“What time is it there?”
“Two A.M. But I’m wide awake. Jet lag. Is anything happening? Anything I should know about?” This would be her only chance to tell him if his cover was blown.
“No. The kids are fine. Everyone misses you.” An all-clear, or as close as he would get.
“Tell them I miss them too. How’s my niece?”
“Still hasn’t called. Your brother’s worried sick.” So the mole was still gone.
“Well, tell him not to worry. Listen, honey, this call’s costing a fortune, so… I just wanted to check in, say I love you.”
“I love you too, honey. Stay safe, huh? You’re on your own this time.” A reference to the way she’d saved him in New York. Her voice cracked, and before he could say anything else, she hung up.
30
“SIR.” THE CONCIERGE, A SMALL MAN in a three-button suit, waved frantically as Wells strode toward the St. Regis’s front door. “Good morning, sir. A moment, please. We are asked to give this to our American guests.”
The concierge handed Wells a paper embossed with the State Department’s logo and headlined “Notice to Americans.”
“Maybe you stay in the hotel today, sir,” the concierge said.
“And miss my chance to see Beijing?”
“WHERE TO, SIR?”
“Tiananmen Square.”
The St. Regis doorman looked unhappy. “No cars in Tiananmen today, sir.”
“Just have him get as close as he can. I want to see the Forbidden City”—the former Chinese imperial palace, north of Tiananmen. “Forbidden City is open, right?” It better be, Wells thought. He was supposed to meet Cao Se there.
“Yes.” The doorman waved a taxi forward, but his frown didn’t disappear, not even after he palmed Wells’s tip.
Wells wasn’t surprised to see that the cabbie had a soldier’s close-cropped hair. Everyone who left the St. Regis today would be watched. He’d have to assume that Cao had planned for the surveillance. Trying too hard to ditch his watchers would only draw more attention. Though if he could lose them without seeming to work at it, he would.
“So what do you think about this mess?” Wells said to the cabbie. “I think we’ll work it out. In two years it’ll be like it never happened.” Jim Wilson was an optimist. Wells wasn’t so sure.
“No English.”
“Oh. Not that many Chinese speak English, I’m noticing. Course, I don’t speak any Chinese, so there it is. The language of the future, everyone says.” The driver just shrugged.
As they moved west toward Tiananmen, the traf fic slowed to a standstill. Ahead the road was blocked and police were diverting cars off the avenue. Around them a steady flow of Chinese walked west. Wells saw his chance. He handed a hundred-yuan note to the driver and popped out, ignoring the cabbie’s sputtering.
Wells picked his way through the soot-belching trucks, packed minibuses, and shiny black Mercedes limousines jammed together on the wide avenue. The sweet smell of benzene mixed with the stink of unburned diesel. He joined the Chinese heading west on the sidewalk, following the human current toward Tiananmen, and peeked back at the cab. The driver had a radio to his mouth, no doubt warning other agents to watch for Wells. Which wouldn’t be easy in this crowd. Mostly men, they had the same buoyant mood he’d sensed the day before. They waved Chinese flags and didn’t seem to mind having Wells among them. Two men traded a camera back and forth, snapping pictures, holding their hands high in a V-for-victory salute. Though Wells knew from his years in Afghanistan that under the wrong circumstances a crowd like this could become a mob in seconds.
He felt a tug on his elbow. “American?” A tall man in a fraying blue sweatshirt pointed an angry finger at him.
“Canada,” Wells said. No need to start a riot. He was taking enough risks today. His questioner pushed by and was swallowed in the crowd. After the next intersection the road was clear. Men surged onto the pavement. Police clustered around cruisers and paddy wagons, watching for trouble but not interfering with the flow.
Farther on, a herd of television trucks sat close together, Chinese channels that Wells didn’t recognize, along with CNN, Fox, BBC, NHK.
For ordinary Chinese — and their rulers — this moment had to be thrilling and frightening, Wells thought. Every person in this crowd was both a spectator and a participant in the action. They wanted to remind the world, and themselves, of that most easily forgotten fact: that they existed. Wells half expected to see Gadsden flags — the yellow banners flown by colonists during the Revolutionary War, emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The crowd was delivering that message to America. But their rulers in Zhongnanhai would have to hear it too.
And yet… after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, ordinary Chinese had given up politics and focused on the economy. Maybe this demonstration, big as it was, would be forgotten in a few weeks. Or maybe—
“Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Wells murmured. He’d been in China not even twenty-four hours, didn’t speak the language, and now was forecasting the country’s future. Classic American arrogance. He ought to spend less time making predictions, more time figuring out if anyone was watching him.
PAST THE TELEVISION TRUCKS, the crowd quickened. They were close now. Just ahead the avenue opened into Tiananmen like a river pouring into a lake, and Wells saw the astonishing breadth of the square. He’d expected something like the Washington Mall. A manicured space, carefully maintained. Instead Tiananmen was a fixer-upper, a hole in the middle of a giant city, all the more powerful for its rawness.
From its northeast corner, where Wells had walked in, Tiananmen stretched south a half-mile, west a quarter-mile. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City marked its north side. The hall housing Mao’s body sat in the southern half of the square, behind a tall granite obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument.
As Wells oriented himself, protesters flooded by, joining the hundreds of thousands of people already huddled in the center of Tiananmen. Shouts came in bursts from the loudspeakers around the square. Warnings or exhortations to the crowd? Wells didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know today. All his life he’d felt privileged, and sometimes cursed, by what he’d been allowed to see. But he had never, not even on his first day in Afghanistan, been so much of an outsider. He was in the eye of a human hurricane, watching a maelstrom whose physics were beyond his understanding, a force of nature uninterested in him, yet with the power to tear him apart.
THE SECURITY FORCES HAD LEFT the center of Tiananmen to the protesters. But at the northwest corner, where an avenue led toward the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, a green wall of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder before a phalanx of armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more soldiers blocked the entrance to the Forbidden City, where a giant banner of Mao hung from the outer wall of the palace.
