12
EDDIE had always believed in the old adage that people made their own luck. That didn’t mean he discounted the blind chance of someone winning a lottery or being involved in a freak accident. What he meant was that proper planning, attitude, and sharp wits were more than enough to overcome problems. You didn’t need to be lucky to be successful. You just needed to work hard.
After the first two hours of lying in an irrigation ditch, he still maintained his beliefs. He hadn’t had time to properly plan the mission, so it wasn’t bad luck that brought him to this predicament. It was lack of preparation on his part. But now that he was into his fifth hour, and his shivering sent waves across the stream’s surface, he cursed the gods for his bad luck.
His arrival in China had gone off without a hitch. Customs barely glanced at his papers and made only a desultory search of his bags. That hadn’t come as much of a surprise, since he was traveling as a diplomat returning home from a year at the Australian embassy and was therefore afforded special courtesy. The papers he’d planned to use while traveling in China were those of an unemployed office worker. He’d spent his first day in Shanghai just wandering the streets. He hadn’t been in China for so long he needed to reacclimate himself. He had to change his posture and walk — his was too brazen — and he needed to get used to the language again.
He’d learned Mandarin and English simultaneously from his parents living in New York’s Chinatown, so he had no accent but rather a bland inflection that would sound foreign to a Chinese. He tuned into the conversations around him, relearning the accent he’d used when he’d been here with the CIA.
He couldn’t believe the transformation in the years since he’d last been to China’s largest city. The skyline was among the tallest in the world, with buildings and construction cranes crowding ever higher, and the pace of life was among the most frenetic. Everyone walking the sidewalks carried on excited conversations over ubiquitous cell phones. When night fell, the Shanghai streets were washed in enough neon to rival the Las Vegas Strip.
He vanished into society in incremental steps. After checking out of his hotel, he left his two suitcases behind a Dumpster that had just been emptied and wouldn’t likely be moved for a few days, not that there was anything in the bags to incriminate him. The diplomatic papers had already been flushed in the hotel. Next, he bought off-the-rack clothes from a midpriced department store. The clerk thought nothing of a customer wearing an expensive Western suit buying clothes that didn’t seem up to his standard. Wearing his new purchases, Eddie ditched his suit and bused out of the thriving downtown until finding an area of factories and drab apartment blocks. By this time, he’d gotten food stains on his shirt and had scuffed his shoes using a brick from a construction site.
He got a few looks from the poorer workers in their ill-fitting clothes, but for the most part no one paid him much attention. He wasn’t one of them, but he didn’t look like he was that much above them, either. Again, the clerk at the clothing store where he bought two pairs of baggy pants, a couple of shirts, and a thin gray windbreaker assumed Eddie was a down-on-his-luck salaryman forced into the labor ranks. He bought shoes and a rucksack from another store and a few toiletry items from a third without raising an eyebrow.
By the time he arrived at the overland bus terminal for his trip to Fujian Province, on his third day without a proper shower, he was an anonymous worker returning to his village after failing to make it in the big city. The slow transformation not only ensured no one would remember him, it helped Eddie become the role. As he sat on a cold bench at the terminal, his eyes had the haunted look of failure and his body slouched under the weight of defeat. An old woman who’d struck up a conversation told him it was best he return to his family. The cities weren’t for everybody, she’d said and told him she’d seen too many young people turn to drugs as an escape. Fortunately, her cataracts prevented her from seeing that Eddie wasn’t as young as she assumed.
The trip had been uneventful, crowded onto a bus that belched great clouds of leaded gasoline fumes and stank of humanity. His trouble had started when he reached Lantan, the town where Xang and his family had begun a trip that ended with them murdered in a shipping container. Eddie had no way of knowing, again because he hadn’t had time to prepare, that he’d arrived during regional elections. The army had set up a checkpoint in the town square, and everyone was required to pass through on their way to the polls.
Eddie had seen such elections before and knew that the townspeople had a choice among one candidate for each office up for election. Oftentimes the ballot was already checked, and the voter had to simply place it in the ballot box under the watchful eye of armed soldiers. This was China’s version of a democratic concession to its people. Some high officials had come out from the provincial capital of Xiamen to watch the polling, and the military had even brought a tank, a massive Type 98 if Eddie’s quick glimpse had been enough for an ID. He assumed it was a public relations ploy by the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, as well as a subtle reminder of where the ultimate power in China lay.
Although Lantan had a population of less than ten thousand, Eddie knew he’d attract attention. He didn’t speak the local dialect all that well and didn’t have a plausible reason for being in the isolated town if questioned by a curious soldier. Which was why he’d spent the past five hours under a bridge in an irrigation ditch just outside the town limits. He didn’t plan on leaving his hiding place until the officials and military rolled on to the next target of their intimidation.
But once again the luck Eddie tried to make for himself had left him.
He’d been lost in his own world of cold and pain and didn’t hear the voices until they were almost directly overhead.
“Just a little farther,” a male voice cajoled. “I saw a spot when we entered town.”
“No, I want to go back.” It was a woman’s voice, but young — maybe a teenager. She sounded frightened.
“No, it will be okay,” the male said. He had a cosmopolitan accent. Beijing or its environs. The girl sounded local.
“Please. My parents will wonder where I am. I have chores.”
“I said come on.” The man had lost all pretense of civility. His voice was sharp, tinged with a manic, desperate edge.
They were on the bridge spanning the ditch, just a few feet over Eddie’s head. A patter of dirt rained from the joints of the heavy wood decking. Their footfalls had become uneven. He could picture the couple in his mind. The girl was holding back, trying to slow them, as the man drew on her arm to the point of having to drag her.
Eddie gently pushed himself from the bank and sidled silently across the eight-foot ditch, listening as the man drew the girl across the structure. “It will be fun,” he said. “You’ll like me.”
There was a dense copse of trees just beyond the village along the dirt road, a secluded spot that Eddie knew would soon become the scene of a rape. As the man and his victim gained the road, Eddie pulled himself up the embankment, exposing himself had there been a sharp-eyed observer in the nearby town. He shouldn’t have even moved from his original spot. What was about to happen wasn’t his concern, but he was about to make it so.
The man was a soldier, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, his uniform clean compared to the dirty peasant clothes the girl wore. He had her by the arm, lifting her so her feet barely touched the ground in a frog march to the nearest trees, already in shadow as the sun set beyond a range of mountains to the west. She wore a skirt and simple blouse, long hair in a thick tail dangling between her narrow shoulders.