by Marc Cameron
“Seriously, Boss,” Midas said. “I’m fine. Just got bosh-boshed out of the way.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
Midas thought of telling Hendley to think about calming down, but decided being a wiseass to the boss’s boss was not the smartest thing to do.
“Not sure,” Midas said. “Probably ‘get out of my way.’ Anyway, something’s come up with our mutual friend.” The line was presumed secure, but he still refrained from using names.
“All right,” Hendley said. “Let’s have it.”
“Everyone’s intact,” Midas said. “Our problem is egress. Our friend’s message said he has the package.”
“Has the package? With him?”
“Sounds like it,” Midas said. “From the sound of things, something really bad went down in the neighborhood he was looking at. I’m not sure about the details, but I’m hearing three dead.”
“Our friend?” Hendley asked.
“Well enough to send the message,” Midas said. “He must have rescued the package.”
Midas’s plane had arrived in the middle of the night, really in the wee hours of the morning, when he would have been getting up to do PT during his days as a lieutenant colonel in the Unit, commonly known as Delta Force. Halfway around the world, Gerry Hendley was hungry to know what was going on.
They spoke over an encrypted Internet connection, the virtual IP address bouncing around the globe to discourage local authorities in Kashgar from monitoring the call or tracking his signal. This had been the first opportunity Midas had been in the clear enough to call in with a report.
He’d done his usual TSCM—Technical Surveillance Countermeasures—sweeps covertly as soon as he arrived in the hotel room, always assuming the walls were bugged and equipped with at least one camera. Chinese security services surveilled everyone on the street, and it stood to reason that they wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to bug the rooms where foreigners spent the night. He’d found two listening devices, one in the lamp by the house phone—too obvious—and another at the corner of the bathroom mirror. Those wily MSS guys, assuming people might conduct their nefarious conversations while sitting on the john. Midas had used enough laser listening devices himself that he left the draperies closed to keep anyone from picking up the subtle vibrations of his voice against the window glass.
In case anyone happened to be watching, he’d used his phone to take the obligatory YouTube video of his Chinese vacation, getting a 360 of his room. Pinhole cameras in the walls would show up as shiny dots. Lenses in other objects—smoke alarms, wall hangings—might or might not give themselves away.
Even so, covert phone conversations from a hotel room in Communist China were too big a risk, so Midas waited until he got to the market—Rally Point Bravo, where Clark’s message had said to meet.
He’d just begun to bring Hendley up to speed on the new turn of events when the goatherd bosh-boshed his way past.
“We’ve got an emergency bugout plan,” Midas said. “But it didn’t take the package into account. We should be meeting up soon.”
“Very well,” Hendley said, obviously not wanting to end the connection and be left in the dark. “Three dead, you say?”
“As far as I know,” Midas said. “We passed a bunch of XPCC armored personnel carriers and troop trucks rolling into the neighborhoods behind Jiafang market this morning on the way in from the airport. My driver said he heard through the cabbie network that three officials were murdered with knives. XPCC and cops are saying it was Uyghur terrorists. I guess they’re already rounding up the usual suspects, at least the ones who aren’t already in detention camps.”
“Any word that a foreigner might be involved?”
“None so far,” Midas said, sidestepping a fresh pile of what he believed to be camel shit. “You need to cut back on the fruit, Mister,” he said under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“Sorry. Nothing,” Midas said. “The most important point is, our friend says he’s intact. Knowing him, I’m sure he has some kind of plan worked . . .”
Midas’s voice trailed off as he watched a half-dozen SWAT officers in black BDUs and helmets swagger through the crowd. Each had a small rifle Midas recognized as a QCW-05, a Chinese-made SMG, slung diagonally across his chest. Long wooden riot clubs hung from rings on their Sam Browne belts. The mass of marketgoers parted in front of them. Midas glanced to his left, and saw another group of officers, this one moving down the next aisle where food vendors sold grilled versions of the same animals that were still on the hoof just a few feet away.
It was clear from the way they scrutinized the crowds that these officers weren’t just out on patrol. They were looking for someone in particular.
At the other end of the line, Hendley grew agitated at the long silence. “What is it?”
“Have to go, Boss,” Midas said. “I got officers in hats and bats strolling around hunting for somebody. I need to make sure it’s not our mutual friend.”
Midas promised to check in soon and ended the connection, stuffing the phone into his coat pocket. Strolling slowly, he checked out the different livestock and food vendors, keeping tabs on the nearest group of XPCC troops out of the corner of his eye. A grizzled little man in a dark suit coat and four-cornered doppa hat stroked a wispy beard with one hand and held up a straight razor with the other, offering to give Midas a shave. Midas smiled and shook his head. Yeah, sitting down in these crowds and letting a stranger put a blade to his throat didn’t seem very tactical at the moment. A woman selling hot soup called him over with a flick of her wrist and held out a steaming cardboard cup. He figured soup from a boiling cauldron was about the best chance he had not to catch street-meat two-step. It was good, salty, with a few more globules of fat floating on the surface than he was used to, but it warmed his hands, and carrying it made him look like a tourist. Just yards from the soup lady, a man in a ratty military-surplus coat butchered a black goat. A pool of fresh blood in the dust said he’d just killed the thing. When Midas drew closer, he realized the hatchet that the man used to cut the animal was connected to a concrete block with a length of chain—one of the Bingtuan’s prohibitions about Uyghurs possessing weapons.
He checked his watch. Almost 0900.
While the bulk of the livestock market visitors were Uyghurs, there were plenty of tourists, Han Chinese and European alike, oohing and aahing and snapping photos at every camel and sheep. The guy with the chained hatchet got a lot of attention. Midas took a photo there, too, more to get a pic of the officers behind the man than the bloody carnage.
At first Midas thought the troops were singling out European tourists specifically, but further study made him realize they weren’t zeroed in on any particular ethnicity at all. Their focus appeared to be on taller men who happened to be with children. It made sense. Clark would have worn a hat that covered his face, but they must have security camera footage that showed a big guy in the company of Hala Tohti.
One of the policemen caught Midas looking in his direction and glared, a challenge to come closer. Midas smiled, ducked his head subserviently like a nervous tourist would—all the while thinking he could surely take this skinny dude, body armor and all. The real problem was Rally Point Bravo, where he was supposed to meet Clark, was on the other side of this officer and his heavily armed friends. With any luck, Clark had seen the patrols and was staying away.
Midas made a right, nearly running into a different patrol. He smiled again, stifling the urge to speed up. That would look like he was trying to avoid them. Instead, he worked his way in the opposite direction from the rally point, taking the long way around. Clark would wait fifteen minutes before he left the area. Midas would stand off and watch, approaching only if they were in the clear—which wasn’t looking very likely, since the place was crawling with XPCC cops.
Midas stopped to look at a rack of
colorful pashmina scarves as two more officers sauntered by, chatting with each other like they were at the beach instead of an occupying force. Their wooden batons rattled against black riot armor.
The Uyghur woman behind the scarves smiled at him, covering her sales bases. “Three for five euro. Two for five dollar.”
Midas bought three. “A lot of police,” he said, giving the lady a smiling grimace as he gave her a U.S. five-dollar bill. “Did something happen?”
She folded the scarves neatly and put them in a flimsy plastic bag. “Nothing happen,” she said. “Always police. They here every day.”
Midas thanked the woman and walked on, swinging the sack full of scarves in one hand while he sipped the fatty soup with the other—the perfect tourist cover.
“Mr. C.,” Midas said, blowing a blossom of vapor into the cold, musty-smelling air. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
* * *
—
Clark tapped Hala on the shoulder so she’d follow when he left the rally point. Midas was twenty minutes late, which meant they’d have to try again at 1400. There was too much law enforcement roaming the livestock market to tarry in one spot for long. They needed to get somewhere out of sight—away from the dead man at the dilapidated caravanserai.
With his phone battery near zero, he had no way of knowing if Midas was free to move around the city or if he’d picked up a tail. There was always a chance he’d been compromised. Clark would cross that bridge when he came to it, but in the meantime, he decided to pay a visit to Adam Yao’s contact, a woman named Cai, who sold handwoven carpets. Her presence at the market was the reason Clark had picked it as one of the meeting points in the first place.
The authorities appeared to be looking for someone with a child, so Clark whispered where they were going and then had Hala walk a few paces ahead, mingling with the other marketgoers. She blended in well with the crowd, always alert, stepping behind a string of camels or sheep when she spied approaching officers.
The clatter of hooves and baas of sheep drew Clark’s attention over his shoulder.
“Bosh-bosh!” the boy driving the sheep said.
Hala stepped close enough to tug at Clark’s sleeve, translating before putting distance between them again. “Make way.”
Clark knew the general area where Yao’s contact would be set up, but he supposed assigned spots could shuffle from week to week with so many people being taken away to camps.
To his left, a young man wearing an embroidered green doppa hat and a white apron over his coat arranged small glasses of pomegranate juice on a table to tempt passersby. A girl about Hala’s age—his daughter, perhaps—stood behind him, leaning on the handle of a juice press twice her size to fill a large metal bowl with the vibrant red liquid. Beside her, a man fanned smoke away from a line of fatty mutton kebabs that had likely come from a friend of one of the flocks the next row over.
Across from the juice stand, a cobbler tapped at his bench beside a mountain of refurbished shoes as high as his waist. Beside him, blue tarps covered a stall with shelves of assorted Uyghur pottery.
Yao’s contact, Mrs. Cai, came into view as he walked, on the other side of the blue tarp. A stout woman with high cheekbones and a sun-pinked face, she wore an ankle-length brown coat of heavy wool over broad, workingwoman shoulders. A few strands of black hair escaped her white headscarf. A Hui Muslim, one of China’s fifty-six recognized ethnicities, Cai’s ancestors had likely been Central Asian travelers from Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan on the ancient Silk Road.
Clark kept his distance, watching the young cobbler tap tiny nails into the new heel of a gnarled pair of leather shoes, while he waited for a German couple to haggle over a Central Asian rug the size of a bathmat.
They finally got the price they wanted, and walked away with their tiny rug. Mrs. Cai glanced up at Clark but didn’t acknowledge him as she stuffed the Germans’ cash into a metal box underneath her table. Clark noted the tarp over the potter stall next door blocked a good portion of the security camera on the nearby electric pole.
“Nice carpets,” he said in English, keeping his back to the camera and the pottery seller.
She smiled but said nothing.
Clark smiled back and waved a hand over the hand-knotted display rug of rich maroon and deep blue wool. “Like Aladdin’s magic carpet,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “I’ve heard it said that Aladdin’s rug was Persian.”
Clark gave her Yao’s passphrase response. “I’ve heard that as well,” he said. “I have also heard that all Persian rugs are Oriental, but not all Oriental rugs are Persian.”
“You are John?” Cai whispered. Her expression never changed, and anyone who looked on would have thought they were still discussing carpets.
Clark watched her closely. Initial meets were always touchy, but at some point, you had to commit. To paraphrase Hemingway, sometimes the only way to know if you could trust someone was to trust them. There were so many soldiers and police around that all she had to do was raise her voice and he would be toast.
“Yes,” he said. “I am John.”
Like usual, the travel alias retained his real first name, so John was the given name on his Canadian passport. Cai would not know or care if it was his real name or not.
Her head dipped in an almost imperceptible nod toward Hala, who stood watching the shoemaker a few feet away.
“The girl is safe, then?”
Clark picked up a small rolled carpet, perusing the golden fringe. “She is,” he said. “But getting her out is a problem.”
“I will help,” the woman said.
“I would appreciate anything you could do,” Clark said. “The person we were supposed to meet hasn’t arrived.”
Cai pretended to explain the details of the carpet. Her wrists peeked from the sleeves of her long coat, exposing a cluster of scars when she reached to unroll the edge—cigarette burns that didn’t look accidental. It was no wonder she was helping Yao. Sadly, the fact that this woman had likely been tortured by the same people who were after him allowed Clark to relax a notch. She had her personal reasons for fighting the Han government.
“I am to give you some special items.” She took the carpet they were looking at and reached below her table to retrieve a small one, deep red and coal black, about the same size as the one she’d sold the German couple. Stepping closer to the blue tarp wall of the pottery stall to block the security camera’s view, she unrolled it enough to reveal two handguns. One a semiauto Norinco known as a Black Star, a Chinese copy of the venerable Russian TT-33. Two magazines of 7.62x25 Tokarev ammo lay nestled in the carpet beside the pistol. Clark wasn’t a big fan of Norincos, but you took what you could get at times like this.
Mrs. Cai unfurled the carpet a few more inches to reveal a puggish stainless-steel derringer with the words SNAKE SLAYER and BOND ARMS engraved on the side of its three-inch over and under barrels. Elegantly simple, the little gun was chambered to fire either two .45 Colt or two .410-gauge shotgun shells. Cai had no .45, but provided six .410 shells loaded with number-six birdshot—a snake slayer indeed. Always a gun guy, Clark resisted the urge to pick up the derringer and handle it.
Cai rolled the carpet and tied it with a piece of strong cord.
“Some Bingtuan police carry 7.65,” she said. “Others nine-millimeter. The derringer was given to me by a friend. I would like the girl to have it.”
“Of course,” Clark said. He marveled that the little Texas-made gun had somehow found its way to the frontier city of Kashgar, about as close to the rough and tumble of the real Wild West as anywhere left on earth. “It will be perfect for her, should we need it.”
“I fear you may have many opportunities before you are out of this country,” Cai said. “These guns are small but powerful. Perhaps you can use them to obtain other weapons.”
“Getting out of the country,” Clark said. “I understand you have the contact for the route.”
“You must leave the city as soon as possible,” she said. “Too many cameras here. They are looking for the girl, saying she has been kidnapped. If they have her photo, facial-recognition software will eventually identify her.” She scribbled an address and a new passphrase on a piece of paper, holding it out of view of the surveillance camera while she showed it to Clark. “Memorize this.”
He nodded, reading it to himself and committing it to memory before she rubbed the pencil marks away with her thumb.
“This person will help you get out of the country. You can trust him.”
She handed him the carpet and held out an open hand.
Clark looked at her.
“You have to pay me,” she said. “People will think I am giving things—”
A commotion on the other side of the cobbler’s stall drew both their attention up the aisle. Four XPCC soldiers moved among the crowds, stopping every few steps to look at people’s phones and question them. They were led by a tall officer with dark glasses and a gray hat of curly Karakul lambskin. This kind of hat, known as a papakha, was traditionally reserved for Russian officers of higher rank. The way this man moved led Clark to believe that the hat might have the same significance for the Bingtuan of western China.
Behind Clark, Hala gave a startled gasp. He turned to find her crouching behind the stack of carpets at the far end of Mrs. Cai’s stall. Deathly pale, she chewed away furiously at her collar, rocking forward and back as if she might bolt at any moment.
Clark stepped closer.
“Do not run,” he said, keeping his face passive, his voice low and even. “They will notice us more if we look afraid.”
“It is him,” Hala whispered.
“Ren Shuren,” Cai said, running a hand across one of the carpets for the benefit of the security camera that viewed that end of the table. “A major with the local Bingtuan police service. His younger brother, Ren Zhelan, works for the Kashgar building council.”
