John Clark felt the truck slow beneath him, brakes squealing. He and Hala swayed forward, bracing themselves as it came to a stop. Another checkpoint, the second in less than an hour. Anywhere else and Clark would have thought the authorities were conducting a full-blown manhunt, but here in Xinjiang, security stops were so common, one was often within sight of the next.
It was completely dark in the hollow cavern they’d built beneath the piled carpets and stacked bolts of cotton cloth. Clark had given Hala a small flashlight that she used while they were underway, but he had her turn it off each time they stopped. He could hear her tentative breathing now that the truck was stopped again, and wondered what it must be like for her, a small child, trusting her life to the hands of a stranger — an old man, no less, someone she’d met only twenty-four hours earlier.
The truck’s rear doors squeaked open. Muffled voices outside. Clark put his arm around Hala’s shoulders, and they both held their breath. More voices — a long discussion — then the doors slammed shut. Hala began to shake as the truck moved on. She flicked on the light, blinking at the sudden brightness. A child again now that they were underway, she moved the beam back and forth, playing with the shadows it made on the uneven stacks of cloth and carpet tassels in their cozy little cave. Clark leaned on the carpets along the outer wall, careful not to dislodge the stack, and watched her smile.
They still had a long way to go — and Hala wasn’t the only one putting trust in strangers.
Omar Alim’s wife called the People’s Armed Police office in Kashgar to report her husband missing after a fellow taxi driver had seen his cab abandoned by the old caravanserai a few kilometers south of the livestock market. A missing Uyghur near a Uyghur bazaar — certainly a Uyghur problem. The officers had taken almost six hours to go to the scene. Ren doubted the fools would have responded at all, but for the fact that he’d sent word to every station reminding them that two prominent members of the government had been murdered and the fugitives remained at large. Even the most insignificant events should be closely examined.
At least the responding officers had enough sense to follow footprints from the abandoned vehicle into the caravanserai. The blood and carnage inside were difficult to miss. Major Ren arrived a short time later, calling in a dog from an XPCC detachment on the other side of Kashgar. The dog, a German shepherd they’d recently gotten from Beijing, was more of an intimidation asset than it was a tracker, but it led them straight to Omar Alim’s body.
Ren and his lieutenant climbed into the shallow coulee behind the building where the body had been dumped.
“His throat has been slashed,” Ren’s man observed.
The major stared at the wound, and thought of his dead brother, murdered in much the same horrific manner. With little access to firearms, crimes of violence in and around Kashgar most often involved a knife or an ax. Still, three deaths, two with their throats cut, in the same twenty-four-hour period. A coincidence? This was clean, as much as such gruesome work could be.
As an officer with the Production and Construction Corps, Ren’s primary responsibilities lay with enforcement — keeping the resident Uyghur population in check, not solving their murders. Ordinarily, he would have had little interest in finding out who had killed Alim. That was a job for the local People’s Armed Police — who in all likelihood would have filed it away as a case involving no civilized individuals — a Uyghur-on-Uyghur incident.
Ren took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his nose while he stooped for a closer look at the torn flesh and glistening gore on Alim’s neck. Green flies were already congregating on the wound, even with the chill, smelling the scent of death and decay. This was the work of someone desperate, someone on the run — someone who had killed before.
“The Canadian,” Ren said suddenly, giving his man a start. “You saw him board the aircraft?”
“Yes, Major,” the lieutenant said.
“To Beijing?”
“To Urumqi,” the lieutenant said. “Connecting to Beijing.”
“Of course,” Ren said. “And there were no other Canadians or Europeans on the flight?”
“Not that I observed.”
“The perpetrators will try to leave,” Ren said. “To flee across the border. Alert all border crossings to be extremely cautious, to double-check all vehicles, especially any with small girls. Send them a photograph of Hala Tohti. Alert check—”
“Major,” the lieutenant said, holding up his phone. “Border guards in Tashkurgan report an incursion by American military aircraft.”
Ren gasped. “Into China? That would be an act of war.”
