Chasing the Monkey King

by D. C. Alexander

  “Turn on the radio and select AM,” Severin said.

  “Another one of your counter-surveillance tricks?” Zhang said, turning it on.

  “Some types of tracking devices mess with AM radio. If one is on our car, we might hear a loud tone if the radio is on. Not a sure thing though. Depends on the type of tracker.”

  They listened to the radio but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. As they neared the outskirts where the main highway was located, they found a row of orange cones blocking the road. Beyond the cones, floodwaters covered the road where a culvert had been two days earlier.

  “Oh, crap.” Zhang said.

  “There’s another ramp on the other side of town. Stick to the side streets. But wait. Give me your phone. I don’t trust the delete function on these things. And neither of us wants to be caught with a phone containing texts or emails about a new submarine.” Severin took it, got out of the car, and threw both of their phones out into the overflowing drainage canal.

  They made their way back across Yinzhen, Severin still constantly scanning for followers. He didn’t see any. But that didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. They could just be that good. He tried to commit car types and license plate numbers to memory. But his hungover brain wasn’t cooperating. Regardless, as they reached the outskirts of the other end of town, they ran into the same problem. The road was awash in floodwater. They were cut off from the only two highway on-ramps they were aware of.

  “Okay,” Severin said, his pulse racing. “We’ll try the country roads. Smaller and slower, but at least they’ll get us the hell out of here. Let’s head north. When we were looking for the factory, it seemed to me that the roads didn’t cross as many drainage canals out that way, and the land was a bit higher.”

  The first road they tried got them out into farmland nearly two miles outside of town before it came to a flooded and impassable bridge. The second barely made it a mile. As they crisscrossed through the northern reaches of Yinzhen, they found themselves on the road the YSP factory was on. Approaching it, Severin spotted a van in its otherwise empty parking lot. “Pull over,” he said.

  “Are you nuts? Let’s get out of here!”

  “Let’s watch that van for a minute.”

  “I thought we were about to be arrested as spies.”

  “Take three deep breaths. For the moment, nobody’s following us, at least as far as I can tell. And I’ve finally had a non-frantic moment to think.”

  “You said yourself there’s probably a tracking device on the car. They’re just sitting back waiting for us to stop so they can swoop in and bag us.”

  “Wallace—”

  “$50,000 isn’t going to do us much good if we’re both dead.”

  “We’re trapped, Wallace. If these roads on the north side are flooded, then all the damned roads out of here are flooded. Also, if it was the MSS that came for us last night, they’d have us, don’t you think? They wouldn’t have given up on my door after having a little trouble prying it open, and they wouldn’t have just up and left after killing a man they thought was you. The place would have been swarming with agents. They would have locked down the hotel. And they would have taken us alive, for interrogation. They wouldn’t have wanted to beat you to death.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “No, I’m not sure. It still could have been an MSS operation. An inept operation run by a fifth-rate, blockhead agent who got his job because of family connections. Or maybe YSP thugs were behind the break-in last night, but MSS is still out there surveilling us. What difference does it make? What choice do we have? We can’t get out.”

  “This is bad, Lars.”

  “Breathe, Wallace. Let’s just watch the van for a minute while we think about what to do.”

  As they sat in the car, the rain pounding on the roof, Severin considered their options. They could ditch the car and hide. Zhang could certainly blend in well enough if he changed out of his Seattle clothes and into something more common to the area. They could set off on foot, and possibly swim across the flooded channels. If they didn’t drown and made it to one of the roads on higher ground, they could try to flag down a passing motorist and pay them anything to just get them to a city. Maybe one with a U.S. consulate they could take refuge in. He tried to remember what the nearest city with a consulate would be. Probably Shanghai, hundreds of miles to the south.

  “My heart is racing,” Zhang said.

  “Not as bad as mine was last night. Woke up at midnight or something. Heart pounding in my ears. Skipping beats. Pulse rate up around 160 beats per minute.”

  “Trouble swallowing? A vague feeling that you’re gonna die?”

  “Yeah,” Severin said with a tone that all but asked how did you know?

  “You had a panic attack.”

  “Screw you.”

  “No, really. You’re describing the exact symptoms of a panic attack.”

  “Why would I have had a panic attack last night?”

  “With all the anxiety we deal with as a species, the better question is why aren’t all of us having panic attacks all the time? We’re all afraid of the dark on some level, Lars.”

  “Right. How about we change the subject. Let’s think about what we should do.”

  “Wait, how many of those pills did you take?”

  “I don’t know. Seven or eight, maybe.”

  “Eight?!”

  “They were small.”

  “You’re supposed to take two.”

  “You could have mentioned that.”

  “The pills could have been a contributing factor. There’s some weird stuff in Chinese medicine.”

  “What was in those things?”

  “I don’t know. The bottle just listed the symptoms it was good for.”

  “And what symptoms were those?”

  “Hangover.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Stuffy nose, excessive bile, lethargy, and impotence.”

  “Oh my g—”

  Just then, Severin spotted a man emerging from the YSP factory. He carried a large umbrella and wore an unusual jacket. It appeared to be white leather. Under one arm, he was carrying a small cardboard box as well as what appeared to be a hotplate. He jumped in the van, started up, and headed out of the parking lot and down the street.

  “Follow him at a good distance,” Severin said.

  The van zigzagged through Yinzhen’s industrial zone, passing other small factories and warehouses, making several turns along the way, as if the van driver were, like them, trying to find a way out of town. Finally, it came to a stop at the curb on a random stretch of road alongside a grass lot strewn with slabs and blocks of what looked like broken concrete. Perhaps the fragments of a demolished foundation.

  “Why is he stopping there, of all places?” Zhang asked as he too pulled over.

  “Maybe he’s pouring a cup of tea.”

  “Or maybe he spotted us tailing him.”

  The van sat, running. And they sat, watching. One minute, two minutes, five minutes. Suddenly, two familiar looking black sedans came racing around the same corner they’d taken. One pulled in at an angle, just in front of them, blocking all possibility of forward motion. The other pulled right up to their rear bumper. They were trapped. The van fled.

  “I’m guessing he spotted us.”

  “You think?”

  “And called his goon buddies.”

  Four men jumped out of each car. Some of them held lengths of iron pipe. Severin recognized at least two of them from their confrontation at the factory the night before.

  “Here we go,” Severin said.

  They threw their doors open and stood for battle. The eight men advanced on them. Those with iron pipes held them high in the air. Severin and Zhang were each able to disable the first man to attack with hard punches to the face. But then the remaining men gang-tackled them. Severin fell to the ground and immediately employed the ground-fighting defensive tactic of spinning on h
is back and keeping his feet and legs directed at his attackers, kicking at them whenever they moved forward. But they quickly figured out that if one of them kept Severin occupied, the other two could flank him and approach unopposed. As he kicked at one of them, landing a blow on the man’s knee and dropping him, he lifted a forearm above his face to shield his head from a pipe one of the others was swinging down on him. He watched in horror as the pipe came down on his arm, breaking it so thoroughly that he could see a new odd angle in it resembling a second elbow. With his broken arm, he was only partially able to block the next blow, which caught the edge of his eyebrow, opening a huge cut that immediately bled into his eye, half blinding him. With his good eye, he turned to see Zhang already flat on his belly on the concrete on the far side of the car, unconscious, his arms pinned under his torso, blood pouring from his nostrils. Then he heard loud voices coming from elsewhere, and his good eye was drawn to the image of four more men—in plain clothes, but of a rigid bearing that suggested military or law enforcement discipline—emerging from two newly-arrived cars with small guns drawn, seeming to shout commands at the attackers. Some of the attackers began backing away from the men with the guns. It was the last thing Severin saw. A brilliant flash of blinding white light shot across his consciousness from somewhere in the back of his skull. Then all went dark.

  TWENTY-SIX

  All at once, Severin was aware of pain. Two kinds of pain—a sharp pain and a throbbing pain—both originating from the right-rear quadrant of his skull. In heavily accented and halting English, someone said, “You squeeze finger please,” and Severin realized he was reclined and that his right hand was indeed closed around someone’s finger. He gave it a quick, weak squeeze, then tried to open his eyes. Painfully bright light pushed another dagger of pain through the back of his head, and he quickly shut his eyes against it. An interrogation light? Had someone decided that he was a spy, there to gather information on the new submarine? Was he imprisoned in one of the dungeons of the MSS?

  How had he gotten here? What had happened? His memory was a jumbled mess, distorted and barely visible across a black abyss of pain. Despite it, he tried, once more, to open his eyes. Holding them open for an agonizing couple of seconds, he was able to see that he was in a bed in an immaculate, ultramodern hospital room. That much was clear. His broken arm was already in a cast. A man in medical scrubs stood at his side, looking at a clipboard. Another man in street clothes sat in a chair opposite the bed staring at him intently. His face struck Severin as familiar. Perhaps he was from a surveillance team that had been shadowing them. Perhaps he was an MSS counterintelligence officer. Someone to be wary of. Someone to fear. As he wondered, nausea hit him like a ton of bricks. He sat up straight, feeling his head go light as he did so, turned, and vomited to his right, losing consciousness as he heaved.

  *****

  “Mr. Lars Severin,” a gentle, accented voice said—presumably that of the man who had been sitting in the chair, as it seemed to come from across the room. Severin opened his eyes once again, briefly, to confirm his suspicion. “Good afternoon. I’m one of your rescuers. You’ve had a busy day. Do you remember what happened?” English fluency. Another worrying sign that this mystery man was a professional. Severin didn’t speak. “Maybe it’s better that you not try to talk right now. The doctors have said that, above all, you need to rest. That you should not strain yourself in body or mind. You are in a hospital in the port city of Qingdao, in case you’re wondering. We had to bring you here because the facilities in Yinzhen and Zhucheng weren’t equipped to handle the situation. They don’t have CT scan or MRI machines out there. We had to get you out of there in the back of a dump truck,” he said with a faint hint of a smile. “It was the only thing we could find with sufficient clearance to ford the flooded road.”

  “Anyway, you ran into some rough boys today, and one of them gave you a glancing knock on the back of the head with a metal pipe. But you’re lucky with respect to the head injury. It seems you have only a mild concussion. However, you also have a compound fracture to your arm, and a good set of stitches on your eyebrow.”

  Severin pursed his lips to speak, but the sound didn’t want to come out. The man seemed to anticipate his question. “Wallace Zhang was not so lucky. He’s alive, but he has a serious concussion. The doctors thought he might have bleeding on the surface of his brain. What they call a subdural hematoma. They had him prepped for surgery to drain the blood, then did one more scan with the MRI machine and decided he didn’t have a hematoma after all. They called off the surgery. So he is fortunate in that respect. But it will be some time before he is able to speak or receive visitors, and he isn’t going to be very happy with the pre-op haircut they gave him. Still, the doctors assure me his prognosis is good. And we have very good medical personnel at this hospital. So not to worry. Rest. You are safe here.”

  Severin didn’t believe him. He wanted to call Thorvaldsson and tell him what had happened. Wanted to tell him that things had gone well beyond the scope of what he’d signed on for and that he and Wallace needed to get the hell out of China and go home. But he had no phone. Even if he did, he didn’t think it would be secure to call from the hospital.

  *****

  Shortly after waking the next morning, Severin sat up in bed, looking around the Spartan, fluorescent-lighted room, utterly amazed that he was still alive, not in a cinder block interrogation cell, and that he wasn’t even so much as handcuffed to the bed. The door to his room was open. He considered getting up and making a run for it. But a wave of weakness, lightheadedness, and nausea shook him as soon as he half-attempted to lift his legs over the edge of the bed. He wasn’t going anywhere. At least not yet. As he let his head fall back onto his pillow, a uniformed police officer glanced in, then shouted down the hallway. A moment later, the plain-clothes man from the day before strode through the doorway, carrying himself with a posture of command.

  “You’re awake. Very good,” the man said, taking a seat on a chair beside Severin’s bed.” Severin eyeballed him. “My name is Joe.”

  “Joe,” Severin repeated dubiously, his voice weak.

  “That’s the anglicized version, anyway. Much easier to say and spell. It’s actually Jianquo.”

  “Let’s stick with Joe.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Tell me, Joe. Am I under arrest?”

  Joe looked surprised. “No. Should you be?” Severin just stared at him, silent, knowing from experience that a feigned look of surprise at such a question was an old interrogation trick to keep from spooking a suspect when you wanted them to keep talking to you.

  “Where’s Wallace?”

  “In the ICU. He’s still more-or-less unconscious.”

  That struck Severin as a sinister excuse for not being able to see him. Was Zhang instead being interrogated? Tortured? As for his own predicament, were they just playing nice to see how much information they could get out of him before bringing in the bruisers?

  “Who are you, Joe?”

  Joe straightened in his seat. “Well, I’m a type of policeman. I think it’s in both our best interests that we just leave it at that.”

  “A policeman,” Severin echoed, thinking a policeman who happens to speak perfect English, despite living in a remote and tiny village of a rural Chinese province where a knowledge of English is probably about as useful as tits on a boar.

  As if reading Severin’s thoughts, Joe said, “I was in Yinzhen on a temporary assignment. I’m based here in Qingdao. It’s a major city, at least by U.S. standards. I moved here for my wife. I actually lived in the States for many years. Went to grade school and college there.”

  “Grade school and college where?”

  “Grade school in San Marino, California. L.A. County. College at UCLA.”

  “Really,” Severin said, two-thirds sure this was some sort of trick to get him talking. “I had the best doughnut of my life there after a campus tour. A buttermilk bar,” he said, waiting and watchi
ng Bill’s face.

  “At Stan’s, right? Stan’s Donuts? Off of Weyburn Avenue? That place has been there since California was part of Mexico.”

  Severin gave him a close look before answering. “Yes. Stan’s.” Maybe this guy was for real after all. Or maybe the MSS counterintelligence bureau was so good that it could quickly summon and brief an operative who really had studied at UCLA.

  “Anyway, I’m here more or less temporarily. We moved from Los Angeles to Beijing seven years ago. But my wife’s family lives in Qingdao, and her mother is ill. So she wanted to be close to home. My father-in-law is a big cheese in law enforcement here. He was able to call in a favor to get me transferred to this job.”

  “Which you don’t want to describe.”

  “Well, I can tell you that in Beijing I was a sort of general detective. Assault, theft, murder—all within my purview. Let’s just say that I now have a certain specialization in anticorruption investigations.”

  “Business must be good.”

  “You have no idea. Last year alone, there were more than a hundred thousand government officials found guilty of corruption in China. Not suspected—found guilty. Over a hundred thousand! And that’s according to an official government report, so you can assume the true figure is much higher.”

  “Wow,” Severin said, thinking that was close to the total number of employees in the entire U.S. Department of Justice. “But why come back to China at all?”

  “Well, for one thing, it was taking my wife forever to get a U.S. visa. But I also wanted to contribute.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is the country of my birth. My heritage. I wanted to help.”

  “By being a cop?”

  “I majored in economics at UCLA. Studying econ and living in the U.S. drove a point home to me. Economic miracle that this country is, it won’t last unless we can do something about all the corruption. The income disparity. The lack of consistent legal recourse for common people. If the rich and powerful and corrupt keep getting richer and more powerful off the backs of cheap labor and decent honest people, one day it will all come crashing down. History will repeat itself. But it doesn’t have to go that way.”