Part III: The Escape

“Pray for us..that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men. For not all have faith.”

The offending officer at the end of chapter two also happened to be very knowledgeable of other religions, including Christianity. For instance, at one point, he asked me a few questions to determine whether or not I was not a Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, or some other cult. His “job” for the Religious Affairs Bureau was to understand the faith enough so that he could effectively persecute its adherents!

Again, hearkening back to 2 Thessalonians 3, he was like the violent and depraved Jews in Paul’s day, who although having some understanding of Christianity, were the ones with the greatest hatred for Christ’s followers.

Please pray for this depraved officer and his minions in the “Communist Bureau of Religious Affairs”!

On the Lighter Side

Contrary to what one might assume, there was actually a bit of comedic relief during the night. 

Sometime late in the night, I had the following exchange with one of the young officers who had been called in. I think he was supposed to be playing the role of “bad cop”, but he acted more like a Communist Barney Fife.

He came in and took a chair just a few feet to my left, not noticing that there was an official document of some sort in his seat

“Hey, you just sat on something there. It could be important.” I began.

“What? Are you talking to me?” he responded, annoyed I would dare offer him advice.

“Yeah, you just sat down on something,” I continued, pointing at his seat.

“Mind your own business.” he snapped. “I’m the one asking the questions.”

“But..it could be important,” I muttered again, trying not to laugh.

Adjusting himself in his chair, he finally noticed that there was indeed something under him, but he wasn’t happy that I wouldn’t let it go:

“You are the one being interrogated. If I want to sit on a piece of paper, I’ll do it!”

“No kidding!” I thought to myself, doing a mental “eye roll” as he finally pulled the partially crumpled paper free. 

“Locked In” With Deputy Chubs

At one point during a short break in the action, when my interrogators were switching places or going off duty, somehow the only door in and out of the room got shut completely, locking a bulky officer inside the interrogation room alone with me.

I looked on amusingly from my seat across the room as the rather chubby officer realized he was stuck inside, and began to bang on the door while calling his co-workers on his cell phone so they would open up for him. Evidently, he didn’t like the idea of being stuck alone with a dangerous criminal like me. Funny enough, those were the only few moments all night that I was truly “locked up”.

May I Go to the Bathroom, Please?

I already mentioned how the combination of being nervous and talking a lot (in the interrogation) made me extremely thirsty.

Well, they brought me water, and then some more water, and then even more water, and so on and so on. In fact, they kept refilling my cup with hot water or green tea (I can’t remember which) throughout the night, since I was talking (and therefore drinking) so much! 

But that inevitably led to me needing to use the men’s room. And not just once. I probably had to go four or five times throughout the night, as I kept chugging water due to both nervous energy as well as a dry mouth from talking. They obliged my multiple bathroom requests, but seemed to be a bit suspicious of my intentions.

These short walks down to the end of the hall (within just a few feet of the real prison cells) were the only times I got to leave my interrogation room, but I had a police escort walk by my side and stand directly behind me at the urinal. I guess they wanted to make sure I didn’t try to “flush” any evidence. 

I actually did have evidence in my pocket, but not the kind of thing I would want to dispose of in a Chinese squatty potty. 

And that brings me to the next part of the story…

Answered Prayers

In Part I: The Arrest, when I was first taken into custody, I had to use sleight-of-hand to separate my own personal keys from the rental van’s keys, which the police needed in order to drive me to the station. I was then able to keep these important keys hidden in the pocket of my shorts.

These other keys, now nestled safely in my front right pocket, included the keys to our own ministry vehicle, which was still parked in front of our home. As I sat there all night, I marveled that the police never once “patted me down” or asked me to empty my pockets. I could feel the keys resting against the outside of my thigh, and I thanked the Lord that my shorts were baggy enough to conceal them.

Not only did the keys go undiscovered, which was a miracle in itself, but the eyes of the officers were also blinded to another major item of evidence that was sitting right in front of them all evening!

Spiritually Blindfolded

When my passport and phone were confiscated, my Chinese driver’s license was also taken, along with a thin blue booklet (see below) containing the vehicle registration. And so I assumed from the outset that it was only a matter of time before they would see the clear picture of our own ministry vehicle (as opposed to the rental van, which they had already impounded), and begin asking me about it. 

 This is an example of a Chinese car registration document

And this discovery, which seemed certain to come, would have probably led to a search of the vehicle (where many more Bibles and tracts would be found), as well as a search for my car’s license plate number in the highway surveillance system, which would have revealed many other ministry trips during the previous few years. None of that would have turned out well. I would have wound up with hundreds, if not thousands, more questions to answer!

Although this kind of in-depth questioning is what I was mentally bracing for, it is not what actually occurred. As I sat answering (or refusing to answer) their questions throughout the night, I watched officer after officer flip through my confiscated documents one by one, page by page. Not a single officer ever mentioned the picture of my “other” vehicle, even though it was so clearly visible on the desk I could practically see it from across the room.

Sometime during the night it dawned on me that I was watching a miracle, a blinding of the eyes, taking place right in front of me as I sat praying silently. I pondered all that we had done over the years to spread the Gospel far and wide throughout western China, and marveled that they were only asking me about what had happened in just the previous few days!

Kinda-Sorta Confession

When they had finally exhausted their questions, I was asked if I wanted to go back through everything again (“Nah, I’m good!”) before they printed out my “confession”, which was just a copy of everything that they had been typing up all night. I was asked to sign my name acknowledging that everything recorded was true, to the best of my knowledge.

As I think back to that night, my memories are not linear. Instead, many random bits and pieces seem to be floating around in my head, with only the most unforgettable moments appearing as intelligible conversations. But even if I could remember everything perfectly, there is no way I could share it all in writing; at least not without filling many (mostly boring) volumes (John 21:25).

Backseat of a Police Car

Just a little before 3am, a discussion began about how to get me home. I had expected to be released sometime that night, or maybe early the next morning (in spite of their bluster about keeping me “indefinitely”), and to see it becoming a reality was a wonderful thing. There’s nothing like the thought of being back at home with the family, after you’ve been forcibly taken away with no real guarantee that you would return anytime soon.

When the police realized that I had forgotten my wallet, and that they had confiscated my phone (no way to call a taxi or use e-pay), it was quickly decided that I would be escorted home. 

As I sat in the back of a patrol car, with an officer pressed up beside me, I thought that it would be nice to give my *wife (see footnote) a heads up in case the police would want to come in and say hey. Who knows what she might think if a bunch of people suddenly came knocking in the middle of the night? An officer kindly lent me his phone, and I quickly called her, communicating in rapid-fire Spanish that we were on our way.

I also had to do one final trick. Somehow I had to get my house key off of the hidden keychain so that I wasn’t forced to reveal my secret stash of keys in front of everyone when we arrived at our complex. I took advantage of the darkness, and as I shifted in my seat, slowly worked the appropriate key loose while distracting the officer next to me with small talk. It worked. I slid my car keys back into my pocket, leaving the apartment key all alone in my right hand there in the dark.

(Curiously, they never did ask me where that apartment key suddenly “materialized” from.)                

When I climbed out of the police car in front of our apartment building a few minutes later, I had to smother a grin, as I pretended not to notice my own car parked just a few feet away, still packed to the hilt with suitcases of tracts, unknown and invisible to everyone but me.

A Different Kind of Confession

At this point I need to make another confession. There are certain parts of this story I simply cannot share publicly, at least for now. One of the reasons for this is that I don’t want to give away any more secrets to the enemy than I have to. So if you’d like to know what happened next, and the strategic victory that was won during the few minutes that the police escorted me up to my apartment, please feel free to ask me about it someday and I will (probably) tell you the rest of the story.

Evacuation Plan

One of the first things I did once the police drove off into the night was check my email and attempt to contact the team. Turns out they were still waiting patiently, and prayerfully, in their hotel room just a few blocks away. I had hoped that they had already escaped the city, hopping a train to somewhere (anywhere!) else. They were nervous, but had no idea how desperately the police had been looking for them. So when the team leader immediately responded to my message, he was ready for some marching orders:

“What do we do now?”

“Where do we go from here?”

I was certainly hoping the police were bluffing when they claimed to “already know” who was on the team, and that they would be caught if they tried to leave town.

Why else would they keep pressing me to reveal their identities?

So over the next hour or two, we devised a plan whereby the team would split into smaller groups and depart the city by multiple modes of travel: train, bus, and via the airport. In this way, if any one subgroup was compromised, it would hopefully minimize the risk for the others. 

Hindsight is 20/20, but I don’t remember feeling very nervous about our plan working, although it did seem more likely than not that at least one of the sub-teams would get caught. But either way, they were going to make a run for it. Like a covey of quail getting flushed, there was safety in numbers, but a few of them would probably get “bagged” in the process.

The Escape

So just before 6am, after hiding their remaining Bibles and tracts in a **secret compartment (see footnote) in the ceiling of one of their hotel rooms, each sub-group slipped out a few minutes apart and hopped in taxis to different stations across the city. 

One group caught a bullet-train to a neighboring province. A second group got a bus to take them a couple hours down the road to a different city, where they then hopped on a train to the next province. A third group was already waiting near the airport, where the new guy had flown in just a few hours before. But instead of hopping on a plane somewhere (much more expensive, and possibly more risky), they got on a regional airport bus to wherever.

Literally, they didn’t know where they were going to end up!

By the end of the next day, by the grace of God, the teams had all safely reconnected with one another in a large Chinese city many hours away, without having any security issues at all along the way. Not only did they not get arrested, but they were able to fill the last week or so of their China missions trip by Bible-smuggling, encouraging other missionary families, and in the case of some, taking care of precious Chinese orphans.

In His Hands

Words cannot describe how thankful (and amazed) I was that God protected the rest of the team! There is no way to know how near they came to being caught that morning, but I do know that the police came extremely close to identifying them early on in my interrogation. 

For instance, at one point, as a handful of officers crowded around a computer, actively searching for foreigners who had registered at hotels in the city, I heard them mention the name of the first hotel the team had stayed at. So at least at one point during the previous night, the team’s information was literally “in the hands of the police”. Yet they were in God’s hands, and God was in control of everything. 

Not Out of the Woods Yet

After helping the team escape, my wife and I spent the early morning hours “cleaning house” and taking many precautionary measures, expecting the police to return at some point later in the day to do a more thorough search.

For instance, I was able to remotely delete everything on my phone, which was evidently still “on” and connected to the cellular data network. I knew how difficult it would be for the authorities to crack an iPhone passcode (hence their efforts to get me to share it with them), but it sure felt good to backup and delete everything from the comfort of my own living room!

I knew that God had his hand on us (of which the miracles described above are evidence), and I could even understand why He might remove us from China for a season. However, with the need for God’s Word (1 Thess. 3:1) and for laborers (Luke 10:2) to preach the Gospel in China as great as ever, our hope and prayer was still to somehow be able to remain in the country!

In the meantime, utterly exhausted after the earlier interrogations, the many hours of tedious work to “batten down the hatches” at home, and an emotional reunion with my children, I finally crawled into bed around 9am. 

Despite my exhaustion, sleep was not easy to come by, not only because the sun was already shining, but also because I knew the ***phone might ring, or there could be a knock on the door at any moment…

Continued in Part IV: The Aftermath

*My wife had received no news since my initial call on the way to the police station the evening before. In an email to some close friends of ours, written around midnight (when I was still being interrogated), she opened up: “It’s been five hours and I haven’t gotten any news or text from him. So please pray for his protection and for peace and wisdom for us to know what to do in this moment. Pray for peace for our kids too, they’re sad and worried about their dad.”

**A few months later a different team was able to stay in that same hotel room and retrieve all of the hidden materials from the ceiling vent. In this way thousands of tracts and Bible portions were saved and planted as Gospel seed in Chinese soil! Click here to give towards our continuing efforts to evangelize NW China!

***I no longer had my phone, but the police had my wife’s number, and they had left me with a simple, yet ominous, message the night before: “We’ll be in touch soon. Don’t go anywhere.”

(Credit ©David Foldvari for the 4th to the last image.)