The Einstein Papers

CHAPTER 3

Li Choi was seeing an apparition.

Closing his eyes, he rubbed them with his fingertips, then opened them again. Strangely enough, he could still see the blond-haired man. It must be my mind playing tricks, Choi thought to himself. Some residual memory from American television perhaps, dredged from the depths of my subconscious and brought about by the torture of the past few weeks. It was a logical assumption and it brought Choi some degree of comfort.

The ghost who had appeared inside his cell looked vaguely like the star of a detective show he had enjoyed when he was in the United States. What was the name of the show? Choi thought to himself. It was about a detective in Florida, the city of Palm Beach. Oh well, no matter, he thought; the show will come to me after the ghost disappears.

Or perhaps I'm actually asleep, Choi thought.

Since being abducted in the parking lot of a Chinese grocery store in San Francisco seventy-one days before, the thoughts that ran through Choi's mind were a jumbled mass of bizarre images, seemingly unlinked. The shock of his kidnapping, combined with his being transported to the remote laboratory and weapons facility at the foot of the Qilian Mountains on the dividing line between Gansu and Qinghai provinces on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, and his worry for his family's safety in the United States, had combined to bring Choi to the edge of madness.

None of this was happening and he knew he would soon awake.

He rubbed his eyes again. The apparition remained.

And then the blond-haired man framed in the door spoke. "Li Choi, I presume?" Choi stared from the metal cot bolted to the wall of the cell where he had spent the last several months under armed guard. Each evening, after a full day in the laboratory, he was brought to the cell and locked inside for the night. He was so conditioned to the door being closed and locked, his mind could not comprehend the door now being wide open without a guard present.

"Where is the guard?" Li managed to stammer.

"He met with an unfortunate accident. His neck snapped," the blond man said quietly as he stared at a photograph. "It must have been when I twisted it." Choi swallowed, rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the man. The man's accent was obviously American. He stood tall, a shade over six feet. If Choi had to guess his weight, he would place him at just over two hundred pounds. Judging from his biceps, which thrusted from the sleeves of his shirt, very little of that weight was fat. The glacial blue eyes beneath his thick blond hair stared at Choi with a barely concealed danger. The blond man's lips were sculptured and his strong chin had a thin scar that ran along the left side like an exclamation mark. He was dressed in khaki pants with a multipocketed shirt that matched. The buttons on the clothes were made from a sharp-edged metal of dull finish. His feet were covered with paratrooper boots. The clothing bore no insignias, and other than a watch, the man wore no jewelry. like a caged tiger, he seemed to be emitting waves of heat and impending motion from the aura surrounding his body.

"Index finger, please," the man said.

"But I just…" Choi stuttered.

"I'd love to stand here and chat, but I think someone might be along soon to check on the guard. Since he's dead, and I have no intention of joining you for eternity in this cell," the man said easily, "let me print you and see if we have a match. If we do, the time has come for you to leave."

"My family, they said they'd kill my family," Choi said, sitting upright on the cot, wondering why the unreal aspect of this encounter was barely diminishing. The man nodded, then pressed Choi's finger to an ink pad, then a slip of paper. He fed the paper into a black plastic box roughly the size of a sandwich and waited until a light flashed green.

"Who would have thought?" the man said as he pushed a series of buttons on his wristwatch. "It is you."

Less than a minute later, the numerical code Taft had entered into his wristwatch was beamed through space to an orbiting satellite and then back down to an NSA facility in Maryland.

"Confirmed as a valid transmission," the intelligence officer said to his partner, who was standing with a telephone in his hand. "Contact General Benson. His man is inside and has verified the target's identity."

Without another word the man removed the black nylon pack from his back and began to dig around. From a zippered pocket he extracted a single photo and handed it to Choi. The picture showed Choi's wife, Chun, and his son, Li Jr. They were standing next to the blond-haired man in front of Disneyland. Mrs. Choi held a copy of a newspaper in her hands.

"What is today's date?" Choi asked, squinting to read the newspaper's date.

"September 21st, 1999," the man answered.

The picture had been taken less than a week before.

"How did you…" Choi began.

"Listen, I'll explain later. Right now we've got to get out of here," the blond-haired man said as he repacked his equipment, then walked over and helped Choi off the cot to his feet. "What's your physical condition?'

"I'm weak and one of my eyes is blurry from being beaten," Choi said. "My kidnappers wanted me to renounce the United States. They said since China paid for my education I became no more than a common thief the minute I filed my immigration papers."

The man nodded and reached back into his pack. He took out a thermometer and placed it under Choi's tongue, then set two fingers on Choi's wrist. He stared at his watch as he took Choi's pulse, then removed and read the thermometer.

"You'll live, I expect," the blond-haired man said.

Choi watched as the man placed the pack on his back; then he followed him into the hallway outside the cell.

The man turned to Choi and whispered, "So did you… did you withdraw your citizen papers?"

"No damn way," Choi said proudly.

"Good," the blond-haired man said. "Now, if you'll just remain quiet and let me do my job, I'll get you out of here and back to the States."

Stepping over the body of the guard, whose head was twisted at a grotesque angle, the two men walked to the far end of the hallway and stopped at an outer security door. Beyond the door rose a stairway that led to the ground above and freedom. The blondhaired man removed a suction cup sporting wires from one of the pockets on his shirt and stuck it to the door. Placing a small speaker in his ear he listened for a second.

"All clear," the man said. "Get ready."

"One question," Choi said. "What is your name?"

"John Taft," the man said, peering through the glass in the door. "My name is John Taft." Opening the door, he led Choi outside.