Chapter 27
“If he was alive,” Alice said, more softly this time, “wouldn’t he have tried to contact you?”
“Maybe he was mad at me, for leaving without him.”
Now it was Vivien’s turn to regress. Before Alice’s very eyes, her mother became a frightened young woman in her twenties.
“Where you went to see the Terracotta Warriors again and the two of you dreamed up Pangu.”
“Shi. With your father’s help, I escaped to the United States with false documents. He said he’d continue the search for Kai-wen. When he escaped a few months later and joined me, he said there was no sign of him. He’d vanished.”
“What did you think had happened?”
“I allowed myself to hope he’d gone to ground and that one day he’d show up on the doorstep, like your father did.”
“But…?”
“But then, years later, an informant told me that Kai-wen had been arrested, tortured, and killed. And that Liu was the one who’d turned him in.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what he’d done?”
“It was important to keep the legend of Tank Man alive, even if Kai-wen was not.”
Vivien’s hands were trembling, tapping her thigh in what looked like Morse code. An urgent SOS.
But it was, Vivien knew, far too late. Her soul, if she had one, had been damned years ago. The task now was to hide the truth. That had been the price Liu had exacted. If she kept silent about his unforgivable act, he’d keep silent about hers.
“If Kai-wen was dead, don’t you think the government would’ve made a show of it?” asked Alice. “Tank Man was the most wanted protester. They wouldn’t hesitate to announce that they’d executed him.”
“It’s the one thing that didn’t make sense to me, yes.”
“So…” Alice’s mind moved slowly forward. “Maybe he did escape to Taiwan, maybe Dad got him out. But why didn’t Dad tell you that when you accused him of turning him into the MSS? Why didn’t he tell you the truth then? Why allow you to believe that Kai-wen was dead and he was responsible?”
This was the question that had troubled Vivien since her ex-husband had whispered into her ear in the warrior pit. Why would he let her believe he had betrayed her by turning in her only sibling?
Alice continued, trying to rationalize the lies. Generations of lies. “Maybe … maybe he didn’t want you to look for him. Because you would have, Vivien. And you would have exposed yourself, Tank Man, and Pangu. You would have looked for him.”
The ferry was rolling side to side. Up and down. Lurching. Pitching. Twisting. Vivien began to feel sick.
People clung to each other to keep their balance while vomit sloshed on the deck. A ripple of panic moved through the crowd.
A voice came over the loudspeaker, speaking in some adulterated form of Mandarin, to Alice’s ears.
“What’s he saying?” Alice asked, her own voice high with anxiety.
“He’s speaking in Fukinese. It’s the first officer. He’s telling people to stand in the middle of the deck and not fall to the sides.”
Everyone moved. Except those in seats, reluctant to give them up. But when the rolling got worse, even they moved.
“Come on.” Alice pulled her mother to her feet.
They stood with the others. Knees bent. Legs wide apart, swaying with the waves. Trying to keep to their feet. Trying to find their sea legs.
Alice stared at the water splashing the windows at the front of the ferry, and her father peered back. It startled her for a moment, thinking he’d joined them after all, until she realized it was her own reflection. There was the same round face, the eyes, even the hairline.
Maybe that was why Vivien was so distant. When she looked at her daughter, she saw the man who’d murdered her brother and broke her heart.
Despite what Liu had said, it seemed more and more clear to Alice that they had been led astray, set on a wild-goose chase to find a man long dead and buried.
“You asked why Kai-wen didn’t contact me,” said Vivien. “Probably for the same reason you haven’t contacted your brother. It just wasn’t possible.”
“But I have contacted him.”
“What do you mean?”
Alice was surprised by the look of anxiety on Vivien’s face.
“I left a message for Kevin, telling him I was coming to Hong Kong, to help you. Don’t worry. I wrote it out longhand and left it in the kitchen. No one else will see it.”
“Except his husband.”
“You know?”
“You think I’m an idiot? I knew he was gay when he came out of the womb high-kicking and singing the theme from A Chorus Line.”
Alice raised her brows. Kevin was a singular sensation.
Still … “Paul? What about him?” The crowd continued to roll with the ferry. Trying to keep it from tipping over.
“He’s a Chinese agent.”
The ferry took a sudden lurch to starboard, and the women grabbed each other as others fell into them. There were shouts of panic as the boat listed, listed. Leaned. People began to fall, to slide to the edge.
Then it slowly righted itself. There was the sound of retching, and Alice felt her own stomach lurch.
Coconut buns, coconut—
No, that was making it worse.
“What’re you saying? Paul’s a Chinese agent?”
“You don’t think he’s with Kevin just for Kevin?” Vivien demanded. “Think about it. His fascination with me? Asking all sorts of questions—”
“You’re delusional. You think everything’s about you.”
“And it generally is. This gives me no pleasure to say—”
Alice doubted that. “You’re just being paranoid.”
“Right, and that’s a bad thing when dealing with China.
Think about it, use that clever brain of yours.
Who works in supply chain and technology?
Who are the easiest people for the UFW to turn?
To groom? The tech billionaires and wannabes.
Because their only allegiance is to themselves.
To power. And money. They have no other loyalty.
If they think doing business with China would be good for their bank accounts, they’d toss aside all human rights.
If they think getting rid of the CCP would be more profitable, count them in. ”
“But he’s not even Asian.”
“Who better? He’d be beyond suspicion. A guai lo.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Without proof? And like Kevin would listen to me. And even if he did, they’d just send someone else. Someone I might miss. This way I could control what Paul saw and sent back.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I hope I am.” But it was clear Vivien didn’t believe that.
The ferry had stopped its violent lurching, and now there was just the back-and-forth, up-and-down of a normal passage. People began grabbing seats again. Two men were sitting where Vivien and Alice had been, but at a look from Vivien, they slid to the floor.
Spineless, thought Alice. She knew the feeling.
“Okay, so if you’re right and Paul is an agent, is he working for the regime or Pangu?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible he doesn’t even know. Or care. Unfortunately, he now knows we’re here. If it’s the regime, that’s okay, since Chen already knows. If it’s Pangu…”
“Vivien, how did you know about the elevators? You sent Kevin and me a warning right before they fell.”
“An informant got word to me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but wonder if might have been your father wanting to protect you, but that doesn’t make sense either. I assumed it was one of my sources.”
“If it was Dad, that means he knew about it, and that means he’s with Pangu.”
Vivien hesitated a moment. “Not just ‘with,’” she said. “I think it’s possible he’s running it. What’s so funny?”
“He said the same about you.”
“Shithead,” said Vivien.
Oh dear God, please let me be adopted.
Her mother had gone back to staring at the image on the li bien ball. “The recluse scholars.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Vivien turned to look at Alice, full on. “The day our parents were taken away, Kai-wen and I each only had time to grab one thing from our home. Our father taught math, but his hobby was mythology. I chose his favorite book—”
“The one in your study. The one with Pangu.”
Vivien nodded. “Our mother was a professor of history. Her favorite book was a biography of the recluse scholars. This”—she looked down at the image frozen on the phone—“was one of the paintings in it.”
“And Kai-wen took that book.”
“Yes. He became obsessed with the recluse scholars. He was by nature a hermit himself.”
“And now it’s on the li bien ball Liam sent back. What does it mean?”
“It means I know what Liam was trying to tell us. I know where to find Kai-wen.”
“I need to know how many Americans have been hurt.” The bank of monitors in front of President Pardington showed the scale of the disaster. “Killed.”
The numbers were, even now, so staggering as to be near impossible to grasp.
The power going out, suddenly, everywhere, all at once, was catastrophic.
But it coming back on, everywhere, all at once, was almost as bad, as blown transformers burst into flames.
As surges crippled computers and other electronics, the sparks igniting homes and businesses.
Fried power stations created brush fires, which quickly escalated into wildfires.
It was, in the words of the Secretary of State, the nation’s top diplomat, a clusterfuck.
“I have news,” said Grant McAllister, striding into the room.
“Good news?” The President of the United States looked and sounded like a hopeful child.
But no, judging by McAllister’s face, it was not. Though everyone in that room knew bad was a sliding scale.
Pardington steeled himself. “Go on.”
“We have an informant in the White House.”
Oooph. This was bad.
“I’m pretty sure he was working for the terrorists.”
With that, they slid right off the scale.
“And it looks like Pangu is, in fact, an arm of the Politburo. Probably through Double Dragon. I think their informants were selected and groomed by the United Front Work Department.”
“Eeyore is fucking with us,” said the SecState. A sentence never before uttered in the Oval Office. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Pardington was trying to keep up. He’d only just learned about those entities two days ago, and now they were coming at him fast and furious.