Wednesday
I climbed out of Grace’s car and walked around the back, my boots making a quiet swoosh on the ground. After a moment I went back to her side.
Grace rolled down her window and shot me a cool gaze. “You are not going to help me.”
“It’s not that. Someone has hacked into my computer and tapped my phone. I’m being followed. I’m pretty sure it’s Delcroft, but if it isn’t, and I tried to contact the media on your behalf, I’m sure I would be stopped.”
“My phone and computers, and Gregory’s, too, were hacked,” she said. “But I cannot allow that to stop me.”
“That’s not all, Grace. Aside from the flash drive, you don’t have concrete proof. You can’t expect the media or government to act on what is essentially little more than conjecture. It doesn’t happen that way.” I didn’t add that even I wasn’t sure I bought the whole story. I’d just met the woman. Why should I trust her? Especially with so many double-dealing people in the mix?
If she really was Gregory’s fiancée, her pro-Uyghur, anti-China politics would work against her. I’d given up on a black-and-white world long ago and had learned to live in the gray. But Grace was still young. She still thought she could change the world.
I glanced back at the temple. Our tail would be emerging soon. “We need to go.”
“Go online. Look up the Uyghurs. You’ll see.”
“I don’t disbelieve you. I just don’t know what I can do.”
She shook her head, as if she realized she’d wasted precious time.
“Look…,” I tried to mollify her. “Let’s talk again in a few days. How can I get in touch with you?”
She shook her head again. “You can’t. I will contact you.”
“Okay. By the way, how did you and Gregory get out of China?”
“Gregory came five years ago. He was, of course, an only child, and his parents were killed in a train derailment. That’s when he started to work for the government. He learned English, and they sent him here. I was already here. My parents saw there was no future for me in the basin. They helped me escape to Pakistan ten years ago and I eventually made it here.”
“Your parents are still back in China?”
She nodded.
I thought back to my former boyfriend, David Linden. His mother had escaped Nazi Germany and met her husband, Kurt, here. Kurt had been the sole survivor of his family.
“There’s something else you should know.” She keyed the engine. It started up right away. Toyotas. “Gregory was afraid we would run out of time. China hacks into everything. All over the world. That’s one of the reasons I came to see you. I do not know how much more time I have.”
She closed the driver’s side window, pulled away from the curb, and drove east to Sheridan Road.
I trudged to my Camry, mulling over her warning. If the Chinese knew what Grace knew, and were able to connect Gregory to me…
I pulled my jacket more closely around me.