16
Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery / Singapore City
August 28, 8:30 a.m. SGT
From the back seat of his car, Charlie Han smoked and watched the woman.
This ang moh was nothing like her sister. Where the older girl had been bold in her determination to help Mèng, this one was cautious. Careful. He didn’t know if she’d believed his mix of lies and truths about her sister, or his story that he worked for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. In the end, it wouldn’t matter.
He needed her, so he would find a way to convince her. As Sun Tzu wrote, “The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the war has been won.”
Once he turned Nadia Brenner, he would at last hold his enemies in his fist, much as he’d held the green crested lizard. A single flex of his muscles and Mèng and his enemies in the Second Department would be crushed.
Yet the thought didn’t bring the pleasure it once had. Because the destruction of his enemies wouldn’t give him what he most deeply wanted.
Charlie stubbed out his cigarette. “Zǒu ba,” he said to the driver. “Let’s go.”
He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
How had he gotten here, so far from the rutted lanes and crumbling concrete homes of his village in Qinghai Province? The one-room school dormitory he’d shared with the other boys. The filth and scarcity and grinding poverty. Now he was a respected officer of the Guóānbù. So different. So strange. Sometimes it was hard to believe both places existed in the same country. Despite the tenets of communism, China was a patchwork of the haves and the have-nots.
His family had been moved to Qinghai as part of the CCP’s push to occupy former Tibetan territories. Built on the Tibetan Plateau, their village was cold, racked by earthquakes and landslides, sandstorms and heavy winds. Populated with unhappy Tibetans and descendants of the Mongols.
Charlie had despised Qinghai. His family and the families of the other farmers were essentially prisoners. The work was hard and unrewarding, the schools poor, and the chances for escape to a better life close to zero. But Charlie had escaped, and sometimes—rarely—he thought that he should be content with that escape. Let his obsession with Mèng go.
But then he would remember his sister, Xiao. She had not escaped.
He closed his eyes. Xiao had been beautiful. Smart. But also foolish. She had allowed herself to be influenced by the locals. She’d begun by bringing up her crazy ideas to her family. Free Tibet, she’d said. We have no right to be here.
Their father had beaten her, but Xiao persisted. She began to speak out at school. She joined a demonstration staged in front of the local party headquarters.
Yes, Xiao had been stupid. And bad things happen to stupid people. But she’d been young. Impetuous. It was George Mèng’s father—then governor of Qinghai Province—who had issued the command that led to Xiao’s arrest and disappearance. Her likely death.
The injustice of it had first broken Charlie’s heart, then enraged him.
While Mèng earned scholarships, elite jobs, and prestigious positions reserved for the party’s elite, Charlie was left to search for his sister. Quietly proffering questions, secretly searching files. Because of the party’s blunt determination to expunge traitors, he suspected authorities of blocking his efforts. Yet he refused to accept that Xiao had gone to a place he couldn’t reach.
Despite his background, Charlie had done well within the Guóānbù, the Ministry of State Security. But he wanted more. And to satisfy both ambition and revenge, he was risking everything to prove what he knew: Mèng was a traitor. Not merely a would-be defector but also an asset to the CIA. Charlie was sure that Mèng was supplying the Americans with information about China’s AI program. He just couldn’t prove it.
The vise around Charlie’s neck was tightening. The wrong people were watching, and his position in Singapore had become precarious. It had taken months for him to convince his boss to let him trail Mèng. Watch and do nothing, his boss had told him. See what the man is up to. Look for signs of defection. Nothing else. Mèng’s wealth? Pah. Let the Second Department worry about that.
It is Mèng’s AI and his knowledge that we can’t risk losing.
Chinese AI experts entered and left the country all the time. But even Charlie’s boss understood that RenAI was unique. Special. Dangerous.
Charlie dropped his glasses as the driver hit the brakes. He fumbled blindly until his fingers closed on wire and glass.
The car exited the expressway and turned onto a surface road. Rain sluiced down the windows and banged on the roof like gravel falling.
Sun Tzu had also said that when facing a larger foe, taking them directly is foolish. This was where Charlie had made his mistake. His weakness was the fierceness of his emotions. The desire to destroy Mèng was an itch buried deep in a place he couldn’t scratch. In his desperation to relieve that itch, he had become hasty. People had died, including the guard at the shipyard he’d killed weeks earlier.
Charlie’s boss had been reprimanded.
The ice was cracking beneath his feet. Destroying a traitor to the Chinese Communist Party would be a coup and a springboard to Charlie’s rise to the upper echelons of MSS.
But tearing apart an innocent member of the red aristocracy would mean death.
The car sloshed through puddles collected beneath the overpass. A tidal wave of rainwater washed down the windows.
“Turn here,” he said to the driver. He would go to Geylang, take relief as a man sometimes must.
That thought, too, brought him little pleasure.
He pulled out the gold cigarette case his parents had given him. Gold for him, jade for his sister. Treasures passed down through the generations and clung to through famine and want. The heirlooms had remained in the family through Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests Campaign, the Cultural Revolution. They had survived and now belonged to Han. Someday he would find Xiao. When he did, he would take the small jade dragon that sat on the mantel at his home in Guangdong. He would place the jade dragon in her palms and restore her to his family. He would see his parents smile again. He would use his own placement in the party to protect her.
But first, first he would annihilate George Mèng’s life, as Mèng’s father had destroyed Xiao’s life.
And his own.