The lead guard inspected the restraints, though he knew they were unnecessary. Yin had never reacted violently toward a guard in all his years of imprisonment. The only danger the Bishop posed was to himself, and that because of his stubbornness. Satisfied that Yin was securely bound, the guard motioned the escort to proceed.
Yin kept his head bowed and his eyes on the floor as he moved down the corridor. The simplest gesture, a nod or glance at anyone, was forbidden and would result in a severe beating, as the badly healed break in his left arm bore testament. Yin’s eyes gradually grew accustomed to the light as he shuffled along, taking two short steps for each stride by the guards.
Just up ahead, Yin thought, counting his steps.
The guards stopped. A buzzer sounded the release of the electronic locks securing the door to the solitary-confinement wing. The heavy steel door slid open, and the small procession continued.
Almost there, almost there.
Then he saw it — a glint, a tiny sliver of light on the floor. Yin turned his head a few degrees to the right and gazed upward. A small window, barred and paned with grimy wired glass, but a window nonetheless to the world outside. It was midday, and the sky was clear and blue.
A thin plastic cane lashed across Yin’s back, causing him to drop to his knees. The return stroke caught his right shoulder, and Yin toppled to the floor.
‘Enough!’ the lead guard commanded. ‘Get him back on his feet.’
The guard who had struck him grabbed Yin’s arm and pulled him up so forcefully that the bony shoulder popped. Despite the blinding pain, Yin found his feet, and when the guard released his arm, the traumatized joint slipped back into place.
The march continued through the concrete corridors of the prison, the light rustle of Yin’s sandals lost in the guards’ heavy boot steps. Yin knew the route by heart, but only one way — rarely did he emerge from an interrogation conscious.
Yin felt a conflicting mixture of relief and dread when the guards walked him past the doorway that led to the corridor of interrogation rooms. Today’s journey from his cell was to be different.
Lord, Yin prayed silently, whatever is your will, I remain your servant.
The guards escorted Yin through parts of the prison he could not recall. Then a doorway opened, and Yin felt a breeze kiss his face. It was not the prison’s fetid air thick with rotting filth and human sweat, processed and recirculated by dilapidated machinery. This breeze was a whisper from the heavens. Yin detected the faint aroma of prairie in summer and the sweetness in the air that follows a cleansing rain.
So they have finally grown weary of me, Yin thought.
The only reason Yin could fathom for the guards to take him outside was to put a bullet in the back of his head, so he savored each breath of fresh air as if it were his last.
‘Stop!’ the lead guard barked.
Yin kept his head bowed and focused on his silent prayers. The sound of footsteps crunching on gravel, the measured strides of a long-legged man, intruded on his meditations.
‘The prisoner, as ordered,’ the lead guard announced respectfully.
Yin heard a rustle of paper and glimpsed a file folder in the hands of a tall man who wore not a uniform but the dark gray suit and polished black leather shoes of a businessman.
‘Show me his face,’ the man ordered.
One of the guards grabbed a handful of Yin’s hair and jerked his head back. Yin’s eyes traveled up the elegantly tailored suit past a pair of broad shoulders. The man’s face was long and hard, the skin taut over bone and muscle. His jet-black mane swept back from his face, held in place like a glossy veneer so slick that the morning breeze had not dislodged a single hair. The man’s mouth was a thin line that betrayed no emotion. Yin guessed his age somewhere between late thirties and mid-forties — only a child when Yin arrived at Chifeng Prison.
When Yin’s eyes met those of Liu Shing-Li, the old priest shuddered. Liu was appraising the prisoner with eyes so unnaturally black that it was impossible to discern between iris and pupil. Liu’s eyes seemed to absorb everything into their unfathomable darkness while betraying nothing. Yin had always viewed hell not as a sea of unquenchable fire but as a state of being totally removed from God. This was what he saw in Liu’s eyes.
‘Clean him up,’ Liu ordered. ‘And put him in a new uniform. The rags he’s wearing should be burned.’
The lead guard nodded and gave the orders to his men. They marched Yin a short distance to the motor pool, where they stripped him of his threadbare garments and shackled him to a steel post with his arms above his head. Two jets of icy water pounded the Bishop’s frail body, the guards laughing as they directed the high-pressure streams at his face and genitals. Yin choked, coughing up blood and water, his lungs desperate for air.
With the same brushes used to clean the prison’s trucks, the guards attacked Yin’s flesh until it was raw. Yin shivered uncontrollably, his body confused by the combination of numbness and the burning of industrial cleansers.
‘Hold him still,’ a guard barked as he pulled out a knife.
A pair of hands roughly clasped Yin’s head, and the sharp blade scraped and tore at his facial hair. Years of growth fell away, and blood-tinged water streaked the Bishop’s emaciated body. While hacking at Yin’s mustache, the guard sliced a narrow strip of skin from Yin’s nose, and blood flowed freely from the wound.
After shearing fistfuls of Yin’s ragged mane, the guards turned on the hoses once more to finish the job. They then brusquely dried him off and gave him a new prison uniform, its cloth stiff and rough against his skin.
The guards reattached Yin’s restraints and again presented him to Liu. At Liu’s nod, Yin was handed over to the soldiers accompanying Liu and loaded into the back of an armored military transport. Two benches ran down the sides of the windowless compartment. Yin sat where he was told.
As the soldiers secured Yin’s restraints to the steel loop bolted to the floor, Liu signed the paperwork authorizing transfer of the prisoner into his custody and dismissed the prison guards. Liu then donned a pair of sunglasses, slipped into the passenger seat of a dark gray Audi sedan, and signaled his driver to get moving. It would be a long drive to Beijing.
Accompanied by four soldiers, Yin moved across the countryside inside the steel box on wheels. The men did not converse with him, or even among themselves, and they acknowledged his existence only once with a meager meal and a scheduled relief stop. Yin knew this was partly due to his status as a prisoner and an enemy of the state, labels that made him less than human in their eyes. Too, the soldiers’ masters feared his faith like a contagion — the Bishop of Shanghai was hazardous cargo. Yin felt no animosity toward the soldiers but rather sympathy for their predicament. To protect them from risk of punishment, Yin kept his silence and prayed for them.
The two vehicles reached the outskirts of central Beijing shortly after sunset. In a modern metropolis teeming with nearly thirteen million people, the rundown district seemed oddly abandoned. Soldiers manning one of the roadblocks that cordoned off the area scanned Liu’s papers and waved him past.
The long journey from Chifeng ended a few blocks farther in an alley behind a modest theater. The brick building dated to the waning days of the imperial era, and the intervening years had not been kind. Armed men clad in riot gear stood guard at the theater doors, which appeared both solid and new. An officer approached the Audi and opened the passenger door.