Irving Waters - The Wuhan Mission

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.

Xue Lin bought a thick black marker and dug some cardboard out of a trash bin and wrote: ‘Wuhan Please’ in large Chinese characters. Hitching a ride to Wuhan in a truck was the smartest way to make the ten hour journey. Completely untraceable. The research she’d done while still in the States had turned up pages of tourist hitching experiences from young backpackers. It was not considered a suspicious way to travel for young foreigners, and truck drivers were known for their marathon routes across vast distances in relatively short periods of time.

Xue Lin stood at the toll entrance for highway G50. Her hair was in a ponytail and her clothes were those of an American tourist: a fashionable branded hoodie and designer cargo pants, sunglasses, and now a different hair extension. She waited less than half an hour before a driver paying the toll read her sign and beckoned her over. Xue Lin used just a few words of poorly pronounced tourist Mandarin to communicate that indeed she wished to go to Wuhan. That way she wouldn’t have to converse with the driver.

Once in the truck, the driver made the universal ‘sh’ sign with his forefinger against his lips, and pulled a corner of the curtain back to reveal that there was a narrow bed behind the seats in which another driver was sleeping soundly.

After four hours on the road, the drivers skillfully changed shift without even slowing down. The new driver smiled and nodded at Xue Lin, asking only: “Meiguo ren?” to which she nodded, indicating that she was indeed American as she turned the other way and went back to sleep.

The young Chinese computer tech watched the blip that represented the chipped adopted girl. She was on the move. The tech put his hand up to get his superior’s attention.

“What do you have?”

“She is moving rapidly on toll highway G50” replied the tech.

“Is she on a bus?”

“I’ll check sir.” The tech worked through the public transport closed circuit camera system until he found the Shanghai bus depot. He found the departure area cameras. There were eighteen cameras. Opening another window on his computer he pulled up the timetables. He methodically clicked through the different bus lines that would take the G50 highway.

“Shall I come back later?” His superior asked sarcastically.

“Ah, yes sir. This will take a while,” said the tech embarrassedly, watching his superior stalk off.

Dr. Wu was late for work and the smog was the worst he could remember. His silver Mercedes was very ostentatious for Wuhan and he enjoyed the looks he got from poor people. The car was already five years old but without a single scratch. The Central Military Commissionhad given it to him to grease the wheels when offering him the dubious job in which he was still working five years later. At the time it seemed like a good deal: high salary, luxury car, choice of his own lab assistants, state of the art laboratories, a new house with security posted outside. But he had been given a dark directive.

Dr. Wu was surprised to learn that two of his lab assistants had resigned just that morning. No reason was given, and nobody seemed to have any idea why. In any case, he would have to fill the two positions before the end of the weekend as there was work to be done. Wu was not concerned about any possible harassment allegations from the two girls who had quit. He had all the power, and they had none.

“Could you post two lab assistant jobs this morning please?” he asked one of the administrative girls. I want to do interviews on Friday so we have two new girls here working on Monday.”

Xue Lin had slept all the way through the second driver’s shift and she awoke as the sun began to rise. They would soon be pulling into Wuhan. She’d been out of contact for forty-eight hours. She would need to find her contact in Wuhan almost immediately and get her hands on the gear that had been organized for her so she could contact Sam and get an update on the job prospects. She was on a very tight schedule.

“Zai Jian!” she said getting the tones wrong on purpose, as she shook hands with both drivers and climbed down out of the truck cabin and started walking in the direction one of them was pointing.

It was a relief to move her limbs again after having been couped up it the truck for so long. She was pleased with how things were going. She felt safe, anonymous and undetected. She had managed to get herself to Wuhan without incident. Now she needed to find a GPS position near the river to initiate contact.

She typed in the position that she’d memorized during her last week at Langley: 30°34’17.3”N 114°17’20.9”E, and hailed a cab. “Hualou Fairprice!” she said.

It was a supermarket close to where she needed to be.

During her ride in the semi-trailer she’d spent a couple of hours running scenarios in her head. Today was her official arrival day and she was to be met by Jimmy, a contact who should have tools for her and should have organized her an apartment. She had been taught in training never to let her guard down in these situations. Assets can never be trusted. They can flip back and forth, they can be playing both sides, or they may just try to kill you the moment the opportunity arises. This particular asset was one of Roet’s. He was ex-PLA, and on the CIA payroll.