China Wife (21 page)

Mr Hu explained. ‘Afterwards, the courier may go back to Australia.'

‘Afterwards?'

Li Qiang suspected he knew what Mr Hu meant by ‘afterwards' but knew that his employer would want to know exactly from Hu's own mouth.

‘After the ceremony. The courier will be at the ceremony and then allowed to go back to Australia. And I will want clear evidence of the courier's safe arrival in Australia.'

Mr Li suppressed the obvious questions. Clearly, the Xu organisation was not trusted – why should it be? – and the witness of an independent person at the ceremony and the security of that person leaving China was a simple enough precaution. But for Mr Xu and Li Qiang it was a risk that Mr Li at least would have preferred not to take.

As Mr Hu reached rather obviously into his inside jacket pocket, Li Qiang knew that at this point he had no bargaining power.

The noise level in the coffee shop had been steadily escalating as the brief conversation proceeded. The music suddenly turned from the latest hit single of China's number-one pop group to an old Beatles favourite. The gathered youngsters went wild. It was an obvious moment for money to pass.

Mr Hu withdrew his hand from his pocket and passed an envelope to Li Qiang. He made no effort to hide the transaction. No one, not even the minders, was paying attention to him and Mr Li.

And then Mr Hu was gone. How he managed to leave the coffee shop through the heaving mass of young people with the minders, without causing so much as a ripple, Li Qiang never really understood.

Li Qiang pocketed the envelope. It contained one hundred thousand US dollars in high-value notes, down payment from
a quarter of a million dollars. How a young woman, even a virgin, could be worth such a sum of money Li Qiang didn't bother to wonder.

As Mr Hu and his small entourage swept out of the shopping mall and into an illegally parked car at the back entrance, the minders noted the three men in rather ill-fitting suits who were lounging in the open area outside Starbucks. Careful observation told the minders that these men were no threat to Mr Hu.

The terrified shop assistant who later reported the body in the refuse bin in the yard at the back of a newly opened jewellery store was incoherent in her description.

When the police recovered the body of Li Qiang, they were quick to note the single bullet wound at the back of the head. They were equally quick to put the death down to a gangland killing of the sort that was almost endemic in the new Shanghai. That Li Qiang was a senior official in the Interior Ministry ensured that only a minimum of details reached the media.

As the investigation got lost in the depths of the police and Interior Ministry bureaucracies, it was clear that Li Qiang was on the payroll, not only of the State and Mr Xu but also, in a freelance capacity, a number of other organisations equally as nefarious as that of Mr Xu.

He was hardly missed.

‘Welcome!'

The young man who entered Mr Xu's apartment and employment as his new chief of staff was the grandson of a long-standing and trusted friend. Xu had had enough of public-service types; he of all people should have known how unreliable they would be.

Two days later the sum of one hundred thousand US dollars found its way into Mr Xu's Norfolk Island bank account.

32

When the final stages of the transfer of Alice to China had been discussed, Mr Kim hadn't approved of the burkas that Julie Li and Alice Hou were wearing on the flight to Hong Kong. He thought that they would make the two women too conspicuous. And he had an entirely justified suspicion that that was what Julie was intending.

‘Conspicuous? What's so uncommon in a couple of women in burkas?' Julie had said.

Of course in the UK and Europe she was right. In Australia, it was rather less common. Hinting at a mistress–servant relationship with her drab black and Alice's more colourful attire, Julie was not only fulfilling Kim's worst fears – she was also signalling her independence from him now that she had taken over full responsibility for Alice.

She and Alice were noted at the airport and on the aircraft and reports were made to a number of interested parties. And whatever Mr Kim thought of her plan Julie knew in advance that his opinion was going to be ignored. The poisonous Mr Xu had finally brought himself to contact her directly and had approved of what she was planning; a fact that didn't help her already fractured relations with Kim.

It hardly mattered.

The Hong Kong flight was busy. As David Hutchinson settled into Business Class under the watchful eye of Janice Liang, Julie and Alice settled into their seats at the back of the aircraft. Julie blocked any access to Alice in the window seat,
as a good Muslim servant would have done. Alice was now recovering from the drugs that she had been treated with for most of the last few days, and her despair was beginning to overwhelm her. Her whole world had been in turmoil for so long that she had almost forgotten what peace of mind was. If she had been capable of coherent thought, she might almost have welcomed the drugs as a means of shutting herself off from the horrors of her existence.

Alice had been aware of the presence of Janice Liang in her company for a few days, but in her drugged state and her permanent fear of Mr Kim she had been unable to re-establish the close relationship that the two had had on the voyage from Canada. Often bound and taped up together, Alice had developed feelings for Janice that were almost like hero worship at first but which soon became an affection verging on infatuation. Seemingly never afraid, Janice had probably done more to help Alice through the journey than anyone or anything. In much the same way, Julie's gentleness in the face of Mr Kim's violence had also induced the same schoolgirl crush type effect, so fragile and vulnerable was Alice's state.

‘Jesus, Alice,' Julie had said to herself more than once when Alice's affection had spilled over into physical contact, ‘if I understand even a half of what's going on here, you're going to be in dire trouble if you can't control your feelings.'

Now on the flight to Hong Kong as they tried to play the parts of Muslim women, Julie's thoughts were in a turmoil of their own. Seeing the world through the black slit of the head-dress she was wearing prompted thoughts of Tariq al Hussaini and the bittersweet times that they had spent together and the Rag stunt that they pulled.

‘Tariq, you bastard,' she said under her breath.

But the venom had gone out of the statement.

Whatever else Tariq al Hussaini had done for Julie, his unremitting selfishness and self-focus, once she had recognised it for what it was, had conditioned her to deal with the
complex world she was now inhabiting. In the quiet moments of the night on the houseboat as she relived those last months of her life in Britain, Julie finally realised and accepted that she had been manipulated, not just by Tariq, but by her own lords and masters at the Border Agency.

They're the bastards
, she had thought to herself many times.

But were they?

As she began to ponder what had happened in Australia, and how she had been manipulated there, too, a small niggling thought started to grow in her mind. Yes, she had been manipulated, but what she had achieved as a result of that, she had achieved on her own. She had been successful in everything that had been expected of her, when in their unguarded moments the likes of Alan and his Security Service colleagues had clearly been anxious and uncertain of a satisfactory outcome.

The whole operation to date had been successful; she and Alice were on their way to China and the surveillance had worked throughout. That had been entirely down to her.

And the really hard part that was about to start was also going to be down to her. In China, she would certainly be reliant on her own resources – at least, as far as she knew.

Jesus, they went to all this trouble to set me up in the eyes of the Australians and Chinese because they knew I could achieve what they wanted; me – and not just because I look like a full-blood Chinese woman!

But she had no time to savour how good that made her feel.

‘Julie!'

The obvious fact that she wasn't in Britain or Australia now, but was actually on the way to China, finally pushed all the speculations and self-satisfaction from Julie's mind.

Shit, I really am on an aeroplane to Hong Kong with a woman who is about to be basically sold into slavery and I'm running bait for the Chinese Security Services and Christ knows whatever bunch of … what?

‘Julie?'

Bait – bullshit! – all you've got to do is hand the woman over as planned and get yourself back to Australia. You've got the return ticket in your bag.

She refused to acknowledge the surge of panic that wanted to spread through her body. She had been on her own all the time. If anything went wrong, she would be stranded in China; that was the deal. OK, so it wasn't just completing the handover; she had to keep herself visible to the Chinese authorities and invisible to everybody else. And after her experiences at Lake Mulwala and in Queensland she was far from clear who everybody else was. But, in reality, nobody among the array of officialdom supposedly backing her up knew that either.

‘Julie!'

Alice's hand lay on Julie's arm seeking some sign of comfort as the bleakness of her existence began to impinge again. She felt the shudder that ran through her minder and she almost withdrew the hand.

Through the slit of Alice's burka headdress, Julie could see her anguished eyes. She had been drugged and restrained and told nothing – the last few days must have been an unimaginable nightmare for the poor girl. With the baleful presence of Mr Kim ever in her vision, Julie had been unable to alleviate her suffering. Alice had been terrified almost to rigidity and Julie had been able to offer no reassurance.

As the closing stages of the captive's delivery to China developed, Mr Kim had become more and more aggressive and even more unpredictable. It was a relief to both Alice and Julie when he had gone, but it had left Alice in a state of shell shock that she seemed incapable of overcoming.

‘Alice?'

As always First and Business Class passengers were allowed off the flight first; Janice Liang was among the very first to scurry
up the ramp from the aircraft to the arrivals area. Seasoned flyers like David Hutchinson didn't hurry. Experience told him that there was no point in hurrying. The need to hurry was a concept unknown to the designers of airport people management systems and Hong Kong, he knew, wasn't going to be any different. Besides, he had nearly two hours to wait for the Shanghai flight and one airport was much the same as another.

The usual long walk up and down stairs to get you back to where you started from began. Hong Kong was among the world's newest and most modern airports, but it still seemed necessary to walk these miles to get nowhere. As he was funnelled into the lanes approaching Immigration and Passport Control, an unexpected variation to the norm confronted him.

‘Now what?'

David had seen the small group of two policemen and a young woman in a pale-blue uniform shuffling to intercept him.

‘Mr Hutchinson?'

The dazzling smile of the young woman as she addressed him did nothing to allay his immediate concerns. It wouldn't have been the first time that he had been arrested and expelled on arrival in a country irrespective of what his expectations of welcome might have been.

‘Would you come this way, please?'

The smile got more dazzling as the impossibility of refusing became apparent to David.

If the public walkways and corridors were complicated, the private ones were byzantine by comparison. David was led to a small elevated office that opened from the higher level beside the coffee shop/restaurant and which gave an extensive if oblique view of the main concourse of the airport below them. There were several other policemen in the office, two of whom were wearing bulletproof vests. As he arrived, these two men left.

‘I'm Yu Jing,' the girl in blue said with a slight American
accent. ‘If there's anything you need…'

The quality of minders was certainly good in China
, David thought to himself.

As the two armoured policemen appeared in the concourse below him, David had the impression that he wasn't the object of interest to the police and he had just been got out of the way. It didn't take long to see why.

The two figures, one in the soulless black burka and the other in the more fashionable brown one, moved unhurriedly along the concourse, the black-clad woman supporting the other.

As the two women approached the central shopping area, clearly heading for the toilets, a sudden burst of movement distracted the watchers. The action was initially out of the direct view of the office.

‘Sir.'

Yu Jing shepherded David away from the window overlooking the concourse and out to the fringes of the coffee shop, to an area that looked down at the milling crowds not buying anything in and around the clutter of expensive European and American luxury-goods shops.

Why are they so keen for me to see what's going on?
David wondered.
Susie says I had to look, listen and then report. Factual, factual and factual
, he reminded himself.
Shit, there's a bunch of polizei out there with enough firepower to storm the Bastille and I have to watch while they arrest someone!

But watch he had to.

Mr Xu's man got his message to his boss the moment that the flight had landed and he had seen the two women emerge from the arrival gate. The woman in brown seemed to be being supported by her companion, which is what the man had been told to expect. The man's instructions were very clear. He needed to cause a diversion that would ensure that the two women didn't attract any attention.

Julie's initial nervousness diminished as they entered the airport building, but when she understood what it was that she had to do, her concerns started to return.

She need not have worried.

As Xu's man pocketed his mobile phone and moved into the body of the coffee shop and towards the stairs down to the increasingly packed shopping area, the circle of police still didn't know what they were looking for. Their own anxiety rose as the police commander realised that, if the diversion that he had been warned to look out for took place in this particular area, he would be in trouble. Two international flights had just landed, both with a considerable number of transit passengers, most of whom, like David Hutchinson, were foreigners; the risks in any incident were going to be enormous.

The scream and inevitable babble of staccato American voices alerted the police and attracted David's attention.

‘He's got a gun!'

Since none of the police officers in the immediate vicinity of Xu's man spoke English it was more the tone of the excited cry that alerted them.

A frightened circle of open space instantly formed where the man had been standing, but revealed nothing. The gunman had moved into one of the shops.

Entries to the shopping area were quickly blocked and the police herded the now excited and anxious crowd back into the central spine of the building. Stretching almost out of sight, the central area contained the moving walkways, the various lounges surrounding the departure gates, but also toilets and a range of advertising displays, the invariable paraphernalia of a busy airport.

‘Into the toilet, Alice!'

Unaware that a diversion was deliberately being created to provide her with cover, Julie nonetheless was quick to exploit the opportunity it presented. Correctly counting on the
attendant's curiosity taking her out into the open area around the toilets to see what the commotion was all about, Julie hurried Alice into one of the cubicles.

‘Not a word!'

Alice needed no admonition; she had been largely bereft of speech for the last couple of hours and moved more like an automaton than a person.

The burble of noise in the toilet told Julie that other people had taken refuge there, but the sounds soon became normal for such a place and she sensed that whatever had happened was no longer a course for concern.

The police had been attracted first by a muffled scream from the upmarket dress shop closest to the exits from the concourse and then by the surge of people fleeing from the premises.

The rapid flow of Mandarin from what seemed to be the manager of the shop caused the police to freeze and then to cautiously entered the trading area. The young Chinese girl found in a crumpled heap at the back of the store pointed mutely and in obvious terror to the service area and the back entrance. Xu's man was almost at his car before the police were able to follow and out of the car park by the time that they did.

Had she known that Mr Xu was planning this diversion, Julie might have counselled against it; but of course Xu knew full well that the European ethos of protecting the women and children first wouldn't apply and that she and Alice would be ignored rather than attract notice.

The flight to Shanghai, delayed by the brief hiatus at Hong Kong Airport, was full and the passengers rather subdued.

Whatever that was all about
, David thought once he was settled,
you have to admit that the police behaved much as the British police might have done
.