Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [99]
The plant had been shut down for nearly six months for upgrading three years earlier but still had no air-conditioning. That, it was said, would be left for the new plant, the one to be built after the turn of the century. It was the same with most water-treatment and -filtration plants throughout China. They were old, and most in disrepair. Some, like this one, had been upgraded when the great water wheel in Beijing finally turned and the central committee provided funds. Small funds with big promises for the future.
What was true was that in some places the future had already arrived; and new ventures with western construction and engineering firms, such as the Sino-French hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar drinking-water plant in the city of Guangzhou, or the massive thirty-six-billion-dollar Three Gorges dam project along the Yangtze River, were well under way. But in the main, water-delivery and water-filtration plants across China were old, some bordering on the ancient, with hollowed-out trees serving as conduit pipes, hobbling along at best.
And at certain times of the year—as now, in the middle of summer when the long hot days provided ideal growing conditions for sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins—the filtration plants became nearly ineffectual, providing little more than putrid lake or river water to the taps of Chinese homes.
It was, of course, why Li Wen was here—to oversee the quality of water flowing from Chao Lake, Hefei’s primary water source to the city of a million. It was a job he had been doing day in and day out for nearly eighteen years. Eighteen years of never realizing money could be made from it. Real money, enough to flee the country and at the same time wreak havoc against a government he despised; a government that in 1957 had branded his father a “counterrevolutionary” when he protested against the corruption and abuses of power inside the Communist Party and had imprisoned him in a labor camp, where he died three years later, when Li Wen was five. Li grew up revering his father’s memory while dutifully caring for a mother who never recovered from her husband’s death or the public scorn surrounding his imprisonment. Li Wen had become a hydrobiological engineer only because he had an aptitude for science and simply followed the path of least resistance. Outwardly he seemed soft and faceless, a man without passion or emotion. Inwardly, he burned with rage against the state, secretly belonging to a group of Taiwanese sympathizers dedicated to the overthrow of the Beijing regime, and to the return of Nationalist rule to the mainland.
Unmarried and always traveling, he counted as his closest friend Tong Qing, an uninhibited, twenty-five-year-old computer programmer-artist he had met two years earlier in an underground meeting in Nanjing. It was she who had introduced him to the persuasive flower merchant Chen Yin, whom he had liked immediately. Through Chen Yin’s familial connections in the central government, he had been able to travel widely, a hydrobiologist visiting various water treatment plants in Europe and North America to see how other governments did things. And through Chen Yin he had met Thomas Kind, who had taken him to the villa outside Rome where he had briefly met the man on whose mission he now worked—a giant of a man who dressed as a priest and whose name he was never told, but a man of power and position who had a unique design for the future of the People’s Republic.
That meeting alone set Li Wen’s entire future in motion, making the past year more exhilarating than any he’d ever known. At last and finally, he would avenge his father’s death and he would be paid handsomely to do it. And afterward, through Chen Yin, he would be spirited out of the country and into Canada, with a new identity and a new life. There to sit and watch gleefully as the years turned and the government that had robbed him of his childhood, the government he so profoundly abhorred, slowly crumbled