“It’s not complete, sir,” the middle-aged man in charge of the banking investigation said as he pointed to the hundreds of pages of printouts in front of him.
“It’ll never be complete, damn it!”
“Well sir, banking no longer sleeps so-”
“Just give me your best guess.”
The man reluctantly flipped through the pile to a red ribbon marking a page. “This man. Tator is his name. He had two large sums of money transferred here from overseas. Each a few days before a blast.”
Fong grabbed the page with the man’s Shanghai hotel address and threw it at two detectives, “I want him in my office in half an hour. And I want him shackled.”
The detectives ran out and Fong turned to the team in charge of finding the American tourist with the camcorder.
“Well!” Fong demanded.
“We’ve got it down to thirty-eight, sir. They all seem to fit the description and every American in Shanghai seems to have a camcorder.”
“Pick your top three and keep them in their hotel rooms. I’ll see them after I meet this guy Tator.” After the men were sent scurrying to round up the suspects Fong approached the Hilton’s front desk. “The manager,” he barked.
Quickly, a primly dressed young Caucasian male stepped out of the back office. Fong wondered if he were an Asian if he would have risen so high at such a young age.
“You know who I am?” Fong asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. You have a secured line.”
The man hesitated so Fong repeated his statement but this time more forcefully. “You have a secured line.”
The man nodded and turned. Fong followed him into an oak-panelled office. Oak in Asia! Senseless when there are so many exceptional hardwoods here, but so many Europeans never really see the beauty of Asia. The young man pointed at the phone and left the room.
Fong flipped open a small phonebook he carried in an inner pocket. He had to check for the number. After all, he’d never called the head of Shanghai’s Communist Party before.
The party boss took Fong’s call without hesitation. Fong didn’t really know how to begin so he just spat out the facts of the second firebombing as he knew them. He was only momentarily surprised when the party boss stopped him by asking, “Has there been newspaper coverage – foreign newspaper coverage?”
“I’ll check but I would assume that there will be, just as in the first bombing.”
“So what is it that you want from me, Traitor Zhong?”
Fong allowed the reference to his previous felony conviction to pass and said, “I want the airport closed and access to Shanghai by all other means curtailed.”
Silence greeted his request. Both men knew that granting the request would cost the great city tens of millions of US dollars a day. Finally the party boss asked, “For how long, Traitor Zhong?”
“Until we catch the arsonist, sir.”
“No, Traitor Zhong. Three days. You have three days at the end of which time either this maniac is caught or you return to that small village west of the Great Wall – I understand that you made quite an impression on the peasants there.” Without so much as a goodbye, the party boss hung up on Fong.
Fong muttered to himself, “If I don’t find this guy, you’ll join me west of the Wall, oh great party boss man.”
The party boss made a call – a single phone call – and all services in and out of the biggest city in Asia began the process of coming to a full stop.
The West always underestimates the degree of control available to the Chinese government and the country’s inherent efficiency. Communist China is not the comically inefficient former Soviet Union or the hopelessly ideological Cuba. The huge number of people living on the relatively small amount of arable land had always forced efficiencies on the Chinese.As well, the country had been on a quasi-war footing for years. So preparedness was a given.
The call went to the command centre beneath the new radio tower in the Pudong Industrial District, across the Huangpo River. The call activated a vast civic protocol – and this being China – there was no questioning the order that commanded all who received it to stop and wait exactly where they were until a further countermanding order arrived.
Within the hour all buses stopped and pulled over to the sides of the road on highways all around the perimeter of the city. All aircraft were diverted away from the Shanghai International Airport. No planes left. Trains literally stopped in their tracks. Ships throughout the vast river networks leading to the Shanghai Port Facility simply threw anchors over their sides and waited. On the access roads to the great city all traffic, whether car, bicycle, or foot was stopped and turned back to from whence it came.
In the third hour after the phone call from the party boss not a single person came into or left the eighteen-million-souled entity known as Shanghai. Within six hours of that, because there is little refrigeration in the city, food everywhere began to rot. Within seventy-two hours, the city would begin to go hungry.
But it was the newest parts of the stop protocol that had the greatest effect on Joan Shui as she and Wu Fan-zi retreated to her hotel room. The most recently added section of the protocol closed all long distance phone lines and totally shut down the thirty- four massive servers that handled all Internet and e-mail traffic in and out of the region.
“What does REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY mean?” asked Joan, holding out the phone for Wu Fan-zi.
He took the phone and listened. “You were calling Hong Kong?”
“Trying to report our new findings.”
He punched a local ten-digit number and it rang. He hung up.
“What?” she asked.
“Local calls work.” He dialled a Beijing number and quickly got the REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY message. “Try your computer.”
“It’s a long distance call to get to my server in Hong Kong.”
“My server’s local.” Wu Fan-zi punched in his access codes on her laptop. “Give me the e-mail address of your office.” She did and he typed it in and hit the send button. Instantly his “in” box dinged. He opened the returned message: REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY.
“Can they do that?”
“Not meaning to be flip, but they just did, Ms. Shui.”
“So, Big Brother really is listening over on this side.”
“Not listening, rejecting.”
She smiled. “So we’re sort of isolated.”
“Yep, only eighteen million people to play with.”
Her smile grew. “That might be enough, if . . .”
“If what, Ms. Shui?”
“If you, Mr. Wu, are one of those eighteen million.”
He opened his wallet and withdrew his Shanghai residency permit and let out a deep sigh. “Hey – lucky me – I’m one of the eighteen million.”
“No,” she corrected him, “I’m the lucky one to be with the one of the eighteen million who is standing – now sitting, right here.” Their hands touched. She was tempted to say something smart. He was tempted to ask why him. But neither spoke – although their bodies did a lot of talking in the next hour.
Fong’s cell chirped. He spoke into it sharply, “Dui.”
“We’ve picked him up, sir.”
“Bring him to my office and officer . . .”
“Sir.”
“As I said before, I want him shackled.”
Fong sat in his office on the Bund and straightened his Mao jacket. It was a useful thing to wear when interviewing Westerners. It tended to scare the shit out of them.
For a moment Fong allowed himself to remember the pockets he’d sewn into the lining of his jacket when he was in internal exile west of the Wall. Then he stood up and shouted, “Dui! ”