Private Beijing

Chapter 32

I was sitting watching the footage being transmitted by the drones, listening to the restful sound of Zhang Daiyu sleeping. Hua had set us up in one of the Beijing office’s surveillance vans, a black LDV 9 with screens, audio receivers, and data-capture systems that made the most of the information being transmitted by the bugs he’d hidden around Molly Tan’s apartment.

Hua had taken away the defunct bugs we had discovered in the apartment for analysis. They were standard-issue CREPTO, the same model and design as the ones he’d installed. Intelligence agencies and private security companies throughout Asia used them.

Zhang Daiyu and I stayed in the van, which was parked around the corner from Molly Tan’s building. We decided to split the day into shifts and I was on point first, monitoring the apartment while Zhang Daiyu slept in a cot at the back of the vehicle. She was due to relieve me at 8 a.m., but she was exhausted and still suffering from the after-effects of the street attack, so I planned to let her sleep in if she didn’t wake naturally.

Her breathing was deep and rhythmic. It would have sent me off to sleep too had it not been for the years of training that kept me alert and focused on the mission. There would be a time for sleep, but this wasn’t it.

The apartment was completely still. Molly and her husband were in bed and their two boys were fast asleep in their bedrooms. She was one of the richest women in China, if not the world, but when it came to the fundamentals of life, her needs were the same as everyone else’s.

I’d never really had to worry about money, not in the way people operating at the margins of society do, but I’d been exposed to the challenges faced by families who weren’t as fortunate as the Tans. I wondered how many children could be fed and clothed with Molly Tan’s fortune. Retaining just half of it would still have left her a wealthy woman, but how many lives might the other half have changed? I wasn’t usually big on politics, but inequality on this scale was hard to ignore. It was of course built into the capitalist system, and was one of the distinguishing features of a functioning democracy, but China claimed to be something else. Yet still there were people like Molly Tan living here, who had so much when countless others had so little.

I couldn’t quite square this in my mind.

I allowed my thoughts to wander for a time, to avoid the lure of sleep, but eventually I forced myself to focus on the job in hand: watching the Tans’ apartment. Nothing much happened and I settled into the rhythm of the sleeping household, disturbed only by the occasional deep breath or snore.

Then, at a little after 5 a.m., the peaceful scene was interrupted by something completely unexpected. I saw the living-room door open. The live video feed from the surveillance device in the air vent above the living area showed two men in ski masks creep into view.

They were both carrying pistols fitted with long suppressors and I had little doubt they had come to murder Molly Tan.