Flags of Sin (5 page)

“Get
up!” ordered one of them.

She
stood slowly, keeping her head bowed.

“What is
your business here?” demanded the man directly in front of her.

Her
mouth was dry, her tongue like withered reeds. She mumbled.

“Speak
up, woman!”

“Do you
have any food for a poor woman and her child?” she asked, her voice barely a
whisper.

The man
reached forward and grabbed her by the chin, pushing her head up. She caught a
glimpse of Yu further down the street, stopped, but not facing her. The man’s
eyes looked at her in disgust, then down at the baby.

“You’re
both filthy! As a mother you should be ashamed!”

She
dropped her head as soon as he let go, and bowed profusely. “Your words are too
true, too true,” she repeated, again in the hoarse whisper.

“You
disgust me,” he said, spitting at her feet, then stepping around her. “Let’s
go, these aren’t the ones we’re looking for.”

She
began to breathe a sigh of relief when a hand tapped her on the shoulder and
she nearly screamed. She spun her head around and saw an outstretched hand. It
contained several scarred coins.

“Take them,
you need them more than I do.”

She
stretched out her hand, and her heart nearly stopped as she saw how much it
shook. The coins were deposited in her palm, then the soldier closed her hand
around them lest they should fall onto the road.

“Now
go.”

She
stood frozen, unable to move. She felt his hand on her shoulder. It squeezed
gently. She looked up. Her jaw dropped as she recognized the young man in front
of her as a soldier she had seen many times in the Empress Dowager’s court.

He
smiled at her.

“Go,
Mei, and save our future emperor.”

National Stadium, Beijing, China

One Week Ago

Chris looked up at the massive structure, his mouth agape. “It’s
incredible!” he exclaimed. He looked down at his much shorter wife, who too was
staring at the combination of glass and metal towering above them. “You can see
why they called it the Bird Cage.”

Anne-Marie
nodded. “Reminds me of that nest above our door that bird kept trying to build
last year.”

Chris
chuckled at the memory. “I think I had to clean that out every day for almost a
month. Persistent little bugger.” His experienced eye took in every square inch
of the structure it could manage. An architect himself, he had just finished
his involvement with the Freedom Tower in New York City, and as a reward, he
and his wife decided to fulfill a lifelong dream—visit China.

It was a
blowout, four week vacation, where he wasn’t skimping on anything. The downturn
hadn’t hit them at all, his work secure due to the project he was on, and
though he felt some sympathy for those actually losing their jobs, he felt little
sympathy for those losing their homes due to having taken on ridiculous
mortgages.

Think
people! How can you earn forty-k a year and expect to afford a four-hundred-k
home?

As an
architect, he was always floored at how much square-footage the average American
thought they needed to live comfortably. Every year the average seemed to go
up, the footprint getting larger and larger as each new-home season began. He
thought of the homes he had seen last year in Europe when travelling on
business. These were well-off people, living in half of what an American would
find acceptable, yet perfectly content.

And
we wonder why it all collapsed.

A
massive Ponzi-scheme, funded by the average person, who trusted the experts
advising them.
Don’t worry, just pay the interest now, and when the balloon
comes due, your house value will have risen so much, you can just flip it and
double your money.

Chris
frowned.
Yeah, and what happens when someone wises up?
But he knew the
answer. The bubble bursts, and the very people who gave the bad advice, not out
of the desire to improve their customers’ lives, but to line their own pockets,
get bailed out by the very taxpayers they bilked.

He
understood the anger of the Occupy protestors, but their anger was directed at
the wrong people, at least it was after the first couple of weeks. Once the
unions and politicos got involved, the protesters were merely pawns, their
message manipulated by experts without them even knowing it.

One
thing the kids protesting didn’t get was that they were most likely part of the
one percent. This was the fault of a society so successful until the Great
Recession the kids had no way of knowing how good they have it compared to most
of the world’s population. There are almost two hundred countries in the world,
and less than a couple of dozen actually have any significant immigration.

It’s
so bad out there, despite all of
our
problems,
they still want to come here.

When the
daily wage for eighty percent of the world is under ten dollars, food is a
constant struggle and personal safety is a daily concern. The average American
salary of over $30k per year is an unimaginable dream that the Occupy
protesters apparently feel isn’t enough for the common man. Laughable.

Protesting
against bailouts, he agreed with. You never throw good money after bad. Auto
bailouts? Never should have happened. He firmly believed that those that
couldn’t survive, should have been allowed to fail. The proof was Ford. A rock
solid American company now, but not always. It had had its difficult days, but
made the proper decisions years before the recession hit, reducing costs,
improving their product, and when the buckets of cash were offered, they were
able to turn them down.

And the
naïve notion that if they weren’t bailed out, hundreds of thousands of jobs
would be lost, was ridiculous. He knew enough about supply and demand to know
that for one thing, the millions of cars produced by GM and Chrysler would
still be needed. It wasn’t like millions of Americans were ready to just stop
driving because there were no cars to buy, and second, other companies would
have swooped in to fill the demand, and the only way to quickly fill the
demand, is to keep those factories open, with the existing workers. Would those
workers have been forced to accept a more reasonable wage and benefits package?
Absolutely, but when your workers are getting free weekly Viagra handouts,
perhaps your union has run out of reasonable things to demand.

He
understood the need for unions years ago. It was the unions who helped bring in
decent salaries, five day workweeks, forty hour workweeks, benefit packages.
But now they had lost their way. The laws were now in place to protect workers from
the very things they had formed unions to gain protection from. It is now against
the law to force someone to work more than forty hours, to put them in
dangerous situations, to not give them time off. Would some employers take
advantage of workers if there was no union? Absolutely. But with the vast
majority of Americans not unionized, if this were a real concern, wouldn’t they
all be up in arms?

Unions
helped make America great, but now some were destroying it by becoming
politicized and forgetting their real role. Manufacturers were fleeing the
country to build the wares Americans demanded, fleeing to countries with far
cheaper labor. Did he agree with the ridiculously low wages paid to these
workers? Of course not, but it was an economic reality that America had to wake
up to. A unionized bus driver shouldn’t be getting nearly six figures with
overtime, when a researcher in a lab, working on the cure for cancer, who spent
seven years in university, but isn’t unionized, makes less.

And is
perfectly happy with what he makes.

He stared
at the incredible feat of engineering in front of them and wondered how much it
cost to build, and how much it would have been in America. What he had seen in
his first two weeks in China had been breathtaking. The progress they were
making was incredible. This was where the unions were needed. He wasn’t blind
to the fact the population was poor, and those building the infrastructure were
paid a pittance, but he also wasn’t blind to the fact that this economic
progress had created a burgeoning middleclass that would soon rival that of
America.

And
if we don’t get our act together, it will be a Chinese flag planted on the moon
or Mars, orbiting in space, or on the soil of the very countries we have vowed
to protect.

He
shuddered to think of what would happen when China had a blue water navy that
could rival our own. Their first aircraft carrier was in testing, a second was
being built. Their first stealth fighters were already flying, and with no
qualms of stealing any and all industrial and state secrets, with no
repercussions because we needed them to buy our treasury bonds due to our
massive deficit, there was little we could do to stop them.

And the
next Bird Cage would continue to be built.

I
just hope democracy catches on here before it’s too late.

He felt
a tug on his hand and he looked down at Anne-Marie. “Sorry, Hon, lost in
thought.”

She
smiled. “I recognized that distant stare. Let me guess, wondering about how
much this would have cost to build back home?”

A smile
stretched across his face as he laughed. “My God, you know me waaay too well.”

She motioned
with her head. “Let’s go. There’s lots more I want to s—”

It was
as if she had been grabbed by the back and torn from his hand. Her arms and
legs seemed to remain in place for a split second, then her entire body was
shoved thirty feet from where he stood as a snapping sound he didn’t recognize
echoed through the park.

“Anne-Marie!”

He
turned, pushing his legs as hard as he could, trying to close the distance
between them. A moment later he saw the prone figure of his wife jerk, and
shoot back another ten feet, but this time something was different. As he
closed the distance, it took a few seconds for his mind to comprehend the
horror it was witnessing.

His
wife’s body had been torn in two pieces.

Her
waist and legs were nearest, her upper torso, including arms and head, were
another ten feet distant. His realization of this sent bile spewing from his
mouth as he felt a terrific force slam into his back, then heard another
snapping sound as he was sent sprawling forward. He hit the ground hard, then
rolled several times before coming to rest beside the upper half of his wife’s
body.

There
was no pain. No feeling whatsoever. No sensations. Just the dead stare he saw
on his beloved’s face, the same stare all he too could manage as he felt the
life drain from him.

His last
sensation was that of a single tear rolling across the bridge of his nose, then
dripping onto the ground.

I
love you.

Outside the Forbidden City, Beijing,
China

January 13, 1875

Li Mei rubbed at the mud that had now hardened on her face. Then she
stopped herself. It was a disguise that had worked once, and she may not have a
chance to replace it should it be necessary.

But
the little one.

If the
Emperor saw his son, how his face was soiled with common street grime, he would
most definitely be horrified, and whoever had let his son get in such a state
would most definitely be put to death. Or at least cast out of the palace with
nothing but shame on their family name.

But he
was dead. She was sure of it. She was certain she had heard his cries as he was
murdered by the traitorous troops loyal to the Emperor’s “doting” mother, the
Empress Dowager Cixi.

Mei had
been in the next room when they had fought. It was plain to everyone from the
beginning that there was no love shared between the eighteen year old emperor,
and his mother. Her child being a boy meant continued power. Having usurped the
regents appointed to rule in his stead until he was old enough, she was the
true power until he had come of age, and even then, had continued to be the
iron fist behind the young man.

But when
he had a son, it had all changed. He had begun to assert himself, to overturn
some of her rulings, to push back against some of her mad philosophies.

And she
would have none of it.

Mei had cowered
in the next room when the Empress Dowager had her final fight with the Emperor.
But her style wasn’t to yell. It was to talk at a near murmur, barely audible
to those not close to her. Her voice, old, gravelly, to the point she almost
sounded like her late husband should, sent fear through those around her. And
that fateful evening, when Mei was in the side chamber washing the baby in
preparation for a visit with his father, she had heard the Emperor’s side of
the conversation, increasingly agitated and angry, but consistently answered by
the low, sotto voce of the Empress Dowager.

Until
her final line, delivered louder than Mei had ever heard her speak. It wasn’t a
yell by any means, merely a line spoken at a volume most would consider normal,
but from her, it was chillingly ominous.

“Never
doubt, my son, that you can be replaced.”

He had
yelled after her, demanding she explain herself, but she had left. When Mei had
entered the room with the baby shortly thereafter, she found the Emperor
perched on the edge of his favorite chair, his head held in his hands with a
distant, vacant stare that bore through time as he apparently recalled the
conversation.

He held
a hand up at her as she approached, and she stopped, bowing low. He snapped his
fingers at one of the aides. The man jumped several inches, running to his
Emperor, bowing deeply.

“Get Us
the Captain of the Guard.”