Murphy bit her bottom lip, making her chin quiver. She could not only turn her wiggle off and on, but the waterworks as well. “Honestly,” she said, sniffing for effect. “Hundred Flowers Campaign be damned. Think whatever you want. Whoever is doing these things, Wuming or whatever they are called… Who could blame them? There are evil people out there, taking children from parents, husbands from wives… I worry about the children, but you’re probably right. It would be better to place them with unrelated Uyghur families. Chinese authorities are relentless. They will eventually find and imprison everyone who even thinks a separatist thought, even the Wuming.”
“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.”
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
