The Interior (Red Princess 2)

“Maybe because Sun was an orphan, maybe because it was his homeland, he stood firm. We crouched together and he mapped out a plan. He brought me into it, because I knew the caves better than he did. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. If we were going to make our move, it had to be now. Well, you can guess the rest. We made it. Sun saved my life.”

“You’re not getting off that easily,” David said.

Henry looked over at Hulan. She too looked at him expectantly.

“Just as Sun planned, we dropped down over the top of the cliff with ropes and swung right into those caves like we were a couple of Tarzans. The Japanese were surprised, but ready enough. It was a classic hand-to-hand fight. We were outnumbered, but not as badly as I thought. There were only eight men up there. I don’t know how many were down below on the mountain. We were out of there before they could reach us. But still, the men in the caves had gotten sleep. They’d had fires to keep them warm. They’d eaten. They’d been up there for months, while I’d been pumping my way across the interior, climbing that mountain, watching friends die. I think the only reason we lived was because we expected to die. We h

ad nothing to lose, so we beat them back. We had to kill them. I mean, we couldn’t take them captive. What were we going to do, seesaw them back across China to Xian and on to Kunming? And they had to kill us too as a point of honor. We left the bodies where they dropped and met again in the largest cave, where there are two huge Buddhas—each about fifty feet tall. These statues were still in good shape, because the heads were too big to get out of the cave. But all the smaller ones had been vandalized and shipped back to Tokyo. I was looking at what was left in wonder, when this soldier—not dead obviously—pulls out a gun and aims right at me. I was completely oblivious—standing in that cave was a dream come true—when Sun shot him. So see, I would have been dead a couple of times over if it hadn’t been for him.”

Henry fell silent. The only sound was the drone of the G-3’s engine.

“Sun’s hiding in those caves,” David guessed.

“If not in the caves, then somewhere on that mountain,” Henry agreed.

For a moment everything seemed settled, but Hulan wasn’t satisfied.

“You’re sure that Sun was mission-educated?” she asked.

Henry nodded.

It explained Sun’s near-perfect English, but why hadn’t this been in his dangan, which said that—far from being an orphan—his parents were from the reddest class, the peasant class? How could all this have been kept a secret? How had this not come up during the various purges that had so shaken China over the years?

“And you say you didn’t have contact with him again until seven years ago?” Hulan continued. “So much has happened in China. How did you find him, and weren’t you surprised at what he’d become?”

“I didn’t see him again until 1990, but that doesn’t mean I’d lost contact with him,” Henry admitted. “After our escapade I stayed in China for another two years. I did everything I could for the boy. I brought him west to Xian and later to Kunming. I made sure he ate, and he began to grow and fill out normally. He picked up more English, but what can I say, he was around soldiers so his language was pretty much in the gutter. Still, I gave him books. In those days almost everyone in China was illiterate, so I made sure he learned to read and write in his own language too.”

As Henry spoke, Hulan began to put the pieces together. Sun’s dangan said that he’d been involved with the local Communist party from an early age. Was it possible he’d already been a Communist when he’d gone to the mission? Had he been sent there by the local cadres? It explained his attitude on the mountain. If he’d been a Nationalist, he’d never have fought the Japanese, because the threat of retribution was so great. And later, when Sun had gone west with Henry, he would have been able to report not only on the Nationalists but the Americans as well. It made sense, but again, none of it was in the dangan.

“Once my tour was up,” Henry was saying, “my dad wanted me to come home, which I did. But I still wanted a life in China. My father continued to take a very dim view of that idea, but I was working on him. In the meantime I kept sending money back to help Sun. The Chinese called it ‘tea money.’ But after the war the Nationalists and the Communists went back to their own bloody fight. In 1949 Chiang Kaishek was beaten back to the island of Taiwan, Mao marched into Beijing, and the Bamboo Curtain fell. Both of you weren’t even born yet, but back then anti-Communist sentiment was strong, vicious. To have any contact with China became very dangerous. By 1950 an embargo was in effect, McCarthy was doing his mad dog thing, and little tea money at all crossed the Pacific.”

“People here would have been scared too,” Hulan said. “How do you explain to your new comrades that you’re getting money from foreign imperialists?”

“Without question it was dangerous,” Henry agreed, “but you can always find a crack, and if you’re smart, and Sun Gan was, you learn how to hide your money, live frugally, and spend carefully. And you have to remember, I wasn’t sending a fortune, just fifty or a hundred here and there. It was enough to buy him food, enough to get him to college, and later, as China became increasingly corrupt, enough to get himself out of various jams.”

Again Hulan thought about Sun’s dangan. Sun had taken Henry’s money for years. If he was a true Communist, how could he have done this? Could he have turned the money in to the government? Not according to the dangan. So he must have squirreled it away, which had to explain how he’d been able to buy his way out of trouble during the Cultural Revolution. But how could it not have come to light? Could he have used his stash to buy his way into the file, hire someone to make the critical changes, and clean up his past?

“Not one word of what you’ve said reassures me,” David said, verbalizing what Hulan was thinking, “because in a sense you’ve been paying Sun bribes for over fifty years.”

“I was helping a friend!” Henry sputtered. “What I sent him was nothing compared to what he’d given me. He saved my life! Can’t you see that?”

“I see a nice man who tried to do the right thing, who may have chosen to call an apple an orange—a bribe a gift—and in doing so became a pawn in Sun’s game.”

“You are blind and stupid,” Henry retorted.

The two men scowled at each other. Henry was the first to break eye contact by standing and going to check the fax machine. Still, nothing had come through. He came back to his seat, strapped himself in, and looked out the window. David too looked out the window, putting aside all he had heard and plotting their next moves. Once the plane landed, they would need to proceed quickly and efficiently. He also thought about Hulan. No matter what she said, he could see that something was wrong with her. She looked hot even in this air-conditioned environment. She was falling asleep every chance she got, and her mind didn’t seem all there. He needed to get all this over with so he could get her to a doctor.

As they had done many times before, Taiyuan airport authorities gave Mr. Knight’s plane permission to land, which it did without incident. But from this point all activity associated with Mr. Knight’s Gulfstream deviated from anything they had seen before. Fortunately, they showed no curiosity about this. They didn’t even come out to investigate why no one except a solidly built Chinese man who looked suspiciously like a law enforcement officer stepped off the plane, trotted across the tarmac, exited the terminal, bargained fiercely and paid handsomely to “rent” a car from a driver (which really meant that Lo flashed his MPS credential and made a few bone-chilling threats), then drove back around through the airport’s south gate, back across the tarmac, parked, then disappeared back into the private jet, where there appeared to be no further activity.

Inside the plane the minutes dragged on as everyone waited for Anne Baxter Hooper’s fax to come through. One by one they checked to see if all of the fax lines were plugged into the right places. David became increasingly convinced that the call was being blocked in some way, but Hulan—who’d awakened from dreams filled with unsettling images of war and the Knight factory floor, of mutilated bodies and dirty money—doubted that could be so. Finally the machine hummed to life and the papers began to spew out. David picked up each sheet as it came through. As with the others, they made no sense by themselves or even when compared to the papers Sun had given him.

Over Henry’s objections, they decided not to look for Sun. “If your friend is hiding on Tianlong Mountain, he’ll be hard to find,” Hulan offered reasonably after Henry had shouted at David that his judgment was clouded and that he was only concerned with saving his own hide. “For now he’s probably better off where he is. Let’s get this resolved once and for all. If Sun is innocent as you say, Mr. Knight, then we can bring him out safely. If he’s guilty, then he’ll be found, prosecuted, and shot no matter what we do.”

“All I’m saying is that your boyfriend here keeps forgetting that Sun is his client—”

“I’ve told you twenty times, Henry, I haven’t forgotten that—”

“Can we just go?” Hulan asked.