Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  When I open the door, General Zinna is standing ramrod straight in the posture of a man of honor doing his duty. I give him the high wai at the same time as he wais me.

  “Please forgive me for disturbing you,” he says. “May I come in for a moment?”

  I think that Chanya will remain squatting on the floor as a gesture of disgust, but thirty years of programming forces her to her feet with a high wai. Zinna isn’t charismatic like Vikorn, but he carries a lifetime of military training and the brutal courage of a warrior. His head and face are huge with the crude power lines of a man who fights dirty, wins big. He looks us both in the eye once, then turns away to look out the window. “I think you saw everything, no?”

  “We saw your men take someone away. Heard the howls,” Chanya says, avoiding his eyes.

  I watch Zinna while he takes out a pillbox. “May I have some water?”

  Chanya finds some bottled water in the fridge, and we wait while he swallows the pill.

  He stares at me with frank bewilderment. “You have no idea what shock and misery can do to your head. I suppose it’s age. During the Communist insurrection I spent months in the jungle, fought hand to hand with bayonets, lived on a couple balls of rice a day, led my men to victory. To victory. I never thought something like this would happen to me. Never. In love there is no victory.” He looks me full in the face. “He’s broken me. A little private soldier from Isaan has brought me down like no enemy ever could.” He stares out the window again. “I came to offer my most sincere apologies. I will do everything in my power to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. Even if it means…”

  He and I both turn to look at Chanya. She puts a hand over her mouth. “I don’t want anyone killed because of me,” she says. “You can’t kill a man as if he’s a rabid dog.”

  The phrase has caught Zinna’s attention. Perhaps he has used exactly those words himself recently. He is troubled and only manages, “No, no, of course not.” He coughs apologetically. “Well, I must be going. Once again I am compelled to offer my humblest apologies.”

  We watch him leave. Chanya puffs up her cheeks, then lets the air out in a whistle. The raw fear has passed, leaving us in confusion. We are looking at each other as if we are both drowning, when my phone rings.

  “Master, you are a total genius. Really, you blow me away with your brilliance. I just don’t know how you do it. If Vikorn doesn’t give you a promotion after this, I’m going to resign.”

  “Lek? What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened? Well, you know how I hate flying, so I used the train and it took all night, but I thought you wouldn’t mind because I arrived earlier than if I’d taken the morning flight-”

  “Okay, okay. You got to Phuket, and you’re now at the land registry?”

  “It’s exactly as you foretold, you witch. The reason that clerk was being so crafty was the whole purchase contract was a cover-up. Whoever bought the property made sure you’d have to spend days and days digging before you discovered that the transaction included those three houses and the common land. The whole estate.”

  I feel a twinge of excitement. “That’s why they needed the clerk, the only reason they kept him alive. He’s the one who did the paperwork, and so long as he worked in the registry, he would know if anyone was investigating the title.”

  “But why would they want to be so hush-hush? It’s weird.”

  “I want you to dig further. See if there are any work permits for underground tunnels. If it was a big job, they would have needed legal cover-”

  My phone bleeps. I see it is an SMS from Chan. I close on Lek and check messages: Yips on morning flight tomorrow. I’m getting the red-eye around midnight. Arrive V.P. about four a.m.

  I make the calculation in my head. If I’m to be there for Chan’s arrival, I’ll have to make my way to the airport now. When I close the phone, I have to summon the courage to look Chanya in the eye. “Ah, I know this is a bad moment, but…”

  She stares at me. She’s too far gone in rage and hurt to say Great, I’m nearly raped by a monster, and all he wants to do is go visit his tart in Phuket.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow for sure.”

  She nods in a state of collapse, apparently defeated by life itself; but summons the strength to whisper “Asshole” as I’m leaving with my modest backpack.

  28

  I miss the afternoon flight and have to take the early evening one instead. I don’t want to use the chopper service in case a member of the Yip party has the same idea, so I take a taxi right up to the helipad. When I check out the other two houses, there is no sign of life. I’m curious about Inspector Chan’s landfill theory and take a second look at the level area on the other side of the mountain. It’s twilight, so visibility is low, but from certain angles it does seem as if a huge hollow in the mountainside has been filled in and leveled off.

  I return to the main property, but I don’t feel secure sleeping in it. I decide to wait on the balcony. After a while I realize I’m going to need some support for my aching backside, so I go back into the house to collect some cushions. It’s been long day. I find the corner of the balcony that is in the most darkness and bed down. The moon has aged greatly since I started coming to Phuket on this case; it’s only just on the eastern horizon when my eyes start to get heavy.

  I awake because of a vibration that is shaking my body. The force is coming through the teak deck: footsteps, quite heavy. I freeze at the same time as I open my eyes and slightly adjust the position of my head so I can see who is there. At floor level all that is visible is a pair of legs dressed in fatigues tucked into army boots. If I turn my head a few degrees, I can see as far as a black T-shirt and a couple of brawny arms holding a combat rifle. I watch the rifle cover all sides and corners of the balcony in a professional sweep.

  It must be quite late because the moon has reached far to the west and there is a quietness about the night that only occurs in the small hours.

  If I dare to raise my head a couple inches more, I’ll be able to see his face. As I try to do so, one of the cushions slips, making a faint catching sound on the wood. Instantly the gunman freezes, then crouches. Now he repeats the sweep of the balcony with greater concentration. The sound I made was so faint, though, it could have been anything, a rat or a mouse or even a cockroach. He relaxes again and stands up straight. But now I know who he is. I am surprised at how tall: at least six foot two, maybe more, with an athletic body.

  He resumes his inspection of the balcony and pauses in the most westerly corner. Now, when I dare to raise my head, I see him in sharp black profile against the silver moon: the wrecked face, the missing nose, the lopsided mouth: it is the blunt face of a giant bat. In addition to the M16, he is wearing a holster with a handgun. Everything about him says career soldier. After all, this once was a young man so fired with military ambition, he was prepared to sleep with a general.

  He remains illuminated by the moon for maybe five minutes, then crosses to the house, which he enters, closing the sliding door behind him. I roll over to the door and press my face against it. I am just in time to see him cross the vast salon and enter the hall that leads to the front door, and the road. When I reach the front door, I open it with agonizing care. He has gone, but I can guess where to. I scramble over to the heliport. Sure enough, he appears at the entrance gate to the second house and leans forward to press his eyeball into a security device. The gate opens, then clangs shut behind him. A light goes on for a moment, escaping from a crack where shutters join, then darkness. I am thinking: Om must know this and Om never told me this and What else does Om know? •

  Rough hands shake me while their owner talks to himself in Cantonese. It’s hard to see him clearly because it is still dark.

  “Chan?”

  “What are you doing on your back, Third-World Cop?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “So, here I am.”

  I groan. “It must be about five in the morning
.”

  Chan checks his watch. “Four forty-two.”

  He is dressed in shorts and T-shirt with a soft sports bag. We enter the mansion, where he takes a pair of black coveralls from his bag and pulls them on. I take him across the common ground to the heliport and then to the other house. I watch while he walks around the perimeter, examining the walls and the CCTV cameras. He disappears behind the house, then reappears on the other side and walks quickly toward me.

  “I’ll have to make a move now, while it’s still dark. If I set off an alarm, you’ll have to cover for me somehow. Find some way of making it legal.”

  “There’s no way to do that.”

  “Sure there is. The next governor of Bangkok will make it right-he’ll have to if he wants to be prime minister.” Chan touches my hand. “It’s okay. I won’t trigger the alarms.”

  “Sure?”

  “I was in a tactical unit for six years. I know how to bypass security systems. This one is nothing special.”

  I wait on the heliport. It’s not quite dawn but no longer quite dark when I see the main gate open and Inspector Chan appears, beckoning me to enter.

  Chan closes the gate behind me. To my unspoken question, he says, “No sign of your friend. Maybe he left after his last patrol.”

  I look nervously at the CCTV cameras, but Chan claims to have neutralized them. Instead of the front door, he takes me to the back of the house and points to a shuttered window on the second floor. I stand while he climbs on my shoulders and manages to hoist himself up to the window ledge. His burglary skills are so well honed, he has opened the shutters and the window in moments. I walk back to the front of the house to wait. Now there is a sound of bolts, and the front door opens. With all shutters and doors closed, it is dark inside the house, despite that the sun has started to appear in the east.

  Chan takes out a pencil flashlight. “I had to cut the electricity where it enters the building,” he explains. He gives the impression of familiarity with the house’s purpose. He traces the frame of the front door with his flashlight. “See anything unusual?”

  “Looks like the doorway has been enlarged.”

  “Right. Why?” I shrug. “Hospitals also have extrawide doorways, to allow for the passage of gurneys flanked by medical staff.” I flash him a look. “I knew three things: a place like this must exist; it could not be in Hong Kong or I would have found it; you would sooner or later lead me to it.”

  “What do you call your technique, parasitical policing? You could have admitted you were riding on my back.”

  He sighs. “Still the medieval mind-set, the fixed cosmology, the stunted Old Testament sense of truth and justice, right and wrong. Ever hear of cloud policing?”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to be the next phase in humanity’s descent. No one cop will have all the evidence-it will be shared out among significant players. A cop will need to maintain high-level contacts, like a diplomat. Guilt will be only one factor in any investigation and by no means conclusive. Negotiation, relative politico-socio-economic status, guanxi, all become relevant.”

  “Did you take your lithium yet today?”

  He grunts. “You don’t believe me.”

  I lose it and hiss at him, “What’s to believe? Every time I meet you you’re someone else.”

  “That also is a feature of modern policing. I believe we already touched on it. A fixed sense of personal identity will be a fatal impediment in law enforcement of the future. A murder squad detective will have also to be a murderer in some sense. See?”

  “No identity, no loyalty, no rulebook?”

  “Oh dear,” Chan says, and shakes his head.

  “You need to meet Vikorn.”

  “I have,” Chan says with a smile. “Medium height, in his sixties, prowls instead of walks, a criminal genius almost on a level with Mao, if I was not mistaken.”

  I’m shocked. “Where?”

  “China,” Chan says. “Don’t worry, he wouldn’t recognize me. I was just some little cop in deep background.” I scratch my jaw. “You need to stop trying to work it out. No one person has all the answers.”

  “Not even the Yips?”

  “Those little girls? So long as they’re allowed to be as naughty as they like, they don’t ask questions either. They don’t know.”

  “Cloud killing?”

  “You could say that.”

  I follow Chan in his examination of the house. Now we are standing in what was once a bedroom with a view over the mountain. It is empty, like all the others we have checked: no people, no furniture. We return to the ground floor and notice a new hole in the wall. On examination it turns out to be a doorway that we missed because it is designed to be invisible when shut. It obviously leads to a cellar. We stare at each other: Someone must have gone down or come out while we were checking the house.

  I watch Chan become seduced by the big black rectangle presented by the open door. It smells musty when we poke our heads into the cavity. A set of raw concrete stairs leads downward, like an invitation to sink into a lightless ocean of infinite depth. Only the inspector would find it irresistible.

  “I’m going down,” Chan says. He raises an eyebrow at me. “Why don’t you stay here where it’s safe, Third-World Cop?”

  I groan and follow.

  The underground room is a kind of operating theater. The stairs drop down into the huge chamber with-so far as I can make out-a dome-shaped roof. It is as vast as an emperor’s tomb. Chan’s pencil flashlight cannot penetrate from one end to the other. Little by little Chan edges forward while I cover his back.

  There is a bank of refrigerators against one wall, shelves full of bandages, disinfectants, anesthetics, boxes labeled CYCLOSPORINE. There are five stainless-steel gurneys with drainage outlets, two operating tables side by side, red blankets, and some high-tech electronic gadgets on portable stainless-steel tables, including what I suppose are three heart monitors. It is cool down here, and there is a slight breeze from a ventilation system.

  “They even have a backup generator,” Chan says, pointing, “just like a real hospital. Look, see how close the two operating tables are? They wouldn’t get away with that in a legal clinic-the donor and donee have to be decently separated. In the parallel trade, of course, it’s all no-frills.”

  “So who are the donors?”

  Chan stares at me in the gloom. “Don’t you see? Anybody. Anybody at all. A young person coming home from school in India, a minor felon from China, a Western tourist led into a trap in Malaysia, desperate Africans without travel papers searching for work, unemployed Brazilians from shantytowns, orphaned kids in Isaan-in this business, nobody cares where the meat is grown, so long as it’s still on the hoof and breathing when it arrives. Right now, I guess you could say we are in danger of becoming donors ourselves.” I meet his gaze. “I told Interpol, but they didn’t take me seriously. The Yips are too smart and the operation too big-it boggles the mind.”

  “Tell me how it works.”

  “Take Lourdes, the Yips’ favorite hunting ground. They find someone with, say, terminal liver problems. In the course of a number of interviews, they dismantle whatever faith the patient has left in their god. Now you have a true citizen of the twenty-first century, a totally confused human soul with no identity, no direction, no faith, no religion, no politics, no instinct other than to survive. The Yips impose a culture of absolute secrecy, which is sealed by hints that if the authorities find out, the patient, also, will be an accessory to a serious crime. By this time, the patient, nailed to a cross of hope and terror-a real Christian at last-will do whatever they’re told.

  “They are given to understand they are being taken to China, where they will receive the organ of an executed prisoner who would have died and had his organs sold by the state in any event. That’s the great Yip innovation. Everyone has heard of China’s organ sales. Everyone with a serious problem with a solid organ has been through the thought process: Well, I don’t ag
ree with it, of course, but if the poor bastard’s going to die anyway, why should someone else get the liver? And of course they tell the patient they’re flying to China in a private jet.

  “They are heavily sedated before they arrive at Phuket-as far as the patient is concerned, it could be anywhere, but they’ve been told it’s somewhere in China, and they’re happy to go with that. They have also paid a great deal of money by now, perhaps the whole of their wealth. They’re committed. You could say they have finally become believers. They are already under the anesthetic when the chopper brings them up to Vulture Peak.”

  “And the donor?”

  “Sometimes it really is an executed felon. Why not? The organ is popped into a chilled Jiffy Bag minutes after the bullet, but there simply are not enough legal executions to go around. The list of people in need of livers, kidneys, eyes, faces grows by the hour. In Shanghai you told me the Yips showed you some of the e-mails. And what happens when the disposable income of average Chinese and Indians reaches a point when, say, half a billion people are looking for organs to buy… perhaps even for frivolous reasons? You’re a cop-you know to what lengths narcissism can drive people. What we do to poodles today we do to ourselves tomorrow. Suppose someone is sick of the face in the mirror and decides to buy another. D’you see?”

  “Faces are still a challenge,” I say. “It’s going to be a while before someone can look at someone else’s face and say, ‘Gimme, or you will never see your daughter again.’ ”

  “Sure. Personal computing, also, took a while to get off the ground.”

  I pause to take in the enormity of his argument. “I wouldn’t want to be a film star in the economy of the future.”

  “Now you’re getting the point. The human being has already been commodified by stealth. In the future everybody is viewed as an item for sale. Crowds become sources of stupendous wealth, so long as you can get away with murder-as the rich and powerful always do. In addition to corporate raiders, we already have organ raiders. Take the Yips. It’s market logic: the only true god.”