A Drop of Chinese Blood (25 page)

“How about you start by untying me.”

“Can’t do that. Not yet, anyway. You didn’t let anyone know you were following me?”

He hesitated a fraction too long. “Yeah, that’s what we always do. Check in to make sure we have backup.”

“You used smoke signals, perhaps? You said you were just out for a stroll by yourself when you spotted me. I think you just took out after me and that big Mongolian without letting anyone know. Tsk, very bad operational practice. You don’t even have a phone on you. I checked.”

“Maybe I lost it.”

I smacked him on the back of the head. “Don’t start with me. How many are on your team?”

He looked down at the floor.

“Three?” I moved around in front so he could see me.

“Come on.” He sounded impatient. “You know I won’t give up that sort of details.”

“I think you will.” I pushed the chair over on its side and stepped on his hand. “I’ll grind the little bones in your fingers into powder. There won’t be enough to glue back together, much less heal. You might as well audition as a sea lion in a circus.”

“Hey!” He twisted his head around as far as he could so he was looking up at me. “What’s your problem? It’s my job. Nothing to do with you.”

“That’s what you say.” I put some weight on the foot covering his hand. “I’m willing to believe you, but that doesn’t save your hand.” I moved my foot a little.

The night was cool, but he was sweating. His eyes went from my face to my foot. “You can’t let me get up from here. You know you’re going to have to kill me. Then they’ll send someone to even things up. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later. Why start a vicious cycle like that? Let’s think about it. Hey!”

I stepped hard on his hand. “I’m not interested in killing you. I just want us to be friends, maybe something on Facebook. Could be a while, though, before you can type. At this point, if they put your hand in a cast for five or six months, you might get use of a couple of fingers again. Might. It all depends on who sets the bones. The bones in your hand are real small. Did I mention that? They’re tiny. It takes a skilled surgeon a week of operations to sort them out. You know any skilled surgeons in one of your top-notch hospitals?”

“I know three of them. Four counting me.”

I eased off his hand a little. “That’s better. Next question.”

“No more questions.”

I lifted my foot completely off his hand for a second. His face relaxed. Then I stepped down hard. He screamed.

“You don’t tell me what to do,” I said. “You tell me what I want to know. Are we clear?”

“Yeah, yeah.” It was whispered.

“What’s he doing here?” I already knew. I needed to know if the North Koreans knew.

“We heard he wants to go home. No one told us that exactly, but we heard.” He had his eyes focused on my foot. His eyes were practically popping out of his head, willing my foot not to move. “I can’t be sure. All I can do is tell you what we heard.”

“That’s good. You heard he wants to go home. And where is that? Where is home?”

“China.”

I moved my foot a little; he screamed again.

“I already knew that,” I said matter-of-factly. “You care to be a little more specific? Maybe save your thumb?”

“They didn’t tell us! What the hell would they tell us for? They don’t give us bio sheets, nothing like that. We’re like dogs with a sock. Smell this. Find who it belongs to.”

“Maybe you could find him easier if you knew something about him, did that occur to anyone? Like where specifically he’s headed on his way home? Makes sense, don’t you think? People usually go the shortest distance between two points.”

“Sure, it makes sense, but so what? We’re not supposed to know too much about him. It’s no different from tracking an animal. Who knows what a deer thinks? Who cares? Anyway, we’re not supposed to get him in China. We can’t operate there, not normally. We’re supposed to find him here.”

“And when you find him, then what?”

“I told you what my orders were.”

“Send him to the moon.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“What if he’s not armed?”

He made sure my foot was nowhere near his hand and then grinned at me. “It’s easier if they’re not armed.”

I set him upright on the chair again, then pulled the harness down from the wall, crammed the bit in his mouth, and tied the whole thing tight on the back of the chair.

“Give my regards to the cows,” I said and scrambled back out of the shed into the night. With barely any moon, there were no shadows, which may be why I nearly bumped into a hulking figure standing a few meters away near one of the piles of stones. Bazar put his finger to his lips and indicated with a frown and a nod of his head that I should keep walking. That seemed like a good idea, and without any words between us, we parted company.

Chapter Six

“I found something out,” I said to my uncle as soon as he closed the door to our hotel room.

“Long time no see.” He sounded unconcerned, but I noticed he watched closely as I moved into the room. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine. How was your dinner?”

“Dinner? You mean last night? It was good, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The restaurant was overcrowded. Too many South Koreans.”

“You really don’t like your countrymen, do you?”

“No, in the aggregate they’re fine. It’s one by one that they can get on your nerves.”

“Guess who is about to visit here?”

“The Chinese prime minister. I thought you were supposed to know these things.”

“How did you find out?”

“The waiter at the restaurant mentioned it. He and Mei-lin had quite a conversation about the details.”

“Madame Fang knew, too?”

“Of course she knew.”

“OK, next question, who is the prime minister bringing with him?”

“A long convoy of happy capitalists who think this place is a fat pig ready to be carved up.”

“Really?” I hadn’t focused on this possibility. “You think this is all about money?” Our earlier conversation about whose phony seal was rolling around, and why, jumped up and bit me. “Don’t tell me you think Beijing wants to discredit the South in order to steal a couple of lousy business deals.”

“Steal? Did I say steal? I did not. I’m sure your capital just wants to get the South dropped from consideration for a few strategically important ventures. The South Korean prime minister was here last month. He initialed a stack of memoranda with the Mongolians on investment. These were only MOUs. The details remain to be worked out and the final agreements signed.”

“And you know that because…?”

“Because there was a picture of him and his business pals with sloppy grins on their faces in the hall to the men’s room in the restaurant. That was where they held the final banquet.”

I must have frowned.

“No, not the toilet, the banquet room. A South Korean reporter was sitting at the next table, and she told me they were all drunk out of their minds. At the banquet, which she attended apparently, she was wearing a lace dress that should not be allowed in public according to the waiter. He told me in confidence that he had reason to doubt that she was a reporter at all.”

“Hooker?”

“Lower than that in his estimate. Intelligence. Halfway through dinner, she invited herself over and sat down. She kept rubbing her ankle against my leg under the table. I guess maybe I still have it, huh?” He smiled faintly. “I think she was trying to get up Mei-lin’s nose. If so, she succeeded. They seemed to know each other.”

I was skeptical. “The South Koreans are moving to close some deals with the Mongolians. Hooray. So what? That’s what the South Koreans do. They roam around Asia and close deals. We have scores of them in Yanji.”

My uncle lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. “Maybe it’s that simple, but I don’t think Beijing is comfortable with the thought of so many South Koreans in Mongolia. They want to knock those deals loose and then move in to pick up the pieces.”

“Pieces of what?” I tried to remember if I’d ever read anything about Mongolian resources. “Gold mines?” Something about gold and Mongolia rattled in my memory.

“Better than gold—coal, a lot of it, not to mention uranium and rare earth mines. To top it off, a deal on construction of a rail line to carry away all the goodies.”

“Since when do you know anything about rare earth mining? Or did the lady with the lace dress have some insights?”

“She was dressed demurely enough for our conversation, fortunately. Otherwise Mei-lin would have yanked my arm out of its socket dragging me away.” He sat up suddenly. “From the way things are moving, I’m pretty sure Beijing has lost control of this operation, whatever it is. After all these years, there’s one thing I know in my bones—your people don’t like what they don’t control.”

“And your people do?”

“We don’t control anything, which means it’s never a problem. Chinese, on the other hand, are historically conditioned to think they control plenty, or ought to. Beijing’s anxiety won’t drop to normal levels of paranoia until your bosses think they’ve got firm hold of the reins again.”

“Yes, pretty important not letting someone else hold the reins.”

My uncle went to the window and pulled the curtains shut. As he did, I could see that Lenin hadn’t budged.

“What’s more, your friends in Beijing are no doubt fretting that unless they regain control, the whole thing will blow back on them,” my uncle said. “Believe me, all of us living on the periphery know that nothing in the world is as dangerous as a fretful Han Chinese official. In MPS Headquarters, right outside the minister’s offices, we had two five-drawer safes full of files. All ten drawers were marked
How to keep the Chinese off your neck.
Over each safe was a big sign, in blood red. ‘
ATTENTION!
NOT TO BE MOVED TO STORAGE. NOT SUBJECT TO
PERIODIC EVALUATION FOR DESTRUCTION. THIS MEANS YOU!
’”

He picked up the brochure on Ulan Bator nightlife and flipped through it once again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is digging through those files right now, trying to answer a crash request for a review of current Chinese operations that might go bad and leave everyone on the border in pain for months. Pyongyang must know something is up.”

I didn’t say anything about the North Korean team I’d spotted, or the conversation I’d had with the man in the shed. All I said was, “How?”

“The roe deer always knows when the tiger has a thorn in its paw.”

Roe deer? I’d never heard my uncle describe his former colleagues in such unflattering terms. “So what does all this toing and froing of officials have to do with the counterfeit state seal?”

“That’s your job to figure out, not mine. Not withstanding Beijing’s stubborn belief in my nonexistent continuing access to North Korea, I’m only along to provide commentary on the treeless plains.” He paused, meaningfully. It was the sort of pause that always means trouble. “How about we take a trip out to the east? There are supposed to be mountains there that disrupt the sky a little. We can drive; I’m not going in one of those little airplanes we saw at the airport when we landed.”

I was right—trouble. He didn’t care about the mountains, and for all his complaining about the sky, he didn’t care enough about that to take another long drive. It was a simple equation. If he wanted to go east, I didn’t, at least, not before I knew what he knew. He wasn’t going to just tell me; that would be too simple. It wasn’t in his genes. Well, I had genes, too.

“Not so fast,” I said. “We agreed that the whole reason for this trip was to bring you here to deal with your old colleagues. We already did our driving when we went to see Ding. That’s enough.”

“Oh, really? The reason we’re here is for me to deal with the North Koreans? Was that supposed to be in one of my hypothesis bags? I thought it was in yours. I don’t work for Beijing, though no one seems to be able grasp that idea. I actually have other things to do.”

“For instance.”

“For instance, consult the medical profession.”

This was news to me. He’d never gone to a doctor in the time he’d lived with me. Never even complained, except maybe about his back, which he thought was a body part that had no purpose except to cause problems.

“Are you sick?” I dropped my suspicion momentarily but picked it up again a second later. He looked in good shape, and if he was sick, my uncle would not go to a doctor in Mongolia. No, he knew something.

“I’m not sick. I have to go see a doctor at a clinic, that’s all, and you need to drive me. It’s four hours away, more or less.”

“Four hours?”

“Three hundred easy kilometers, more or less.”

“There isn’t a clinic closer than that? And you don’t know for sure how far it is? More or less could be anywhere in this country.” All of a sudden, something rang a bell. It wasn’t mountains, it wasn’t sky, and it wasn’t a clinic four hours away. My uncle must have heard something from Madame Fang. Whether a slip of the tongue, which I doubted, or a deliberate message beamed from her necklace, I didn’t know. Of course, I’d stumbled across part of the same information, though under less comfortable circumstances. The Mongolian police detective had suggested that Madame Fang arrived in country with someone—a gathering of the clan, he’d called it. After some persuasion, the odious man in the cowshed confirmed Madame Fang had arrived with the quarry his gang was after, but they’d lost him. They’d lost him because they hadn’t thought to drive four hours cross-country to a clinic in the middle of nowhere.

Or maybe not. Maybe Madame Fang was playing with us again. Maybe she wanted us out of town exactly because that’s where her wingman was, or was about to be. Maybe she was using us as rabbits leading a pack of dogs off to where they wouldn’t find anything but a lot of sky. If you came right down to it, what was she doing with a wayward MSS special bureau director, once defected, here in Mongolia, anyway? For that matter, what business did she have in North Korea to start with?

No, I wasn’t going to jump in a car after too little sleep and drive on a monotonous road just because my uncle was hypnotized by Madame Fang’s pearls. Not without a fight. “I don’t think we should go off for drives anywhere. We’ll be wasting time. Besides which, you’ve done nothing but complain about the car. Is there anything you haven’t objected to since we arrived?”