“I will tell you this much,” Beg said, growing animated. “If Wuming was real, no stupid Han Chinese soldier would be able to find them. Wuming is shapeless. No… how do you say it? Formless. Wuming can never be caught. They would never preach. Never say a bad word against China. Never talk aloud of a free East Turkestan. He shook his head again, snorting, almost a chuckle. “Wuming is no one, but could be anyone. So many borders, they will never be found. They don’t speak of what they must do, they do what they must. If anyone looks, they will only disappear into wilderness like fox or melt back into the fabric of regular folk.”
“I understand,” Murphy said. “Do you have a mobile?”
Beg looked around his modest apartment and gave a wan smile. “A phone is expensive,” he said. “And I have no one to call.”
“I’ll check back tomorrow or the next day,” she said.
“As you wish,” Beg said. “But I doubt I can help.”
She said her good-byes and left a card with a hello-phone callback number — the voicemail gave an extension, not a business name. Pondering what a colossal dead end this had proven to be, she rounded the brick wall on the way back to her car and nearly jumped out of her skin when Joey Shoop stepped from behind the creepy witch’s cottage.
“Nice haircut,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, trying to remain nonchalant.
“Hey, my ass,” Shoop said and sneered. “I about smacked into a meat truck trying to find you. What’s with trying to lose me back there?”
“I wasn’t trying to lose you, nimrod.” She wagged her head. “I was running this little thing we do in intelligence work called a surveillance-detection route. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”
Shoop just stood there, glaring at her. “Rask was right to wonder about you. You got something going on, don’t you?”
“You’re an idiot, Joey. You want to hear him yell at me, I’m going back to the office to type up a report now.” She gave him a disdainful shrug. “I guess you’re welcome to follow me if you think you can keep up.”
27
Adam Yao was running out of options. Two days of interviews and meetings hadn’t got him any closer to finding Medina Tohti. Leigh Murphy had come up dry as well.
The Usenovs were his last shot.
Adam Yao arrived unannounced, but that did not matter. Kambar Usenov answered the door, heard Yao say he was a journalist from Taiwan who had a few questions, and waved him inside out of the chill. Russian was the lingua franca of Kazakhstan, but the Usenovs were Oralman — literally “returnees” who had come back to their ethnic roots after living for generations in another country. Kambar and Aisulu Usenov had fled Xinjiang, so their first language was Mandarin — making Yao’s job much easier. His Russian was halting at best, but he spoke Chinese like a native — which at first appeared to put Usenov on edge, until Yao showed him the Taiwanese journalist credentials. Usenov, a bear of a man with a slight limp, gripped Yao’s hand firmly with both of his. He peered into Yao’s eyes for just long enough to make Yao think he might have to pull away.
At length, Usenov gave a satisfied grunt and let go, welcoming Yao into his home as if he was a long-lost relative. Mrs. Usenov set a third plate at the low table situated on the colorful Asian rug in the middle of the Usenovs’ main room. She was a quiet Kazakh woman with flour on her dress and a light blue scarf tied above a handsome oval face. She wore little makeup, but a thin black pencil line connected her dark eyebrows. Yao had seen it many times before on women in Central Asia.
Mrs. Usenov shuffled back and forth from the kitchen, bringing tray after tray of noodles, boiled meat, and fried bread, as if they’d been expecting company.
Kambar put Yao where he normally sat, at the head of the table — a place of honor for the guest. He waved a wind-chapped hand over the top of the feast his wife was busy bringing in.
“We went to a cousin’s wedding,” he said in Mandarin. “My cousin’s wife, she makes the best beshbarmak I have ever tasted.” He smiled, high cheekbones squinting his eyes. “Except for my wife, Aisulu, of course. She is a most excellent cook.”
CIA case officers received language and culture training before heading off to any long-term posting, but most colloquialism and nuance could be learned only firsthand. After ten minutes at the Usenovs’ table, stuffing himself with beshbarmak—literally “five fingers,” because that’s the way the mixture of noodles, boiled horse, and onion was eaten — Yao realized no instructor had ever covered the dangers of too much hospitality.
He took a drink of kumis—fermented mare’s milk — and got down to business.
“Forgive me for being forward,” he said. “But I understand you and your wife were in a Chinese detention center in Baijiantan.”
Aisulu leaned forward, grease dripping off her fingers from the beshbarmak. “Someone reported that Kambar was studying Russian. The authorities said that meant we were thinking about leaving China, so they put us in a camp to remind us that the grass is not greener in Kazakhstan.”
Kambar shrugged. “If I am being honest, we were studying Russian so we could leave. Kazakhstan is the best country in the world. No offense meant to Taiwan.”
“What business is that of theirs if we leave China?” his wife snapped. “We are Kazakh. We should be able to come home if we wish.”
“I agree with you,” Yao said. “If I may ask, were you treated harshly in Baijiantan?”
“We were fed,” Kambar said. “Our heads were shaved and I was separated from my wife. We attended many classes, sang songs about the Motherland, told we should love and respect President Zhao, things of that nature. I was not beaten, if that is what you mean, but I saw it happen many times.”
Mrs. Usenov covered her mouth with an open hand as she chewed a large bite of fried dough. She swallowed. “Same for me. But you do not have to be beaten to be mistreated…”
“I am sure,” Yao said. “I would like to return to the conditions inside at another time, perhaps when we are not in the middle of such a delicious meal.”
Kambar looked heavenward while he chewed, remembering. “Though they never beat me, it was the worst time of my life. One day, after two months, they let us go. It took two days, but I was eventually reunited with Aisulu. She was so frail and gaunt, and both of us had terrible coughs — everyone in the camps did.”
“But they came back,” Yao prompted. “The Chinese authorities, and arrested you again?”
Usenov nodded, heaving a great sigh. “I have no idea why. Maybe they needed more numbers for their quota. Maybe they felt they were in error letting us go the first time.”
“But you escaped?”
Mrs. Usenov rocked back and forth on her cushion, excited at the memory. “Kambar and I were in the back of the same van. The van stopped so quickly it threw us all forward. We heard shouting, then gunfire — and then the van began to move again. We drove for a long time, hours maybe. I fell asleep so I do not know.”
“I, too, slept,” Mr. Usenov said, nodding for his wife to continue the story.
“I felt my ears begin to pop, so I knew we were going up into the mountains. I thought maybe they were taking us far away to kill us, but one of the other men said that the Chinese were in charge. If they wanted to kill us, they would not have to drive out of their way to do it. Finally, the van stopped and the doors opened. A man in dark clothing motioned us out, unlocked our shackles, and pointed us toward the Kazakh border.”