he might respond to the government’s other accusations and proceeded to do so. “I see no reason for my esteemed colleague to bring up the matter of the triads when he has been unable to prove that they even exist. Nor do the allegations about crimes in China have any bearing on this case. We do not have an extradition treaty with China, nor, I might add, should we, when we consider that country’s gross violations of human rights. But I would offer one more thing. I have to question Mr. Stark’s motives today. He has audacity—I’ll give counsel that—but I am outraged that he is even implying that my client could be responsible for crimes that occurred in China. During the same dates that Spencer Lee was abroad, there were a billion other Chinese also in that country. How Mr. Stark can implicate my client is simply beyond me.”
Broderick Phelps’s voice rose in indignation as he went on. “As for what happened in our city last night, well, Your Honor, I simply don’t know what to say except that my client was a guest of the federal government. In fact, I would say that the assistant U.S. attorney is using the worst sort of stereotyping to attack my client. If Mr. Lee were of Italian descent, would Mr. Stark be calling him a member of the Mafia? I’m sorry to say that I expect so. Our city has withstood a lot in the last few years stemming from just this sort of prejudice. Spencer Lee is innocent of these ludicrous charges and we ask that bail be granted in this case.”
“Mr. Stark?” The judge’s tone was dubious, but he was willing to hear David out.
“Your Honor, I am in no way trying to imply that all Asians are involved in crime. Today I am here on behalf of the U.S. government as we try to determine Spencer Lee’s involvement in several cases—”
“Hold it right there, counselor. Allegations are not enough to jail a man in this country. If you have proof of Mr. Lee’s involvement in any of these other crimes—and I’m speaking specifically about those occurring on U.S. soil—I am willing to listen. If you don’t, then you’d better sit down.”
When Judge Hack granted bail, Spencer Lee turned in his chair to face his coterie of women and raised two fists in triumph. Then he swiveled toward the FBI agents and smiled smugly. The agents sitting on either side of Jack Campbell had to hold him down. Finally, Lee turned his gaze to David, cocked his head, and lifted his eyebrows questioningly. Instead of feeling incensed, David felt a strange kind of sympathy for him. People in his line of work with his foolish bravado often died young.
Having signed over his house as collateral and handed in his passport, Spencer Lee was on the street by 11 A.M. and in the company of the four young women. As they drove along Alameda, turned up Ord Street, then right onto Broadway, they were not alone.
Fifty agents were assigned to Lee’s round-the-clock surveillance. In the air, he was covered by two tag-teaming helicopters. On the ground, a whole fleet of cars—each with two men apiece—followed Lee wherever he went. As soon as he got out of his car, he would be followed on foot by at least five agents. When he was at home, agents would cover the iron gates, which provided the only entrance or exit to the property. To be on the safe side, additional agents would be stationed around the perimeter of the property in case Lee tried to jump the fence. The FBI believed he would make a mistake somewhere along the way, and when he did, they would be there.
His first stop was Chinatown and the Princess Garden. The FBI agents watched as Spencer Lee circulated around the huge dining room, stopping here and there to say hello, even exchanging a few business cards. With his bevy of women, he took a table near the front of the room and ordered dumplings, stewed duck feet, rice noodles, and warm tapioca soup.
Later, he took a walk with his groupies, first along Hill Street, with detours on Chungking Court, Mei-ling Way, and Bamboo Lane. He stopped in curio shops, in herb shops, in noodle emporiums, and in a couple of antique stores. Obviously the FBI agents didn’t follow him inside these enterprises, nor should they have. But they were there on the streets of Chinatown, posing as tourists, loitering, like homeless men, or striding purposefully as though they had business to attend to.
By two in the afternoon, Spencer Lee was ensconced in his mansion. The FBI agents sitting in their cars pulled out thermoses of coffee and bags of doughnuts. Over the next two hours, several guests came to pay calls on Spencer Lee, presumably to celebrate his release from jail. The gates would open and a Mercedes or a Lexus would pull through. By the time the gates closed, the license plate number would have been radioed in to the FBI and the owner traced. All of these activities were relayed to David and Hulan in his office.
At four, the party—much like those in China—abruptly ended. Everything seemed quiet. David and Hulan went back to his house for the night. All any of them could do was wait.
At two in the morning, David was roused from his sleep by the ringing of the phone. Jack Campbell was on the line and he seemed half crazed. “He’s gotten away, Stark!”
A few hours later, the mood in David’s office was grim. The FBI agents roiled with a volatile combination of fury and chagrin. At about midnight, although they could see
someone walking inside the house, they’d begun to suspect that Spencer Lee had slipped away. At 1 A.M., Jack Campbell had begun pleading with his superiors that someone had better go in there and check things out. Half an hour later, frustrated and racked with guilt, Campbell, ignoring orders, marched up to the front gate and rang the buzzer. The voice that responded over the intercom was not Lee’s. In fact, he was not at home. According to Campbell, he must have left the mansion’s grounds in one of his guests’ cars, which gave him as much as a ten-hour head start.
Everyone considered the possibilities. Lee had left the house by car, which meant he could have done any number of things. He could still be driving. He could be in Las Vegas, hoping to wait things out. He could have gone three hours south to Mexico. He could have headed north, thinking that Canada was only a couple of days away if he drove straight through. But David discarded these ideas. From what little he knew of Spencer Lee, he was convinced that the young man didn’t have the gumption to go on the lam without his cronies.
So, during the night, domestic and international airlines were checked. Again, there was no telling which way Lee might have gone. Paris? Chicago? Hong Kong? Hulan thought not. Lee was a Beijinger, she reasoned. He would travel back to that city, where he would have the protection of family and his triad connections. That the name Spencer Lee did not show up on any passenger lists came as no surprise. His passport had been turned in, as was customary, but they had hoped that he’d travel under a recognizable Rising Phoenix alias, maybe even keep the last name of Lee.
At 9 A.M., FBI agents hit the streets of Chinatown to search every business that Lee had entered during his walkabout the day before. Most of the enterprises in this part of Chinatown were run by old families, some of whom had been in the United States for a hundred years or more. They listened to the agents and offered what help they could. Yes, they remembered Spencer Lee’s visit. No, they didn’t know him personally, but over the years they’d met his type many times before.
But in a stationery store where calligraphy brushes, ink, and practice paper were sold, the owner insisted he had never seen Spencer Lee, knew nothing about the triads, and had never heard of the Rising Phoenix. The FBI agents noticed that Bright Peony Papers looked as if it had never served a single customer, which was strange given how busy all the other shops had been. Seeing a door at the rear of the shop, one of the agents asked what was back there. When the owner refused to answer, the agents burst through (to hell with a warrant), went down a set of stairs to the basement, and found a counterfeiting operation. After a few minutes and a little excessive force, they had an alias for Spencer Lee.
Twenty minutes later, as Hulan predicted, the name was found on a passenger manifest for a direct flight to Beijing. The flight had left from San Francisco at one this morning, which meant that Lee had been in the air for nine hours. He would be arriving in Beijing very shortly. Hulan called the Ministry of Public Security. “Find Vice Minister Liu, find Section Chief Zai! We need someone arrested at the airport.”
A couple of hours later, a call was patched through to David’s office for Inspector Liu Hulan. David couldn’t understand the Chinese she spoke, but early on he picked up from her expression that Lee had been caught. After she hung up, there was silence. Finally she asked, “Do you think Spencer Lee is responsible for all this—the deaths in Beijing, the Peony’s cargo, the bear bile, and the murders of Zhao and Gardner?”
“I don’t think he’s smart enough or rough enough. We have a word for what he is, Hulan. Spencer Lee’s a patsy.”
“I think so, too, because as complicated as this has been, as twisted…” She didn’t finish. She smoothed a few strands of hair from her face. She looked exhausted. “They want Peter and me to come home.”
“I thought we decided you wouldn’t do that.”
“I know, David, but let’s look at this. Five people have died. Someone is making a profit—on people, on medicines. We thought the answer was here, but we were wrong. I think we have to start over again. I have to go back. It’s my duty. You see that, don’t you?”
That he saw it didn’t make him feel any better about it.
“Then I’ll come with you.”
Madeleine Prentice thought otherwise. “I’ve had calls from both the State Department and the Ministry of Public Security. Everyone is satisfied that the culprit is in custody. The Bureau, of course, isn’t too thrilled, but I think they’ll take some consolation in the fact that the Chinese have a very different judicial system than we do.”
“He’s not the murderer.”
Madeleine shrugged. “It’s political now, David. Let the Chinese handle it. Spencer Lee’s the scapegoat. Take it. Be happy with it. Try to put this whole disaster behind you.”
As David walked down the corridor, he thought over what Madeleine had said. In his office, Hulan waited for him. No matter how things turned out, they would be together.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He took her hand and they went down the hall to find Peter. The trio left the Federal Courthouse Building and walked to David’s car. When they got to his house, David opened his wallet, pulled out his American Express card, and made three reservations on United to Beijing via Tokyo.
Later, after they stopped at the bank to get as much cash as he could, David and Hulan didn’t speak much. They were taking a tremendous risk. David’s career in the government was effectively over, a realization that gave him a strangely exhilarating sense of freedom.
He did, however, worry about Hulan. In the last week, as the story of the illegal sale of the nuclear trigger components continued to come out, the political situation between the United States and China had regressed to its worst state since the Bamboo Curtain fell. Most of the dependents from the U.S. embassy as well as from its consulates in other parts of China had been sent home; the Chinese had reciprocated by doing the same with about 50 percent of its personnel stationed in the United States. The State Department—while not yet issuing an official advisory against travel to China—had announced that visitors to that country should be “careful” better yet they should postpone their trips indefinitely.
David and Hulan would go to China. They would see this thing through to the end. And then? The answer to that was out of reach, beyond anything David could imagine.
17
FEBRUARY 10
Beijing
You’re about to see why I don’t practice law,” Hulan said as she and David took two seats in Beijing’s People’s Court. The room was large and typically cold. Several observers still wore their coats and scarves. But the air was oddly stuffy from cigarette smoke and, he presumed, fear. For David, who watched as several cases were tried and sentences meted out with amazing dispatch by a panel of three judges in military uniforms, the whole scene had a surreal quality.
The first trial of the day involved a man accused of bank robbery. The prosecutor shouted out the facts of the case while the defendant stood with his head bowed. There were no witnesses, and the defendant chose not to speak. His wife and two children, however, were present at the proceedings and listened as the lead magistrate announced the decision less than forty-five minutes later. “You are not an honest man, Gong Yuan,” the judge said. “You were trying to leapfrog to a new level of prosperity by stealing from your countrymen. This cannot be allowed. The only justice for you is immediate execution.”
The second case involved a habitual housebreaker who had come to Beijing from Shanghai. This time, after the prosecutor had itemized his accusations, the judge asked the defendant several questions. Had he known his victims? Had he come to Beijing legally? Did he understand that if he confessed he would be dealt with more leniently? The answers were no, no, and yes. Still, the defendant chose not to accept responsibility for his crimes. The judge said that twenty years at hard labor might make him see otherwise.
And on it went.
These trials, Hulan explained, were the result of the “Strike Hard” campaign that
had begun a little over a year ago. Fueled by the rise in crimes for profit, the government began a crackdown that had produced tens of thousands of arrests and well over one thousand executions. “Once convicted,” she said, “the criminals are paraded through the streets, marched through sports arenas, and displayed on television. They wear placards around their necks listing their crimes. They are denounced as barbarians by their jailers and heckled by crowds. Then it’s off to labor camp or death.”
Such harsh justice had a long pedigree in China. Twice a year in days gone by, posters would be displayed in cities across the nation—not in public places where foreigners might see them, but behind walls in the neighborhoods—listing the names of those executed and their offenses.
“Families of those who are put to death have to pay for the bullet,” Hulan continued.
“But all that must be for serious crimes,” David said.
Hulan shook her head. “Even minor crimes merit tough sentences. Being fired from a job and having no other way to make a living, refusing to accept an employment assignment or housing transfer, or simply ‘making trouble’ can mean a four-year sentence to a labor camp.”
“And many of those camps,” David said, remembering articles he’d read, “provide cheap labor to American-owned factories in China.”
“That’s right. The U.S. profits from my countrymen’s transgressions.” Hulan motioned around the room. “And as you can see, justice proceeds quickly here. We have no pretrial hearings, no delays, no extensions, and rarely any defense witnesses to muddy the waters. The defendant is guilty until proven innocent. When that guilt is verified, punishment is determined and carried out promptly. An appeal is as rare as a solar eclipse.”
A door opened and Spencer Lee was brought in. His fashionably wrinkled linen suit had been exchanged for a white shirt, black slacks, and leg irons. His head was bowed, but at one point he glanced up. Then, just as quickly, a guard bopped Lee’s head with the heel of his fist and the prisoner’s head dropped back down submissively.
