Series: Beijing Acupuncture

It was rain­ing that day as I walked down the dri­ve­way to the mail­box.  The fore­cast­ers had pre­dict­ed that rain would con­tin­ue off and on for anoth­er twen­ty-four hours and it had already been rain­ing steadi­ly for the past twen­ty-four.  It was a wel­come rain as the pre­vi­ous three weeks had been with­out any pre­cip­i­ta­tion at all and all the crops around were thirst­ing, so there were no com­plaints from the farm­ers who could­n’t get into their fields at the moment.

I tossed my rain-cov­ered cap and rain­coat on the floor of the porch, sat down in the chair near the front door, removed my shoes and sat­u­rat­ed sock along with the dry one and entered the house barefooted.

“L.T.  It’s no prob­lem for me to get to Lexington.  I’m there a lot any­way so I could meet you or pick you up at the air­port and we could dis­cuss busi­ness some­where.  That might also allow you to make a round trip in one day unless you need­ed to stay over for some rea­son,” I offered, anx­ious to steer Mr. Trane from the idea of meet­ing at my house.

“Michael,” began L.T. as soon as Mark was out of earshot. “I’m going to rely on your pro­fes­sion­al­ism and assume that, if you choose to not accept this com­mis­sion, noth­ing of our dis­cus­sion today will ever go any fur­ther. The impli­ca­tions relat­ing to this job are sim­ply too far-reach­ing to ade­quate­ly assess. You can per­haps sur­mise what the con­se­quences might be if any details of this ever became public.”

“Michael, this com­mis­sion involves a North Korean named Yeung Chun Le, a sci­en­tist who leads the North’s atom­ic pro­gram and with­out whom that pro­gram would prob­a­bly be set back by at least two years.

Three weeks lat­er, my prepa­ra­tions com­plete, I parked the Lexus in the long-term park­ing struc­ture at Bluegrass Field and made ready to board my flight to Chicago, where I would meet up with the remain­der of the group tour­ing to China.

Beijing is a city that greets the day ear­ly, with the blare of auto horns and the rat­tle of bicy­cle bells.  I did­n’t know there were that many bicy­cles in the whole world!  Even at this hour, the streets were filled with cars and bikes and peo­ple rush­ing to somewhere.

The next two days were spent in a whirl­wind of tours, the sec­ond day being spent get­ting to and explor­ing a sec­tion of the Great Wall.  What an expe­ri­ence!  This is a man-made fea­ture that can be seen from space.

At 0830, as sug­gest­ed by the concierge, I had fin­ished a light break­fast at the hotel restau­rant and exit­ed the hotel to a wait­ing cab. Entering the cab, I gave the dri­ver a slip of paper which had been pre­pared by the concierge des­ig­nat­ing my des­ti­na­tion in Chinese.  I also car­ried a sim­i­lar slip with the hotel’s address to give to a return­ing cab­bie and we head­ed off to Number One Dahua Road, Dongcheng District (wher­ev­er that was).

I pressed my ear to the door qui­et­ly to see if I could dis­cern the pres­ence of more than one indi­vid­ual inside and stood that way for as long as I dared, not rel­ish­ing the idea of being found in that com­pro­mis­ing posi­tion by some­one enter­ing the hallway.