The Lord and the Cross
by
James L. Drako
Thanks to:
Mom and Dad, for obvious reasons;
Caroline, for watching TV by herself while the story labored to come into the world;
Jeff, the best chemistry teacher a guy ever had;
Outback Bob: eat your heart out, Crocodile Dundee;
And Mike, for helping me reach the stars.
"Tyler, as far as I’m concerned, the only difference between slitting a man’s throat and swatting a fly is the mess you have on your hands in the end." Nathan closed his eyes and squeezed his right fist in his left hand, as if trying to crush a ripe fruit. "I’ll cut out a little girl’s eyes as easily as you’ll order a drink on the beach in Tahiti. I’ve killed, and I’ve raped, and I’ve stolen, and I’ve done things I won’t even begin to tell you about, and I’ve made money off it all, and you know why? Because people like you need people like me to do things they’re too sane to do. I earn my living doing things nice, decent, civilized people like you can’t bring themselves to do, but things that need to be done just the same. You and I live in two different worlds, two different dimensions. One hour in your world and I’d blow my own head off, just like you’d lose your mind if you had to spend one hour in mine. But I don’t really expect you to understand any of this, because in your sanity you have the arrogance of believing that only you are right, that only your vision of the world, that only your conception of reality, is the correct one. As far as you’re concerned, people like me don’t even deserve to be locked away, let alone treated: all they deserve is to be sent straight to the chair before they hurt someone like you. Except that now you need me, so you have to put all that aside and, as much as it displeases you, you have to trust me to clean up your mess for you, and that simply drives you crazy because it forces you to admit that you don’t have all the answers, that there is room in this world - in your world - for people like me, who do what I do."
ONE
International Space Station
Present day
The empty champagne bottle slowly spun end over end, spewing an endless shower of perfect tiny golden orbs of nectar as it went.
It first floated past the door to the deserted control room, where the station’s commander, Australian Edward Hastings, was sprawled, unconscious, in his command chair, a cheap paper party hat askew on his head. He had somehow remembered to buckle his safety harness before passing out, which kept him from simply floating away.
The bottle then floated through a lengthy corridor that ended in a “T”. The left passageway led to crew quarters, the right to storage. The bottle bumped against the far wall, seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then headed for crew quarters.
It encountered dirty paper plates and empty glasses as it went, all floating freely in the complete absence of gravity.
As it neared crew quarters, music began to be heard. The Eurythmics’ old classic, Sweet Dreams, fittingly filled the air. Fittingly, for inside crew quarters four people, all reputed to be among the best and brightest their nation had to offer, were fast asleep, as drunk as college kids on their first day away from home.
Only one, Sweden’s Karin Andersdotter, appeared to be half-conscious. She seemed to rouse when she saw the bottle, perhaps stimulated by the thought of one last gulp of heaven, but her uncoordinated movements rendered hopeless any attempt she made to reach her target. She could not even manage to get out of her sleeping bag, and she soon gave up and simply went back to sleep.
The bottle finally floated past a wall of computer screens that all flashed the same message: “Happy B’day, Mags!!!”.
It ended its journey against the window to the hydroponics lab where the birthday girl, Ukrainian astronaut Magdalyna Cheburko, was engaged in a furious multicultural exchange with fellow space traveller Satoaki Arakawa of Japan.
Cheburko had her back to her companion, her head resting against the top of his right shoulder, her fingers ferociously digging into his buttocks. Arakawa was kissing her neck, while his right hand slowly lowered the zipper of her silver spacesuit. He then slipped both hands inside, the right heading up and the left heading down. When they reached their respective destinations, Cheburko shivered visibly and found there was no truth whatsoever to the old joke about the size of Japanese noodles.
The two began to move in unison, oblivious to their impending doom.
Analyst Mike Brown almost spilled his coffee all over his computer when he saw the readings on his screen suddenly and unexpectedly begin to rise.
gSir !”, he shouted.
His boss at the NOAA Space Center in Boulder, Colorado, Matteo di Francesco, hung up the phone and walked to his desk.
gWhat’ve you got ?”
He took one look at Brown’s screen and saw that his day was about to go to Hell in a hand basket.
Some 150 million kilometres away, magnetic energy trapped in the solar atmosphere had suddenly and unexpectedly been released. The solar flare exploded with as much energy as millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs, sending a massive wave of deadly radiation racing toward the International Space Station.
gJesus Christ…”, di Francesco muttered, his face suddenly drained of all colour. He picked up the phone on Brown’s desk.
gCohen ? This is di Francesco at NOAA… Yeah, never mind that… You gotta get your people off the Station now… There’s solar flare that just erupted… Bastard didn’t give us two seconds’ notice… Yeah, now as in yesterday…”
Di Francesco fell silent for a moment as his counterpart at NASA tried to argue.
gIt’s your call, man. But hear this: YOU GOT FIVE MINUTES TO GET THEM OFF THE STATION OR THEY’RE ALL GOING TO FRY !”, he finally exploded.
He slammed the phone down and ran to his boss’ office.
Alarms went off inside the International Space Station less than 30 seconds later, just as Cheburko and Arakawa were climaxing together.
A deafening siren supplanted Annie Lennox’ soothing voice, and Mags’ birthday wish was replaced by an order to evacuate the station immediately.
Hastings was jolted awake. Dazed, he at first tried to get out of his chair without unfastening his safety harness. He fumbled with the buckling for a few seconds before succeeding, and floated dizzily to the control panel.
He sobered up instantly.
gEVERYBODY OUT, EVERYBODY OUT, TO THE LIFEBOATS ! WE GOT FOUR MINUTES TO GET OUT OF HERE !”, he started shouting, before realising that his voice was barely audible above the alarm.
I’ve got to get my people to safety, he thought, regretting he had not enforced discipline better the previous night, when the party had started getting out of hand, or I’ll never forgive myself.
He headed instinctively for the crew quarters, figuring that’s where he was likely to find the most people in one spot. Using handholds along the corridor, he propelled himself as fast as he could and slammed into Andersdotter coming from his left when he reached the “T” intersection.
gWhat’s going on, commander ?”, she shouted, also apparently – and suddenly – a lot more sober than she had been five minutes earlier.
gSolar flare. Massive. We got three minutes to get out before this becomes a barbecue”, he explained, her Swedish ears struggling a bit with his thick Aussie accent.
Her eyes grew wide as saucers but he was relieved to see her nod her understanding.
gAnyone in crew quarters ?”, he demanded.
gJa! Three people: Roussillon, Traugott and Clemmons”.
One French, one German and one American, Hastings reflected. Great.
The International Space Station was equipped with three Soyuz lifeboats, each capable of carrying three astronauts to safety in case of an emergency. Their only hope of surviving was reaching and launching those lifeboats before the radiation hit the station.
gWhat about Cheburko and Arakawa ?”, he shouted.
Andersdotter simply shrugged.
gOkay. You, Roussillon and Clemmons get on Soyuz One and eject as soon as you can. Send Traugott to meet me at Two. I’ll look for Cheburko and Arakawa and send them to Three”, he said, drawing a quick mental map of where his people were in relation with the escape pods and assigning each person to the nearest lifeboat.
Andersdotter once again nodded her understanding and pushed herself off the wall, back towards her sleeping companions.
Hastings left in the opposite direction, towards storage, unsure where to look for his missing crewmates but knowing he had less than a minute to do so.
They weren’t in storage, nor were they in Life Sciences, nor were they in Materials. Hydroponics, he remembered. That’s where he works. That’s also at the other FUCKIN’ end of the Station.
He glanced at his watch and saw that he had less than two minutes before the radiation reached them. Seized by a new sense of urgency that bordered on the panic that stems from knowing that one’s life may just be about to end, he retraced his steps and headed for the hydroponics lab.
He had covered half the distance when the first conduit blew up, filling the station with a dense white smoke that the emergency lighting tinted pink. He heard a second conduit blow in the distance, then a third, and then a fourth, each explosion rocking the Station, and then he stopped counting.
Hastings, who had vowed to become an astronaut at the age of 5, was now navigating completely blind, which slowed his progress to a crawl. He stopped to try and get his bearings and saw, through the smoke, a dark shape headed straight for him.
gCheburko!! Arakawa!!”, he shouted, hoping against hope he had finally located his missing crewmembers.
The dark shape never even slowed down and barrelled right into him, never even stopping: it was Traugott, a look of sheer panic on his face and coming from completely the wrong direction.
He lost his way in the smoke and now he’s also lost his mind, like a guy who’s lost in the forest, Hastings realised. But now he’s headed straight for Two, and if he gets there before I do, no way in HELL is he going to wait for me…
The Aussie hesitated for half a heartbeat, torn between his duty to ensure the safety of all those under his command and his desire to see his 3-year-old granddaughter again. In the end, he figured that he had done all he could, that time was running out and that Cheburko and Arakawa would make their own way to an escape pod, since they had to be completely deaf – or already dead – to still be oblivious of the catastrophe around them.
He turned around and chased after Traugott, knowing he had to catch up with the demented man if he was to survive.
Their lust sated, Cheburko and Arakawa had fallen asleep, still linked together in the most intimate manner.
Cheburko was the first to stir. Arakawa had closed and locked his lab’s sealed door to ensure their privacy, and now the noise of the alarm reached her only as a pale and weak imitation of its true self. She shook her head, realised that her breasts were hanging out of her suit, zipped them up, and went to the door.
She tried to open it and found it locked. She shrugged, the full extent of the unfolding emergency still not registering on her alcohol-impaired brain. Like a peeping tom at a schoolgirl’s window, she placed her nose against the reinforced plexiglass, both hands on each side of her face, and peered outside.
Her blood froze.
The Station was filled with pinkish smoke and she couldn’t even see across the passageway, even though it was less than six feet wide. She again tried to open the door, this time using both hands, and again found it locked.
gSATO, SATO, WAKE UP !!”, she screamed. Arakawa barely heard her.
She spun around to look at him and saw that he was still unconscious. She also saw that, like had been her case a few seconds earlier, a private part of his anatomy was hanging out of his spacesuit.
She reached out, grabbed the part in question and twisted, noting in passing that it was still sticky from their previous activity.
Arakawa woke up with a scream and twisted away from her, all the while uttering what she assumed were a litany of Japanese profanities. When he again turned to face her she slapped him as hard as she could to make sure she had his undivided attention.
gWhat ? What ? I thought you… I asked you three times if you were sure…”, he began, mistaking her anger for regrets over their encounter.
gNot that”, she said, “THAT!!” She pointed at the window and saw his face drop when he, too, finally noticed the smoke that had filled the station.
gWhat, what…”
gI don’t know, but you locked the door and we can’t get out of here ! AND WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE !”, she shouted.
Without saying another word, he started going through his pockets and, to her indescribable relief, almost immediately found the key. He floated to the door and opened it. The pink smoke and deafening alarm both rushed into the lab at the same time, giving the two astronauts a rush of adrenaline that instantly sobered them.
Cheburko pushed past him and entered the corridor, unsure which way to go. She somehow found a screen through the smoke and read the order to evacuate.
Oh my God, she thought, even though she had been raised in a officially atheist society. Oh my God.
Where was the nearest lifeboat ? Was it Two or Three ? She simply couldn’t remember. Left or right ? She fatefully went left, towards the third and final escape pod, Arakawa immediately behind her.
Traugott had reached Two and started fumbling with the opening mechanism, his utter panic rendering impossible a procedure he had otherwise been so proficient with in training exercises that he had been asked to teach it to new recruits.
Hastings was struggling to catch up. He had become painfully aware of an intense cold that made his extremities tingle and he was now finding it more and more difficult to breathe. When he touched the wall to propel himself forward, he felt tiny icicles melt under the relative warmth of his fingers.
gHang on, let me do it”, Hastings said as forcefully as he could when he finally got there. Traugott completely ignored him and continued messing with the mechanism, wasting precious time. “Move over, I’ll do it”, Hastings repeated, this time trying to push his crewmate out of the way.
Traugott, who outweighed his commander by at least 50 pounds, shoved him back as hard as he could before returning to his work, as if nothing had happened.
Hastings made a few backward summersaults through the smoke before he was finally able to grab something and stop his momentum. He propelled himself toward the escape pod one more time, his panic now mixed with rising anger.
gColonel, you will stand down immediately and move away from the door”, he barked, hoping Traugott’s military discipline might still be intact.
It wasn’t.
The Station gave a violent shudder and Hastings understood that Andersdotter, Roussillon and Clemmons had just launched One. There was no more time to waste.
He positioned himself against the wall, directly behind the bigger man. He took a deep breath, counted to three, and pushed himself forwards as hard as he could with his feet. He collided with Traugott and purposefully banged the man’s head against the door.
Traugott fell limp, knocked unconscious.
Cheburko found and opened the third Soyuz lifeboat without any difficulty. She was vaguely aware of someone following her, of someone there with her in the pod, but now she couldn’t have named that person had her life depended on it. She was entirely focused on escaping the Station alive.
She fastened her safety harness, closed and sealed the door, and hit the “Launch” button.
Nothing happened.
She hit the button again.
Still nothing.
Again. Nothing. Again, again, AGAIN. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING.
Oh my God, I’m going to die here.
She unfastened her harness, re-opened the door and re-entered the smoke-filled corridor.
Again, there was someone right behind her.
Holding onto Traugott’s lifeless body with one hand to keep it from floating away, Hastings managed to open the escape pod with the other. He put his crewmate in his seat, fastened his harness, and then did the same for himself.
As he was getting ready to launch, he hesitated. What was that he was hearing ? Were those voices ? Screams, perhaps ? Could he really hear anything above the alarm and through the sealed door ?
Cheburko felt the Station lurch and realised that one of the escape pods had just launched.
Oh my God, what if it’s the last one ? What if One and Two are already gone ? What if I’m stuck here with… with…
Arakawa was right behind her, like a faithful lapdog keeping up with its master no matter what. This was his first stay on board the Station and he wasn’t as familiar with its layout as Cheburko, who had been up here for months, was. He figured his best chance of survival resided with her.
She went left, then right, then left again twice, then straight, navigating through the smoke-filled maze with an uncanny ease, despite the fact that she, too, had become aware of the biting cold and thinning oxygen.
That’s it, she thought, we’re there, we’re right there, we’re going to make it, One is at the end of this corridor, it’s right there, it’s…
It’s not there, it’s gone. We’re doomed.
Traugott began to stir in his seat, the lump on his forehead an angry purple.
Hastings looked at his watch. How much longer could he afford to wait ? There was still one seat available in his pod, but he had only felt the Station’s telltale lurch once, meaning only one lifeboat had been launched so far.
Or did it ? Maybe One and Three were both gone, and he had simply missed one launch in all the noise and confusion ? Conduits were still exploding left and right, shaking the Station to its core. Would he really have noticed one more explosion ? He believed he would have.
Traugott opened his eyes, but they wouldn’t focus.
Sorry about this, me ole mate, Hastings thought.
He sent him back to sleep with a punch to the point of the jaw.
This is our last hope, this is our last hope, she kept thinking.
Cheburko reached the door to Two just in time to see Hastings punch Traugott through the window. When Hastings looked back and saw her looking at him, his heart dropped at the thought that he had almost left another human being, one of his crewmembers, to die alone.
But she was not alone. Arakawa’s face appeared in the window next to hers, and they both started banging against the door, shouting at him to open it. Both their faces were covered with a thin film of frost and their lips had turned a deep purple. Their breaths condensed on the window and they kept wiping it off with their sleeves.
Hastings was paralysed by indecision. There was only one seat available for two people. Could four people cram into a lifeboat meant for three ? Would the person left without a seat survive re-entry into the atmosphere ? Would the others ?
He had no choice but to find out.
But as he made to open the door to let them in, Arakawa tried to shove his erstwhile lover aside to be first. Cheburko would have none of it. She grabbed Arakawa by the hair, tilted his head back, and, as Hastings watched in horror, sank her teeth into his throat, vampire-like, severing his carotid artery.
She let go of her victim and Arakawa’s body simply fell away. She locked eyes with Hastings and resumed banging on the door, her mouth eerily red and dripping with blood, the color made even more vivid by her snow-white face.
The Aussie closed his eyes and hit the “Launch” button, and the Station shuddered one last time.
TWO
Banbuquiao penitentiary, mainland China.
November 1988.
How he despised them, those wai guo ren, those foreigners. Look at them. How smug they are, how arrogant.
The first wai guo ren, the one with the crazy eyes, was the worst of the two. He always wore a faint, mocking smile, and always addressed them in a tone better suited for slow-witted children. He had the irritating habit of punctuating his speech with pauses to highlight every point he made, even the most obvious ones. And he seemed to consider some of his statements truths worthy of Confucius himself.
Zhu. Pig.
"Truth", the tall wai guo ren was saying, "is irrelevant. Truth is relative and fluid. One man’s truth is another man’s lies, and one man’s lies can be another’s truth. So whatever you believe to be the truth is only one point of view, yours, and it doesn’t have to be shared by anyone else".
The second wai guo ren, the one with the cold, uncaring eyes, nodded to himself. He was leaning against the wall, his hands crossed behind his back, and always kept his eyes down. But if your gaze rested on him for too long, he would immediately look up and stare you down.
Staring at him for too long was a mistake you only made once.
"The key is convincing the other party that your version of the truth is the correct one", the tall wai guo ren went on. "And how you go about achieving that goal matters very little. If you know your position to be the correct one, you are entitled to go to great lengths to change your adversary’s mind, to… enlighten him, if you would".
To his left, an interpreter was translating every word he said in Mandarin, her voice barely a whisper, yet loud enough to reach the back of the small, overheated room. He paused to give her time to catch up and when she fell silent, he smiled condescendingly and resumed.
"You must not hold it against the other party not to understand that you are right and that they are wrong. You cannot both be right at the same time, so someone will have to give. And who that someone is will be a matter of perseverance, technique and skill".
The foreigner paused once again, this time for a longer period, as if collecting his thoughts. He looked at each one of his students in turn. They were all members of the Tu-We, the Chinese secret police, and had been sent here for what had been described to them as a seminar on interrogation techniques.
The wai guo ren’s gaze came to rest on major Zhao, who tensed imperceptibly. His hatred and suspicion of all foreigners, and especially Westerners, was well-known, and it somehow seemed to radiate from his entire being. People often picked up on it without his having to say a single word.
"You", the tall foreigner said, pointing at him. "Answer me this. If you know something to be the truth, and the undeniable truth, and you must convince someone else that your understanding of facts is the correct one, but the other party stubbornly refuses to accept your arguments, what will happen?"
The interpreter seemed to look for the correct translation, finally found it, and Zhao nodded, his gaze never leaving the other man’s.
"I get angry", he answered slowly in his primitive English. "I get very angry… zhu".
The last word slipped out and Zhao sensed some his colleagues tense. He cursed them for their weakness and their subservience. Why these two wai guo ren had been selected as teachers was anybody’s guess, though it was clear they had significant expertise in the matter. But Zhao hardly cared. He hadn’t heard a thing during the four-day session he hadn’t already known or suspected. And that had only served to fuel his contempt for the two foreigners.
The tall wai guo ren’s smile froze on his lips. He knew something had just happened, something unpleasant, but since he spoke no Mandarin, he could only guess. He decided to let it pass… for now.
"Indeed you will", he said, "and therein lies a very specific danger. An angry man tends to lose his temper and his self-control. He may then do things that will hurt him in the long run. We have here a prime example of what happens when a man loses his temper".
He turned to his right and waved at the slumped figure of a man tied to a chair. The man had been there for hours and had all but been forgotten by the class. He hardly moved and only moaned feebly now and again.
The foreigner grabbed the man by the hair and pulled his head back. Both of the man’s eyes were swollen shut and his lips were cracked and bloody. His nose also appeared to have been broken, and two rivulets of dried blood ran from his nostrils.
The wai guo ren let go of the man’s hair, and his head simply fell forward on his chest again. Zhao noted that a handful of bloody hairs had stuck to the latex glove the foreigner was wearing.
"This", he repeated, "is what happens when a man loses his temper. This poor soul was interrogated by some of your colleagues yesterday. Those colleagues, needless to say, had not had the benefit of our instruction. They spent hours trying to convince this individual that he was wrong and they were right. They failed. It is my understanding that he has steadfastly refused to alter his position. Ask him if his mother is the dirtiest whore in all of the People’s Republic. Even after being pounded for hours upon hours, he will not even admit to that much. Your colleagues have not weakened his resolve on bit. Furthermore, during their interrogation, they seriously endangered the cause which you are all entrusted with protecting".
He once again grabbed the man by the hair and pulled his head back. He twisted it left and right, examining the bruises that covered his face and giving them all a good chance to do the same. When he spoke again, his voice was hard and his words heavy.
"A blow to the head can plunge a man into a coma from which he will never emerge. A blow to the abdomen can trigger bleeding so severe that a man will die within hours. If you kill the person you are interrogating, if you render that person permanently unconscious, you lose any chance of ever extracting more information from her. And that is extremely undesirable".
The teacher once again surveyed his pupils, and once again he locked eyes with Zhao. Zhao refused to lower his gaze.
Asshole, he thought to himself. He didn’t know too many English words, but he knew that one. Asshole.
"But then, what are you to do?", the foreigner asked, his eyes leaving Zhao’s after a few more seconds. "We all know this man is lying. We all know he is holding something back. How can we then convince him to talk, to rejoin our version of the truth? How can we convince him of the error of his ways if we are not allowed to hit and punch him?"
As if on cue, the second foreigner straightened up and walked to the door. He opened it and gestured to someone in the hallway. A few seconds later, a group of a PLA soldiers appeared, and with them was a woman. Her clothing had been torn and her face was streaked with tears.
She looked around the room and when her eyes fell on the man tied to the chair, she became hysterical and lunged forward. The soldiers restrained her, but she fought like a wildcat and almost got away.
Her screams seemed to infuse the man with new energy. He sat up, turned his head left and right, and tried to peer through his swollen eyelids. He tried to say something but only managed to produce a fine mist of blood and saliva. Still, he struggled mightily against his bond and managed to topple his chair over to the side. Tied as he ways he couldn’t guarantee his fall and banged his head against the floor. The woman shrieked madly but the man just laid there, sobbing and muttering something which sounded like please.
The other wai guo ren motioned to the soldiers to leave the room with the woman. He closed the door after they had gone, but still her screams and shouts could be heard. Zhao looked around the room and was ashamed to see that some of his colleagues appeared sickened by what had just happened.
"Unless you hadn’t guessed, that was our man’s wife", the tall wai guo ren said after a silence of a few minutes. "This man was put into my care earlier this morning. As soon as he arrived I informed him that his wife had been arrested and put in the care of some PLA soldiers. That was all I said. I let his imagination do the rest".
The foreigner stopped one more time. He removed his latex gloves with a characteristic snap and threw them aside. He flexed his fingers and cracked his knuckles before concluding.
"I gave specific instructions that she not be harmed. We are not barbarians after all. Whether those instructions were followed matters very little. What matters is that I did not tell the man I had ordered his wife be kept safe. All I told him was that she had been given to some soldiers. Then I let his imagination do the rest. His mind ate away at his resolve. Now ask him whether his mother is the dirtiest whore in China. He’ll tell you she is."
Nathan sensed that something was amiss the moment he entered the room. A tiny alarm bell – one he knew only too well – went off and the hair on his arms prickled.
The assembled students were listening with their usual limited interest to whatever Lord was saying. Lord looked at him when he walked in and winked without interrupting his train of thought. Cross shivered.
There were seven People’s Liberation Army generals standing at the back of the room. That in itself wasn’t unusual. This was the last day of their instruction, and the generals were probably here to witness for themselves what their money had bought. The generals were escorted by a number of regular PLA soldiers.
A man, his bowed head covered by a bloody towel, was tied to a chair, facing the students and the generals. Nothing unusual there either. This was the same man they had used throughout this latest round of classes.
"There will be times when your subject will be knowledgeable of a truth – the truth you are seeking to attain – without even being aware of it’, Lord was saying. "In such a situation, it is you duty to help this hidden truth come out and be expressed".
This had been a somewhat uneventful, straightforward assignment. Cross had been contacted by a middleman on behalf of Chinese authorities. This middleman had offered him a lot of money to travel to China to come teach a refresher course in so-called interrogation techniques. Why they had needed him, given the PLA’s well-deserved brutal reputation, he had neither asked nor cared. The money was good and the work was easy.
He had decided at the very last moment to bring Manfred Lord in on the job. He could have handled it alone easily, but he found the prospect of eight long weeks alone inside a Chinese penitentiary – he knew full-well he wouldn’t be allowed outside – less than appealing. Since Lord and him had a long partnership, and since there was enough money to go around and still be worth their trouble, he had given him a call.
Lord had jumped at the chance to be paid to teach people how to beat up other people.
"Extreme violence in such a situation will be useless and even counterproductive", Lord said. "Pain and suffering will only distract your subject. Apply just enough pressure to keep your subject on his toes, keep him aware of the questions you are asking, but refrain from inflicting so much pain that he won’t be able to concentrate and answer your questions in the matter in which you wish them answered".
Lord stopped for a moment, looked at him and winked again, as if sharing an inside joke. Cross smiled faintly, intrigued and once again alarmed. What the hell was Lord up to?
He looked around the room and thought how he couldn’t wait to get out of this place. He knew that Lord had a small job lined up in North Korea right after this one, and would be flying off in a few days. For his part, after eight weeks in a damp cell, a warm beach in Thailand sounded mighty interesting.
Their students of the past few days were all assembled for this final lesson, looking neither more nor less interested than they usually did. Cross looked at each of them in turn. There was the one who never smiled, and there was the one who always did. There was the one, a bit younger than the others, who seemed constantly on the verge of throwing up. There was the one who Cross constantly caught looking at him, but who always immediately dropped his gaze when he stared back.
He had never bothered learning their names. He and Lord had taught 10 groups of fifteen over eight weeks, and there had been little purpose in developing any kind of friendship with any pupil. They were here to learn, he was here to teach them, and that was it.
"Our man here", Lord said, waving in the general direction of the slumped victim, "is a prime example. Up until recently, he had been a fine, upstanding citizen of the People’s Republic. Yet, in his heart, he harboured a knowledge which threatened the very foundation of your beloved country".
With the exception of Zhao, of course. He had had no other choice but to learn Zhao’s name.
Over the span of a life filled with murder and violence, Cross had seldom met an individual so filled with rage and hatred than this Zhao. His fury was so intense it seemed to radiate from his very being. The closer you got to him, the more you could feel it, like warmth from a fire on a cold night.
He had never sought to understand the origin of Zhao’s hatred. It mattered very little. He had simply assumed – rightly so – that Zhao hated them purely because they were Westerners, and that all things from the West were bound to be evil.
Cross looked around the room for Zhao. His alarm level tripled when he couldn’t find him.
Zhao’s not here. Where the hell was Zhao.
"A tactic favoured by many goes as follows", Lord explained. "In order to hide his true beliefs, a man will profess to be of a completely opposite persuasion. For example, a man who claims with much vehemence to be a patriot, may in fact be hiding that he is a traitor".
Out of the corner of his eye, Cross caught one of the PLA soldiers thumbing the safety off his Chinese-made AK-47. Slowly, cautiously, Cross backed away until he rested against a wall. Lord caught his movement, looked in his direction, but this time neither winked nor smiled.
Cross then knew he would have to fight to leave the room alive.
"Such a man used to exist in your midst", Lord went on, his tone suddenly harder. "A man who proclaimed high and low his love of the fatherland, but who in his heart harbored deeply unpatriotic thoughts".
Lord then reached over and ripped the towel off the man’s head. The entire class gasped as they recognized their erstwhile comrade, Zhao.
"This here man, Zhao, was well-known for his hatred of the West. You all heard his fiery diatribes. This indicated to me that maybe he was seeking to hide something, that perhaps he was seeking to hide traitorous thoughts and actions behind a smokescreen of hatred. I was right. After a lengthy interrogation, Zhao has confessed to betraying his country. It was he who arranged for two Westerners to infiltrate the Tu-We. One of those foreigners he knew to be an agent sent to recruit more traitors who…"
Cross didn’t need to hear the rest. He knew where this was going and how the speech would end. He had been set up and sold out.
Then, as things always seem to do in such situations, everything seemed to happen at once.
Cross rushed to the door, only to see it open on its own. An armed soldier appeared in the enclosure and froze, seeking to take in the situation, but Cross was already moving in another direction.
He ran to his right and wheel-kicked a Tu-We student in the head. The man, stunned, started to collapse. Cross grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. He then seized the empty chair and used it as a club, knocking out two more students. Then, spotting the PLA soldiers at the back of the room rushing at him, he threw his broken chair in their general direction. Most of them ducked out of the way, but a general was caught full in the face and fell to the ground with a broken nose.
Cross spun around and once again ran for the door, hoping he’d be able to shove his way through.
He met a soldier – the one who had blocked his exit a few moments earlier – half-way there. Half a dozen more soldiers had entered the room behind him. The man froze when he saw his prey suddenly turn on him. His half-second hesitation proved fatal. Cross kneed him in the genitals and tried to rip his AK47 away from him. The man held on and in the struggle, a brief burst was fired. Bullets ricocheted in the room and a few cries of pain were heard.
Cross paid them no heed.
He kicked the man again and felt his opponent relax his grip on his weapon. But then a dozen hands fell on him from behind, grabbing at his shoulders and hair and arms. They pulled him backwards, causing him to lose his own grip on the AK-47 just as he was about to seize it for good.
Cross didn’t try to pull away from his aggressors, as others may have instinctively done in his place. Instead, using an old martial arts technique, he took several quick steps backwards, pushing with his opponents instead of pulling against them. The manoeuvre caught his assailants off guards and Cross felt the human mass behind him destabilize. Several men tripped and fell, and he felt a few of the hands let go of him.
He then rushed forwards once again, this time pulling against the remaining hands and freeing himself. But there were simply too many of them. As soon as he was free, he was confronted by a new, fresh PLA soldier. He saw the man drop the butt of his gun and he knew the blow was coming. He tried to duck out of the way but couldn’t avoid it completely. The butt caught him in the cheekbone instead of on the jaw, just enough to make him see stars and lose his balance for a few seconds.
Then there were more hands on him, and he knew the fight was lost. They dragged him down inexorably, fists and feet hit his stomach and face and legs, and he felt his strength leaving him. He fell to the ground and managed to trip one man on his way down. The man fell, taking a couple of others with him in his fall, but it was too little too late.
Cross found himself surrounded by a sea of legs and through them, like the sun seen through dense foliage, all he could see was Manfred Lord’s laughing face.
Beijing, May 1989.
A man’s freedom can sometimes hang on the smallest, most insignificant detail: a misspelled name, a tired guard, a wrong date…
Or a car that simply won’t start.
It occurred to Nathan Cross only years later that had the prison van he and his jailors been scheduled to use started, he would, in all likelihood, not have left the People’s Republic of China alive.
But the van’s engine would simply not catch, no matter how much they slapped it or swore at it. And since no other official vehicle was available at the moment, the two jailors who had been charged with transferring him from Banbuqiao to a forced labor camp in Qinghai province instead decided to use one of the two’s private car, a battered Lada who looked as though it had been around when Nikita and JFK were busy exchanging pleasantries.
And it was in the back of this car that he now found himself, in handcuffs and in leg irons, as though his severely broken ankle did not preclude any escape attempt.
He knew the wound was infected. He had been running a low fever for several days and a greenish, smelly liquid oozed slowly but constantly from a cut in his skin, where his captors had repeatedly hit him with a crowbar. He had been fed nothing but a thin gruel and stale bread for as long as he could remember. He had been tortured without rest, hung upside down for days on end so that when he inevitably had to pee, he would pee in his own face. Many of his tormentors had been individuals he had himself trained during the previous weeks.
His strength and endurance were gone. He would not have been able to defend himself from a grandmother and her handbag. His joints ached and his skin felt as though it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper, so that every time the car hit a bump in the road, which happened more often than not, waves of pain flooded his entire body. He knew that his seriously weakened state had partly prompted his captors to use this car instead of waiting for a more secure prison van. They regarded him as posing no threat whatsoever, and he would have been inclined to agree with them.
They had done their best to kill him, short of putting a bullet in his brain. They had apparently decided that his needed to be a long and painful death. And yet he lived, though he knew he was being sent to the labor camp to die.
For the first time in many, many years, Nathan Cross, one of the most feared guns for hire on the surface of the planet, found himself as defenseless as a child.
Through a feverish haze, he became vaguely aware of an argument going on in the front seat. The driver had turned up the volume of the radio and was waving at his companion to be quiet while he listened. Their car had stopped at a large intersection, and Cross noticed more than a few people walking or biking in the same direction, as though on their way to some common event.
The driver pointed in that same direction, while the passenger pointed in the opposite. Clearly, one of them was suggesting that they too went to wherever all these people were going, while the other argued they should avoid it. The argument went on for a few more seconds but in the end, as is bound to happen in such circumstances, the driver won. He turned the wheel to the left and accelerated, an eager grin on his lips. The passenger threw his hands in the air and let them fall noisily in his lap, as though washing them of any responsibility.
At first there were only people – more and more of them – on the sidewalks. But then, about two kilometers down the road, they began encountering people in the street itself, and the driver had to slow down to drive around them. The strangeness of the situation reaching him through his enfeebled state, Nathan began to pay more attention to what was going on around him.
Most of the people they were encountering were young, but he also saw a number of middle-aged and older individuals. Without exception, or so it seemed, they appeared happy, relieved, exhilarated, but also anxious and wary, as though they were experiencing an unfamiliar situation whose outcome remained uncertain.
He could see that a number of protesters – for that was what he guessed them to be, protesters of some kind – carried flags and signs. But not Chinese or Soviet flags. American flags. British flags. French flags. And while most of the signs were covered in Chinese symbols he couldn’t decipher, he caught the odd, sometimes-misspelled English word here and there. Freedom. Democrassy. Liberty.
There were now so many people in the street that their car had been forced to a crawl. And then, unavoidably, there were simply too many people, and the car could go no further. All they could see were the backs of hundreds of people, all staring at something going on somewhere ahead of them. After hesitating for a moment the driver put the car in reverse, but the trickle of human bodies had turned into a flood behind them and there was nowhere to go. They were like a rock in the middle of a raging river.
So the driver killed the engine and sat back with a faint, worried sigh. He looked at his comrade with a timid smile, suddenly uncertain of the wisdom behind his earlier curiosity. The other guard simply ignored him and stared out his window, fuming.
At first the protesters paid them no attention. But as the space around the car was filling rapidly with people jostling for a better view, Nathan knew it was only a matter of time before that changed.
That change came in the guise of an inquisitive eight-year-old girl, who happened to be standing right by the window on the passenger side. Cross saw her first look, then smile at the guard, who failed to acknowledge her in any way. Then the girl seemed to notice the man’s uniform, and she tugged at the sleeve of the adult she had been holding by the hand. She tugged again, looking up, then tapped her finger against the glass, at the same time obviously explaining what she had seen.
The adult in question bent forwards to look for himself. He stared at the first guard, then at the other, and then examined their uniforms, his face unreadable. He stood up and shouted something in a loud voice that attracted the attention of all those in the vicinity. The car’s three occupants, like so many fish in an aquarium, then found themselves staring back at a dozen curious faces.
There was an unreal, eerie standstill that lasted for several heartbeats, each party unsure of what to do next. A young man standing directly in front of the car then placed both hands on the hood and pushed down, as if trying to provoke a reaction that would end the stalemate. The car’s battered suspension yielded and its nose dipped. The young man pushed again, rocking the car and prompting others into following his example. The small vehicle began rocking from side to side as people pushed and shoved, at one point the wheels on the right side even lifting from the pavement for half a second.
Shackled and weak, Nathan was unable to protect himself in any way. He was tossed about from side to side, his ankle exploding with pain. He banged his head hard against the glass and lost track of what was happening for a few moments.
When he came to, the car had stopped rocking. He barely had time to wonder why before noticing that the guard on the passenger had pulled out his handgun and was desperately trying to point it in all directions at once. The people surrounding the car, perhaps believing that their number made them invincible, had not stepped back and most still had their hands on the car. They had simply stopped shaking it.
The guard was terrified and on the verge of panic. For some reason, he feared he would be lynched and he intended to take a few of his presumed assailants with him. Cross had seen the look on the man’s face a million times and knew he was likely start shooting at any moment. He lowered himself in his seat as much as he could, hoping to place himself outside the trajectory of any bullet.
But then the other guard intervened and ended a situation that would otherwise have unavoidably resulted in a bloodbath. Moving rapidly, he placed both hands on his companion’s gun and forcibly pointed it down at the floor. A brief struggle ensued but ended when the driver began shouting at his comrade. The other man’s eyes then cleared and his face relaxed, and he seemed to come to his senses. When he did, the driver removed one hand from the gun and waved at the crowd around them, as though asking his companion whether he intended to kill all those people with only nine bullets.
The man looked around himself for several seconds, nodded in defeat and then relinquished his gun. The driver held it up in plain view with his thumb and forefinger before deliberately placing it at his feet. He then repeated the operation with his own weapon, thus indicating to all those who were watching that they were now unarmed and inoffensive.
Understanding there was nothing else for them to do, the driver then unlocked the passenger side door before unlocking his own. Both doors instantly flew open and the two guards were grabbed by a dozen hands. They were pulled out of the vehicle almost too rapidly for the eye to follow, and they were swallowed by the crowd.
Eager arms then reached inside the vehicle and unlocked the rear doors, and they too were opened. Looking first to his left, then to his right, Nathan wondered for the briefest moment what the protesters would make of this thin, haggard, sickly-looking foreigner.
They apparently did not know what to make of him, for they just stared, clearly puzzled and nonplussed. Cross again looked to his right and to his left, but was only met with blank stares. His head was spinning and he felt on the verge of fainting. But then, in a flash of inspiration that could very well have cost him his life, he uttered three syllables.
"C… I… A…"
The impact was monstrous. Faces lit up with excitement and a chorus of excited voices erupted as people discussed amongst themselves. Cross closed his eyes and tilted his head back to try and keep from fainting. He jumped when he felt someone tapping him on the left shoulder.
He looked in that direction and found himself staring at a young, beautiful woman. She was smiling and motioning at him to get out of the car and follow her. With his chin, he pointed at this broken ankle and lifted his pant leg to reveal the wound. She nodded in understanding and yielded her place to two young men who helped him out of the car as gently as possible, which wasn’t very much at all.
When he was out of the car and standing, his head once again began spinning and he would have fallen had the two young men not caught him. To his amazement a wheelchair was produced, and they slowly lowered him into it. They then placed a blanket over his shackled hands and ankles to hide them from indiscreet eyes, and another over his head to hide his features.
The students wheeled him away, moving away from the crowd. Progress was painfully slow at first as they had to zig-zag between hundreds of on-lookers. But eventually the crowd started thinning out and they accelerated, until they were almost running. Cross wondered if perhaps his benefactors might not simply be taking him to the police, but they had already walked past clusters of policemen and soldiers without paying them any attention.
After they had gone about a kilometer, they slowed their pace down to a brisk walk. Nathan looked up from under his blanket but couldn’t tell where they were, let alone where they were going. He saw that the young woman he had seen earlier was walking to his immediate right.
"Where are you taking me?", he asked her in a voice that sounded dry and weak.
She looked down at him and smiled again.
"Where are we going?", he repeated.
This time she simply shrugged, in a universal gesture of incomprehension. She spoke no English, and her comrades didn’t either.
Cursing his non-existent knowledge of Mandarin and Cantonese, the two languages she might have understood, Cross racked his brains for the few words he had managed to learn while working for the Tu-We. His mind was reeling with pain and exhaustion, which made it almost impossible to concentrate. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, channeling his remaining energy into one last, seemingly impossible task: communicating with these people who had, for one reason or another, saved his life.
"Nar?", he finally said. Where?
The woman looked down at him again, an amused frown creasing her brow, as though wondering where he had suddenly learned to speak Mandarin. He was asking where they were going, but she thought he was simply asking where they were.
So she told him.
"Tian An Men".
Ten years later, somewhere in the Costa Rican jungle.
The animals knew that something was wrong a full minute before the humans did.
The rebels were awakened by a sudden, chaotic concert of screaming monkeys and panicked birds. They rushed out of their tents, most only half-clothed, some completely naked, but all bearing at least one weapon or another.
The rumbling came a few moments later but lasted no more than two or three seconds. The rebels gasped in surprise and crouched instinctively, as much to keep their balance as to make themselves into smaller targets for… whatever it was that had caused the tremor. They looked at one another, not daring to speak, their faces painted with a mixture of worry and disbelief.
Then, after the trembling had stopped and they felt it was safe to relax, they straightened up and began discussing what had just happened in low voices. They knew that government soldiers were nearby and they didn’t wish to attract any unwanted attention. The soldiers, too, had to have been awakened by this strange event.
They fell silent when a young woman emerged from the darkness and stepped in their midst. Even the animals suddenly subsided, as though the aura of authority that radiated from her also applied to them.
"What happened?", she asked, her voice soft but hard.
"An earthquake, apparently", one of the men volunteered.
"I doubt it. The tremor only lasted for a couple of seconds", she said.
"A bomb, then? But I didn’t hear an explosion, so…", another man suggested.
"It may…"
Her answer was cut short by the sound of footsteps behind her. The men, their nerves ragged, immediately pointed their guns in that direction, but she beat them to it. With panther-like fluidity, she spun around, drew her sidearm and raised it at shoulder-level in one single movement. When she stopped, her muzzle was less than five centimeters from the forehead of the newcomer.
"Jorge", she said after lowering her gun, a note of alarm in her tone. "You’re bleeding. What happened? Were you attacked?"
The man wiped the trickle of blood running down his forehead with the back of his sleeve and smiled, his white teeth glowing in the darkness.
"No Maria", he said. "I was sitting on a large rock, keeping watch. When the ground shook, I fell off the rock and hit my head against a tree. It almost knocked me out, or I’d have been here sooner to tell you what I saw".
"What? What did you see?", the woman asked impatiently.
"I’m not sure, but it looked like a giant fireball", the man said after hesitating for a moment. He knew his comandante had a very low level of tolerance for foolishness, and he feared her reaction.
"I think maybe you hit your head too hard, Jorge", one of the other men joked. The others snickered.
"Hush!", Maria snapped. The men dropped their gazes. "This fireball he saw was probably a meteorite. A big one, if enough of it survived to shake the ground the way it did. Did you see it fall, Jorge? Do you know where it is?"
"Yes", Jorge said. "In that direction, I’d say maybe three or four kilometers", he added, pointing west. And then, slitting his eyes, he asked, "Do you intend for us to go find it?"
"Those things are worth their weight in gold", she said. "They’ll sell for up to 1,500$ per gram. We will sell it to some scientist in San Jose. Just think how many blankets that money will buy for our people".
She paused and looked at the sky. The darkness was already lightening in the east. Her voice contagious with enthusiasm, she issued her orders.
"It will be dawn in a couple of hours. Start breaking camp now, but keep the noise down. We move out at first light. A fortune just fell from the sky right into our laps, hombres, and I don’t intend to let anybody steal it from us".