Riding the Snake (1998)

He sat in the back of his beautiful new three-engine Falcon jet as a setting sun turned the silver wings bright orange. He watched in fascinated silence as his "dirty" blood was transferred, snaking out of his arm in the transparent plastic tubes, then shooting into the large dialyzer where it was washed of urine and body toxins. Then his blood would return from this grotesque laundry and be inserted back into him. The process was debilitating and caused "Willy" Wo Lap Ling tremendous fatigue. He looked up at his full-time physician, a young Chinese doctor from Hong Kong named Li Dayu. He was narrow shouldered and skinny with thick prescription wireless glasses. Dr. Li checked the dialysis machine, which was built into the private jet's lavatory. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and noted the blood flow rate that measured the fluid processed by the hissing, gurgling monstrosity. Next, the doctor checked the permanent plastic tips that had been surgically implanted in Willy's arm and abdomen, and to which the dialysis machine was now attached. Then he looked at the withered sixty-nine-year-old Triad leader critically.

"I think it is time. We must go to Beijing," he said in Mandarin Chinese. "I sent your blood panels to them. They have notified me they have a donor."

"I have enemies there," Willy sighed. "I have ignored the wishes of Chairman Deng. I cannot lose face. I cannot now crawl there like a wounded animal, drag myself up onto his porch, and ask forgiveness."

"
Zou Hou Men," the doctor said, looking into Wo Lap's jaundiced eyes, using the Chinese expression meaning "Go in the back door." "Use your Guan-Xi with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences." Guan-Xi was the time-honored Chinese tradition of influence that still controlled most social and business relations in China. The head of that new Academy was Chen Boda, who also headed the Chinese Communist Party's Military Commission and was, arguably, the most powerful man in China. Even more powerful than the ailing Chairman Deng Xiaoping.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had been formed only one month before and had been heralded by President Clinton as an important step by Chinese Communists to find bridges of understanding with the West. Willy Wo Lap Ling had been invited by Chen Boda to be part of the Academy. The invitation had surprised him, because he lived in Hong Kong under British rule and had engaged in a life of crime there, but Willy had been told it was extended because he was an expert on U
. S
. commerce. After all, didn't he steal billions in cash annually from an unaware and stupid America?

Chen Boda had identified the United States as China's sole global enemy in his address before the Communist Party's Central Committee during a closed meeting at Beijing's Jiangxi Hotel in January of 1994, the Year of the Dog. In the view of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Willy Wo Lap Ling was actively engaged in poisoning the American fabric from within with his drugs, guns, and illegal immigration. He was known to have great influence with corrupt American officials. He had invested heavily in American politics and had influence with many U
. S
. Senators and
Congressmen. Willy Wo Lap had even been to the White House and had his picture taken with President Bill Clinton. The picture was hanging in his Hong Kong office and displayed for all his incredible Guan-Xi with the American leader. It was this criminal activity and political influence that caused Chen Boda to invite Willy to be an adviser to the powerful new Academy, which was hardly a bridge to better understanding with the West. It was a Chinese think tank solely dedicated to the total and absolute destruction of American interests around the world.

Wo Lap Ling had been born in the New Territories inside the Walled City of Kowloon in 1925. At the time there were nineteen members of his family living in a one-room concrete flat. The Walled City was the perfect place for Willy. History had prepared that ghetto for him years before he was born.

The New Territories had been ceded to the British from China for ninety-nine years in 1898. The Walled City of Kowloon, as a result of a poorly worded agreement, became disputed property, with both the British and the Chinese claiming sovereignty over it. It was a pocket of lawlessness, governed by neither country, where crime and violence flourished. Soon criminal Triads became the ruling power in the Walled City, where there was no wall. The Japanese had it torn down by POWs when they occupied that area during World War II. The ghetto kept its name because the place had been designed without streets. Narrow alleys randomly transected the crowded mass of buildings. As the population and need for new housing grew, the ghetto swelled. "New" top floors were built precariously over old. With no Planning Commission or City Council to oversee design, stress, and load requirements, the new floors were balanced unevenly, like randomly stacked boxes, giving the ghetto the look of a wall of concrete. The narrow alleys became tunnels which were closed in by top stories. Even at noon, no sunlight penetrated these walkways. Water and electricity were stolen from nearby conduits. Makeshift water mains leaked; jerry-rigged wiring sparked and zapped in the fetid darkness. Sewage and the entrails of animals were thrown down into the dark pathways from one-room factories that churned out pork balls and fish cakes. In most places, the narrow walkways were filled almost two stories high with human excrement and rotting garbage. At some places, the alleys were only a few inches wide.

The small industries that operated in the Walled City hummed twenty-four hours a day, turning out everything from hair oil and bicycle parts to sex toys for Western consumers. Theft, murder, and intrigue always hovered in the dark.

It was in this criminal environment that Wo Lap Ling grew up. His family lived on the fifth floor of a ramshackle old building. Since there were no streets, no apartment had an address, and children from an early age learned to navigate in the teeming black tunnels, finding their homes by instinct almost like blind ants returning to the nest.

Wo Lap Ling had to share a bed with five other members of his extended family. They used a "hot-cot" method. He had the bed from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, then he would turn it over to his cousin, Sun Yee. By five P
. M
., he was out in the swarming alleys of a city that housed factories, opium shops, and humanity with equal disregard.

No Occidentals dared go into the Walled City of Kowloon, except, that is, for Jackie Pullinger. She had lived there since she arrived from England in 1929. She was an evangelist missionary who taught the children the vague customs of the West that were now the rule in Hong Kong. She also ran a drug rehabilitation program. Her success rate was staggering. Since she provided a service for these Chinese children, she had at first been tolerated, and eventually became a fixture that everyone accepted. She had taught Wo Lap Ling English and had given him his Western name, Willy.

Jackie Pullinger was the only Occidental he had ever loved.

Willy had been so adept at feats of criminal balance that he had risen from a street urchin who ran errands for the area Triad leader to become, at the age of twenty-three, the powerful Incense Master or Vanguard of the Chin Lo Triad. As Vanguard, it was his duty to wreak punishment on delinquent Triad members, a job he performed with great relish. He became an expert on all forms of punishment, including the painful Death by a Myriad of Swords. He resurrected several ancient tortures involving rats and insects. He rose quickly to become the White Fan (Consigliere), and now Willy Wo Lap was the "most powerful Shan Chu" and ran the entire Chin Lo Triad in Hong Kong. The Triad's current annual take from its worldwide illegal activities was eighty billion dollars and growing.

The largest market for his criminal empire was America, which had focused almost all of its law enforcement energies on the Italian Mafia and Colombian drug cartels. Willy was astounded. Together they netted only twenty billion. Yet the stupid Americans concentrated on them while Willy's Triad poisoned American society with guns, drugs, and illegal immigration, extorting three times that amount, while having his picture taken with the American President. It had been an exciting, exhilarating ride.

Now at age sixty-nine, the trail seemed to be coming to an end. He had applied to Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York for new kidneys and been told by the Americans that there was a donor. He had flown there in his new three-engine Falcon jet, only to find out at the last minute that a mistake had been discovered in the tissue match. He had been turned away without explanation or regard for his desperate condition.

"You will die if you do not get new kidneys immediately," his doctor said, interrupting Willy's thoughts.

Willy's life had been a mixture of violence and power. Women, enemies, and wealth had all been conquered, like helpless children. Wo Lap Ling had been riding a vicious tiger. In his youth, he sat the beast easily. The tiger carried him fast and far and, at his direction, had savaged his enemies. But now he was desperately holding on, barely able to stay aboard. If he fell, he knew the tiger would turn and savage him.

"Tell the pilot to refile the flight plan for Beijing," he whispered.

The doctor turned and moved away as the blood-cleansing, lifesaving machine, squatting on the toilet behind him, hissed and throbbed at the end of two plastic tubes that coiled out of him like hooded cobras--one snake sucking his blood, the other spitting it back inside him.

The problem with riding a tiger was that when the ride was over, it was impossible to get off the vicious animal's back.

The Friendship Hospital in Beijing was clean but not very friendly. Gray walls and yellow tile floors made the sterile environment foreboding. The Communist doctor had given him a complete physical as well as a new blood work-up. He checked Willy's vital signs, then told the dying Triad leader that he was in immediate need of a kidney transplant. Any wait would make his chance of survival more difficult. This was hardly news. When Willy asked in Mandarin Chinese if this could be accomplished, the doctor only looked down at him and clucked his tongue in a very peculiar way before leaving Willy's private room.

Willy Wo Lap's dreams had been getting very bizarre. He assumed, in his waking moments, that it was probably all the toxins in his blood that were poisoning his mind. But there was a part of him that wondered if he was getting a sneak preview into the dark hallway of his spiritual future. If so, the dim light under that door was grim and held evil promise.

The dream he was having in the Beijing hospital was strange indeed: He was sitting up in bed but needed to urinate. The floor was alive with writhing poisonous snakes. They hissed and bared their fangs at him. He needed to walk to the bathroom but had no shoes. The snakes would surely strike his bare feet and kill him. Two large, snow-white Akita dogs were also in the dream, sleeping at the foot of his bed. Willy called to them. They looked up, then came over and sat obediently next to him, one on each side. Suddenly a knife magically appeared in Willy's hand. He turned and drove the knife deep into each dog's back. They sat patiently as he opened them up, making long cuts, exposing their innards. He stuffed his bare feet down inside them, pulling the carcasses up like huge furry white bedroom slippers. Then he stepped down off the bed, into the sea of snakes, walking carefully in his new dog shoes . .. but then, slowly and powerfully, the dogs began to move in their own directions--one right, one left. In panic, he knew he had been fooled by their trusting beauty. He could not control them. Soon he was caught in awkward peril, unable to stand, his legs spread, his genitals dangling inches above the snapping reptiles. Willy was hopelessly off-balance and began falling face down into the sea of hissing snakes.

He woke up with a start and was looking up at the smooth liver-spotted face of Chen Boda. The Chinese politician had been sitting in the room, staring down quietly at him, saying nothing. It was strange, even frightening, to wake up in the middle of the night and find one of the most powerful men in China--perhaps the whole world--sitting silently at his bedside, observing him, making plans while he slept, but saying nothing. Chen Boda was seventy
-
one, his hair slicked back on his small, bony head. His skin was the color of an old calligraphy scroll, an aged wheaten yellow. He was only five feet tall. Western diplomats refused to take him seriously because of his size, thinking him diminutive in spirit as well as stature. It was a mistake they were just now beginning to regret. He had soft brown eyes, an angelic complexion, and a ruthless core.