When they arrived in Seattle, having driven up, just the two of them, they stored Michael’s car at the local organization headquarters. He and Ariel moved into the backseat of another car. Two local cadre sat up front to drive them past the border.
In Vancouver, they made a brief stop. Michael stayed in the car. Ariel entered an apartment building. A few minutes later, he reemerged with two passports with their photographs and new identities. Michael felt a chill. He hadn’t handed a photograph of himself to anybody, and this particular photo he’d had taken in a photo booth at Ocean Beach, with the only prints he knew somewhere in his desk at home. Ariel told him, none too reassuringly, everything was being taken care of “on the other end.” He also had another item with him: a suitcase full of something, clothes presumably.
“You’re going to check this piece of luggage in under your own name,” one of the Seattle operatives told Michael. “You’ll get a ticket for it, but you won’t need to replace the contents with anything. In fact, once you check it in, you won’t see it again until you get back to Canada.”
On the long flight across the Pacific Ocean, the two of them didn’t speak much, sleeping most of the way, but for the few hours both of them were awake, Ariel turned surprisingly chatty. He broke into his life’s story, how he once ran off to join a puppet troupe, decided to become a Communist before he turned forty, even going a bit into China. Michael appreciated how friendly he’d become, after the long, tense drive from San Francisco, but grew unsettled the more it went on. Somehow, every time Michael tried to steer the topic of conversation toward actual information, such as going into greater detail over the handoff protocol, Ariel batted it away. It was very subtle, Michael couldn’t say at what precise moment he’d been deflected, but it happened repeatedly. Despite the fact that Ariel’s stories sounded too nutty to be made up, Michael eventually realized that what seemed like casual candor was boldly executed diversion. The more Ariel talked, the less Michael knew.
Ariel was in a grand mood, though, and, once he got going, went into his theory on why Vietnam was just a prelude to a global war between the U.S. and China.
“Either the two superpowers are going to enter into an alliance against China or, more likely, the U.S. is going to simply beat the Soviets into reneging on their commitments to international socialist solidarity, to the point, if you ask me, where we’ll see the collapse of the U.S.S.R. as a political entity. At that point, we enter a new phase of the Cold War, where the balance of power isn’t between the U.S. and Soviets, but between the U.S. and China. This will all happen within the next twenty years, by the way. Moreover, everyone knows this already, which is why the real target of U.S. strategy right now the world over isn’t the U.S.S.R., but China. By the time the crucial battleground will have shifted to the Pacific Rim, the Eastern Bloc will be just a memory.”
Michael couldn’t help feeling excited. Or maybe it was just the straight drive, without stopping, and to finally have got up in the air. Either way, he thought there was a grain of respectability to the scenario Ariel had just painted. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. in twenty years? China as the world’s second superpower? A shift in the global balance of power to the Pacific nations? It seemed unbelievable, and yet here they were, suspended in the stratosphere, somewhere between San Francisco and Tokyo, on a mission to change the world.
Japan was no different than, say, La Guardia, but once they boarded a Russian passenger jet bound for Shanghai, Michael felt he had entered another world. The cabin looked like the interior of a kids’ clubhouse. There was no crew to speak of. Or passengers, for that matter. Just a few black-haired heads scattered about the narrow cabin, none of them in a seat next to another. He and Ariel sat in the first row, with their interpreter/guide/watchdog, a thin woman in a blue pantsuit with a bob haircut.
A minor hubbub went up when their guide remarked in fluid Queen’s English that they had entered Chinese airspace. Out the window, Michael could see the coastline of the continent, marked by a few small fires here and there. It was happening. It was one thing to take cues from translated texts that wore the dry air of the exotic and esoteric, another to be confronted with a glimpse of a world of real lives and a landmass that, reaching across impassable stretches of time and space, had bore the near totality of human civilization. The idea of that history, rolling back from the shoreline he was now tracing through the dark, was incomprehensible. All that made such a thought tolerable was the counterforce of the equally impossible fact that the most radical social revolution the world had ever known was taking place here too. Michael had spent a lifetime in exile from everything. For the first time, he felt as if he had come home.
They touched down at Hung Chiao International Airport in the dead of night. Michael picked up the luggage he’d packed for himself, but not the suitcase he was given in Vancouver. The streets of Shanghai, one of the world’s most populous cities, former Whore of the Orient, Paris of the East, as seen from the backseat of a Chinese government sedan, were pitch dark.
They were put up in a hotel room. The next day Ariel went out for a few hours, but Michael was forced to stay the whole time in the sparse, narrow room. Most of those hours were spent catching up with his jet lag. A rotation of chain-smoking young men in the same kind of blue jackets Francis wore stood watch outside the door. They didn’t speak English. Every time Michael opened it and asked if he could go out, the response was the same sheepish smile and bout of mute head shaking and hand waving.
Around 3 in the afternoon, he was staring out the window when he saw, miraculously, three white people walk by. He tried to get their attention by banging on the window and yelling, but they didn’t hear him, or acted as if they didn’t. He tried to see where they were headed, but they quickly disappeared from view.
That evening they were put on the train and spent the night in an isolated car. They arrived in Peking by morning. They were put in another hotel room.
They spent most of day two cooped up in the hotel room together, with Ariel being called out for a few hours in midmorning.
When Ariel came back, he was not any more forthcoming about whatever he was doing, or what was going on, than he was about anything else. But like almost everyone else they had met on this trip so far, he had a case of nerves.
It was apparent they were being handled very carefully. So far, every time they had been met by someone, picked up, or taken around, the atmosphere was tense. No one looked directly at anyone or anything. The passing off of the Americans from one handler to another was an especially serious affair. Their sponsors tended to be young men, and occasionally women, dressed in identical blue suits, although there were a few seniors here and there. So far everyone they encountered either spoke fluent English or none at all. They all smoked constantly. People were only grudgingly friendly. They ground their teeth when they smiled and were otherwise businesslike. Too businesslike for Michael’s taste. There was something flinty in their behavior; with any misstep in the complex operation going on, Michael felt he (and Ariel?) would be sacrificed. Michael recognized some of the m.o.: They tended to travel in pairs in which the partners clearly did not like each other. As with Ariel and himself, they were there to keep an eye on each other as much as on their charges.