Razing Beijing: A Thriller by Sidney Elston III Page B

invited her to participate in the development
of a fuel-efficient family of aircraft engines. The day after receiving their
offer letter a second arrived, amending the first; Thanatech would assume her
tuition debt. Emily was thrilled—they were desperate for somebody like her! The
work sounded important and exciting. It appeared that anything was possible.
    Two months into the job, her career assumed an unexpected
urgency. Emily learned through a network of relatives that Chinese doctors had
diagnosed her mother with a rare form of liver cancer. Distraught by the news, Emily
investigated options and determined that Western medicine regularly achieved
the highest efficacy rates for treating this particular disease. She approached
the Chinese embassy in Washington to propose they fly her mother to the States;
they refused to even grant her an audience. Suddenly it seemed her selfish
decision to expatriate had earned her not only dishonor at home but pain and
suffering for her mother. A woman from the U.S. State Department attempted to
intervene, whereupon they were told that the socialist order of China delivered
the finest medical care in the world.
    During her undergraduate days at Qinghua University, Emily
dated the son of a mid-level official in the People’s Liberation Army. The
young man liked to boast of his family’s numbered accounts in Switzerland and
the Caribbean islands; profits arising from their Quangdong factories were
deposited offshore in order to evade the whims of the communist government. Armed
with this recollection, Emily learned how to set up her own offshore account,
choosing a reputable international bank branched in Tortola. Soon she was
making sizable deposits from the money she made at Thanatech, mailing postal
money orders via FedEx—a technique she’d found on the Internet. This way, when the
time arrived to pay her parents’ illicit benefactors, there would be no reason
to fear American Homeland Security inquiries into the whereabouts of some
$40,000 of savings.
    Emily placed one stockinged foot on the chair by her desk
and sat down. While scrolling through the bank statement it occurred to her
that the sum would represent different things to different people. The
individuals to whom she would hand over her money were criminals—unscrupulous
cheats who often as not stole from the fugitives of oppression rather than
deliver them from it. For this she blamed not the unsavory scum who exploited
the desperate, but the elitists in Beijing who fostered their desperation. She
had grown up the daughter of a prominent scientist and money was never
portrayed as the solution to any of their needs; a powerful ministry ran the
corporation that employed her father. The danwei provided their modest
home and all of her schooling, coupons to subsidize the cost of their food,
clothing, electricity, even hot water, and a doctor for every illness—except,
apparently, for her mother’s condition.
    Tonight the question was whether she would complete
preparations in time to save her mother’s life. She was several thousand
dollars shy of the amount demanded by the Democracy Underground, the smuggling
ring ‘snakeheads’ with whom her relatives had put her in touch. Money for
beginning her mother’s treatments in Pittsburgh would also have to be found.
    Weeks had passed since the latest word of her mother’s
condition. Typing into the keyboard and logging off the Internet, Emily hoped
with a sigh that no news meant good news.

12
    THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON Emily Chang sat primly straight, hands clasped on the small table inside of her
cubicle, her ears literally ringing from the shouted acrimony and frayed nerves
of today’s meeting. Stuart’s lingering obsession, as to what had caused the
total loss of electronics in the back of the aircraft in the seconds before the explosion, remained unaddressed. Arm waving vagaries on the part of Morton
Hackett, the chief engineer, had been met by Stuart’s