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Pendleton walked along the dike, then along the road past the rabbit wood to his plain, tin-roofed, cinder-block dwelling on the brigade’s far edge. He found a bowl of cold rice with some fish in it, and a warm bottle of beer, and sat down at the plain wooden table.

The food was good, the beer better, but he would be happy when Li Lan came home. Everything was better when she was there. Well, she should be home from the mountain any day now, any day.

He shoveled down some rice and speculated about the nitrogen content in the Dwaizhou soil.

Neal Carey steadfastly refused to eat. He sat on the kang in his dark monk’s cell not even looking at the bowl of rice that the monk brought in every day. He had a vague awareness of hunger somewhere in his body, but the pain and guilt more than drowned it. Li Lan was dead because of him. Pendleton was dead because of him. He wished the driver had thrown him off the cliff instead of carrying him to the remote monastery on the west slope of the mountain. He wished that Xiao Wu had killed him instead of Simms. He wished he were dead. He wouldn’t eat to keep himself alive.

The monk opened the shutter of the window to let the noonday light in. How many days had it been, Neal wondered. Seven? Eight? How many days did it take to starve?

“You must eat,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

The English startled him and he looked up. Who spoke English on this damn mountain?

Li Lan stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a white jacket and white pants. White ribbons held her hair in two braids. White, he recalled, was the Chinese color of mourning. Behind her stood an older man. The resemblance was startling, even though he wore a green Mao suit with a plain white armband.

Neal blinked twice to try to clear the hallucination from his head. He understood that his subconscious was desperate to relieve the feeling of guilt, so it had produced Li Lan alive for him. But the vision didn’t go away. It stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the sunshine.

Then he understood. It was not Li Lan, it was her sister. They were twins.

“You must eat,” she repeated.

He shook his head.

“You used to like my cooking.”

He looked up again.

“I am alive,” she said. “So is Robert.”

“I saw-”

“My sister, Hong. My twin sister. When we were babies, Father and Mother tied blue ribbons in my hair and red ribbons in her hair to tell us apart.”

Twins.

“It was my sister who took you from The Walled City, my sister who came to you at Leshan and asked you to go home, my sister who made love with you.”

Sister Hong. The actress.

“She told me a story, about her sister killing her mother.”

“She was talking about herself. She could never overcome her guilt. She found herself in the Buddha’s Mirror.”

Neal felt the room spinning. “Why? Why did you do all this?”

The older man stepped forward. “Mr. Carey, I am Xao Xiyang, Party Secretary for Sichuan Province. Lan’s father. Hong’s father. I am the responsible person in this matter.”

Neal could only stare at him.

Xao continued, “You must understand how desperately we need the expertise that Dr. Pendleton can offer us. You have never seen hunger, Mr. Carey. You have never seen starvation. I have seen both. I never want to see them again, no matter what the price.

“When Lan began her relationship with Dr. Pendleton, I was overjoyed. I saw a wonderful opportunity, one that might never come again. As you know, I asked Lan to bring Dr. Pendleton into China. But such an operation was fraught with danger. Your own CIA, the Taiwanese, even our own government-especially our own government-would seek to prevent his defection at all costs.

“You see, Mr. Carey, we are engaged in a desperate struggle for control in China, a struggle between the hard-line Maoists, who seek to reimpose tyrannical madness and backwardness on us, against progressive, democratic reformers. I need not tell you that I am numbered among the latter. I need not tell you it is imperative that we prevail in this struggle. The agricultural advances that Dr. Pendleton could provide may be a critical weapon in that struggle.

“He who feeds China, Mr. Carey, controls China.”

Xao paused for comment or agreement, but Neal remained silent.

“We exercised every caution in our seduction of Dr. Pendleton. There were two factors that we did not predict: Lan actually falling in love with the man, and you. Lan shook you off easily in California, but we did not expect you to follow her to Hong Kong, which was the midpoint of the operation. We had to keep Pendleton in Hong Kong until our internal arrangements were complete. You were never supposed to leave San Francisco. The fact that you did was the fault of Lan’s local case officer, a certain Mr. Crowe. He failed to delay you, failed to deflect your search.”

It’s all about making money now, Neal. Is that what Crowe said? Is that why he came so quickly to Mill Valley to pick me up?

“Was it Crowe who tried to shoot me that night?”

“No. To the best of our understanding, that would have been Mr. Simms. It appears now that Mr. Simms was working for our government, and he wanted Lan and Pendleton to make it into China, where I could be implicated along with them. He apparently mistook you for Pendleton, but the shot was intended to miss.

“When you made such a bother of yourself in Hong Kong, Lan argued that she had to meet you, to persuade you to give up your obsession. Frankly, I would have preferred to have you killed.”

“You tried,” said Neal, remembering the gang with the choppers and the Doorman’s bloody death.

“And Simms intervened and saved your life. He had further use for you. You confirmed his good judgment when you tracked down Lan that night and ‘persuaded’ her to defect. After you saved her life that night from the Taiwanese thug, Chin, Lan would no longer countenance your being eliminated.”

Neal turned his gaze to Lan. “So you lured me into the Walled City and dumped me there.”

“May I remind you,” said Xao, “that she also rescued you?”

“Why?”

“Again, this arose from a miscalculation. Your friends and employers were creating a stir. Lan would not let you simply perish in the Walled City, and we could not let you return to your employers and tell what you knew. The only solution was to bring you here and either buy your silence or give you convincing disinformation to take home with you.”

Neal’s head was starting to clear. They had run him past Li Lan at the commune to see if he’d keep his mouth shut. Encouraged when he did, they’d sent Li Hong, pretending to be her sister, to sleep with him to ensure his silence when he went home. But he had screwed that up when he demanded to see Pendleton personally. Queered the deal and also sentenced Hong to death.

“You knew that Peng was working for the other side,” Neal said.

“Of course. We knew that you would lead him to the rendezvous on the mountain. Your obsession with Lan would not let you turn back. So we wanted both you and Peng to see Lan and Pendleton commit suicide. That was the word we wanted you to take to Washington and Peng to take to Beijing.”

Neal looked at Lan. “Your sister was willing to do this?”

Lan nodded. “She was eager. Life had become a torture for her after Mother’s suicide. I had hoped her sacrifice would not be necessary, but your obsession with me demanded it.”

“Let us be honest, Mr. Carey. Hong never forgave herself, but neither did I. After my wife’s death, Hong took part in the worst of the Red Guard infighting. She trained as an agent, a killer. She was consumed with self-hatred. After the chaos, when I came back to power and influence, I had her found. And I imprisoned her myself. We were chained together by our guilt and sorrow. I asked her to perform this mission.”

“Your own daughter?”

“I do not expect you to understand.”

“And it was Hong I was with on the mountain.”