I rose and walked the short distance to the refrigerator, getting a cold bottle of water for me and Tessa, and taking the beverage orders of the seven others now with us in the warehouse. Given the circumstances, and what had transpired here, this was a surreal attempt on my part to obtain a bit of normalcy, to attempt to keep our imminent discussion somewhat civilized.
Finally, we were all seated and facing each other once again. Our four-person team was on one side, and Ming’s five-man team on the other. Neither side was bound, or held any guns on the other, and all of us were dressed in plain clothing. As we sipped from various chilled beverages, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking this was a friendly gathering.
Until he or she noticed the headless corpse six chairs over, or the bolts holding the chairs in place. Or learned that Ming and his four comrades were wearing potent suicide vests, mentally triggered, making the playing field anything but level.
Ming took a long drink from a cold plastic bottle of Diet Coke, a choice I found unexpected, and stared at me so intently it was as if I were the only one in the room. Since the magnificent Tessa Barrett was sitting beside me, this underscored the seriousness of the proceedings. I found it nearly impossible to look in her direction for long without my eyes settling on her radiant face, but maybe that was just me.
Even so, Ming’s single-minded focus on me made absolute sense. When he was a hostage, Tessa had been in control, and he had spoken mostly to her. Now that things had changed, I would become the center of his world. I had talked too good of a game for him to suspect I had zero actual answers.
“As I was saying,” began Ming, “we are not from China. In fact, my country has had a long-running dispute with the CCP. They’ve been clamping down on us harder every year, like a slow but unstoppable vise. Our guess is that within the year they’ll clamp down so hard it will make what they did in Hong Kong look like a honeymoon.”
He sighed. Not only hadn’t his eyes left mine, he rarely even blinked. “Tell me, Jason, are you familiar with the conflict between our two countries?”
“I am,” I said simply.
After my podcast appearance that morning, Ming’s team—no doubt already operating in the States—had been rushed to San Diego, and his question indicated that his hurried briefing on my background had left a lot to be desired.
On the other hand, perhaps the good folks who ran Taiwanese intelligence weren’t fans of my work. Given that my novels weren’t available in Taiwan, I guess they could be forgiven.
Anyone who had read my recent work would know that I had researched Ming’s part of the world fairly extensively. Taiwan was an island nation just to the southeast of mainland China, with a population of more than twenty-five million, whose autonomy was hotly disputed. While the governments and ideologies of China and Taiwan could not have been more different, Taiwan’s citizens were all descendants of Chinese settlers, hundreds, or even thousands of years earlier, so many of the inhabitants couldn’t be definitively distinguished based on appearance alone.
The CCP regarded Taiwan as a breakaway province, which it vowed to retake someday by any means, including force. Taiwan’s leaders, on the other hand, insisted they were a sovereign nation. One with its own constitution, democratically elected leaders, and more than three hundred thousand active troops.
Taiwan was all about democracy and freedom.
The CCP . . . not so much.
In fact, the Chinese government represented the most severe form of totalitarian communism found anywhere in the world, with the goal of complete control and repression of its own citizenry to go along with a grand array of appalling human rights violations.
“We believe China is a huge threat to every nation on Earth,” continued Ming, “and will stop at nothing to eventually dominate the globe. But it is especially a threat to my country. The CCP continues to insist that Taiwan is still part of China, and guarantees that it will get us back—soon.”
“I can see why you might find that . . . troubling,” I allowed.
Everything he said about the despicable ambitions of the current rulers of China was true, even though most Americans failed to appreciate the enormity of the looming threat. China often came across as cute and cuddly, and spread so much money around that the media and Hollywood routinely looked the other way when evidence to the contrary reared its ugly head.
When I first began writing novels the greatest threat to America and the world appeared to be fundamentalist Islamic terrorists intent on waging a Holy War to establish a Caliphate. So these tended to be my villains. I dutifully took care to explain each time that radicalized Jihadists vowing to wipe all non-Muslims from the face of the Earth and create rivers of blood in the streets didn’t represent the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims. Since there were only small pockets of Jihadists, and over a billion Muslims, nothing could be more obvious. Still, in today’s world, one needed to state this explicitly.
But then I began researching the leadership of China, and I was astonished by what I found. I had always thought the country was largely harmless. A promising market for American goods, and a wonderful supplier to American consumers. But the more I researched, the more clear and ominous their endgame became. It wasn’t as if it wasn’t all there to find, in their own words. Still, their reputation within the US tended to be excellent. China was ten times the threat of Russia, yet many Americans thought just the opposite.
So I began using the CCP as the antagonists in my novels, again making sure to point out what I considered obvious. That while the Chinese government was despicable, the poor Chinese people they were abusing were innocents—victims—and that my depiction of the CCP as villains had nothing to do with these fine folks.