Irving Waters - The Wuhan Mission

Xue Lin tossed the three handbags in the closet, and looked at the remaining gear on the bed. The bug detector, the lock picks, the data recovery tool and the wire.

The Garrote wire, a necessary but unpleasant and rather grizzly weapon, she made into a bracelet. “I hope I don’t have to use this before the day is out” she thought to herself, reminding herself that she needed to check the position of the locator she’d put on the girl.

“Email first!” she said, putting on the thick rimmed reading glasses that Jimmy had left for her. “Wow these really do make me look like a geek” she thought.

She opened the laptop and logged in to her Email account that she had established for her job application. It had just gone five o’clock.

Dr. Wu looked carefully over each of the three applications on the large white table. There was something about the feisty one from Beijing that he didn’t entirely trust. The smart thing would be to hire the other two nicer girls, one of whom was a shoe-in. They would undoubtably tow the line, do as they were told and be sweet to him.

“Yes, I’ll hire the good girls. Less chance of problems.”

He turned to his desktop computer and cut and pasted together a job offer from an old file. He sent it off to the first girl, the ‘shoe-in.’ Next he started to type the ‘rejection email’ to Xue Lin.

“Thank you for your time. After reviewing the finalists I have decided to go with the other applicants. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

Xue Lin signed in to her Email account.

“You have no mail,” she read out loud. “Not good!” she said shaking her head, thinking about Dr. Wu’s promise to let them know by the end of the day. She closed her laptop and went to her phone to check on the location of the poor innocent girl who had no idea what was coming if Xue Lin didn’t get one of those jobs.

The little red ball on the map in her phone showed that she lived near the river, a couple of neighborhoods to the South. It was just starting to get dark. Xue Lin had noticed a bicycle rental shop in her neighborhood. She had one more look of satisfaction at the drying paint on the wall and walked out the door into the stairwell and wandered out into the early evening.

At the bike shop she offered to buy one of their older rental bikes. It was rusty but mechanically it was fine. It would get her to and from work and would be handy for little side jobs like the one she would have to do tonight.

She haggled relentlessly with the shop assistant so as not to arouse suspicion. Eventually they agreed on a very low price and she wheeled the bike out of the shop onto the street. Her plan was to take out the girl tonight.

As she paused to look at the map on her phone Xue Lin thought: ‘Maybe I’ll just have her choke on some fried rice. Something that would not call for any questions.’

Dr. Wu paused before clicking the send button on Xue Lin’s rejection letter.

‘It would be more interesting having her in the lab than a quiet girl. More fun for me. She had nicer boobs, and she doesn’t button all the way up. That had to be for me,’ he thought to himself, pulling the long hairs that grew from a mole on his chin.

Wu clicked in the address bar and changed it and sent the rejection off to the other girl, who would likely be very disappointed as she was well qualified for the job and had done an excellent interview.

Xue Lin slowed to a stop on the side of the road outside the apartment building that was pinging on her GPS locator map. She parked the bike without locking it and approached the list of names and apartment numbers. She rang the buzzer next to the name she remembered from the girl’s file in front of Dr. Wu.

“Hello?” the voice crackled through the old speaker.

“Hi! It’s Xue Lin… from today? The Interview?”

There was a long pause before the girl answered.

“Oh yes. Is everything alright?”

“I just wanted to talk. I don’t have any friends here.”

The door buzzed and Xue Lin pushed it open, walking into the old wooden lobby. Her heart had picked up it’s pace. Depending on what happened next, she might be minutes away from murdering an innocent girl because the American Government needed her to.

Xue Lin climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and soon found apartment 420. The girl had already opened the door and was waiting in the doorway.

“Hi! I’m so sorry for stalking you like this. I was feeling lonely and anxious about the interview today, and I wanted to talk to someone my age, and you seemed really nice.”

The girl blushed. “How did you find my apartment?” she asked, looking more than a little bit uneasy.

“The Institute gave it to me. I told them I had borrowed money from you and wanted to pay you back.” Xue Lin glanced at the girl’s petite neck thinking how she wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, you are so kind. Thank you,” said Xue Lin, thinking she would use the garrote wire.

Xue Lin unravelled her bracelet behind her back. During training, her instructor had drilled her intensively in the use of the wire. Being petite, Xue Lin had been encouraged to bring larger victims to the ground with the wire and a well placed aikido style trip, using their weight to bring them down, where she could put her foot behind their neck for more powerful leverage. The trainees practiced on each other, making use of a specially designed ‘neck protector’ that enabled the assailant to go all the way with the strangulation without causing injury.

Xue Lin still had not asked if she’d heard back about the interview, but there was something about the demeanour of the girl, a bit of smugness perhaps, that suggested she’d been given one of the two jobs.

With her back to Xue Lin, the girl pushed the pump button on the top of the thermos and hot water spurted out of the spout into a tall porcelain white cup.

“Did you hear back from Dr. Wu?” Xue Lin asked.

“Yes, I did! I got the email an hour ago” she seemed happy.

“He gave me a job! I was so surprised. I thought my interview was not that good.”

She looked at Xue Lin who was now standing very close to her, to accept her tea. “And congratulations to you! You got the other one!” she sang, continuing: “My friend was very disappointed. She thought she would get the job for sure. She got a rejection letter same time as my email came.”

Xue Lin was already winding up the garrote behind her back to put in her pocket out of sight. She accepted the tea cup and sat down pulling her phone out to check her email. Still nothing.

The awkward silence lasted a good thirty seconds.

Xue Lin was thinking: “Either the email has gotten lost, or Wu decided just to hire just one girl.”

Xue Lin sighed. It was already six o’clock. She should have received the email by now. What a shame for this poor girl and her family.

“Bing” her phone chimed. The Email banner glowed across the top of the screen of Xue Lin’s phone. “Oh there it is!” she said as she started to read.

Congratulations.

I would like to offer you one of the jobs at the lab… blah blah blah

Xue Lin looked at the girl and smiled a real smile, relieved.

They chatted superficially for a half hour while finishing their tea. On her way out, Xue Lin saw that the girl’s jacket hanging near the door was the one she’d put the GPS locator in.