China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  As the two armoured policemen appeared in the concourse below him, David had the impression that he wasn’t the object of interest to the police and he had just been got out of the way. It didn’t take long to see why.

  The two figures, one in the soulless black burka and the other in the more fashionable brown one, moved unhurriedly along the concourse, the black-clad woman supporting the other.

  As the two women approached the central shopping area, clearly heading for the toilets, a sudden burst of movement distracted the watchers. The action was initially out of the direct view of the office.

  ‘Sir.’

  Yu Jing shepherded David away from the window overlooking the concourse and out to the fringes of the coffee shop, to an area that looked down at the milling crowds not buying anything in and around the clutter of expensive European and American luxury-goods shops.

  Why are they so keen for me to see what’s going on? David wondered. Susie says I had to look, listen and then report. Factual, factual and factual, he reminded himself. Shit, there’s a bunch of polizei out there with enough firepower to storm the Bastille and I have to watch while they arrest someone!

  But watch he had to.

  Mr Xu’s man got his message to his boss the moment that the flight had landed and he had seen the two women emerge from the arrival gate. The woman in brown seemed to be being supported by her companion, which is what the man had been told to expect. The man’s instructions were very clear. He needed to cause a diversion that would ensure that the two women didn’t attract any attention.

  Julie’s initial nervousness diminished as they entered the airport building, but when she understood what it was that she had to do, her concerns started to return.

  She need not have worried.

  As Xu’s man pocketed his mobile phone and moved into the body of the coffee shop and towards the stairs down to the increasingly packed shopping area, the circle of police still didn’t know what they were looking for. Their own anxiety rose as the police commander realised that, if the diversion that he had been warned to look out for took place in this particular area, he would be in trouble. Two international flights had just landed, both with a considerable number of transit passengers, most of whom, like David Hutchinson, were foreigners; the risks in any incident were going to be enormous.

  The scream and inevitable babble of staccato American voices alerted the police and attracted David’s attention.

  ‘He’s got a gun!’

  Since none of the police officers in the immediate vicinity of Xu’s man spoke English it was more the tone of the excited cry that alerted them.

  A frightened circle of open space instantly formed where the man had been standing, but revealed nothing. The gunman had moved into one of the shops.

  Entries to the shopping area were quickly blocked and the police herded the now excited and anxious crowd back into the central spine of the building. Stretching almost out of sight, the central area contained the moving walkways, the various lounges surrounding the departure gates, but also toilets and a range of advertising displays, the invariable paraphernalia of a busy airport.

  ‘Into the toilet, Alice!’

  Unaware that a diversion was deliberately being created to provide her with cover, Julie nonetheless was quick to exploit the opportunity it presented. Correctly counting on the attendant’s curiosity taking her out into the open area around the toilets to see what the commotion was all about, Julie hurried Alice into one of the cubicles.

  ‘Not a word!’

  Alice needed no admonition; she had been largely bereft of speech for the last couple of hours and moved more like an automaton than a person.

  The burble of noise in the toilet told Julie that other people had taken refuge there, but the sounds soon became normal for such a place and she sensed that whatever had happened was no longer a course for concern.

  The police had been attracted first by a muffled scream from the upmarket dress shop closest to the exits from the concourse and then by the surge of people fleeing from the premises.

  The rapid flow of Mandarin from what seemed to be the manager of the shop caused the police to freeze and then to cautiously entered the trading area. The young Chinese girl found in a crumpled heap at the back of the store pointed mutely and in obvious terror to the service area and the back entrance. Xu’s man was almost at his car before the police were able to follow and out of the car park by the time that they did.

  Had she known that Mr Xu was planning this diversion, Julie might have counselled against it; but of course Xu knew full well that the European ethos of protecting the women and children first wouldn’t apply and that she and Alice would be ignored rather than attract notice.

  The flight to Shanghai, delayed by the brief hiatus at Hong Kong Airport, was full and the passengers rather subdued.

  Whatever that was all about, David thought once he was settled, you have to admit that the police behaved much as the British police might have done.

  Alice and Julie re-embarked after an otherwise trouble-free stopover.

  David was seated well to the front of the aircraft. Janice Liang, who this time made every effort not to be seen by him, was sitting about halfway back. She had a few moments of anxiety during the boarding process, Chinese passengers were nothing like as well behaved as their British or Australian counterparts, and she had been forced into Alice’s and Julie’s range of vision.

  ‘Shit,’ said Julie, almost out loud, ‘what’s she doing here?’

  Julie hadn’t seen Janice since they were parted in Queensland. Seeing her boarding the aircraft openly and freely was a bit of shock, although Julie wasn’t quite sure why she was shocked; she had come to expect the unusual from Janice. With Alice flagging and increasingly dragging on her arm, she had plenty enough to do without worrying about this other young woman. Alice’s and her progress was nonetheless reported and received with some relief in Melbourne as well as Beijing.

  It would be some time before Julie got to understand Janice’s role in the people smuggling saga.

  ‘Sir, welcome to Shanghai.’

  As David walked into the foyer of the Renaissance Shanghai Yu Garden Hotel, the last thing that he had expected to see was the young woman from the flight to Hong Kong.

  ‘It’s my job to ensure that your stay in Shanghai is as pleasant as possible.’

  And perhaps not, David said to himself. It’s your job to see that I see what I’m supposed to see and to do what I’m supposed to do.

  Recalling what Susie Peveral had told him and her amused comments about honey traps, David made up his mind to be very wary of this young woman. There were too many coincidences stacking up. He had no doubt at all that the woman’s presence on the flight from Australia had been deliberately set up. He assumed that she was his minder, but whether that was all that she was, the jury was out for him.

  ‘My name is Janice Liang.’

  33

  For transit passengers, passport inspection on arrival had been cursory. On departure, it had been more thorough and Julie and Alice as well David Hutchinson were duly registered with the Chinese Security Services as being on their way to Shanghai.

  Between times and unaware of the distraction created for them, cramped together with Alice in the concourse toilet, Julie had quickly shrugged herself out of her burka and rolled it up into a tight ball.

  ‘Alice, for God’s sake!’

  Paralysed by being in an almost permanent state of terror, Alice stood rigidly in front of Julie, not understanding that she, too, had to remove her own burka. Julie almost ripped it off in her frustration and anxiety. Stuffing the two garments behind the toilet bowl, Julie gave Alice a quick hug and then a drink from a small bottle that she carried in her rather copious handbag.

  Totally unfamiliar with Chinese medicine, Julie had been most reluctant to feed Alice with the drugs that Mr Kim gave her, but having seen Kim’s clumsy and brutal technique for administering them she was forced
to take on the job herself. Alice still walked a little stiff-necked from having had her head forced back and the bottle of medicine jammed into her mouth from Kim’s ministrations.

  Equally, having seen the effect of the drugs – they might have turned Alice into a partial zombie but at least she was a biddable zombie – Julie had overcome some of her reservations. However, she couldn’t overcome Alice’s terrors or her own horror at them.

  Alice took the dose of drugs that she had been offered. No longer capable of resistance, she seemed to recognise that they would do her no harm but calm her down to some extent; an extent that would allow Julie to walk her to the departure gate for Shanghai.

  Divested of the burka, Julie was back in jeans and boots mode with a tight sweater and fleece; clothes that were appropriate for Melbourne but which she knew would be too much for the summer temperatures of Shanghai. She would at least be noticed, and, as it later turned out, admired by the younger generation of fashion-conscious Chinese nouveaux riches, for whom any Western costume was desirable. Alice’s more modest trouser suit, as intended, attracted nothing like the same sort of attention.

  Any connection between the two young women finally being funnelled into the bowels of the Air China aircraft and the two Muslim women who had landed from Australia totally escaped the other reboarding passengers.

  Briefed by the police, two discarded burkas were spirited away by the Hong Kong Airport Security staff.

  When the purser announced the journey time, Julie groaned inwardly. It was almost as if time had gone into slow motion. The closer she got to the end point of her journey, the longer it seemed to be taking.

  Yet Julie was happy enough that whatever was going to happen it was going to take her to a conclusion that would at least hopefully save Alice from her fate. Not that she, as the aircraft reached its cruising height, would have been inclined to risk any money on what that conclusion might be.

  But the thought that regularly invaded her nightmares – had she been set up as expendable and thus end up in some remote Chinese jail for the rest of her life rather than back in Melbourne, let alone Britain? – was still there.

  Again, she need not have worried. Pawn she most certainly was, expendable she also most certainly was to the Chinese, but not to the Australians. And the Chinese now owed too many favours to the Australians and had too much ‘face’ to maintain.

  God, if I get out of this alive … she thought wearily.

  As always, she couldn’t articulate what she would do and as always she admonished herself for being so negative.

  In a situation that was now moving from the weird to the bizarre on the way to the totally unbelievable, Julie was also a pawn in a game that she couldn’t even have had any intimation of. Hu Hengsen was using her safe return to Australia as a marker of good faith for the payment of the final instalment of funds for the purchase of Alice.

  Julie knew that she was taking Alice to be sold to a mysterious Chinese businessman; that was what the whole of Mr Xu’s activities were about as far as she knew. What gave Alice value, beyond the rather simplistic explanation given by Mr Kim of her being a virgin, Julie couldn’t imagine. Of course, she knew that there was a massive preponderance of males in China as a result of the one-child policy, and the rich, as always, would be able to buy their way out of the problem for their marriageable sons. But kidnapping and forcible delivery of the victim to the businessman seemed to be way too over the top.

  Why, why, why?

  As she looked at the gentle face of Alice whose almost unseeing eyes followed her every movement, she was ever more perplexed. She was suddenly afflicted by a momentary panic.

  Jesus, Alice. If you really are a lesbian!

  The image of Janice Liang flashed into her mind. A confident Janice Liang who was somewhere in the aeroplane, she supposed. The brief time that she had seen Alice and her together they had clearly been on good terms. Julie had no way of knowing what Alice’s feelings truly were towards Janice, let alone what Janice’s feelings about Alice might be, but the idea of offering a young woman with no taste for men to a ruthless businessman who had shelled out God knows how much money for her seemed to Julie to be a real cause for panic, even if it was a panic based on ignorance.

  Being obliged to focus on getting Alice to Shanghai and to the businessman in the secret but full knowledge of the Security Services of China, Australia and Britain was challenge enough for Julie. To understand the Chinese authorities’ need to both eradicate the criminal practices that were represented by the trafficking and the corrupt business activities that stood behind it, as well as demonstrate to the UK, the US, Australia and others that they were successfully achieving that eradication, was beyond Julie’s opportunities for comprehension.

  What threat can poor little Alice pose?

  As an individual maybe none, so the logical Western mind might think. But Alice was just that, a Western mind, in the eyes of the Chinese authorities. A Western mind founded in Chinese culture; the worst possible import into a country where imports of people were very carefully controlled.

  Of course, if Julie had known that fewer than a dozen Westernised Chinese women had been imported and married into the independent but corrupted non-political Chinese elite she might have been even more surprised.

  But the Chinese authorities were nothing if not paranoid.

  And Alice, like the other trafficked high-value women, had a Western passport that would allow her free movement in the West! The opportunities that this represented to the complex, corrupt and self-seeking networks that underpinned some sections of Chinese society were inevitably anathema to the Communist authorities, yet their ability to counteract the exploitation of these opportunities was often strangely inhibited.

  But then some sections of Chinese officialdom were nothing if not corrupt.

  Alice dozed and Julie tried to relax. Having now spent so much time on aircraft, Julie was feeling frustrated, jaded and angry all at once. Relaxation was probably beyond her.

  If she was going to have to be reliant on her own resources anywhere, it was going to be in Shanghai. It was this thought that was driving so much of her thought processes.

  They were to be met at the airport. As she rehearsed her instructions for the hundredth time, Julie’s anxiety began to emerge again. She was aware that Alice had been hijacked from another group of Chinese criminals by Mr Xu and Kim. She was also aware that the original group had twice tried to recapture Alice – once at Lake Mulwala and then again in Queensland. In the backyard of the Chinese criminal fraternity she had no idea what might happen, and she cursed the premonition that told her something would.

  And these shitty Chinese security people still want me to deliver poor Alice to her businessman!

  34

  ‘Listen carefully, Miss Li. Do exactly what you are told and no harm will come to you.’

  ‘No, no, no!’

  Alice’s voice rose to a scream.

  In the crowded area of the baggage reclaim the commotion around Julie and Alice passed almost unnoticed; but not quite. The plain-clothed policeman scanning the mass of people from the supervisor’s window high above the reclaim area picked up the movement, recognised Julie as the person he was looking for, and called for help.

  Much busier than the reclaim area at Hong Kong, the Shanghai equivalent was seething with passengers when Julie and Alice arrived. Backed against a solid mass of people all waiting impatiently for their belongings to emerge from the depths of the airport system, the man addressing Julie stood behind her but was pressed against her.

  Julie couldn’t see this man or get a measure of his size. But she could see that another man, much shorter than the one behind her appeared to be, had grasped Alice by the left arm and was attempting to steer her away from Julie and into the crowd.

  ‘Never mind about your bag; you won’t be needing it. Just move towards the exit sign.’

  ‘Sod this,’ Julie muttered to herself – although still not s
ure who was supposed to make contact with her, she was clear that it wasn’t these men.

  She didn’t move.

  However, she did know who the men were. It didn’t need much imagination to work it out. And they weren’t Mr Xu’s men. Mr Xu’s men would have watched and waited all the time that Julie was following her orders. And they wouldn’t know that she wasn’t until she failed to meet them at the agreed location. The Chinese police or whoever else it was who was tracking her equally wouldn’t know that things were not going to plan – how could they?

  Shit. It’s the bastards who attacked us at the lake!

  ‘Move!’

  The man sounded nervous. Alice was beginning to resist the second man and to cry. Things were not going well for the two men.

  ‘Move!’

  The sharp pain at the base of her left ribcage told Julie that what she was being threatened with was a knife and not a gun. And she knew that she had to act.

  A sudden thunderous roar beside them announced that the adjacent baggage carousel was starting up. A swirling surge of people pressed around them as the waiting crowd moved forward to recover their luggage. People pushed and shoved at each other and Julie realised that the short man had disappeared with Alice.

  ‘Move!’

  The man really was nervous. With the swirling and often aggressive mass of passengers intent on reaching the carousel and seizing their suitcases, he wasn’t in control of the situation, even if it provided perfect cover for what he was trying to do.

  The chaos for Julie, however, was an opportunity.

  Realising in the scrambling mass of people that her assailant had no leverage to strike at her, Julie smashed her heel down on the man’s foot as hard as she could and wrenched herself from his grasp pivoting to face him. Pitched forward by a middle-aged man thrusting his newly retrieved suitcase into the small of his back, the man now presented a realistic target for Julie.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ she said in sudden and unconscious imitation of her ex-boyfriend.

  Bringing her right knee sharply upwards, she crashed it into his crotch. She almost heard the squelching sound as his genitals were jammed back into his body. The man dropped to his knees dropping his knife which was immediately kicked away by a scurrying foot and wordlessly looked up at Julie as he collapsed on to his forearms.