Four days after her double-eyelid procedure, Winnie unlocks the front door to the sound of her burner phone ringing in the bedroom. She turns the dead bolt and hurries toward it, shedding her sunglasses. The number that flashes on the screen is local, one she doesn’t recognize. She rejects the call before remembering the only other person besides Ava who has this number—the marketing and PR strategist she’s hired to do some preliminary work for the new diamond venture. He’s done a day early; she’s not surprised. Here in China, no task is ever deemed impossible, no demand too extreme, no deadline too tight. There’s always someone younger, scrappier, hungrier, willing to work harder, faster, longer. Need a high-speed rail station in nine hours? Or a 1,300-ton bridge in a day and half? Not a problem. Done and done.
It’s one of the reasons she’s hiding out in Beijing, despite Ava’s initial incredulity.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ava said during that last conversation before Winnie boarded her flight out of LAX. “Anywhere but there.”
Winnie argued that her homeland checked all the boxes: no extradition treaty with the US, no chance of the Chinese police cooperating with their American counterparts. In Beijing, Winnie is far enough away from Dongguan to hide from the Maks, yet close enough to keep tabs on them. Because it’s imperative that the Maks believe their business is thriving, that all is well. The entire plan hinges on Boss Mak boarding a plane in three hours and arriving in San Francisco for his medical appointment—the only person important enough to give up in Winnie’s place, the key to securing a lighter sentence for Ava.
Indeed, all this time, as Ava’s submitted to Detective Georgia Murphy’s questioning, she’s maintained communications with the team in Dongguan, paying for inventory with Homeland Security funds—inventory that goes straight to the department to be used as evidence in the case against Boss Mak. To explain Winnie’s absence, Ava told Mandy that she’s flown off to a silent meditation retreat in the Arizona desert. It will buy them another day, which—assuming his flight leaves on schedule—is all they need.
Winnie applies another coat of ointment to her eyelids before checking the clock. Boss Mak should be about ready to head to the airport. She sees him standing in the circular driveway of his mansion, instructing the driver to load the matching set of Rimowa luggage into the Range Rover. Perhaps Mandy has left work early to see her father off. (Mandy’s mother, who remains Boss Mak’s wife only in name, certainly won’t bother emerging from her wing of the house.)
“The next time we see each other, you’ll be a new man,” Mandy might say.
Boss Mak would scoff. “I’m the same old guy regardless of the age of my liver.”
“So does that mean you won’t come into work to micromanage me, no matter how good you feel?”
“I promise nothing,” says Boss Mak. “As long as I’m alive, Mak International will always be my company, and you will always be my baby girl.”
Father and daughter embrace.
Winnie’s eyes sting. She plops down on the bed and stuffs her hands beneath her seat, waiting for the urge to pick up the phone and call him to subside. Nothing will happen, she reminds herself, for the next fourteen-plus hours, until the flight touches down in San Francisco. To help pass the time, she goes through her routine of checking Mandy Mak’s social media pages. In addition to being a businesswoman, Mandy is a socialite and fashion icon with tens of thousands of followers. Several times a day, she documents her designer outfits, her fancy restaurant meals, her adorable Scottish terrier, Butterscotch.
This afternoon, her photos of a cappuccino adorned with an intricate milk-foam rose and a pair of sapphire satin Manolo Blahnik mules strike Winnie as strangely melancholy, shot through with longing, though, of course, this is ridiculous. There’s no way Mandy has a clue of what’s to come.
In addition to the photos, there’s a new video clip, filmed at a gala a week earlier thrown by one of those high-society glossies that’s featured Mandy and her lavish town house multiple times. Mandy’s dressed in a bubblegum-pink halter-neck ball gown with a plunging neckline. “It’s Armani,” she says, giving the camera a flirtatious wink. “I was inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars. Remember? Back when she won for Shakespeare in Love?”
Winnie’s about to close the clip when a face in the corner of the frame catches her eye. The person interviewing Mandy from behind the camera notices too.
“Is that your father?” the interviewer asks. “Did he come with you?”
“Dad,” Mandy calls, reaching out and tugging on the sleeve of his jacket, as the interviewer blathers on about the most stylish father-daughter pair in town.
Boss Mak lurches into the frame, and Winnie feels her throat constrict. Purple shadows ring his eyes, giving his face a ghoulish cast. Even thinner than before, he looks like a child trying on his father’s tuxedo. As he makes his way over, he lists to one side, and Winnie spots the cane supporting his weight. The clip ends before he has a chance to speak.
Winnie shuts her laptop and pushes it away, as though that could somehow erase the image that has already wormed its way deep into her skull.
All evening, Winnie is too tense to eat anything, to do much more than watch the clock. Now Boss Mak is taking his first-class seat; he’s wiping his face with a steaming-hot towel in between sips of champagne; he’s flipping through Duty Free magazine; at last, his plane takes off.
After a fitful night’s sleep, Winnie leaps out of bed at dawn and turns on the television to CCTV.
At first, it’s business as usual: afternoon showers in the forecast, traffic on the Jingha expressway. What follows is a lively segment on China’s first food court powered by artificial intelligence. Despite herself, Winnie studies the robotic arms that deftly dunk wontons into bubbling oil. She watches a customer place a bowl of seafood noodles on a smart cashier desk that instantly calculates the cost of the meal. The pride that rises within her quickly gives way to skepticism when she spies a weary worker in the corner with a rag in hand, ready to clean up the robots’ spills. What is the point of all this? Another case of tech for tech’s sake.
CCTV disagrees.
“What an achievement!” Dee Liu, one of the morning news anchors, exclaims.
Her coanchor jokes, “How do I get one of those installed in my kitchen? My wife could use the help.”
All at once, the mood in the studio shifts. Dee Liu touches her earpiece, listens intently, and apologizes for interrupting her coanchor. Speaking straight into the camera, she says, “Breaking news—we’ve received reports that businessman Mak Yiu Fai, head of handbag manufacturing giant Mak International, has been arrested at the San Francisco International Airport.”
A grainy video, clearly filmed on a cell phone by an unsteady hand, fills the screen. Winnie turns up the volume. In the video, an old man in a wheelchair is rolled out of the boarding gate and into the terminal. Despite Boss Mak’s wizened form, his navy sports coat looks freshly pressed. Flanking him is an attractive young woman in a cashmere sweat suit, whom Dee Liu identifies as his personal assistant, but who Winnie knows is his mistress, Bo Linlin.
Whatever Boss Mak says to Linlin draws her eyes away from her phone. In a flash they’re surrounded by a team of law enforcement agents.
“You’re under arrest,” one of them says, handcuffing Boss Mak’s child-size wrists.
He protests in Mandarin. “What are you doing? This is preposterous. Linlin, tell them we have a medical appointment at Stanford. Tell them Dr. Desjardins is expecting us.”
An agent handcuffs Linlin, too, and she starts to cry.
“Stop it,” Boss Mak urges. “Tell them, tell them!”
The young woman opens her mouth but only wails emerge.
Winnie’s stomach plunges. She shuts her eyes. On-screen, Boss Mak continues to bark orders at Linlin, full of vigor to the last.
“Who’s that old dude?” the amateur videographer asks as the pair is led away. “A drug dealer? A mob boss?” He drops the phone and curses. The video ends.
All morning CCTV replays the clip on a loop, interspersed with incensed commentary from the anchors. How dare the Americans arrest a helpless grandfather who was only seeking medical care. How dare they allow this upstanding businessman to pledge a five-hundred-thousand-dollar donation to one of their elite hospitals and then turn him in to law enforcement. How dare they disrespect an entire nation.
After a while, Winnie mutes the newscasters, though she remains glued to the screen.
They won’t send him to prison, Ava’s told her, not in his condition. He’ll receive all necessary medical aid, even if his dreams of a new liver have vaporized. Winnie knows these words are meant to comfort her, but the last thing she wants is to ease her guilt. She made the choice to trade his life for hers; at the very least, she owes it to him to feel every ounce of remorse deep within her bones.
Now she asks herself the question she’s posed so many times before: Could there have been another way? A way that didn’t involve betraying the man who helped change her life. Should she have pushed harder for Ava to flee with her? Would it have been so intolerable to be stranded in China for the rest of their days? To never walk freely in America again?
As usual, the last question is the one that does her in. “I’m sorry,” she says aloud, as though her words could somehow reach Boss Mak. And she is, truly sorry, from the bottom of her heart, but the answer to that question is yes. What was it he used to tell her? “Everyone has a price. The trick is figuring out what it is without overpaying.” Well, she’s unearthed America’s price for her freedom, and that price, not a penny more, nor less, is him.
Her laptop chimes, informing her of a new email. It’s from the hardworking marketing strategist who must have grown impatient waiting for her to return his call. Dazed and queasy, she reaches for the remote and turns off the TV, glad to have something else to do. She clicks on the link to the new website for her fictional family-owned jewelry business, Hopkinton Jewels. The business is based in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, USA (pop. 5,589), a place she landed on after poring over photographs of New England’s famous fall colors. Soon, once their social media pages are up and running, she will visit Beijing’s premier diamond labs, seeking out the perfect partner for their next venture.
She still hasn’t told Ava about these developments, not yet, not when they’re so close. There’ll be plenty of time to catch her up once all this is over.