The Visitor (24 page)

“Very fragrant,” Lee said. “It’s very generous of you to serve me such excellent tea.”

Baron nodded to Mei Ling, who then left the room and closed the door. Looking at Lee, he asked, “Have you made the arrangements?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got you five healthy Han Chinese, both sexes, unrelated by blood, between eighteen and thirty, from Mainland China. They are ready to come here to Taiwan. They believe they will be given false identity cards, a place to stay, and jobs. As you requested, they all believe they cannot contact relatives for several months so as to minimize any detection. I’ve arranged for them to pay a boatman, who makes illegal runs across the Taiwan Strait regularly, the sum of one hundred dollars each to be delivered to the Taiwan coast. That is less than the actual cost, but your instructions were to find five straight away and that it would be financed in part by you. They did not have enough money for the full fare.”

“Is that with Madman Cheng?” Baron inquired. That boatman that had a reputation for extraordinarily fast trips across the Taiwan Strait in a very unusual boat. Baron had used him before.

“Yes. It’s set for three days from now. But the military has caught more and more of those who came across this year. I cannot guarantee that they will not be detected and caught. Those new Robinson helicopters with those special cameras can detect a man’s head swimming in the ocean.” Lee exaggerated slightly, but he wished to inform his employer that there might be a problem and Lee did not want to be held responsible.

“Yes, I know about them. Those are FLIRs, Forward Looking Infrared, thermal imaging cameras. I sold the helicopters and the FLIRs to the Taiwan military.”

“Excuse me, Baron,” Lee said. “I had not realized that you would, of course, know about such devices. Can you make arrangements to make the military look the other way?”

“Of course. I just need to know the estimated time and at which spot Madman Cheng will be landing. I’ll make sure that the military is not looking.”

“I’ll get the details from Madman Cheng and call you,” Lee said.

“My man from Russia is coming into Taipei tomorrow and will be with you on the shore to meet them when they arrive. You will escort them in a lorry to a Russian ship that we have chartered at the shipyard. The Russian will know what ship to go to. You will tell them that they must hide out on the ship in its hold for several days until everything is arranged. Stay with them long enough to be sure that they have everything they need before you leave. When the ship is ready to go, the Russians will take over. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, and now we must discuss money.” Although the amount was insignificant to Baron, especially since the ship and fuel that was taking them to Russia would cost two hundred fifty thousand dollars, he had to sit with Lee for a while, negotiating over the amount that would be charged, as was the Chinese tradition.

Lee asked for what Baron called an insultingly high amount and offered half that. More tea was poured and the negotiations continued. But if it had not been done in this manner, Lee would have suspected that there was something bigger going on, as he had not been informed about where the five Chinese were headed or why they were wanted.

Finally, after fifteen minutes of
nego-nego
--the name, taken from English, used in Taiwan as the term for negotiations--Baron, acting reluctant, agreed to pay the sum of two thousand five hundred dollars for the fee of Madman Cheng and another two thousand to Lee, but only upon the safe arrival of the five Chinese to the hold of the Russian ship--less the five hundred dollars, of course, that the five Chinese were going to pay Lee as the fee to be taken to Taiwan.

As Lee was shown out by Mei Ling, Tak said to Baron, “It was very exciting to watch you negotiate.”

“Here it is a process,” he said. “If I did not do it, he would have been suspicious and would have begun making inquiries to see how he had been cheated.”

***

Under the bright moon in high Tibet, a prison guard opened first one and then another cell door in a Chinese military prison, located inside a Chinese military base. The base was not prestigious as compared to those in Mainland China. It was just set up to have troops ready for crowd control, rioting, insurrection, and any other problems that the Tibetans caused, which were mostly on the anniversaries of various Tibetan events, which had all been banned by the Chinese government.

The jailer had been given orders from his commander, which in turn came from a general in the Chinese Army in Beijing. The orders stated that Tibetan prisoners Neema Lhamo and Jamyang Gyamtso, being held pending an unspecified trial date for anti-government activities, were to be taken to a Hong Kong prison and then to be deported from China. General Lee Dai Kwok signed the orders. Unbeknownst to anyone at the jail, he had been provided with fragrant oil by Baron for the turnover of the two Tibetans.

Neema Lhamo and Jamyang Gyamtso saw each other for the first time in months. Jamyang had been beaten a number of times during interrogation, more so at the beginning of his incarceration. Neema had regularly been used sexually by several of the jailers.

They looked at one another but were afraid to speak, for fear of a beating for talking. Led to a desk, they were put into prisoner-escort chains around the waist, with handcuffs on either side of their waist chains, and a detachable chain in-between them so as to tie them together.

“You have been ordered deported from the country for your subversive activities,” the soldier at the desk told them. “You are being taken to Hong Kong to be deported.”

They looked at each other in shock and disbelief. Deported? Where would they go? What country would have them? Were they being sent to the Dalai Lama in exile in India?

The transport guards came in from a truck waiting outside and motioned for them to come. They had no idea where they might go or what would become of them.

***

“Nikolay! It’s so nice to have you here in Taipei.” Baron got up from his chair to greet the resourceful man, which he did not normally do for subordinates. But since Nikaloy had come such a distance, Baron stood.

Nikolay came in and sat in front of Baron’s desk. Tak was present, so they conducted the meeting in English for her benefit.

“It’s always good to see you, Baron, and you, Baroness. Thank you for having the driver meet me at the airport.” He had arrived the day before, and Baron had sent Driver Chen to fetch him from the Taiwan airport.

“You look well and rested,” Baron said. “How is the hotel?”

“Splendid. And so were the girls!”

“Ah, I’m glad you were pleased,” Baron said. He knew Nikolay’s propensity for young girls, and so he’d had Madam Su, who had the very best prostitutes in Taipei, send over two of her newest additions. Su had assured him that she had two new girls who had only just begun in the profession, were just eighteen, and could please. Apparently, she was right, as usual.

“And so, when are the Chinese coming?” Nikolay asked.

“Tonight, after midnight. Is the ship ready?”

“Yes, I have set up living quarters in the hold. How many again?”

“There will be five Chinese, a mix of males and females.”

“They are prisoners, right? It should not matter if they have to stay together.”

“Yes, this is a one-way journey, but they must arrive healthy. You make sure that they are kept warm and have plenty of food. I don’t want them to arrive all beat up and injured either.”

“Done.”

“Good. Now, I have two more prisoners for you to take. I told you that I would be sending over two Tibetans, if you recall?”

“Yes. Where do I get them?”

“In Hong Kong. They were imprisoned in Tibet by the Chinese for dissident political activities. I bribed a high official in the military and he arranged for their release and expulsion from the country. I’m told that they are young, probably in their early twenties. You had better put them in different quarters than the Chinese. I don’t know if they will get along with the Chinese after what the Chinese have done to them.”

“All right. Is there anything special I should know? The food will be coming from the ship’s Russian cook. Do they have a special diet?”

“They’ll do fine. But I don’t want these political dissidents to try to martyr themselves by discovering they are going to die and assuming that they must die beforehand to promote their belief in the Dalai Lama or their homeland. Don’t forget what I’m paying you for, which is their safe delivery in Stepnogorsk. Make sure that these Tibetans, who have already shown that they will risk jail rather than give up their beliefs, don’t go on a hunger strike or start acting crazy. You might tell them that they have been brought out because they’re on a mission to further the causes of Tibet, which is true, and then deal with them as a ship security matter on the ship as opposed to letting them get the idea that they are prisoners. You work it out. As for the Chinese, they will eventually figure out that they are leaving Taiwan, so you better keep an eye on them. They won’t try anything like a hunger strike, but the less they know the better.”

“Understood.”

“Next I want you to start arranging the tour group to go to Tibet. I’ll advise you when the material is ready, hopefully within a few weeks after you make your delivery of people to Stepnogorsk, according to Dr. Dorogomilov.”

***

Upon returning from Europe, Ralls met with Hauser in his office. Ralls had sent his report in advance in case the director wanted to review before the meeting. As it turned out, he did.

Hauser started off with, “What is this about not being human?”

“I know, I know,” Ralls said. “Winger had it checked three times at the lab, and then I sent samples to another lab. Same conclusion in all cases.”

“If she is not animal, then she must be vegetable or mineral,” Hauser said, still disbelieving,

Ralls smiled at the joke. “Well, perhaps a freak of nature?” He began summarizing what he had. “The mystery woman in the hypersonic craft may or may not have been the one that Baron Von Limbach drove from the salt mine in Poland to the hotel. He stayed at the Forum Hotel with a red-headed woman and took her to dinner in downtown Krakow. They left in his car to go to Germany, with me a few days behind. There was one strange thing along the way on the road they took, which was a hole in the highway, ten feet deep, with none of the dirt or debris that was removed from the hole anywhere to be seen. When I got there, highway repairmen were filling in the hole. But I could find nothing connecting the baron or the woman to it.

“The two went on to Germany. I could not find them, initially. They may have stayed with friends, or if at a hotel, possibly one of those small places, like on the Romantic Road, but I could not confirm that. He may have paid cash for the room and there was no computer record of it. The two were definitely in Berlin next, where their marriage was recorded. It looks as if this baron must have fallen in love with whoever he was traveling with, as it was not a church wedding, but a civil ceremony. I have been unable to find out anything about her background, which is, in itself, very odd.

“One theory is that she came from someplace in Russia with a very poor economic background. The baron might have found her through some dating or marriage service and had her sent down to Krakow. This is very easy for a Russian woman to do as the airfare is cheap, although paid for by the potential mate. But the main thing is, that young women can go freely to Poland, whereas trying to get a visa to the US, for example, is very hard. After Berlin, their next stop was Paris. They took a commercial airline to Paris from Berlin.

“Our CIA connection got me the information that Baron and Baroness Von Limbach booked tickets on the French Train a Grande Vitesse, but they weren’t passengers aboard this same train when it was de-railed by terrorists south of Paris in protest for the law not allowing women to cover their faces in public. The CIA hacked into the French surveillance cameras at the train station after the sabotage and found the two sitting at a café table. There is a picture of them in the file, but it is low quality as it was taken by a surveillance camera some distance away. It seems clear that they intended to take that train but missed it. From there, the CIA found them in a hotel in Paris. Winger at the CIA sent one of their operatives into the Paris hotel for DNA and fingerprints, which she was successful in getting.”