by Fritz Galt
If all went well, he’d check out of the hotel by mid-morning and still be on a flight to Beijing by noon.
He tried to settle his nerves by slowing down to a stroll and thinking about his family. He could visualize their faces. Kate could paralyze him with her playful green eyes and put him at ease with her ironic smile. Jane’s cascade of dark hair never obscured the flat, open planes of her eager young face. And Sammy, God bless him, what a bundle of energy, could knock him flat on his back with his chubby, fiery red-haired, five-year-old determination to beat his dad.
He passed a swarthy fisherman with a cell phone hooked to his rope belt. Boy, he missed his own kind. What was his family up to? Under what conditions were they living? He hoped to hell Kate hadn’t fallen in love with some other guy…
The motorboat continued to buzz in his ear like an irritating fly as it cruised parallel to him across the wide, curving Yalong Bay.
Two colorful figures appeared on the sandy horizon. They developed into a pair of mature young beauties walking toward him in what looked suspiciously like thong bikinis. He reddened as they checked him out.
He wandered past them in his tailored sport coat, long trousers, and bare feet. In the past year, he had lost some of the handsome glow of his features, what with his receding hairline, flaccid cheeks, and permanent hangdog expression. But his skin tanned evenly, his six-foot stature made up for his bad posture, and his determined look behind his wire-rimmed glasses convinced even him at times that he was up to the task, whatever that task might be.
As of that morning, he was a married man again. Hell, after burying his family in Maryland, he should not have felt so damned inhibited. But on a normal day since that funeral, he wouldn’t turn toward the innocent scent of youth that wafted past him, and check if those really were thongs. If his heart hadn’t hurt so bad, if he hadn’t worshiped every aspect of his wife Kate, if he hadn’t invested his entire soul and every breath in the happiness of Jane and Sammy…what kind of trouble would he have gotten himself into?
He gazed at the widening wake of the motorboat. Had somebody planted that pair of tall, busty brunettes in the sand to test his libido?
No, he wouldn’t look around. Instead, he conjured up his wife walking toward him, a smile working its way around her face, drawing his attention away from her trim form. But she was wearing something very naughty, too.
He continued down the beach, passing a Hmong minority family out for a stroll before the heat of the day. They wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts as if they had dressed up for the occasion. Perhaps for the mountain people, the beach was something other than a place to let their hair down and relax.
He stepped across the wet grooves left by several high-sterned fishing boats. Fishermen had recently hauled them up the beach and were already drying their nets.
Suddenly his heel slipped and he nearly lost his balance. He swung his arms to remain upright, wrenching a few vertebrae in the process. He looked back. Like a plastic bag, a large jellyfish quivered in the sand. His right heel felt a sting, then his back began to tingle. Had the jellyfish injected him with some sort of toxin? Or had he merely pinched a nerve?
He looked up just in time to catch a gang of pale, majority Han Chinese approaching him. It was a loose band of men, not a tightly knit family like the previous group. Chilled by their expressionless eyes as they passed, Sean picked up his pace.
Suddenly, a burlap bag flew over his head from behind.
What the—? He tossed his shoes onto dry sand and reached for the fabric around his throat. God, were they trying to strangle him?
“What’s going on?” he tried to yell, but the coarse fabric muffled his voice.
He heard water slapping against the hull of the motorboat as it approached.
He tried to sink to his knees, create as much dead weight as he could. He had to get to Beijing, to save his family.
“Help! Help!” Could the Hmong family hear him? Maybe there were policemen on the boat. Perhaps the fisherman could help.
He looked around desperately, but could see precious little through the tiny holes in his hood. Every gasp for air that he took filled his lungs with the oily fumes.
Who were these thugs? Was it Beijing or the White House that had hired these goons to execute him?
Strong hands pinned his arms behind him, and he had to let go of the tiny gap that prevented him from choking. Then, working as an efficient team, the group wordlessly hustled him into the water toward the boat. His pants were saturated by the first wave.
Damn. This was going to cost someone. But whom?
For an instant, the coarse fabric lifted above his eyes. A brief glimpse revealed the fisherman holding up his cell phone and waving at someone in the trees. Was he calling for help? Then the bag slammed down over his face again. As he stumbled into the water, it became clear that the fisherman wasn’t appealing for help at all. He was calling something off, or giving an “all clear.”
Events were not going his way, and nobody seemed the least bit concerned.
Before he was even waist-deep in the water, he knew what he had to do: forget the money for a moment and try to escape. He had to find some way to free himself from the long arm of the authorities before they took him out of the game.
His obstacles to finding his family were mounting exponentially.
So who were these thugs? It seemed incredible that Washington could have dispatched hit men to that remote beach in China. It had to be the Chinese with some gripe against him. Or were the two working hand in hand?
He felt a twisting yank against his neck. He coughed and tried to unclog his crushed windpipe. Air wasn’t getting through. With each faltering step he slogged through the water, he could feel the effects of depleted oxygen.
Okay, the first step was to stay alive.
What did they intend to do? Drag his corpse through the streets? The whole thing really sucked. But at the moment, he would trade everything for a single breath of air.
Then he felt several pairs of powerful arms lift him, and he landed hard on his tailbone in the back of the motorboat. While he was being transferred aboard, the bag slipped loose around his neck once more. He coughed until his windpipe cleared. Then a gush of air filled his lungs. He was euphoric to simply breath again.
The small craft rocked wildly as the men clambered aboard. Then someone opened the throttle, and Sean fell back against the gunwale as they spun around and headed out to sea.
“Who are you?” he managed to croak. “Where are you taking me?”
In addition to the cold of his wet clothes pressing against him, a new thought sent a chill down his spine. What did he know about the island beyond the resort? Hainan Island had been his home for two weeks. But he didn’t have a clue about what lay beyond the resort’s walls, much less on the nearby mainland or at sea.
The men remained mute and unresponsive.
Oh this was great.
“You’ve got the wrong man!” he shouted at them above the deafening roar of the outboard motor as they accelerated.
Their silence was unnerving.
He couldn’t reason with them, negotiate with the limited capital that he had to offer, even get to know who they were.
It felt like he was falling into a black hole.
Tiffany Klug was waiting curbside at Macy’s, their favorite rendezvous point.
Hiram pulled up to the curb, but kept one eye on the security guard by the door, half expecting to be shooed away.
But the guard seemed reluctant to step out into the falling snow, and besides that Tiffany had her gloved hand on the door handle just seconds after he came to a stop.
“What took you so long?” she whined, throwing herself into the bucket seat beside him and letting several shopping bags land in her lap.
He caught the name on one bag, “Victoria’s Secret.”
That was uncharacteristic of her. He wanted to ask what she had bought, but clammed up. Was he still inhibited after all
those years?
He fishtailed through the huge parking lot and guided them onto the Garden State Parkway heading home. Only when they reached the tollbooth, did he manage to glance up to his wife’s face.
In the pinkish halogen glow, she looked lovely.
“Been to the hair dressah?” he asked, noticing the new frizz in her otherwise droopy red hair.
“You noticed,” she said, not displeased.
“Yeah,” he said, speeding up to merge with the fast-paced traffic. “You got that certain look I remembered from our days in Florida.”
The words sounded odd because he was exaggerating. In fact, they had only spent two separate weeklong vacations over the past twenty years in Florida. But considering the spirit of the occasion, he would allow himself a bit of drama.
“I don’t know if they’ve got hairdressers in Purang,” she said. “I asked my girl, but she didn’t know.”
“I didn’t see any mention in the guidebook,” he said.
Suddenly, the tiny Pacific nation sounded a bit alien to him. He hated to admit that his only source of knowledge about the place was a travel agent’s brochure and a guidebook that he had checked out of the library. And that was already ten years out of date.
Which reminded him.
“You got everything packed already?”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Kitty’s got our luggage ready for the limo.”
Bam. There it was again, another daunting concept. Hiram was not a limousine kind of guy. He preferred the trips where an entire family piled into the car to see off a grandmother at the airport. But, he sighed, he had to join the Twenty-First Century. People took limos from Jersey to Kennedy every day.
“So what you got in there?” he asked, nodding at the bags that sat so slim and elegant in her lap. “What is that, a Victoria’s Secret?”
He changed lanes to let her get over any embarrassment in fielding the question.
“Oh, I was looking for a bathing suit.”
He let out a short laugh. “Sweetie, I don’t think they’re called ‘bathing suits’ any longah. At least not at Victoria’s Secret.”
She gave him a funny look. “What do you know about Victoria’s Secret?”
Now it was his turn to feel uncomfortable. “I switched over from that Fredericks a while back,” he quipped.
She gave his shoulder a teasing shove. It didn’t move his bulk one inch.
He eased down the slick parkway exit ramp. Soon he was following a slushy back street through a small forest toward their home.
At last, their two-story house was in view. Sure enough, not only was Kitty waiting for them, but she was already standing by the curb with the limo driver. Hiram and Tiffany’s two suitcases were already in the trunk.
Frost floated on his daughter’s breath as she greeted them cheerily.
“Well I certainly do envy you,” she said a tad too effusively. “You’re off to the tropics.”
“What?” he said. “Are you telling me you want us ta leave you?” He looked over at the limo chauffeur, as studly a man as any that might find Kitty attractive.
“No, Daddy,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “I just want you to be happy on your Twentieth Anniversary.”
“I’ll miss you, Kit,” he said, returning her hug. It was the first trip he and Tiffany were taking without their daughter. Now that she was a freshman at the junior college, she could certainly spend two weeks alone. But it did feel like he was breaking up the family.
The al-Jazeera TV truck rolled cautiously through the maze of trucks and vans with their crews already hard at work.
Covering the Academy Awards was a strange, last-minute assignment for Abdul, who wasn’t even well versed in American cinema. On the contrary, his journalistic instincts made him want to track down the stories that were shaping the lives of other young Arab men and women just as his life had been shaped.
Hollywood barely factored in.
Nothing about American culture threatened the Arab youth of his day. Fast food, music, fashion and the mass media were all a natural result of economic development. Who he was was not determined by American cultural hegemony. In fact, he embraced American culture as a normal part of life.
He glanced around at the cables that snaked from cameras inside the building out to the trucks. “Watch out,” he said, directing his driver to avoid disrupting a live broadcasts by one of his colleagues.
What did shape his life most profoundly, however, was the harsh treatment of Palestinians, a battered and long-suffering people. Abdul wasn’t Palestinian, nor did he even grow up with Palestinians. He hadn’t even dwelled particularly on their quest for independence and statehood as he perfected his English language skills at Cairo University.
But the Palestinian cause affected everyone’s lives in Egypt, if not the entire Middle East. Abdul suffered under military law imposed by a figure propped up by the American government simply because he was useful in putting down the Palestinians. Abdul’s entire country was dominated, from restrictions in the press and political freedom to the books sold on the street, by one man, Washington’s man who sat in the Presidential Palace in Cairo.
After all, how would the Americans feel if their president was a puppet of some foreign power?
They rolled up to an impressive angle on the Kodak Theater. Spotlights reflected off the curved façade with a glittery sparkle.
“Stop right here,” he ordered.
The driver braked and turned off the truck’s engine.
Abdul checked over his camera crew, hunkered down in the back of the truck. “Let’s set up a live feed from this spot,” he called through the back window of the cab.
The crew set to work at once, and Abdul began to compose his thoughts. What could he say to the Arab world about the stars of Hollywood?
Since it was too early in the waking Arab world for anyone to turn on his or her television set, whatever he announced would reach few ears. Nevertheless, he was determined to do the event justice.
While his crew established a satellite link and rolled out electrical cords for lighting and the television camera, he thought he would stroll inside the building and take a look at the ceremony that was already in progress.
Chapter 4
Sean grew increasingly woozy as he inhaled the vapors of the oily burlap sack. How much longer could he endure the smell before he collapsed on deck unconscious? And if that didn’t knock him out, surely the nauseating rollercoaster ride in the motorboat would get to him. Even while two strong pairs of hands pinned him to his seat, the acid in his stomach rose up his throat with every swell.
The bag still blocked his view, and all he could do was listen to the slap of the prow against the surface and the drone of the motor. The men weren’t talking. They were either professionals, or sullen types.
They had better be professionals. If they were going to kill him, at least they should do so quickly and efficiently. After all, the Chinese certainly were experienced at executions.
What was he thinking? Who would save is family then?
He would have to get to know his captors better. How strange that they needed to conceal their identities. Not only had they blindfolded him, but they were as quiet as mice. Maybe they were just going to rough him up and intimidate him so he wouldn’t testify in the Chinagate trial. But he had given no indication to anybody that he intended to testify. This had to be some mistake.
He cleared his throat. He was ready to offer his silence to the president, even perjure himself. What did it matter to him if he let the scoundrel walk? He would get his family back in return.
But what did he know of his captors. Maybe they weren’t from the White House after all, but from the special prosecutor who wanted the president thrown in jail. Maybe they wanted him to testify! In that case, he would sing like a bird.
Until he knew who these thugs were, he’d just have to keep his trap shut. He wouldn’t play his cards until he found out who these guy
s were and why they were holding him captive. In the end it didn’t matter to him who had hired these smelly thugs that manhandled him so roughly. The sooner he cooperated with them, the sooner he could track down his family.
And with that decision to comply, his muscles began to relax. He would take his lumps in stride. He had already done his company’s bidding, he had transferred the kickback funds to the president’s personal bank account, he had watched his family being carted off to a SARS ward, sacrificed in order for him to do it. What more could he do for a president that he hadn’t even voted for? Now he would either have to lie or die for the president, and he was not going to give the crook his life. That’s where he would make his stand. Call him a liar, at least he would be alive to save his family.
The boat droned on. The clank of loading cranes tinkled in his ears. Perhaps they were nearing a port, possibly the capital city, Haikou.
That was no real capital city. Now Beijing. That was a real capital.
He allowed his thoughts to wander for a moment. Perhaps if he searched deep enough into his past, he could find who had written the note that his family was alive. Who was pulling the strings in his life? Who had triggered his breathtakingly quick descent from a well paid family provider to a widower, then from a solitary and honored figure in the press as he stood alone at his family’s freshly dug grave in Maryland to becoming a haggard wreck trying to fight off a hit squad, barefoot on a remote Chinese island.
The whole tragic story had all begun in quiet, peaceful Beijing as the city eagerly anticipated the first green buds of spring.
Every industrialist and his head honchos were there in China’s capital, including all the oil companies against whom his firm, Core Petroleum, was competing.
His mind replayed images of the easy life among other expatriates, professionally manicured yards in summer, dining in the glittering city at night. Cocktails with clients, beer and nuts at the wood-paneled bars with coworkers. Soccer games with Jane and Sammy at the International School. Hikes with Kate along overgrown stretches of the Great Wall.