Chapter 685 - Interrogated

According to Weiss, living in the bell tower was to "listen to God's bells for penance" every day. But when Father Jin Lige came to visit his attendant with admiration, he found this late-vocational ascetic's condition had deteriorated.

"My child!" Father Trigault seized Weiss Rando's trembling, outstretched hand in alarm. That hand, once like an iron vise, now felt soft and weak, cold and drenched with sweat. "What's wrong? Are you ill?"

Weiss shook his head. Beads of sweat dripped one by one from his gray-white face. "Just an old illness flaring up. Some old wounds ache badly. Father, you know I've fought against pagans and been wounded."

He sat on a straw mat in the bell tower, back against a pile of miscellany. His voice came low and rapid, some syllables mumbled indistinctly—clearly enduring great pain. "This is all God's will."

Weiss closed his eyes, kissed the cross the Father offered, then leaned back on the straw mat, breathing heavily. Jin Lige felt at a loss. Father Rodrigues was famous even in Macao for his medical expertise, but he had gone to the countryside to spread the Gospel. Jin Lige decided to go to the monastery to ask those two Australian priests for help.

What Father Jin Lige didn't know was that the moment his footsteps faded from the stairs, all of Weiss's symptoms vanished. He nimbly sprang from the straw mat and moved to the bell tower's louvered window. The watchers at the church entrance hadn't followed Jin Lige when he left. It was time to leave this bell tower. Weiss felt he had seen enough of what he wanted to see from this highest point in East Gate Market. He had even observed a Marine Corps drill once.

The next day, Father Jin Lige learned from Prior Wu of the Lingao Monastery that his attendant had been properly settled and sent to Bairen City General Hospital. When the Father visited, Weiss was alone in a private room. Though he looked weak, his spirits were much improved. Father Trigault felt uncomfortable after staying in the room awhile. The walls were snow-white and bright, but the place was permeated with an unpleasant medicinal smell. Moreover, the windows had iron bars—triggering the Father's unpleasant memories of the Quarantine Camp.

Prior Wu, who had accompanied him, relayed the Australian doctors' diagnosis: Mr. Weiss Rando's condition was serious. The root causes had accumulated over many years. A complete cure would require recuperating in Lingao for half a year or even longer.

Rando himself wasn't clergy, and His Excellency the Superior hadn't explained what purpose was served by assigning this soldier as an attendant. In that sense, however long Rando wanted to stay in a Lingao hospital made no difference to Father Jin Lige's missionary work. The Father suddenly had a feeling: the reason Rando had suddenly transformed was probably because he was about to be called by the Lord.

"My child, are you sure you don't need me to administer Last Rites?" he asked with concern, looking at Rando lying in bed.

Rando gasped: "No, thank you, Father. I feel I still have a chance to serve the Lord..."

He lay silently abed. The room was very quiet. Rando thought of nothing—he had shown his cards and would see how the Chinese responded.

He still had a final trump card, but that depended on whether the Chinese wanted it. After all, they held plenty of good cards themselves.

My goods are still in demand, he thought. He had noticed that most native personnel used muzzle-loading rifles with percussion caps, and the security personnel's pistols had a crude, improvised quality. Not to mention the muzzle-loading cannon he had seen soldiers drilling with.

The Chinese of Lingao lacked modern weapons. Just as they had only that one cargo ship in the harbor while everything else was sailing vessels. This showed they couldn't continuously obtain reinforcements from another timeline—they had to rely entirely on their own manufacturing.

Regardless of what they could produce, the Chinese of Lingao's industrial level apparently hadn't surpassed the nineteenth century. Though Rando knew nothing about science and technology, he at least knew the century that followed could manufacture breech-loading firearms and metallic cartridges. In that case, his automatic rifles and machine guns would be enormously tempting to them.

When Weiss Rando secretly left the hospital room under the protection of four armed personnel, he knew the crucial moment had arrived. The people he was about to meet would become the masters of his fate. He didn't care about that. Fate had already created too many surprises for him. The worst outcome was receiving a 9mm bullet to the forehead tonight—still far better than being nailed to a cross and roasted by fanatics.

The armed agents escorting him were clearly different from the security personnel who had "escorted" the bishop's party out of the Quarantine Camp. The leader, though he had an Eastern face, was nearly as tall as Weiss. The others also looked burly and powerful—obviously elite soldiers. Perhaps because this wasn't a surveillance mission, their holsters hung directly from their belts, revealing boxy GLOCK pistols—definitely not products of Pakistani or other workshop manufacturers. Rando suddenly realized his status had been greatly elevated.

Following a concealed passage out the hospital's back door, he found that night had grown deep. Though the streetlights were bright, not a soul was visible. Only two jeeps stood quietly there. Weiss was hustled by the agents into the first vehicle. From the corner of his eye, he saw four soldiers wearing steel helmets and carrying automatic weapons in the second car. A light machine gun was mounted on the roof. Though he only glimpsed it, Weiss recognized it as a modified Serbian M77B1 automatic rifle.

Weiss sat in the back seat, wedged between two armed agents. Throughout the ride, he suppressed the urge to turn and look back. In three years, this was his first time enjoying automobile transportation. If things went badly, it might also be his last.

Weiss knew his strategy of proactively reaching out to the Chinese of Lingao was risky. His recent discovery had been like a bomb detonating in his heart. Neither the Chinese nor French governments would equip their militaries with that rare rifle. If the Chinese had found that ship, once they decided he had no more utility but posed a danger, they might send him to meet God in the simplest way. But he had no other path. Before the king fell, he hadn't completely lost this game of chess.

The jeep screeched to a halt, startling Weiss from his thoughts. The car had left the prosperous district near the brilliantly lit East Gate Market and turned onto a small road beside the highway. The roadway entrance had a barrier—guardhouse, barbed wire, sentries. All present. The jeep passed without document checks. They continued until reaching a row of dark buildings. The driver rolled down the window and exchanged words with a sentry. After checking papers, the jeep drove through the gate and stopped before a row of buildings.

The moment Weiss stepped out, a blinding light struck his eyes, almost preventing him from opening them. The second jeep had been following close behind; now it switched on its headlights, aimed directly at them. Undoubtedly, what was aimed at him wasn't just two headlights, but also the light machine gun mounted on the roof.

Weiss couldn't see a thing. Several hands pushed him into a building. He stumbled through a corridor and was pushed all the way to a room at the corridor's end. Several arms pressed him into a chair. The door slammed shut behind him.

After a while, his eyes adjusted to the light. He gradually made out that this was a bare room whitewashed with lime. Besides the incandescent bulb on the ceiling, there was no electrical equipment. The high windows had welded iron bars. The wide cast-iron chair he sat in was bolted directly to the cement floor—a chair specifically for interrogation, with rings on the armrests and legs for attaching chains. A rectangular table stood nearly two meters ahead; behind it were two tightly closed doors.

Just as he was carefully examining the interrogation room's sparse furnishings, trying to extract some useful information, the doors ahead suddenly opened. Several people filed in. They weren't wearing uniforms but civilian clothes. What slightly surprised Weiss was that among the obviously Chinese figures was a tall white woman, looking about thirty-something, both capable and attractive—a typical modern Western woman. She wore the gray cloth "Mao-style clothes" that both the Chinese and natives here wore. Her cold face showed an expression that seemed to say finally caught you—reminding Weiss of federal law enforcement officers he had dealt with.

"Mr. Weiss Rando. You've finally arrived."

Rando raised both hands in surrender. "This is God's will." He decided to appear as candid as possible.

Salina gazed with interest at the man sitting in the interrogation chair in striped hospital clothes. He displayed a cheerful, childlike smile—one that had surely charmed many girls before. Yet those brown eyes remained cold and alert.

You bastard, you've finally fallen into my hands, she thought. When the Political Security Bureau had asked her to help analyze photographs of a suspicious entrant, Salina had recognized him at once. Weiss Rando had a criminal record. During her time at ATF, she had encountered a weapons smuggling case file. A cargo ship transporting feed had been found to contain shipping containers concealing large quantities of automatic rifles, ammunition, even Claymore mines and SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles. Though the ship was detained in American waters, some DSA58 rifles had still made it to Europe, falling into the hands of the Kosovo Liberation Army.