God's Double Agent (31 page)

“Goodbye, Father,” I said, choking on the word. I looked down at my shoes so he wouldn’t detect my emotion. My dad looked up at me, smiled, and said, “I’ll see you at the Spring Festival, won’t I?”

I could only nod, knowing my voice would certainly betray me. Then I watched as the train disappeared down the tracks. Once we got back into our apartment, however, I steeled my emotions and discussed our escape plan.

“I need to jump,” I said.

“From our window?” Heidi gasped.

“No,” I assured her. “I’ll go down as many floors as possible, and jump into that bushy area of the landscaping. Those shrubs might break my fall.”

“You’re betting your life on a lazy gardener?”

Our goal was to get out of Beijing without being detected by the police, which meant we needed to split up. After much deliberation, we decided Heidi could disguise herself and simply walk out of the building late one night. We got a scarf, a hat, and a different style of clothing. Heidi worked on walking with a different gait. It was definitely a risk. But we hoped they wouldn’t necessarily notice a single woman going out for a late stroll. After all, they normally saw us together.

At midnight, she walked into the room with her floppy hat and different clothes. “It’s time.” We said a quick prayer together before she walked out of the apartment. The only items she carried were the little address book and a collection of business cards we’d collected from our Christian friends and acquaintances, tucked into her pocket. A suitcase or bag would arouse
the officers’ suspicions. When the door shut behind her, I didn’t have much time. If her disguise didn’t work, the officers would apprehend her and then come to the sixth floor to arrest me.

But I wouldn’t be on the sixth floor. Heidi had the idea of leaving our apartment lights on, so the security watching from the street would think we were having a late night before bed. I made it to the second-floor restroom windowsill and jumped.

I’m not sure how long I was out, but I was surprised when I woke up in a mound of vegetation next to my apartment building. My face tingled and my body ached, but I seemed to be all in one piece. When I opened my eyes, however, everything was blurry, like a Van Gogh painting. I momentarily thought the fall had damaged my eyesight until I realized my glasses must’ve fallen off during the drop.

It is so hard to be a political dissident with bad vision
, I thought as I painfully lifted myself out of the shrubbery and crawled around on my hands and knees, feeling for my glasses.
First I get beat up in prison because I can’t see the guards, and now this?
I looked back up to the window from which I had jumped, and calculated that the glasses had to be within a certain radius of where I fell. However, the grass was so tall it hit me in the face as I crawled through it, feeling around, hoping my fingers would land on something . . . Aha!

I almost broke into tears when I realized I’d found the proverbial needle in the haystack. Then I got up, put on my glasses, dusted myself off, and headed out to meet Heidi and face the rest of my life on the run.

“Two tickets, please,” I said, sliding some of our last bit of money through the slot. Heidi and I had met at a prearranged rendezvous point on the street, hailed a cab, and headed to the train station.

“We did it,” I said to Heidi, as we boarded the train.

Though we didn’t speak much on that train ride, the motion of the car on the tracks was pleasantly lulling to our troubled souls. Heidi closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, but I was wide awake. I kept thinking about my dad, our little apartment, and—believe it or not—our television, washer, and refrigerator we’d left, which had taken us so long to purchase. But mainly, I wondered what the police would do to my family once they realized we were gone. With every stop, I watched the doors open and close. No agents jumped on to apprehend us. Rather, the train lazily meandered from location to location until we stopped at our destination.

We emerged from the train and inhaled the fresh air of the country. It was both liberating and unnerving to step out of the car without any bags or money.

“Do you think anyone followed us?” Heidi asked.

“If they had, we wouldn’t have made it this far,” I assured her, as I looked around to figure out how to get to our next destination. Our plan, for lack of a better one, was to stay in the home of a high-ranking police officer who had secretly become a Christian. We’d never met him. “Ready to go?”

She looked at me with exhausted eyes. “What if he turns us in?”

“What choice do we have?”

I’m a bit like my father in that I put my trust in people easily. However, I really believed I could rely on the officer not to turn us in, because he was a believer. Whenever I came across another Christian, I felt an inexplicably deep connection and loyalty. After all, we belonged to the same family! In China, if someone professed Jesus, he was doing so at great cost. Though I couldn’t be totally sure of this officer’s sincerity, we really had no other choice. We showed up at the family’s back door and were quickly ushered in. And with that simple gesture of hospitality, they were guilty of the crime of harboring fugitives.

“You can stay here,” the wife motioned to a nice bed they’d
set up for us in the corner of their home. They also gave us food and even helped arrange a medical check-up for Heidi. Otherwise, we stayed indoors, slept a great deal, and tried to figure out what to do next.

“I have an idea how you can have a normal life and make a living here,” our host said to me one day.

“I’m listening.”

“McDonald’s,” he said.

“You want me to work at a McDonald’s?”

“No, I want you to operate one!” The largest McDonald’s in the world opened near Tiananmen Square in 1992. With seven hundred seats, it had served forty thousand customers on opening day and captured the imaginations of Chinese citizens as a symbol of American entrepreneurship. With their limited menu, spotless restaurants, and equal seating, the restaurant chain even emanated a spirit of democracy. Everyone, regardless of social status, was served there. “Let’s open a McDonald’s here. I could own it and you could run it, since you know English so well. You and Heidi could make a nice life for yourselves here, far from the eyes of the Beijing police.”

He didn’t know it, but I’d always wanted to open a restaurant. When I was in college, I read Lee Iacocca’s biography late into the night, dreaming of starting a restaurant that incorporated his ideas of customer service. “That’s a wild idea,” I said. “But I’d love it!”

Within minutes, we dialed the number of the headquarters of McDonald’s in Hong Kong.

“I’d like information on starting a McDonald’s in my area.”

“Where are you located?” She put me on hold as she looked up our area, then came back and said, “I’m sorry. Your city is not big enough to be a lucrative location for our franchise. All of the large Chinese cities are in queue for our restaurants, and it’ll be another ten years before your location can sustain one.”

I hung up the phone. We thought all we had to do was to
receive permission to start a restaurant and hang up a homemade sign with the golden arches. We didn’t know we’d have to put down at least a hundred thousand dollars to rent the building from the corporation, or purchase the food through their headquarters. Ironically, I didn’t even have enough money to buy a Big Mac.

The next day, we said goodbye to our lovely new friends who’d risked their lives for us. We’d stayed there two weeks, and it was time to move to the next location. From then on, we moved every three days, relying on the kindness of members of the underground church to sustain us. Occasionally, we were able to get chilling reports from our friends back home. The Beijing police were combing the city looking for us. They called our friends and said, “Have you seen Bob and Heidi? We want to help them and give them amnesty for their crimes, but we can’t find them.”

My friends always responded as we’d planned. “Oh, they’re just visiting family.”

That deflection meant the Beijing police were in constant contact with the local police in the villages of my dad and Heidi’s parents. We got reports they’d gotten pretty rough with our parents, but had relented when they realized our parents really didn’t have any information.

“I just want to live a normal life,” Heidi said in exasperation. We’d moved every three days for weeks. “I want a place where our child can be free to play in the yard and go to school. Somewhere we won’t have to constantly watch our backs.” My heart ached for my family’s situation. As long as we lived in China, we’d live in fear. But there was no way to cross the border without passports and there was no way to get passports without getting rearrested.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Do you remember when we met Craig at church, and he asked us to reach out to that new Christian man to disciple him, the one who worked in a travel firm?”

Craig was the Australian missionary who’d tried to connect us with others to make sure new Christians received good teaching, theology, and support. “I think he handed us the man’s business card,” I said, sheepishly remembering that I had never followed up on his request. I retrieved the stash of cards we’d carried all the way from Beijing and began to flip through them. I found one with the man’s name in foil lettering.

“Maybe we should call him and get advice about getting passports and leaving the country.”

“Do you think he’d remember that Craig told him about us?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “But if I could get him on the phone, perhaps I could discreetly jog his memory.” I flipped the card back over to its front and dialed his number.

“Hello, is this Zhang Shaoping?” In China, people don’t ask for people by name unless they’re very good friends. However, I wanted to give the impression of familiarity.

“No,” a man answered. “This is his assistant. Do you know our director? Mr. Zhang’s out of the office right now, but what can I do for you?”

Suddenly, I realized the man we’d met in Beijing was the head of the entire agency.

“Yes,” I said slowly, trying to figure out the best way to handle this new information. “My wife and I want to travel overseas. Can you help us?”

“Of course, sir,” he responded. “That, after all, is our business. All you have to do is send me your identification and your passports and I can get you wherever you need to go.”

“We don’t actually have passports yet,” I responded. I couldn’t explain my situation, which is why I’d hoped to speak to Mr. Zhang directly.

“No problem,” he said, very happily. “All you have to do is apply through your work unit.”

“Well, there’s a complication,” I said, thinking of a plausible story, while twirling the cord of the phone between my fingers.
“I’m a teacher at the Communist Party School, so I can’t leave the country without permission from my school. But if I ask for permission, my co-workers at school will be jealous we’re traveling abroad.”

The assistant chuckled a bit. For one moment, there was an awkward silence, and I knew I was overreaching. I was just about to make up an excuse to get off the phone, when the assistant said something that would change the course of our lives.

“Well, since you know my boss, I can do you a favor,” he said. “Let me help you apply for a passport. Can you send over photos of you and your wife? Also, would you like to take a tour? We have a nice one here that will take you to Bangkok and then Hong Kong.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said, trying to maintain a steady voice. If we could get to Hong Kong, then under British rule, we could apply for asylum in the United States as religious refugees.

The assistant paused and said, “The total cost will be 24,000 yuan.”

He might as well have asked me to jump on a rocket to collect moon dust, but I assured him I’d send the money. The only person I knew with access to cash was Zhuohua Cai, since he printed so many Bibles illegally. For days, I tried to track him down.

“Cai,” I said, when I finally got in touch with him. “Where have you been?”

“Me? Where have
you
been?” Apparently, he’d been walking to our apartment back in July but arrived just in time to see me being pushed into a car by the police. “I took off and have been running ever since!”

“Any chance you have any money you could send me?” I asked.

“Would three thousand American dollars help?” he asked. “Remember that lady who showed up out of the blue asking us to print thousands of Bible handbooks? She said she was a friend of Craig’s? Well, we began her printing job, but she never
came back to pay the rest of the deposit. I’ve been keeping her three thousand American dollars ever since.”

At that time, the conversion rate between the US dollar to the Chinese yuan was one to eight, which meant we had 24,000 yuan . . . precisely how much I owed the travel agency.

We were getting closer, but the agency still had to verify my employment to get my passport, a strictly enforced regulation. When we got a call from our travel agent, however, he said, “Everything’s set up. You should be getting your passports in the mail. Have a great vacation!”