“Then?”
“The house warden knew I wanted to speak to the head nurse so she checked in and found her – like this.”
“Why did she check?”
“Someone reported the smell of smoke coming from the room.”
“When?”
“Less than an hour ago.”
“He’s covering his tracks,” Fong muttered.
“The bomber, sir?”
“That’d be my guess.” Fong looked around. “No struggle except for those odd scratches on her cheeks. No forced entry. She knew her killer. She let him in.” Fong stopped and stepped away from the body and stood very still. “Her head was facing that way, wasn’t it?”
“Toward the curtain on that wall, right.”
Fong looked at the curtain then pulled it aside. A photograph of an old woman hung on the wall behind the curtain. “Find out if that’s her mother.”
“Why . . .?”
“Just do it, Officer.” Fong wasn’t in any frame of mind to answer questions. As he shoved his way toward the door his cell phone rang. “Dui,” he said into the device. He listened for a moment, then on a long line of breath let out a single English word:
“When!!!!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AND ONE MORE MAKES TWO
The second blast dwarfed the first. It ripped through the entire fourth floor of the People’s Fourteenth Hospital. It was hard to see how many were dead. What was not hard to see was the fear etched deep on the faces of the citizens of Shanghai and the edgy creep of panic rising like a waking dragon shaking off its lethargy and staring, wide-eyed and hungry, at the new day.
Wu Fan-zi ran past Fong into the burning hospital. An attractive Asian woman in Western dress was at his side. Fong ordered a cordon be set up around the hospital, activated the house wardens, and contacted Wu Fan-zi on his cell. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I’m leaving crowd control out here to a sergeant. You be careful in there.”
“Will do.”
“I want to be at your fifty-third birthday.”
“Me too.”
Fong hung up and took one last look at the gathering crowd – no Caucasians – then headed back to the Hilton. He was tired of being hit. He wanted to hit back.
Angel Michael had been angry. Out of control after the refusal of the head nurse. What should have been a gift, gladly received, became a murder. It enraged him. So much so that his work with the explosive at the People’s Fourteenth Hospital had been shoddy.
His pre-queued e-mails would have already reached stateside newspapers. But would they publish them after the false alarm at the Hua Shan Hospital? It was all getting messy. As he stepped into his luxury hotel suite, for the first time he wondered if he could pull it off – if he could bring back the light.
Instantly, Matthew felt a dull pain start in the nape of his neck. He waited helplessly as it moved upward until it sat directly behind his left eye. Then it exploded, obliterating his sight and releasing wave after wave of pain so intense that Matthew fell to the floor in agony. But even as the pain overwhelmed him, Matthew thought, “Why?” A line from an early Manichaean text floated up to his mouth: “I look for the light but I behold the darkness.” Yes but why, he demanded. An approaching wave of pain caught his attention then it crashed, releasing its crystalline fury. He was pulled down beneath the surface of the pain. Then he bobbed up to the air. He sensed the next wave gathering. But in the pause, the respite, a face came back to him. That woman at the Hua Shan Hospital. The one he’d seen speaking English to the Chinese man. The one who had bought the fresco that had been mistaken for his bomb – she was the one who had derailed his well-laid plans. A fierce wave of pain swamped him, but as he was dragged along the razor-sharp bottom, he saw the woman’s face and began to plot how to make her pay for what she had done to him. For, as Mani has said, “A bringer of the light must destroy those who would keep us all in the pitchy darkness.”
Wu Fan-zi knew that fire is a living thing. It consumes oxygen, constantly searches for food to sustain itself, and like all life, is programmed to maintain its existence and propagate. The fire beast inside the People’s Fourteenth Hospital was a wild thing trapped within the walls of the fourth floor of the old building.
Joan Shui crouched at Wu Fan-zi’s side in the stairwell. The firewall door to the fourth floor, the floor where the abortion surgeries were, was a mere twenty steps up from them and it was the only thing stopping the fire from racing into the stairwell. But the differential of the heat on the corridor side from the relative cool on the stairwell side was exerting tremendous torque pressure on the metal. The door was already buckling. It was getting harder to breathe in the stairwell as the blaze sucked all the oxygen it could to feed its fury. Wu Fan-zi touched the wall. It wasn’t hot but it was warmer than it should be. He pointed at the firewall door, “It’ll be behind that.”
“Crouching,” she said.
He looked at her and nodded. “Yeah, crouching.”
She nodded back at him.
“You understand,” he said simply.
“Yeah, I understand. I’ve been around fires since my father first brought me along with him to his work.”
“And his work was?”
“A fireman, what else?”
He laughed. A slow groan came from the door as one of its hinges was forced from the wall. Smoke slithered beneath the firewall door. “Ready to meet her?” he said.
“Sure, but I always thought of fires as he, not she.”
“To each their own.” He wrapped a kerchief around his face to cover his mouth. She pulled out a mouth filter from her bag and slipped it on. They looked at each other – only their eyes were visible. She thought he looked solid, like a brick. He thought, “What’s a spectacular woman doing here, at my side?” Then they ran up the last set of steps and threw themselves at the firewall door. It flew off its remaining hinges and crashed to the floor without offering any resistance. So much so that their force carried them some five or six yards into the corridor where they stood in a daze before they realized what had happened.
By then the fire had leapt behind them in response to the new source of oxygen from the stairwell. Joan took a step back toward the stairwell and was stunned by the intensity of the heat. She put up her hand to shield her face. Wu Fan-zi seemed immune to the extreme temperature. Overhead a beam creaked. Joan looked up just as it swung free from one side and headed straight for Wu Fan-zi’s back. She leapt at him, pushing him out of the way just in time. The beam sent shocks of sparks up the far wall and immediately cut off any possibility of their access to the north side of the building.
Wu Fan-zi took it all in quickly. The stairs would be on fire before they could get back to them. He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward toward the south end of the building, toward the abortion surgeries, toward the source of the fire. The next five minutes were so intense that Joan could only remember the feeling of her hand in his. Her eyes were scalded with the heat and her hair was singed, but his choice to run toward the source of the fire saved their lives. A fire needs motion. Once it has eaten a field it must move on to another. Going to the source of a blaze can lead you to a calm behind the storm. Although Joan knew this, she had never been forced to put theory into practice. It was the single most terrifying thing she had ever done.
When they finally got to the second abortion surgery, they were stunned by what they saw. The whole room was tilted. The blast had been so intense that there was almost nothing left in the room. Kicking aside the remaining timbers of the doorframe, Wu Fan-zi ushered Joan into the scorched room and he immediately began to take in the blast site, noting details, trying to remember everything he saw. While he did so, she was drawn by some force she didn’t even begin to understand to the fetus in the cage. He saw her and quickly raced to her side.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded but couldn’t take her eyes off the thing in the cage.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
She tried but couldn’t take her eyes away from the thing – the being in the cage.
“Look at me,” he said again but with infinite gentleness this time. Then he reached over and pulled her head toward him. “Puke if you need to but don’t faint. I couldn’t carry you out of here and I’m not leaving you here.” Something cleared in her eyes and the slightest smile creased her lips. “You’re on fire,” she said pointing to his suit coat.
“Damn!” he said whipping off his jacket and throwing it to the ground. As he stomped out the embers, he swore, “Fucking hell.”
“Never been on fire before Wu Fan-zi?” she said with a quiver of hysteria on the fringes of her voice.
“Dozens of times – but my jacket! Do you know how hard it is to find a jacket that fits a guy built like me? Fucking hell.”
“Get me out of here and I’ll buy you three in Hong Kong. I know just the right tailor.”
Wu Fan-zi leaned in toward the cage. “What does the etching on the sheathing say?”
“It doesn’t translate well into Mandarin but basically it says NO MORE GAMES. THIS MUST STOP. THE LIGHT MUST COME.”
“The light,” Wu Fan-zi muttered, “. . . more with the fucking light.” He was on his hands and knees searching.
“What are you looking for?”
“Yes!” he said scooping up metal threads from the floor.
“More phosphorus?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“And there’s the window,” she said.
“He likes to watch.”
“No. It can’t be that. You wouldn’t be able to see much of anything out of a window like that – it probably leads to an airshaft or an interior courtyard. I think the window is just there to assure a good flow of oxygen.” She glanced at the titanium banner again. “He likes to bring the light,” she said.
“Maybe, but he fucked up this time. Too much something or other. The last time the building didn’t burn. This whole place is going to go up. Look at this with me. I don’t think there’ll be a second chance to go over this crime site.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“It’s why I ran into the building, yeah. And you?”
She didn’t say. She wasn’t sure why she’d run into the building. Then she looked at Wu Fan-zi and she was less “not sure.”
“Force centre beneath the operating table,” he said.
“Right. Uneven scoring. Much more force to the north side than the south.”
“Right. And so much explosive that it destroyed the planch.”
“Could be he got bad exotic.”
“Why wouldn’t he buy it all at once?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was too expensive.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s getting hot, what else?”
“The cage.”
“The etching on the metal wrapper.”
“The fetus.”
She wavered and he steadied her.
The fire whooshed up a wall across the way. “Fuck, back draft.” He turned to her. “Ready for another run.”
“With you? Sure.”
“Hold on and we’ll get out of here. If that window leads to a corridor or even an airshaft we have to head in the other direction.”
“Through the other abortion surgeries?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold on tight.” She grasped his hand and he pulled her hard through a flaming hole in the wall. Into a second surgery.
The voyage out was simpler than the one going to the surgery. Going out all they needed to do was avoid the fire beast. As well, since they didn’t need to go to a specific destination as they had coming in, they could keep veering away any time they encoun-tered fire. And fire had one significant disadvantage – it liked going up and they were going down.
When they stepped into the cool air outside the back of the hospital, she looked at him. “You’ve got ash in your hair.”
“Yeah, well you’ve got a little less hair than you had when we went in.”
“Then there’s your jacket.”
“Just an offering to the beast. You’ll get me a new one.”
She took his arm and squeezed him. “I’ll get you two and twenty if you want.”
They sat at a stone table in the hospital’s back courtyard staring into each other’s eyes. “It’s just the excitement of the moment, you know,” he said.
“Yeah, getting out alive is a bit heady,” she responded.
“Your hair’s still smoking.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“Really?”
“I’m a fireman, after all.”
With that she came into his arms. Her elegance and his rock squareness fit together with remarkable ease. Then his cell phone rang.
Fong’s charge into the lobby of the Hilton sent ripples of anxiety throughout the great building. His anger dared even the manager to approach him. So he didn’t. The cops in the lobby manning the phones were exhausted. No one had slept. The news of the second blast had spread a thick layer of impotence over their fatigue. But Fong didn’t care. Things were escalating out of control and he knew it. Only a break in the case could regain them the initiative, put some lead back in their pencils.
“It’s not complete, sir,” the middle-aged man in charge of the banking investigation said as he pointed to the hundreds of pages of printouts in front of him.
“It’ll never be complete, damn it!”
“Well sir, banking no longer sleeps so–”
“Just give me your best guess.”
The man reluctantly flipped through the pile to a red ribbon marking a page. “This man. Tator is his name. He had two large sums of money transferred here from overseas. Each a few days before a blast.”
Fong grabbed the page with the man’s Shanghai hotel address and threw it at two detectives, “I want him in my office in half an hour. And I want him shackled.”
The detectives ran out and Fong turned to the team in charge of finding the American tourist with the camcorder.
“Well!” Fong demanded.
“We’ve got it down to thirty-eight, sir. They all seem to fit the description and every American in Shanghai seems to have a camcorder.”
“Pick your top three and keep them in their hotel rooms. I’ll see them after I meet this guy Tator.” After the men were sent scurrying to round up the suspects Fong approached the Hilton’s front desk. “The manager,” he barked.
Quickly, a primly dressed young Caucasian male stepped out of the back office. Fong wondered if he were an Asian if he would have risen so high at such a young age.
“You know who I am?” Fong asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. You have a secured line.”
The man hesitated so Fong repeated his statement but this time more forcefully. “You have a secured line.”
The man nodded and turned. Fong followed him into an oak-panelled office. Oak in Asia! Senseless when there are so many exceptional hardwoods here, but so many Europeans never really see the beauty of Asia. The young man pointed at the phone and left the room.
Fong flipped open a small phonebook he carried in an inner pocket. He had to check for the number. After all, he’d never called the head of Shanghai’s Communist Party before.
The party boss took Fong’s call without hesitation. Fong didn’t really know how to begin so he just spat out the facts of the second firebombing as he knew them. He was only momentarily surprised when the party boss stopped him by asking, “Has there been newspaper coverage – foreign newspaper coverage?”
“I’ll check but I would assume that there will be, just as in the first bombing.”
“So what is it that you want from me, Traitor Zhong?”
Fong allowed the reference to his previous felony conviction to pass and said, “I want the airport closed and access to Shanghai by all other means curtailed.”
Silence greeted his request. Both men knew that
granting the request would cost the great city tens of millions of US dollars a day. Finally the party boss asked, “For how long, Traitor Zhong?”
“Until we catch the arsonist, sir.”
“No, Traitor Zhong. Three days. You have three days at the end of which time either this maniac is caught or you return to that small village west of the Great Wall – I understand that you made quite an impression on the peasants there.” Without so much as a goodbye, the party boss hung up on Fong.
Fong muttered to himself, “If I don’t find this guy, you’ll join me west of the Wall, oh great party boss man.”
The party boss made a call – a single phone call – and all services in and out of the biggest city in Asia began the process of coming to a full stop.
The West always underestimates the degree of control available to the Chinese government and the country’s inherent efficiency. Communist China is not the comically inefficient former Soviet Union or the hopelessly ideological Cuba. The huge number of people living on the relatively small amount of arable land had always forced efficiencies on the Chinese. As well, the country had been on a quasi-war footing for years. So preparedness was a given.
The call went to the command centre beneath the new radio tower in the Pudong Industrial District, across the Huangpo River. The call activated a vast civic protocol – and this being China – there was no questioning the order that commanded all who received it to stop and wait exactly where they were until a further countermanding order arrived.
Within the hour all buses stopped and pulled over to the sides of the road on highways all around the perimeter of the city. All aircraft were diverted away from the Shanghai International Airport. No planes left. Trains literally stopped in their tracks. Ships throughout the vast river networks leading to the Shanghai Port Facility simply threw anchors over their sides and waited. On the access roads to the great city all traffic, whether car, bicycle, or foot was stopped and turned back to from whence it came.
In the third hour after the phone call from the party boss not a single person came into or left the eighteen-million-souled entity known as Shanghai. Within six hours of that, because there is little refrigeration in the city, food everywhere began to rot. Within seventy-two hours, the city would begin to go hungry.
The Hua Shan Hospital Murders Page 11