The Brad West Files

by Fritz Galt

  Why had he even bothered to listen to the crackpot? He wouldn’t go out on a limb for someone who had nothing concrete to offer.

  “I’ll tell you my problem,” he said. “Actually I have three problems. One, if you can’t tell me where Hitler is, then what use is the information? Two, a ticket to China costs a lot of money and we don’t consider such junkets part of the Marshall Plan. And three, there’s nothing you told me to make me believe your story.”

  The man’s eyes once again shifted to the window, this time with a paranoid expression. “They’re after me. The Russians have been trying to track this envelope down for fifteen years.”

  “What’s so important about that envelope?” West slammed a hand down on his desk. Damn, Pringle might have heard that.

  “They would kill for it. Easily. They know I have it, and they will kill me. They will do anything to stop me.”

  At last West understood what lay behind the absurd claim. The shape of one’s head might determine one’s personality, but not one’s psychoses. The man was clearly paranoid to the point of delusion. As West’s resolve hardened, he felt his heart soften. Here was someone roughly his own age, living under far more difficult circumstances merely because he ended up on the wrong side of a political divide. What a pity.

  Fried continued in an urgent tone that only further undermined his credibility. “They are looking for me. They know I am in Berlin.”

  West nodded. The impersonal “they.”

  “Khrushchev will do everything he can to block me from leaving their zone.”

  Self-aggrandizement.

  “What will Khrushchev do?” West asked, rising. It was time to burst the guy’s bubble and dispel his delusions. He sat on the front of his desk and crossed his arms. “Will he send agents into our sector?”

  “He already has.”

  Ha! The delusions were rooted in the absurd. “The Russians could have stopped you at the checkpoint.”

  “I was just in time, but they didn’t know that.”

  West took the story to its logical extreme. “Well, how about another blockade of Berlin like Stalin tried in ’48?”

  “Airplanes flew in and out of the American Sector. A blockade wouldn’t stop me.”

  West turned his back on Fried and circled behind his desk. “Then what on earth would Khrushchev do to stop you?”

  Fried straightened his back. Dark shadows reflected in his eyes as he sized West up. “If I tell you this and it comes true in the next day or so, will you help smuggle me to China?”

  “Tell me what? Khrushchev’s plan to capture you?”

  “You will see his plan take form in the next few days. He will stop at nothing to contain me, and his attempts will change the face of Berlin forever.”

  West had to admit that the prospect of gaining intelligence on the unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev was tempting. Fried was talking his language. But please, spare him the hyperbole! Changing the face of Berlin forever?

  “Listen.” West sat down and scooted close to the man. “I want to believe you, but I simply can’t. Tell me about Khrushchev’s plan, and I’ll tell you if it’s interesting enough for us to help spring you free.”

  Fried’s eyes shifted quickly to the window and back with a sadness that West couldn’t begin to understand. “The Soviets are going to erect a barrier between the two zones. I know it is a big area. There are buildings in the way, even lakes and forests. But they will erect a wall and let nobody out. In this way, they hope to catch me.”

  West looked at the apartment block just beyond the trees. “I don’t see anybody building a wall.”

  “They will build it quickly. First with barbed wire. Within days, they will have wire strung clear across the middle of the city. They will patrol it with armed guards and dogs. Before the Americans can protest or react, a solid wall will stretch across Germany.”

  A Great Wall in Germany? West didn’t think so. Sure, he would pass the claim along, encumbered as it was coming from one who would say anything for his freedom, but this case was going nowhere.

  At last, he turned back to the professor. “Here’s the deal. If Khrushchev builds a wall around West Berlin in the next forty-eight hours, I will pay for a ticket to China out of my own pocket.”

  Just then he heard a knock on the door, and David Pringle stepped in. He had a gleam in his eyes. “What’s taking you two so long? Have you found Hitler yet?”

  West hid the pact that he had just made with Professor Fried behind a tight smile. Adolf Hitler alive, a trip to China, a secret envelope, a wall across Germany? It looked like Pringle had gotten the better of him this time.

  Chapter 3

  The Present

  Nearly fifty years after that hot day in Berlin, a ferocious spring wind swept through China and turned Beijing into a dust bowl.

  A limousine took President Qian as close to Building 13 as possible. He looked through the car’s lace curtains at the short distance to the curb, up the steps, and into the Party’s most dreaded building.

  He would rather face the National People’s Congress than what lay inside. Situated in the Chinese Communist Party’s downtown Beijing compound, Building 13 was the long-term care facility for the Party’s elderly, many of whom were on life-support and would never leave alive.

  President Qian was an old man, and he wouldn’t live forever. He had visited on numerous occasions to say good-bye to former Politburo and Party elders. The howling dust storm would have been a convenient excuse not to make the trip.

  “Here, Mr. President,” his bodyguard said from the front seat, and handed him a surgical mask. Such masks were a normal part of life during the spring storms that wracked the city with the fine dust of the Gobi Desert. Qian didn’t want the vile red stuff in his lungs any more than the next man.

  With practiced fingers, he slipped the mask over his nose and mouth and adjusted the bands behind his head. He gave a determined grunt and signaled for his car door to be opened. Within seconds, he was hobbling on his old feet up the steps. Two bodyguards braced him against the warm, driving wind. He squinted, and still the fine particles made their way into his eyes.

  At last, he reached the safety of the building and the doors swung shut behind him. In a surreal reversal of roles, the surgical mask came off once he entered the hospital. With a handkerchief, he wiped the grit from his eyes, forehead, ears and neck.

  The lobby was cluttered, but President Qian nodded with approval. It was wiped as clean as could be expected.

  An orderly led him to the room of Tie Ren “Iron Man” Zhuang. The stricken party elder lay harnessed to Western life-support equipment. The environment seemed sanitary. Someday he, too, would slip from life in such a room.

  Qian turned his attention to the stern, but frightfully frail old man who was propped up on a pillow. With a crook of the index finger, Zhuang motioned him closer.

  Qian leaned down to hear the old man’s words.

  “Nothing I say is to leave this room,” Zhuang croaked through dry lips.

  “It won’t,” Qian assured him, and patted the sheets.

  “No. I mean we must remove all the bugs.”

  “You mean listening devices?” Qian asked.

  “Yes. If you call them that.”

  Qian ordered his security team to sweep the room for listening devices. The technician with the detection wand deftly removed hidden microphones from the surgical lamp, the heart monitor, and even under the kidney-dialysis machine.

  “The room is clean now, Mr. President,” the technician said.

  “Then leave us alone,” the dying man said.

  The security team looked at Qian for authorization. He nodded. They took one last look around before closing the door behind them.

  “Before I die,” the old man said, his voice weak but insistent, “there is something I must tell you. It is your right to know. As the Party elder, I have kept this secret until my deathbed.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Qian said
.

  “Don’t patronize me. I’m dying and I know it. What I have to say is this: I have heard of a place where one can live forever.”

  Qian looked down at him with disbelief.

  “Don’t think I’m crazy. I am not asking to go there. But it is your right, as party leader to take yourself to Shambhala.”

  It had been decades since Qian had heard that name. He hadn’t received religious indoctrination since the Communist takeover in 1949, and he hadn’t much sought to explore his Buddhist roots once he became a committed Communist. But he had heard the legend of Shambhala, the promised place of eternal peace where handsome men and lovely women lived in palaces. He had never considered it more than an allegory.

  “I will talk quickly, for I feel my chi leaving my body. As soon as Comrade Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek, he moved to annex Tibet. He launched a military invasion that guaranteed China’s possession of her most valuable treasure. When Mao’s work was complete in 1976, he disappeared from Beijing. Soon thereafter, he officially ‘died.’”

  “Don’t tell me Chiang and the Nationalists believed in it.”

  “It’s why Mao needed to evict both the Japanese and the Nationalists.”

  It was a heretical thought, and Qian dismissed it by using the Western term for the place. “You say the war was all about Shangri-la?”

  “It has driven men crazy for centuries. The idea of perpetual youth is too powerful for people to resist. Even our most dedicated leaders.”

  “More than one has tried to go there?”

  “Deng went, too.”

  Qian held a hand over his mouth. “The place is simply a figment of their imagination.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I have never been there. I have been told that only one man knows for sure. Professor Hans Fried, a German, ten years younger than I, came to China in the early 1960s and promptly disappeared. I remember interrogating him when he arrived, because we allowed very few foreigners into the motherland at the time. But he posed no threat that I could tell. Perhaps he alone knows.”

  “But he disappeared?”

  “I never heard from him until last week.”

  “He survived all these years?”

  “Apparently. All I received from him was a request to travel out of China. Clearly our borders are as tight as they have ever been,” he added with pride.

  “What did he say? Did he find his Shangri-la?”

  “I was too weak to investigate. But I did grant him permission to leave.”

  President Qian found himself leaning far over the bed, eager for more details about the mystical land and its fountain of youth. He should be ashamed of himself. It was madness. He could see how men waged wars over it. “But most people consider Shangri-la a myth.”

  “Our Department of Religious Affairs has been very effective in that regard.”

  “And nobody has ever claimed to find it.”

  “I have kept my mouth shut all these years.”

  “I thank you for your discretion.”

  “…with one exception. Over the years, I informed each party chairman such as you.”

  “So where is Shangri-la?”

  “I don’t know where it is. I only know that I gave up the chance to go.” Zhuang’s voice grew hoarse and barely audible. “I believed in the Revolution.”

  Qian squeezed his eyes shut. Hadn’t they all?

  When Qian reopened his eyes, he noticed that Iron Man Zhuang no longer stirred. Zhuang’s once pained expression was replaced by a blank stare.

  A nurse hurried into the unit to check Zhuang’s vital signs. She felt for a pulse and then held a stethoscope to his chest. At last she straightened up. Grim, but matter of fact, she turned the machines off one by one. As an afterthought, she shut the old man’s eyes.

  Elder Zhuang had departed the world when he could have lived there forever. So noble was his sacrifice.

  The nurse left the room, and Qian’s security team stepped through the open door. A shoe smashed something on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” said the technician who had cleared the room of bugs. “That might have been another listening device.”

  Now President Qian understood why Iron Man Zhuang had insisted on total secrecy. The story of Shangri-la should remain a secret, lest it drive more countries to war. He certainly would never choose to look for it, and he hoped that nobody was eavesdropping on the other end of that listening device.

  Chapter 4

  Further south in China, Liang Jiaxi was spared the nasty dust storm experienced by his grandfather, President Qian. Only the suggestion of a breeze wafted through the sprawling city of Shanghai. Jasmine, the fragrant herald of spring, cast an enchanting spell over the affluent French Concession district.

  Liang was enjoying a massage in his open-air library when his private line rang. He had rigged up a secure communications network with his invisible army in Beijing, the party cohorts who formed the inner circle of his group. Only the most important messages passed along those lines.

  He grunted to alert his masseuse that he was preparing to roll off the padded bench and take the call.

  The young woman in a blue silk dress backed away and departed down the covered walkway. Liang tightened the towel around his trim waist and crossed to the phone on a shelf stacked with scrolls.

  “Wei?” he answered.

  “This is Peng.”

  Liang stiffened. He rarely heard the voice, that of his best-positioned informant. Chou Peng had to be careful about his contacts with Liang because of the sensitivity of his posting. As a colonel in the army, Peng was in charge of all surveillance at the Communist Party headquarters on the extensive lakeside grounds of Zhong Nan Hai in central Beijing. If Colonel Chou Peng called, it was important.

  A former military pilot and ex-cadet at the space academy, Liang valued his military contacts. They enabled him to fly the latest aircraft at Jiangwan Airfield north of Shanghai. There he maintained a keen edge in his flying and tactical battle skills. Furthermore, loyal troops within the People’s Liberation Army might prove valuable should he ever need to call upon them again.

  “Speak to me, Comrade Peng,” Liang said warmly.

  “Comrade?” Peng smirked at the antiquated term. Few still saw the Communist cause as a war. Rather, it had turned into a club for the elite. And as an active member of the party, Liang indulged in all its privileges.

  “What is happening among the cadres?” Liang said.

  A hunk of phlegm got caught in Peng’s throat and he started to cough. Liang recognized it as the usual Beijing crud, a continuous cycle of respiratory irritation and infection. Deforestation of China was one more brilliant move by the party of old.

  He reclined in a bentwood chair and mused on the recent history of his party.

  Once a force for the exploited, the Communists had long since broken their social contract with the rural population and made a deal with the rich and those who aspired to wealth. Shortly after the Tiananmen crackdown, President Deng Xiaoping had traveled to promote a new paradigm for governance. His trip to the industrialized south signaled an encouragement of manufacturing and trade.

  By his actions, Deng indicated that it was acceptable to make money, and the government would support commercial development. He had opened up a new conduit for the people to pour their enormous energy. They would resume the longstanding tradition, especially in coastal and river cities, of making money any way possible.

  Thus, Deng had revved up the Chinese economy. Presently it was humming along at full speed, transforming society and cities nearly overnight. It was on a trajectory toward grandeur, opulence and modernization unimaginable a few short years before.

  Liang had long sought the power of his grandfather’s position. Having lost his father to illness, Liang was itching to leapfrog the party’s stodgy Central Committee nominating process and take the reins of power. However, his previous attempts to usurp power, masterful as they were in design and execution, had fallen short, and l
eft him shunned in the political circles of Beijing.

  But was that a bad thing? Who needed political clout any longer when money wielded more power?

  Plundering the accounts of the nationalized banks had funded his investments in real estate from Shenzhen to Shanghai. His party position allowed him to circumvent zoning regulations, flout contract-bidding rules, snub employees and ignore environmental constraints. He was building a personal empire, and China’s economy benefited from it.

  In his eyes, he was a model citizen, a national hero. And it was his duty to flaunt it. He had cars, mansions, girls, hot and cold running staff. What more could a man want in life?

  Sure, his grandfather had banished him from Beijing, but life was so much easier in Shanghai. And it seemed only natural for him to have purchased and renovated the house of “Pockmarked” Huang Jinrong for his personal palace.

  After all, Pockmarked Huang had been the chief Chinese officer in the corrupt local French gendarmerie. The French had let him run all organized crime in the concession, thus keeping brothels and opium dens orderly and profitable. In fact, Huang had owned the largest den of vice in the city, the multi-story Great World department store that offered all kinds of entertainment at any price.

  Huang had had a free hand in the ’20s and ’30s to run whatever illegal operations he wanted. And his means was his small army of police, along with a large coterie of gangsters and hoodlums.

  Seventy years later, the services offered to the public had changed from brothels to hotels and from taxi girls to taxi companies, but the methods had hardly changed. Shanghai and most other cities in China still operated in the same fashion, and social order was maintained.

  Liang was especially fond of his rock garden among the cedar, plum and camphor trees. His lotus pond was full of goldfish, his pavilions were hidden from the public, and the sounds of the city were distant and muted. He lived in a tranquil quarter of the city with narrow, tree-lined streets and art deco-inspired architecture. He had it all.

  Peng finally cleared his throat, gargled up something productive and spat it out.