Wells turned right, toward the banner, where the police had opened a path for any tourists brave or dumb enough to come to the Forbidden City today. An archway cut through the outer palace wall, directly under the portrait of Mao. This was the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the palace complex.
And as Wells walked through the gate, it lived up to its name. The crackle of the Tiananmen loudspeakers faded away. “Open?” Wells asked the sweet-faced girl inside the ticket booth. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But she nodded.
As she handed him a ticket, a man grabbed his elbow. “You American? I student. Beijing University. Name is Sun.”
“Sure you are,” Wells said. Cops looked the same everywhere. This guy could have been the brother of the cabbie Wells had ditched two hours before. His shoes — black lace-up boots — were polished. Had any student anywhere ever polished his shoes?
“I take you,” Sun said. “Practice my English. Free.”
“I’ll pass. I’m kind of antisocial.” Wells held up the audio guide, which, weirdly, was narrated by Roger Moore. “Besides, I got the tour and everything.”
Wells handed over his ticket to the guard and walked through the front entrance. When he looked back, he wasn’t surprised to see Sun about a hundred feet behind, conspicuously tailing him. What would Jim Wilson do? Wells turned around.
“This is my only day sightseeing and I don’t know why you’re bothering me.”
“Not bothering,” Sun said. “Just watching out. Not good day for American here.”
“So I’m told.”
But Wells decided not to argue further. It was only 9:45 A.M., and the meet was supposed to be at noon, so he had two hours to lose this guy. He wandered through the palace, doing his best impression of a half-bored, half-awed American tourist. Which wasn’t difficult. The Forbidden City wasn’t a European-style palace like Versailles, a mansion filled with decorated rooms. Instead, the complex consisted of empty courtyards divided by ceremonial halls. The Hall of Complete Harmony. The Hall of Preserving Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony. The emperors had been big on harmony. They wouldn’t have been happy today, Wells thought.
To the north, the inner palace held the emperor’s living quarters, elaborately carved wooden pavilions, painted deep red to symbolize the emperor’s power. The average Chinese had been barred from the complex on pain of death — hence the palace’s name. But over the years, the palace had been ransacked so many times that today its buildings were mostly empty. Without Roger Moore to guide him, Wells wouldn’t have known what he was seeing.
Besides the audio tour, he’d brought his own pocket-sized guide to the Forbidden City. He thumbed through it as Sun trailed behind, the world’s slowest chase. Wells shooed him off a couple times, to no effect. The complex got slightly busier as the morning went on. At 11:00, a dozen nervous-looking American tourists walked past, watched by two bored police officers. Wells guessed they’d come through the palace’s northern gate, not the Tiananmen entrance. He wondered what they were making of this. Joe and Phyllis from Sacramento probably hadn’t expected war when they signed up for seven nights in China.
Finally, at 11:45, in the northwestern corner of the palace complex, where narrow cobblestone corridors connected irregularly shaped courtyards, Wells found a way to lose Sun. He reminded himself not to run.
Wells ducked through a group of Japanese sightse ers and into a wooden pavilion housing a display of court costumes. As the Japanese clustered at the entrance, blocking Sun for a precious few seconds, Wells jogged through the pavilion and hopped over a railing into an alley, then sprinted along the side of the building. Thirty yards down, the building ended and the alley formed a T-intersection with another pathway. Wells swung right, ran a few feet along the pavilion, then hopped over another railing and back inside the building.
He flattened himself against a display case and peeked out. Sun reached the intersection, panting. He twisted left and right, looking for Wells. Finally he trotted left, toward the center of the complex. Perfect. Wells waited a few seconds more, then walked out the pavilion’s front entrance. He felt as though he’d rid himself of a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. Losing Sun wouldn’t matter if the cops were watching the meeting site, but Wells was glad to be rid of the guy anyway.
He made his way into the palace’s northeast corner, a quiet area filled with narrow pavilions and gardens. Over the years, emperors had competed to build the most beautiful spaces, adding narrow cypress trees whose bodies twisted like flames and the Buddhist rock gardens more common in Japan. The meeting with Cao was supposed to happen in a garden famous for a sculpted piece of rock known as “The Stone That Looks Like Wood.” All morning Wells had wondered if he’d recognize it. But when he stepped into the garden where the stone stood, he knew he was in the right place.
Unfortunately, the stone wasn’t the reason.
Until now, Wells had seen no Chinese tourists in the palace today. Understandable, considering the protests in Tiananmen. But this garden was the exception. Five Chinese had decided it was a perfect place to relax. A young couple sat side by side on a bench, holding hands. Three men in their early twenties sketched a cypress tree, their hands flying over their pads.
Maybe Cao had been set up too. Or maybe Shafer and Exley had been right all along, and Cao was part of the trap. But the bad guys knew about the meeting for sure. Somewhere nearby a squad of secret police was waiting to arrest him.
Wells kept walking. Turning and running wouldn’t help. He had nowhere to go. He might as well see who showed up. He stopped beside the stone that looked like wood. It did, too, like a piece of flotsam sculpted smooth by waves. Wells checked his watch—12:00. In a minute, or two, he would walk on, casually, leave the garden. Then—
“Hey, mister!” A kid scuffled into the garden, waving at him.
Per Cao’s instructions, Wells was wearing a green T-shirt, the contact signal. The kid, also wearing a green shirt, walked over. “Mr. Green,” he said.
“Is this a joke?” Wells couldn’t help himself. Was this part of the setup? Why didn’t they just arrest him?
“You Mr. Green, right? I meet you at stone like wood.” The kid seemed to be enjoying himself. “I know code word,” he said.
Somewhere over the walls of the courtyard, a man shouted in Chinese. The students dropped their sketch pads and walked toward him.
“Tell me,” Wells said.
“Ghost.”
“You’re crazy, kid.”
“For you.” The kid reached into his pocket for a package hardly bigger than a pack of Juicy Fruit. A flash drive. He handed it to Wells and ran away. He didn’t get far. The students grabbed him roughly. Then footsteps clattered behind Wells.
He turned to see two men, the biggest Chinese he’d ever seen, as tall and muscular as NBA power forwards. They reached for him, wrapped their meaty hands around him. He didn’t try to fight. Another man followed. And as the power forwards twisted Wells’s arms behind his back, the third man reached into his pocket for a black canvas hood.
“Wait—” Wells said. But the world went black, and around his neck the string drew tight.
31
THE DARK BLUE BUOY, about the size of a basketball, popped to the surface of the East China Sea and fired an electronic burst into the atmosphere. A fraction of a second later, the
