Those Who Feel Nothing

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘Youk Chang.’

  ‘You know him,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘I know of him,’ Harrison said.

  Gilchrist glanced out of the window at a huge chute coming from a tall, grey warehouse. ‘Do you export concrete?’

  Harrison laughed. ‘Aggregate. But not us. We have a number of private terminals here for companies that deal in aggregate. We have scrap exporters too. Our own operations division handles a range of imports and exports. Scandinavian timber and nitrates from France, for instance.’

  ‘Goods from Cambodia?’

  Harrison frowned. ‘Not that I’m aware of. Not directly from Cambodia, at any rate. You think Youk’s disappearance had something to do with his work here? I thought he’d got into some trouble in Brighton.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’ Heap said.

  Harrison scraped her bobbed hair back behind her ears. ‘Well, I’ve no idea – or if he did. I meant that was my assumption.’

  ‘We’re exploring all possibilities,’ Gilchrist said, resisting the urge to mirror Harrison’s hair fiddling. ‘It happens we have an inquiry running parallel that involves Cambodia.’

  ‘And you assumed a connection,’ Harrison said, though not negatively. ‘Well, our ships all come from Europe – Tallin and Riga is about as far east as we go. And that’s north-east, in the Baltic. But it’s possible that a mixed cargo could contain Cambodian goods, loaded in a European port.’ Harrison looked wary. ‘What kind of goods are we talking about?’

  ‘Antiques,’ Heap said.

  Harrison sat back and messed with her hair again. ‘Illegally imported?’

  ‘Probably. Mainly we’re trying to figure out how they got here.’

  ‘And you think Youk’s disappearance had something to do with these illegal imports?’

  Gilchrist spread her hands. ‘To be honest, we have no idea but a connection might help us with both cases.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Harrison picked up her phone. ‘Jack? Email me the human resources files on Youk Chang, will you?’ She listened for a moment. ‘OK – well, whatever we have.’

  She hung up and looked from Gilchrist to Heap. ‘Goods leaving Cambodia would almost certainly go via China. Cambodia is in hock to its neighbour. China is lending Cambodia a couple of hundred million pounds to pay for various projects, including a huge new port just completed about thirty kilometres east of Phnom Penh.’

  ‘The capital,’ Heap murmured to Gilchrist. She gave him a look.

  ‘Phnom Penh has been jammed up for years,’ Harrison went on. ‘It handled ninety-five thousand containers in 2012 – double the number it was handling five years earlier. The new port can handle a third more – and eventually three hundred thousand.’

  ‘You’re remarkably well informed,’ Gilchrist said.

  Harrison put her palms together. ‘How else am I going to end up running the company?’

  Gilchrist smiled. ‘How easy is it to smuggle something in a container?’

  Harrison glanced at her computer screen. She tapped at her keyboard with bright blue-nailed fingers. ‘How big is this something?’ she said as a printer whirred in the corner of her office.

  ‘Not huge,’ Gilchrist said.

  Harrison laughed. ‘Could you be more specific?’

  ‘The boxes we found the goods in are about sixty cubic metres in total,’ Heap said.

  Harrison slid from behind her desk and went over to collect the printout from her computer. As she brought the thin sheaf of papers back to her desk she said:

  ‘The China trade is now using the new Triple E cargo boat. It carries 18,000 containers, each twenty feet long. The boat is almost a quarter of a mile long and taller than a twenty-storey office block. It usually leaves China full and goes back empty – you know China prides itself on being an exporter, not an importer?’

  ‘That’s a big boat,’ Gilchrist said, watching as Harrison made three piles from the pages she’d printed off.

  ‘Someone has done the maths. To carry the containers on a railway it would need a train sixty-eight miles long. These ships are so big there are hardly any ports capable of taking them. Shoreham can’t get anywhere near, though Southampton and Felixstowe can manage them. There are no ports the right size in the whole of North or South America. They won’t fit through the locks of the Panama Canal though they can just about squeeze through the Suez. Antwerp is digging a bloody great hole for them. London Gateway is being built as a dock especially for them.’

  ‘So we’re way beyond the needle in the haystack,’ Gilchrist said.

  Harrison handed each of them a couple of sheets of paper. ‘Youk’s personal file. A bit skimpy, I’m afraid, but he wasn’t with us that long and at his level we don’t require much information.’

  Gilchrist glanced at it. ‘Just staying with the smuggling for a moment.’

  Harrison gave her a sharp look. ‘Now you’re saying for certain this stuff was smuggled?’

  ‘I understand these are objects that are not supposed to leave their country of origin,’ Gilchrist said. ‘So my assumption is that they were smuggled in.’

  Harrison smiled. ‘China does kind of quasi-legal smuggling in that it breaks tariff limits and export quotas all the time. It simply ships goods to a third country or one of its independent territories – most notably Hong Kong or Macao – before re-exporting. What kind of antiques are we talking about?’

  ‘Big ones.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Bits of temples.’

  Harrison laughed again. ‘That’s very big. You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Exaggerating, maybe,’ Gilchrist said. ‘As I understand it, they’re stripping statues and wall art from Cambodian temples and palaces.’

  ‘If such goods came through here they would be on a standard container ship – five thousand containers. If they were exported billed as something else – in among containers of tourist goods, for instance – we wouldn’t have a hope of spotting them, regardless of the size.’

  Harrison looked at the sheaf of papers on her desk. ‘The last ship Youk helped unload was bringing a mixed cargo from Lisbon.’ She tapped at her keyboard, watching her computer screen, for a moment. ‘Interesting. It had come to Lisbon from Sharjah.’

  Heap and Gilchrist both looked blank.

  ‘United Arab Emirates – south of Dubai. Nice place.’ She tapped again. ‘And that’s where the ship is now.’

  She pressed a key and her printer whirred once more.

  As she started to get up from her desk, Heap stood. ‘May I?’

  He brought the sheet from the printer and handed it across the desk. Harrison demurred.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  Heap looked at it. ‘The SS Yangste. Registered in Hong Kong.’

  Gilchrist was looking at the other papers Harrison had passed her. ‘Youk didn’t live at home,’ she said. Thinking: why had Youk’s mother lied?

  There’s a fall-back. Some weird set of catacombs up on the hill near the castle. Your contact is there. You’re thinking these people have been watching too many Mission Impossible films.

  You slip and slide through the snow down to the river. The wide Danube looks beautiful, the snow falling on the row of lights either side of it. Even you notice that much.

  The Danube. You’ve been reading more about the Danube. It held back the Romans, for a little while. Then again it didn’t stop Genghis Khan and the Huns or the Mongols or the Turks.

  You cross the river and take the antique lift up the precipitous hill from Pest to the castle atop Buda. It moves slowly. You sit on the bench and watch the lower town reduce behind you. Lights glimmering for miles through the curtain of snow.

  The catacombs, carved from the soft tufa centuries before, have been turned into an art installation. You pay a few euros and you make your way to a chamber where a fountain on the wall is spilling out red wine. There is a row of glasses on a table by one curved wall. You catch a glassful of wine and sit on a bench and wa
it. You refill the glass. You wait.

  To get into this chamber you had to bend at the doorway. A man comes in now, almost bent double. When he stands you see the goatee beard and come up off the bench, glass in hand.

  The man with the goatee touches his finger to his lips and smiles, his other hand up in a pacifying gesture.

  You were taught in training you don’t fall for that. You throw the glass at him. No warning. He shifts his head to the side and it sails past his ear. As you hear it break against the wall of the cavern goatee is pointing a gun at you. A bloody big gun, but that’s irrelevant, since from this distance a small one would do the job just as well.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ the man with the goatee says in unaccented English. ‘Are you deliberately trying to fuck up a highly sophisticated operation?’

  You say nothing. To be honest, you’re not sure what to say. ‘What’s your part in it?’ you finally say.

  ‘To make sure nothing goes wrong until we’re ready to move.’

  You’re starting to feel out of your depth. ‘Move on who or what?’

  ‘The trafficking syndicate, of course.’

  ‘Which one?’ you say.

  You hear footsteps and a woman bobs into the cavern. The woman you saw in the Terror Museum. You start to put your hand in your pocket. Goatee man shakes his head.

  ‘Are you stupid or crazy?’ she says to you. English again. ‘Your actions could incline me either way.’

  ‘What was going on in the street market and the Terror Museum?’ you say.

  ‘What did you think was going on?’

  ‘Who are you people?’

  ‘What instructions did Sal Paradise give you?’ she says.

  ‘Who’s he?’ you say.

  ‘The guy you’re working for. The guy who told us to expect you.’

  ‘You work for this man Paradise too?’

  The woman glances at goatee and gives a taut smile. ‘He works for us, Mr Tingley.’

  The fact they know your name plunges you into even more confusion.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ you say.

  TWELVE

  On the way back to the station, Gilchrist called Donaldson. He was churlish, of course.

  ‘Any news?’ she said.

  ‘Well, the antiques have gone, I understand. And we’re trying to see if that blocked up tunnel leads anywhere.’

  ‘Antiques gone?’ Gilchrist said. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Agent Merivale and his team took them away in a big truck just after you’d gone. He’d mentioned it in our meeting, remember.’

  She told Heap what had happened.

  ‘That was never really our investigation, was it, ma’am?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she said quietly.

  He glanced at her. ‘Do you mind my asking you something?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Why didn’t Agent Merivale chip in when Windsor was mentioned? Do you think he wasn’t aware of him?’

  They had stopped at the lights on the seafront near the Palace Pier. Gilchrist kept her face expressionless, especially as she knew Heap was watching her like a hawk. She wasn’t sure about this brotherly interest he seemed to be taking in her welfare.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know or didn’t think it important,’ she said with a shrug, hoping her confusion didn’t show.

  Heap had a sympathetic look on his face as the lights changed and he moved on. Gilchrist obviously hadn’t done quite as well as she’d hoped on the concealment front.

  Back in the office, she called Merivale’s mobile. The line was dead. After some detective work she found a number for Homeland Security in the US.

  ‘I’m trying to get hold of a George Merivale, on secondment to UNESCO from the FBI.’

  ‘This is the State Department, ma’am. You mentioned two organizations there that might suit you better.’

  ‘He said he was seconded from Homeland Security – doesn’t that have overall responsibility for all the other agencies now?’

  ‘That is correct. What is this gentleman’s particular area of expertise, Detective Inspector?’

  ‘Cambodian antiquities.’

  ‘A moment if you please.’ It was just a moment. ‘We have no one here by that name working in or contracted to this agency.’

  ‘If he were doing undercover work you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Probably. So, Detective Inspector, if you choose to disbelieve me, that’s your privilege. But I can tell you that our interest in Cambodia lies elsewhere.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  He paused again. She wondered if he was conferring with a colleague.

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am. You mentioned this agent. I’m embarrassed to say that whilst we’ve been talking I’ve fed him into our computer – I apologize for my rudeness in not paying total attention to you but we live in the age of multi-tasking. I am that rare man who can do that.’

  Gilchrist chuckled. She liked this man.

  ‘I’m afraid this man might not be all that he seemed,’ the American said. ‘His name is not coming up at all. Anywhere.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Gilchrist said, not feeling quite so much like chuckling now.

  ‘Meaning,’ he said slowly, ‘that if we’re the good guys … he probably isn’t.’

  Gilchrist was silent for a long moment. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, ma’am.’

  ‘It’s not you I’m thinking of shooting,’ she said. ‘It’s me. How could I be so stupid?’

  ‘Might I ask if you gave him these Cambodian artefacts?’

  Gilchrist laughed again, more harshly than before. ‘I did assign the artefacts to his care, yes.’ Thinking: but I assigned more than that.

  Maybe the man on the other end of the line heard her thoughts. He softened. ‘How long have you been in law enforcement, ma’am, if I may ask?’

  ‘Coming up to eight years.’

  ‘A good time, but I’m approaching my thirtieth year.’

  ‘So you have words of wisdom for me?’ Gilchrist said.

  His laugh was guttural. ‘I had wisdom about twenty years ago – I thought. Maybe when I was your age. But I quickly realized as I got older that I knew less and less. Maybe you could give me more definite words of wisdom.’

  Gilchrist’s laugh was quieter. ‘The mantra that is going round here at the moment is: the world belongs to those who feel nothing.’

  Another pause. Maybe it was the international phone line – but weren’t delays a thing of the past in this digital age?

  ‘If I may say so, that is not an entirely cheerful piece of wisdom,’ he finally said. ‘I have to believe that people are generally like you and me, ma’am, with morals and integrity and basic human decency.’ He paused. ‘All the evidence notwithstanding.’

  ‘You’re not looking on the bright side,’ Gilchrist said.

  His deep laugh again. ‘Which in this instance is?’

  Gilchrist laughed. ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she said. But to herself: but this conversation has helped me get perspective on the bastard.

  The situation in the subterranean caverns below Buda castle with the goatee beard and the woman reminds you of a time in a basement wine bar on London’s Embankment and a conversation with people in the same line of work.

  You had been there in the days of acceptable cigarette use, when the smoke billowing round the room had made the dark so Stygian the candlelight – the only light – could scarcely penetrate. Decades of smokers in the groined alcoves had left a black cake on walls and ceilings you could almost peel off with your fingernails, if you were so inclined.

  That dim light and atmosphere was appropriate enough when you were being recruited into the smoke and mirrors world of the intelligence services. Well, recruited was maybe too strong a term. They wanted to use you now and then on specific projects.

  The couple in the catacombs beneath Buda castle are called Sebastian and Phyllida. You think t
hese are probably their real names.

  ‘We know you, Jimmy,’ Sebastian says. ‘Probably better than you know yourself.’

  That’s for sure, you think but don’t say.

  ‘We’ve had you checked out back in London,’ Phyllida says. ‘We’re guessing Sal didn’t realize he had a tiger by the tail.’ She leans forward. ‘He still doesn’t.’

  ‘Sal Paradise works for you?’ you say.

  ‘We use him, yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d be the sort to collude with spooks.’

  ‘Well, Sal is always about the bottom line,’ Phyllida says. ‘When his business is under threat then he’s happy to collaborate.’

  ‘And this man he’s sent me after is a threat?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Sebastian says, wrinkling his nose as he tastes the wine from the fountain. He puts his glass down on the tufa floor.

  ‘My brain still functions pretty well,’ you say.

  Phyllida snorts. ‘You’re going to have to convince me of that,’ she says.

  ‘This guy is ripping him off selling on Asian artefacts,’ you say. ‘I have no idea how that links with the person and paper trail that I was following.’ You look at Phyllida. ‘But you picked up that book in the museum. You know what it is all about.’

  ‘You followed a man called Slavitsky from the flea market,’ she said. ‘Your taxi driver is doing fine, by the way. And we secured his taxi-cab so he doesn’t lose his pathetic livelihood.’

  You shrug. ‘I couldn’t afford to lose this guy Slavitsky, who I know as Harry Nesbo. Plus the driver pissed me off.’

  ‘We noticed,’ Phyllida says drily.

  ‘Slavitsky had a list in the book he was carrying,’ Sebastian says.

  ‘The book you took,’ you say to Phyllida.

  ‘The book it was my mission to take,’ she says. She gestured at Sebastian. ‘We are part of the set-up.’

  ‘So are there antiques at that flea market more valuable than they look, or is there some stuff hidden away in a basement there?’

  ‘No basement,’ Sebastian says. ‘No antiques.’

  You look from one to the other.

  ‘People,’ Phyllida says quietly.