CHAPTER 41
Is that everything?” Old Cat asked, standing next to the table in the Meinhard storage room, hands locked on his waist. Neither Wo-li nor Mu-rong looked up from where they sat across from each other. They just nodded.
Between them lay bank records, spreadsheets, and notes that Jian-jun had retrieved from a safe anchored to the foundation in the basement of their mansion. Down the hallway and in the remaining buildings on the Meinhard property, workers were questioning other government officials and party members and factory managers-each now confessing who paid them, how much money, by what routes-not pleading for their lives, but truth-telling for them.
Faith glanced up from her notes. She didn’t believe that Wo-li and Mu-rong had disclosed everything, and the expression on Old Cat’s face told her that he didn’t believe they had either.
But she did believe something else: If what they had admitted to so far was confirmed by their records, every
U.S. corporation that had invested in Sichuan Province could be convicted of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S. and their officers convicted of bribery in China. She imagined the business elite of the Western world, men and women dressed in suits and handcuffs, lined up in front of courthouses in London, New York, Paris, Bonn, and Beijing and taken in bus caravans to prisons.
She flipped back through the pages, the mass of names and amounts. Two hundred million from RAID Technologies. A hundred million from Spectrum. A hundred million from Meinhard. Payments made to officials from Beijing to Chengdu and into accounts and shell companies from Hong Kong to the Bahamas to Zurich, to front companies in every world capital and in every offshore haven.
A shudder of dread shook through her. In the intensity of the last hours, her mind hadn’t broken free from the immediacy to realize that thousands of officials and company officers would kill to suppress what lay on the table and what was contained in her notes. Like the odor of the stale food on the table and the old sweat stained into their clothes and the generator oil soaked into the concrete floor, she’d been too enveloped in it. Now she could see that the trails starting from these records would eventually implicate the entire Chinese government and its corporate elite.
Her eyes fell on her notes about RAID and she knew what Graham would’ve done next: followed the RAID money back to its Hong Kong account, then out to all the other Chinese officials they’d kicked money up and down to.
A fist rapped on the door.
Old Cat grabbed the documents, dropped them into a cardboard box at his feet, and folded the lid closed.
The man he’d whispered to before the start of the people’s court hearing entered. He fixed his eyes first on Wo-li, then on Mu-rong. Finally he looked up at Old Cat.
“Have they cooperated? “ the man asked.
Old Cat nodded. “But we’ll need another forty-eight hours to examine their documents to verify what they’ve told us.”
Wo-li and Mu-rong both slumped as though to say they couldn’t endure another two days of questioning.
Unless it was an act, Faith thought, they didn’t seem to realize that Old Cat had just told them that he’d decided to let them escape.
“Tell the people to return to their homes,” Old Cat said. “There’s nothing for them to do until we call them back for the trial.”
Mu-rong’s hands flew to her face. Moments later, sobs emerged from behind them.
Old Cat’s arm shot out and he backhanded her. Her head snapped to the side.
“Shut up,” Old Cat said. “The time to cry was when the hospital collapsed.”
Faith pushed herself to her feet. Old Cat turned toward her, facing away from the man, a slight shake of the head telling her that though the violence was real, it was a performance to convince the audience of one standing at the door that justice would be done.
Mu-rong’s sobbing stopped.
Faith sat down and lowered her head, acting as though she’d been reprimanded and as though she feared that he’d slap her next.
Old Cat looked back at the man, then said, “Go.”
The man nodded and turned away.
“Wait,” Old Cat said, “let me have your gun.”
The man turned back and handed Old Cat the semiautomatic that was stuck between his belt and pants.
“One more outburst like that,” Old Cat said, “and I may finish her off myself.”
Faith tensed. The words hadn’t sounded at all like a performance.
CHAPTER 42
What the devil is the Chinese army doing?” Vice President Cooper Wallace asked the CIA director. “Are they going to stand by while those criminals destroy every American asset in Central China?”
Wallace’s coffee had turned cold in the study of his Naval Observatory home as he’d inspected dozens of satellite images of the burned-out Spectrum distribution center in Chengdu, and farther south in Chongqing and Guiyang, and even farther south in Kunming. Other photos showed incinerated Meinhard plants and RAID factories and branches of German and French and Taiwanese companies, the smoke from the ruins hovering like patches of fog over the crosshatch of roads and buildings in the special economic zones.
CIA Director John Casher slid a DVD across the desk and pointed at the vice president’s laptop. Wallace pressed it into the drive.
Casher waited until the video activated, then said, “These shots were taken outside of a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party.”
Wallace’s eyes jerked from the screen to Casher.
“How did you-“
The director waved his hand. “It’s not important. What is, is that you see three old guard PLA generals walking inside. The last of the true believers.”
“What does it mean? “
“We think it means that the army, or at least part of it, is taking the position that the rebellion in Central China should be allowed to run its course.” Casher pointed at the computer. “During the 1950s, when these men were young, Mao staged what was called the Hundred Flowers Campaign.”
Wallace nodded. “I read about it in college. Let a hundred flowers bloom-and then Mao snipped them off one after another.”
“Exactly. What’s happening now is that workers, laborers, and farmers are identifying and rounding up corrupt officials. And it seems as though the army wants those flowers to bloom.”
“Are the flowers the rebels or the officials?”
“Both. But our intelligence is telling us that the army is most focused on making an example of some of the officials and on having it happen in the outlying provinces where it can be contained. When the time comes, they’ll crush the rebellion before it spreads to Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou where it might spin out of control.”
Wallace remembered something else from his Asian history course.
“It could just as easily spread like a wildfire and we’d have another Cultural Revolution that would bring their economy to a halt.” Wallace pointed toward the window. “And ours too. Eighty percent of our suppliers are in China. Store shelves will be empty in a matter of days. Car assembly lines will stop moving. A million empty containers will stack up at our ports with nowhere to go.”
