Day Of Confession

135

Beijing, China. Still Friday, July 17. 9:40 a.m.

'James Hawley. An American hydrobiological engineer,' Li Wen said in Chinese. His mouth was dry and he was soaked with sweat. 'He… he lives in Walnut Creek, California. The procedure came from him. I… I… didn't know what they were. I… thought they were a new test… for wa… water toxicity…'

The man in the army uniform who stared at Li Wen across the hard wooden table was the same man who had demanded he confess what he had done six hours earlier in Wuxi. The same man who had handcuffed him and accompanied him on the military jet to Beijing and taken him here to this brightly lit cement-block building somewhere on the air base where they had landed.

'There is no James Hawley of Walnut Creek, California,' the man said softly.

'Yes, there is. There has to be. I did not have the formulas, he did.'

'I repeat… there is no James Hawley. It has already been checked out from the papers you provided us.'

Li Wen felt the breath go out of him as suddenly he realized he'd played the fool the entire time. If something went wrong he alone was the one who would pay for it.

'Confess.'

Slowly Li Wen looked up. Just behind the man at the table was a videocamera, its red light on, recording what was happening. And behind the camera he could see the faces of a half dozen uniformed soldiers – military police, or, worse, men like his interrogator, members of the Ministry of State Security.

Finally he nodded, and looking directly into the camera, told how he had introduced his 'snowballs' – the deadly, nonmonitored constituent polycyclic, unsaturated alcohol – into the water systems. Explaining extensively and in scientific terms the details of the formula, what it was designed to do, and how many it was expected to kill.

As he finished, wiping sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand, he saw two of the uniformed men suddenly step forward. In an instant they had him on his feet and he was marched through a door and down a dimly lit concrete corridor. They went for twenty or thirty feet before he saw a man step out of a side door. The soldiers froze in surprise. In an instant the man had stepped forward. He had a pistol in his hand, a silencer on the barrel. Li Wen's eyes went wide. The man was Chen Yin. His finger squeezed back on the trigger and he fired point-blank.

PTTT! PTTT!

Li Wen was blown backward, his body twisting away from the soldiers, his blood splattering across the wall behind him.

Chen Yin looked at the soldiers and smiled, then started to back away. Suddenly his grin turned to horror. The first soldier was raising a submachine gun. Chen Yin backed away.

'NO!' he screamed. 'NO, YOU DON'T UNDERSTA-' Suddenly he turned and ran for the door. There was a sound like a dull jackhammer, the first shots spinning Chen Yin around, the last taking off the top of his head just over his right eye. He, like Li Wen, was dead before his body hit the ground.