Dragon Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

between her fingers.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “You know what happened?”
    After he nodded, she looked up through the leaves of the ginkgo tree to the dull brown Beijing sky. After a moment, she said, “I had a good shot. That woman shouldn’t have died. She was crazy. I should have recognized it earlier.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. Then, “But you saved the girl.”
    She looked at him as though she was trying to decipher the meaning of his words. For a single instant he saw a shadow of vulnerability, then she rearranged her features into a reassuring smile. He’d come to think of that look as her survival mask.
    “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “That means a lot to me.” After a beat, she added, “But you should get to your office. Miss Quo will be worrying about you by now. And of course I need to clean up, then get to the MPS.” A trace of uncertainty crept back into her voice, and she averted her eyes again. “There will be things I need to do.….”
    “Is there any way I can help?”
    Her determined smile gelled again, and he could see just how hard she was trying. “We could have dinner together. I’d like that.” Then she held out her bloodstained hands for him to see. “I really need a shower.” With that she walked past him and into the next courtyard.
    They had managed to get through the conversation without mentioning the one thing that was on both of their minds. The little girl who’d lost her mother only an hour ago was the same age that David and Hulan’s daughter would have been.

IT WAS STILL ONLY NINE IN THE MORNING WHEN HULAN LEFT HER room and walked to an adjacent building to pay a quick visit to her mother and her mother’s nurse. Hulan’s mother had been confined to a wheelchair since the Cultural Revolution. Her mind was “delicate,” which meant that her rare moments of lucidity were often swamped by weeks or even months of no words, gestures, or acknowledgments of any sort. This morning, Hulan’s mother stared into the distance, and the visit was short.
    Hulan then left the compound and got into the backseat of a black Mercedes. Investigator Lo, her longtime driver, didn’t speak—it had already been a long day for both of them—and he quickly drove her to the Ministry of Public Security compound on Chang An Boulevard. As soon as Hulan reached her office, a tea girl brought in a thermos and a porcelain cup, then quietly left the room. There would be an inquiry about the events this morning, and Hulan would need to write a full report, but before she started that she needed to finish up with her informant. Hulan opened his file and began making notations for the prosecutor. It was a simple case. Mr. Wong, a teller, had used his bank’s official chop to move funds from several private accounts into one held by the All-Patriotic Society. Hulan had five other files with similar stories that had come across her desk in the last month. The difference between those and the case of Mr. Wong was that he was willing to trade what he knew so that he might not be sent to labor camp.
    Unfortunately, stealing funds was not the only problem that Hulan had been able to link to the All-Patriotic Society. During the last few months, there’d been several cases of sabotage by workers who suddenly disapproved of the merchandise they produced in factories in the countryside and in Special Economic Zones. Equipment had been destroyed and defective parts inserted into products. There’d even been a couple of explosions in factories that manufactured high-tech components. The Chinese government took the position that the All-Patriotic Society was an extremist religious cult engaged in “domestic terrorism” and responded accordingly. Naturally, international human rights groups took a very dim view of China’s zero-tolerance policy.
    Having spent much of her life in the States, Hulan should have agreed, but she hated the All-Patriotic Society. She hated the way they