Shadow Creatures

by Andrew Lane

  The harbour was only a hundred metres or so from the hotel, and he wandered down towards it. One of the Star ferries was just docking at its jetty. The sight of the familiar boat, with its green lower deck and white upper deck, sent a shiver of recognition through him.

  He wandered to the barrier that separated the jetty from the waters of the harbour and stared across at the incredible sight that was Hong Kong Island. Boats of many different kinds crossed in front of him: from bamboo junks steered with a single long oar up to the most modern of yachts. At night, he knew, the skyscrapers on the other side of the channel would be lit up with garish neon purples, blues, greens, yellows and reds of a thousand different advertising hoardings, with the choppy waters reflecting them like a fractured, shifting mirror. Behind the buildings rose the lush dark green of the hills that sat in the centre of the island, with Victoria Peak the highest.

  He shivered as he remembered running through the foliage of the Peak in the dark once, some years ago, desperately trying to get to the tram station and the safety of a crowd of tourists, knowing that an agent of the Guójiā Ānquánbù, the Chinese Secret Service, was somewhere behind him, armed with a silenced automatic pistol and a knife. Rhino’s past was littered with such moments – moments where his life depended on something as simple as whether or not a twig cracked beneath his feet, or whether a gate was locked or open. He was happy to have left those days behind. Well, he thought, kind of happy. And only kind of behind as well, considering what he was now getting himself into with Calum Challenger.

  He wondered where that agent was now. Was he dead, or was he perhaps leaning on a barrier somewhere nearby and looking out at the same waters as Rhino?

  He shook himself. This kind of introspection would not help the mission. He turned and headed back to the Marco Polo.

  The hotel was attached to an exclusive shopping mall of the kind in which Natalie would love to spend her time and her mother’s money, and Rhino wandered across the hotel lobby and into the heavily air-conditioned mall, looking for places that sold high-quality clothes. Within an hour he had suits in his and Gecko’s sizes, plus several shirts for both of them, and a silk dress for Natalie that matched the shoes she was already wearing – all charged to the credit card that Calum had given him. He supposed he could have waited until they’d both woken up and gone shopping with him instead of having to shop for them, but trailing Natalie around a shopping mall while she tried on all the clothes would have driven him mad. Better that he just presented her with a fait accompli. The problem was that they hadn’t had the time to get suitable clothes in London before they left, and the way they dressed, like the place they were staying, would be part of their cover.

  He also bought three mobile phones with pay-as-you-go SIMs, and spent a few minutes setting them up and making sure that each phone had the numbers of the others in its memory. Better to be safe than sorry.

  Back at the hotel, he found Natalie and Gecko having brunch. He joined them and showed them what he had bought.

  ‘Seriously?’ Natalie said when she saw the dress. ‘Green? I have blue eyes. It’ll clash.’

  ‘So will we if you don’t put it on,’ Rhino said. ‘Besides, you’ll be wearing sunglasses. All rich celebrities wear sunglasses all the time, don’t they?’

  Gecko was running his fingers over the cloth of his suit. ‘Not much flexibility of movement here,’ he pointed out.

  ‘And you won’t be wearing trainers either.’ Rhino raised up another bag with a shoebox in it. ‘I had to guess your size, but I have a good eye. Fortunately I’m not expecting any trouble that might require your particular skills.’

  ‘So apart from the fun of dressing up,’ Natalie said, ‘what exactly is the plan? I mean, do we have a full cover story and everything?’

  ‘You are a rich American named Jayne-Anne Richmond,’ Rhino replied. ‘Your father works in oil. You can be as vague as you like about what he does – the vaguer the better, actually. You have a trust fund, and you’re interested in buying something cute and cuddly – but, specifically, something that your friends don’t have. It’s like a competition with you and your friends, to see who can get the rarest, most exotic animal.’

  ‘I guess that we are her bodyguards,’ Gecko said. ‘The suits give it away. Do we get sunglasses too?’

  ‘We do. Our job is to stand behind her and look as if we’re ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

  Natalie frowned. ‘Giant rats aren’t cuddly or cute,’ she pointed out. ‘How am I going to convince them that I have my heart set on one?’

  ‘The point when negotiating and in gathering intelligence is that you don’t barrel in and ask for the thing you actually want. If you do, the price goes up rapidly. You play it carefully, not giving away your interests. Let the seller mention the thing you’re interested in first, and don’t react to it. Be dismissive at first.’

  Natalie stared at him. ‘You expect this Xi Lang to mention giant rats first? He’s going to have to get through a lot of cute and cuddly animals before he gets to that.’

  ‘Not,’ Rhino pointed out patiently, ‘if you mention that you used to have a pet white rat when you were a child, and you loved it.’

  ‘Like that’s going to come up in conversation.’

  ‘Trust me, it will. He’s a salesman. He’ll ask you about your pets when you were younger so that he can work out what your likes and dislikes are.’

  ‘But I’ll have already told him I want something cute and cuddly!’ Natalie protested.

  ‘Again, it’s the art of the deal. Sellers know that buyers rarely end up buying what they say they want. They almost always buy something else, something that’s been at the back of their mind, or that means something special to them.’

  ‘OK!’ She shrugged in a way that said ‘whatever’ without actually uttering the word. ‘You’re the boss.’

  ‘No,’ Gecko said, ‘you’re the boss. We’re just the bodyguards.’

  ‘And remember,’ Rhino pointed out seriously, ‘that these people are criminals. Gangsters. If we stick to the cover story, we’ll be OK, but we’re walking a fine line here. I want you to leave anything with your name on it at the hotel. I’ve got fake IDs that I brought with us from England, and replacement mobile phones for us that can’t be traced back to our real identities. Things could get ugly, and if they do it’s my job to get you out fast.’

  Rhino coached them for a while longer, making sure that they were comfortable in their personas, and then the three of them went back to their rooms and got changed. When Natalie and Gecko reappeared in the hotel lobby, he hardly recognized them. Natalie was the absolute picture of a reality-TV star, complete with sunglasses and high heels and baseball cap, while Gecko was hovering somewhere between inconspicuous and dangerous in his dark suit and sunglasses. He had even gelled his usually unruly hair and brushed it back neatly. Natalie, to give her her due, didn’t even glance at Gecko or Rhino as she walked towards the lift that would take them to the cavernous underground car park. Of course she didn’t – celebrities never notice their bodyguards.

  Before they got into the car, Rhino used his new mobile to dial the number that had been on the receipt that Tara had pulled off the internet – the one from Xi Lang to some unnamed buyer. It was, presumably, the phone number for Xi Lang’s Emporium of Unusual Animals. As he dialled, he glanced from Natalie to Gecko, silently warning them that this was it. There was no going back now.

  ‘Hello?’ a Chinese voice said in English. Rhino noticed that nothing was given away: not the name of the establishment or the name of the person answering the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is that Mr Xi Lang?’

  ‘Maybe,’ the voice conceded. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to buy something – or, rather, my employer wants to buy something.’

  ‘What kind of something?’

  ‘Something unusual.’

  A slight pause, and then: ‘Where you get this number f
rom?’

  ‘From a previous customer of yours – a customer who is a close friend of my employer. She was very happy with the service you provided.’

  ‘You have name?’ the voice demanded.

  ‘I do, but I don’t really want to say it on the phone.’

  ‘OK.’ The voice sounded slightly happier, and Rhino guessed that if he had actually named some celebrity that he thought might have bought an exotic animal from Xi Lang then the phone call would have ended rapidly. Xi Lang only wanted customers who would be careful about giving out too much information.

  ‘You know where we are?’ the voice said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then you come over now.’ A slight relaxation in the voice. ‘We give you good service. You get what you want from us.’

  ‘We will be there in half an hour,’ Rhino said, and cut the call off.

  The drive out to the Sham Shui Po district of Kowloon took about twenty minutes, and in that time they seemed to cross from affluence to poverty and back several times. The younger Chinese people buzzed around on scooters, dressed expensively in designer jeans and T-shirts, with sunglasses over their eyes and iPods in their ears, but their elders rode around on bicycles, wearing loose, plain shirts and trousers and wide straw hats. As they got closer to Sham Shui Po, the buildings became older and uglier. The majority of them were still high-rise blocks of mixed design and variable height, but they were plainer now, made of water-stained concrete, and they had balconies and air-conditioning units stuck randomly all over them. Clotheslines were stretched from balcony to balcony, and clothes fluttered from them like drab flags.

  After a while, they left the residential area behind and entered an area of long, old warehouses made of crumbling breeze blocks and rusty corrugated iron roofs set at shallow angles. Thin, mangy cats with hungry eyes slunk in the shadows. Rhino drove carefully up to a particular warehouse and stopped.

  He got out, motioning for Gecko to join him. Stepping out of the air-conditioned interior of the car was like stepping into an oven. The two of them stood there, looking around, feeling the sweat prickle down their backs and across their foreheads.

  A side door in an anonymous warehouse opened and a large Chinese man in a suit emerged into the sunlight. His eyes were hidden behind black sunglasses. There was a bulge beneath his jacket that suggested he was armed. Without saying anything, he gestured Rhino over, and expertly searched him from head to foot. Rhino assumed that he was looking not only for weapons but, more likely, for recording devices that might suggest he was an undercover policeman. The man removed Rhino’s wallet and checked the fake identification carefully, then handed it back. Beckoning to Gecko, he did the same, then stepped back and nodded.

  Rhino went and opened the car door, and Natalie got out, every inch the regal rich princess. The Chinese man stepped towards her as if to search her too, but Rhino put a hand on his chest. The man stopped, stared at Rhino for a long moment, and then turned to look at the black rectangle of the open door.

  A Chinese woman stepped out of the darkness and into the sunlight. It was difficult to tell her age, but Rhino thought she couldn’t be much older than her late twenties. Her hair was black, and wound into a tight bun on the back of her head, and she wore a red silk dress embroidered with dragons.

  ‘Mr Lang welcomes you,’ she said in good English, ‘and hopes that you had a pleasant journey. Your visit is unexpected and unplanned, but welcome regardless. Mr Lang does insist, however, that all visitors be searched. It is a . . . requirement of this establishment.’

  Natalie took her hat off and threw it in the back of the car, then followed it with her tiny handbag. She held her arms out from her sides and twirled round. The green silk dress that Rhino had bought for her didn’t really leave anywhere that she could have hidden anything larger than a credit card.

  ‘Do I look like I’m hiding anything?’ she asked.

  The Chinese woman paused, and then shook her head. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and I apologize for the necessity of asking. My name is Tsai Chen. Please to come inside.’

  The inside of the warehouse was shadowed and mercifully cool. The smell reminded Rhino of the times he had gone to the zoo when he was a kid. It was the smell of the elephant house.

  He hoped they didn’t have any elephants there. He just knew that Natalie would want to take one home with her, for real.

  From where the five of them stood, inside the doorway, rows of cages and crates stretched away into the darkness. Some of them stood on the floor, and others sat on metal shelving, three or four levels high. Rhino thought that he could make out, far away, some fenced-off areas of earth or water where animals would be free to roam and stretch their muscles. The warehouse wasn’t silent either. From every direction Rhino could hear bleats, screeches, growls, barks and other noises that were more difficult to classify, but which obviously came from living things. He couldn’t see how this many creatures could be kept in these conditions for very long. Just keeping them fed and watered would be a major undertaking in its own right. Presumably Xi Lang had some large open-air facility somewhere in the New Territories, and this was a staging post, somewhere close to the docks and the airport where the crates of ‘merchandise’ could be stored before they were sent to their final destination.

  Rhino wondered how many of them actually turned up alive. Xi Lang must take precautions to minimize the fatality rate in transit. Maybe he drugged the creatures before they were dispatched. He wasn’t going to ask – real customers wouldn’t be that interested in the mechanics of the operation, whereas undercover police or other investigators would, and he wanted them to be counted in the former camp, not the latter.

  ‘May I offer you some refreshments?’ Tsai Chen said smoothly. ‘Perhaps some jasmine tea?’ Rhino noticed that the large man in the suit who had stepped out to meet them had come inside and closed the door, and he had been joined by two smaller men.

  Rhino was about to say ‘No,’ but Natalie stepped in before he could open his mouth. ‘Thank you – that would be lovely.’

  As Tsai Chen gestured to one of the men, she said, ‘We never established the name of the person who recommended our services to you.’

  Rhino saw a fleeting look of panic on Natalie’s face, mirrored by one on Gecko’s . . . Ah, he thought, this is where it all starts to go wrong . . .

  The door to Tara’s room opened and one of the two short-haired Eastern European men entered. Tara wished she could tell what country he came from – Russia? Lithuania? Poland? – but her ear for accents wasn’t good. She just knew he sounded like a baddie from a James Bond film.

  He had a small gold earring in his left ear. She hadn’t spotted that before.

  He was also carrying a video camera on a tripod. Without looking at Tara, he plonked it down in the centre of the room, facing away from the window. Noticing Tara noticing that, he shrugged.

  ‘No need to give away location,’ he said.

  ‘At the angle you’ll be filming, there’s just trees and sky out there,’ Tara pointed out.

  ‘Even so. Best not to take chances. I have seen these CSI programmes on TV – just one piece of a building, with a shadow showing which way the sun was shining, and they can tell where the video was made. Is very clever. That is why I use video camera instead of mobile phone to record you – harder to trace.’ He nodded towards the tray on the floor, beside the mattress. ‘You eat OK?’

  ‘If you like fried chicken.’

  ‘Who does not like fried chicken?’ he countered.

  ‘What kind of food do they have in your country?’ Tara asked, trying to get some kind of clue as to where he came from.

  ‘Fried chicken,’ he said. He looked up at her, from where he was fiddling with the camera, and smiled. ‘We also eat goat, on special occasions. The tender parts of a goat, grilled.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘If you like the tender parts of a goat.’

  ‘Which are the tender parts?’ she as
ked.

  He frowned. ‘If you do not know, it is best not to ask.’ He gestured to her to come towards the centre of the room. ‘Now, you stand there.’

  Standing was difficult. Her muscles didn’t want to obey her, and her legs were shaking with fear. She did as she was told though, and stood in the middle of the room, in front of the glass eye of the video camera. She cast a despairing glance at the door, but the man had closed it behind him, and she knew that his companion had to be out there somewhere. She could run for the front door, but she wouldn’t make it, and things would just get worse for her. At least at the moment they were making her relatively comfortable. She’d lived in worse places, and eaten worse food.

  The man handed her a piece of folded-up paper from his pocket. ‘You read this out,’ he said. He held up a hand, indicating that she wait until he had switched the video camera on, and then his hand swept down in an ‘Action!’ gesture.

  She looked at the words on the paper, which were so predictable that she could have scripted them herself. She felt something shrivel inside her as she thought about the effect that the words would have on Gecko. It was loading a whole lot of guilt on to him that he really didn’t need – and if he agreed to do what the gang wanted then it would be her fault!

  Taking a deep breath, she looked up at the camera.

  ‘Eduardo,’ she said, and then improvised by adding, ‘Gecko – I am being held by some men who say that they have talked to you before. They say that you have to come and work for them. If you don’t, they say they will hurt me.’ She could hear the tremor in her voice, and tried to suppress it. ‘They say they will hurt me badly, and that it will be your fault. They say that you must come back to your flat, and that they will be waiting for you there.’ She paused, reading the last sentence. ‘They say you have three days.’

  The man behind the camera paused, then clicked the Off button. ‘That is fine. We will edit down and send to his mobile phone.’ He glanced at Tara, and frowned slightly at her expression. ‘You want to do it again? More feeling, maybe?’