by John Burdett
We divide up the house and search for an Ethernet jack. When we hear yet another chopper, we go out onto the balcony. This one is a hefty double-bladed army bird. It dwarfs the landing pad and creates a typhoon that bends bushes and small trees; twigs and leaves take flight. We retreat inside the house and watch from the window in the maid’s room. First emerge the two farang election advisers, a man and a woman, who duck and run to escape the wind.
They wait while another figure emerges: squat, broad, indomitable, brutal. General Zinna is followed by his aide-de-camp, a tall, dark, handsome young officer. They walk at a smart pace toward the house. Zinna bends to offer his eyeball to the biometric gadget. The gates open, but when the rest of his party pass the gate, alarms go off. Zinna says something to his aide but does not pause in ushering the others into the house compound. The gates clang shut, and after a few minutes the alarm ceases. Silence.
Sun Bin and I exchange glances. Without a word, we go back to searching for the Ethernet jack. We’re sweating with the effort and frustrated that we can find no leads, when there is yet another noise of throbbing blades. This time it is the little black chopper from the airport. We watch while Om gets out and runs for the house. She too has security clearance. The gates open when she puts her eye to the black box and clang shut behind her. We go back to looking for the Ethernet jack.
Sun Bin has an idea. “The kitchen.”
“We already searched it.”
“It has to be disguised.”
Now Sun Bin finds the Ethernet jack behind the state-of-the-art coffee machine.
“Sneaky,” Sun Bin says. He brings his laptop to the kitchen and finds a cable in his bag to connect to the jack. I wait while Sun Bin uses a software program to search for signals from the security system. Now we are looking at a set of sixteen boxes, each one showing green images from an individual CCTV camera. A couple of clicks on the mouse, and a new set of sixteen boxes appears. In all there are ten sets, making a total of one hundred and sixty CCTV cameras.
“They must be everywhere,” Sun Bin says, looking around. When we examine one of the pages, we find a view of ourselves in the kitchen. We exchange glances. If the Yips have a laptop, which they surely must, then they will be able to see us. On the other hand, we can see them. They are under the other house in the tunnel system. They seem to be having an argument. Manu is alone in the operating theater, playing with his faces. We are unable to find Zinna or Chan.
“That tunnel system is vast,” Sun Bin says, adjusting the program. “Look.” He goes from page to page to show me the system, bathed in green light, which runs under all three houses. It’s difficult to work out from the CCTV cameras, but it seems each house owns a tunnel, and each tunnel ends at the operating theater. We hear a voice calling from the balcony. •
“Oh Buddha,” Lek says. He is leaning against a wall of the house, breathless and soaked through with sweat. He is holding a large brown envelope.
“You climbed up the stairs?”
“The cab driver couldn’t work out how to get here-all those lanes are soo confusing.” He puts a hand on his heart. I take the envelope, which contains plans of the houses. In the kitchen the three of us pore over the details.
“So it works like this,” Sun Bin says. “The donor and donee are brought here separately by chopper or car and taken into the other house on a gurney. The unwilling donor, who has been kidnapped, also has been sedated. He or she is probably already unconscious on one of the operating tables when the donee arrives. The donee is laid on the other one and hooked up to life support while the diseased liver-or another solid organ-is removed. As soon as the healthy liver has been harvested from the donor, it is placed inside the donee, who has been pumped full of cyclosporine. There is no life-support system for the donor, who is left to die.
“Later, the donee, who is only half conscious for the first few days, is told that they have been brought to Phuket to relax and enjoy Thai hospitality in accordance with the contract. Basically, they wake up in this fancy mansion with a new lease on life and maybe as much as half a million dollars the poorer.
“I would guess that for maximum efficiency the Yips would try to harvest as many organs from the donor as possible, so there are plenty of occasions when two or three patients are lined up to receive different parts of the cadaver: eyes, face, kidneys, sex organs, et cetera.”
“Charming,” Lek says. “So why were those three corpses left here on the bed in the master bedroom?”
“To and the two women?” Sun Bin looks at me. “What do you think?”
“I have no idea. It makes even less sense now.”
“Unless…” Sun Bin says.
“Oh, no,” Lek says. “You can’t be serious.”
I scratch my jaw. “It’s the only explanation.”
“Why not?” Sun Bin says.
“He’s an ex-soldier. Tough as hell. Is he going to have the sensitive fingers of a microsurgeon?”
“Maybe not for working on the donee-but the donor is going to die anyway. What’s to be careful about, so long as he doesn’t damage the organ? Obviously, they must have trained him.”
“Psychologically, it would make sense. Give a pariah work, a profession, something to be proud of. Bring him back into the economic system, pay him well. Maybe he owns a house, a car, and a bank account. What more could anyone want in terms of human identity?”
“Something that gives him face?” Sun Bin says. “That’s sounds like a Chinese point of view.”
“So after he shot those three in a jealous rage, he removed their organs-for what?”
“Practice, of course. And don’t forget, he’s an understudy to the Yips.”
“But why didn’t he do it in the tunnels?”
“He did. That’s why there was almost no blood.”
“So why did he then bring the cadavers back up here where they were bound to be discovered?”
All three of us are seasoned cops. We know the answer to that one.
“He’s proud of himself.”
“He wants recognition for his achievement, his mastery of a difficult and respected skill, his power over life and death. It’s his final demand: that he be permitted to crawl out of his tunnels and reveal himself to the world as an expert surgeon.”
“But he cut off the fingertips?”
“Just because he’s insane doesn’t mean he’s stupid. His victim To was a real high-flyer. He didn’t want him identified.”
End of conversation. We are unable to look one another in the eye, because none of us has stopped thinking about Chan. I take over Sun Bin’s laptop for a moment in my constant search for the inspector, who is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Om. As I continue to scroll from one green image to another and from one page to another, both Sun Bin and Lek become interested in the underground society.
“It’s like they don’t want to see him yet.”
“Or maybe they can’t get into the operating theater.”
“There’s been no contact with him so far.”
“The Yips aren’t even going in that direction. They’re heading toward Zinna and his aide.”
“That’s a kind of communications center.”
“That’s right. That PC must be hooked up to the surveillance system.”
We stare at the two soldiers and the two American advisers, bathed in green in the cellar of the third house, sitting at a table with a tower PC and a set of monitors. They also seem at a loss as to what to do next. Now the four of them look up. Has there been a knock at the door? The aide takes out a pistol and stands flat against the side of the door, then pulls at a couple of bolts. The door opens. The Yips enter, with Om between them. Om looks upset, frightened, and angry. The Twins and the soldiers remonstrate with her. She shakes her head with a wild look in her eyes. One of the Twins slaps her face. Om stares at her in disbelief. The four of them herd her back into the tunnel system.
Sun Bin has become adept at manipulating the software, and we are able to
follow the progress of the group until they come to a steel door. It must be one of the doors to the operating theater. It seems that Om has decided to obey her captors. She knocks on the door and seems to be speaking, even shouting. We switch to the operating theater, where Manu has frozen with one of the faces in his hands. He replaces the face-it is To/Wong-in the fridge and walks to the door. In another square, Om is pleading with her face to the door. In the next square, Manu seems to be squealing in anguish, quite beside himself. He picks up a machine pistol lying on one of the operating tables and stands by the side of the door, then releases some bolts. The door opens. Om steps inside. Manu slams the door shut and bolts it. We watch while Manu approaches the camera and points his pistol at it. The square on the monitor is full of his destroyed face for a moment, then it turns black.
We switch to the screen where we can see the closed door to the operating theater, with Zinna, his aide, and the Twins standing outside. Perhaps they expected Om to produce a docile Manu within minutes. They seem to be fretting and arguing. Zinna’s aide disappears, then comes back with a black backpack. He takes something out. It is another bag. From that bag he takes something that needs unwrapping. Now he is holding a black sausagelike object about twelve inches long in his hands. He kneels at the door to the operating theater and presses the puttylike substance around the edges of the door next to the locks. Now he takes some electric cable out of his backpack and presses one end of it into the explosive, then retreats while unwinding the cable. Zinna and the Twins retreat with him. Now they are back in the control room. The aide connects the electric cable to a switch. Sun Bin returns us to the door of the operating theater. We see a sudden cloud of dust envelop the camera lens. From the tunnel exit in the garage we hear a muffled explosion. All the screens go dark.
30
Two hours have passed, during which we’ve done nothing except stare at the blank monitor, wondering. Sun Bin owns one set of night-vision goggles, which he takes from his backpack and shows me. They consist of two heavy lenses that fit directly over the eyes and are held in place by a crisscross of straps over the head. He tries them on, then immediately takes them off. “It has to be dark for them to work.”
I pick them up to examine them. They were manufactured by a German firm. “Made in China,” Sun Bin says. “They’re my goggles,” he adds. “I should be the one to go.”
I shake my head. “No way. It has to be me.”
“Why?”
“ Gatdanyu. He saved my life. I owe him.”
Every now and then we return to the laptop to see if anyone has repaired the CCTV system. We are rewarded each time with a blank screen. Sun Bin and I think of Chan. Most of the time madness is an alienating condition; every crazy I’ve ever met has made me want to run. Except Chan. He has had the same effect on Sun Bin. “He’s a kind of prophet,” he says, “China style.”
“China style?”
“In the old days, we were all crazy like that. He’s so revolutionary, he could have been a Red Guard.”
I take the goggles, go into one of the bathrooms, close the curtains, and turn out the lights. The goggles work fine, but the images are green.
I take out my gun, check the chamber, grab a handful of bullets out of my bag, and cram them into my pockets. I stick the gun down my waistband at the small of my back and start to descend the stairs to the garage. I leave the secret door wide open. Natural light only illuminates the tunnel for the first twenty feet, though.
I discover that the goggles need some vestigial light, but I don’t dare use the flashlight that Sun Bin gave me. Deep inside the tunnel everything is pitch-black and I have to feel my way along the walls. I reason that if I can’t see with these state-of-the-art German goggles (made in China), neither can anyone else. I also remember that this tunnel leads directly to the door of the operating theater, which Zinna’s aide blew open. As I inch closer to it, I do not need visual clues. The stench of explosives, dust, blood, and guts is unmistakable. At the door itself I stumble over a body. There is no way of telling who it once belonged to, except that when I run my hand over it, I feel some long thick hair running through my fingers. I’m barely able to suppress the urge to flee: Panic Terror Claustrophobia. Any plausible excuse and I’m out of here.
When I inch my way into the operating theater, though, the goggles suffer overload and I have to rip them off. There is a single intense beam at the far end of the chamber, which is otherwise quite dark. Ever been scuba diving at night, DFR? Ever sink slowly down into that absolute liquid blackness that makes such a perfect proxy for everything terrifying, irresistible, and mysterious? If you have, you know how the mind goes when your underwater illumination focuses an intense lance of light into total blackness; it’s like a Buddhist concentration exercise with heavy gearing. And the cavern is so long the figures at the far end are miniaturized in exquisite detail. I can even see the single tooth poking out of Manu’s ripped lip as he bends over a figure strapped to a chair. In his big soldier’s fist he is holding a blade so fine it disappears when the light catches it head-on. It is wider than a normal scalpel, a wafer of steel designed to harvest facial skin.
Both Manu and his victim are frozen, however. Well, I guess the victim doesn’t have a lot of choice, but as I slowly draw my gun, knowing full well there’s no chance of hitting him from this distance, I see that Manu has not moved an inch since I entered. My first paranoid thought is that he heard me and is about to drop the scalpel and grab a rifle, against which I have no defense. But he’s not looking at me. He’s not looking down the room in my direction at all. Something else grabbed his attention just as I entered. He’s staring at a figure lying on a gurney next to Chan-I cannot be sure it’s him, of course, because the head is turned away; I just know it’s the inspector strapped to that chair and to my own shock I feel a weird, Chan-induced combination of horror, rage, and love. But what has caused the monster to pause in his black art if not me?
The three of us remain frozen in chiaroscuro, like in an old-style noir movie from the 1930s. I’m in a half crouch, pistol in both hands, elbows locked-a reflex of training, merely, and no use at all in this fix. And still Manu does not move, the glinting blade in his hand as steady as if gripped in a vice, those black shining eyes looking down the tunnel of light at the figure on the gurney. It is as if there has been an event too subtle to read, but too significant to ignore; something even more important than the theft of Chan’s face. Then the figure on the gurney gives a groan that echoes through the cavern and makes the slightest movement of a hand. It is a beautiful fine female hand, every detail visible. I know that hand. I even share Manu’s heartfelt care as he drops the scalpel, which clinks twice on the concrete floor, and goes to her.
Now is my chance. With gun at arm’s length I dash down the chamber to a point where I can be sure of hitting him.
“FREEZE.”
I might as well have yelled at a rock. I’m not sure he even heard me, despite that my scream echoes off the walls. I stare openmouthed as the monster picks up the figure from the gurney. As he does so I see that the back of Om’s head has been smashed by something and her hair is thick with blood. And now comes the miracle: tears flow from those flinty black eyes and down the insensate cheeks as with infinite care he clasps her to him. She opens her eyes for a second, recognizes him, lifts a hand, finds the strength to caress his face once, then lapses into unconsciousness.
There’s no question of firing now, because of the risk to Om-and because Manu pays me no heed. I might as well be a figure from a different dimension with a limited curiosity value but no power or influence. I have walked the full length of the cavern, and I’m right up next to him, maneuvering to reach Chan, who is strapped to some high-tech medical chair with his head and face held rigidly in a steel device with parallel struts and gleaming stainless-steel bolts. It is a simple matter to undo the bolts and the straps, all the while keeping my eyes on Manu, with my pistol at the ready.
“Don’t kill him,
” are Chan’s first words.
I had been too busy dividing my attention between his bonds and Manu’s likely next move to notice what work the monster surgeon had already performed. Chan registers the sudden shock on my face before I’m able to dissemble.
“How bad is it?” he whispers.
“Anyone else would grow a beard-you though-maybe you’ll start a new fashion. Better than tats and body piercings.”
There is an exquisitely thin red line that runs with impressive precision the full circumference of the inspector’s face, across the forehead just below the hairline, under the jaw and all the way sround in a circle; I guess faces can be removed like gloves when you’ve been trained by experts.
The inspector touches the incision with a finger and stares at the blood. “I’m disgustingly grateful to be alive,” he mutters. “Given time I might even forgive you for robbing me of my consummation.”
“What happened to Om?” We communicate in those extrasoft intense whispers that television naturalists use when they get up close and personal with dangerous animals.
“The girl? Those clumsy bastards used too much explosive. Bits of iron flew all over the place-one hit her in the head. Our friend went crazy. He’s the best and fastest shot I’ve ever seen. They didn’t have a chance, not even that young soldier. I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it. No ordinary man can shoot like that. He saved me because he wanted my face. He was sure the girl was dead. So was I. She isn’t going to live long, though. Not with that much skull missing.”
We are both fixated on Manu, who has not stopped staring at Om’s unconscious face as he holds her in his arms. For a second the fascination of what he will do next quite eclipses fear. When he starts to turn toward us, though, I bring my gun up to a firing position. Chan holds my arm and shakes his head, even as Manu stares at us for a moment.
Telepathy is a curious phenomenon. Suddenly I know exactly what he is going to do, and so does Chan. I experience a despair that cuts deeper than anything a human can be expected to endure. But he does endure. He turns, quite as if we are not there, and carries her to the door where I entered. As soon as he has passed through to the tunnel, Chan finds a fuse box and the underground room is filled with harsh neon light. The bodies of Zinna (a single bullet in the forehead); his assistant, who managed to draw a pistol (stomach ripped open by a spray from an automatic of some kind); the Yips (one in a lake of blood from a heart wound, the other covered in fresh pink blood from the lungs); and the two Americans, also caught in a third-world disaster straight out of farang horror mytholgy. All dead. We have to step over them to enter the tunnel, which is now illuminated. We catch up with Manu, who is still carrying the wreckage of his love. I draw my gun again. Again Chan stops me.