fic: Chinese Boxes 2/11

[01cheers]

(ch 3 continued)

At daybreak three days later they land in Beijing. He has chartered another Skyhawk four-seater to go with his license, and they leave almost at once on a two-hour hop north to Xilinhot in the middle of Inner Mongolia. She takes in the view from the cockpit, the striped expanse of land beneath dotted with hills, the cotton wool of the clouds sailing by. It is good to just be flying alone with him and not have to save cities and outrun villains. She did not realise how much she has been looking forward to this.

In the end they only spend a couple of days in Inner Mongolia itself but they are a good couple of days. She has always been a city girl, by circumstance as much as, if not more than, by choice, and it all feels new - the endless grassy plains, the blue hills, the breeze, the horse rides, the quiet in the evening and the insanely starry nights. They don’t talk much but they touch a lot. She is content to just soak in the sensation of peace, and, she suspects, so is he.

On the third afternoon they fly over the ruins of legendary Xanadu and a further 500-plus miles southwest to the mysterious 108 Dagobas, set in the desert in gleaming rows overlooking the Yellow River, on the border between Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. Early the following morning, after an overnight stay in the lively, leafy old town of Yinchuan, they fly further west, more or less following the Mongolian border, to the stunning, remote Jiayuguan Fort, once China’s farthest western outpost on the Great Wall, sitting on a striking barren plain overlooking snow-capped mountains, and then continue further west to Turpan in Xinjiang. The next day they wander around the haunting Jiaohe abandoned city ruins and drive over toward Urumqi to spend a few hours on the shores of deep-turquoise Tian Chi, Heaven Lake, surrounded by meadows and pine forests and the towering Tian Shan peaks. She has never seen so much beauty and so much variety in so little time, and makes no attempt to hide her amazement. They walk, they take in the sights, they forget about the rest of the world. And they talk.

They don’t ask each other questions; there is a time for that, and they’ve already asked each other a few and will keep doing so. After all, the two of them were complete strangers until they were briefly and fatefully brought together by circumstances so extreme that they will probably be the stuff of Gotham legend for centuries. And apart from the instant and continuing attraction, it takes getting to know each other, likes, dislikes, habits, moods, tastes, morals, whatnot, to really learn to live with each other. But part of that is just listening and not pushing or prying, and trying to understand.

He tells her about his life and travels in Asia, where he went and what happened and what he learned, the adventures and misadventures, the odd jobs and fights and discoveries and Chinese prison and training. He does not talk much about the months he spent in the Tibetan retreat, apart from the fact that he learned a lot of useful things from the wrong people. She wants to know more, but knows that the time for that is yet to come. He talks, briefly and with difficulty, about Rachel and the eight years after she died; the time for knowing more about that may never come, but she also knows that she should let it be, should not try to open the Pandora’s box of history until and unless he is ready to do so himself. And she finally works up the confidence to tell him about her younger years, confesses how she came to regard theft a thrilling escape from a dreary life and a guarantee that she wouldn’t go hungry or have to sell her body for food, and is grateful when he listens and does not judge.

The more she learns of his history, the more she is struck by how much pain there is in it - and how a lot of it, at least on the surface, might seem avoidable. His destiny was shaped by childhood tragedy, but here is a man who could have had everything, who has so much intelligence and curiosity and, when he does not suppress it, so much lust for life - and who spent years turning himself into a weapon, then battling the underworld, then mourning something he never really had. In very different ways, they both have lost years of their lives doing questionable things, and she is both happy and not a little amazed that he is even able to contemplate, and set about building, a life beyond the cape.

On the second evening in Xinjiang, after he has told her about his prison stint in the province of Qinghai, between Mongolia and Tibet, and his long hike into Tibet and further on into Bhutan, she tells him that she would be curious to retrace his footsteps and they decide, almost on a whim, to do just that - figuratively speaking, as they would be flying rather than walking or hitchhiking - and go south toward the Bhutan border. And so on the afternoon of the next, the sixth day, they come back from Turpan to refuel at Jiayugun and fly a further two hours on to Xining, passing by Qinghai Hu, China ‘s largest lake, remote and eerie, with colourful Tibetan prayer flags on its shores. He chooses the less developed Xining rather than the more accessible and crowded Lanzhou on the banks of the Yellow River as their stopover point, allowing them to spend the next day looking at two magnificent monasteries located in the area before they fly a further 700 miles from Xining to Lhasa. They start with nearby Ta’er Si, a huge hillside temple complex dazzling with the golden roof of its great hall, and later fly southeast to Labrang Monastery in Xiahe with its dramatic mountain valley setting and its backdrop of almost-alpine mountains around Langmusi in the distance.

It has crept up on her before she even noticed. The better she gets to know him and the nicer he is to her, the more the beginnings of their history become an insidious torment. She cannot shake away the memory of having been an instrument of suffering for him; instead of going away, it burrows deeper into her mind. She knows that telling him about it will only invite dismissal, but ends up with a heavy suspicion that she has somehow been given this reward she does not deserve, that the day will come when she will have to pay both for her past deeds and for this unexpected happiness, and that he deserves someone better than her. Maybe, she argues in her thoughts, her purpose in his life is to help him enjoy it and protect him from himself. But whatever it is and whatever he thinks, one thing is clear. Selina, always a cool-headed and independent girl until he turned her life upside down, finds herself, for the first time in her adult existence, falling desperately in love, and knows that it is already too late to do anything about it.

_________________________________________

Notes to Ch 3

You may be familiar with my habit of sneaking in photo links. Here is another one that is somewhat relevant and not easily found: a few pics of an apartment above Lake Lugano for an idea of what I had in mind for the Carona villa, above all in terms of the terrace. I imagine it sleeker and more spacious, less 90-degree angles and more oblique, sloping lines, plus of course the hot tub, and definitely better furniture inside, but in this overall setting and style, even though this apartment sits on the "wrong" side of Lugano, on Monte Bré. I just wanted to convey the general sense. And here is an indoor pic of another villa that looks about right.

The original plan was to have them travel to Outer Mongolia ; but the Mongolian authorities are, in fact, to blame for changing the couple's travel plans ;) My remarks on the Mongolian, Hong Kong , and Chinese visa regimes may seem contrived but reflect the real state of affairs. Likewise, the implied Cessna travel times and distances in China are real.

4. Of shit and fans, part one

Bruce is usually restrained, or at least concise, when it comes to swearing. So when, after talking to the controller in Chinese, he hisses an extensive and almost exclusively four-letter invective at the Xining air traffic control, she knows that there is a reason for it.

“Something wrong?” She tries her best to sound casual.

“Fucker’s not letting us land,” Bruce snaps. “Says we must keep circling. Says there is an incident on the runway because a Boeing has just cocked up its landing because of fucking hail on the tarmac and he has a queue of passenger jets.”

They checked the weather before taking off in the morning, and again before leaving Xiahe. She has enough confidence in Bruce’s fluency in Chinese to believe it when he says, in between expletives, that the forecast contained nothing more menacing than scattered thunderstorms. Which the shit they are looking at resembles in name only, with 100 mph wind gusts and something that looks and sounds decidedly like hail. For now they are observing it from a relatively safe distance, but having had to do three circles wide enough to steer clear of the storm after they were already on approach, they are running out of options, and the controller does not seem to care.

“We have forty minutes’ fuel left,” he says in a flat tone. She does not know enough about flying to know if it is good or bad, but assumes from looking at him that it is the latter.

“Anything I can do?” She keeps her own voice level and matter-of-fact. She is not even scared; well, she certainly is, but somewhere in the crazy corner of her mind that seems to have grown a good deal lately, she thinks that there could be worse ways to die than here, five thousand feet up in the sky and looking at him. Maybe there is a point to the whole live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse thing.

Luckily for her, her pilot is much more practical thinking about the landing.

“Take a look on here.” He pulls out the tablet holding flight maps and hands it to her. “See if you can find an airstrip within a fifty-mile radius.”

She does her best to stay calm and look, if only to be helpful. A minute or so later, she holds the tablet for him to see. “Check it out. I’ve found this one but it’s not marked as an operational airfield.”

He looks away from the controls long enough to scan the satellite view. “Right. No wonder it’s been shut down, there was a major quake in this area four years ago. They’ve refurbished Xining airport and repaved the runway but they wouldn’t have bothered with something as small as this forty miles away in a seismic zone and right under the mountain ridge. Can’t believe they built it there in the first place.”

“Can we still land on it?”

He scowls. “We can, but we’ll be landing on visual only. There’s no one to give us an approach vector and landing guidance. And there’s no telling exactly how bad the runway is. But it’s doable. The upside is, there won’t be anyone else landing there so we’ll have it to ourselves.”

“I guess it’s the best we have,” she ventures.

“I guess so,” he says between his teeth. He likes it far less than she does, and she suspects that it is because of her being there. God knows what crazy shit he’s pulled on his own. “We won’t know until we’re there.”

It doesn’t look disastrously bad on the recon pass they are making before settling on the approach vector. The runway looks smooth; it’s almost as if it had been maintained. Bruce is initially pleased to see it; she cannot immediately see what suddenly makes him change his mind.

“Anything wrong?” she asks a second time in half an hour.

“I don’t like this,” he states grimly. That much is obvious.

“What?”

“The radar.” He points to a white dot in the distance, far below on the ground ahead of them. “It’s working.” Peering ahead, she can just about see the top of the array spinning.

“Maybe the map’s old,” she offers. “Maybe they’ve restored and reopened it since.”

“I rechecked the local flight maps for updates before we left Turpan two days ago,” he argues. “They were dated end of April. There’s no way it would have changed in a month.” He lets out his breath in a hiss. “The more likely scenario is, it’s something dirty.”

“Dirty?” she echoes.

“Drugs,” he explains. “They could be growing opium poppy at the foot of the mountains. Would explain their desire to repave the strip in this location.”

Fuck.

“You don’t think we could pay them off,” she wonders aloud. They have a duffle bag of 100-yuan banknotes hidden under the back seat of the plane, money they have been using to pay for refuelling - “that way we get much faster service than we would with a credit card,” he explained to her - and still have about three hundred thousand yuan, thirty thousand euros’ worth, left, leaving them a cushion for emergencies. “Give them a hundred thousand and say we were never there?”

“If this is the Triad,” he counters grimly, “they’ll take all that there is and the plane and there won’t be enough left of our bodies to identify. They are beyond paranoid, now that the government is cornering them and they retreat into the wilderness. If we were on a more equal footing, in a built-up area or at least on uneven terrain, I could do something, take out enough of them so we could outrun the rest. But we have no fuel and we’re literally going to be a sitting duck the moment we land.”

She can’t fault his logic. But she is not sure that they have conclusive evidence yet.

“I’m not going dumb and delirious on you, but there’s still a chance that it’s something legit or at least non-Triad,” she offers, not really convincing even herself.

“What the fuck - “ he snaps, and before she has time to wonder if he has lost patience with her, he goes on, peering ahead and to the left of the runway, ”I can’t believe they built a -“

At that moment, the comm relay hisses to life, the static quickly replaced by a gruff Chinese voice.

Bruce shoots her a quick look. “Listen, if we don’t get a chance to talk until later, there are three things I need you to do.”

“What?” she asks, startled by this turn of events and the change in his countenance, not knowing what to expect.

“Hide your Canadian passport below the dash as far as you can stick it, speak Italian, and act stupid.”

She has no idea what this means, but says “sure” just as he switches over the comm and answers the query, by now repeated, in Chinese.

______________________________________

Notes to Ch 4

I was looking forward to posting this next link. Not a photo, but a song that perfectly sums up the tone of this scene… or this fic, for that matter. If you are familiar with Warren Zevon's Lawyers, Guns, and Money, you know what I mean. If not, here is the video and here are the lyrics

And the part about Xining being in a seismic zone is true.

5. Getaway

Bruce is still talking to the controller, or to whoever the man on the other end of the conversation is, when it occurs to her that they may, after all, need bribe money. She twists in her seat as far as she can to lift the back seat cushion, drags the duffle bag from under it, pulls it into her lap, and takes out four rolls of notes, 5000 yuan or about 500 euro in each, offering them to him before replacing the bag. He nods in gratitude - the conversation and the descent manoeuvres do not really allow him to direct his attention to other things - and stuffs the notes into the pockets of his bomber, this one made of leather but still predictably black. But he does not seem interested in hiding his passport.

Instead he grabs the tablet holding the flight maps and hurriedly types something on it with one hand before passing it to her. She looks at the notepad memo he opened: delete our flight plans. She has a moment of panic thinking how she can find them, leave alone delete them, before calling up the file manager and seeing the directory. Once the files are purged from trash, she cancels the memo and looks at him for further instructions; he motions for her to give him the tablet and runs a command on it, briefly glancing at the screen while steering the plane with one hand. Whatever it is, the program appears to crash the tablet, and she wonders whether it was intentional before a sideways glance at him shows her his satisfied expression.

He spends most of the final approach on the radio with the controller, keeping his voice so calm it’s almost casual, but she sees the tension in the sharpened lines of his face. Whatever he is saying seems to work, for the moment: the other man started in a tone that sounded distinctly put out but, while still apparently displeased, has decided to let them land: judging by Bruce’s reaction to what he is saying, he is giving them landing instructions. Contrary to procedure, the controller cuts off when they touch down - but then they are landing on an empty strip and there are no other craft to watch out for or parking spots to be directed to - leaving the cabin suddenly quiet save for the whine of the engine slowing down. This may be their last chance to talk; there is too much to say and none of it is appropriate for the moment.

“Don’t switch on your phone.” As usual, Bruce goes for the practical side. “We have better chances if they don’t worry about anyone locating us via GPS. We could be dead by the time they locate us, anyway.”

She OK’s her acknowledgement as they slow down a couple of hundred feet before the end of the runway, fifty or so feet away from the squat concrete building of a rudimentary terminal. The place looks eerily empty as they sit there waiting for some sign of human presence other than the disembodied controller of a few minutes ago.

He turns to her and looks at her in a way that makes her throat ache in sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she replies steadily. Whatever this may lead to, she has no regrets about having made it this far.

Two seconds later, the terminal doors open to spit out half a dozen men in uniform.

“Cops or military?” she asks while the group is walking up to the Cessna.

“Look like Armed Police,” he says, his voice uncertain.

“Can they tag you with fingerprints to show your previous arrest?”

“No. They aren’t really -“ he cuts himself off and motions for her to open the passenger door, seeing how the men are gesturing for them to get out.

***

The cops or whoever they are motion them out of the plane but do not handcuff them; a good thing already, she thinks. There are guns on display, handguns in holsters and AK47s held in a discreetly menacing way by two of the men, but for now, they are just standing on the runway and talking.

And even without knowing a word of Chinese, she can tell that Bruce is giving an Oscar-worthy performance.

She was amazed at the sudden change in his expression and manner the moment he turned away from her to open the door. It is as if the problem had suddenly resolved itself, or had never even existed. Here was a man so relaxed, so unperturbed, that had she not seen him seconds earlier she would have never believed such a change possible. And here she was, thinking she had been an accomplished actress. If anything, he looks slightly lost, but still with an air of someone who managed to take a wrong turn in his own manor house.

It seems to be working, at least in the sense of not getting them shot. Initially they all ignore her standing next to him while the presumable highest ranking officer is questioning him; then, seeing Bruce steal a glance at her, she figures it is her turn to contribute.

“Amore,” she drawls in her best fake cooing voice and her best Italian accent. “Cosa sta succedendo?

“Tutto a posto, cara,” he replies smoothly before turning his attention back to his Chinese interrogator, and she wonders how much truth there is in his reply. Is he saying that everything is OK as part of his performance, or does he mean it?

A minute later, she turns to him again. “Amore, questo non mi piace, ho paura.”

“Non preoccuparti cara, stai tranquilla.” This time he actually touches her arm to reinforce the soothing message. No one stops him from doing it; so far, so good.

The conversation continues, a stream of sharp singsong syllables in an unfamiliar language. She cannot possibly hope to make any sense of it - except at one point she seems to hear Bruce mention an Italian name, Giacomo something, presumably tying in with her pretend identity.

She decides to try a different tack. After all, he did tell her to act stupid.

“Tesoro, possiamo pagarli per andare via?”

“Si, si, sto per farlo,” he answers quickly, as if irritated by her pestering him. But to her, this is the most decisively encouraging message so far: if he acknowledges, albeit in a language the cops presumably do not understand, that he is about to pay them off so they let the two of them go, it really must mean that they are off the hook.

And so it seems. They walk over to the terminal - no guns trained on them - and Bruce shows the cops his Swiss passport and signs some sort of papers and gives them two of the money rolls from his pockets apparently under the pretence of an official payment, and after about ten minutes’ wait, she sees a refuelling truck pull up to the Cessna from behind the terminal, and they are led back to the plane for Bruce to open the fuel tank. After a few more minutes the tank is sealed again, the truck pulls away, the cops wave them on - impatiently, it seems to her - and miraculously, they get back onto the plane not only alive but with only half of their intended bribe paid and with fuel in the tank. They taxi into takeoff position on the runway and, following the surly controller’s instructions once more, take off into the beginnings of dusk.

It is almost anticlimactic. Something that seemed like mortal peril an hour ago looks now to have been little more than an unusual refuelling stop, not that she isn’t happy about it. In fact she is too bewildered by their good luck to be capable of an immediate reaction. It is only when they are a few hundred feet off the ground and a couple of miles from the airstrip that she steals a glance at Bruce and sees how utterly exhausted he looks.

“You OK?” With the past hour’s happenings, it was easy to forget that their troubles - specifically, his troubles as the pilot - actually started almost three hours ago and included the near miss of running out of fuel while airborne.

“Yeah.” He sounds like he means it, if rather downbeat. “You?”

“Fine,” she answers with a shrug. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we seem to have got away with it.”

“Looks like it.” He sounds like he doesn’t want to discuss it at the moment, the fatigue seeping into his voice. “Now, where do you want to go? I don’t think it makes sense to return to Xining. We can head back toward Beijing, or we can still try to go to Lhasa but in either case we need to stop overnight and refuel in the morning. We only have half a tank.”

She feels slightly guilty about insisting on sticking to their plan seeing how preoccupied he is, but does not feel like spending the last two days of their trip in a huge crowded city. Besides, he is offering her a choice, and they can sleep until late tomorrow if they want to.

“Is it OK if we still go to Lhasa?”

“Of course it’s OK.” For once he sounds nearly upbeat. “I have to warn you, our stopover point tonight will be something of a shithole. But I didn’t feel like pushing my luck and asking for a full tank when my stated destination only needed half.”

“So long as we get a bed, I’m sure we’ll live,” she offers, as he veers the plane to go west. She wants to know more about what just happened and especially about what seems to have left him unhappy about it, but it can wait.

***

Her patience pays off the following morning. By the time they take off from rather desolate Golmud - she has to agree with Bruce on his less-then-favourable opinion of their overnight stopover point - they are both well-rested; for once they spent all their time in bed just sleeping, too drained by the evening’s misadventure. Bruce seems to be in better spirits; and when she asks him what exactly happened at the airstrip the previous afternoon, he eventually gives her a full account.

“Basically, I played clueless bordering on brain dead. I’ve had a lot of practice at it,” he adds, noticing her quizzically raised eyebrow.

You and me both, she thinks. “And the cops went for it.”

“They weren’t cops.”

“Armed Police, whoever.”

“They weren’t police at all. They did a good job with the uniforms, probably stole some and made copies, but they had Russian-made AK47s, without a bayonet. The real Chinese Armed Police use the Type 56, it’s a locally made version that has the bayonet attached, or a QBZ-95. I suppose they couldn’t get their hands on genuine PAP weapons and figured most people wouldn’t think about such things when looking at assault rifles.”

Well, I sure wouldn’t, she thinks. She would think about how to overpower or outrun the guards, but not about the finer points of rifle accessories.

“As soon as I saw that, I figured that a, they wanted us or any other visitors to think they were legit, and b, they could be bribed.”

So that’s part of the reason he looked so relaxed when talking to these people, AK47s and all. Still doesn’t explain why he was so downbeat afterwards, though.

“And they were happy to see that we were foreigners,” he continues. “The controller couldn’t tell I wasn’t Chinese, so they had no advance notice.”

“Why did you tell me to speak Italian?”

“I suppose I could have asked you to speak French, but it made more sense to pick a language we both speak.”

“Why not English?”

“Same reason as I told you to hide your passport. Anyone English-speaking snooping around in these parts will make them think they’re CIA, or worse, DEA. And Canada is notorious to them for issuing passports to CIA agents on undercover assignments. If they saw your passport and heard you speak English, it would have screamed Langley to them.”

“But you have an English-sounding name in your passport and they saw it.”

“In a Swiss passport, mind you. The Swiss aren’t exactly known for leading the international law enforcement effort. They probably figured I had a few things to hide with a passport like that.”

And you sure do, she smirks to herself. “So you said I was Swiss too?”

“Italian, actually. The story I told them was that I was here on an associate’s business. I had to tell them there was a business reason for the trip, or they’d never believe we were in Qinghai on holiday when foreigners never really come here. I gave them a name of an Italian client of ours who I knew has Chinese partners in his company in Italy and a small stake in a local yarn producer in Chengdu, less than 400 miles south of here in Sichuan. I figured he’d bear me out if it came to calling him to check our credentials, and my Chinese would explain to them why he took me on as an associate.” So that’s who the Giacomo guy must have been. “I told them that we were flying to Chengdu from Beijing, that you were his future daughter-in-law also involved in the business and had an affair with me in the meantime, and that I’d chartered the plane to impress you with my flying and get us some privacy,” he flashes her a mischievous look, “and I didn’t want my business partner to know that his son’s fiancée was cheating on her future husband with me, so I was anxious to keep your presence quiet from him. I figured if they did call him, he’d recognise my name and say the right thing, but he wouldn’t know the first thing to say about you. And since Beijing to Chengdu is 1000 miles and beyond the Cessna’s range, I had to stop and refuel. You’d erased our real flight plans and I made it look like the tablet crashed to explain why we hadn’t saved any, so I could tell them that my original plan was to fly from Beijing to Xi’an, on a straight line to Chengdu, but Xi’an International was too busy and I had to go to the alternative airport, which in this case was Lanzhou, which in turn was busy receiving redirected traffic from Xining, which we knew was not letting us land, and we were flying on fumes and were desperate to land anywhere and pay anything for the half a tank needed to get us to Chengdu.”

She is impressed, in retrospect, by his ability to construct a flawlessly coherent cover story in what must have been a few seconds after he heard the controller and before he told her to speak Italian. “I thought we’d end up giving them more money to let us go.”

“They wanted it to look official. I paid them about five times the going rate for fuel, anyway.”

“Which was still a hell of a lot less than we could have lost,” she admits. “What’s this Giacomo guy like?” Part of her reason for asking it is to see if it gets him jealous; ever since she discovered that particular trait of his, it has been a gift that keeps on giving. If this doesn’t work, she’ll proceed to needle him about the guy’s son she was supposed to be engaged to.

But rather than look jealous or annoyed or amused, he looks dejected, just like the previous evening. “I shouldn’t have mentioned him. Name’s Giacomo Varese, he asked us to install surveillance systems a couple of months ago, it was one of the first jobs I remember tackling with Theo after I got out of hospital and came to Lugano. He seemed worried, and wanted top-of-the range surveillance for his home but none for his business, which seemed strange. I figured he’d probably received threats from the Mafia, but he didn’t say and I didn’t push him. I had no right to invoke a client here.” He shakes his head. “But I wanted to be sure they’d believe us and wouldn’t mess with us.” Wouldn’t mess with me, she thinks, knowing perfectly well that Bruce would have managed to get out of this even without a cover story. But he looks too miserable already for her to call him out on his over-protectiveness.

“Chances are, he’ll never know and they’ll never remember. Maybe they’re just a small outfit producing fake Gucci bags.”

He looks anything but convinced. “Not likely.”

“What is it that worries you?”

He takes his eyes off the instruments for a few seconds, but does not quite look at her. “Just before we started the landing procedure, when the controller called out to me, we were flying over the northwest end of the strip. The way he directed us to the landing, we never passed that side again until we landed and couldn’t see beyond the foothills. But I’m positive that what I saw in the valley over there was a chemical plant. Not a meth lab but a serious thing, reactor tanks, storage tanks, the whole nine yards. In a seismic area, mind you, that had a major quake four years ago and two 5-magnitude quakes this year alone, and hundreds of miles away from any big industrial zones. And it looked to be in perfect working order.”

_______________________________

Note to Ch 5

I'll do my best to explain anything Italian that is important to the plot - the only "unexplained" words are likely to be commonplace greetings etc (e.g. ciao, come va, tutto bene) or swearwords (stronzo etc). But if my translations/comments seem confusing or you are curious about the meaning of a particular expression, let me know.

6. Deja Vu

She is not surprised when he asks her, on the evening of the first day they spent in Lhasa getting lost in the Potala Palace and wandering around the town and its fabled temples, if she would be OK with a half-day stopover in Hong Kong, after they complete the local monastery tour tomorrow afternoon and fly to Beijing, or rather Lanzhou to stay overnight before arriving in Beijing on the last day of their trip, so he can drop by the Wainwright Security rep office. She knows the reason full well; they are enjoying their time in Lhasa but she can see it, hear it, in his subdued voice and the fleeting dull look in his eyes; he cannot let go of the remote valley west of Xining, with its deserted airstrip and fake Armed Police and sinister-looking chemical plant. She wants to argue, to tell him that it is none of their business, but she knows it to be useless. Going to the Hong Kong office and running a query may be the lesser evil in the end; with any luck, he will either discover the damned thing to be less of a threat than he thought, or if it turns out to be big, will alert the Chinese authorities to its existence and let them deal with it. She tries to think of the likely outcome in these binary terms, and not dwell on what other scenarios may crop up.

On the plus side, neither of them is eager to fly commercial on the typically-full three-hour flight, so after they’ve changed their long-haul flight departure point and time from Beijing late in the morning to Hong Kong late in the evening and have landed in Beijing in the early afternoon, they immediately board an executive charter jet to travel the three hours in relative luxury. By the time the door closes and the plane begins taxiing, the much-delayed adrenaline rush from their lucky escape outside Xining catches up with her, and Bruce is only too willing - or rather, all too eager - to play along. They send away the hostess to the pilots’ cabin, and the moment they hear the cabin door shut, he pulls her into his lap and gets his hands under her clothes. They are only marginally embarrassed when they are discovered, sleepy and tousled and distinctly underdressed, in a heap of blankets on the leather couch when the plane begins its descent over Lantau; and when questioned about it now, Bruce has to admit that his previously indifferent opinion of the mile high club was entirely a function of his fellow travellers at the time.

Wainwright Security occupies a total of five rooms on the vertiginous 85th floor of the gleaming Two IFC Tower in Hong Kong Central near the Star Ferry terminal. Bruce had no intention of making a big deal of his visit - he just needed an hour or so to talk to Chen, the chief representative, run a quick online search, and call Theo from a room where he could look at a decent-sized computer screen while talking - but once the other staff, all three of them, get the news that the mythical Mr Wainwright not only exists but is actually sitting in their boss’s office, they all find pretexts to poke into that office at the close of the business day. Huang and Zhou, the existing and new contract managers, suddenly need advice on how to deal with tricky negotiations, and Lin the executive assistant, the sweet, willowy girl who packed and brought Selina’s suitcase to Lugano but only met Selina herself while Bruce was off taking to Theo in the review meeting he had unceremoniously skipped on the day of their dinner date, sneaks in, with a million apologies, under the pretence of saying hello to Selina. Bruce plays along and is nice to all of them, even if Selina suspects that he’d rather get down to business with Chen. Eventually they are left in peace; Selina herself feels like an interloper, unable to contribute much to a discussion of the Chinese criminal world, but when she suggests that she might take a walk downtown so as not to be in the way, Bruce says “sure, if you’d like to” and looks at her in a way that suggests that he likes watching her right there, and she thinks that she has pretty much seen all of Hong Kong in any case.

The search and subsequent discussion achieve little besides partially vindicating Bruce’s assertion of having seen a chemical plant. It is, in fact, officially mapped and listed as Gonghe Rongbaolin, a chemical pulp mill, a producer of unbleached kraft pulp and cardboard, illogical as it may be in a sparsely forested area when most of China’s pulp mills are a good thousand miles further south. There is even a single-page website, a crude, garishly coloured page with a bullet-point list of products and contact details. The airstrip is still listed as closed in every source they encounter; there is no point in transporting cardboard by air anyway, so it is not even clear if there is a connection between the strip and the mill. Chen says that he can try doing a more extensive search in business directories and official financial reporting databases to see who Rongbaolin belongs to and what sort financials it boasts, but this, by definition, would take time. To make sure they leave no stone unturned, Bruce calls Theo on the conference table speakerphone, gets an earful of calm but excruciatingly sarcastic mockery about how much his general manager appreciates being urgently pulled out of an important sales pitch meeting to discuss the nuances of the Chinese pulp and paper industry, retaliates with pointed and patently fake admiration of Theo’s love of sales talk, and secures a promise that Theo will see if he can pull strings at the Interpol to find out if the location has ever been mentioned in any of the information-seeking blue notices, arrest-warrant red notices, or any reports on organised crime, drug production, or failing that, environmental crime. There seems little else to be done; they just have a couple of hours for a quiet dinner before heading to Lantau for their 11 pm flight. How strange life is sometimes. A mere month ago, she left Hong Kong on the very same flight to Zurich, anxious and hopeful, not sure what to expect but unable to resist the draw of seeing a man she had once betrayed and then mourned for dead. And here she is now, about to board it with him.

They walk out of Chen’s room; it is almost seven, but Lin, who usually leaves at six sharp to Theo’s regular time zone-related frustration, is still there, apparently typing up a memo she forgot about. Selina tries not to smile, noticing the girl steal lingering looks at her admittedly gorgeous boyfriend.

“One more thing,” Bruce says to Chen, oblivious to Lin’s attention, “could you run a detailed search on suspected Triad assets in Qinghai and see if you can cross-reference the coordinates? Maybe the the airfield comes up under a codename? Or maybe they have something else in the vicinity?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” To Selina’s benefit, Chen prefers speaking English when he can, accented though it is versus Bruce’s near-native Chinese - he does not often get a chance to practice. “They aren’t doing well, fortunately. At least here in Hong Kong they aren’t,” he corrects himself.

“Hong Kong is still Lau’s sandbox, isn’t it?” Bruce says, absent-mindedly.

Selina has no idea who Lau is, and why this is met with peals of laughter from both Chen and Lin.

“You must have been studying ancient history, Mr Wainwright,” Chen says, still chuckling. “Lau’s business never recovered after he was snatched into mid-air by a flying ninja dressed as a bat and taken to Gotham City for questioning, almost ten years ago. He came back eventually, but his empire was finished. And then they had to sell their building two blocks from here to an American insurance company. Imagine the humiliation.”

Bruce does his best to act like he is embarrassed by his memory lapse and amused by the details, but she notices him looking anxiously around the room, thinking of a way to change the subject. She remembers his seemingly-offhand comments to her about his last Hong Kong trip before this one, halfway around the world on the top of San Salvatore: interesting enough to be a pleasure; a thrill ride, anyway. And he managed to get so distracted now as to forget its consequences. She tries not to laugh along with the other two to save him further blushes.

It is a valiant but futile effort. Lin, apparently still at the stage in life when romantic heroes trump successful businessmen, stops ogling Bruce and gets positively starry-eyed, waxing lyrical about the episode.

“It was incredible, Mr Wainwright,” she gushes. “They only got about five seconds of TV footage but it was fantastic. This man was like a warrior from legend, flying up there. I was only thirteen at the time and I would have given anything to meet him. Actually, I think I still would,” she adds, dreamily.

By now Selina has chewed the inside of her cheeks into mincemeat. Next to her, Bruce does his damned best not to laugh, and amazingly, he succeeds. If he is also trying not to blush, he is failing miserably.

Oh well, time to rescue the warrior from legend.

“See, I’ve been telling you,” she says, nudging him, before addressing Lin with her hastily concocted explanation. “I’ve just been telling him again how much I’d like the two of us to go hang-gliding. I keep trying to convince him that it’s really fun, and he’s too scared to believe me.”

***

“Anyone you’re looking for?”

They are sitting in a relatively quiet corner of the bustling Tokio Joe, grabbing a simple but exquisitely fresh sushi dinner, when Bruce catches her scanning the crowd. Logically, she should be on the lookout for anyone who might recognise either of them to save them an embarrassing conversation, or worse, the risk of exposure; irrationally, she wants some acquaintance from her earlier stay to walk in and take an eyeful of the two of them flirting their way through the meal. Admittedly there would be a bit of explaining to do about her sudden disappearance, but she wants to draw some sort of symbolic line below the two months she spent here recovering but still not quite living.

No, she is about to say, and stops herself. It would certainly make him jealous... but just this once, she does not want to tease him with imaginary rivals when she has been reminded of his recent status as her imaginary dead husband. “Yes, actually,” she replies instead. “The day I found your card, I was about to have dinner at the Gaddis with this guy from Brazil who said he might have a business offer for me.” She notices his momentary scowl, though it looks to be provoked by the over-the-top restaurant choice rather than the would-be date as such. “I was interested enough to want to hear what he had to say. He didn’t know anything about me and thought I was rich,” she explains, omitting the widow bit, “and I finally made myself open the box to put on the pearls to look the part. The rest, as they say,” she half-smiles at him, “is history. I was just thinking it would be funny to see him now.”

“You should have told me this before,” he counters, mirroring her expression. “Seeing how I am forever indebted to him for your phone call, I’d have invited him for dinner to thank him.”

“Some other time, perhaps. For now, I’d rather have you to myself, Mr Legendary Warrior, so that you’d tell me more about your airborne adventure,” she prompts.

“Believe it or not, it started with the orgy.” The positively flirtatious way he says it makes her want to laugh already.

“Which wasn’t really an orgy, as I recall,” she teases, quoting his earlier comment.

He grins at her. “Precisely. I should have thought better of it, in retrospect,” he continues, obviously enjoying taunting her, “but I left myself way too little time to make the most of being on a boat with thirty or so very attractive girls before I had an important date to go on.” He pauses - deliberately, the bastard - seeing that he has piqued her curiosity. “With Lucius,” he finishes.

“Did you guys enjoy it?” she winks at him.

“A lot. It was very romantic,” he deadpans. “He picked me up in a seaplane and we flew over here, and he went and talked to Lau officially... and gathered enough info about the building to allow me to then go and talk to Lau unofficially later that night.”

“If our friend Lin is to be believed, go is a misnomer in your case,” she suggests, raising an eyebrow and making flying gestures with her fingers.

He grins again. “If you insist on precise terminology, then I didn’t talk much to him, either. I just grabbed him and got us both lifted on board the plane so that Gordon could talk to him.”

She smiles, but it all sounds almost too much fun for her liking, the way he is relishing the memory. Stupid as it is, it makes her feel ridiculously jealous not of a person, but of her boyfriend’s former persona. So much for Bruce thinking once that it was Batman and not him that she was after. Then again, it makes two of them, both jealous of the same symbol from the past. Talk about confusing.

(end of Ch 6) - continued in part 3