Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  Bud said the offer had come out of the blue, and that the company was well informed.

  “They seem to know a lot about me. About the business and our technologies. I mean really detailed stuff that I didn’t really know. They’ve done their homework. I was quite surprised.” He said the Chinese company had asked him for a whole ton of additional stuff about his plans.

  “They are especially interested in the technology.”

  Morgan said that was good news, that technology was often the deal clincher, but to be careful about what you give them in advance. He said he’d be happy to do the due diligence, check them out. And this time it was Bud’s turn to brush that off, saying US$250 million in cash was about as diligent as you could get.

  Bud said he was staying on for a few days to try and close the deal, but to keep him up to speed on the guy down south. Morgan thought the offer to buy out Bud’s entire business sounded odd, but he kept that thought to himself and didn’t push the issue. Bud was happy, and that’s what counted. If this new deal collapsed then Bud only had himself to blame.

  The restaurant served what it called “Chinese fusion”. Morgan wasn’t sure what that meant, other than an extra zero or two on the bill. But the wine, two bottles of it, was good.

  Bud said he’d been to a seminar at the US Consulate that was beyond tedious. Something about computer hacking. “I only stayed for a while. Those people are paranoid. You know what I mean?”

  Morgan said he knew what he meant.

  Bud was so loud it was as if he was broadcasting to the whole restaurant. Morgan wondered if there was anybody in there who hadn’t heard Bud’s plans. And it struck him that you didn’t really need to break into computers to steal his business secrets.

  When they left, Bud said he wanted to visit the bull on the Bund, get a photo with it. Feeling good about himself now.

  The raging bull sculpture was a replica of the famous Lower Manhattan bull, and created by the same artist. The Bund had been the financial heart of old Shanghai, and the Chinese bull had been installed in front of that famous facade, a universal symbol of financial muscle, but also of Shanghai’s ambition to take on the world.

  Bud grabbed the bull by the horns, flashing a V for victory, while Morgan took a few photographs on Bud’s smartphone.

  “I think you’re right to remain bullish on China, Tony,” he said in his deep southern drawl, before his car arrived and Morgan waved him off.

  Morgan looked again at the bull. The thing he’d always found most interesting about it was its enormous testicles. With its backside raised towards the Bund, it was what you noticed first, or at least Morgan did.

  As did a bunch of kids, who began to photograph each other grabbing the bull by its balls. Morgan raised his iPhone and took a photograph of them, thinking that was maybe a better way of looking at Bud’s latest China deal. And at a good many others too.

  He then took a mid-grade pollution mask from his pocket, coughing before he put it on. He didn’t wear them in front of clients or officials, fearing it might somehow be seen as a reproach, showing a lack of confidence in China.

  He still had a while before he was due to meet his wife, Cindy Wu, at her favourite teahouse in the old French Concession. So he decided to walk.

  The sun had broken through the haze for the first time in days, which brought out the wedding photographers. Brides and grooms posing in front of the Bund’s old buildings, brides in flowing wedding dresses, grooms in dinner jackets and bow ties.

  They pouted, laughed, smiled and jumped on cue.

  It was a cold day, and the trick seemed to be to get in as many photos as possible before the smiles became a grimace and bare shoulders sprouted goose bumps. At which point friends were on hand to put them back into thick coats, to warm them up before the next set of photographs.

  One couple was wearing colourful pollution masks. Designer masks. Morgan liked that and took a photo. Another one for @Beijing_smog.

  He walked up Nanjing Road, packed with Saturday shoppers, and through People’s Square, where there was a very different picture of marriage from what he’d just seen down on the Bund.

  The pathways through the centre of the park, around an artificial lake shaded by tall trees, were packed. Shanghai’s marriage market was in full swing. Hundreds of mostly older people stood behind open umbrellas, which served as noticeboards on which were taped photographs and profiles of their children or grandchildren, trying to find them partners. Desperate to have them settle down and have a child, maybe two now that was allowed.

  Others, whom Morgan assumed to be commercial marriage brokers, had taped together dozens of laminated profiles and draped them over fences and bushes.

  Crowds moved slowly along the lines of umbrellas, looking over the profiles, photographing some and stopping from time to time to talk. To get more details. They were mostly older too.

  Missing were the kids themselves. The ones in the photographs. Most would be single children, children of China’s one-child policy, and Morgan wondered whether they even knew they were being marketed like this. Which got him thinking about his own marriage to Cindy Wu, which in its own way had been arranged, a kind of marriage of convenience.

  They’d first met more than thirty years earlier and were married six months after that. He was a young businessman, a pioneer back then as China first opened up. Her mother was a prominent scientist involved with the country’s young space industry, her father a senior Communist Party official with links to the country’s early revolutionary leaders.

  Morgan had first met the parents, at a reception for a visit of the then US President, Ronald Reagan, and they’d got back in touch soon after, introducing their daughter, seeing the young Englishman as a good catch in spite of their Chinese establishment background.

  A reformist mood was running through China back then, the mid-eighties, which was brutally brought to a close with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Both Morgan and his wife had retreated to the UK for a while after that, until they figured it was safe to come back and resume business.

  Her Chinese name was Wu Jinting, and she’d joined him at MacMaster and Brown as his translator and guide. Until they both began to understand the value of information in a society where nothing was certain or clear, and the authorities all too often made up the rules as they went along.

  And as the country opened up and the economy boomed, everybody wanted to be part of the China Miracle, and the value of insight and information grew with it. Morgan and his wife rode that wave. And they were the best.

  And even though the skyline of a city like Shanghai had been transformed, Morgan reckoned the rules of doing business remained as clear as the smog that all too frequently blanketed those towering skyscrapers.

  He was walking in the old French Concession now, his favourite part of Shanghai. An oasis. Almost like it wasn’t China at all. And it gave him the feeling again, a feeling that had been growing stronger in him, that it was time to cash in and leave. But he felt trapped. Trapped by all the money he was making. China was like a drug to him. It was hard to quit the habit, even while his fears grew that it might destroy him. That any day it might all come tumbling down.

  He hadn’t talked to Cindy Wu about that, not in those terms, uncertain how she’d react. He knew she was as worried about the future as him. Maybe more so. But she had family here. And anyway, he wasn’t sure what the marriage meant anymore. Maybe leaving China was what would save it.

  And he thought again about Mr Fang. He’d not yet told Cindy Wu about his dealings with Fang either. The man had money to burn. All that property he was after. A football team. What was that all about? He didn’t know and didn’t really care. More and more he saw Mr Fang as his last big killing. The final ticket to a comfortable life beyond China.

  Daylight was fading fast along the Concession’s
tree-lined streets, lights going on in the restored mansions and old shop fronts from a different era.

  He and Cindy Wu had agreed to meet in a narrow three-storey teahouse, or Maison de Thé as it called itself, a teashop on the ground floor, tea and cake served on the top floors.

  He climbed the stairs to the first floor to find his wife sitting in her usual alcove, the most private area, glass teapots and a small cup on a traditional wooden tray in front of her. The walls were lined with big old metal tea tins, wooden birdcages hung from the ceilings, without the birds. Mellow jazz played in the background.

  He could see why she liked the place.

  His wife greeted him business-like, a kiss on both cheeks, which seemed appropriate, since they were in a Maison. Then some small talk about their villa in Thailand and their son’s schooling in the UK and his visit to China. Cindy Wu said she’d meet Robert when he landed in Beijing and he could stay with her for a few days. Then she’d bring him to Shanghai.

  Morgan said that sounded fine.

  A server came over and refilled her pot, then decanted it into another, and then into the cup. The server said it was a green tea with a hint of flower from Hangzhou. Morgan ordered the same.

  He looked at her and wondered whether it was just boredom, familiarity maybe, that had driven them apart. There’d been no serious girlfriends since she’d left to live in Beijing, nothing like that, but plenty that weren’t so serious, and there was barely a city in China where he hadn’t rustled up company, usually at commercial rates. And he wondered whether she knew. Whether she suspected.

  As with his business dealings, he was always cautious and discreet, but if Cindy Wu could dig out all that stuff on officials and business people, what couldn’t she find out about him?

  She had a small box in front of her full of index cards, preferring that to computerised records. She’d divided them into current investigations and then subdivided them into different aspects of each case, including education, family, business, and Party links. There was a special card for the personal stuff, the indiscretions, real and rumoured. It was usually the fullest card of them all.

  And Morgan wondered whether one of them had his name on it.

  She was always well organised, always had been. And once Morgan’s tea had arrived they began to run through the active investigations, mostly background checks on prospective business partners, Cindy Wu giving a brief commentary as they went, usually in terms of eggs.

  “He’s a bad egg. I’d be very careful here. This one’s a good egg. This one’s got no real business record, but he’s well connected with the local government.”

  For each completed investigation, she’d compiled and printed a document, summarising her findings on a cover page, followed by more detailed background, translated from Chinese to English where necessary. Both of them preferred to deal with hard copies, real paper, from years of doing it that way.

  At first they’d been surprised how easy it was to get hold of personal information in China. The flip side of an authoritarian system was an almost complete disregard for privacy, and they’d discovered that everything from bank records to household registration files were readily handed over for a small fee or sometimes just by asking.

  And rumours could be found everywhere.

  Rules had been tightened, which meant that sorting the eggs took a bit more money and leverage than before.

  But Cindy Wu had plenty of both.

  Morgan asked her about Bud’s partner, the guy who’d disappeared, and she said that had come as a shock to her too, that her contacts had told her the guy had got caught up in a corruption investigation.

  “But I thought he had impeccable Party connections,” Morgan said.

  “He did have connections,” Cindy Wu said. “But they turned out to be with the wrong faction of the Party.”

  She said the investigations were getting tougher and he asked why.

  “It used to be more straightforward, just a matter of judging the quality of connections. You know, whether Dad’s in a position to help with contracts or the wife’s in the Party. But the anti-corruption crackdown has complicated things.

  “They dress it up as being anti-graft, but it’s an old-fashioned purge. It’s about power.”

  She said that it was hard to explain, but even purges had rules. Now all the certainties had gone. She said there’d been nothing like this since Mao.

  “Nothing or nobody is out of bounds. It makes it hard to figure out who’ll disappear next,” she said, sipping tea and tapping the card file box with long fingernails, painted purple. She said there were all sorts of rumours around, about a power struggle in the Party.

  Morgan said that maybe they really did want to get rid of corruption, to clean up the system. And that had to be a good thing.

  And Cindy Wu said, “Sometimes you just don’t get it Tony. Corruption is the system.

  “What we’re doing, it’s not as straightforward as it used to be.”

  Morgan said that he understood, though Cindy Wu doubted that too.

  “So what else have you got for me?” she said.

  “These are from a new client, an American guy,” Morgan said, handing her two plastic folders: the Nanjing chemical company and the Shanghai insurance outfit. “Due diligence stuff mainly, on companies looking to make investments in the States.”

  She looked at them and said neither should be a problem.

  “And there’s this one,” he said. “Same client, but more urgent.”

  He placed a third file on the table beside their tea cups, first taking out the photographs of the kid at the party and of the older man, and laying them on the table in front of Cindy Wu.

  “Background?” she said.

  “Kid’s name is Chen Huizhi. Rich. The client thinks the older man is his father, so I guess he’s a Chen too.”

  “And that’s it?” she said, lifting the photos as if she might find something else underneath, something that might give her a bit more to go on. Then she placed them back on the table.

  “The client says they’re into digital stuff, computers, and wants whatever background we can get on both of them. And there’s one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kid’s into Ferraris.”

  He handed her two more photos. Chen Huizhi getting into the car and a tight shot of the licence plate.

  She sat for a while looking at the photos and then said, “This really isn’t a lot to go on.”

  “I know,” said Morgan. “But the client is paying well. Very well.”

  They sat in silence for a while, both of them sipping tea, and then Cindy Wu said, “Tony, Ferraris aren’t good.”

  – 12 –

  Shanghai Dumplings

  I do not believe it. I do not frigging believe it. They’ve gone for the noodles. They’ve gone for the frigging noodles.”

  “Relax, Tom. Maybe they want a change.”

  “But they always go for the dumplings. Every day they order the dumplings, Dick. Come on, order the dumplings, you twats. Order the frigging dumplings.”

  But the twats ordered the noodles, beef with pepper, some spicy chicken and a bunch of vegetables.

  “Ah shit,” said the one called Tom, pushing his laptop away.

  Tom and Dick were the latest additions to the surveillance team in the office of Shanghai TT Logistics, or The Facility, as they now liked to call it. They were fresh out from Fort Meade, National Security Agency analysts, travelling under the guise of visiting businessmen, and they’d arrived with a pile of computers, and various odd-looking accessories, which they’d set up in the room overlooking the white low-rise building in the North Bund.

  Not that they’d really introduced themselves. Just Tom and Dick, which Drayton suspected weren’t their real names.
Nothing more. He wanted to ask if Harry would be arriving next, but wasn’t sure they’d find that funny.

  Tom was fluent in Mandarin and all sorts of computer stuff that Drayton didn’t come close to understanding. He’d been staring at the online menu of a local restaurant, from which the shadowy characters in the white building ordered their takeaways. And mostly they did order dumplings, the speciality of the place, and mostly they ordered online.

  Tom and Dick had hacked into the restaurant’s website and so could monitor the orders being placed real-time. They’d also infected the menu with malware, some bug they’d developed back at Fort Meade, so that when the guys from the white building clicked on the dumplings they got a whole lot more than soggy pastry and pork.

  “They’ll be downloading a code,” Tom had told Drayton. “And that should give us a foothold in their computer system.”

  Drayton asked about the malware they’d used on the maestro’s computer, to get the photograph of the Colonel, and they said that one was programmed to self-destruct once they had the photo. They said they weren’t taking any chances. Tom said the dumpling bug was much smarter, smiling at Dick in a knowing sort of way.

  Drayton said that was really neat, and made a mental note never to order takeaway food online. He asked Tom what happened once they got the foothold with the new smart bug, and Tom said they’d take a poke around, but that he wasn’t entirely sure because it was new and untried. The guy was pretty excited by his new bug. Which was why he was so pissed when they ordered noodles.

  “Should we infect the noodles?” said Dick.

  Tom said no, we don’t want to overplay our hand. These guys are cyber experts too.

  They watched from the window as a deliveryman on a motorcycle arrived at the main gate. He was wearing a bright red jacket, “Dumpling King” in big black characters on the back. He retrieved two bags from a red box on the rear of his bike, and handed the food to a uniformed guard.