The vomit tasted sour and acrid in his throat, but it brought him back to reality. Feng moved behind him and unshackled his legs so he could stand, though his arms remained locked over his head. Ernie and Bert popped his shoulder back in. The pain eased. A little.
Feng turned to him.
“You see now, Mr. Wilson?” He looked at his watch. “You’ve been here three-quarters of an hour. Imagine weeks. Months.”
But Wells was no longer listening. He was looking at Cao, trying to understand if this was the final act in his betrayal. Was Cao working with Li, or against him?
Cao trotted forward, hobbling a bit on his artificial left leg. He looked impassively at Wells’s flayed stomach and bruised legs.
“Name?” he said in English, heavily accented but recognizable.
Wells closed his eyes. He could hardly stay upright, but if he sagged the pressure on his shoulder became unbearable.
A finger poked at his abs. “Name?”
“Wilson. Jim Wilson.” Wells coughed, twisted his head, spat a clot of phlegm, thick and streaked with blood, onto the cell’s concrete floor beside Cao Se’s shiny black boots.
“My name Cao Se.” Cao paused. “You understand?”
Wells felt a glimmer of hope. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”
“What you tell them?”
“That I’m here on business—” The effort of speaking left Wells exhausted.
“Nothing. You tell nothing.”
“That’s right. Nothing.” Cao and Wells speaking their own language now, one that Feng the interrogator couldn’t understand no matter how closely he listened. So Wells wanted to believe. Feng said something to Cao, but Cao cut him off and turned back to Wells. A thick scar ran down the left side of his neck, an old jagged wound. Shrapnel, Wells thought.
“You American spy. Arrested in Forbidden City.”
“I’m not a spy.”
Cao twisted Wells’s head in his strong little hands. Wells met his stare.
“Who? Who you meet there?”
“Nobody.” Wells snapped his head out of Cao’s hands, looked at the men standing behind him. Time to jump. Time to find out which side Cao was on. “What do you want me to say? I came to meet Chairman Mao. Only he’s dead. I came to meet you. You. Cao Se. Happy?”
Cao pulled a pistol from his bag, a long black silencer already screwed onto the barrel. “You confess? You spy?”
“Sure. I confess.”
Cao stepped forward and put the silencer barrel to Wells’s temple. Wells wasn’t even afraid, just angry at himself for miscalculating, letting Cao trap him a second time. They’d played him so perfectly. He’d thought—
But what he thought no longer mattered. He closed his eyes, saw his head exploding, brains splattering the floor. Exley came to him then, and Evan—
And Cao fired, three times, the silencer muffling the shots, three quick quiet pops, pfft pfft pfft, a surprised yelp, then two more shots. Wells heard it all and knew he was still alive. Again.
HE OPENED HIS EYES. Three men lay on the floor, Bert and Ernie dead, shot pinpoint between the eyes, Feng still alive, a hole in his face and two in his chest. He’d gotten a hand up. He moaned, low and tired. But even as Cao raised the pistol to finish him, a soft death rattle fluttered from his mouth, the hopeless sound of a balloon deflating, and his chest stilled.
Cao dropped the gun into his bag. He knelt down, careful to keep his boots clear of the blood pooling on the floor, grabbed a set of keys from Feng’s jacket, unlocked Wells’s arms. Wells could hardly stand. He leaned against a wall, fighting for balance.
“You my prisoner now,” Cao said. “Stay quiet. Understand?”
Wells nodded. Already he was pulling on his pants. Even the lightest touch of the cloth set his bruised and swollen legs afire. He tried to put on the green T-shirt but couldn’t get his arms over his head. Coursing under the sharp pain of his broken ribs was a deep throbbing bruising that was getting worse by the minute. He wondered if he was bleeding internally.
Cao gently pulled Wells’s T-shirt over his head. Then he cuffed Wells’s hands behind his back and nudged him forward. They picked their way through the blood and brains on the floor as carefully as children stepping over sidewalk cracks. And not for the first time Wells wondered why he’d been allowed to live, and what price he would pay.
CAO SLID THE CELL DOOR OPEN. Behind it a short corridor ended in another steel door. Cao punched numbers on a digital keypad until the second door snapped open. They walked down a concrete hallway to a double set of gates where a guard sat in civilian clothes. Cao said a few words. The guard nodded and the gates slid open. As they walked through, Cao pointed to the cell where Wells had been held, pointed at his watch, said something sharp. Wells imagined he was warning the guard against entering the cell. He probably didn’t need to explain much. Generals rarely did.
And then they were out, into the Beijing haze. Wells had the strange sense of being on a movie studio back lot, rounding a corner and traveling from New York to Paris in a second. He’d figured they were in the belly of a military base outside the city. Instead they were in the middle of Beijing, and the nondescript building behind them could have been a cheaply built elementary school, two stories high and concrete. In fact Wells could hear children shouting not far away. Only the guardhouse at the front gate and the razor wire atop the property’s outer walls offered a clue to the building’s real purpose.
Cao helped Wells into a jeep. They rolled up to the thick black gate at the front entrance, and a uniformed soldier jumped out of the guardhouse and trotted over. He pointed at Wells, but before he could say a word Cao began to shout. Without understanding a word, Wells knew that Cao was reaming out the soldier for daring to question him. The soldier turned tail and pulled the gate open with almost comic speed.
FIVE MINUTES LATER CAO TURNED into an alley and unlocked Wells’s cuffs.
“What about the kid who gave me the flash drive?” Before anything else happened, Wells needed to hear the kid was okay.
“The kid?”
“The boy. In the Forbidden City.”
“Nothing happen. He not know. I give him fifty yuan, tell him he playing game,” Cao said.
Wells bowed his head. He wanted to rest but feared what he would see if he closed his eyes.
“No other way,” Cao said. “We have spy in your embassy. Know you coming.”
Wells understood. Cao had known that the PLA had intercepted his message to the embassy. He’d known that whoever the CIA sent would be arrested at the meeting point. He had no way to warn his contact off or change the meeting place. But no one would question his presence at the prison afterward with Li.
Still, Wells couldn’t see how he and Cao could possibly escape. As soon as someone found the bodies in the interrogation room, all of China would be searching for them. “Why didn’t you just defect?” Wells thinking out loud. He figured his broken ribs gave him the right to ask.
“Didn’t know about spy in embassy. Wanted to stay in China.”
“When will they find the men you shot?”
“Two, three hours. I warned the guards, don’t go to the room.” Smart. Cao had bought them some time, Wells thought. But soon enough another officer would come along with different orders.
“Anyway, things very bad now with America,” Cao said. “We torpedo Decatur.”