by Ian Williams
Wang said he always thought about his family, but it would help enormously if they could tell him why he was here and what actions they were talking about. He said he was confused.
At which point the man in the blazer got a little agitated. He looked at the other one, the one on the laptop, who was banging away on the keyboard, presumably making a transcript of the interrogation, and then he told Wang it was precisely that attitude that had got him into trouble in the first place and could only make matters worse for him.
Wang asked what attitude that was, but the men ignored him, the one in the blazer then saying, “Are you enjoying university, Wang?”
“Very much, sir. It’s a good course, at a good college. And I have always enjoyed computers.”
The two men looked at each other again, the one in charge then having another look at the file.
“The accusations against you are very serious,” he said.
Wang said he was very sorry to hear that.
“I’d be very grateful if you could tell me those allegations,” he said. “It will help me to better understand just how serious they are.”
The man said nothing. He then began sifting through the papers in front of him.
“You know, Wang, everything you do on the internet is logged. Everything you click on, to buy things, watch videos, follow blogs or view websites. It’s all in the log. As well as who you message and call, and what you write and say. Everything you post, too. Even where you go, because when are you ever without your smartphone? It’s all logged. Everything.
“Wonderful thing technology, isn’t it Wang?”
He paused for effect and to make sure the one on the laptop was keeping up.
“Mostly its done to sell you stuff online, or else to sell the data to others who want to sell you stuff. The data are very valuable. And you know something else? They can also show what sort of person you are, what sort of citizen. Are you a patriot, Wang?”
Wang said he was very proud of China and being Chinese.
“Well, that’s strange, Wang, because you score very low as a citizen, and that has been drawn to the attention of the relevant organs.”
“Which organs are they?” said Wang.
“The relevant ones.”
Then the man stood up, as moments later did the one on the laptop, telling Wang to think very carefully about his situation.
Wang promised that he would, but said that he was having trouble understanding that situation.
Then as they were leaving, the one in the blazer turned and said, “When was the last time you saw Yang Eu-Meh?”
Wang was so startled by the question that he almost fell off his seat.
“I’ve never met her.”
“You’ve never met your own girlfriend?”
“No. Never. I mean she’s not my girlfriend. Never has been.”
“Your girlfriend’s a very bad person, Wang, who’s said some treacherous things about her motherland.”
“I swear I’ve never met her. I made it up to please my mother,” Wang said, rambling now.
“And you thought that seeing a girl with a bad attitude would please your mother?”
“But I never saw her.”
He started to explain about the pressure he was under from his parents to find a girlfriend, but the man in the blazer raised a hand, not wanting to hear any more, and said, “Your situation is very bad, Wang. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Then the men left, and the two guards resumed their positions in the chairs across the table, just watching him.
“Do you understand my situation?” he asked the one nearest to him, who said nothing and continued to show not the slightest emotion.
Wang then raised his hand and said he’d like to take a shower, have a dump and change into his new clothes. One guard nodded, and then both followed him to the bathroom and again took up their positions at the door, watching him as he squatted and then showered. He was beyond caring.
The man in the blazer and his sidekick returned the following day, and again sat at the table opposite Wang. The one in the blazer opened his file and this time removed several pieces of paper, placing them on the table in front of him.
Overnight, Wang had thought a lot about his situation, as he’d been told to, and he decided that if this was just about Eu-Meh then he really could explain, that perhaps his situation wasn’t so bad after all. And he’d practised that explanation in his head, rehearsing what he’d say over and over.
But this time the man in the blazer didn’t even mention the Chinese-Australian beauty queen, and for the first five minutes he just sat there slowly shuffling the papers in front of him and staring at Wang.
Then he pushed one of the papers across the table towards Wang before sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms.
“Look familiar, Wang? You posted it to your account, the one you call The Gasping Dragon. Nice name. Snappy name. Tell me about this, Wang.”
Wang looked down at the paper in front of him, which was definitely a printout from the internet, and which contained words and two images.
“Tell us, Wang. Who exactly is under cover of smog and what have they taken over?”
Wang said nothing at first, not sure how to respond. It was definitely his, but he’d pretty much forgotten about that posting, and why he’d done it. Surely this couldn’t be why they’d brought him here?
“I can’t really recall,” he said. “It must have been a joke about the smog. That the smog was so thick aliens could land and we’d know nothing about it.”
“Aliens that could take over the Government, Wang? Do you believe in aliens?”
Wang said he didn’t believe in aliens, that he was just having fun.
“Fun, Wang? You were having fun?” said the one in the blazer, looking again at the sidekick on the laptop, to make sure he’d got that, and who then also looked up, a vague smirk on his face, like this was the most fun he’d had all week.
“Well, tell me about this one,” the one in the blazer said, taking out from the pile a second sheet of paper, another printout from The Gasping Dragon.
“Making weapons out of smog. That’s an interesting concept, Wang,” said the man. “You think that’s possible?”
Wang said he wasn’t sure, but the smog could be very bad at times.
The man ignored that and showed Wang a third piece of paper, this one with a stick alien wearing an outsize pair of spectacles and a Twitter-like posting beside it, about Chinese officials.
“So you think Chinese officials lack imagination, foresight or intellectual insight?”
Wang didn’t know what to say. His anonymous postings had clearly been less anonymous than he’d thought, but surely they can’t be taking them seriously?
“They were jokes,” he said, pleading with the man now, his voice cracking. “They weren’t supposed to be serious.”
The man pushed his seat back and looked at Wang like he was some sort of strange object in a museum or a child who really didn’t get the simple and self-evident words of a parent.
“Are these a joke?” the man said, showing a series of photographs: Protesters outside some building, facing off with police and holding high big drawings of the alien, the same alien. Wang’s alien. The alien scrawled crudely on the door of a charred police car. Another on a poster carried by a protester with only one foot. Then the stick alien in graffiti on a wall near a demolition site.
Then again on a soiled greetings card alongside the words “Keep up the fight”.
“Tell me about ‘the fight’, Wang. Which fight are we talking about here?”
And Wang said he’d never seen that before, or the others, that he had no idea what fight it was referring to.
“But it’s your alien is it not?” the
man said.
Wang said not necessarily, that there were probably a lot of aliens.
“Let me tell you what I think,” said the man. “I think that by ridiculing our leaders you are trying to start some sort of uprising. You really think you could do that in China?”
Wang started to say that he wasn’t trying to start anything, that the pictures, those aliens, it had to be a coincidence. But the man interrupted him and asked whether Wang was aware that China faced infiltration from hostile foreign forces, that the country needed to be vigilant.
Wang said he wasn’t aware of that, but promised he’d make it a priority to look out for infiltration just as soon as he got back home.
The man said infiltration took many forms, but sometimes ideas were the most dangerous. He said it was happening all the time, all around us, trying to undermine our socialist values. He said that after a century of humiliation, China under the leadership of the Communist Party was standing high again and had to keep permanently on its guard.
“I want you to think about that, Wang.”
Wang said he would, and nodded as if he understood.
Then the man said, “Who else is in your organisation, Wang? Who else is involved? Are you receiving foreign funding?”
Wang said what organisation? And the man started banging his finger hard on the picture of the alien and saying, “This organisation, Wang, this organisation.”
He said Wang had allowed himself to become a tool of foreign powers.
That the Communist Party brought stability and order.
“And you know what the alternative is Wang?”
Wang said he wasn’t sure. Possibly instability and disorder?
“Chaos Wang. It’s Chaos.”
Then the man asked whether Wang knew the punishment for subverting state power and Wang said he didn’t, and said again that he was just messing around, that he’d only been joking with all the online stuff. That it wasn’t real.
“Subverting state power is no joke. It is deadly serious, Wang. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in prison? We have treated you gently so far. You come from a good family. Your father is a good man. There could be consequences for them too. Do you understand? Our patience is wearing very thin.”
Wang began to ramble, close to tears. He said he understood subversion was very serious, but how could a few posts of a spindly alien, a few silly posts, a bit of fun, possibly be a threat to the Communist Party?
“You really don’t get it do you, Wang?”
And Wang said, no, perhaps he didn’t.
– 31 –
Macau
For twenty-four hours Anthony Morgan had remained in his Hong Kong hotel, mostly in his room, his curtains drawn and the do-not-disturb sign lit up by his door. He was not sure what he should do next.
He had his @Beijing_smog Twitter account open on his laptop, retreating to the comfort of his alter ego, trying to distract himself with some fresh posts. The Hong Kong haze. The protesting lawyers and their alien. A dead graft-buster. The last was the strangest and he’d almost missed it. He’d found the report, just a few words, buried right down the bottom of an inside page of the People’s Daily, which he’d read online. The Party’s mouthpiece was always a good source of slightly surreal stories.
He decided to make a joke of it, sharing the story with a comment about overwork, which made him smile, but only very briefly.
@Beijing_smog had always been his own private world where he could say what he wanted to say, be who he wanted to be. But that bubble of anonymity had burst, and he kept returning to the message from his wife:
Stay in Hong Kong. Do not come back, and do not try and contact me or Robert. Robert should be fine. My parents are helping. Cindy
There could only be one explanation. That she’d seen the video. That she knew. That would explain her strange tone of voice on recent calls, her reluctance to let him speak to Robert. She also knew about his alter ego, his private Twitter account. What else did she know? She could dig up the most intimate details about the targets of their investigations. So why not about him too? Mimi the masseuse had not been the only one.
He decided he couldn’t hide from it. He needed to talk to her face to face.
So he checked out and took a taxi to Hong Kong airport, checking in for a late morning flight to Beijing. He didn’t phone Cindy Wu, or reply to her message. He didn’t want to give her any advance warning.
He was at the gate, preparing to board, when his phone rang. It was the man from Mr Fang’s office saying Mr Fang needed to see him, and that it was urgent.
Morgan said he should be able to get to Shenzhen the following week, but the man interrupted him and said that was too late, that Mr Fang wanted to see him today, in Macau, where he’d meet him for a late lunch on the Cotai Strip. He gave Morgan the name of a restaurant, asking him to text when his ferry arrived.
Then he hung up.
Morgan sat back down on a seat close to the boarding gate, thinking this was strange, even for Mr Fang. But he was an important client. Maybe even more so now. If he was going to get into a scrap with Cindy Wu over their assets, then Mr Fang’s money would be very useful. And he had a lot of it. And the way Morgan saw it, he needed to move quickly to seal the deals, and his own commissions, before Drayton had the deals blocked.
So he went to the airline desk and said he could no longer fly, that some urgent business had come up. The woman behind the desk looked irritated, studying her watch for what seemed to Morgan like an eternity before taking back the boarding pass. There were only thirty minutes until the flight was scheduled to leave, but he had no check-in baggage to retrieve; he rarely travelled with check-in luggage.
Then he retraced his steps back through the airport, wheeling his battered black bag to an exit marked Mainland China and Macau. He bought a ticket for Macau, and an hour later he boarded a blue catamaran ferry, climbing a staircase to the Superclass cabin, where he sat in a fading blue leather seat beside the window. He took off his jacket, laying it neatly on the empty seat beside him and rubbed his eyes.
He thought about Drayton, since he had several missed calls from the American. In Lamma, Morgan had demanded to know more about what he was getting into, but Drayton had given him nothing apart from some vague stuff about there being a bigger picture and promises to protect his anonymity. From what? He’d decided he couldn’t trust a man who wrapped his iPhone in kitchen foil, wouldn’t sit with his back to a restaurant, and had a side job with some obscure Shanghai trading company.
What sort of Economic/Commercial Officer was that?
Morgan wanted nothing more to do with him, and when his phone rang again, he ignored it.
A large screen at the front of the cabin was looping rapid-fire images of his destination. Bright lights, gambling tables, a cabaret troupe in sparkling bikinis, and a preview of a world title boxing match, days away. Macau, the world’s biggest casino city, it boasted, now outstripping by far the tables of Las Vegas, and a magnet for big-spending Chinese from the mainland.
Men like Mr Fang.
The ferry pulled away from the airport jetty, heaving and swaying in the wake of a larger passing ship laden with containers. The control tower was barely visible through the haze, below it the smudgy outlines of taxiing aircraft.
It had been a wretched few days in Hong Kong, what with that massage video, and then the disappearance of Sam Ching.
Before the message from his wife, he’d tried to reassure himself that the video was nothing, just a bit of spite on Mimi’s part, not liking being shouted at, and that the whole thing would blow over. And Geraldine MacMaster seemed reassured.
And he’d convinced himself that Ching’s detention couldn’t possibly be about La-La and that stupid sperm machine. That would be ridiculous. It must be something else Ching was into.
And he’d continued to reassure Ching’s increasingly desperate wife that all would be well.
He began to read that morning’s edition of the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, a front-page report saying Macau gambling revenues were plummeting, and blaming the Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption.
Then his telephone rang again, this time from a number he didn’t recognise. After a moment’s hesitation, he answered the call. It was Sam Ching.
“Hello there, Mr Morgan, Sam here.”
Morgan jolted up in his seat and asked how he was. He said he’d heard some terrible things from Su.
Ching laughed, but it was an awkward laugh.
“Everything’s fine. A lot of fuss about nothing. Just a silly misunderstanding. But I do need to see you. It’s quite urgent.”
Morgan thought for a moment, then he said, “I’m not sure I can come immediately to Shenzhen, Sam. But I will be in Macau later today. I have a late lunchtime meeting with a client at the Cha Chaan Teng restaurant on the Cotai Strip. Can you slip over to Macau?”
There was a long pause, and then Ching said, sure, he could make it, that he’d see him there, and he asked Morgan to text this number when he arrived. Maybe they could get together just before or just after his lunch. There was another silence, and then Ching asked, “Is that Mr Fang you are meeting?”
And Morgan said yes it was, thinking it was a strange question to ask.
He said he was glad Ching was okay, that he was looking forward to talking, and then they hung up.
Morgan slumped back in his seat, an attendant in a soiled grey jacket serving him a plastic tray with lukewarm jasmine tea and stale biscuits.
He should have felt relief, but instead he felt unease. Ching had sounded awkward, stilted, almost like they were not his words he was speaking. It certainly wasn’t the Ching he knew. He never called him Mr Morgan. Anything but that.
But he pushed back the uncertainties, feeling duty-bound to try and meet him. Ching had been loyal to him over the years, and he felt he owed it to him.