Dragonfly

by Dean R. Koontz

  Chai Po-han sat up on his meager straw mattress, a scream caught like bloody phlegm in the back of his throat. Then he heard the soft, furtive rustling of sleeping men turning on their straw beds on all sides of him, and he realized where he was: the agricultural commune in the cursed Province of Kweichow, well north of the minor city of Ssunan. He swallowed the scream and felt it slide thickly down his throat.

  Lying back, closing his eyes, he tried to recover his breath and slow his heartbeat.

  The night wind rattled the glass in the warped window frames of the long stablelike building.

  Why, he asked the darkness, was he plaqued with this hideous, repeating nightmare?

  The wind abruptly gentled down, and the window glass stopped rattling — as if the darkness were saying that it did not want to talk with him.

  Was the cause of his bad dream to be found in his visit to the United States? The dream had begun immediately after that, around the middle of February, and it had been replayed nearly every night since then. In that land of unproscribed churches and cathedrals and synagogues and temples, had he begun to doubt the Maoist creed of godlessness which had freed China and made it great? No. Most certainly not. Surely a lifetime of atheism could not be cast off after one brief encounter with those who were religious. Such faith was not a bacterium that could infect a man once he had but taken a few breaths of tainted air.

  But how else was he to explain this dream which he threw out each morning and which returned like a boomerang each night?

  He got up and dressed in the coarsely woven gray pajama-suit which had been folded at the head of his bed, on top of the thatched box that contained his personal belongings. Although there was little light in the communal sleeping quarters, Chai made his way into the central aisle without stepping on anyone, and he walked to the far end of the building where there were several windows flanking the main entrance.

  The glass was discolored and flecked with imperfections, but it was clean; and he was able to look down through the foothills to the River Wu which shimmered in the waning moonlight. A thin, pale yellow line edged the horizon: dawn was not far off.

  How would he celebrate this anniversary of his birth? he wondered. Working in the terraced rice paddies? Or perhaps he would be assigned to the construction crew that was erecting — laboriously and solely by manual labor — new dormitories, barns, machinery sheds, and grain storage silos.

  What a stifling place this is! What a hole!

  Just months ago, during his visit to the West, he had spoken to American and French journalists who had been to China and who praised the communes. They had all seen Liu Ling Commune in Shensi and were impressed. Chai was proud of his people and had talked about Liu Ling as if he had been there. He had explained about the Chairman's enormous program which moved millions of young people to the countryside every year in order to keep them from becoming bourgeois, in order to have them “revolutionized” by the peasants, in order to have them completely “reeducated” as they could be only by sharing the simple life of the countryside. He had been so eloquent. At the time, however, he had not known that Liu Ling was a showplace, an atypical unit of the system, highly polished for the benefit of foreign newsmen and diplomats. Now, a veteran of the Ssunan Commune, Chai understood that those foreign journalists had been deceived, that he had been deceived, that most of the communes were slave labor camps where the inmates remained for the most part voluntarily because they had been made to believe that they were not slaves but heroes who were shaping the future of China.

  He wanted out of here. Badly. But to leave on his own, to go where the government had not sent him, would be disastrous. He would not be arrested, of course. He would not be beaten or publicly shamed. Rather, he would be ostracized by every Party coordinator in every town and district throughout China. He would be able to get no work at all and little if any subsidization. Then he would know real poverty, and he would beg to be given a place on a commune, any commune at all — even this hole north of Ssunan.

  He shuddered.

  He had not been born to this.

  Chai Po-han was the eldest son of Chai Chen-tse, who was one of the most powerful men in the country. The elder Chai was director of the Central Office of Publications, which had total control over every form of print and broadcast media within the People's Republic of China. Chai Chen-tse was respected — and feared.

  In his father's shadow Chai Po-han had moved through the highest strata of Chinese society. He had studied media theory and language in Peking and had been greatly honored when he was chosen as the student representative to the group of publishers that was sent to tour the United States during the first half of February, and then France during the latter half of the same month.

  He could never have foreseen that the trip to the United States would be his downfall.

  The trouble had begun just three days before his group had been scheduled to leave Washington for Paris. During dinner that evening Chai had become drowsy and slightly sick to his stomach. Soon after the dessert and coffee had been served, he asked to be excused from the table, and he returned to his hotel room. The tour had been full of conferences, lectures, expeditions to publishing houses and printing plants and television stations, receptions… His exhaustion was not remarkable — although he thought it was somewhat odd how suddenly and forcefully it had caught up with him. No sooner had he undressed and passed water and climbed into bed than he was fast asleep.

  He had learned the next part of the story secondhand:

  An hour later his roommate, Chou P'eng-fei, had been stricken by the same exhaustion and had returned to their room. According to Chou (liar of liars), Chai had not been in the room at that time. Surprised but not alarmed, Chou had gone to sleep. When he woke the following morning, Chou saw that Chai had returned and was asleep in the other bed. And then Chou realized that his roommate stank of whiskey. He thought of ignoring it, thought of helping to conceal Chai's reactionary behavior. But Chou (liar of liars) said that he quickly realized his duty was to Maoism and Chinese honor rather than to his friend. Shocked, Chou had gone immediately to see Liu Hsiang-kuo, who was the security chief for the tour group. Chou and Liu returned to the hotel room and woke Chai with some difficulty.

  And the rest of it he remembered all too clearly:

  He had been in an incredible state. He had slept in his clothes, which were soaked with perspiration. He reeked of whiskey. And worst of all, preposterous as it seemed, impossible as it seemed, he was sleeping with a pair of lacy women's panties, very Western panties, clutched in his hands.

  He insisted that he had slept the night through, that he had not been out of the room, that he knew nothing of the whiskey or the panties.

  Liu Hsiang-kuo said that it would be easier to believe the peace offerings of the worst war-mongering, running-dog imperialist who had ever lived than it would be for him to believe Chai's story of mysterious victimization and ultimate innocence. Liu Hsiang-kuo said that he would rather sleep with vipers and eat with tigers and live with scorpions than turn his back to Chai Po-han.

  Chai Po-han said that apparently Liu Hsiang-kuo thought he was lying about all of this.

  Liu Hsiang-kuo said this was exactly, wonderfully true.

  For the remainder of their stay in the United States and for the entire two weeks they spent in France, Chai Po-han was watched closely. He was never allowed to go anywhere by himself for fear that female pawns of the capitalists would convert him into a mad, raging counterrevolutionary by cleverly manipulating his genitals. One could not guess what techniques these Western women knew — although one had surely heard the shocking stories. So Chai was informally but rigorously guarded. And on their return trip to Peking, when their aircraft stopped to refuel in Chungking, Chai Po-han was taken from his group and given orders to report to the Ssunan Commune forthwith so that, by associating with working peasants, he could be “reeducated in Maoist thought and purged of his counterrevolutionary and nonrevolutiona
ry interests and weaknesses.”

  He had been framed, and now that he'd had enough time to think about it, he knew why. His father was a great and much-respected man — but he had enemies just the same. The elder Chai was far too powerful for anyone to risk an overt attack on him. He knew too much about other high government officials to allow himself to be purged from the Party. He would not hesitate to use his knowledge to destroy anyone who attempted to usurp his authority. However, these faceless cowards might attempt to ruin Chai Chen-tse by discrediting his eldest and favorite son. That was the only explanation for these astounding events in Washington.

  Soon after he had reported to the Ssunan Commune, Chai had sent word to his father that Chou P'eng-fei — and perhaps Liu Hsiang-kuo as well — had drugged him at dinner, soaked him with whiskey while he was unconscious, and placed a pair of Western women's decadently lacy underwear in his hands while he slept all unawares. Two weeks later a letter had arrived from the elder Chai, in which he assured his son that he had faith in him and knew he had been tricked; Chai Chen-tse also promised that his son would be ordered home from Ssunan before many weeks had passed. Relieved, Chai Po-han had waited for these new orders to come — had waited and waited and waited. Two days ago he had received another letter from his father, who assured him that he would soon be brought East from the wasteland of Kweichow. But he was no longer certain that his father could arrange it. And after six and a half months at Ssunan, he knew he would never again be happy living anywhere in the People's Republic, for his trust in Maoism and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been broken by too many fourteen-hour days of brutal, semi-enforced labor.

  Now, beyond the discolored window glass, dawn had come while he stared at the River Wu and thought over his predicament. And now, outside of the commune director's quarters, the gong sounded which signaled the beginning of a new workday.

  Behind Chai, the other men of this dormitory — a fraction of the comrades, both women and men, who lived at Ssunan — got to their feet and stretched. They rolled up their thin mattresses and bound them with cord and hung them from specially rigged poles so that — if a storm should come and rain should wash across the dormitory floor — their beds would not be prey to a capricious Nature. One by one, then in twos and threes, they dressed and went outside, heading toward the men's latrines. When he could not delay any longer, Chai Po-han had followed them.

  From the latrines they filed to an open-air kitchen, where they were given two bowls each: one filled with rice and large chunks of stewed chicken, the other containing orange slices and pieces of hard yellow bread. Here and there young courting couples sat together to eat, although they maintained a respectable yard of open space between them. For the most part the peasants ate together, the students ate together, and a third group of nonstudent transferees from the cities ate in circles of their friends.

  Chai was sitting in one of these circles, finishing his breakfast, when the commune director brought him a large envelope. “For you, Comrade.” The director was a short, squat man with an enormous chest and thick biceps. He never smiled. Now he seemed to be frowning more deeply than he usually did.

  Chai took the envelope. “What is it?”

  “You are being transferred from Ssunan,” the director said.

  Chai quickly opened the envelope.

  K'ang Chiu-yeh, Chai's closest friend at the commune, stopped eating. He set his bowls aside on the earth and came up onto his knees. He shuffled closer to Chai and said, “Transferred to where, my friend?”

  “Back to Peking,” Chai said.

  “How wonderful!”

  Chai said nothing.

  “But you should rejoice!” K'ang said. “And instead, you look at me as if you've just found weevils in your rice.” He laughed. Unlike the director, K'ang had a marvelous smile and used it often.

  Five months ago it would have been the most wonderful news that Chai could have received. But not now. He said as much.

  “But that makes no sense,” K'ang said. “Certainly, it would have been better if it had come five months ago. But it is no less a good thing for having come late.”

  Chai looked at his friend and felt a great sadness well up in him. K'ang had been a medical student at Shanghai University before his name had appeared on a list of thirty-seven thousand young people who were to leave Shanghai in order to serve the proletariat and the Maoist cause in the Fifty-Year Farm Program. K'ang was not going home; he would not leave Ssunan for years and perhaps not ever. K'ang did not have a powerful father; therefore, his duty would remain with the Fifty-Year Farm Program.

  “What is the matter?” K'ang asked him.

  Chai said nothing.

  K'ang shook him by the shoulder.

  Chai thought of the thousands of displaced young men and women who were in no better position than K'ang. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands… Now, instead of laughing aloud at his transfer as he would have done five months ago, Chai Po-han began to weep.

  He was going home.

  TWO

  ONE

  TOKYO: FRIDAY, 2:00 P.M.

  The International Date Line made it all very complicated. In order to minimize the effects of ordinary jet lag compounded by the radical change of clock-calendar time, David Canning allowed himself only five hours of sleep in Honolulu, rose at six in the morning, had an early breakfast, and read a paperback novel until it was time for him to go to the airport. His flight for Tokyo departed shortly after noon. Aboard the plane, he ate a light lunch and drank two martinis. Then he settled back for a nap, and because he had not allowed himself a full night's sleep in Honolulu, dozed off almost as soon as he closed his eyes. He was asleep when the jet crossed the International Date Line, switching instantly from Thursday to Friday. After nearly a five-hour nap he woke forty minutes out of Tokyo and had a third martini while the aircraft worked into its landing approach. They touched down in Japan at two o'clock Friday afternoon, which was seven o'clock Thursday evening in Hawaii and midnight Thursday-Friday in Washington, D.C.

  Just after he had passed through customs, with the aid of his State Department credentials, Canning saw the first Committee agent. Any Westerner would have found it impossible to run a surveillance on Canning in this airport without his noticing it. In the predominantly Asian crowd, the man's pallor and height made him as obvious as a dead fly atop an uncut wedding cake. He was standing near the boards that listed the departures and arrivals, and he stared openly at Canning.

  Canning stared back at him and nodded.

  The agent looked through him.

  Smiling grimly, Canning walked out into the crowded main hall of the terminal. He sensed rather than felt the man fall into step behind him, and he walked with his shoulders tensed.

  But there would be no killing here — and for the same reason that they could not possibly run a secret surveillance of him. The killers were tall and white, and they could not count on anonymity to help them escape through the hundreds of incoming and outgoing passengers. Furthermore, the Japanese were generally not as apathetic about crime as were most Americans. They admired tradition, stability, order, and law. Some of them would surely give chase to anyone who tried to commit murder in a public air terminal. And although the Japanese police — stationed throughout the building — relied for the most part on the sort of nonviolent techniques of the British bobbies, they were capable of swift and terrible action when it was necessary. The Committeemen, therefore, would merely follow him to be certain that he went to the Imperial Hotel, where, having had his real and cover names for more than twenty-four hours, they would surely have traced his Otley reservation. Then, at the hotel, in the comparative privacy of a corridor or an elevator, or perhaps in his own room, they would make a hit.

  Or try.

  He wouldn't be an easy target.

  Outside the terminal, there were more people than cabs at the taxi line. Most of them were Westerners who had too much luggage or not enough self-confidence to us
e the city's bus system. Canning walked to the back of the line, stepped off the curb, and put down his suitcases. He held up three fingers and waved them prominently at the taxis that were just turning into the approach lane: this was a sign that told the drivers he would pay three times the meter price, and it was often the only way to get a cab in Tokyo, where the drivers worked as much as sixteen hours a day for quite modest wages. He got a taxi at once, much to the consternation of the people who had been waiting there some time before he arrived.

  “Konnichiwa,” the driver said, smiling at him as he climbed into the taxi.

  “Konnichiwa,” Canning said, smiling back at him. The automatic cab door closed and locked behind him. He asked the driver to take him to the Imperial Hotel.

  The Committee agent also knew the three-fingered trick. His taxi followed immediately behind Canning's cab.

  The driver spoke no English, and Canning spoke only a few words of Japanese; therefore, the ride into the city was silent, and he had nothing to do but take in the scenery — what there was of it. On both sides of the road there were shabby houses, unpainted warehouses, gray factories, gasoline stations, and power lines. There were no cherry trees, landscaped gardens, or flower-encircled temples as seen in all popular illustrations of the Orient.