‘The food smells so wonderful,’ Yin said, his voice almost choked with tears. ‘I had forgotten.’
‘Try to go easy,’ Kilkenny advised. ‘Your stomach might not be up to real food just yet.’
Despite their modest means, their nomadic hosts put on a feast worthy of a visiting Khan. Traditional courses of shaomai dumplings, buckwheat noodles, cheese, and roast lamb, all served with milk tea, sated everyone with delirious warmth.
When the inevitable bottles of baijiu came out, Kilkenny leaned close to Tao. ‘Please inform our host that we mean no disrespect, but my men and I won’t be drinking tonight. We’ll be leaving when it’s fully dark and will need our wits about us.’
Tao relayed Kilkenny’s message, and though disappointed, the host seemed to understand Yin’s safety mattered most. After a brief exchange of questions and answers, he walked up, placed a glass in Kilkenny’s hand, and filled it to the brim.
‘Roxanne?’ Kilkenny asked, unsure of the etiquette of the situation.
‘It’s a compromise,’ Tao explained. ‘I told him we would be flying tonight, and he countered that not all of us could be pilots. He point-blank asked if you were a pilot. Nolan, you are responsible for Yin’s liberation, and these people know it. You must drink.’
‘Here, here!’ Gates shouted. ‘You have the honor of the team to uphold. Drink up!’
Kilkenny glanced up at Yin, who smiled, holding his own glass of liquor. The alcohol in the baijiu was so strong, Kilkenny was thankful the fumes didn’t ignite in the confines of the yurt.
‘To freedom!’ Yin toasted.
‘Amen to that,’ Kilkenny seconded.
Both men drank heartily, much to the roaring approval of the assembled families. Kilkenny nursed the rest of his drink slowly, but the host made sure his glass was never less than half full. After several rounds, the host called for quiet and approached Yin. As he spoke, Tao quietly translated for Kilkenny.
‘Bishop Yin, you have honored my family and me with your presence among us.’
The man bowed deeply as he spoke, showing both humility and deeply felt respect.
‘And we are truly thankful that God has bestowed such a gift upon us. For many years, we have prayed for the day you would be free.’
‘God answers all prayers in time, even those of a stubborn priest.’
‘I hope you will forgive my rudeness, but I have a request that I hope you will consider,’ the man trembled as he spoke. ‘The priest who used to visit us was arrested last year; we do not know his fate. We continue to pray for him, but without him we have had no mass, no sacraments. Will you celebrate mass for us?’
Yin’s eyes teared up at the request, his voice too choked with emotion to speak. As he regained his composure, Yin turned to Kilkenny.
‘Do we have time?’ Yin asked.
‘Just enough for a mass, I think. Are you up to it, though? It’s been thirty years.’
‘I celebrated mass on each day of those thirty years,’ Yin said, ‘except for today.’
‘The day’s not over yet,’ Kilkenny replied.
35
In the dimly lit workroom in the catacombs, Grin dozed at his workstation, exhausted from ten days with far too little sleep. He was bathed in the glow of multiple screens, a dizzying flow of electrons containing fragments of information gleaned from computers half a world away. Some of the screens contained moving images; others were filled with scrolled panes of arcane symbols — the poetry of the machines.
A window displaying a countdown timer reached zero, and Bing Crosby launched into his rendition of the twenties’ chestnut ‘The Red Red Robin.’ Grin’s eyes fluttered as the late crooner and orange juice pitchman roused him from a dreamless sleep with his dulcet baritone and impeccable phrasing.
Wake up, wake up you sleepy head.
Get up, get up, get out of bed.
‘All right, all right. I’m awake,’ he said with a yawn.
With one hand, he keyed in the command that cut Crosby off in the middle of the second verse. Blinking away the sleep, Grin made contact with a stealthy piece of code he left embedded deep inside the main server at Chifeng Prison. Even after the system administrators at the prison had taken the drastic step of wiping the server’s hard drives clean and reloading every bit of software, his program survived.
When he tapped into the security camera feeds, he saw armed guards patrolling empty corridors and the idled brickyard — the facility completely locked down and in a state of heightened alert. Hastily erected barricades protected the two main gates. Nearby lay the scorched and twisted wreckage of the original entries along with the gutted remains of the vehicles destroyed during the breakout.
Now to see what the cops are up to, he thought.
The screens windowing the central computer that served the Ministry of Public Security in Chifeng showed a marked increase in activity. Grin culled several pages from the steady stream of data and fed them into a Chinese-to-English translation program.
‘They’re setting up roadblocks, covering the airport and train stations,’ he mused, skimming through the rough translations. ‘Rousting the usual suspects in the community of Catholic subversives.’
‘And what might that be, Mister Grinelli?’ Donoher asked as he entered the workroom.
‘Reports from Chifeng’s finest,’ Grin replied, his eyes remaining fixed on the screen.
‘Have you learned anything?’
‘That I should never again complain about the jack-booted meter readers in Ann Arbor. The words To Serve and Protect may be stenciled on cop cars in Chifeng, but the question I have to ask is, Who are they serving and protecting? See for yourself.’
Grin quickly keyed in several commands, activating windows linked to surveillance cameras throughout Chifeng. Long queues of vehicles blocked the main roads as uniformed police searched each one and interrogated the occupants.
‘The Chinese are casting a wide net,’ Donoher said.
‘Uh-huh, and check this out.’ Grin pointed at a pair of windows listing arrival and departure information. ‘They’ve diverted all incoming flights and grounded everything that’s already there. The trains are shut down as well. I hope our guys got out of town before the clamp-down, because they have pictures of Nolan and Roxanne for the wanted posters.’
‘At least this tells us they haven’t been caught yet.’
‘You one of those silver-lining types?’ Grin asked.
‘An occupational requirement.’
A window popped to the surface of the monitor in the center of the workstation, a white square containing a vibrant-hued version of Andy Warhol’s famous Rolling Stones logo.
‘Dare I ask?’ Donoher inquired.
‘Operation Rolling Stone,’ Grin answered as he keyed in a new command. The dot in the center of the window spiraled open like an iris diaphragm, revealing a three-word message.
‘Gandalf Isengard Eagle?’ Donoher read aloud, puzzled.
‘A message from Nolan,’ Grin said warmly. ‘A good one.’
‘What does it mean, beyond the literary reference to Tolkien’s literary opus?’
‘Yin is Gandalf,’ Grin explained, ‘a pretty straightforward substitution. Early in the story, Gandalf is imprisoned in the tower at Isengard by the wizard Saruman.’
‘So Isengard stands for Chifeng Prison.’
‘Exactly. The king of the eagles plucked Gandalf from the tower and flew him to freedom. They got Yin out of prison and, as of—’ Grin checked the time stamp on the message, ‘a few minutes ago when Nolan sent this, they haven’t been caught.’