by Chris Ryan
Bald said, ‘What the fuck is this place?’
Xia said, ‘Welcome to our underground city.’
forty-nine
1720 hours.
A large steel lift dominated the middle of the bunker. The size of the thing suggested it was designed to take heavy loads: machinery, parts, even vehicles. There was a basic sliding door with a grille in it. On top of the lift a series of steel cables fed into an overslung gearbox and motor system. That told Bald it was designed to travel down, not up. The lift was manually operated by a button on a panel to the right of the door.
‘Project 779,’ said Xia, leading Bald towards the lift. ‘That’s the official codename for the city. It was built in the sixties, when the Communist Party ordered the construction of a hundred underground cities to protect us against nuclear attack by the West. There are shopping malls and factories in these cities, and gardens and housing blocks and schools. There is everything here people need to survive and flourish.’
Bald was still looking longingly at the weapons rack.
‘You like what you see?’ asked Xia. She nodded at the gun with thirty-six barrels at the end. ‘That one fires a hundred thousand rounds a minute.’
‘You designed this gear yourselves?’ Bald kept up the small talk as he tried to assess how he could escape from this fucking place. But it looked airtight.
Xia laughed. ‘An American company did. We made a very generous offer to them to build new designs for us. They refused. So our National Knowledge Infrastructure team stole the technology instead. And it’s not just guns we’re developing. We have hyper-velocity systems to intercept ballistic missiles. Space weapons.’
She shoved Bald into the lift with surprising force. He felt sorely tempted to punch the bitch but with his hands still locked behind his back he was helpless. Xia stepped in after Bald and the door whirred and slid shut. Now they were sealed inside, on an six-metre-square platform. The space was lit by amber lights on the metal walls, and a big yellow sign graphically illustrated the dangers of riding the lift without a hardhat. Xia thumbed a red button and the lift stammered. Gears clicked and clanked. A motor churned into life. Then the steel cables began feeding up into the loop.
The lift rumbled on its descent. The sounds tumbled down faster than the lift and were regurgitated as echoes that flooded Bald’s ears. He tried to figure out how far down they were going. Most lifts dropped at a rate of around 150 metres per minute. But freight lifts were much slower, owing to the heavy loads they were designed to carry. They sacrificed speed for sturdiness. They averaged more like 100 metres per minute.
Bald noticed his right hand was shaking. He stilled it with his left. Felt the tremors twitching in his left wrist. The needle on his booze clock was hitting the three-hour mark. The migraine was whispering in the base of his skull. Then Xia talked over the voice in his head.
‘Do you like Asian women?’
‘Depends,’ said Bald.
‘On what?’
‘On whether she’s got a gun pointed at my fucking head.’
Xia tittered like a schoolgirl seeing her first cock. ‘I heard you like beating up women.’ She wiped her hand across her face and said, ‘I think you will find you’ve never met a woman like me.’
Bald sniffed. ‘Where are you taking me? To show me your dildo collection?’
‘I read your file,’ Xia replied, blanking the question. ‘Chinese intelligence has files on everyone who has worked for Western intelligence. CIA, MI5, MI6, FBI. Mostly they are thin. Like this,’ she said, forming a centimetre gap between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Yours was more like this.’ She widened the gap to an inch.
‘What can I say? I make good bedtime reading.’
Xia gave Bald her back.
He’d been counting. Thirty seconds. Fifty metres.
Xia turned back to Bald. ‘They send you to this country just to kill me. And they think I’m the only sleeper who’s managed to smuggle technology out of their back yard.’
‘So there’s a few of you. Big fucking deal. You all get caught in the end.’
‘A few thousand. Ten years ago the Chinese military decided it needed to upgrade its weapons.’
Invisible drills bored holes into the sides of Bald’s skull. The migraines were coming back. He snorted at the ground.
Xia said, ‘The nineties was a good moment to carry out the operation. China was becoming more open. Beijing relaxed travel restrictions; we knew that the Europeans would return the compliment. We sent out thousands of our brightest minds to operate in all the major industries, for all the major players. Communications. Space. Defence. Chemicals. Heavy industry.’
‘And do what? Steal their shit?’
Xia wrinkled her lips. ‘If you wish to put it like that – yes.’
Bald faked a yawn. ‘I don’t know why you’re telling me all this bollocks. I’m just here on a diplomatic visa to meet a few contacts. That’s it. I don’t know anything else.’
‘You killed a soldier. You’re here to kill me. I know everything.’
‘That wanker went for me first. Like I said, it was self-defence. And my diplomatic visa guarantees immunity.’
Xia evened out her lips into a wry smile. ‘Not down here it doesn’t.’
One minute. A hundred metres.
Xia said, ‘Nearly there.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Somewhere you will continue to have problems with your phone reception. But I think you will find it exciting.’ Now her smile broadened as she said, ‘This is the great project that you’ve been helping us with.’
Clang. Just over a hundred metres. Throw in the descent from the courtyard down to the bunker, and they were a long way below ground level.
Xia opened the door and a long corridor unfolded in front of Bald as she stepped out of the lift. Halogen lamps above them beamed jaundiced light across walls lined with grime-coated tiles like old teeth. The floor was linoleum and slicked with pools of damp. Four fuel pipes, mottled with rust, snaked along the ceiling. Bald heard the distant hum of a power generator. Frayed posters were peeling off the walls, depicting Chairman Mao and heroic Communist Party workers. Bald squinted. This section of the underground city was a world away from the futuristic, expensive set-up he’d seen in the main bunker. There were no hi-tech computers or scientists down here. The corridor appeared to gouge its way far into the distance.
The two of them passed a series of metal doors on either side, marked with yellow signs and mounted cameras. Bald peeked through the few open doors to see dormitories crammed with metal-framed bunk beds. Empty.
Xia said, ‘The actual city is more than eighty-five square kilometres. What you see in front of you is just a small part of it. Most of the city has been cordoned off, but when the Cold War ended the Party decided we could use our cities to carry out our work, without our enemies spying on us.’
‘You hide nukes down here?’ asked Bald.
Xia laughed. ‘Once, yes. But not now. We research.’
‘Into what?’
‘New weapons. You see, the true path to power is through technology. Innovation. Science. This is why the West was more powerful than us in the twentieth century. But starting now, things will change.’
They had travelled three hundred metres along the corridor when Xia abruptly stopped at an unmarked metal door. She turned to her right and flashed her security pass in front of a card reader to one side. Bald felt his bowels tighten. Sweat coursed down his back and onto his anus. The air was thin and stale. He glanced up and spotted air vents punctuating the length of the ceiling. The card reader blinked green and the door unlocked. Xia tugged it open and pushed Bald forward. The top of the door frame was too low for Bald and he had to duck to step through.
The room was basic. A metal table in the middle, two metal chairs. A mirror covered one wall. Overhead a fluorescent bulb filled the room with harsh white light. The place was some kind of interrogation room. Bald was willing to bet good
money that the mirror was two-way and the door and walls were soundproofed. On the plus side, he didn’t see any torture instruments. Maybe they’d just beat the fuck out of him and try to intimidate him.
‘Have a seat,’ Xia said. An order, not a welcoming offer.
Bald drew up one of the chairs and sat. Xia left the door ajar and set herself down on the other chair. Silence. She cold-stared at Bald across the table. A fly buzzed invisibly around the room. It zipped and hovered and darted. Bald wondered how it had got down here.
The fly stopped buzzing. Xia slapped her left palm down on the table with a bang. She held it there for a few seconds, her eyes not wavering from Bald. Finally she peeled her eyes away from him and lifted her hand to reveal the crushed insect.
She studied her palm, then said, ‘You were meeting someone in Jinchun.’
Bald said nothing.
‘The two of you were going to stop me handing over the plans for the Intelligent Dust.’
Bald still said nothing.
‘I have a friend of my own,’ Xia continued. ‘He’s on his way. A specialist. I know what he is capable of, and if you’re smart, you’ll tell me where your friend is. Then maybe I’ll tell mine to make it quick.’
Bald laughed inside. A weak, ironic laugh. He laughed because Xia wanted Mallory but it sounded like she didn’t even know the guy had been slotted.
He said, ‘I can tell you that, no problem.’
‘Good. Where can I find him?’
‘Try the morgue.’
Xia maintained her blank expression, but it cracked a little at the edges. She snorted, then eased out of her chair and stepped towards the door.
Bald felt anxiety brewing in his guts.
‘It’s the truth,’ he said. ‘I went to meet him. He was already dead. Someone had killed him. That’s everything. Jesus.’ His arms, still restrained behind his back, were beginning to hurt. He took a deep breath and felt the pain in his shoulder blade and ribcage coming back with a vengeance.
‘You’re lying,’ Xia said to the door. She pushed a buzzer and it clicked angrily. ‘We know that your partner is alive. And you’re going to tell me where to find him.’ She paused. The door opened. ‘I will come back later,’ she said as she slipped into the corridor.
A second later Bald saw a figure lingering in the doorway. He was leaning against the metal frame and chewing gum. He stood in a kind of stoop in his hundred-dollar suit, the crumpled trousers and faded white shirt making him look like a used-car salesman. The right arm of his jacket was hanging free, and wrapped tight around the upper part of his right arm was a bandage.
He was carrying a rusting metal toolbox.
The American.
fifty
1817 hours.
‘You should have taken my advice,’ the American said as he entered the room. ‘Back there in Clearwater. It was good advice. Free, too. Yep.’ With a big heave and a clang, he lifted the toolbox onto the table. ‘You should’ve gone back to Scotland.’
Bald said, ‘Thought I’d see the world first.’
The American chuckled. ‘And how’s that working out for you?’
His voice was scratchy and blunt, like an unsharpened shard of flint. ‘I mean, any other guy would get the message after what went down Stateside. You know? They’d pack their bags. Call it quits. Go home, screw their wife. But you? You’re a shit that won’t flush.’
The American hocked something up in his throat, and shuffled around to get a good look at Bald’s face. His limp seemed more pronounced than it had been in Florida. The bullet wound in his arm probably didn’t help much.
‘Hand on heart,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t give a solid fuck about you. Twenty years in the game, all I know is that assholes like you end up one of two ways. Either you blow your own brains out or you drink yourselves into an early grave. That’s fine by me, either way. But there’s one thing I can’t get my head around.’
Bald said, ‘You still have doubts over your sexuality?’
The American shook his head wistfully and said, ‘Why are you doing this?’
Bald didn’t answer.
The American continued, ‘To be this committed to stopping us, you must be mentally retarded, right?’
Bald said, ‘I just wanted to get rich and get laid.’
The American belted out a laugh and sounded like he was choking on a bag of rusty nails. He reached out and patted Bald on the shoulder and said, ‘Amen to that, my old friend.’ He grinned. ‘This was my idea, by the way.’
‘What was your idea?’ Bald said.
‘Bringing you down here. Xia, she figured she could squeeze the necessary int out of you up there. On the surface. But I told her, no way. This guy ain’t just good, he’s also out of his goddamn mind. To get information out of a guy like you, we need to bring out the heavy artillery.’
‘We? I thought you were working for the Agency.’
‘I am.’
Hauser pushed his face close to Bald’s, a smile playing across it. He didn’t look like he smiled much. He had the hard, gristly look of someone who had lived an outdoors life. Not the artificial veneer of a life spent at the gym and consuming tofu salads.
‘Sweet Jesus, you don’t know, do you? I’m thinking, you must truly be dumb as a shit sandwich without the bread.’
Bald turned away. Hauser staggered around and locked onto his eyes again. ‘The Agency set you up. Shit, you really had no idea? They played you, brother. All those ass-kissers in the Firm.’
Bald didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to put the lid on the migraine. The pressure was building between his ears again. He could barely hear Hauser.
‘We brought the Firm on board to help kill the sleeper. We had only one criteria: that the shooter needed to be hand-picked by us. Your man Land shared your file with us. I read about all the goddamn shit you’ve been involved in. Christ! Drug trafficking. Arms dealing. Assault. Murder. Alcohol dependency. PTSD. You’re a work of art, John.’
‘How’s the fucking arm?’ Bald said.
Hauser ignored him and went on, ‘With all the shit you had under your hood, we knew we could control you. Then it was just a matter of making sure you fucked things up. Gotta say, that didn’t require a whole lot of input from me. You seem perfectly capable of doing that all by yourself.’
Bald said, ‘If you wanted my number you could’ve just asked.’ His voice was cracking now and his brain splitting. He was on the edge.
‘What about Xia?’ he asked.
‘What about her?’
‘She works for the Chinese government. She’s the enemy.’
‘The rules have changed, friend. Keep up.’
‘And Rachel?’
‘That bitch is your problem.’
Hauser walked to the table and pulled open the toolbox: three trays folded out on either side of the lower compartment. He rummaged through an assortment of tools, before taking out a pair of straight-cut snips from the uppermost tray. He held them up to the light and rehearsed the snipping motion. They were the compound-action type with a leveraged handle to cut through thicker, more durable materials. Such as knuckle joints and finger bones. Hauser gently replaced the snips in the toolbox.
His fingers searched out a pipe wrench from one of the lower trays. It had a red handle over a foot long and looked like it was made of steel or aluminium. The adjustable, toothed head was coated in ginger rust. Hauser studied it under the hot light for a few moments, toying with the business end. He didn’t seem satisfied by what he saw, so he dumped the wrench back in the box too.
Then he reached into the main compartment. This is better, his face said. This is the fucking tool for the job.
The tool was heavy. Hauser hauled it out with his left hand and set it down in front of Bald. At first glance it looked like a cordless power drill. The casing was made of orange plastic and at the base there was a handle with a chunky trigger mechanism. But there was no drill bit protruding from the head. Instead Hauser fished a str
ip of 1.83mm-diameter finish nails from the toolbox and loaded them into the unit. With his left hand he picked up the tool and waved it in front of Bald.
‘Know what this is?’ he said.
Bald hardened his features. ‘A nail gun.’
Hauser stroked the top of the tool. ‘Damn right it is. Powerful one, too. The propulsion engine inside this baby can punch a nail through solid rock. What do you think it’ll do to your knees?’
Hauser began circling Bald.
‘Xia asked you a question. Your partner. Where is he?’
‘Like I said, he’s dead.’
‘Quit lying, or I start making you look like Jesus Christ on the Cross.’
‘I’m telling the truth. I found the guy murdered.’
Hauser shrugged at the walls, like he was playing to an unseen audience. ‘You expect me to believe that bullshit?’
‘Believe whatever you want,’ Bald said. ‘It’s the truth.’
Silence.
Then Hauser nodded. ‘I was kinda hoping you’d say that.’
He moved with surprising speed. His right arm thrust across the table and his fingers gripped Bald’s chin, while his left hand simultaneously drove the nail gun down onto his cheek. Bald braced himself for the shot. But it didn’t come. Not yet.
‘Fact: the nail gun injures about thirty thousand folk every single year.’ Hauser was sweating hard. Air blew out of his nostrils like espresso-machine steam. ‘That’s almost the exact number of people killed by firearms in America. So nowadays they fit nail guns with a contact trip trigger.’
He pressed the tool harder into Bald’s cheek.
‘That means you can’t just fire a nail by pulling the trigger. First of all you got to be pushing the head against the surface you want to nail.’ He stopped, smiled at Bald and said, ‘Then you pull the trigger.’