As the famous New York Yankee baseball legend, Yogi Berra, would have said to me, “Honey, it’s déjà vu all over again.” I was in even deeper shit than a couple of weeks earlier. First it was Harry. Now it was this damned woman, Zhang Jing, the boy Josh’s mother. In facing my boss, Wu Zhibin, the Vice Minister of Education – and former Minister of Education whom the State Council had insisted stay on after retirement, to steer the current, younger Minister in the proper direction—I was one sorry sight to behold. My face was a patchwork of purple and pink and yellow bruises inflicted by my target, the boy’s mother.

Vice Minister Wu’s face twisted into a cruel grin as he stared at his star pupil’s multicolored countenance. “Pamela,” he softly snorted, “I am becoming surprised at what others around me are calling your ineptness. When the old American man eluded you and our American partners, I still had a basis for spinning it as their fault, even though they tried to pin more blame on us for not providing extra guards. But when a middle-aged woman is able to disarm three men in a car and pound your face into a strawberry tart, how am I to defend you? The two guards are in the hospital now. I’m told one of them has a crushed windpipe and may never speak or even breath properly again, and the other needs further surgery on the vertebrae in his neck. As for the driver,” Vice Minister Wu shrugged, “he’s another useless fool who will be reassigned to sharpening pencils for nursery school children the rest of his life.”

I stared into this political powerhouse’s eyes and dared say nothing. I knew I deserved whatever befell me. I hoped I would not be reliving my father’s life of ostracism in a distant, hard-scrabble part of China, squatting over holes in the ground to defecate, my life of world-class luxury evaporated into a wisp of memory.

“She must be quite a lady, this Zhang,” Vice Minister Wu mused, and then, in an icicle-coated tease, he said as if to elicit a response with a sharp jab, “don’t you think so, Pamela?”

“We had no idea…” I began to explain but never got to finish the excuse.

Vice Minister Wu bent forward and slapped the table with his thick hand, “You had no idea?! You dare to say that to me?! Did you know nothing of the woman’s background? Did you know nothing of why she fled from China twenty years ago? Did you not know she was involved in the theft of millions of dollars from State enterprises? Did you not know that her ex-husband had been a ranking State Security Bureau official trained in the elite corps to survive and kill, before he was disgraced and imprisoned, and that he had trained her in turn? What the hell am I keeping you around here for? Just to sleep with me?!” He spun his thickly-padded leather chair away from me in disgust and fury.

He lit a cigarette, took a few drags and spit out the smoke to show his displeasure. Still faced away, he said, “We don’t know who that taxi driver was. We’re reviewing the film from the street cameras with the Shanghai Public Security Bureau. They inform us that the license plates were phony. Facial recognition analysis is useless on the driver, and that is of particular discomfort to the PSB, because if that man could somehow evade or fool it, so can others. In that case, the multibillion-dollar nationwide program we have exported to governments all around the world will become a laughingstock. Can you imagine what that would do to our national reputation? Can you imagine governments around the world demanding refunds?”

He chuckled, finding some satisfaction in the foundering of the facial recognition network. Perhaps he could turn part of my missteps to his advantage in implicating, in disgrace, the many agencies that had designed the network. And he could take credit for having exposed the network’s shortfall. The irony clearly amused him. As he had learned throughout his life as a top politico, survival is the transformation of failure into success. There was always a way for the brilliantly ruthless to persevere.

He swung back to face me. He gazed without emotion at my swollen face for an eternity before he said quietly, “Tomorrow you are to be on an airplane back to New York. You must find the Zhang woman. Our people there – real professionals, not the clowns you used yesterday – will accompany you to deal with her.”

I nodded gently in silent surrender.

“You might be interested to know that the American man she works for actually left China very recently, bound for Ireland. Why Ireland, nobody yet knows. The facial recognition system worked, at least to that extent, but unfortunately after the fact, not in advance. He was reported wearing some sort of disguise that did not fool the system’s analytics. Apparently, however, he left on a British passport, and that must have stymied the stupid airport officers who let him depart. We don’t know yet how he obtained it, but he must have had sources here in China. So…” he continued peering into my face, “that’s another interesting internal investigation that’s going on because of your – yes, and our American partners’ – screw-up.”

Vice Minister Wu rose from his chair, walked around his desk and stood looking down at me, his battered lover, gently caressing my bruised face. “Pamela,” he said calmly and with some small tenderness, “this is your last chance to tie up the loose ends. We can’t afford to have these people exposing our DNA program before we and our partners have completed all the steps of putting it into full practice. The American market is huge and lucrative. More than that, however, is the fact that this is our historic opportunity to join our next generation with theirs so that we and they are all of one mind. You have done so well up to this point. I am depending on you.” And, with the impeccable timing of a stage actor, he solemnly intoned, “And so are your parents.”

My stomach twisted. This was, after all, China.