The Wuhan Mission

Here she looked just like everyone else. No more “so where are you from?” questions from well meaning people. She had done most of her growing up in Beijing. It wasn’t until she was thirteen that her parents were suddenly told to go home to America. At the time, their sudden departure seemed really strange to her. She had no time to say goodbye to any of her school friends, and none of them yet had cell phones. She had not managed to stay in touch with them using email. Unbeknownst to Xue Lin, her emails never made it through the Chinese censors.

In America, she had made new friends at both the normal school with the ‘whities’ and at the weekend school for Chinese kids. Saturdays after school she would hang out with the Chinese kids for hours. She had felt quite homesick for a few years after the move and it had not helped that the some of the white kids and black kids were racist toward her and she had more than a few dust-ups in the schoolyard. Her adoptive parents had put her in regular Kung Fu classes in Beijing, nine years of classes in fact, so quite often she found herself in the office of the head mistress explaining the various abrasions and bloody noses of the other, usually much bigger kids. Xue Lin had adopted a ‘kick them in the face, first; ask questions later’ method with the bullies. It only took a year before they realized it was safer to be her friend than her enemy.

*

The young computer tech sat at his terminal inside one of the many high security buildings belonging to the 3PLA. He was part of the ‘3PLA Locator Team’ whose purpose was to provide location information on demand about anyone who had been placed in the chip geo-locator database.

His computer had pinged somebody who had just reentered China. He put his hand up to call over his superior.

“I just had a ping for a reentry. Shanghai. The file says: ‘Born 1991, female, adopted by Americans, possibly CIA. Left China in 2003. Possible espionage. Enemies of China.’”

“Keep a detailed file on her movements between cities, and let me know whenever she moves.”

“Got it” replied the young tech.

Shanghai

Xue Lin had slept peacefully across two seats, enjoying the safety and anonymity of bus travel. There had been nothing to look at during the ten hours of darkness out the window. The bus entered Jiangsu Province at first light. As they reached Shanghai, the sun was already well into the sky and the city was crowded with people on their way to work. She would spend the day wandering Shanghai before meeting her contact after sunset at the Shanghai Peace Hotel, in the Jazz Band Room that she’d heard stories about. She would be picking up her papers: a Resident Identity Card and driver’s license with a Wuhan home address.

Walking the streets of Shanghai, with her face covered by the blue surgical mask to avoid starting any kind of trail on the facial recognition cameras, Xue Lin continued to feel like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She hadn’t been back to China since being removed with her parents by the Chinese Government more than twenty years earlier. It all seemed very surreal with barely a white man to be seen. It felt odd to be this happy while on such a high pressure and dangerous assignment. It felt right.

Xue Lin pre-empted her eight o’clock date at the hotel with some reconnaissance. Dressed as a tourist, she wore one of the long hair extensions that she’d packed. She located the Jazz Room and wandered in. The crowd looked like they had been there for a while already, probably onto their third or fourth cocktail by the looks of them. The old guys in the band played nonchalantly on their instruments as though they had been doing it every night for the last forty years. Possibly some had. They were wearing white tuxedos and seemed oblivious to the crowd of tourists listening to them.

The band stood up to take a break and Xue Lin looked at her watch. It was right on eight o’clock. She was standing at the agreed upon place by the bar looking around the room wondering who her contact was. The audience were mostly white people. The bass player from the band stood next to her as he ordered a drink. He said quietly to her in a Shanghai accent: “I got your papers.”

As his whisky was being poured he palmed her a very small red envelope that contained her ID and driver’s license. He did it so smoothly and quickly that Xue Lin was shocked. “Bass players are usually so slow and clueless” she thought to herself, reminiscing about her dating days in the States.

Xue Lin quietly slipped out of the bar, and left the hotel. The IDs looked good to her. The guy had come highly recommended by the asset, Jimmy. ‘Pretty slick cover, playing in the band’ Xue Lin thought as she laughed out loud, heading out to the street. The unlikely nature of what had just gone down was amusing to her, and she walked off into the Shanghai night, still shaking her head, smiling.

Hitchhiking to Wuhan