Absolute Risk (17 page)

T
he tyranny of history and the force of its contradictions weighed on Faith as she sat in a corner watching Ayi Zhao, her son, her daughter-in-law, and Jian-jun confronting one another at the metal table in the center of the storage room.

In the previous days, in sitting with Ayi Zhao at dinner in the house and around the stove they’d used for cooking and heating, fragments of times past had emerged and the roles her family members had played in recent years had become clear.

Ayi Zhao: once a fifteen-year-old Communist revolutionary whose parents died in the Long March in the 1930s, herself marching toward Beijing in January 1949, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, purged by the party when it turned totalitarian, rehabilitated when it liberalized under Deng Xiaoping, then banished to the countryside by Deng in 1989 after the Tiananmen uprising. To her right, her son, Zhao Wo-li: vice mayor of Chengdu, a city with a population of eleven million. An engineering Ph.D. and owner of secret offshore bank accounts funded with bribes from foreign corporations.

To her left, her daughter-in-law, Zheng Mu-rong: Communist Party Secretary, enforcer of ideological discipline in Chengdu from the top floor of a two-hundred-million-dollar government complex. Owner of mansions on the Italian Riviera and in San Francisco that were held in the names of Hong Kong front companies.

Across from Ayi Zhao, her grandson, Jian-jun. A Christian pacifist and rebel against both Communists and capitalists.

And all sitting in the ruins of a German-owned factory built by penal slave labor in the early 1980s.

Wo-li straightened in his chair, removed his hands from his overcoat pockets, and laid them on the table in a let-us-begin gesture as though he was leading a meeting of government officials.

He doesn’t get it,
Faith said to herself as she watched him.
He’s deluded. He thinks he’s still in charge because he’s under the protection of his mother, but he’s actually drifting in a purgatory of his own making between a past he created and a future that he can’t control.

Faith glanced at the closed door and noticed the rumbling voices in the hallway outside. At any moment, it could be yanked open and men could rush in and drag Wo-li and his wife out to waiting pickup trucks destined for the killing fields. She was certain that the signs had already been painted. Maybe they’d even wipe off the blood of the executed and reuse the old ones:

Ayi Zhao raised a forefinger and wagged it at him.

“Don’t deceive yourself,” she said. “The conditions outside this room may be temporary, but death is permanent.”

Wo-li’s face flushed and his flat hands tightened into fists.

Ayi Zhao spread her arms. “What is happening here is happening all over Sichuan Province. The people have no prisons in which to house the corrupt, nor have they the certainty that they’ll have power long enough for the sentences they might want to impose to be completed.”

Wo-li’s widening eyes showed that he understood the implication even before she finished her thought.

“This means,” Ayi Zhao said, “that the only punishments available for them to inflict are beatings or executions.”

Faith knew, and was certain they all knew, that since some of those serving below Wo-li and Mu-rong had already been killed, the rough parity observed by the provisional people’s courts would require death for the two of them.

Wo-li looked across the table toward Mu-rong; something unspoken passed between them. Faith couldn’t determine what it was, but she was certain it wasn’t surrender.

Like so many of their caste whom Faith had met over the years, she knew them as Nietzschean Supermen, founders of a new but impermanent world in which the strong prevailed and in which they perceived themselves as self-sufficient gods of right and wrong.

And why shouldn’t they?

Faith had answered that question countless times in lecture halls at Berkeley: They’d grown up in a country that had spent thirty years without a criminal code and in which justice was truly in the hands of the beholder. And they’d been raised in the absurd contradiction of a Communist-capitalist society in which careers were made or destroyed, lives were taken or given back at a whim, sometimes ideological, sometimes political, sometimes personal.

It was a world in which nothing was certain and fixed except the inevitability of death, and it was clear to Faith that Wo-li, unlike his mother and his son, believed in nothing beyond his own instincts for money and power.

Faith heard an echo in her mind, the last description wasn’t her own, it was Graham’s. It was how he’d described an American hedge fund manager whose firm had been bailed out by the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s.

“What do they want?” Wo-li asked.

“Justice,” Ayi Zhao said.

Wo-li forced a laugh. “You mean money.”

“When workers haven’t been paid in months, they’re the same,” Ayi Zhao said. “But that’s not what brought them here.”

Ayi Zhao paused and stared at her son, then she lowered her head and closed her eyes. After a few moments she looked up and asked, “Do you know what the death toll was when the Number Two Hospital collapsed?”

Wo-li glanced at his wife, then shrugged.

“Or at the girls’ school?” Ayi Zhao pointed over her shoulder toward the door. “The people outside of this room do.”

Wo-li said again, “What do they want?”

“You already know,” Ayi Zhao said. “But we have to give them a reason not to do it. A reason to keep you alive.”

Wo-li pulled back and threw up his arms. “What? Play the part of puppets in their new Cultural Revolution? Turn us into political clowns and march us through the streets and then stand us up on chairs with signs hanging around our necks announcing our alleged crimes?”

Jian-jun stared at his father in the silence that followed, and then said, “That’s the problem. They aren’t merely alleged. It’s all an open secret. They know you have accounts, they just don’t know where. And they know that you filled them with payoffs from construction companies and foreign corporations, they just don’t know how and who helped you.”

“And it’s better that they hang you in effigy,” Ayi Zhao said, “than for real, especially”—she spread her hands again—“since this will not likely last and they know they must act before the rebellion is crushed.”

Ayi Zhao glanced over at Faith, then back and forth between her son and daughter-in-law.

“They want names.”

G
age’s cell phone rang as he checked his e-mails at the desk in his hotel room in Marseilles. The window next to him overlooked the Old Port from high above the night-jeweled Quai de Rive Neuve that formed its southern border.

He looked at the number and the time. It was Faith and it was 3:30 A.M. in China. As he reached for the phone, he felt the force of the contrasting images of the devastation in Chengdu and the starlit perfection of sailboats rocking in their slips and the purring Mercedes limousines sliding by below. “I need some help,” Faith said. “Is everything—”

“I’m fine, really. The government shut down the Internet and I need to check something.”

“Hold on.” Gage closed his e-mail program and opened a Web browser.

“What are you trying to find out?” he asked, as it loaded.

“Do you know who Donald Whitson is?”

“The CEO of RAID Technologies. He was on the news the other day, talking about the destruction of their plant in Chengdu.”

“I need to know whether he was once head of their East Asian operations.”

Gage navigated to the RAID Web site, the officers’ tab, and then to Whitson’s résumé page.

“From 1988 through 1991,” Gage told her, then heard her repeat the information in Mandarin. “Who are you with?”

“A workers’ committee in the economic development zone east of the city. They want evidence that Whitson was in a position to have arranged payoffs to Ayi Zhao’s son.”

“Let me call Alex Z and I’ll conference you in.”

Gage put her on hold and punched in Alex Z’s number in San Francisco, then connected him to her and explained the issue.

“We need something fast,” Gage said, “so they won’t think Faith made it up. But she’s got no e-mail access.”

“No problem, boss,” Alex Z said. “I’ll get Whitson’s résumé on my monitor. I’ll bypass the Internet by sending a photograph to her cell phone. A screen shot. I’ll magnify it so it’s readable and she can zoom in even closer.”

Gage heard the ticking of Alex Z’s keyboard in the background, then “It’s on its way.”

“Keep sending whatever you can find about Whitson,” Gage said. “Then find out where he lived in China, who he worked with, and who the RAID bankers in Asia were at the time.”

“I’m on it,” Alex Z said, then disconnected.

“Do you need to get out of there?” Gage asked. “I can send Mark Fong over.”

“Let me go into another room,” Faith said.

Gage listened as a door was opened and closed, then murmuring voices, then another door opening and closing, then the tap of her shoes, and finally silence.

“I’m not sure that it’ll be necessary to smuggle us out,” Faith said. “Anyway, a snakehead’s background may be a little too shady for the circumstances.”

“Which are?”

“What’s going on here is one of the most astounding things I’ve ever seen. The farmers and workers have formed themselves into an investigative body, kind of like a French inquisitorial court. Some of these people can barely read and they’re questioning and deliberating like the best judges I’ve ever seen. If only—” Faith’s voice broke. She paused, then sighed. “If only the mobs hadn’t killed so many before they got to this point.”

“I know it’s small comfort,” Gage said. “But it could’ve been worse. China usually kills in the millions, not in the hundreds.”

“You have a better perspective than I do since you’ve been in the middle of this kind of thing before. I’ve always been the note taker that comes by afterward, when things are settled and new institutions are in place.”

Faith fell silent. Gage didn’t interrupt her thoughts.

“There have been some amazing things,” she finally said. “You should’ve seen Ayi Zhao’s grandson. A sweetheart of a boy. He took the leader aside before the meeting began in which his parents were first questioned. They call him Lao Mao, Old Cat. Not because of his appearance—he’s tall and long and lean—but because of his silent pantherlike grace and because of the look he has in his eyes, how he takes things in and sees inside of people. He seems severe until you look at him closely, then you can make out how weary he is. Just beat. These people haven’t slept much for days and days and you can see it in his face. He’s in his mid-fifties, but right now he looks mid-sixties.

“They stopped a few feet away from me, just outside of the door to the provisional court. Jian-jun looked up at Old Cat and told him the story of Moses and how God wouldn’t let him enter the Promised Land because his hands were bloody from fighting his way across the desert. He was trying to explain to Old Cat that legitimacy requires clean hands.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s courageous,” Gage said, “or just crazy.”

Faith exhaled. “I was holding my breath. Old Cat gave him a puzzled look, then walked inside and whispered to a man already seated at the judge’s table. I was sure he’d just given the order to have Jian-jun hauled away. The man nodded and Old Cat turned back, and then walked past Jian-jun and out the door. Just like that. It was stunning.”

“And that’s the difference between tyranny and rebellion,” Gage said. “I hope it lasts.”

“I’m afraid that tyranny will return pretty soon, but from another direction, when the government decides that things have gone far enough and sends in People’s Liberation Army troops to take control—hold on.”

Ten seconds later, Faith said, “The photo just arrived from Alex Z.”

“There should be more coming in a few minutes.”

Gage heard a door open in the background, and a voice calling to Faith in Mandarin.

“I need to go,” she said.

“Call me the instant you need to get out. I’ll find a way.”

After Faith disconnected, Gage checked his contact list and called a number in Taiwan.

The phone rang four times before a man said,
“Wei,”
then yawned.

“Mark, it’s Graham.”

“Ah,
Da-li Shi-fu.”
Marble Buddha was Mark Fong’s nickname for Gage, given to him when they’d last worked together. “What do you need? ”

“Faith is in Chengdu.”

“And you need to get her out? ”

“When she’s ready. Her and students. Six altogether, one with a leg in a cast. And not by air since the airport may still be shut down.”

“Why not just have someone drive them over to Chongqing. My cousin can meet them and help them get tickets and they can fly out from there. They won’t even need to change planes in China. They can go straight to Bangkok, then back to the States.”

Gage stepped to his window and looked toward downtown Marseilles at the east end of the port, and at the cars streaming out of the city center.

“I have a feeling that the country may cave in toward the middle,” Gage said, “and they’d be trapped. They may need to take a land route, maybe across a few borders, and I need someone who knows how to get that done.”

Fong laughed and said, “You mean someone who can slither like a snake? ”

“Exactly.”