‘So here’s the deal, Chen. You’re a proud man, and you’re no doubt proud you betrayed your nation, and aligned yourself with the yang guizi. So we figured we should give you a badge of honor to mark you out as a Westerner forever more – after all, you wouldn’t want people to accidentally take you for Chinese, would you? So, we’re going to perform a blepharoplasty. It’s simple, really: we cut into your eyelids with a scalpel, and tear off a strip of skin and muscle. Then, when it heals, it gives your eyes an extra crease, so you can look just like your beloved round-eyed yang guizi forever.’
Xi Chen stared up at Yuelin plaintively, and mumbled incoherently into his gag. He was trying to project calm, but his body gave him away: he was twitching against Yuelin’s men, who were holding him in place in the back of the white-panel van.
Jantzen was holding the scalpel, and dangling it in front of Chen’s face.
Yuelin grinned.
Xi Chen had long been on Yuelin’s radar – ever since he’d fled China in cowardly retreat in 2013. Chen was part of a publishing house in Hong Kong that’d brazenly published filthy, Tibet sympathizing materials. Some of his colleagues were arrested, and made to disappear – in other words, they’d reaped what they sowed. But unlike his colleagues, Chen had foreseen what was in store, and hastily retreated to America before they could bring him in. Then, once he’d arrived in America, he’d been granted asylum – by none other than Secretary Forsyth.
Yuelin had fantasized not of killing Chen, but of in fact orchestrating an extradition; of kidnapping Chen, and hauling him back to China.
But the idea had been off the table for a number of reasons. Firstly, she’d been forbidden by the individual she’d been cooperating with and, while she would not ordinarily take instruction from him, she understood that she would need him to pull it off.
Secondly, she knew that it might impact on her deniability. This was by no means definite, because as it so happened, Chen’s presence in America was unknown publicly in either China or America: when he’d arrived in the States, it was kept hushed, and he was granted refuge under highly secretive circumstances. This meant that, if Chen did suddenly go missing, US politicians couldn’t make a scene, because officially, Chen wasn’t even there. But that said, America would undoubtedly know that he’d been kidnapped, that there’d been foul play – and she was worried not only by the fact they’d probably hunt for a culprit, but also by the outside chance that they’d then retrospectively realize that the Consulate fire, and the attempt on Secretary Forsyth’s life, were in fact all linked to this forcible extradition.
But ever since the attack on Forsyth had gone awry, she knew she needed to do something spectacular to make up for it. So she decided she would force the man she’d been cooperating with to play ball. And she would run the risk of damaging her deniability, since she felt that it was still very unlikely they’d in fact reinterpret the previous attacks.
And so, she’d returned to his house in his Sacramento; his house almost nobody knew about, but Yuelin had found because Chen had continued to communicate to dissidents in China via TOR. And because Yuelin had in fact stalked his movements a month ago, and knew Chen took evening walks in the quiet green space opposite his home, it’d been easy to pull up in a van, and bundle him into the back.
And now it was time to a have some fun. She hadn’t be able to do much with her previous victims: they’d had to look like victims of sniper killings. But Chen was different.
And nothing gave her more pleasure than marking out traitors. Physically altering them, so they could never forget, never deny, their betrayal.
She licked her lips.
‘Did you know that back in China, three million people a year choose to have this surgery done? At university, I was surrounded by Chinese who were trying to emulate the round-eyed yangguizi. And while a part of me was sickened – sickened at how their culture had colonized ours – another part was glad. Glad that those traitors made themselves known physically, so we true Chinese knew to revile them.’
She paused. There was fear in Chen’s eyes. And she was pleased. He’d thought he could escape justice. But now he’d come to understand that he could never have escaped the justice he’d incurred when he’d chosen to humiliate China.
‘Of course, when these low-level traitors get their eyes done, they go to a doctor. They’re allowed to shirk the pain with drugs. But this will be our first time doing this, so I suspect the end-product might be a bit more – distinctive. They say – they say that watching your own eyes being operated on is psychologically traumatic. I’d be interested to hear your opinion once we’re done.’
Chen still tried to remain motionless, but his primal responses were giving him away: his slacks suddenly went a deeper grey around the groin. The rich smell of ammonia filled the air.
Since 1999, when her father had died at American hands, Yuelin had kept a diary. Every day, without fail, she’d written the single word in the top-right corner: Xuechi – avenge humiliation. Every day, she’d accompanied this with a means of doing so. And the very first method she’d dreamed up was to mark traitors physically, so the world would know the truth forever.
It was a privilege to carry out this justice.
Yuelin gestured to Jantzen. He handed over the scalpel. Yuelin’s men then held Chen’s head firmly in place.
‘Now, hold still. You wouldn’t want me to slip, and puncture one of your eyes. They’re almost entirely water and nerve tissue. It wouldn’t be pleasant.’
Now he was thrashing. The men held him more firmly still.
Yuelin lowered the scalpel to the sound of muffled screams.
Twenty minutes later, Yuelin was back on the road, behind the wheel of the van. Chen was in back – under the watchful eye of her closest remaining comrade, Jantzen Pang – tied up and gagged, his eyelids bleeding. And one eye not-so-accidentally punctured.
Yuelin hadn’t enjoyed inflicting the pain for the sake of it. But she had enjoyed watching justice being served.
Xuechi, Xuechi, Xuechi, she said softly to herself.
Yuelin now felt calm. She knew that the last part of her plan was safe from meddling forces. And she knew, also, that she’d get her way with her all-important contact. After all, she had the hard-drive. The hard-drive hidden in the airbag compartment in front of her.
Now, she just had to wait for the signal.
Of course, there were so many who had not yet felt her wrath: Ellen Kelden, Saul Marshall, Secretary Forsyth. And while the last one was probably the hardest to stomach, it was Saul Marshall who really got her heart racing, who really elicited that deep, black bloodlust. He’d turned up out of the blue, and had destroyed so much, spilt so much pure Chinese blood, and the pain of that was enormous. She’d do anything to spill his blood – to dip her finger into a pool of it, and taste it. But she was patient: she would go back to China and formulate a plan. And this extradition of Xi Chen, this demonstration of China’s ability to exact justice anywhere on the planet, would go some way to compensate.
And so too would getting the technology into the hands of the PLA. Because while the PLA frustrated her with its unwillingness to show its true colors abroad, she knew that when it came to dealing with dissidents at home, they wouldn’t shy from the task. And with her technology, they’d be able to sniff out even the most hidden, most cowardly dissidents. The ones who dare not show their faces.
Xuechi, Xuechi, Xuechi.