“I think so. Roet will want us for two days, tops. After Langley, we can go straight to the West Coast for some Californian sun. Might do Lu Lei some good to be in the ocean. Make use of those swimming lessons.”
“Leave in two days, after the funeral?” Casey asked.
“I’m good with that. She can go to school tomorrow and say goodbye to her friends.”
"Poor kid. We're all she's got now."
It had been Jimmy’s idea to ferry the sniper to the factory in a rickshaw. The Chief thought it an odd plan, but Jimmy had convinced him that it was a clever way to avoid witnesses. When they were done, they could just dump it and it would soon be stolen. Jimmy had the gift of talking people into things.
After killing the sniper on the factory roof, he'd cleaned the scene and thrown the sniper’s body off the building rather than carry it down. On his way down the exterior ladder, the rifle slung over his shoulder, he wondered, what could possibly bring the chief of police to want to kill an old man and a young girl?
He wheeled the rickshaw out of the laneway and stopped next to the body. The sniper was as light as a feather. Probably malnourished after being locked away. After roughly tossing his corpse into the passenger seat, Jimmy slid the rifle behind the body and pulled his own hat off and put it over his passenger’s face.
While riding from the edge of town toward a small, abandoned farm, Jimmy talked to the lifeless sniper. “You see what happens when you shoot Jimmy’s friends? Nothing to say? That’s because you are dead. You did not know Jimmy was coming for you, did you?”
He laughed and continued cycling and abusing his quiet passenger until he reached the farm.
He dug a grave with an old shovel from the shed. Then pulled out rubber gloves and a small bottle of bleach from his backpack and cleaned. He threw the body into the hole along with the rifle, the shell casings and the pistol he’d stolen from the army base.
Going to the old man’s funeral was an unnecessary risk, but Jimmy felt confident he could get in and out without being seen, and he wanted to get an idea of who he might be dealing with if people started pointing fingers. The old man’s death had been reported in the paper as a heart attack. Jimmy wondered what lies the police had told to get around the problem of the large caliber gunshot wound in the old man’s chest.
Dressed as a monk, Jimmy arrived late to the funeral service. He saw the little girl near the front with two foreigners who were acting like parents. He worked his way around to the side of the gathering where he could get a good look at their faces. The little girl looked to be about five and was crying inconsolably while the monks chanted. He felt an unfamiliar warmth. He’d done the right thing, taking out the sniper. It was a revenge killing, but he had also saved an innocent life.
20
Vacation
Lu Lei looked out the oval window at the activity of the baggage handlers. The smell inside the plane was strange. She sat between Matt and Casey in a large and comfortable seat. They had been the first to walk through the door of the plane, where the uniformed ladies bent down to say hello as she arrived. Casey handed her the pillow from home and her eyelids closed as she snuggled sideways into the seat.
Matt covered Lu Lei with an airplane blanket, whispering, “That went well.”
Casey pulled the blanket higher over her shoulders. “I thought the guy at the X-ray machine was going to keep searching your briefcase until he found the compartment.”
“Business class helps.”
Langley, Virginia.
Matt looked around Roet’s office disapprovingly. It was much bigger than he deserved. He couldn’t help but feel a touch of indignation, sitting there with Casey in front of Roet’s big desk like students at the school principal’s office.
“Welcome back, guys.” Roet closed the door behind him and moved to his ergonomic chair.
“Thanks, Marcus.”
“Firstly, nice work on the virologist. Those files will put us out in front of the problem. We were completely in the dark about their bioweapons program. He worked out well. Good value for money.”
Matt nodded. “Best to keep him on the payroll for now. We think he’ll be a good worker if he’s paid adequately. The dirty photographs were good to get him started, but experience has taught us–”
“Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted Roet, “women don’t matter much in China. His wife will forgive him, yada yada. Don’t worry folks, I’ll make sure the man gets paid. You can trust me.”
“Anyway...” Casey said, “So, he keeps getting paid, and the same with the dirty cop. Here are the negatives. Also, we need a requisition form for some other evidence we need processed. It’s unrelated, but might have some applications in the future. It’s about Beijing’s chief of police. A little murder conspiracy. We can keep in our back pocket.”
Roet swiveled to open the filing cabinet. “Have we covered everything?”
Casey answered, “The Communist Party has locked up, and is probably torturing, hundreds of thousands of the Falun Gong’s people. A ‘re-education program’ they are calling it.”
“As long as it’s not a threat to the security of the United States of America, the CIA does not give a rat’s ass. Here’s your requisition form. Have a nice vacation. Let’s chat after you get back to Beijing. By the way, they are expecting you downstairs at Research and Development. New encryption tech for field personnel.”
“Okay, Marcus. Talk in a couple of weeks then.”
La Jolla, California.
Lu Lei held Casey’s hand as she looked at the sea for the first time in her life. Matt had pulled over at a cliff top on the way to the house. Casey pointed, and Lu Lei squinted to block out the sun so she could see the tiny surfers far below. The sky was so blue here; the clouds were whiter, and it smelled better.
“Can we go down there?”
“Later this afternoon if you are not too tired.”
Lu Lei looked up at Matt, who was also gazing at the sea.
“It is beautiful,” she said, still looking at Matt, who nodded in agreement.
“Right, ladies, time to eat. Let’s go and buy the spinach.”
Casey suggested that they get her some Chinese food and pick up a couple of burgers. “She’s going to need a nap. It’s been a big day for her already.”
After lunch, Lu Lei was reluctant to lie down for a nap but was asleep in minutes.
“Grab that forensic file from my briefcase,” Matt called out, looking everywhere for a bottle opener.
Casey walked into the kitchen with the file open. “Tire tracks, axle width of a ‘93 diesel Mercedes Benz, no surprise there. That’s the Chief.”
She flipped the page. “Baton, two clear fingerprints. Straw, a smaller print, makes sense, probably Sun Yi.”
Casey flipped the page. “Blood work: scalpel blade is B-negative, blood collected from gravel is O-positive. Nothing conclusive except that there were two bleeders.”
“But with high probability it puts the Chief at the house, with at least two extra bad guys. Then what?” asked Matt, “a car chase? But he came at them from a side street. Weird, right?”
Casey looked pensive. “Maybe that’s where the premeditation happened: after the little tracheotomy operation outside the house, they were heading to the hospital and the Chief went after them and took a detour to cut them off.”
“Possible. The Master’s sources said that the side-on collision appeared to be premeditated. We know now that shortly before, there was a fight at the house. If this all happened here in the States, the District Attorney could put him in jail, but in China–”
“In China,” interrupted Casey, “corruption is cool. What can we do?”
“Shoot him in the street? Blow his car up? Strangle him in his home?”
She laughed. “How many beers have you had?”
He laughed, ignoring the question. “Or, we could let Lu Lei grow up and she can take him out when she turns eighteen.”
“Don’t even think i
t,” she scolded. “That’s way too long for her to wait.”
He chuckled, glad Casey was relaxing.
“It’s a nice idea, but you and I both know that when it boils down to it, we can’t afford to touch the Chief. He’s connected, and it would put the heat on us, and our cover might not hold up to the extra attention.”
“Which means we just keep the evidence close to the chest. Save it for a rainy day and hope that Lu Lei’s memory of the Master’s assassination gets buried deep until she is much older.”
Lu Lei’s sun and surf filled days on the California coast distracted her from thoughts about the Master’s death. Her questions about why he was bleeding, why they were fighting, and why the Chief chased her were always answered with adult tricks and distractions. The silly answers they gave just made her wonder more. Her nightmares had become a regular occurrence.
No matter how little she slept, every morning Matt forced her out of bed and drove her to the beach. The surfing lessons were fun and her instructor was a beautiful, light-brown girl who smiled all the time and seemed very surprised at how quickly she was able to stand up and control the surfboard. Together, they planned for her last lesson to be at a place called “Wind and Sea,” the sound of which she liked. The Master often talked about movement in terms of nature: water, rain, trees, wind, snow, and forest. She sometimes felt that she could hear his voice as she was learning to balance on the board. After a few days of Matt’s “get up early” rule, she started to sleep through the night.
Casey started to teach Lu Lei about western food. Most nights, dinner was in a different restaurant, always with a knife and fork, sometimes eating with the hands, like pigs. On the nights when Casey and Matt went out together for dinner, Casey invited the surfing girl over to keep Lu Lei company and teach her new words in English.
The day arrived for the final surf lesson, but the waves at Wind and Sea were too big for her, so instead the girl taught her to skateboard. When Matt arrived to pick her up, she begged him to buy her one, which, of course, he did. It had a beautiful picture of the breaking waves at Wind and Sea on the bottom.
Lu Lei was feeling moments of pure joy, but underneath it all she felt lost, abandoned and lied-to. Although she was too young to understand it, the unexplained deaths had instilled in her an undertone of dread and mistrust.
21
Suspicions
Seven years later
Visits to La Jolla became an annual pilgrimage. Lu Lei wondered why they always had to stop in Virginia for two days. When she complained, the answers given her were consistently vague: ‘just business’ or ‘we have to take care of a few things.’
It was boring in Langley, and she was always eager to get to the ocean and pick up where she had left off. She’d started to like boys and already had a few friends at the beach.
She noticed how different her parents seemed while on vacation. Laughing and smiling, talking to strangers on the street. Each year, when the time came to return to Beijing, the mood became tense, though Lu Lei felt the opposite, always excited to go back home to normal food and chopsticks.
Despite her rough beginnings with Wei Bao, they had become close friends, and even though the Chief forbade it, they hung out after school in a group with other twelve and thirteen years-olds. Her parents had been trying to keep her thoroughly occupied, but she didn’t mind. Except for the erhu lessons, most of it was fun. She’d become a strong swimmer despite having had to change to a different pool after an incident with the coach, who she felt was being abusive. He was always swearing at them and punishing them with more laps to do. She’d gotten out of the pool to storm off, and he ran after her, making the mistake of grabbing her wrist.
Casey had scolded her on the way home, but Matt later confided in Lu Lei that he was proud of her, and that he thought it was entirely appropriate that she had brought him to his knees on the pool deck and held him there until the lifeguards came over to release the poor man from the humiliating situation.
Being thirteen, she felt that she was too old to go back to the child psychologist, but whenever there were incidents, the Barbecue Couple made her go for a visit, ‘just to be on the safe side’. The lady always talked about Lu Lei's anger coming from her ego, which had appeared prematurely because of her parents’ accident. It sounded like adult psychobabble and she ignored it, though it did, somehow, ring true.
In Beijing, tai chi was still a risky art to practice, so they had decided that she would switch to kung fu. There were several famous schools from which to choose. The closest one to their apartment was, unfortunately, the one Wei Bao attended, so she had to go to a different one, a little further away, to keep the adults happy. In any case, it was probably wise to stay out of the Chief’s way. He seemed to hate her. Maybe his ego had appeared prematurely too.
One morning at school, Lu Lei was the first one called to the front of the class to give a presentation in English. Her teacher, a young American lady, always seemed amused by Lu Lei’s American accent, which had a twang she’d picked up from her parents. Having lived with Americans for nearly eight years, her proficiency had risen to near fluency, although she still chose to speak Mandarin at home. It was how she had started out with the Barbecue Couple, and she had no inclination to change it.
Lu Lei noticed that for the last couple of years, Matt and Casey had increasingly opted for leaving the room to have private conversations. They realized now that she could understand most of their English.
Eavesdropping, she could never get the full story. All she knew was that there were secrets. She loved her adoptive parents, but the constant exclusion was hammering a wedge between them.
The classroom was respectfully silent as Lu Lei gave her talk about the events of September 11th, two years earlier. She looked up occasionally at the teacher, and noticed that she was fidgeting nervously in the corner – more so after she reached the part about the failure of the American intelligence community and the new laws that had come into effect in the United States.
“Thank you, Lu Lei. That’s wonderful,” the teacher cut her off long before she was finished. “That’s all the time you have. Who is next? Wei Bao?”
Matt jogged up the stairs from the barbecue factory floor to the office. It weighed on his mind that Lu Lei’s renovations had halted seven years ago on the day of the Master’s death. Most of the Falun Gong community was living behind barbed wire, and Matt had not been able to bring himself to pick up the renovation project using contracted workers.
“Do you think I should talk to Lu Lei about getting her old house finished?”
Casey looked up from the books. “Honey, I think it’s a great idea. It will bring you two together again. She seems pretty icy, of late. Maybe the trauma is catching up with her.”
“I reckon she should be in regular therapy.”
“I really don’t know what to think, Matt. The child psychologist said she just has a lot of anger. I would too, in her place, never being told the whole truth. It was always going to come back and haunt us, but I still think she’s way too young to hear the full story. There’s no telling how she might react. It might blow back on us.”
“Being back at their old house could bring it all up again.”
“I don’t believe that it ever went away, Matt. She still has the night terrors and insists on using only her mother’s metal chopsticks to eat with, and taking them to school is cute, but a little over the top.”
“I’ll ask her. If she says yes, it’ll be good for me too. Something real to focus on.”
Casey moved her phone call into the bedroom just as Lu Lei came through the front door with Matt. She drummed her fingers while Marcus Roet droned on about China’s biological weapons program.
“Marcus, for better or for worse, the virologist’s alteration of the SARS virus went according to CIA instructions. It’s now only dangerous to people of Asian descent. It’s no longer a serious threat to Caucasians. I don't like where this is all headed, Marcus
. Not one bit.”
"You know how it goes, Casey. Decisions come from above, and we do what needs to be done to protect America, no matter what. The storage and alteration of viruses is currently standard operating procedure on both sides of the fence. If they do it, we do it."
"Let's not forget that America signed a treaty not to do it, Marcus."
"That's why we don't let this get out. Keep that in mind when making friends with your assets."
“Don't lecture me Marcus. Anyway, mission accomplished. By the way, you should make the recommendation to evacuate non-essential American personnel from southeast Asian posts. They are in no danger, but it would look odd if the white people stayed and none of them got sick.”
“Okay, Casey, I’ll make the recommendation. You'll deal with the virologist when the time comes?”
“He’s a viable asset, as far as Matt and I are concerned. We recommend that you keep paying him. In our opinion, he'll continue to be useful well into the future.”
“I’ll take it under advisement, Casey. What we really need is a mole in China’s Ministry of Defense. Do you have any inroads? Maybe the virologist has a contact?”
“I’ll talk to Matt about putting some feelers out. You might have to be patient. Listen, Marcus. We need to rest the virologist for a while. He’s got a spotlight on him. Just keep his retainer payments flowing. He has a good attitude, but we don’t want that to change. I don’t have to remind you that our lives are in the balance here. If you pull funding from any of our assets, you need to tell us well in advance. This is China, Marcus. Are we understanding each other here?”
Surviving Spies (Irving Waters, Spy Fiction Series) Page 17