by Reece Hirsch
A minute later Chris heard Mei-Hua screaming. He strode quickly away toward the train station, anxious to get out of earshot.
Headed south on a clattering train to Beijing, Chris once again watched the apartment buildings, with their red-tile roofs, give way to factories, which in turn gave way to fields. He had taken the first train out of the station, regardless of the destination. The important thing was to quickly put as much distance as possible between him and that blood-spattered apartment. He wanted to cradle his damaged arm, but he let it dangle painfully at his side so that he would attract less attention on the street.
Chris noticed a spot of dried blood on his hand and rubbed it away with his thumb. He had spent ten minutes in the train station restroom cleaning himself up, but he kept finding traces he had missed. He knew he would find more things he had missed, and that frightened him.
Chris removed the laptop from the backpack and opened it up, then examined his aching forearm, which was covered with an enormous violet bruise. With effort, he tried to ignore the broken bone and focus on the laptop. It was definitely Owyang’s computer; the desktop image was a photo of him with a pretty girl at a graduation ceremony. Chris paused because he knew he was at a critical juncture. He wanted to immediately review the contents of the laptop but didn’t want to muddy the forensics.
If he could get the computer back to his forensic lab in San Francisco (which was admittedly a big if), then Zoey would be able to access the files, which were almost certainly encrypted. If they contained the sort of information that he expected, then US-Chinese relations were about to become a lot chillier.
Chris couldn’t stop replaying the deaths of Li Owyang and Bingwen Ma. He didn’t feel any guilt over Park’s death. After all, the PLA officer had been in the process of beating him to death with a rolling pin. Given that Park was a trained and deadly professional soldier, Chris could only attribute his survival to sheer blind luck.
But it had been obvious that neither Owyang nor Ma knew how to handle a gun. He also knew that if he had blacked out a moment sooner, they would have figured it out, and he would be dead. Even though it was self-defense, he wondered if he had a choice. Perhaps he could have aimed lower, taken them down with shots to the legs.
Owyang and Ma reminded Chris a bit too much of himself when he was an immature teenager who got in over his head in a hacking scheme. He knew from experience just how quickly the excitement of getting behind a firewall could turn criminal, and dangerous.
Chris had been on the verge of blacking out, so it was hard to reconstruct exactly what he’d been thinking in that critical moment in the apartment. As he assembled the working version of events that would become his memory of the incident, he became increasingly convinced there had been a choice and that he had made the wrong one.
Did Chris decide to kill those two men either because he was afraid or hurt or angry—or maybe, and this was the part that bothered him the most, simply because he wanted to? He would probably never know precisely what impulses were at work in the split second when he squeezed the trigger. Chris knew already, though, that he would continue to revisit that moment, even though the actual sense memory of the incident would only degrade, like an analog tape played too many times.
The night came, and he leaned his head against the cool, vibrating Plexiglas of the window and tried to sleep.
Some time later, he started awake. He eyed the faces of the passengers around him and found one man on the opposite side of the compartment watching him. Hopefully because Chris was a Westerner far from the beaten tourist track and not because he had killed three men in Shenzhen.
In his mind he returned to the apartment, retracing every one of his actions. Rather than questioning his decisions, he now began to wonder whether he’d left any clues that would set the PLA or other Chinese authorities on his trail. The deaths of Park and the two hackers were unlikely to be treated as a routine robbery-homicide. The PLA would probably give the apartment a thorough CSI-style forensic exam, and he had not been meticulous or clear-headed enough to remember everything. Not even close.
The best that he could hope for was a decent head start on his pursuers. He doubted he would be able to keep his plane reservation. The PLA would probably have his identity figured out before he could reach Shanghai, and put him on every watch list.
Chris flipped open his personal laptop, and the screen seemed to single him out in the dark train car like a solo spotlight. Fortunately, the train had wireless, so he attempted to send Zoey a message through their secure website.
After an agonizing wait, Zoey responded. The letters raced as she typed. He could sense her anxiety coming right through the screen.
ZOEY: You okay, Chris?
CHRIS: No, but I’m safe for the moment.
ZOEY: What happened?
CHRIS: Found Li Owyang and Bingwen Ma, but they had a PLA escort. They’re all dead.
There was a long pause before the reply. She chose not to ask the obvious question of whether he had killed them.
ZOEY: Are you injured?
CHRIS: No, I’m on a train to Beijing. I think they’re going to be pursuing me. Maybe they already are.
ZOEY: What can I do?
CHRIS: Need help getting out of China. Probably don’t have much time.
ZOEY: Let me think.
CHRIS: I’ll need new papers.
ZOEY: Right. Have an idea, but need to run it down. Sit tight and I’ll get back to you.
CHRIS: Are you okay?
ZOEY: Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Just know that we’re going to get you out of there. Even if we have to send in Seal Team Six.
CHRIS: Thanks, Z.
ZOEY: Thank me when you’re home. Try to get some sleep.
The connection terminated.
Communicating with Zoey helped calm him a bit, but he found sleep impossible now. He gazed through the scratched Plexiglas window at the outline of a factory under construction. In the moonlight, the superstructure of the building looked like the bones of some great beast that had been picked clean by carrion birds.
A couple of hours later, he awoke to a pinging sound. He squinted in the white morning sunlight, which streamed through the train window. Outside were rolling hills and green fields. The pinging was a new email. From Zoey.
ZOEY: Go to the secure site. I have a contact for you.
Chris logged on.
ZOEY: I found someone who can help you. He’s a dissident pro-democracy hacker named Guiren Song.
CHRIS: Are you sure he can be trusted? If he’s a dissident, won’t he be under surveillance?
ZOEY: It’s possible, but he says he’s not under active surveillance. Where are you right now?
CHRIS: Not sure exactly. I just woke up. But we’re definitely not in Beijing yet. I’m in the countryside somewhere.
ZOEY: Good. The train is going to stop at a place called Badaling. Part of the Great Wall is there. That’s where you get off.
CHRIS: And then what?
ZOEY: Buy a ticket to the Great Wall and go to the second parapet to the right of the entrance. You’ll meet Song there.
CHRIS: How will I know him?
ZOEY: He’ll be wearing sunglasses and a blue baseball cap.
CHRIS: What happens then?
ZOEY: We should let him tell you that. We’ve got a plan for extracting you, though. Second parapet to the right of the entrance, okay?
CHRIS: Got it.
A half hour later, the train was approaching Badaling. In the distance Chris could see the Great Wall stretched across the rugged green hills like a pale snake, its notched walls resembling a saurian spine. Chris knew that he was far from safe, but he began to breathe a little easier knowing that someone would be waiting for him and that they had a plan.
The train shuddered and slowed. Probably routine, he thought. Then the train came to a complete stop well short of the Bada
ling station. Maybe there’s some obstacle on the tracks.
Then Chris saw activity in the car ahead. Railway agents were requesting the papers of train passengers—but only those who were male and non-Chinese. The Chinese authorities knew that he was on the train.
Chris rose slowly, careful not to look like he was fleeing, and made his way to the back of the car and away from the inspections. As he entered the next car, he saw another railway worker making his way toward him down the center aisle, inspecting passports.
He was trapped.
14
Chris was unable to go forward or back. His only option was to exit.
The pneumatic doors were set into an alcove at the rear of the car, so the approaching ticket agent couldn’t see him when he ducked inside. Chris pushed open the doors and looked up and down the tracks. No railway workers were outside, so he jumped down, skidding in the gravel of the embankment. Once more the pain crashed over him like a wave enveloping a surfer.
Chris scrambled to his feet and ran away from the train. He needed to make it over the nearby hill before one of the railway workers looked out the window and spotted him. With each step he expected to hear a shout in Mandarin behind him or maybe even a gunshot.
As soon as he crested the hill, he threw himself painfully on his stomach and looked back at the train. No one was following.
After a few minutes Chris descended the green hillside dotted with white and yellow wildflowers into a ravine that paralleled the train tracks. He set off walking toward Badaling, which looked to be about a mile and a half away. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he heard the train begin rolling again. He hoped that Song wouldn’t stop waiting for him on the wall when he figured out the train had arrived without him.
As Chris approached Badaling, the Great Wall loomed ever larger before him, and its enormity began to sink in. He imagined the sheer volume of human toil that had been expended in transporting the enormous stone blocks and bricks across the mountainous terrain, then recalled the army of tech workers at the Commsen factory in Shenzhen. China had always had sheer numbers on its side.
He broke into a jog as he made his way along the ravine. It was a warm spring day, and sweat began to sting his eyes. The pain from his cracked rib, which he had begun to tolerate, ratcheted up to an excruciating new level.
If Song gave up on waiting for him, then Chris might not make it out of China. He could imagine the dissident nervously eyeing the oncoming tourist crowds, wondering whether he would be met by Chris or the PLA. Who could blame him for bailing out if Chris failed to show on time?
Finally, he reached the outskirts of the town, climbing out of the ravine and putting as much distance as possible between him and the train station. The Badaling portion of the Great Wall was one of China’s premier tourist destinations, so the crowds were thick and would provide welcome cover.
When he saw the scale of the Great Wall up close, Chris was reminded that it had been a military fortification defending the borders of the Ming Dynasty long before it became a tourist attraction. If he had been greeted by this seemingly impregnable and never-ending barricade as a fourteenth-century barbarian looking for plunder, the imposing sight would have been enough to send him back to foraging for a living.
Chris passed through a courtyard with an unmanned police kiosk, a battery of ceremonial cannons, and a pole bearing a red-and-yellow PRC flag snapping in the wind. He paid his entrance fee and walked under an ornamental wooden arch and up a stone path to the wall. Whoever had chosen the site for the rendezvous knew what they were doing. It would be hard to pick out anyone in the throngs and, unlike most of the places he had been on the trip, here Western faces did not stand out in the slightest.
Once he was on the broad stone walkway atop the wall, he turned right and headed for the second parapet. The steps climbed precipitously up the mountainside to a forbidding tower that was white stone set against a background of lush, green mountain vegetation and unusually clear blue sky. Chris attached himself to a school of tourists making their way to the tower. He wanted to race past them, but he knew that would only draw attention. He glanced back to look for a blue baseball cap in case Song had already abandoned their meetup.
It was then that he saw that he was being followed.
His pursuer wore a gray uniform, and he was stocky, gasping a bit at the exertion of ascending the steps. He didn’t look to be a PLA soldier and was more likely a parks worker who had been deputized into the manhunt.
The man quickly looked away, but there was no question that he had been staring directly at Chris. Perhaps he was just a pickpocket who saw him as another tourist mark. But pickpockets didn’t usually wear uniforms. Chris’s heart rate spiked. As in a chess end game, he had only a few possible moves now. If he didn’t make the right ones, he would be captured in a matter of minutes.
A French tour group clogged the path ahead as they listened to their guide intoning from a book. Chris ducked into the band and used them to momentarily block his pursuer’s view.
The heavyset man was now gesturing to a gray-uniformed colleague, who set out after Chris at a more athletic pace. Realizing that he had very little time left before he was apprehended, Chris glanced desperately up at the second tower—and there stood the man in sunglasses and the blue baseball cap: Guiren Song.
Hiding in the tourist group wouldn’t protect him for much longer, so he bolted for the tower.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that things slowed down in that moment, but Chris certainly saw everything with a painful clarity. The man in the blue cap was younger than Chris had expected and had the blocky build of a wrestler. He had already spotted Chris, but more to the point he had also spotted Chris’s nearest pursuer.
Song nodded at Chris and then took a quick step back into the darkness of the stone arch, which led inside the tower. When he reached the parapet, Chris followed him in. As soon as Chris was through the archway, Song grabbed him by the front of his shirt with both hands and brought his face close.
“I want you to listen to me carefully,” he said in unaccented English. “I won’t have time to say this again.”
Chris nodded.
“Go down these steps and you’ll find a garbage truck parked directly below us. Climb in the back and cover yourself up. You’ll be driven away from the wall.”
“Where will I be taken?”
“No time for that. Go.”
As Chris descended the ancient stone stairway, Song turned and exited through the other side of the parapet. If he was lucky, the pursuers would not have spotted him with Chris or emerging from the tower.
Chris ran down the steps, taking them two and three at a time, feeling each shock in his knees. Near the bottom of the stairwell, a garbage truck had backed up into an alcove at the base of the tower, just as Song had said. He could see the back of the driver’s head in the cabin up front, but he didn’t turn around.
Chris tossed his laptop over the back gate of the truck and then attempted to climb after it. Despite his fractured forearm, he finally managed to pull himself up on the gate and throw himself into the mound of trash after a couple of agonizing failed attempts. As Song had instructed, Chris burrowed down into the sea of bottles, cans, and fast-food containers. At least it wasn’t wet, and the smell could have been worse. Passersby couldn’t see him, because the truck was shielded in the alcove.
Almost immediately after he had buried himself in the garbage, he heard the grinding of gears, and the vehicle lurched forward. Chris carved out an air pocket in the trash mound that allowed him to breathe and look up at the sky.
The truck rumbled through the visitor center that surrounded the Great Wall and stopped at the gated entrance. This chokepoint was the place where capture seemed most likely. Chris hunkered down deeper in what appeared to be a mountain of inscrutably labeled Chinese soda cans. He waited a few seconds. Then a few seconds mo
re.
This is taking too long.
And then they lurched forward and were moving again, leaving the Great Wall behind.
He began to breathe easier as they picked up speed through the streets of Badaling. From his vantage point, Chris could see the tops of commercial buildings and, farther and farther in the distance, the Great Wall snaking among the mountains, as it always had and always would.
The driver left the surface streets and got on a freeway. The entire contents of the truck bed now seemed to be vibrating like overheated molecules about to undergo a chemical reaction. It was like being trapped in some hellish, filthy version of a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.
Chris had no idea who was driving, but he hoped that he could be trusted. At this point he really had no choice but to have faith that Zoey and the team at Zapper had found reliable partners to aid in his extraction.
The vehicle slowed a bit as it bumped along what felt like an unpaved road. They had probably reached the landfill or wherever the garbage was to be deposited.
There was shouting outside. Chris was alarmed, until he understood what they were saying. Protesters were shouting in Mandarin, “We were not consulted!” and “Send it back to Yangfang!” Apparently, the locals did not want this garbage dumped in their landfill.
The truck rumbled forward, and the shouting protesters were left behind, no doubt directing their protests at the next team of sanitation workers.
At last they came to a complete stop and the engine cut off.
“You can get out of there now,” said a man’s voice in English.
Chris clambered out of the truck bed, struggling for traction in the yielding sea of aluminum cans. When he was finally out and sprawled on the ground, Chris gazed up into the curious face of a skinny young man in the blue jumpsuit of a municipal garbage worker.