INCARNATION

by Daniel Easterman

He gave them a place name - Karakhoto - but could not locate it on any map of the region. Nor could anyone else. When asked for the names of the generals responsible for liaison with the Iraqi scientists and military men, he could only name two - Wang Chigang and Zhao Chingyu - neither of whom rang bells with David, who knew the names of everyone in the provincial military hierarchy. There were several map coordinates, but when David pressed for details of what they referred to, the boy became visibly confused and started contradicting what he’d already said.

  At times it was hard to pin him down. He would allude to things in an imprecise, airy fashion, as if he were a medium at a travelling fair.

  ‘There’s a man with thin hair,’ he said. ‘In the Taklamakan. Be careful of him.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked David. Tursun shook his head sadly and said he did not know.

  ‘Black walls,’ he said. 'There are black walls without windows or doors. They are hiding something behind them.’

  ‘Hiding what?’ The boy shook his head again and lowered his eyes.

  To David, the whole affair had a bad smell about it, an overpowering odour of incense sticks and tarot cards, cheap horoscopes cast in old bazaars, oracles murmured darkly at wayside shrines. He’d seen it all in his day - sleight of hand and sleight of tongue, old men touched by madness more than holiness, little boys with large eyes and outstretched hands. The only thing was, this time he couldn’t for the life of him work out how it was done.

  By mid-afternoon, the boy began to flag. His confidence was leaving him. He said he was tired, that he’d travelled a long way, and had had little sleep. They were all exhausted by then anyway, so David called an early halt to the last session. Mrs Hughes took the boy back to his room, where he went straight to sleep. His parents were being kept in a separate suite on the top floor for as long as the debriefing lasted. They were frightened and, without Tursun to interpret, they talked to no one.

  David went upstairs and knocked on their door. The father opened it, a small man with a permanently pained expression on a face that looked years older than it could possibly have been.

  ‘As-salamu alaykum. Kirishka rukhsatmu?’ David greeted him. He expected some sort of pretence, a masquerade to chime with Tursun’s, but there was none.

  ‘Wa alaykum as-salamu. Kirin. Olturup biraz chay ichin.’ The man’s invitation was spoken in plain Uighur. As he asked David inside, a half-smile crossed his lips, and he seemed to stand a little straighter.

  ‘My name’s David Laing. I’m in charge of your son.’

  ‘Yes, Mr David. Please. Please come in.’ David followed him inside, along a short corridor to the living room. Tursun’s father introduced himself as Osmanjan. His wife was sitting on the sofa watching the cartoon channel, her lips moving silently as though following the words. She got up when David was introduced, and bowed shyly. When he spoke to her in Uighur, her eyes almost popped out of her head, as if it was the last thing in the world she might have expected. Osmanjan introduced her. Her name was Rotsemi.

  ‘Our guest would like some tea.’ Osmanjan sent her off to the little galley kitchen where Britain’s most notorious traitors had brewed endless cups of PG Tips.

  ‘I would like to speak to her as well,’ said David as she left. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

  Osmanjan nodded. What little trace there had been of a smile on his face had gone. He knew he was not among friends. Just because a stranger came speaking Uighur…

  ‘She knows nothing of all this.’

  ‘And you - what do you know?’

  The man shrugged and invited David to sit down. In the corner, the television continued to make a nuisance of itself. The garish colours and jerking movements of a Looney Tunes cartoon flickered and gyrated on the edge of vision. Screeches and whoops boomed from the set.

  ‘You are Muslims,’ David said. ‘Why all this talk of reincarnation? Shouldn’t you leave that to the Hindus and the Buddhists?’

  Osmanjan reddened. It was as if David had accused him of sleeping with other men’s wives. Or betraying his people.

  ‘It is the boy’s story, not mine.’

  ‘Then you say you do not believe it?’

  ‘It is not for me to say. It is his story.’

  ‘He is your son, isn’t he?’

  Osmanjan nodded. Behind him, a new cartoon had started. Road Runner zoomed through the desert, pursued by Wile E. Coyote. Every few seconds, the room was rocked by an explosion.

  ‘How old is he? He says he is twelve, but I don’t think he can be more than ten.’

  ‘No, twelve is correct. He has always looked younger than his real age.’

  ‘And he was born in Sinkiang?’ Another nod. ‘Where in Sinkiang?’

  ‘Khotan.’

  ‘Have you always lived there? You don’t have a southern accent.’

  ‘No, we have lived many places. Urumchi. Charkhliq. Turfan. Kashgar. Many places.’

  ‘And you got to India through Ladakh?’

  ‘Yes. It was a long journey. I thought we would die. It was cold. The snow was like demons.’

  ‘Who told you to make that journey? Who told you to go to India?’

  ‘The boy.’

  ‘You take orders from your son?’

  Behind him, a woman’s voice answered. ‘You don’t know him. You don’t understand.’

  David turned to find Rotsemi standing in the doorway. She held a tray on which a sturdy brown teapot and three china cups were balanced precariously. David recognized them: British Home Stores, Swansea. There were little crowded tears in the woman’s eyes. David got up and went to her.

  ‘Let me take that,’ he said. She shook her head and came in, fighting the tears back, and set the tray down on a low pine table. In her world, it was unthinkable for a guest to help his hostess.

  ‘My son has done nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘All this is to help us, his father and mother. He seeks nothing for himself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t suggest such a thing. I only want to know what is happening.’

  She poured tea into the cups, Uighur-style, without milk, very sweet. The tea was golden-brown, more suited to Chinese than Uighur taste. David thought there’d be little point in having a word with Arwel or his good lady. He’d get a couple of black tea bricks in London and bring them down. And give Glynis some pointers about traditional Uighur cuisine.

  ‘We have come here with our son,’ said Rotsemi. David took a closer look at her. She couldn’t be more than thirty, but her face was white and drained, and her eyes held a vacant look, as though both curiosity and terror had been wiped from them.

  ‘Is he your only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have other children,’ said Osmanjan. ‘From my first wife.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Dead.’ He said it in a flat voice, as though to tame an emotion more acid than simple grief. ‘They took her from me. She died in prison. Then they took the children. There are three of them. Perhaps they are alive. Perhaps dead.’

  David did not need to ask who ‘they’ were. Only the Han Chinese authorities could have put a wife in prison and taken children away by force.

  He looked at Rotsemi.

  ‘And you? Do you want more children?’

  Her pale face coloured gently, and she nodded.

  ‘Now, perhaps. Now that we are safe.’

  ‘Why were you in danger? What did you do that made Sinkiang dangerous for you?’

  Rotsemi shrank back visibly. She’d said too much already. Osmanjan sipped from his cup, holding it from behind, as though it had no handle.

  ‘You must speak to my son,’ he said. ‘He knows everything. He will tell you.’

  ‘Was it on account of a man called Hyde? Matthew Hyde?’ Osmanjan did not answer. But David could see he recognized the name.

  He spent half an hour with them, and at the end he was no further forward. The son had led them here, the son knew everything. They were just his hangers-on. When
he finished his tea, he made his excuses and left. The last thing he heard as the door closed was Woody Woodpecker’s insane laugh. Stepping on to the landing, he sneezed loudly.

  Chris Donaldson was waiting for him downstairs.

  ‘I’m told you came down by car.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Any chance of a lift back?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Hampstead.’

  ‘Well, that’s not too far out of my way.’

  ‘You don’t have to take me all the way there.’

  ‘May as well. But you’ll have to pay your way.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’

  David fished in his pocket for his keys, and tossed them to Donaldson.

  ‘You drive. I’m bushed. But I’ve a few questions I’d like to ask you.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  People‘s Republic of China

  Western Region Military Installation 14 (Chaofe Ling) [Coordinates classified]

  Level 3, Corridor 13

  The corridor was almost two and a half miles long. Four kilometres, to be precise. Four thousand metres. Engineer Zhang Fengsuo said it was the longest corridor in China, maybe the world, and he should have known - he’d designed it, costed it, and supervised its construction. It never turned, never wavered, never altered, not for an inch of its length. In the ceiling, two thousand light units burned day and night. A team of fitters replaced those in each section on a week-by-week schedule. The corridor was divided into twelve sections, so it took three months to work through the corridor before starting all over again.

  There were forty-one corridors like it in the installation, six on each level, crossing and crisscrossing, one hundred and sixty-seven kilometres in all. Each corridor on level three had a minimum of five hundred doors, and each door …

  Karim Hasanoglu shook his head in bewilderment and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Thinking about this place didn’t help your nerves. He’d been here three weeks now, and still dreaded these long drives through the white, brightly lit corridors, each one exactly like the rest, with no landmarks or markers apart from the Chinese signs that he could not decipher.

  He pressed down on the pedal and his little electric buggy picked up speed to its maximum of ten miles an hour. He didn’t bother looking, but he knew that, right behind him, his state security tail would be accelerating to exactly the same rate. Karim gave an inward shrug. He’d been brought up in what one writer had called Iraq’s Republic of Fear, and it was never much of a surprise to find yourself shadowed by a dead-faced secret policeman trying to be inconspicuous.

  Here in the installation, of course, there wasn’t much point in pretending, so his shadow just went along with him everywhere. Since Karim didn’t speak a word of Chinese and his tail knew not a word of Arabic or Turkish, communications between them were extremely limited. They’d told him to drive down the corridor until the tripometer on his buggy reached the figure 2850, whereupon he was to stop and ask permission to enter a door numbered 74:6 (3). At least the numbers were written in characters he could understand. When he slept, he had bad dreams about being lost down here, dreams in which he rode round and round for hour after hour, never seeing a way out, never coming across anyone he could ask for help. He shivered and looked at the dial in front of him. It read 2789. Another sixty metres would bring him to the door.

  He knew what was behind the door, and didn’t relish the thought of passing it. He hadn’t a clue about details, of course, but he did have a shrewd notion as to what awaited him. They wanted him to help question a man, someone who knew more than he should about the weapons being developed here. Karim was a scientist, and he spoke Turkish, which was as close to the Uighur spoken in Sinkiang as you could get, so they’d fingered him as a help and comfort in present peril.

  Karim was a Turkman from the mountains north of Mosul. His father had brought the family to Baghdad soon after the Baathists took power in 1968, had opened a successful business trading in agricultural equipment with Istanbul, and had eventually sent his three sons to university. Karim had gone to Baghdad’s University of Technology to study chemistry. He’d come top of his class, made a good impression on the dean, and gone on to study for a doctorate at MIT. He’d been tempted to marry an American girl, stay in the States, and settle down in a comfortable job with a petrochemical company in the Mid-West.

  Then one day he’d arrived back at his rooms to find a man from the Iraqi embassy waiting for him. A big man with prowling eyes. Sally had been there: she’d been the one to let the man in. He could still remember her eyes, the look of raw fear in them. It hadn’t been anything the man had done or said. All it had needed was his presence. Karim learned later that the man’s name was Hamza, and that he was the embassy’s dog, the one they set on dissidents.

  By then he’d packed his bags, and signed all the papers he needed to sign, and bought a one-way ticket from New York to Baghdad. One ticket. He’d cried silently all the way home, and when he’d stepped down from the plane his family had been waiting for him. They hadn’t been alone. A man in shades had watched him back to their house. The following morning, he’d reported to the State Establishment for Phosphates Production, where a quiet-spoken man in a neat military uniform had handed him papers posting him to the giant fertilizer complex at al-Qa’im on the Euphrates. Long before he got there, Karim knew that phosphoric acid wouldn’t be the only thing produced at his new place of work.

  At 2850 he took his foot off the pedal and the buggy stopped. There was a grey door to his left. It looked exactly like all the other doors he’d passed. The number on it read 74:6 (3). Unlike most other doors, it bore no logograms spelling out the identity of whatever activity went on behind it. He smiled at his shadow and invited him to introduce them. The security man smiled back. He looked animated for once. Karim cringed inside. It was a hard and fast rule back in Iraq to dive for cover the moment you saw so much as a flicker of amusement cross a mukhabarat agent’s face.

  The little man spoke into a grille set in the wall next to the door.

  ‘Wo shi Kao Shien-nun. Zhe wei shi Karim shiansheng.’ The door opened soundlessly. Karim stepped inside, followed by his tail. The door closed, leaving them in a small vestibule. There were photographs on the walls. Karim tried not to look, he knew what they were, but it was hard to avoid them. Over the years, he’d learned how to prevent himself being sick. He took a deep, slow breath and waited for the next door to open. It was heavier than the first, and he knew it would be soundproof.

  There was a click and a soft whirring sound, and the second door rolled back. Waiting for him a few feet across the threshold was a familiar face. Huang Zhengmei smiled and held out her hand. Karim smiled back. It almost made him feel better to see her here. Perhaps things wouldn’t turn out as bad as he feared. Huang Zhengmei was aged about thirty. pretty, with a musical voice and frighteningly intelligent eyes. You couldn’t imagine anything remotely unpleasant happening while she was around. He took her hand in his. It was no larger than a child’s.

  ‘Miss Huang. It’s good to see you again.’

  She’d been responsible for settling him in over the first couple of days he’d spent in the complex. They communicated in English, which she spoke fluently: he’d been impressed to learn that she’d spent several years studying at London University.

  ‘And you, Dr Hasanoglu. I’d like you to meet someone we all admire. Allow me to introduce Colonel Chang Zhangyi.’

  A man stepped forward from a cluster of shadows on Huang Zhengmei’s left. He’d been watching them all along, hidden. Now, as he came forward, Karim realized that he’d been foolish ever to think that the presence of a pretty woman might be allowed to get in the way of what happened here.

  ‘Colonel Chang Zhangyi is head of security for Sinkiang Province.’

  Karim felt the familiar chill, the instinctive lowering of emotional temperature he experienced every time he met men like Chang Zhangyi. Today, he thoug
ht, he was an honoured guest. Tomorrow, he could be served up to the colonel as a wholly different form of humanity. All it would take would be a word out of place, a hint of betrayal, or too great a degree of curiosity. He reached out his hand for a second time and tried to smile.

  The colonel was like a statue come partially to life. Animate, but only in so far as there was movement in his face and limbs. Otherwise dead. No heart, no proper feelings, no remorse, no love, no depth, no fear, no compassion, no true hate - just the mechanics of life, without the essence. The perfect servant of a state system predicated on obedience. It was all there in the face, Karim thought, as though a fine calligrapher’s brush had painted letters of the true man across his pockmarked skin.

  ‘I’m grateful to you for coming today, Doctor. I know you’re a very busy man and that you’re engaged on important work here. But I assure you, this won’t be wasted time.’

  ‘You speak very good English, Colonel. You’ve been to England like Miss Huang?’

  ‘Hong Kong. I spent some years there very early in my career, working for a British finance company. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this over with.’

  Chang Zhangyi gestured casually, and a guard standing near the door flicked a switch, turning on more overhead lights. Huang Zhengmei stood aside, allowing Karim to look past her into the rest of the room. It was a long, narrow room. The walls were painted black, a very deep, matt black that seemed almost to swallow the light as rapidly as the lamps threw it out. Karim felt a bitter taste in his mouth and swallowed hard. Chang Zhangyi led the way to the other end of the room.

  There were several pieces of apparatus set against the walls. Karim tried not to look at them. He could guess their function well enough. He’d never been in a torture chamber before, but he knew enough people who had. Some had been tortured, some had done the torturing. One of his best friends at university had been a Kurd. They’d lost touch for several years after Karim went to MIT, then made contact again about three years ago. On their second meeting, Dara had taken off his shirt and shown Karim the knotted scars that ran like tramlines across his back. It had happened during the year and more he’d spent in the Red Security Building in Sulaymaniyya. hi a room like this.