China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  ‘Our client has set a deadline.’

  It was two weeks later; Julie, Kim and Alice Hou were still in Echuca.

  Mr Xu didn’t like working to deadlines; it led to mistakes, to taking risks, to taking things for granted that shouldn’t have been. But the client in question was rich and powerful. Xu knew that, so did the man now pacing backwards and forwards silently on the expensive Tibetan carpet that was Xu’s pride and joy. Li Qiang – even Xu wasn’t sure whether this was his real name – was a key member of Xu’s business group. A very senior public servant with the ear of some of the most important men in the Communist hierarchy, he lived a double life with an ease and composure that the more intense Mr Xu could never have aspired to.

  ‘The woman, Julie Li, has been instructed to prepare the merchandise. I haven’t given Kim any deadline. He needs to stay out of view for a time; the British are pressing the Australians to pick him up over some unrelated labour importation activities. He’s aware of the pressure the Australians are under. That’ll give him an incentive to get the girl ready quickly without any stated deadlines.’

  Mr Li wasn’t interested. This was a client that had to be satisfied. He gave Xu the deadline.

  ‘It can be met. He is a man of patience; he will want the merchandise in good condition.’

  Li Qiang didn’t appear to hear. Seemingly engrossed in Mr Xu’s collection of Qianlong-era porcelain, he became very still. Arguing with Xu didn’t make sense.

  ‘It will be met!’

  It was an unequivocal statement that the client expected Mr Xu to take as a fact.

  ‘Then you must keep the police from interfering.’

  Julie would have recognised the cold hard way in which Xu made the statement. Li Qiang shrugged. In common with Mr Xu, he was probably beyond intimidation.

  The People’s Police in China was a major problem to the criminal groups that Mr Xu and Li Qiang worked with and were a part of. In fact, they were a problem to a whole range of people in the new China where corruption and political manipulation were rife and the efforts of the Communist authorities to stamp it out were hindered as much by the depths of penetration of the corruption as by their inability to know whom to trust, even among their own.

  The challenge for the UK and Australian Security Services and law-enforcement agencies in dealing with the Chinese was to identify the uncorrupted officials to deal with without alerting the corrupted ones. It was an issue that had taken on a greater urgency with the decision to employ Julie, whose life could be on the line if information got into the wrong hands.

  21

  It was six hours before Kim returned. It was obvious from his body language that he was in a foul mood. It eventually transpired, much to Julie’s amusement, that this was more to do with his need to ask Julie to do something for him than with the nature of the request itself.

  On being released, Alice was dismissed from the room and locked in the bedroom. At Julie’s insistence, she wasn’t handcuffed again and her clothes were returned to her.

  ‘Outside!’

  Kim’s demand was irresistible.

  They sat out on the rear deck in the semi-darkness. Julie was cold. Her sweatshirt provided inadequate warmth and Kim had given her no time to get a coat.

  ‘I was picked up by the police.’

  Julie was surprised.

  ‘What? Why?’

  She experienced mixed feelings. It wasn’t an action that she would have expected. Taking Mr Kim out of circulation would have stalled the whole project. Unless something major had changed, the Australian Security Service would never have authorised such a thing. But a sense of relief was firmly suppressed. Much as she would have liked to have given up on the whole activity, she knew that she still had a job to do.

  ‘I’m Chinese.’

  Kim spat the words out.

  It didn’t seem a likely reason to Julie, so she assumed that it was his way of covering his embarrassment at what had happened to him.

  ‘They’re looking for you. Echuca is just the sort of place where the police would expect you to hole up, apparently.’

  Julie was even more surprised; this seemed even less likely. Maybe something really had changed.

  ‘But you convinced them that you didn’t know anything about me?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe! I still have to take my driver’s licence to the police station tomorrow.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I don’t trust them. There’s something not right. They didn’t ask where I was staying in Echuca. Why didn’t they do that? Do they already know?’

  Julie had no answer. Pulling Kim in and then letting him go didn’t make much sense to her either. She assumed that the police action wasn’t spontaneous. In which case, why had the Security Service put them up to it? Was it a message; a coded enquiry about herself? She had to assume that it was; it was the only reasonable explanation. That meant that she had to somehow show herself but it had to be convincing to Kim.

  Kim had his own problems. He was in a quandary of his own making, having dismissed the driver days ago. If when he went back with his driver’s licence, whether they knew it already or not, they would want his current address. He realised that to avoid suspicion he would have to give it and expect it to be checked. That would expose Alice to the possibility of discovery and rescue if the police came to visit.

  Only Julie could ensure Alice’s security, if he wasn’t there. But Mr Kim still couldn’t bring himself to completely trust her. Yet he knew that he had to; he needed her cooperation. The logic was there; but the underlying niggle of the neatness of Julie’s recruitment still troubled him, as he knew it still troubled Mr Xu.

  ‘Did you buy an exercise bike?’

  Changing the subject wasn’t going to help much but Julie needed to keep up the pretence of innocence.

  Kim’s scowl clearly said that he hadn’t.

  ‘You’re going to have to buy one.’

  His lack of enthusiasm for this suggestion to her as a solution was rather obvious. The exercise bike was becoming an end in itself.

  Possibilities for Julie began to surface. With only one car, three people and the need to keep Alice hidden, the dilemmas were piling up on Mr Kim thick and fast. Julie knew that she had to help Kim, since she was no closer to understanding what the plans were for Alice but she also had to make contact with her bosses.

  ‘I can take you into town and then go on to Swan Hill. You can get a taxi back to the wharf.’

  ‘Sure.’

  It was an obvious solution. Julie noted the tight-jawed way that the word was extruded from Kim’s mouth. It was if one part of his brain didn’t want to say it but another part was forcing him to. The trust gap had still to be bridged. She would have to see to it that, whatever transpired during the day, his trust would be increased.

  How the hell was she going to do that? she asked herself.

  ‘OK,’ was all she said to Kim.

  Next day Kim seemed more reconciled to Julie’s plan.

  It didn’t take Julie and Kim long to tape Alice’s ankles and wrists together and tape over her mouth. The look of betrayal in Alice’s eyes seared into Julie’s brain but her priority was to build Kim’s trust. A look at Kim reassured her that he hadn’t seen the young Chinese woman’s anguish. His contempt for Alice meant that he barely looked at her as he went about the business of restraining her.

  Kim had wanted to get an early start the next day so he was irritable and unapproachable, but as Julie was beginning to read him rather better again she sensed that he was also anxious. Since he shared only such information as he thought she needed to know, she was unaware of the surge of emails that he had had from Britain and the pressure on him from there to resolve the outstanding issues of his last visit. He, in his turn, was also unaware that moves were in hand to remove him from the British action. Like Kim himself, Mr Xu shared only the minimum of information that he thought necessary.

  Equally, the last thing Mr Kim thought he ne
eded was a raised profile with the Australian authorities; it was as much this as the unfinished business in the UK that was making him edgy.

  And the last thing that Mr Xu needed now was for Kim to be distracted from the task of delivering up Alice Hou in prime condition, since that was now his primary and only task.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Leaving Alice locked in the houseboat’s windowless shower room, the two set off for Echuca.

  Kim’s nervousness increased as they drove into the centre of town. The police were expecting him. The Security Service was tracking him. The presence of Julie with Kim was noted and contingency plans rehearsed.

  Events for the Security Service had suddenly taken a more positive turn. Having been spotted in Echuca by his unusual height, Kim had from their point of view absolved Julie of any urgent and immediate need to make contact; they knew where she was. Had she known this she would not have been surprised therefore that their car had been fitted with a tracking device; they had every intention of continuing to know where she was.

  But Julie herself still felt that she had to make contact with the Security Service; Alan had been most insistent that she did so regularly, if infrequently, even if she had nothing to report.

  Having delivered Kim to the door of the police station, she drove off immediately.

  Julie had no intention of going to Swan Hill. Vague as her knowledge of the local geography was, she realised that she had a better chance to engineer a contact with the police and via them, Alan, her controller in Melbourne, by going to the larger town of Bendigo.

  Her driving as she left Echuca was erratic and occasionally illegal.

  Good.

  It wasn’t long before she had attracted the attention of a police patrol car. Patched into the police radio network, Alan, from the comfort of his office in St Kilda, read her mind accurately.

  ‘OK, let’s make it look authentic,’ he told the Victorian Police.

  Australian country roads are generally good quality and rarely busy. That was something that Julie had been told by one of her Melbourne café acquaintances. She was soon over the speed limit.

  Nothing happened for a few kilometres. Then it happened quickly.

  ‘Jesus! Two of them. Where the hell did they come from?’

  Slithering on the loose gravel on the outside of a bend, Julie hit a bush and then bounced over a rock and came to a none too elegant a halt as one of the police cars pulled up beside her. A faint twinkle in the eyes of the officer who approached her told her that he was a party to the game in play.

  ‘Miss Li,’ he said with a wide and engaging grin.

  ‘Miss Kershawe, perhaps,’ said his companion, a diminutive Chinese woman sergeant.

  They made their way in a convoy of three to the police compound in Bendigo, the sergeant travelling with Julie.

  What!

  The sergeant had produced her handcuffs.

  ‘The local press usually have a couple of apprentices around the place. They take photos and daydream of scoops, no doubt.’

  ‘In this day and age?’

  ‘Country town,’ the sergeant said, ‘not Melbourne.’

  She was obviously not a fan of the big city.

  No press photo was taken. But the quality of the mobile phone video that was taken was good enough to identify Julie Li. The Security Service wasn’t the only people who had covered the possibilities when Julie set off from Echuca. Mr Xu was not pleased but he ordered a waiting game. He did not pass the information on to Mr Kim.

  Sitting in front of a police laptop computer, the encrypted conversation with Alan didn’t take long. His Greek-god looks weren’t so obvious through the electronic media as in real life; Julie’s expectation of not seeing Alan again hadn’t been met but the stresses of the role that he had got her into had dissipated any of the feelings that he had generated in her in the Melbourne coffee shop.

  ‘Kim is under pressure. The Brits are very keen to get hold of him. Apparently, some pretty important trafficking deals have gone wrong and opened up a can of worms with the UK authorities. Not our problem, but being on edge makes Kim dangerous.’

  (When she eventually came to hear of this, Linda Shen, in the comfort of her luxury nursery and the gurgling company of her infant son, would hardly be able to suppress a grin of satisfaction.)

  ‘OK. So something’s wrong. I sensed he’s nervous about what we’re doing at the moment; but I didn’t think of him as a bloke who would worry over much about anything other than his immediate problems. Somehow this Alice Hou is really important to them; why I haven’t a clue. I’m supposed to be getting her fit and healthy. How you do that with a woman who’s frightened witless I’ve no idea.’

  Julie was no more going to tell Alan than Mr Kim about Alice’s reaction to herself. Alan told her what she needed to know:

  ‘At the Chinese end of things, something’s brewing. The top brass are very aware of what they call the importation of high-class Western Chinese women, albeit in penny numbers. They also know full well that some pretty important people in the upper reaches of Shanghai and Beijing society could be involved. That’s the difficulty. We still can’t be sure who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.

  ‘The people we believe we can trust have theories on why the women are being imported. We know that so far fewer than ten have made it. But the stories are conflicting. The very people who are telling us this are interrelated politically, and in God knows what other ways, with some of those suspected of having purchased one or two of the women. Even our most reliable Chinese colleagues can’t be sure where the linkages and patronage reach.’

  ‘Alan, you’re not telling me anything. Alice Hou is clearly destined to be sent to China – why probably doesn’t matter at the moment. What does matter is when that will be and how do we prevent it?’

  ‘I think the Chinese would like to see Alice delivered to Hong Kong or Shanghai. That gives them the opportunity to deal with things in their own backyard.’

  Having no knowledge of the banker who had been arrested at the Hong Kong airport and the circumstances surrounding that, Julie was rather taken aback by this statement. But, if anything, what was clear from Alan’s new information about the delivery of Alice was that she, Julie, was going to do the delivering!

  She said so.

  ‘That’s a bridge to cross when we get to it. For the moment, we need to get you back into play with Kim so that you can find out when the delivery is going to be.’

  Julie was only too well aware that this was the case. Alan shut down the laptop link.

  Having consulted with the sergeant, Julie crept out of the back door of the police station and quickly bought a step-up platform at a sports shop; Kim hadn’t given her enough money to buy an exercise bike. Recovering the car from an out-of-town car lot where it had been deposited by the police, Julie set off back to Echuca.

  Julie was unaware that her arrest had been observed, so all she thought she needed to do was construct a suitable story for Mr Kim. The dent in the front of the vehicle gave her the basis for an explanation as to why she had taken so long and would also focus Kim’s attention. The last thing he was going to want to do was to expose himself too clearly to the car hire firm; the damage was unlikely to be reported. But he was going to be very angry!

  Even so Julie didn’t hurry back to the houseboat; she savoured her freedom for as long as she could.

  Why his driver’s licence wasn’t satisfactory Kim wasn’t actually told. It was tossed aside on the desk of the senior sergeant while he and his colleagues took their leisurely morning coffee break. Mr Kim uncharacteristically fretted as he waited for whatever supposed checks to be made.

  ‘Quite a character this one,’ the sergeant said.

  The Echuca Police had already done their checks.

  ‘Keeps interesting company.’

  Kim’s recent activities in Britain and the rather ruthless way that he had solved some of the interrelational problems among the Chinese
labour gangs in the UK had been summarised for the Federal Immigration Department and forwarded to the Victorian Police.

  ‘So what’s the bugger doing here in Echuca?’

  The senior sergeant knew but he wasn’t supposed to share his knowledge with his colleagues.

  ‘Hired a houseboat with a Chinese woman.’

  None of the officers supposed that Mr Kim was indulging in an illicit affair; a less romantic individual they could hardly imagine.

  After the sergeant judged that the arrangements made with the Security Service had had time to be worked through, he picked up the driver’s licence and went through to the interview room. His conversation with Kim largely focused on his points score that left the Chinese man only one offence away from having his licence suspended. It was a useful, if unnecessary, means of warning Kim to watch his behaviour. With Mr Xu always making the same point, Mr Kim was unlikely to put a foot wrong in the immediate future.

  The houseboat seemed quiet and deserted when Julie eventually made her way back to it. Set against the overriding quiet of the section of the Murray River where they were moored, it unnerved her for reasons that she couldn’t explain. Her relationship with Mr Kim had changed; it was more equal, but whether that was going to make the next phase in the action any easier she was doubtful. Mr Kim on edge was a far less attractive prospect to deal with than the enigmatic one that she had first known. And Mr Kim was on edge, having had to endure the incomprehensible football commentary on the taxi’s radio on the journey back from town.

  Julie moved carefully on to the afterdeck and listened. There were faint sounds from within.

  For goodness’ sake, she told herself. Of course it was quiet – Kim was hardly going to be discussing the latest sporting news with Alice.

  The entry door was unlocked. This wasn’t usually the case.

  A moment of panic overtook her. What if he had come back and taken Alice away? He could easily have hired another car.