by John Burdett
Without warning the child stopped and pointed. The path was blocked by double-stacked containers. She gestured that it was necessary to make a detour; what they were looking for was on the other side. She held out her hand while reluctantly Kan counted out nine hundred Hong Kong dollars. A deal’s a deal. Anyway, a chief inspector of police with a machine pistol was watching.
Chan told Kan to wait while he made the detour. He had to go back three containers, turn left, then left, then left again. On each attempt, though, the path was blocked; the center of the maze was cut off by a steel fort. Finally he came upon a ladder. His eye traced five trip wires across the ladder, probably attached to some primitive warning system. He took out the automatic pistol, climbed the ladder slowly, carefully stepping over each trip wire. Near the top of the container he could see an unexpectedly large area, perhaps a hundred feet square, open to the light but completely closed to the rest of the area by containers packed closely together. Hitched across one corner a wire held blue jeans, male and female underwear, T-shirts. On the ground, leaning with her back against a steel wall, Clare Coletti sat hump-shouldered. Heroin had aged her. On a quick take, in a crowd, he would have registered her at about fifty.
Shaved head, blue eyes, Orientalized eye sockets: it was a face out of a comic strip: Kat Woman. Her complexion was gray. With emaciated hands like claws she scratched incessantly at different parts of her body. What Chan noticed most was her head; it was on a swivel, like a video camera on a random scan. In one instant she was looking up at him but seemed not to register anything. She was sweating.
“Johnny? I mean, fuck.” It was a New York accent, Bronx, but not like Moira’s. Clare spoke quickly, with condescension.
“I’m cookin’.”
“Yeah. Hurry up, why doncha?”
“You wanna do it?”
“I don’ cook. We went through that.”
“Right. Right. The Great Khan don’ cook.”
Johnny said something in Mandarin. There was a short laugh from another man.
“You boys thinkin’ of rebellin’ again? Wouldn’t try it. I’m your only way outa here-just remember that.”
“Right, Your Excellency, we remember.” There was a sound of giggles. Clare grimaced, then broke into a short grin.
“Fuck.” She shook her head. “You guys. I should have your balls cut off.”
Two Chinese men came out from under the container where Chan was standing. One was carrying a bottle cap, the other a syringe. One sat down by her side, the other in front of her. The one with the syringe held the needle in the bottle cap and pulled the plunger. In a sudden, practiced movement Clare picked up a rubber band, slipped it above her forearm and twisted it over on itself several times. With her other hand she took the syringe, found a vein after a lot of probing, pressed down on the plunger. Chan watched her body contort with the shudder; groans of joy dribbled from her mouth. She slipped into a fetal position on the ground.
“Oh, man, fuck.”
Chan waited while the two Chinese men also shot up. He knew he had about twenty minutes when they would be very high. After that they would be able to function with more normality.
Clare slowly propped herself back up against the steel wall. One of the men sat next to her, similarly held up. The other lay on the ground at their feet.
Clare spoke slowly. “Know what I just saw, except I didn’t really think about it till now? I just saw someone up on the roof.”
“Roof?” Johnny giggled. “Roof? Excellency, we ain’t got no roof.”
Clare broke into a grin, then a guffaw as the joke caught the other man as well.
“Yeah, well.” She scratched her shaved head, grinned. “I guess. This is good stuff.”
“Thanks to you, Excellency.”
“Uh, you can lose the ‘excellency.’ I wouldn’t mind, except you don’t mean it. You should be grateful. If it wasn’t for me, you’d both be dead. Fuck was that?”
Chan landed in an imperfect karate fall, rolled on the ground, knelt holding the machine pistol in front of him.
“Don’t move, police, you’re all under arrest.”
“Huh?”
Six pupils the size of pinheads tried to focus on him.
“Wow.” Clare scratched her arm, grinned. “Someone just fell from the sky.”
“Fuck.”
“Maybe he fell outa that chopper I can hear.”
“Oh, fuck! Choppers! I’m outa here.” Clare tried to stand. She rose up against the wall of the container, slid back down again. “Shit. I’m so friggin’ stoned. Damn, I think they got us.”
“Don’t move,” Chan repeated. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
Clare stared at him from under heavy lids. “He has one of those British accents.”
“I guess they all do round here.”
“Martian falls outa the sky, and fuck, he talks faggy English.”
Chan hoped they wouldn’t try to escape. How do you instill fear and respect in someone whose consciousness is floating in space? He knew he couldn’t shoot them either. He wasn’t the type to shoot sick dogs. He stood staring at them while they stared at the chopper that had reared up like a prehistoric beast apparently from nowhere. As far as the three addicts were concerned, it upstaged Chan and his gun, like a film with bigger technical effects. They were transfixed by it; their heads swiveled as it banked and hung, blowing up a small typhoon of dust at the other end of the compound.
“Man, I been dreaming about one of those coming to take us away,” Clare said, staring. “Ain’t much they can do us for ’cept possession.”
“Ain’t the cops we’re worried about, remember, Excellency?”
Clare scratched her head again. “Yeah. Shit.” She turned to Chan. “You got, like, witness protection over here? We got stuff we could sell, you know, make your hair stand on end. International implications definitely.”
Chan watched while two SAS officers slithered down a rope at amazing speed. They hit the compound, running.
“It’s okay,” Chan shouted, “I’ve got them covered. I’ve arrested them. They’re too stoned to move. They’re unarmed. I said I’ve arrested them.” Perhaps it was the noise of the chopper. “They’re unarmed, it’s okay.” The two soldiers seemed not to hear him.
They took up positions at angles to the three junkies; each knelt on one knee, held his gun in both hands with arms straight. Chan dived to the ground and watched while bullets from the two machine pistols sawed first through the bodies of Clare and her friends, then through their heads.
Under the thunder of the chopper human mush the consistency of watermelon dripped from the container wall. It must have been all of twenty seconds since Clare was speaking.
“I had them covered, there was no danger, they were unarmed, we could have questioned them.” He was still saying it, jabbering almost, as they led him across the compound to where a rope was dangling from the chopper. Two more men came down the rope.
“All yours to clean up,” one of the gunmen said. The new arrivals nodded and walked briskly toward the corpses.
The gunmen found a harness, which they forced him into, and he was hoisted above the steel maze to the cabin of the chopper, where rough hands hauled him in with brutal efficiency. The other two came up the rope in the same way. A few minutes later the remaining two soldiers were also hoisted aboard, and the machine banked into a turn. One of the soldiers hung on to a steel upright to speak to the pilot.
“We’ll need bulldozers, heavy lifting gear-the containers are packed tight-oh, and something for a fire.”
The pilot flicked a switch; static crackled from a radio. “Operation Kidgloves here, are you reading?”
“Reading Kidgloves, over.”
“You have the coordinates. Send bulldozers, lifting gear to shift shipping containers-and something for a quick bonfire. Something that burns hot for total incineration. Over.”
“Will do. Over and out.”
Chan was made to sit a
t the rear, the two gunmen immediately in front of him. They had taken his gun. Three others sat on the other side; it was a big chopper. Below, they seemed to be following the ribbon of road that led back toward Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
Chan felt a gathering fury. When he’d finally caught up with Moira’s enigmatic daughter, during the few minutes that he’d watched and heard her speak, the mystery had fallen away, together with the fear and awe. He knew who she was; any city cop would have recognized her and her friends: They were the eternal fantasists, the ones who from an early age know that reality will be more than they can bear. They slip into crime out of weakness and despair and deserve to be treated like common criminals, not terrorists. Whatever the connection with the uranium, those three could have been no more than couriers, that much was clear.
The gunman in front spoke to his colleague opposite. “It was a hostage situation; we had no choice. A police officer was in mortal danger.”
The man opposite-he had lean cheeks in which a single furrow had been plowed from cheekbone to just behind the corner of his mouth-nodded. He turned to Chan. “Hear that? These officers saved your life. I’d like you to appreciate their efforts on your behalf.”
The gunman in front of Chan turned to look him directly in the face. “Okay, Chinaman?”
There didn’t seem to be any physical threat in the way they acted, Chan did not fear they were about to throw him from the helicopter. They seemed to rely for intimidation on the innate menace that emanated from who they were and what they’d done and, perhaps most of all, the psychopathic quirk that had driven them to volunteer for the SAS’s training program in the first place. Chan was still in shock. Deeper than shock, distress. The object of policing was peace, but now Moira’s daughter was dead, and so were her two companions, butchered in an unnecessary paramilitary siege. It took him minutes to wind his mind back from a condition of passive despair to deal with the man in front. Finally he leaned forward and spoke with controlled contempt.
“Put what you like in your report, soldier, but if you call me Chinaman one more time, I’ll find a way to squeeze your balls in a vise. Got it, cunt face?”
Chan leaned back in his seat, feeling marginally better. On occasion infantile hostility could revive the spirit when mature self-restraint merely left one feeling depressed.
The man exchanged a glance with his colleagues but said nothing more. At Stanley, Cuthbert was waiting. He ignored Chan and locked himself in a room with the soldiers to debrief them. Chan was sent back to Central in a government car, as if he’d not been at the scene of the slaughter at all.
In his office Chan paced in front of Aston, refusing to answer questions, forcing his black hair back in a juddering motion every few seconds, trying to control the aftershock. Finally he took the Sony Dictaphone from his desk drawer, slipped it into his pocket and went home.
More in sorrow than in anger he found a piece of A4 size paper, wrote with a black ballpoint in large letters: “She’s dead, Chan.”
At his fax machine in the kitchen he pressed the only autodial number he had ever programmed. He watched the paper make its mournful way through the machine.
He took a beer from the fridge to steady his nerves. He was on the sofa sipping from the can when the telephone rang.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
There was a noise of a throat being cleared. “A chopper came. I heard shots, so I ran.”
“Smart.”
“What about the money?”
“I think they’ll pay. So long as you didn’t see a chopper or hear shots.”
“What chopper? What shots?”
“Good. And when you get the money, disappear. That would be my advice.”
“Sure.” There was a pause. “This is big, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You remind me of a triad foot soldier. You’re just obeying orders, and you don’t really know where they come from. Right?”
Chan replaced the receiver without replying. “Right.” He said it to the beer can. Two more cans later he found the strength to face the grille on the Sony Dictaphone.
“File reference one-two-eight/mgk/HOM/STC. This note is to record a development that took place in the western New Territories at about eleven A.M. seventeenth May 1997…”
When he finished, he took the lift to the ground floor to walk around the block. In the lobby he remembered to empty his letter box. On a quarter sheet of paper a wheelchair had been sketched, and instructions scrawled in English. The date of the proposed meeting was May 17, around midnight.
52
At Asian borderlands immovable objects meet irresistible forces and come to arrangements. The irresistible force of communism had been reaching lucrative agreements with immovable British capitalism for almost fifty years-before Thatcher and the Joint Declaration, before and even during the Cultural Revolution.
Chan used his police ID card to cross the checkpoint into the restricted zone in the extreme northeast of the New Territories. From his taxi he recognized the first evidence. Huge quantities of cardboard boxes under corrugated iron shelters were to smuggling what aluminum foil and outsize cigarette papers were to marijuana: not conclusive proof of possession but a reliable indication. Human figures with crates moved in and out of blinding lights like stagehands.
The taxi dropped him farther down the road outside an unmanned office; the title CUSTOMS COMPOUND in English and Chinese was surely facetious. Behind the office the black Lexus on the end of a hook belonging to a small pickup truck seemed to his expert eye to have suffered damage only to its license plates; they were missing. As his vision adjusted to the mixture of halogen glare and primeval night, he saw that he stood on plain earth over which had been built a contraband town of open ironwork with sloping sheetmetal roofs. Articulated flatbeds waited with diesels running in deep shadow or under a white glare: the chiaroscuro of sophisticated crime. Instinctively he slipped into shadow from which he peered at the frontier hypermarket. The PRC section was mostly vegetables, fruit, cotton products, down-filled garments and low-quality ironware for kitchens and workshops. The nearest Hong Kong shelters stacked boxes of videos on boxes of televisions on boxes of laptops. Entrepreneurs with clients in the Communist state browsed ranks of Mercedeses, which respectful salesmen offered tax-free for cash, so long as it wasn’t renminbi, the official People’s currency that nobody wanted.
Despite the concentration of people, Chan was pleased to note an un-Chinese hush over the market town, a kind of lip service to nonexistent law enforcement. Apart from quietness, though, numbers of people, amounting here and there almost to a crowd, moved around with the kind of freedom that exists only in no-man’s-land. With so much democratic openness, where would a man in a wheelchair hide? Chan made for the desktops warehouse fifty yards in the direction of China.
Hide a leaf in a forest, hide a spy on a border: Lee was no fool. Men dressed only in shorts and clearly in a hurry unloaded boxes bearing famous names in information technology from five large vans carrying no advertising and no illumination over their number plates, even though their lights were on and engines running. Many languages described the contents of the boxes as “monitors,” “CPUs,” “keyboards,” “CD-ROM players” and “speakers.” Lee had never told him of this other side of Wheelchair Enterprises. The sixth van was shut at the back. It waited about ten yards from the others. Chan tapped an elaborate tattoo on the rear door and climbed in when it opened. From his chair Lee beamed with a sadist’s goodwill. Chan checked the interior of the van: a cripple, his wheelchair, another chair, a tower CPU on the floor, a desk and monitor glowing with the tropical colors of Windows 95.
“You work all hours,” Chan said.
“For the pleasure you have brought me, I’d give up sleep for the rest of my life. It’s not often a man gets the opportunity to start a war. And when the war is between the two groups he hates most in the world…” Lee raised his arms, kissed his fingers and dropped h
is hands in his lap. Chan had never seen him so close to peace.
“I know about the couriers-the American girl and her two Chinese friends,” Lee said.
“They’re dead.”
“That’s what I mean-I know.”
Chan stared. “You know?”
“This morning some British soldiers shot them. It’s the advantage of information technology: I network, people E-mail me.” He opened his palms. “Kids talk to kids who talk to parents.” Lee’s eyes glistened. “News travels at twenty-eight thousand eight hundred bps, and that’s a relatively slow modem these days.”
Chan dragged the spare chair from a corner and sat.
“What else do you know?”
Lee leaned forward. “I told you, half a billion dollars: it was for a few kilos of uranium. The 14K burned him in a big, big way. He’s not a total clown, though. How do you check the market price of weapons-quality uranium if you are a Communist general who has never been further west than Yunnan? Stealthily, of course. It takes weeks. By the time he was sure that he could have found another supplier to sell him the stuff for a mere few million, he’d already paid. Ever seen a megalomaniac lose his temper? I wish I’d been there; it must have been electric. He gave orders to kill the couriers as soon as the stuff was delivered, see?”
“Almost.” Chan thought about it. “Well, not really.”
“So whom does the richest and maybe most powerful man in Asia use to assassinate triad couriers in Hong Kong, all of whom are American citizens? Not the People’s Liberation Army; the situation is still too sensitive for that.”
“Other triads.”
“Correct. And this is where it gets beautifully Chinese. He paid the Sun Yee On ten million to shred the 14K couriers as slowly as possible: revenge in the name of the people. He’s a Communist with no sense of history. The Sun Yee On were the biggest supporters of the Nationalists in the Civil War and the biggest losers when they all had to flee Chongqing in ’49. The Sun Yee On hate the Communists even more than the other triads do. They took the money and leaked the deal to the 14K. The 14K, naturally, were disappointed. They’d had a commercial arrangement; if he hadn’t liked their price, he could have gone elsewhere. The 14K are passionate about market forces.”