Chapter 34
“Auntie?” The voice came from downstairs again.
If there’d been any doubt about the tone before, there was none now. The one word was ripe with fear.
Those in the small room looked at each other.
“Yes?” Auntie Gugu locked eyes with Vivien as she spoke.
“Some men are looking for you.”
“I’ll be right down. Just using the bathroom.”
“Hurry.”
“What do we do now?” whispered Vivien.
Kai-wen was scanning the walls, as though maybe a window would magically appear.
“You don’t think I’d allow myself to be trapped, do you?”
Auntie Gugu got to her feet with Alice’s help and, leading them into the small bathroom, she pointed to the ceiling.
“What?” asked Ming-na. “I don’t see anything.”
“You aren’t supposed to. It’s never been used, but it’s there.”
Auntie Gugu grabbed what looked like a pole for hanging laundry and poked the ceiling. An opening appeared above the toilet.
“Get up there. Follow the attic along. There’s a small ladder between the two buildings. The gap is narrow, but you should be able to make it down.”
They looked at each other.
“Go! For God’s sake.” Auntie Gugu waved the stick at them.
“I’ll go first,” said Kai-wen.
“No. Let me.” It was Vivien who spoke, volunteering not because she wanted to escape first, but because they were clearly heading into the unknown. Would the ceiling cave in? Would the ladder even be there? Would it come away from the building?
Would there be agents standing at the bottom ready to arrest her, or worse?
She smiled at her brother. A tight grin. It was her turn.
“Auntie?” came the voice from downstairs. “Can you come now? Please.”
“On my way.”
Alice boosted her mother up and through the hole. Ming-na next. Then Alice and finally Kai-wen. Once in the attic, he reached down for Auntie Gugu.
She smiled and, hugging the cat to her chest, she stepped back.
“Go. I’ll distract them.”
He was about to protest, but she’d disappeared from sight.
They wound their way through back alleys and finally made it to the docks and the ferry that would take them the short distance from Hong Kong to Cheung Chau. Fish ball island.
Few people were traveling. Those on the small boat were clearly islanders trying to get home. It was primal, this pull toward home in a crisis. Alice felt it. Home. She longed to get back to the States. American soil. No matter how soiled, it was still home.
As she looked at the family huddled in the bow, she could almost see their DNA elongating, stretching out. Reaching for the tiny island. For home.
Vivien led the group to the stern, where they found seats and could finally talk.
“What will they do to her?” Alice asked.
No one answered, which was pretty much confirming the worst.
“She knows we’re going to Cheung Chau,” said Kai-wen. “Will she talk?”
“No,” said Vivien, though of course she didn’t know. She looked at Alice and was about to say, You’d better be right about fish ball island. But stopped herself.
Going to the island was her daughter’s idea. But in the face of no other option, they’d all agreed. They all owned the decision now. And it was, Vivien knew, a good one.
Unless, of course, Auntie Gugu talked.
The coroner was perplexed.
Why would President Chen insist on an autopsy when it was clear that Wang had died from a single bullet to the brain? He tried to reassure the President that his chief of the MSS, and longtime friend, had felt nothing.
“He never even knew it had happened,” said the coroner. “He was dead before he hit the ground.”
“That wasn’t my question,” said Chen, his voice steady. “Do the autopsy and tell me if you find anything unusual.”
“Unusual?”
He was about to say, Like a bullet in the brain? But wisely decided not to. And actually, there’d been no bullet. That, along with most of Wang’s skull, had been found embedded in a nearby tree. And there was very little brain left in his body.
Chen didn’t answer. He’d already hung up.
He’d ordered agents to go to Wang’s home, only to find someone had gotten there first. It had been burned to the ground. Pangu was cleaning up. Preparing for the final assault.
As it turned out, what was left of Wang’s brain was enough for the coroner to discover something very unusual in it. In fact, inexplicable.
When he’d finished the autopsy and written up his findings, the coroner called to ask if they could meet. “Here, if possible, Mr. President. I did find something.”
Chen was in an emergency meeting with his military advisors and security people. He was trying to keep the assassination of Wang under wraps—the public must not know—while at the same time demanding that whoever did it be caught.
Pangu was inside the presidential complex. Audacious enough to take the shot from one of the offices. In broad daylight.
“Alive,” said Eeyore. “I want them alive.”
He’d made the mistake of not interrogating people when he had the chance. He’d not make that mistake again.
Chen listened to his inner cabinet and shifted slightly in his chair.
No position was comfortable. He could feel the walls closing in.
There were times he could barely breathe.
They had less than twenty-four hours before the National People’s Congress.
He could not possibly cancel it without looking weak and afraid.
This time tomorrow, great displays of China’s power, her magnificence, her rich heritage and military might, would be paraded past him, in open defiance of the horror that had gripped the rest of the world.
China, Chen, would not be cowed.
Troops would march in sharp precision. Horses would prance. Tanks, armored vehicles, rocket launchers, any number of immense, terrifying-looking weapons would be driven along. Many of them mocked up. Created by an opera designer to look threatening. But totally useless.
Something to occupy analysts in the West. Chen’s little joke.
But nothing was striking him as remotely amusing as he listened to his advisors.
All reassuring him that things were under control.
That the Congress would go off smoothly.
That they were closing in on the assassin.
On the terrorists. That they must be outside agitators.
Agents of the West. Not, never, citizens of the People’s Republic. That was unthinkable.
There was absolutely nothing to worry about. He was beloved. He was powerful. The most loved, the most powerful leader China had ever had.
One even had the audacity to compare him to Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
It was not a compliment, though it might have appeared as one.
Chen nodded to his personal security, who grabbed that advisor and dragged him out of the room. Ironically, if he really was like the first emperor, the man’s head would be placed on a pike in the market square.
The first emperor had once been hailed as a symbol of great strength, vision, unification.
But in the new China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang was considered a lunatic, who drank mercury thinking it would grant him eternal life.
A leader who might have once done brilliant things but had descended into madness and cruelty.
To compare him to this madman was an affront.
Was it a simple misstep by an exhausted advisor or a deliberate slur? They’d find out soon enough.
Chen liked to think of himself as a thoroughly modern man. A visionary. But he was also a product of his culture, and he believed in magic numbers and signs, in the gods and superstitions.
And that extended to believing what the historians claimed.
That opening the first emperor’s tomb would release his ghost. An immortal creature of such savagery it would put all others to shame.
All modern weapons to shame. Worse still, Qin Shi Huang would have his wakened Terracotta Army at his command.
Nothing could stop him.
Chen believed that. Though he would never admit it, even to himself.
No, if Chen thought he had troubles now with Pangu, the first god, he did not want to compound them by releasing the first emperor.
Which was why he’d ordered the tomb sealed. Why risk such wrath?
Listening to his inner circle alternatively arguing and sniveling, Chen retreated into his own thoughts. Primarily wondering where Liu had gone. And what he was doing.
So much of this depended on Liu Tongzheng.
Facial recognition had clocked Vivien Li walking into a food market in Hong Kong with three other people. Agents had been dispatched.
The facial recognition technicians had also reported that the man with them was familiar, though it hadn’t yet made a match. It wasn’t Liu—that much was clear.
So where was he? Was he on the trail of Pangu, or was he Pangu?
“Mr. President?” The coroner was still on the line, waiting for an answer. “If you’re occupied, should I send the autopsy report to your advisor? Hello?”
The line had gone dead.
The coroner stared at his computer, knowing that a wrong decision could cost him his life. President Chen definitely said he wanted to know.
So, in the presence but also the absence of Wang, the doctor sent the report over a secure server to Chen’s next closest advisor, who would get it to the President at the appropriate time.
That advisor, everyone knew, was Liu Tongzheng.
It was not the wisest of decisions.
The small ferry gently rose and fell, rose and fell. The group of four was so exhausted, their need for sleep overwhelmed their fears.
The movement of the boat proved lulling, and they fell asleep, leaning against each other.
They were jostled awake by a thud as the boat bumped up against the dock. Alice awoke to see a woman staring down at her. Shaking her.
“Are you all right?” she was asking. But her accent was so broad, her speech so rapid, all Alice could do was stare.
The woman, deciding Alice might not be “all there,” turned to the older woman in a torn and filthy Shanghai Tang jacket. Something, the other family members had concluded while watching the disheveled group, she must have found in a dump.
“Poor ones,” said the grandfather. “We should offer them food.”
They looked down at their small sticky rice packages wrapped in banana leaves and set one aside. Now the woman shook Vivien awake and held out her offering.
“For you.”
Vivien was on the verge of some sarcastic reply when she stopped herself, having realized two things. She was indeed famished. And she was looking at someone far kinder, far more valuable as a person, than she’d ever been.
“Thank you.” She took the leaf-wrapped rice and bowed.
The family was leaving the boat when Vivien ran up to the older woman.
“We’re looking for curried fish balls in wonton soup.”
The statement was such nonsense, the older woman laughed. No one ate that combination. It was one or the other, but never together. That was disgusting.
Then the younger woman broke in. “Can you tell us where to find the best curried fish balls?”
The grandfather was now tugging at the sleeve of the woman. Trying to get her away from the lunatics. But she recognized something in the two women. They were not, in fact, nuts. They were strangers from a strange land. And, more than that, they were desperate and asking for her help.
She shook the grandfather off and gave them her full attention.
“What do you want?” she asked slowly, articulating clearly as though to a child.
“Want best curried fish balls, yu daan,” Alice managed, also speaking slowly and, she hoped, precisely.
“Fish balls?” the woman repeated. This at least made some sense, given the island was justifiably famous for them. But they looked like vagrants. Had they really traveled this far for fish balls? And how did they plan to pay for them?
Still, they seemed adamant.
“Come.” The grandfather was now gesturing wildly, clearly not happy about this turn of events. The woman turned to him, and the two went at it.
“Come,” the woman finally said, having won the argument. She gestured to the group of four.
They trudged away from the harbor, past all sorts of food stalls, most serving steamed or deep-fried fish balls with different sauces, though curry seemed predominant.
Finally, the woman stopped and pointed. The sign above the small stall said Kam Wing Tai.
“The best curried fish balls.”
“Thank you.” Alice reached into her pocket and brought out the small red envelope her father had slipped her when they’d left him at the helicopter.
On it was a gold-embossed dragon, and inside was a crisp new twenty yuan note. It was a traditional gift at the New Year, to wish the person good fortune.
She gazed at it for a moment, then offered it to the woman, who looked stricken.
No part of her wanted to take what must have been the last precious thing this young woman owned. But she also knew to refuse would be an insult beyond imagining.
Better to take it and be gracious. The gods would reward the young woman for giving away her good fortune.
She took it and bowed deeply. Then turned and walked quickly away.
It was now early in the morning of Friday, the twenty-sixth of February. The day chosen for the National People’s Congress as auspicious since 2 plus 6 added up to 8, and 8 was the luckiest of numbers.