The White Vixen Read Online Free

about two hundred meters from the gate. Two more soldiers, looking decidedly more alert than those at the gate, flanked the doorway. “Papers!”
    She carefully set down her basket and pot and produced her identity booklet. The guard tilted her face up to compare it with the photograph in the book, then issued a grunt. His partner looked inside the basket and the pot, then nodded to the other. “Okay,” the first one said.
    Inside, she passed a bored corporal sitting at a desk and clacking away on an ancient typewriter, continued down a hallway and stopped at a closed door. She had memorized the simple routine always used by her “aunt”, and rapped twice on the wooden door. “Come in,” a voice said in response.
    A man sat behind a desk inside the small office. He wore the same baggy PLA uniform as the other soldiers, but Jo saw the sergeant’s insignia. She’d seen his photo during the briefing, and through a cloud of cigarette haze she recognized the face: Sergeant Lu. “I bring food, as requested, honorable sir,” she said, eyes lowered. She’d only needed a quick glance to take in everything.
    The sergeant grunted, then rose from his creaking chair and come around the desk toward her. “Where is Madame Zhi?”
    Jo gave her standard answer. Lu was not very much taller than her, and she knew he was in his late thirties. Non-coms in the Chinese Army were not nearly as professional as those in the Western services, one reason why the PLA was not very highly regarded as a fighting force. What they lacked in efficiency, though, they more than made up for with numbers. And brutality, when necessary. She took note of the pistol holstered on his right hip.
    Lu tilted her chin upward. “I haven’t seen you before,” he said.
    “I just arrived for a visit to my aunt and uncle,” she said. It was an effort to keep her eyes averted and shoulders hunched. She named a village on the mainland, hoping Lu wasn’t that familiar with it. The briefing hadn’t told her much about him.
    “Ah. Well, you come with me.”
    She followed him down a short hallway to a barred metal door. An armed guard stood a little straighter as Lu approached, then unlocked the door in response to the sergeant’s order. Lu and Jo Ann entered the cellblock.
    Just as her briefing had anticipated, the block was small, about ten meters long. Four cells lined the wall to her right. The first was empty. The next contained a Chinese man wearing an unmarked PLA uniform. He looked to be about eighteen years old and quickly averted his eyes from Lu as they passed. An older Chinese man in civilian clothes was in the next cell, lying on a blanket on the stark cement floor, staring at the ceiling.
    They stopped in front of the final cell. “Dinner time!” Lu announced.
    The man inside was sitting in a corner, head between his knees, but when he looked up, Jo immediately recognized the face, despite its bruises and cuts. One eye was almost swollen shut. Two fingers of his left hand were tied together with a piece of rag, doubtless a makeshift splint applied by the prisoner. He was wearing a gray shirt and pants, nondescript and baggy, and his feet were bare and bruised.
    He was Brian Jamison, a colonel in the British Royal Air Force, and one of the most valuable operatives of MI-6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service, and he was a dead man unless Jo could get him out of here. She estimated she had only an hour to accomplish that task. Maybe less, depending on how quickly the men from the helicopter arrived.
    Lu unclipped a ring of keys from his belt and used one to unlock the cell door. Jo made a careful mental note of the key’s position on the ring. Fourth from the end, around five o’clock. The sergeant swung the door open and gestured for Jo to take the food inside.
    This was the most critical phase of the entire operation. If Jamison did not recognize her signal, valuable time would be lost later when she came back for him. Worse, if he had