China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  But for the moment it was business as usual – his latest acquisition was already in Hong Kong awaiting onwards transmission to her buyer in Shanghai.

  The coded telephone call from his man at Hong Kong International Airport had come through just before Li Qiang arrived late on the Tuesday afternoon. The Chinese Intelligence Service heard the message, knew it to be a message, but had no way of knowing what it meant. Events at Hong Kong Airport, however, had some way to run yet but Mr Xu would not come to know that until much later.

  ‘When are you seeing our man?’ Mr Xu asked.

  Having spent time in both London and Canberra, Mr Xu liked to converse with his subordinates in English to show off his command of its idiom, which was considerable. Although crippled in body, his mind was as sharp as ever and even Li Qiang would on occasions marvel at the shrewdness and perceptiveness of his eighty-five-year-old boss.

  ‘In one hour.’

  There was something cold and intimidating in the quiet smile of acknowledgement that Mr Xu gave his chief of staff. Used to such expressions, Li Qiang thought nothing of it and in due time set off for his appointment. He was on his guard – he always was – but a threat from Mr Xu was not uppermost in his mind.

  The door had barely closed behind him before Mr Xu was talking in rapid Mandarin to someone who was clearly expecting his call, knew what had to be done, and was simply waiting for the signal that he was now receiving.

  Li Qiang was not a native of Shanghai. He came from a small provincial town in western China where his father had been a Communist Party boss of considerable and rather baleful influence. When his father had been hanged for corruption in one of the many upheavals that followed the end of the Maoist era, his son had been sent to a government school to be brainwashed into being a powerful and ambitious public official. Having had very little in the way of a moral framework in his upbringing, he had failed to notice early on in his career that there were boundaries to virtually everything in his life and crossing them had consequences. Put to be tutored in the Interior Ministry by Mr Xu, who knew all about boundaries and the risks and rewards of crossing them, Li Qiang very soon became both an indispensable part of the Interior Ministry machinery but also of Mr Xu’s burgeoning criminal empire. The lax and corrupt state of Chinese society in the days before the economic boom – a time of exceptional opportunity for anyone with the courage to take advantage of it – was quickly recognised by Mr Xu. He had that courage. The subsequent development of the capital and manufacturing base in the Chinese economy was manna from heaven for Xu and his ilk.

  Li Qiang thrived, grew arrogant, made people dependent on him wherever he could, and totally underestimated the scope of Mr Xu’s shrewdness and vengeful nature. He was unmarried, and thus there were no restrictions on his greed, his single-minded self-interest and his innate cruelty.

  Nonetheless, still with something of a country boy’s wonder at the glories of Shanghai, old and new, Mr Li was always happy to be visiting the French Concession area and particularly the Xintiandi shopping district. He rarely bought anything – there was very little he needed; he just liked to marvel at the conspicuous consumption that was all around him in the various shopping areas.

  And he liked to take coffee in the new and rather glitzy Starbucks that had instantly become the centre of the world for legions of young, rich and often idle Chinese, the offspring of the Li Qiang generation of grafters turned middle-class consumers. Starbucks coffee shops were more egalitarian and gender neutral than the older coffee shops – this was the reason why the Chinese youth liked them – and were places to be seen in. They were also places that were hard to hide in, which was why Li Qiang had chosen the one he had.

  Not that Hu Hengsen had any intention of hiding; he was too arrogantly confident in himself to ever feel that he might need to. In his early thirties, prosperity personified, he sat at the back of the Starbucks shop staring at the minute cup of coffee in front of him with distaste. More than ten years older than the average devotee, and the only person present not wearing jeans and some excruciatingly Western T-shirt, Mr Hu looked about as out of place as he might have done in a zoo. The youngsters chattering and texting on their phones all around him attracted no interest from him and he attracted very little from them. Their two worlds hadn’t collided; they had simply passed each other by. Only Mr Hu’s two minders, who occupied a table between him and the swirling mass of people at the counter, met the youngsters’ occasional amused gazes with a glowering silence.

  As he entered the coffee shop, Li Qiang looked at this odd scene with some amusement. The rendezvous had been set up as an almost childish attempt to get Mr Hu off balance. It didn’t work.

  ‘Mr Hu?’

  The barely perceptible movement of the head was as close as Mr Hu was likely to get to acknowledging Li Qiang.

  Had class distinction still existed in China in the old terms, Hu Hengsen would have been among the super-elite, a mandarin, an Imperial servant of refinement and remoteness; to him Li Qiang was a peasant-bred nobody.

  ‘Yes?’

  Mr Li knew what the question meant and he was only there to provide the answer.

  ‘The package has arrived in Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘It will be delivered to you within the next two days. The package will be brought by a courier who was recruited in Australia and who will return to Australia as soon as delivery is made.’

  ‘No.’

  Mr Hu’s negative was not what Li Qiang was expecting. There was no obvious need for further conversation; the contract between Mr Xu and Mr Hu was clear in its details and lodged safely with a third party. And it included an agreement to there being no variations. Li Qiang was momentarily at a loss.

  Mr Hu explained. ‘Afterwards, the courier may go back to Australia.’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  Li Qiang suspected he knew what Mr Hu meant by ‘afterwards’ but knew that his employer would want to know exactly from Hu’s own mouth.

  ‘After the ceremony. The courier will be at the ceremony and then allowed to go back to Australia. And I will want clear evidence of the courier’s safe arrival in Australia.’

  Mr Li suppressed the obvious questions. Clearly, the Xu organisation was not trusted – why should it be? – and the witness of an independent person at the ceremony and the security of that person leaving China was a simple enough precaution. But for Mr Xu and Li Qiang it was a risk that Mr Li at least would have preferred not to take.

  As Mr Hu reached rather obviously into his inside jacket pocket, Li Qiang knew that at this point he had no bargaining power.

  The noise level in the coffee shop had been steadily escalating as the brief conversation proceeded. The music suddenly turned from the latest hit single of China’s number-one pop group to an old Beatles favourite. The gathered youngsters went wild. It was an obvious moment for money to pass.

  Mr Hu withdrew his hand from his pocket and passed an envelope to Li Qiang. He made no effort to hide the transaction. No one, not even the minders, was paying attention to him and Mr Li.

  And then Mr Hu was gone. How he managed to leave the coffee shop through the heaving mass of young people with the minders, without causing so much as a ripple, Li Qiang never really understood.

  Li Qiang pocketed the envelope. It contained one hundred thousand US dollars in high-value notes, down payment from a quarter of a million dollars. How a young woman, even a virgin, could be worth such a sum of money Li Qiang didn’t bother to wonder.

  As Mr Hu and his small entourage swept out of the shopping mall and into an illegally parked car at the back entrance, the minders noted the three men in rather ill-fitting suits who were lounging in the open area outside Starbucks. Careful observation told the minders that these men were no threat to Mr Hu.

  The terrified shop assistant who later reported the body in the refuse bin in the yard at the back of a newly opened jewellery store was incoherent in her description.

  When the police recovered the body of L
i Qiang, they were quick to note the single bullet wound at the back of the head. They were equally quick to put the death down to a gangland killing of the sort that was almost endemic in the new Shanghai. That Li Qiang was a senior official in the Interior Ministry ensured that only a minimum of details reached the media.

  As the investigation got lost in the depths of the police and Interior Ministry bureaucracies, it was clear that Li Qiang was on the payroll, not only of the State and Mr Xu but also, in a freelance capacity, a number of other organisations equally as nefarious as that of Mr Xu.

  He was hardly missed.

  ‘Welcome!’

  The young man who entered Mr Xu’s apartment and employment as his new chief of staff was the grandson of a long-standing and trusted friend. Xu had had enough of public-service types; he of all people should have known how unreliable they would be.

  Two days later the sum of one hundred thousand US dollars found its way into Mr Xu’s Norfolk Island bank account.

  32

  When the final stages of the transfer of Alice to China had been discussed, Mr Kim hadn’t approved of the burkas that Julie Li and Alice Hou were wearing on the flight to Hong Kong. He thought that they would make the two women too conspicuous. And he had an entirely justified suspicion that that was what Julie was intending.

  ‘Conspicuous? What’s so uncommon in a couple of women in burkas?’ Julie had said.

  Of course in the UK and Europe she was right. In Australia, it was rather less common. Hinting at a mistress–servant relationship with her drab black and Alice’s more colourful attire, Julie was not only fulfilling Kim’s worst fears – she was also signalling her independence from him now that she had taken over full responsibility for Alice.

  She and Alice were noted at the airport and on the aircraft and reports were made to a number of interested parties. And whatever Mr Kim thought of her plan Julie knew in advance that his opinion was going to be ignored. The poisonous Mr Xu had finally brought himself to contact her directly and had approved of what she was planning; a fact that didn’t help her already fractured relations with Kim.

  It hardly mattered.

  The Hong Kong flight was busy. As David Hutchinson settled into Business Class under the watchful eye of Janice Liang, Julie and Alice settled into their seats at the back of the aircraft. Julie blocked any access to Alice in the window seat, as a good Muslim servant would have done. Alice was now recovering from the drugs that she had been treated with for most of the last few days, and her despair was beginning to overwhelm her. Her whole world had been in turmoil for so long that she had almost forgotten what peace of mind was. If she had been capable of coherent thought, she might almost have welcomed the drugs as a means of shutting herself off from the horrors of her existence.

  Alice had been aware of the presence of Janice Liang in her company for a few days, but in her drugged state and her permanent fear of Mr Kim she had been unable to re-establish the close relationship that the two had had on the voyage from Canada. Often bound and taped up together, Alice had developed feelings for Janice that were almost like hero worship at first but which soon became an affection verging on infatuation. Seemingly never afraid, Janice had probably done more to help Alice through the journey than anyone or anything. In much the same way, Julie’s gentleness in the face of Mr Kim’s violence had also induced the same schoolgirl crush type effect, so fragile and vulnerable was Alice’s state.

  ‘Jesus, Alice,’ Julie had said to herself more than once when Alice’s affection had spilled over into physical contact, ‘if I understand even a half of what’s going on here, you’re going to be in dire trouble if you can’t control your feelings.’

  Now on the flight to Hong Kong as they tried to play the parts of Muslim women, Julie’s thoughts were in a turmoil of their own. Seeing the world through the black slit of the head-dress she was wearing prompted thoughts of Tariq al Hussaini and the bittersweet times that they had spent together and the Rag stunt that they pulled.

  ‘Tariq, you bastard,’ she said under her breath.

  But the venom had gone out of the statement.

  Whatever else Tariq al Hussaini had done for Julie, his unremitting selfishness and self-focus, once she had recognised it for what it was, had conditioned her to deal with the complex world she was now inhabiting. In the quiet moments of the night on the houseboat as she relived those last months of her life in Britain, Julie finally realised and accepted that she had been manipulated, not just by Tariq, but by her own lords and masters at the Border Agency.

  They’re the bastards, she had thought to herself many times.

  But were they?

  As she began to ponder what had happened in Australia, and how she had been manipulated there, too, a small niggling thought started to grow in her mind. Yes, she had been manipulated, but what she had achieved as a result of that, she had achieved on her own. She had been successful in everything that had been expected of her, when in their unguarded moments the likes of Alan and his Security Service colleagues had clearly been anxious and uncertain of a satisfactory outcome.

  The whole operation to date had been successful; she and Alice were on their way to China and the surveillance had worked throughout. That had been entirely down to her.

  And the really hard part that was about to start was also going to be down to her. In China, she would certainly be reliant on her own resources – at least, as far as she knew.

  Jesus, they went to all this trouble to set me up in the eyes of the Australians and Chinese because they knew I could achieve what they wanted; me – and not just because I look like a full-blood Chinese woman!

  But she had no time to savour how good that made her feel.

  ‘Julie!’

  The obvious fact that she wasn’t in Britain or Australia now, but was actually on the way to China, finally pushed all the speculations and self-satisfaction from Julie’s mind.

  Shit, I really am on an aeroplane to Hong Kong with a woman who is about to be basically sold into slavery and I’m running bait for the Chinese Security Services and Christ knows whatever bunch of … what?

  ‘Julie?’

  Bait – bullshit! – all you’ve got to do is hand the woman over as planned and get yourself back to Australia. You’ve got the return ticket in your bag.

  She refused to acknowledge the surge of panic that wanted to spread through her body. She had been on her own all the time. If anything went wrong, she would be stranded in China; that was the deal. OK, so it wasn’t just completing the handover; she had to keep herself visible to the Chinese authorities and invisible to everybody else. And after her experiences at Lake Mulwala and in Queensland she was far from clear who everybody else was. But, in reality, nobody among the array of officialdom supposedly backing her up knew that either.

  ‘Julie!’

  Alice’s hand lay on Julie’s arm seeking some sign of comfort as the bleakness of her existence began to impinge again. She felt the shudder that ran through her minder and she almost withdrew the hand.

  Through the slit of Alice’s burka headdress, Julie could see her anguished eyes. She had been drugged and restrained and told nothing – the last few days must have been an unimaginable nightmare for the poor girl. With the baleful presence of Mr Kim ever in her vision, Julie had been unable to alleviate her suffering. Alice had been terrified almost to rigidity and Julie had been able to offer no reassurance.

  As the closing stages of the captive’s delivery to China developed, Mr Kim had become more and more aggressive and even more unpredictable. It was a relief to both Alice and Julie when he had gone, but it had left Alice in a state of shell shock that she seemed incapable of overcoming.

  ‘Alice?’

  As always First and Business Class passengers were allowed off the flight first; Janice Liang was among the very first to scurry up the ramp from the aircraft to the arrivals area. Seasoned flyers like David Hutchinson didn’t hurry. Experience told him that there was no poi
nt in hurrying. The need to hurry was a concept unknown to the designers of airport people management systems and Hong Kong, he knew, wasn’t going to be any different. Besides, he had nearly two hours to wait for the Shanghai flight and one airport was much the same as another.

  The usual long walk up and down stairs to get you back to where you started from began. Hong Kong was among the world’s newest and most modern airports, but it still seemed necessary to walk these miles to get nowhere. As he was funnelled into the lanes approaching Immigration and Passport Control, an unexpected variation to the norm confronted him.

  ‘Now what?’

  David had seen the small group of two policemen and a young woman in a pale-blue uniform shuffling to intercept him.

  ‘Mr Hutchinson?’

  The dazzling smile of the young woman as she addressed him did nothing to allay his immediate concerns. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he had been arrested and expelled on arrival in a country irrespective of what his expectations of welcome might have been.

  ‘Would you come this way, please?’

  The smile got more dazzling as the impossibility of refusing became apparent to David.

  If the public walkways and corridors were complicated, the private ones were byzantine by comparison. David was led to a small elevated office that opened from the higher level beside the coffee shop/restaurant and which gave an extensive if oblique view of the main concourse of the airport below them. There were several other policemen in the office, two of whom were wearing bulletproof vests. As he arrived, these two men left.

  ‘I’m Yu Jing,’ the girl in blue said with a slight American accent. ‘If there’s anything you need…’

  The quality of minders was certainly good in China, David thought to himself.