Day Of Confession

68

Hefei, China. City of Hefei, Anhui Province, Water Filtration Plant 'A'. Tuesday, July 14, 4:30 a.m.

Li Wen entered as he always did, through the front door, heavy leather briefcase in one hand, identification badge clipped to the lapel of his jacket, nodding to the half-asleep Chinese Army security officer sitting at a table just beyond. Then, opening another door, he turned down a hallway and walked by the main control room, where a lone female engineer kept one eye loosely on a back wall of gauges and meters that measured, among other things, pressure, turbidity, flow rates, and chemical levels, and the other on a magazine she was reading.

'Good morning,' Li Wen said with authority. Instantly the magazine disappeared.

'Everything is in order?'

'Yes, sir.'

Li Wen stared at her a moment longer, letting her know he was not pleased with the magazine business. Then, with a definitive nod, he turned, pushed through a door and went down a long flight of steps to the filter area on the floor below, a long, concrete reinforced room where the final stages of filtration took place before the water was pumped into the clear well for outflow into the city's water mains. The area was below ground level and felt immediately cool compared to the heat and humidity of the outdoors and even of the upper level.

The plant had been shut down for nearly six months for upgrading three years earlier but still had no air-conditioning. That, it was said, would be left for the new plant, the one to be built after the turn of the century. It was the same with most water-treatment and -filtration plants throughout China. They were old, and most in disrepair. Some, like this one, had been upgraded when the great water wheel in Beijing finally turned and the central committee provided funds. Small funds with big promises for the future.

What was true was that in some places the future had already arrived; and new ventures with western construction and engineering firms, such as the Sino-French hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar drinking-water plant in the city of Guangzhou, or the massive thirty-six-billion-dollar Three Gorges dam project along the Yangtze River, were well under way. But in the main, water-delivery and -filtration plants across China were old, some bordering on the ancient, with hollowed-out trees serving as conduit pipes, hobbling along at best.

And at certain times of year – as now, in the middle of summer when the long hot days provided ideal growing conditions for sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins – the filtration plants become nearly ineffectual, providing little more than putrid lake or river water to the taps of Chinese homes.

It was, of course, why Li Wen was here – to oversee the quality of water flowing from Chao Lake, Hefei's primary water source to the city of a million. It was a job be had been doing day in and day out for nearly eighteen years. Eighteen years of never realizing money could be made from it. Real money, enough to flee the country and at the same time wreak havoc against a government he despised; a government that in 1957 had branded his father a 'counterrevolutionary' when he protested against corruption and abuses of power inside the Communist Party and had imprisoned him in a labor camp, where he died three years later, when Li Wen was five. Li grew up revering his father's memory while dutifully caring for a mother who never recovered from her husband's death or the public scorn surrounding his imprisonment. Li Wen had become a hydrobiological engineer only because he had an aptitude for science and simply followed the path of least resistance. Outwardly he seemed soft and faceless, a man without passion or emotion. Inwardly, he burned with rage against the state, secretly belonging to a group of Taiwanese sympathizers dedicated to the overthrow of the Beijing regime, and to the return of Nationalist rule to the mainland.

Unmarried and always traveling, he counted as his closest friend Tong Qing, an uninhibited, twenty-five-year-old computer programmer-artist he had met two years earlier in an underground meeting in Nanjing. It was she who had introduced him to the persuasive flower merchant Chen Yin, whom he had liked immediately. Through Chen Yin's familial connections in the central government, he had been able to travel widely, a hydrobiologist visiting various water treatment plants in Europe and North America to see how other governments did things. And through Chen Yin he had met Thomas Kind, who had taken him to the villa outside Rome where he had briefly met the man on whose mission he now worked – a giant of a man who dressed as a priest and whose name he was never told, but a man of power and position who had a unique design for the future of the People's Republic.

That meeting alone set Li Wen's entire future in motion, making the past year more exhilarating than any he'd ever known. At last and finally, he would avenge his father's death and he would be paid handsomely to do it. And afterward, through Chen Yin, he would be spirited out of the country and into Canada, with a new identity and a new life. There to sit and watch gleefully as the years turned and the government that had robbed him of his childhood, the government he so profoundly abhorred, slowly crumbled at the hands of the ardent revolutionary from Rome.

Setting his heavy briefcase on a wooden bench, Li Wen looked back across the room toward the door through which he had come in. Certain he was alone, he approached one of the four two-foot-square cutouts where he could look directly into the treated water being pumped into the city's water mains. The water ran fast, but instead of being clear as it was in the winter months, it was cloudy and putrid smelling, the result of the summer heat and the buildup of sun-fed algae in Lake Chao. This was the thing the government had done nothing about, and the thing he was counting on.

Turning, he went quickly back to his briefcase. Opening it, he slipped on a pair of thin surgical gloves and then opened its large, insulated, inner compartment. A half dozen frozen gray-white 'snowballs' sat in what looked like a Styrofoam egg crate, their coats just beginning to melt, glistening in the overhead light.

Glancing again at the door, Li Wen picked the egg crate from the case and carried it to the cutouts above the flowing water. Picking up the first 'snowball,' he reached over the side and dropped it in, feeling a triumphant flutter of his heart as he did. Then quickly he did the same with the rest, dropping them in one by one, and watching them whirl away to vanish in the swift flow of murky water.

As quickly, he turned back, put the egg crate and gloves in his briefcase and closed it. Then crossing to the cutouts once more, he lifted a vial from a metal case on the wall and took a sample of the water, then quietly went about the business of testing for what he was certain was its government-acceptable 'purity'.