Satori - Don Winslow [30]
This would never do for the control-obsessed Mao, who quickly condemned the desire for privacy as an “individualist” antisocial attitude. While waiting for the Soviets to complete their architectural atrocities, he attacked the courtyard houses on an organizational level, establishing “safety-keeping committees,” in which neighbors were encouraged to snoop on neighbors. Black-clad squads of “night people” — mostly erstwhile burglars — used their former skills to prowl around rooftops and listen for the sounds of “bourgeois activities” such as the click of mah-jongg tiles, the trilling of a pet songbird, or for antirevolutionary whisperings and conspiracies.
The assault on urban life was also conducted on public spaces. Theaters and teahouses were closed, street performers harassed for licenses, snack vendors increasingly forced into state-run collectives. Even the rickshaw drivers who once jammed the city’s avenues were being gradually phased out as “imperial relics,” symbolic of “human slavery.” It didn’t happen all at once, but it was happening, and the bustle that gave the city so much of its charm was being muted into fearful stillness, in which every activity was watched and heard.
Indeed, Nicholai discerned the man who instantly fell in behind him before he even left the hotel lobby. China was poor in most resources save population, so the intelligence service could easily afford to leave a man at the hotel with the sole responsibility of keeping an eye on “Guibert.”
It was good to know.
Nicholai wanted to ascertain the amount of surveillance that he would encounter, so in that sense he was “trolling for tails,” as Haverford would put it. Nicholai thought of it differently, of course, and in terms of Go. A basic principle of the game was that motion attracts motion. The movement of a single stone on an area of the board generally provokes a move from the opponent. So it was, he discovered, in the espionage game, at which he realized he was a neophyte.
Pretending not to notice the surveillance, he crossed Chang’an into the old Legation Quarter, past the old Russian Legation building, which the current Soviet delegation had reoccupied. Using only his peripheral vision, he scanned the front of the building, where the security, sitting in Russian sedans, was clearly visible.
He kept his pace up, as if bored with the Legation Quarter and intent on heading west to Tiananmen Square.
He walked around the vast square, chaotic with construction — his watchdog doing a good job of staying with him without getting too close — and then turned north toward the great tiled roofs of the Forbidden City.
His tail backed off then and turned him over to a second man, so Nicholai knew that the surveillance of Guibert was something of a priority. The tall roofline of the Imperial Palace, easily recognizable from a hundred photographs, loomed in front of him as he looked for a place to kill Voroshenin that would offer the requisite time and space as well as offer an avenue of escape.
Nicholai had hoped that the walls of the Forbidden City might offer such a location, but then he realized that the area was of course far too heavily guarded now that Mao had taken up residence there and many of the buildings had been turned into housing for high officials or government offices.
Nicholai went