As Jaq sat down, she accidentally caught the shawl draped over baby and mother, exposing a white breast. The bus driver turned and began to remonstrate with the woman.
‘Duìbùqĭ, hěn bàoqiàn,’ the woman said. Her drooping shoulders and anxious expression spoke of embarrassment.
Why should she be sorry? A baby at the breast, the most natural thing in the world. Jaq smiled reassuringly and helped the woman to reposition the shawl.
The man behind them pitched in, striking the young woman on the shoulder, making her wince. The baby pulled away and began to howl.
‘It’s OK.’ Jaq turned and made the universal sign, first finger and thumb forming a circle, other fingers elevated. But the passengers on the bus were not remotely interested in her opinion on the matter. A raucous discussion erupted in the bus. The woman ignored them, and the baby resumed feeding.
The bus joined a motorway. Visibility was poor, a light brown miasma hanging over the flat plain of the Yellow river. The valley of coal-fired industry.
Coal, the most natural of products, is a concentrated form of solar energy. Millions of years ago, in tropical wetlands, plants used energy from the sun to trap carbon and oxygen from the air in the process we know as photosynthesis. Dying plants fell to the bottom of the swamp, new ones took their place faster than the old ones could decompose, layer upon layer pressing down and compacting into peat. Over time, bacterial action, high pressure and temperature squeezed out the water and concentrated the vegetable matter into coal.
You burn coal to heat water, the water boils to becomes steam and the steam turns the turbine, magnets rotating inside stationary copper coils to generate electricity. If coal was just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, then it would be bad enough. Hydrogen plus oxygen to water, no problem. But carbon plus oxygen equals carbon dioxide, and poisonous carbon monoxide if you don’t get the ratio right: greenhouse gases.
And coal is not just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It is a natural material made of fossilised plant matter. And living plants once contained sulphur, as did the bacteria that fed on them as they decayed. Burning sulphur gives SOx, oxides of sulphur, leading to acid rain.
Coal contains more than sulphur, it has traces of other elements. Nitrogen. Selenium, in tiny quantities, essential for plant and animal growth. The dose makes the poison. Released into the air in large quantities, it’s toxic, just like mercury and arsenic. That’s the trouble with nature; it’s messy.
Much of China was still burning lignite, brown coal. The haze was composed of microparticles – unburnt fuel, soot, liquid droplets – emitted from a coal-fired power station. Particles so tiny that they could penetrate the lung’s natural defences.
The great smog of London, in 1956, caused countless deaths and led to the Clean Air Act in England. The new constraints were midwife to the birth of new technologies and the golden age of chemical engineering: clean coal combustion in a fluidised bed with slaked lime, natural gas from the North Sea desulphurised with precious metal catalysts, expansion of the chemical industry to meet the new demands of the Anthropocene – the age of humans and their insatiable demand for nutritious food and clean water and safe medicines. Regulations tightened, forcing polluting industries to close. And who meets the demand today? China.
Now China was coming to terms with the price of progress and moving fast to halt pollution. But was it fast enough?
Jaq was the last off the bus, the only way she could be sure it was the right stop. She shivered in the wintry smog, flapping her arms around to her back to keep warm while she waited for the number eight bus. Several taxis drew to a halt, beckoning, offering to take her to the temple. She ignored them. The little cash she had left needed to last.
Her teeth were chattering by the time the bus arrived, packed with monks. They wore dark red robes and sneakers and sat in silence. When they got off, she followed them. Not that she could have missed the entrance to the temple. A statue of a monk towered over the road, imposing black metal atop a stone plinth, palms touching and raised in greeting or prayer. The noise of people rose to a hubbub as she approached. A mass of Chinese tourists swarmed in a vast, paved square bordered with souvenir shops and noodle bars, sealed at one end by ticket booths and turnstiles. Her heart sank. What had she expected? An isolated monastery in the hills? Just the river and the trees and some fighting monks? She hung back. Even after the disastrous visit to Putuo island, she was still surprised by the scale of domestic tourism in China.
A signpost displayed the distance to the major cities: 960km from Shanghai, and thousands of miles from home. Wherever that was. She shivered. Move, keep moving.
More tour buses arrived and disgorged their shrieking, throat-clearing and spitting passengers. Chato, it was only going to get busier. Jaq bought a ticket with the last of her folding money, throat-tighteningly expensive at 100 yuan, and pressed through the turnstile and under the huge grey archway with elaborately carved roof. She ignored the electric shuttle bus and followed the able-bodied hordes down a paved, tree-lined path beside the dry riverbed.
To the right was the first of the martial arts – wushu – schools. A group of children in red sweatshirts and black tracksuit bottoms ran in wide circles, windmilling their arms.
The temple was big business. On a huge parade ground four groups, separately identifiable by their coloured costumes, were already hard at work. A group of teenagers in yellow were exercising, working on flexibility and strength. Star jumps, sit-ups and press-ups, handstands and backflips, aerial kicks and somersaults – tong zi gong. The group in white were halfway through a recognisable version of the tai chi long form, just moving from diagonal flying to wing-spreading. The grey group, who looked to be the oldest, were working in pairs, on elaborately stylised hand-to-hand combat, each wielding a short stick as they twirled and attacked. The clack, clack of weapon on weapon, with the occasional cry where a blow landed undefended, rang out across the huge open square. The last group, all in red with shaved heads, looked to be the Shaolin kung fu specialists. This group was mixed, male and female, young and old, Chinese and foreign. And yet the most advanced. Diversity in action.
She bypassed the Martial Arts Gym. Her ticket entitled her to a thirty-minute display which she had zero interest in attending. Passing a ginkgo tree with indented bark, she climbed the stone steps leading up to a deep-red building with tiled roof and mouse hole entrance, guarded on either side by statues of fierce warriors.
Monks in grey and orange robes bustled this way and that, the scent of incense mingled with the susurration of chanting.
Timur was meeting Wang here. Thanks to Natalie’s kung fu connections, a cut-price temple hostel with a bed and hot meal were waiting for Jaq. Once she’d located the meeting point in the forest of pagodas, she could afford to wait.
The attack came from her blind side, the low mustard-coloured sun making an inconvenient appearance, burning through the smog before sinking below the horizon, making it hard to estimate the speed or direction of the dark shapes that flitted across the diffuse light.
The smell of male sweat – testosterone and its derivative, androstenone, on heavy cotton, river-washed and not completely dried – reached her before the noise of soft shoes on gravel.
Deus me leve.
Some sixth sense, intuitive self-preservation, made her stop in her tracks, ducking just in time to avoid the first blow. Her swift evading action took the first attacker by surprise. His motion propelled him across her path, giving her just enough time to swing her bag and whack him hard across the side of his head. He tumbled to the ground and remained there.
She took a step back and stared at him. Han Chinese with a round face, razor-cut black hair, dressed in a loose tunic and trousers which failed to hide the overdeveloped muscles. More gym beefcake than a real kung fu acolyte. And not some lone maniac, either; there were others in the trees. Regrouping. Waiting for her next move.
Jaq shielded her eyes and debated her options.
The
path had cleared of tourists as she had wandered further into the forest of pagodas, a cemetery for monks, the tall stupas built to venerate the dead. No help was coming from that quarter.
The living emerged from the trees, four of them, dressed identically to the man on the ground. One stepped onto the path ahead of her, the leader judging by his nods and gestures to the others. Hard to judge his age, but his hair was badly dyed and a slight paunch hung over his cloth belt. Another stepped onto the path behind her, blocking any possibility of retreat. Taller than either the first attacker or the boss, and smarter, judging by the way he moved smoothly into a defensive crouch. The youngest members of the gang formed the wings of the ambush, twigs snapping and leaves rustling as they emerged from the trees on either side of the path. The two older men showed no interest in their fallen companion, who lay motionless on the path, but the eyes of the younger ones strayed there repeatedly.
Delaying tactics. Jaq knelt to the ground and felt the man’s pulse. She shook her head.
‘He needs a doctor,’ she said. What was the Chinese for doctor? ‘Yīshēng,’ she tried, ‘kuài.’ Quickly.
At a nod from Paunch Man, the wingmen approached. Jaq stepped back from their fallen companion, but they adjusted direction. No compassion in their advance, they weren’t coming for their comrade, they were coming for her. The one to her right raised his hands, crossing them in front of his face.
There are three things that matter in a fight. Size, speed and technique. Apart from numbers, size is weight and height. Simple physics. The energy delivered in a blow is force times distance. Force is mass times acceleration. Jaq was outnumbered, but the young man approaching from her left was shorter than her, and slighter. She faced the one on her right, listening out for the other. At the first jab, she feinted, swivelled and high-kicked. Her steel-capped boot caught the smaller man under the jaw before he could strike. He went down without a sound, just the whoomph of his slight body hitting the leaf mulch, the smell of forest damp intensifying. A knockout blow. The chin is the furthest point from the base of the skull, causing the maximum rotation of the head and subdural haematoma in the brain. Nasty.
Two down, three to go. The young man on her right attacked again, but he was slow, landing only a glancing blow to her left arm as she parried, not enough to stop her striking back.
She needed to take this one down, move his centre of mass away from his feet. He might be stronger, but she was faster. She danced from foot to foot, keeping her muscles loose. High-energy strikes, localised tissue damage, make him angry, before tightening her muscles to become a single solid object, concentrating all her mass behind a single punch to the gut. He staggered on impact but didn’t fall, turning and snarling, his face flushed red, his breath coming in short, sharp jabs.
Good. The angrier he got the easier it became. Angry men are irrational. Their brain floods with catecholamines, their muscles tense, heart rate accelerates, blood pressure rises, rate of breathing increases, attention narrows. She waited for his counter-attack. He roared as he rushed her, and she used his momentum to throw him over her shoulder. The fall wouldn’t stop him, so she kicked him in the groin before he could get up.
The first man was back on his feet, and now the other two were closing in. Three big, angry men. She thought of Natalie, hairdresser and kung fu instructor, and wished she’d attended more classes. A different technique was called for.
Jaq ran.
She dashed into the forest, tearing down the wooded bank, weaving through the trees, away from the thugs. At the bottom of the valley an irrigation channel provided a smooth concrete track. She splashed through the cold water, running with the flow, moving downhill, towards the sounds of temple bells and the chatter of people.
She almost made it.
Teesside, England
The plane was airborne now, and Frank opened his laptop to review the documents he’d collected, tapping his fingers, first in impatience and then in alarm.
The £10 million sterling sale at auction of an eighteenth-century Chinese lovers’ cup was fifth-page news. Until the murder of the auctioneer, and that of a retired university lecturer known to have attended the auction, brought it to the front page. How could he have known there was any connection with Sophie and Charles Clark and his own investment in Krixo?
There were other articles on Chinese jade: a spate of thefts from European museums, objects thought to be stolen to order. Was there a link to the Krixo lovers’ cup? Or had the record sale value simply sparked a new understanding of the value of ancient Chinese artefacts, and made them more attractive to criminals?
He pressed the buzzer above his head and ordered a fresh drink.
His concerns were threefold.
First, his own investment looked to be in jeopardy. It wasn’t a vast amount, but it was a lot more than he could afford to lose. He scratched his balls. Given the progress he had been making with Sophie, it was not completely irrecoverable. Unless Wang had her murdered before Frank could get control of her money.
Secondly, the investors were going to be furious when they found out that not only had their factory vanished, but the collateral had been pissed away by the new owner. How on earth had Sophie managed to make a dent in ten million pounds? He needed access to her bank accounts, and fast. But however angry the other investors proved to be, they were unlikely to resort to murder.
The third concern was the most alarming. Someone had murdered the auctioneer and one of the auction attendees. Why? Revenge? A warning to others not to mess with China’s ancient heritage? Then why was Sophie – the person who put it up for sale – still alive? The incident at the Sage had been a warning, not a hit. What did it mean for him? If he remained close to Sophie, was he putting himself in danger?
Sophie was trouble. Time to put some distance between them.
Slow slicing – death by a thousand cuts – was not on his agenda.
Frank had decided to escape from England and its knife-wielding assassins. He was about to revive his career with Zagrovyl, and he was going alone.
In eleven hours, he would be in Shanghai.
A new beginning.
Zhengzhou, China
The founder of the Shaolin Temple, Dharma, brought Buddhism from India to China 1,500 years ago and developed kung fu to improve both the monks’ health and security. The temple was now big business, but away from the crush of tourists, there were many hidden corners.
A group of men dragged their captive to one of these quiet places, to what looked like a gymnasium, a flat-roofed concrete box with a sprung floor and wooden climbing bars covering one wall. They tied her wrists and ankles to the bars with cable ties.
Jaq struggled in vain. After they left, it took a few minutes for her breathing to return to normal, but as it did, she began to shiver. There was no heating in the gym, and the temperature was close to zero. Her clothes were soaked from running down the river channel and her teeth were chattering of their own accord. She looked left and right, craning her neck to try and see out of the high windows. The light was fading. Soon it would be dark. Did they plan to leave her here overnight? Would she survive?
‘Help!’
When the men in black robes arrived, she felt a moment of relief. At least they weren’t going to freeze her to death. Then she saw them line up, seven of them, and raise their sticks.
‘Guys, you are making a mistake. Let me go.’
One of their number stepped forward and drew out a short-bladed knife. She shrank back against the bars and closed her eyes, but he simply cut through the cable ties, first the ankles, then the wrists, and stepped back before she could punch him.
She rubbed the welts on her wrists, the pain more intense now the broken skin was exposed to the chill air, and looked around for a way of escape. The windows were high, two metres off the ground, and the only door was behind the line of seven men.
She walked towards them, hands in the air palms outward, to show that she meant them no harm, hea
ding for the exit. When she was almost level, the first one gave a cry and they surrounded her.
The beating was vicious. She put her hands up to protect herself, but the blows rained down. They made no attempt to question her, so she knew to expect the worst. They were going to beat her to death. A painful and humiliating way to go. She sank to her knees and curled up into a ball, hands over her head, knees up to her chest, and prayed for a miracle.
She didn’t see the women at first, but she heard them. Light footsteps, thin rubber soles slapping the wood, followed by blood-curdling cries in a higher register.
The men ignored them, continuing to hit her in a perfect choreography, taking turns to raise their sticks and thwack them down on her broken body. The first man went down, his legs scissored from under him by a ball of yellow energy. She saw a flash of dark pigtails as the ball uncurled into a young woman, no more than four foot high. The second man staggered back as a short-haired woman jumped on him from behind. She climbed onto his shoulders and grabbed his raised stick, pulling it across his neck and garrotting him. The circle was broken, and the remaining men paused for a moment, long enough for the other women to surge forward and stand between the men and their victim.
For a while her rescuers seemed to be gaining ground. The women were lithe and well trained; their opponents undisciplined thugs. But the men fought dirty, and the women were tiring.
A vicious blow caught her on the temple. Jaq began to float in and out of consciousness, unsure if she was dreaming this whole improbable fight. How could these slight women possibly overpower the fully grown, brutal men?
The Chemical Reaction Page 25