by Oisin McGann
'I climbed into the chopper to help with the other wounded while they tended to the bleeder. It was a typical batch; shrapnel injuries mostly. I think a landmine had gone off under an APC or something like that. Ugly business. One soldier's dressing had come loose – on his arm – and I went to change it. That was when I noticed something odd.'
Domingues leaned forward again and spoke in a not-so-quiet whisper.
'The wound was clean. Perfectly clean. Ever seen a wound caused by an explosion? I mean up close, fresh after the event?'
Amina and Chi shook their heads.
'They're filthy. They've been caught in a blast, right? Apart from the shrapnel, there's bits of dust and sand and stone chips, sometimes glass or worse. Major risk of infection. You normally have to pick out the big bits with tweezers and then scrub the small stuff out with soap and a stiff brush. Not a job for the squeamish, I can tell you.'
Amina went slightly pale. Chi relished the gritty details of the horror that was war.
'But this guy's wound was lovely and clean. Shang and the others were busy, so I took a peek at some the others' wounds. Same thing. Battle wounds, but without the dirt.'
Domingues sat back and folded her arms, raising her eyebrows at them. Amina glanced at Chi and then sat further forward, her eyes opened a little wider to display riveted interest.
'But what does it mean?' she asked.
'Somebody cleaned the wounds before they were put on the chopper,' Chi mused.
'Or . . . or the wounds were grown there,' Domingues exclaimed with one finger raised.
The two journalists sat and waited for the next line, knowing it was going to be a cracker.
'I think that Shang is creating doppelgängers,' she went on. 'The Chinese have come up with a technology that allows them to change a man's body to exactly match another's. Like a photocopier for humans. They are taking Chinese agents and re-forming their bodies into perfect copies of genuine wounded soldiers.'
Amina exhaled softly. What was it with some people that the simplest answer was never good enough?
'Think about it,' Domingues continued.'These soldiers are coming in from a supposed war zone with nice hygienically clean wounds. They're confused, they doubt their own memories, they're being supervised not by a trauma surgeon, but by a plastic surgeon. After their injuries, many suffer abrupt changes in personality. It all fits, see? The Chinks are sending in sleeper cells – moles who will return to the West and wait for the day they're to be activated.
'You see, I heard him talking about it once. I was coming out of the ladies' room and I saw him coming and hid back behind the door. Shang was with one of the other weirdo doctors who followed him around sometimes; he thought they were alone in the corridor, but I could hear him just fine. He was really hacked off about something and he was saying: "It sometimes takes three days to break them down and rebuild them! After that we have a few hours to make sure their injuries fit their stories. Does she think I can work miracles? We're not dealing with modelling clay here! If she thinks she can do a better job with her . . . her zombies, let her come down here and try!"' Domingues paused for a second. 'And then just as he was walking round the corner, Shang says: "Still, it's nice to know they'll all be taking a little bit of China back home with them, eh? Ha ha!"'
Domingues finished the last dregs of her cocoa, then slumped back, regarding her listeners with a triumphant expression.
25
Amina stood in front of the photocopier, hypnotized by the light sliding from one side to the other under the cover, the soft hasty clacking of the originals being fed in, the whishing, clucking sound of the copies sliding out.
Communists. For decades, they'd been the bad guys. For her grandparents' generation, fear of the Red Menace had clawed its way into the daily lives of everyone. The Reds weren't just behind the Iron Curtain, they were among us. It could be anyone – your friend, your neighbour. They plotted against us. Everyone was afraid of what might happen. Fear of 'The Bomb'. It was hard to get her head round; the idea that the Russians could have attacked the Americans, or the Americans could have attacked the Russians and that would have been it. The end of the world. Nuclear holocaust. She had read a lot about it. It had come closer than most people ever suspected.
And yet it hardly seemed real now. Fear of Communism had spawned thousands of spy thrillers and action films and science fiction stories. But it was difficult to think of the Russians as the bogeymen now. For a start, she knew too many of them on a first name basis.
As she often did, Amina imagined being back in that time, when everyone was so afraid. It had reached a level of hysteria in the United States in the fifties. People would be accused of being Communists and to prove they weren't, they would point their fingers at others. It's not me – it's him. It's her. The accusation was enough to ruin somebody's life. Blacklists were made. Suspicion ruled.
Amina was sure she would never have betrayed others like that. Who knows, back then she might even have been a Communist herself – a socialist revolutionary!
She found herself thinking about Ivor again. It was hard to know whether it was the man or his story she found so intriguing. There was something . . . haunted about him. Even more than the injuries, she thought, it was the sense that he'd been betrayed that troubled him. It had made him older than his years. She would have liked to see him in uniform: younger, arrogant, fearless.
The light from the photocopier swished back and forth, lulling her into a trance. She didn't believe Agatha Domingues' story about Chinese sleepers. The Chinese were not the new Russians, or the new Nazis. They were not the new alien invaders. There were no foreign devils coming over the horizon.
Somebody was lying about this war, and that was a betrayal of the men and women who went to fight in it. The thought outraged her. She was a soldier's daughter – she knew that the safety she enjoyed today had been paid for down the generations with the lives of soldiers.
All they would ask in return was that we remember their sacrifice – and try and stop it from happening again.
Ivor snapped awake with a cry, his limbs twitching as the nightmare faded. The bloody roulette wheel again – he wished he could figure out what it meant. He had fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for his friend in Kurjong to text him. There was a sour taste in his mouth, so he went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water.
He had got into the habit of taking a nap in the afternoons. When you didn't have to work for a living, it was amazing how easy it could be to fill all that time. Since being discharged and getting his disability benefits, he had been unable to get work and then, when he won the lottery, there was no need. But the boredom had started getting to him and when he began to suspect he was under surveillance, he gradually sank into the scared numbness that had prompted his desire to tell his story to the press. Now he had a new purpose and he was relishing the activity. But he still enjoyed the odd nap.
Amina had called to tell him about the interview with Agatha Domingues. Ivor had assured her that, to the best of his knowledge, he was not a surgically altered Communist spy. But if Shang had carried out some kind of operation on him, it might explain why Ivor had vague, but disturbing memories of the man. The idea that he might be some kind of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers-style double made to replace his original self was just a little far-fetched. Just because he had recently discovered he was being watched by shadowy government agents did not mean he was going to buy into every conspiracy theory going. You had to have standards.
He was in the middle of boiling milk for a hot chocolate when a vibration in his pocket alerted him to a text. Opening it, he read that Jenny was ready for his call. He grabbed his jacket and a minute later he was on the street, making for the Tube station.
Chi had gone over his flat and shown him the surveillance devices he found there. It had been a chilling experience. While it was gratifying to discover that he wasn't completely paranoid – they were watching him after all – it was terrify
ing to know that there really were people out there who might mean him harm, and who had invaded the privacy of his home. He could not help thinking back to all the embarrassing things they might have picked up since he had won the lottery – or even if they had been listening in before that.
Ivor wanted to remove the bugs, but Chi told him there was no point. They would be replaced. On top of that, parabolic microphones, lasers bounced off his windows and other long-range listening devices could all be used and kept out of his reach. It was better to know what was there and watch what he said. Chi said it encouraged good habits anyway. You never did know who could be listening. He said this quietly, under the cover of loud music from the stereo.
So Ivor had phoned Jenny from a cheap calls internet café a few miles from his place, and she had said she'd text him when she found something out. Jenny was an ex-girlfriend; one of those who didn't bear him a grudge. She owed him too.
The British army didn't tolerate bullying, but there were still some young recruits being driven to suicide by constant abuse. The army considered this a military problem and kept the public in the dark about it. Jenny's little brother had been victimized during basic training and was on the edge of despair. Ivor was in the same platoon. He dealt with the problem by picking out the worst offender and gently placing his hand in a bowl of water while he slept one night. The bully woke up in the morning to find he'd wet the bed. Ivor disposed of the bowl of water before it was discovered. Nobody took the bully too seriously after that.
Jenny was a lieutenant in the Signals Corps now, working in the Media Operations Unit, and still had a soft spot for him.
The internet café, imaginatively named Mr Internet, was a dingy place with Silicon Valley aspirations.
Plastic chairs were pulled up in front of old wood-laminate school desks. The computers were old, but in good working order, and each one was slightly different, suggesting that the place had evolved over time from spare parts rather than being built to design. Mr Internet was run by a pair of young Pakistani brothers, who had probably put all these machines together themselves. It was open twenty-four hours a day and there was always at least one of the brothers behind the counter, along with two or three other members of their family.
Ivor sat down in a white, chipboard-walled booth, put on a headset and logged on, punching in Jenny's home number. She picked up on the first ring.
'Hi, babe,' she chirped. 'How's the rain?'
'Cold and wet,' he replied. 'It would make you homesick just to see it. What have you got for me?'
'Yeeeesssss,' she muttered, and from the sounds he could tell she was tucking the phone under the side of her head while she reached for her keyboard. 'Anthony Shang. Couldn't find anything on him in the personnel database – but that's not surprising, if anything of what you told me is true. I dug around for anything in the usual channels and got nothing. Then I tried a web search on the inconceivable off-chance that you hadn't. You didn't do a search, did you?'
Ivor frowned.
'No. I figured anything on him would be . . . y'know, secret.'
'Nothing's too secret for the web, babe. I love it. I know you didn't do a search because if you did, you'd have found out he has a book! Making Faces: How China's Leading Plastic Surgeon Became a Secret Weapon in the World of Espionage. I'm sending you the link now.'
Ivor opened his email and clicked on the link. The cover of the book came up, showing Shang – definitely the same guy – in a white coat, leaning nonchalantly against a blank white wall with his arms folded. He wore a smug grin and an expensive haircut. The blurb for the book read:
Ten years ago, Anthony Shang defected to the West. He brought with him an extraordinary tale of cosmetic surgery, Chinese politics and high-level espionage. As the most celebrated Chinese surgeon of his generation, he led a double life: giving facelifts to top-ranking Communist Party officials while also working for Chinese intelligence, using his unparalleled skills to change the faces and fingerprints of key spies infiltrating Europe and the US.
Judged by British intelligence to be the most valuable defector in decades, Anthony Shang tells his story here for the first time. Welcome to his world.
'Bloody hell,' Ivor exclaimed.
'Yeah,' Jenny chuckled. 'Nothing like keeping a low profile, huh?'
18
Tmeeting place was different, but they were there on the same business. , and - were in a fourstar hotel suite, sitting in armchairs around a low table with their laptops on their knees. On the table was a tray of tea and coffee and a large plate of sandwiches cut into neat quarters and served with garnish.
The room itself was neat, clean and impersonal. There were tasteful prints on the off-white walls and an abundance of creatively framed mirrors. Each of the three people had conducted their own checks for surveillance. It was not a good idea to trust anybody in this business.
'So, still no sign of Shang,' was saying. He was in a Royal air force uniform today, despite the fact that he had never served in the air force. 'This is getting to be a real problem.'
'He'll be found,' - sniped back in his bass voice. 'The man's arrogant and he's an attention-seeker. He'll make a mistake somewhere.'
The other two did not look satisfied.
'He'll be found,' he said again, with certainty.
'Do we still go ahead with Operation Renewed Faith?' asked, looking at each of his colleagues in turn.
'Yes,' replied.
'Yes,' - agreed, his heavylidded eyes opening a little wider. 'It's too important to put on hold just because of an upstart surgeon. He doesn't know enough to compromise the operation, and we can discredit him if he tries to talk afterwards. The package has been shipped?'
'It's on its way,' told them. 'Due in eight days. It's aboard a Dutch-registered freighter with no ties to Britain. There are two minders, but no one in the crew knows what they're carrying.'
'Good,' - muttered. 'I have to admit, I'll be glad when it's secured again. The risk of it being hijacked—'
'—Is well worth it,' assured him. 'The nation is losing faith in the war. If that happens, they'll drop their guard and the British people will become easy targets for any fanatic who wants to try his luck. That can't be allowed to happen.'
was surprised to see that both men looked anxious. The contradictions of the human mind never failed to fascinate her. These men had planned all this from its inception, and had known the scale of operation they were undertaking. Only now, as it was coming close to realization, did her colleagues seem to consider the risks they were taking. She had only a small, but important, part to play in the delivery of this shipment and had been nervous about it for some time. She was not comfortable working outside of the controlled conditions of her laboratories. These men, on the other hand, should be used to this kind of thing.
'Other business,' said abruptly, as if keen to change the subject. 'You say McMorris has started avoiding your surveillance?'
'Doesn't everybody?' murmured, much to -'s annoyance.
'We think Sandwith made him aware of the devices in his flat, and all three of them are careful about what they say when they're together,' he reported, shifting his large body in the small armchair. 'The easiest one to keep track of is Amina Mir. She uses the phones and computers at the newspaper and we've been tapped into them for over a year. She's talkative too.'
'Her mother could be a problem if she gets involved,' cautioned him.
'She won't. The girl's fiercely independent. She could use her mother's name a lot more than she does, but she's obviously keen to go it alone. The little tart has no idea what she's getting herself into.'
'Then maybe she should be given a hint,' said quietly. 'Nothing loud enough to get the mother's attention. I won't have this nation's security compromised by another loudmouth reporter.
'And do something about Sandwith too. I don't like the way his friends have been sniffing around the Central Database. God knows what kind of dirt they could be digging out of there. It's
time we started to tidy up all these loose ends.'
It was Saturday morning, and Amina was enjoying a well-earned lie-in. She loved her bed. Her purple duvet was piled up around her and a collection of quirkily shaped cushions supplemented her pillows to create a plush boudoir effect, echoed by the terracotta-coloured walls. Despite the cynical attitude she was keen on developing as part of her journalistic persona, she was an avid chick-lit fan and stacks of books on the pitfalls and perils of modern relationships lined her bookshelves, along with books on uncompromising reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Nellie Bly and George Orwell.
Her stereo's timer clicked on at 10.30 a. M., playing her favourite morning radio show, but she stayed under the duvet, resisting the DJ's jovial efforts to kick-start her day. It was only when the staccato lyrics and rumbling bass beat of Absent Conscience started reverberating through the wall from Tariq's room that she finally sat up and faced the day.
'Tariq!' she yelled.
'They say love is blind, but I see just fine/You're tryin' to sell me a world when it's already mine/You are my first love but not the last you see/I love hurting you with honesty . . .'
'TARIQ! TURN. IT. DOWN!'
The volume dropped until it was merely a muffled annoyance and Amina flopped back into her pillows. That was it; she was awake now. The lovely fluffy fog of half-asleepness was lost. She wondered if she could persuade her dad to bring her breakfast in bed. He did sometimes, when he was in a mood for spoiling her.
But one look at her PC was enough to motivate her into getting up and putting on her snug mauve dressing gown over her peach silk pyjamas. She had promised herself she would spend some of the day writing up her notes and putting together the beginnings of an article on what they'd found so far. But not before she'd treated herself to a nice breakfast and an hour or two of lounging on the sofa with a good book.