Take No Names, page 16
Pearce taps the space bar, freezing the smirk on Lai Yixun’s face, and leans back into his swivel chair with his arms crossed over his chest. The silence stretches long, marred only by the relentless ticking of the grandfather clock.
Then Mark picks up his snifter, gulps the rest of its contents, and twirls his finger in the air. “Hit me again, Charlie,” he gasps. “And make it a double!”
“That was the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Pabst exclaims.
“Rife hypocrisy.” Pearce rises from his chair. “But was it not grounded in fragments of truth? Our politicians have insulted the Mexican people with their scapegoating, their fearmongering, their ridiculous wall. Thirty years ago, Americans loved their neighbors. Today, we fear them. The world needs our leadership! Yet we behave like petulant children.”
He stops his pacing, puts his palms on the desk, and leans forward to loom over us.
“Well, China’s not going to eat our lunch, not yet. Lai talks like he’s helping the Mexican people, but all he’s doing is lining the pockets of the powerful. It’s not too late for us to set the record straight.”
He scoots his chair back, picks up something from the floor by his feet, and sets it on the desk: a black box, ornate and sheenless, locked with a padlock. He opens it with another key from his pocket and starts placing items from the box onto the desk. A contact lens case. A thumb drive. Two felt bags—one empty, one full.
“This box was given to me by the first democratically elected president of Angola, in front of their first parliament. African blackwood. The original ebony. Hardest wood there is.”
He keeps talking as he shakes the contents of the first felt bag onto the desk. Painite stones—more than twenty. He culls nine, examining them one by one before placing them in the second felt bag.
“Know a thing about Angola? A bloody mess for decades. Insurgencies. Islamists. Mass kidnappings. The Portuguese, the Soviets, the UN—everyone had their turn, and nobody improved the situation by one iota. Locals are mighty slick with a chisel, though.”
Pearce pushes the box toward us. I dutifully examine the intricate carvings on the lid. Masks. Spears. Daggers. Snakes.
“I spent three years there on a contract for the State Department,” Pearce continues. “Built them an ace army from the boots up. Recruited from every tribe in the country. Trained them, equipped them, made sure they were decently paid. Now it’s the safest country in Central Africa. Top destination for foreign investment, too.”
Mark puts the tip of his index finger on the box and slides it back toward Pearce. “Cool,” he says.
Pearce stares at him for a moment, then shuts the lid of the box and replaces the padlock.
“Y’all think I’m a bag of wind,” he says, his wry smile returning. “You want your payday and off you go. Well, you’re temps. That’s fair. But I still ask you to appreciate the import of your task. This is how the world works, gentlemen. You will free this country from a crippling debt to Chinese overlords as foolhardy and power-hungry as they come.”
He directs a withering glare at the frozen image of Lai Yixun.
“He thinks he’s already won. But this is still our continent. And we can still laugh last.”
23
The two har gow are identical, each dumpling sealed with nine tiny pleats, a hint of pink shrimp visible through the delicate skin. I push one around in my saucer of chili oil and force myself to eat it. Chew mechanically. Swallow dry. I glower at the other childhood favorites on my plate: the egg tart, the fried taro puff, the lotus leaf filled with sticky rice and sausage.
The dim sum from the buffet at Canton Garden, on the mezzanine level of the Baoli Tower, shows exceptional attention to detail. On another day, I might be going back for seconds and thirds, but today, I’m only eating to remain inconspicuous. I set my chopsticks down and glance at Dad’s Casio. 10:27. Thank God, almost time for the swap.
I steal another glance at Lijia Nu’erhachi, sitting alone by the windows that overlook the vast atrium of the Baoli. He’s watching the hallway to the bathrooms. Making sure the men’s is empty before he makes his move.
Lijia’s dressed in the jumpsuit and white baseball cap that identify him as a Longdai worker. His jumpsuit is royal blue, the color worn by technicians and engineers. Orange for laborers. Security wears black. He has a pair of rimless glasses on his face and an ID badge clipped to his chest.
He hasn’t eaten much of his food, either.
I pour myself more jasmine tea and look through the windows as I sip the fragrant brew. The atrium is quiet. Longdai built the Baoli Tower and occupies twelve floors of its offices. Working weekends is expected when you’re building an empire, but today, most of the Longdai staff are at the airport site, seated alongside Mexican dignitaries on bleachers outside Terminal One. The temporary pavilion will offer them a spectacular view of the inaugural arrival of the maglev train in thirty minutes. A livestream will show the event to millions more, including the receptionists and security guards in the atrium, who are following along on the Jumbotron-size screen above the information desk.
At the moment, the Mexican interior minister is making his remarks, muted and subtitled in Chinese. Lai Yixun will speak next. There are a few hundred hard-core protesters there, too, bused by NGAP to the last public road before the airport site. Half a mile from the media cameras, on the outside of Longdai’s high perimeter fence, they wave their signs and chant their slogans unseen, unheard, deniable.
Of course, Longdai’s not the only company with offices in the Baoli. There are still people coming and going between the main entrance and the elevator bank, which is protected by unmanned turnstiles. The mezzanine level, home to an art gallery, a souvenir shop, and the restaurant where I’m not eating, is open to the public.
A wide staircase curves down from the mezzanine to the information desk. Between the desk and the entrance, there’s a sculpture the size of a U-Haul truck. A celebrated Chinese artist received the commission to pay homage to Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec creator god. She used thermal lances to hew her design out of a block of Longdai’s proprietary synthetic jade. The titanic result, a lumpy cyan coil, could pass for either a feathered serpent deity or a lifetime supply of mint soft serve.
Close to the main entrance, there’s another set of turnstiles that restrict access to the building’s lower levels, including the underground maglev station. When the airport opens and the maglev starts carrying passengers, these turnstiles will accept tickets from a row of electronic kiosks. For now, they only open for select Longdai staffers whose irises have been scanned and entered into a secure database. On the other side of the turnstiles, there’s an X-ray machine and a millimeter wave scanner manned by three guards in black jumpsuits.
The escalator beyond the checkpoint descends to the corridor that leads to the maglev platform. And I know from Ken, who knows from Lijia Nu’erhachi, that the first door on the left houses the security center, where more men in black jumpsuits monitor the building’s smart surveillance network.
Lijia’s domain is behind the next secure door on the left: the digital heart of the Baoli Tower. The server room that hosts Longdai’s computing mainframe.
As I think about it, the few bites I took of my breakfast churn in my stomach, and a mezcal-tinged belch rises to my throat. I close my eyes and think, Do not puke. Do not puke. Thirty minutes and it’s all over.
Thirty minutes and I’m free.
When I open my eyes, Lijia Nu’erhachi is gone.
I jump up and walk to the bathroom, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, sweat already beading at my temples. The brightly lit men’s is empty except for the last stall, where Lijia has already stepped out of his sneakers. As I enter the stall next to him and lock the door, he hangs his jumpsuit over the partition.
I pull off my suit jacket and start undoing my shirt buttons, fumbling with them as sweat runs into my eyes.
“Gēmenr, nǐ néng bu néng zài kuài yì diǎnr?” he whispers through the partition—Buddy, think you can move a little faster?
I don’t respond, stay focused on removing my clothes, noting the thick r sounds tagged on the ends of his words. A Beijing accent. Ken hadn’t mentioned that, but of course, he doesn’t speak Chinese, so he wouldn’t have noticed. Hopefully it won’t matter. If everything goes according to plan, I shouldn’t have to speak to anybody while I’m impersonating Lijia Nu’erhachi.
“Gěi nǐ”—Here you go. I toss my pants over the partition. Then I don his jumpsuit, still warm from his body, and pull the zipper up to my neck. Put on his shoes and center his white baseball cap over my side-parted hair.
We step out of the neighboring stalls at the same time and look each other over. Lijia and I are about the same height. He’s got at least five pounds and ten years on me, but with the clothes, hat, matching haircut, and prosthetic mole, which Ken adhered to my upper lip this morning in the pool house bathroom, fumigating my pores with his cigarette breath, we look passably similar.
“Wǒ de qián, ne?” he asks—And my money?
—In your pocket, I say.
He pats the suit jacket, extracts an envelope from one of the flap pockets. A grim smile appears on his face as he inspects its contents: twenty five-hundred-euro bills, a business-class ticket for a flight to Madrid, and the felt bag with nine uncut painites in assorted sizes. Stones worth about two million dollars. And now I see the merits of Longdai’s payoff method: more tangible than crypto, less bulky than cash.
—Don’t forget these. He hands me his glasses.
I slip them on, and the world gets a little bit bigger.
—The server room will be empty? I ask.
—I only have one subordinate. I sent him to the opening at the airport site. Then he points to my hip pocket. —The authentication token is there. They won’t let you through with anything else.
—We have a way to get our bug in, I say. —You’re sure it won’t trigger an alarm?
—As long as it doesn’t modify the existing software. I told your colleague many times.
—I wanted to hear it from you, I say.
We look each other up and down one last time. Two men of similar size and shape, similarly serving APEX’s agenda. One headed to the heart of the building. The other headed out the front door.
And later today, I’ll return home to the United States, while Lijia flees into exile, an enemy of the Chinese state for life.
“Wǒ zǒu le”—Off I go, he says, and starts past me, toward the door.
“Nǐ bu zěnme àiguó ma”—You’re not a patriot. I blurt it out as he passes.
The Chinese word for patriotism is “àiguó”: 愛國 in traditional characters. 愛, to love. A hand 爫 that covers 冖 a heart 心 walking slowly 夂. And 國, country. Territory 口 defended by a wall 一 and a battle-axe 戈, enclosed by borders 囗. Love: to walk on tiptoe. Country: land protected by weapons.
Lijia turns with his hand on the bathroom door. “Àiguó? Wǒ zǎo méi guó le”—Love my country? I have no country, he says. —I’ve been here two years, working seventy hours a week. I put in a lot of time learning Spanish, too, but thanks to this Chinopuerto garbage, I can’t walk down the street without being harassed. Before Mexico City, I spent three years in Venezuela, building the naval base for the Motherland. My girlfriend and I did video chats for the first year. Now she’s married. She has a daughter.
He pats his pocket. —If I worked twenty more years, I wouldn’t save half this money. You people are setting me free. He sniffs hard, once, and then produces a pained smile. —There’s Chinese food everywhere in the world.
And then he’s gone, the door swinging shut after him, leaving me alone with my reflection.
I check the time: 10:44. Three minutes to spare before the pass. I blot my sweaty brow and clammy palms with paper towels. Give myself one last look in the mirror. Dash into the nearest stall and retch out the contents of my stomach. Pinch Lijia Nu’erhachi’s glasses out of the toilet bowl and wash them off in the sink. Rinse the sour bile from my mouth. Blot my face again.
Leave the bathroom and proceed down the stairs, a few steps behind Mark, as Sun walks in the revolving front door.
24
I tail Mark to the bottom of the stairs, where he heads toward the main entrance before pretending to notice the Quetzalcoatl sculpture and changing direction to check it out. As I cross the atrium toward the turnstiles that guard the lower levels, Mark strolls around the sculpture with his hands in his pockets, examining it like a tire kicker.
While Mark circles the sculpture, Sun walks right past me, toward the information desk. On my way to the turnstiles, I pause to look at the giant screen. Lai Yixun’s giving his remarks now, and I read his signature sound bite in the closed captioning: 其他国家修墙时, 我们修路—While other countries build walls, we are building roads. The assembled luminaries deliver subdued applause. Then the livestream cuts to the maglev platform beneath the Baoli.
The station engineer presses a single button on a touchscreen panel, and the electrified loops of conductive metal along the track begin their alternating push and pull of the train’s superconducting electromagnets, cooled to 450 degrees below zero.
As I walk up to the turnstile and remove Lijia’s eyeglasses, all three guards are raptly watching the live feed of the driverless train floating out of the station, silent and sleek.
I close my eyes for a moment, dilating my pupils so that my irises retract behind the images printed on the contact lenses I’m wearing. When I open my eyes again, my field of vision is ringed by a brown haze. I swipe Lijia’s ID badge over the RFID panel on the turnstile and then lean my face into the iris reader. After a moment, it makes a plinking sound, and an LED flashes green, and the glass barriers slide apart with a shoop.
On the other side, I put Lijia’s hat, glasses, and authentication token in a doggy bowl for the X-ray machine. As I step into the millimeter wave scanner and raise my hands above my head, I notice that I’ve already sweat through the underarms of my jumpsuit. I curse myself for not doubling up on undershirts, but the guard waves me through without much scrutiny. As I collect my belongings, he returns his attention to the giant screen above the information desk.
All three guards wear garrison caps in addition to their black jumpsuits, lending their getup a military aspect. They’re wearing the same black Li-Ning training shoes—emblazoned with the same swoosh-like logo—that I saw in Song Fei’s suitcase. Their upright posture and fit physiques mark them as fine specimens of Communist Party 3.0: World Domination Edition. But they also look young. A little green. Like maybe they’ve never had to use the twenty-thousand-volt stun wands strapped to their belts.
Hope you don’t lose your jobs over this, fellas. I silently thank them for paying me so little mind. And I decide to put Lijia’s glasses in my pocket instead of on my face before walking to the escalator. Spotting a mirrored egg flying across a bright lobby will be hard enough without them.
That’s when Sun screams.
When an epileptic suffers a seizure, they sometimes scream in a very specific way: tonic spasms force air out of their lungs, producing a garbled howl. It’s a difficult sound to make on purpose, which is why Sun practiced that exact scream, while imitating the frenetic muscle convulsions that accompany it, dozens of times over the past three days.
But today, at 10:49 on the morning of our foray into the Baoli, instead of simulating a seizure, he makes a completely different noise. A scream that sounds more like a deranged battle cry.
My brain begins the process of freaking out—What the hell is he doing?—as my body follows the routine established through relentless rehearsal over the past seventy-two hours. I turn toward Sun, my head rotating somewhat less than my body, and search the air between Mark and me for the mirrored egg.
A larger projectile, one not coated in reflective paint, would be easier to catch. But it would also be easier for the security guards to notice. And it might trigger the smart surveillance cameras hidden throughout the Baoli, which are programmed by machine-learning algorithms to alert the security center of any behaviors that don’t fall within the spectrum of observed patterns.
Fortunately, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting that mirrored egg. Unfortunately, Sun’s behavior has thrown off Mark’s aim, and I don’t see the egg where I expect it.
When I do spot it—a distortion of the lobby’s light, flying through the air at fifty miles per hour—the trajectory is low and wide.
The egg clears the waist-high barrier around the turnstiles by an inch and zooms toward the ground in front of me. I dive without thinking, snatch it out of the air a few inches from the polished granite floor. In the same motion, I roll back to my feet, prepared to fight or flee, my heart thumping in my ears like a subwoofer.
But nobody’s looking at me. All three security guards are sprinting across the lobby, drawing their stun wands as they rush the information desk.
Sun is standing on top of it, kicking a computer monitor, throwing a clipboard, dancing away from the outstretched hands of the two receptionists.
“Xiānshēng, qǐng cóng nàlǐ xiàlái!”—Sir, please come down from there!
I watch, stunned, as they grab at his legs, yelling admonitions and entreaties. Then I snap back into my role. Slip the egg into my pocket, snatch Lijia’s white cap off the ground, and return it to my head. Tear my eyes away from Sun’s performance. Glance out the great glass wall and see Mark speed-walking through the plaza outside the main entrance. Replace Lijia’s glasses on my face. Step onto the escalator down.
25
As the escalator carries me deeper into the building, the shouting in the atrium fades, making room for my frantic breathing, my racing pulse. What the hell is Sun doing? Why’d he deviate from the plan? If there’s one thing I know about Sun Jianshui, it’s that he always has a reason.
