Chapter 31
They’d wolfed down the sandwiches and beer and were feeling human for the first time in … an eternity.
Alice couldn’t stop staring at her uncle. The man who’d stood in front of that line of tanks. And stopped them. His hair was now white, and his hand trembled slightly as he lifted the glass to his lips.
But he was still, and always would be, Tank Man.
She longed to ask him how. How had he found the courage to do it? But they needed to focus on the near future. The past could wait. Though past and future were converging and making a mess of the present.
“My father sent us here,” said Alice. “To find you. Does that mean he’s trying to stop the attacks? That he’s not loyal to Chen and the Communists?”
“He could still be MSS and loyal to the Communist Party,” said Kai-wen. “Chen wants, needs, the attacks stopped too. Your father could be both for us and ultimately against us. When it’s over, if it’s stopped, he might very well round us all up.”
“But if he’s MSS, and he knew all along you were Tank Man, why hasn’t he arrested you?”
“I think because he thought I was a harmless old man who spent his days serving beef noodles and his evenings in the museum, among the recluse scholars. I think he knew I wanted nothing more to do with revolution, or even evolution.”
“He was wrong,” said Vivien, reaching across the table to hold his hand. This time he didn’t pull back.
“He was not wrong,” said Kai-wen, holding her hand and her eyes. “I really do want a quiet life. I’m happy here.” He let go of Vivien and reached for Ming-na, holding her eyes now.
“But sometimes the world comes calling,” she said. “And we have to answer.”
“Do we?” he asked.
“A young man named Liam Palmer was here,” said Vivien.
“You know him?” Ming-na turned her attention to her sister-in-law.
“Yes. He worked for me.”
“We thought he might,” said Ming-na. “He came to the restaurant claiming to be a food blogger.”
“When he showed up and said he wanted to compliment Shu-hui on the beef noodle soup, we knew he was an agent. But we didn’t know who for. I told him to come back the next day, which he did.”
“That’s when Kai-wen gave him the li bien ball.”
“This?” Alice pulled up the video.
“Shi.” Though Kai-wen tilted his head. “At least I think so. The one I gave him didn’t have those smudges in the sky.”
“Dirt,” said Alice. “You can tell that they’re on the outside, not inside.”
“True. I wasn’t sure he’d understand what I was telling him, but he did. Eventually,” said Kai-wen.
“You wanted him to meet you at the museum,” said Vivien. “At the recluse scholars.”
He smiled. “You remember?”
And for an instant, the years, the hurts, the suspicions, the resentments melted away, and they were their younger selves again. About to join others in the huge square in Beijing. To begin the revolution. To change the world. Their world.
“Just before going to sleep each night, you’d open the book and stare at one particular image. When I looked closely at the li bien ball, I remembered this detail from that page. And that the book came from the museum here.”
“She said if you had a safe place, it would be there,” said Alice. “With the scholars.”
Kai-wen smiled at his newfound niece. “Your mother is right.”
“Your sister is right,” said Alice, and saw him nod slightly.
“I go to the museum every evening, when the shop closes. I waited there for Liam. Took him two days, but he finally arrived. He sat down next to me and I told him I was Shu-hui.”
“But not that you were Tank Man?” asked Alice.
“No. I don’t tell that to anyone. For three evenings running, we sat side by side on the bench, contemplating that image of the peach blossoms and the river and the mountain. Not many can sit quietly for hours on end. Especially when they’re dying to ask questions.
“After three days, I broke the silence and asked what he wanted. He said he suspected there was something big planned, globally, but based out of China. An attack, he thought. He hoped we could help.”
“We were also hearing things from our network of merchants,” said Ming-na. “At first, we thought it was about a trade war, putting huge tariffs on food, using it as a weapon.”
“But when we compared notes with Liam, it became clear the weapon was more literal,” said Kai-wen. “We sat in front of Peach Blossom Spring and tried to piece together what it all meant. As we dug deeper, we got scared.”
When Tank Man gets scared, thought Alice, the rest of us should be terrified.
“After the alarms went off, I tried to contact you,” Vivien said to her brother. “Well, I tried to contact Shu-hui. But there was silence.”
As there was now. And it dawned on her what that silence was saying.
“You thought I was responsible? That I was running the new Pangu?”
“We thought it was a possibility,” said Ming-na. “That disbanding it was just for show.”
“If you still have doubts about me, why’re we even talking?” Vivien tried to keep the anger out of her voice. Without success.
“Because at this stage, we have nothing to lose. If you’re behind the attacks, then we’re already dead. If you’re not, then maybe, maybe, you can help us stop the next one. It’s ramping up. We’ve been waiting to hear from Liam. I’d have hoped he’d come back and report.”
Vivien and Alice looked at each other.
“Oh,” said Ming-na, understanding what that look meant. “What happened?”
“He drowned. Fell off, or more likely was pushed off, the Star Ferry,” said Alice. She brought up the last photo.
Kai-wen’s face changed. “That’s one of the people we told him to contact.” He pointed to the durian man. “We thought he was one of us.”
“My God,” said Ming-na. “We sent him right into the arms of his killers.”
Now Kai-wen noticed Alice’s face. Her eyes. “You cared for him.”
“I did.”
“He was an easy man to like,” said Kai-wen.
Alice nodded. She was beginning to care very much for her new auntie and uncle.
“We never had children,” said Ming-na. “We didn’t think it was fair, or safe, given who we are and what we do. What we have done. But we both felt if we had, we’d have hoped they’d be like Liam.”
Ming-na reached out for Alice, who grasped her hand. A gesture of intimacy and support that was not lost on Vivien.
“He must’ve found out something important,” said Kai-wen. “Otherwise, they’d never have killed him and risk an international incident.”
“He sent the li bien ball you gave him back home and put this inside.” Alice brought out the now scruffy snake and unfolded it. Kai-wen and Ming-na leaned in, then both looked up.
“Those are the multinational corporations with food distribution arms that he told us about,” Ming-na said, turning to her husband.
“Liam worked for one of them,” said Alice. “That’s how he began to suspect something was off. He must have been seeing connections that should not exist between competitors.”
“Something was building,” said Kai-wen. “And it was so big, so bloated, it had begun to spring leaks. Information was seeping out. But it was still unclear. Something to do, Liam thought, with APAI and blockchain.”
“The next generation of artificial intelligence,” said Vivien.
“Yes. Something linked those competitors, with or without them realizing it. It would create a network that reached into every city, town, and village worldwide. Into every home. Wherever there was food distribution, wherever there was food, there was this presence.”
“That’s how they managed to attack globally,” said Ming-na. “Food. A universal. But what made you think something was wrong?”
Alice brought up the photo again, the last one.
There was Liam with his goofy smile.
“You see what he’s holding?” she said.
“A bun,” said Ming-na.
“A message.”
“In a breakfast bun?” asked Ming-na. “Some bun.”
“It’s a coconut bun. He was severely allergic to coconut,” Alice explained. “There’s no way he’d even hold one, never mind eat one. He’d know that I knew about his allergy.”
“So what’s the message?” asked Ming-na, as Kai-wen enlarged the photo.
“We’re not sure,” said Alice. “I went to the bakery but didn’t get far. That’s where I was kidnapped.”
“Which one did you go to?” asked Kai-wen.
“Kam Fung,” Alice said.
“Wrong one.”
“How could you possibly know?” Vivien asked.
Her brother was leaning over the phone, so close his breath was fogging up the picture. “There, look. Do you see it?”
They shook their heads.
“Look closer. The marks. By his thumb. They look like an imperfection in the pastry, but it’s a stamp.”
“He’s right.” Ming-na brought out her phone, took a photo, then started a search.
“Years ago, before Mao and the revolution, every bakery had to register with the government, so that quality could be controlled, they said, but it was actually a form of licensing. It’s no longer used, but the old traditional bakeries have kept the stamp.
It’s a point of pride. Most of the bakers who still make pastry by hand use their individual stamp. ”
Ming-na held out her phone. Sure enough, there was a photograph of a shop, essentially a stall, with the name on an old wooden board and beside it the same symbol as the bun.
“The Lost Orange Bakery?” asked Alice, translating. Badly.
“The Last Mandarin Bakery,” corrected her mother. “It says it’s on Haiphong Road in Hong Kong.”
But Alice was still staring at the photograph of Liam on the Star Ferry, back to its full size now.
“Liam had already been to the bakery,” said Alice. “Did someone follow him from there to the boat?”
“We need to go to the bakery,” said Kai-wen.
“Back to Hong Kong? To China?” demanded Vivien. “Are you mad? They’ll kill you if they find out you were my informant. And we only just escaped with our lives.”
“You think you escaped? You were allowed to escape,” said Kai-wen.