Chapter 6 #2
“Who is she anyway?” The analyst took a chair without being invited. “I mean, I know of her, of course. The famous dissident. But this’s the first time I’ve seen her in person. But Pardington sure seemed to know her well. Do you think they’re lovers?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Just wondering. Did you see how she put her hand on the President’s arm? And he actually stopped. Actually listened to her. Over you.”
Another twist, though Zhou remained unmoved on the surface. The bleeding was all internal.
“And that was her daughter? Must’ve been adopted. Doesn’t look at all like her. Strange that Liam Palmer would send Li’s daughter his last message.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t know it was his last message, did he?”
“I wonder. Do you think it’s true, about there being a new head of the MSS? A woman?”
“I have work to do, and so do you.”
Zhou heard the click as the door was pulled shut.
Alice looked at the closed door. But unlike the viewers of a Hitchcock film, she knew what unpleasantness waited behind it.
She reached out, her hand on the knob.
As soon as they’d arrived home, Vivien had gone straight to her study and closed herself in. It had fallen to Kevin and Paul to comfort Alice. Then the three of them had sat at the kitchen table, with mugs of strong tea, and pieced together what they knew of Vivien.
It had never particularly interested Alice before. Probably because it interested others so much. She felt overstuffed with the myth that was her mother.
“I know after her parents were arrested by the Red Guard, she had to raise her brother by herself,” Paul said, as though his husband and sister-in-law didn’t already know all this.
“She was just a child. Barely ten, I think. She went into the rice fields to work. Her mother and father both died in the reeducation camps.”
“She ended up going to university in Beijing,” said Alice. “But I don’t even know what she studied.”
Her brother shook his head. “I assume she went through for political science. I’m not sure why I think that.”
“What happened to the brother?” Paul asked.
They looked at each other. Alice realized she’d never asked. The few times she did ask about Vivien’s life in China had resulted in icy silence. So, she’d stopped asking. After a while, she’d stopped caring.
But now it seemed to matter.
Despite knowing his office had no windows, and the door was closed and now locked, Alan Zhou still looked over his shoulder.
His office was swept every day, both physically and virtually, for ears and eyes that entered in new and different ways.
He was alone. But still, he had the sense someone was watching, listening, following him. This feeling was not unique to this day. He always had it. It might be paranoia, but it was a healthy one. It would, he hoped, keep him from going the way of Liam Palmer for at least a little longer.
It was a dangerous game he was playing. One Palmer had lost.
He put the code into his computer, and up came the file. But that was only the surface, the most easily accessible.
Zhou dug deeper. His so-called colleagues within the intelligence agency thought his job was essentially a clipping service, following the conspiracies, real, planted, and engineered by the Communist regime.
In reality, his job was to find out things before they happened.
Things no one else in his department could see.
And to do that, Alan Zhou needed to be an IT wizard.
Not just good, not just great, but one of the best in the world.
And he considered himself just that. Until that morning, at 10:09, when the first alarm sounded. And shattered his illusions.
For Alan Zhou, the alarms had not stopped. A now perpetual siren was sounding in his head. Screaming at him to figure it out. What had happened? How? And why didn’t he know about it?
And, most important of all, what was coming? What next?
Was it even remotely possible that old Chinese has-been knew more than he did about what was going on in China? What was happening behind the closed, locked doors? The bolted doors of the Standing Committee?
Could she be right? Was a change of leadership about to happen?
The President and McAllister and the others certainly thought she was. They’d literally and figuratively turned their backs on him. And why not? He had one job. To detect threats before they happened. But at 10:09 …
Now Zhou sat back and rocked slightly in his chair. He was in.
On his screen was the file hidden behind firewalls. And beyond them, he’d navigated through the thick smoke created by the firewalls burning.
He leaned forward, barely believing what he saw. It must have been planted by Double Dragon, the cyberterrorist group he claimed was a myth, but in China, myth and reality merged.
Yes, he had to admit, at least to himself, that Double Dragon did exist. And it used words, images, faked documents to startling effect.
This one could not possibly be real.
“It must’ve taken a lot of courage for your mother to join the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square,” said Paul. “Given what happened to her parents.”
“True,” said Kevin.
Alice remained silent. She was growing a little tired of this hero worship. Yes, her mother was extraordinary. Yes, she was brave. Yes, she’d been in Tiananmen Square with the other pro-democracy demonstrators. Though almost every member of the diaspora claimed to have been part of that protest.
And yet only one photo was embedded into the world’s collective memory. The now famous picture taken by a press photographer with a telescopic lens of a lone protester.
A slender young man only seen from the back as he stood in front of a column of tanks.
Stopping them.
It was an indelible image that had come to symbolize unfathomable courage, a willingness to die for the cause of freedom.
There was even a suggestion, planted by Vivien herself, Alice suspected, that the young man had been her boyfriend. When questioned about it, Vivien had refused to confirm or deny, leading most to believe her silence was assent. An interpretation Thomas More had relied upon. Mistakenly.
It had, of course, only added to Vivien Li’s mythology.
As a romantic teen, Alice had given way to a fantasy that the lone protester was not only her mother’s lover, but that Vivien had become pregnant. By him, with her.
That her father was the brave man who stared down an entire column of tanks. Stared down the regime.
It made no sense since she wasn’t born until years later. A long gestation period even for the frigid Vivien. But it didn’t need to make sense.
She’d lie in bed, behind her closed door, and imagine that one day her father would return and get her. He’d stand in front of the tank that was Vivien Li. He would save her from the tyrant.
Alan Zhou zoomed in tighter.
Though no one had ever been able to identify the lone protester who’d stopped the tanks, Zhou could, in these pictures, see the faces of some of the other protesters. They were taken by agents of the Chinese security service, planted among the protesters, and taken from different angles.
They were all so young, Zhou thought. To see their frightened but determined faces brought him up short.
Like anyone else looking at these images, Alan wondered if he’d have the courage to be there, never mind do what that young man did. He was honest enough with himself, if not with others, to be able to answer that. And the answer was no.
Using facial recognition, he scanned these images hidden deep in the archives of Chinese security, until, finally, it stopped. And zeroed in.
He sat back and smiled. He knew it. He knew it. It was all bullshit.
Vivien Li had been there, in uniform. Doing her national service. She was training a rifle on Tank Man. Though, as he zoomed in closer, he detected a slight shimmering around the edges of the photo.
It was possible, maybe even probable, it was AI-generated. By Double Dragon.
Still, it could be useful.
The funny thing was, Alice thought as she remembered her childhood fantasy, she’d actually known and loved her real father. And had even forgiven him for leaving them. Leaving her. Behind.
She understood why he’d done it. To save himself.
Which he couldn’t do, in the end. Her father had been killed in a car accident in Kansas when she was twelve.
Alice excused herself from the kitchen table, and as her brother and Paul watched, she headed through the living room, pausing in front of the grand piano. Her fingers hovering over the keys, not quite touching. It had been drilled into her by her mother to never, ever touch the piano.
How often, though, had she lain curled up in bed as a child, sheets drawn up to her chin, listening to Brahms’s “Lullaby” drifting under her door.
She closed her eyes and imagined her father sitting there still. Playing for her. Still. Calming her. Letting his little bunny know that she was loved. That someone loved her most.
Alice walked over to the study door and reached for the handle.