He borrowed bricks and wooden boxes from a hardware store on Fengyang Lu and took them to where Linyao remained gently rubbing the white elephant’s boulder-like forehead. He was standing still, swaying slightly, with his eyes half closed.
‘He’s almost asleep,’ the veterinarian said.
‘We’ve just got to persuade him to climb up onto this platform. Then he can sleep for as long as he likes,’ Joyce said.
‘He likes you best, Joyce. You go on one side, and I’ll go on the other.’
Between them the two women persuaded Nelson to mount Marker Cai’s wheeled pallet, and then the beast lowered himself down to his knees and toppled over into a sleeping posture, slumped on his left side. Joyce threw a blanket over him. ‘Okay, sleep tight,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’
Linyao was given the job of running interference. She moved to stand in front of the platform, ready to direct them and clear people out of their way.
Wong, McQuinnie and Cai leaned down and tried to push it along, but it wouldn’t budge—not a centimetre. They strained. They heaved. They lowered their heads and placed their feet against raised bits of paving stone for leverage. It simply would not move.
‘Shoot. There’s no way we can move this thing,’ Joyce said, her face red. ‘Not even an inch. I mean, Nelson must weigh tons. How are we going to push this thing for miles?’
Marker, sweat dripping down his face, said: ‘No need to push this for miles. We need to push it one metre only.’
‘Meaning…?’
‘One metre only. This is the secret of moving heavy weight with wheels. Just start it moving, and then the weight will carry itself. Linyao, you please help also. We count to three, all push. Yi. Er. San. Push!’
The four of them strained against the platform with all their strength—and it started to budge.
The wheels rumbled and squeaked on the pavement and the load was suddenly in motion. As it started to move, Joyce realised what Marker meant. It seemed impossibly heavy at first, but once it had momentum, it rolled along by itself. It went from a crawling pace to a steady canter very quickly. And once it was going, you no longer had to push particularly hard. You only had to fine-tune its journey, adding a push when the ground sloped up, slowing it when the ground sloped down, or nudging it to one side or the other if it needed to change direction.
Wong was fascinated—and delighted to have learned such an important life lesson from such a young man. If you were faced with a truly impossible task, a mountain to move, the only really important thing was to take the first step towards accomplishing it with sufficient determination. That in itself would set in motion the processes that would help you achieve the task. He must find a lesson in the Classics that taught this, and include it in his book. What he particularly liked about the principle was that it showed the power of the man who was in tune with the world. The man who relied on machines needed hundreds of units of horsepower to move a huge weight. The man in tune with natural physics used Heaven-given gravity to do the same job much more simply and cheaply.
They were rolling. Linyao raced ahead of them, clearing the pavements with shouts in Mandarin and Shanghainese.
They could hear the revving of the imported high-performance American cars being driven by the Secret Service agents a hundred or so metres away on Nanjing Xi Lu. But the drivers were disadvantaged by being on a log-jammed main road. They had to constantly force other vehicles off to the side to get through—and there were several points where the traffic was so tightly jammed that movement in any direction was impossible.
In contrast, Nelson and his team were moving at good speed along the pavements and gutters of Fengyang Lu. The pavements were relatively wide and mostly flat. There were slight inclines from time to time, but the momentum they built up enabled them to get over them with no trouble—so far.
‘Out of the way, out of the way,’ Linyao shrieked as the bizarre procession moved along. ‘Coming through, big load coming through.’
They skidded off Fengyang Lu onto a much wider thoroughfare.
‘Come,’ shouted Cai. ‘Down Central Tibet Lu.’
‘No. That will take us back to Renmin Park area,’ Wong replied.
‘No. We turn left after Number One Department Store. To Nanjing Dong Lu.’
‘Yes, yes, good-good, go-go,’ said the feng shui master.
They zoomed past another large signpost in Chinese and English. This one said: ‘Huangpu District will burst out with energy for the future development’.
Passing the Number One Department Store, they turned sharply to the left. Cai’s plan was brilliant, Wong decided: Nanjing Dong Lu was a pedestrian precinct. It was long, wide and smooth. It would be easy to push a wheeled platform along there. But there was no way that men in cars could follow. There were regular bollards and other obstacles specifically designed to make it difficult or impossible for vehicles to get into the precinct.
Better still, the precinct started with a downward slope. It was only a gentle gradient, but it was enough to speed up their progress to a fast sprint.
Wong, unable to keep up with the younger people, trailed behind in a state of shock. From the evidence of his ears, he was amazed to discover that they were actually increasing the distance between themselves and the US officials’ vehicles, which stood buzzing and angry in the gridlocked traffic just in front of the park, now almost half a kilometre behind them.
Dooley thumped the dashboard with both fists. ‘Is there no way we can git this traffic cleared?’
‘It’s difficult,’ said Ari Tadwacker, who was driving in short bursts as agents ran ahead of them trying to clear the space. ‘We asked the Chinese to clear the roads, but they said that there wasn’t much they could do. They’ve kept the road to the west clear all day for Presidential access to the Grand Theatre, but that means all the other roads are much more chock-a-block than usual. Then there’s the demo. I mean, this jam—it’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s worse than Bangkok.’
Dooley clenched his fists and ground his teeth. He was mentally writing the report he knew he would have to produce about this unbelievably ghastly afternoon. Bombs, terrorists, kidnappings—these things might work as excuses for their failure to remain in control of the situation. But being stuck in a traffic jam? There was no way a self-respecting ASAIC could even dare to mention that in a report. In the end, I failed to completely fulfil my duties because the traffic was really bad. He turned to look out of the left-hand window—and was horrified to see Commander Zhang speeding past them on a Forever brand bicycle! Zhang Xiumei turned and waved, giving him a dazzling smile before she disappeared through tiny gaps in the traffic ahead.
‘Goddam it, did you see that?’ Dooley shouted.
‘That police woman, sir?’
‘That’s Commander Zhang and she is travelling ten times as fast as we are, and she’s on a goddam Victorian penny farthing.’
It seemed criminally unfair. Dooley was sitting in his brand new Cadillac XLR, specially imported into Shanghai to provide motorised muscle for the mission. This car cost $77 000 plus $20 000 of Secret Service extras! And they had just been overtaken by his goddam Chinese counterpart on a goddam vehicle that he wouldn’t have paid ten bucks for in a goddam garage sale.
‘Why don’t we have some of them?’
‘Penny farthings, sir?’
‘Anything. Anything that can bloody well move.’
Dooley, losing his cool, stuck his head out of the window and screamed: ‘Move, move, move, damn you, move your butts out of mah way.’
But his performance merely made the other drivers on Nanjing Xi Lu turn around and stare at him, bringing forward movement to a complete halt.
The Acting Special Agent in Charge made a snap decision. He called the senior bomb disposal officer. ‘Donaldson. Dooley. Get me a bike. Big one. Your Harley. I’m on the main road behind the theatre, behind the park, stuck in a jam. The only way to move forward is on two wheels. If it is
not here in two minutes’ time, your butt is my breakfast. I’m starting to count right now. Over.’
Commander Zhang sped along on her bicycle, the wind in her face, reflecting, as Joyce had done the previous evening, on how in practice old technology was sometimes superior to the new stuff. Fifteen years ago, Shanghai road traffic had moved along at a steady 20 kilometres an hour on foot-powered vehicles. Now many people had cars—and vehicles crept along at five kilometres an hour in turbo-charged, computerised, traffic jams. Thank heaven for pedal power. Passing that strange American spy leader in his fancy, chunky racing car had been amusing.
The radio she had clipped to her bicycle handlebars, next to the old-fashioned thumb-rung bell, started to crackle.
‘Commander Zhang?’
‘Yes, Xin. I can hear you.’
‘Things are looking good. We have them surrounded. They are heading east along the Nanjing Dong Lu. You’re right behind them. We’ve got another unit coming west towards them from The Bund. And we’ve found a car not far from them—in fact, not far from where you are now. If you can get to the junction of Jiujiang Lu and the south bit of Guizhou Lu, near the Ramada Plaza Hotel, you’ll find Sergeant Xie waiting with a squad car. He’s looking out for you.’
‘Excellent work, Xin. I’m only about a hundred metres away from Jiujiang Lu now,’ she replied, bumping her bike onto the pavement.
Two minutes later, Commander Zhang had tucked the bicycle into the trunk of the car and was being driven along the roads parallel to the pedestrian precinct, confident that she would reach the women and the elephant well before the Americans. It would take a little thought: most of the side roads leading into the pedestrian precinct had steel bollards built into them to stop vehicular access. But not all of them.
‘Zhejiang Dong Lu crosses Nanjing Dong Lu,’ Zhang told the driver. ‘If we head for that junction, we can actually get the car into the pedestrian precinct. Then we’ve got them for sure.’
‘Vega? It’s Minnie.’
‘Yeah, wot, wot? I’m really busy now, honeychops. How’s it goin’ down your end?’
‘It’s all up, Vega, it’s all up.’ She gave a watery sniff.
‘Wot you talking about?’
‘Someone escaped. They called the cops. It was that feng shui guy Wong and the girl with him.’
‘Wot? I don’t believe this. I don’t believe—’
Minnie burst into tears. ‘They got out. And now the Public Security Bureau people have surrounded this place. We’ve locked ourselves in. But I don’t know how long we—’
‘Don’t worry, Minnie. Let me tell you somefink. That’s just a subsidiary job. That’s a small job compared to what’s goin’ down over here. Our names will be glorified in ’istory for ever more, fanks to what’s ’appening ’ere. I’m sorry your fing has gone down, but believe me, baby, it’s only a sideshow.’
‘Vega, I don’t want to go down in history. They’re going to do us for murder, Vega, do you understand? Murder and kidnapping. I don’t want to be part of anything else violent or which will kill people. None of us do. We’re Vegans, Vega, we—’ ‘Gotta go, babe, see yer.’ He rang off.
Memet turned to his deputy, Dilshat. ‘Shite. The vegan thing’s gone pear-shaped on us. Bloody typical. It was goin’ fine while I was runnin’ it, and the moment I leave someone else in charge, it bloody well collapses into a bloody heap of dung.’
‘Sorry, boss.’
‘Don’t matter. Those bloody bitches will get what’s coming to them. I hope the cops beat them black and blue and lock them up for years and years. It’s what they deserve for lettin’ me down.’
He slumped back into the expensive armchair and put his boots up on a delicate wine table. It was a shame the veggie project had collapsed, but it was not a big deal. He had only been using the veggie groups to get himself a good network in this town so they could pull off the operation they had been planning for the past year—ever since a date for a China–US summit had been announced. That project was not going to fail. He owed it to his family, to his cousins, to his people.
Memet, though raised in London, had been brought up in an atmosphere of bitterness and resentment against the Chinese government. The house in bland, chilly Crouch End had been such a step down for his parents, who had previously lived as royalty under the shadow of the sweeping plains and glorious mountains of Xinjiang. His father had continually stoked his children’s anger by telling them that they would have been kings or princes of a place bigger than Western Europe had not the Chinese invaders made their lives intolerable.
When he had first visited China himself, three years earlier, he had been taken to a Uyghur restaurant in Shanghai. His countrymen were there, dressed in ridiculous clothes, dancing and prancing like buffoons for the entertainment of a party of Chinese officials. He quickly learned that in the main cities of China, Uyghur restaurants were thought of as places to go for a laugh. You ate disgusting food from a shocking menu and watched primitive ethnic people cavort in colourful clothes. And the menus really were revolting, particularly to a vegetarian like himself. A standard Uyghur restaurant menu in Shanghai would offer kebabs and lamb pancakes, but people inevitably ordered the more bizarre items on the menu so that they could sneer at the weird stuff ethnic people ate. Adventurous diners would roar with laughter at the menu and then fashion themselves nightmare meals from it. They would typically start with Raw Cold Jellyfish (20 yuan), and then move on to Drunk Horse Intestines (25 yuan), before focusing on Raw, Cold Sheep’s Head (39 yuan).
Chinese and Westerners would laugh and gloat over the horrors of the menu, and then sneer at the dancers. The men would wear white or red Russian-style outfits with belts that were thicker and more bejewelled than anything Elvis ever wore in Las Vegas. The women would be subservient, well-covered up in trouser suits and hats, flitting around the restaurant laying down dishes for people to guffaw at.
On that first visit, Jappar had watched with morbid fascination. His father, sitting next to him, had tears rolling down his cheeks at the circus acts to which his noble people had been reduced.
Previously Jappar had felt distanced from his past, thinking of himself more as a Londoner than a Uyghur, but that evening something angry and cold was born inside him: a patriotic fury against the people who had turned a rich, proud people living in majestic mountains into an oppressed and poverty-stricken tribe of desperate souls selling their millennia-old traditions for a few paltry yuan.
And then he had met Zhong Xue Qin. Initially, he had nothing but contempt for the willowy Shanghainese activist who was causing trouble in the family-owned supermarkets run by his uncles, but underneath her slogans he quickly found much to admire: she hated the Chinese government just as he did. She was a passionate vegetarian just as he was. She knew how to channel her anger into fighting for what she believed in—something that he wanted desperately to learn to do.
They had become lovers, then a married couple, and then partners in crime. He had encouraged and financed her operations—including the raid on Shanghai Second Medical University that had killed her. Her death had driven him to suicidal despair for months. But he had emerged stronger, harder, meaner, and more determined to fight for his beliefs and the causes for which she had died. It was the Chinese government that had cruelly destroyed the ancient Uyghur culture. And it was in China that the cruellest meat-eaters dreamed up the most evil ways to torture and kill live animals. And so he had founded the Children of Vega, to revenge Xue Qin’s death and get China’s oppression of the Uyghur people right to the top of the international agenda.
And how better to achieve that than to kill the world’s two most powerful individuals: the pair of Presidents identified in his complex plan as Px2?
Bomb disposal officer Sam Donaldson arrived on the biggest bike they had. Dooley abandoned the Caddy XLR to Ari Tadwacker and climbed onto the back. ‘You drive. We’ll go together. We kin tock. Git on the sidewalk if you have to.’
Donalds
on twisted the handlebars and the 1450 cc Harley Davidson Electra-Glide Classic roared into life, skidding its 800 pounds of shiny heft smoothly up onto the pavement. It seemed effortless. Dooley felt like he was sitting on an intercontinental ballistic missile. Now this was American power at its best.
The bomb disposal expert was clearly still struggling to get a grasp on what was going on. He flipped up his visor and talked through the side of his mouth at the man behind him. ‘I know you heard something ticking inside the elephant, but how likely is it that there really is a bomb in the elephant?’ he shouted. ‘I mean, this could just be a trick that the Chinese are pulling, couldn’t it? Something to distract us so that they can get POTUS?’
‘Ah realise that. The whole thing cud be a set-up. A plot to kill POTUS. The trouble is, that makes it worse. Terrorists are bad enough, but to have the Chinese against us, here in their heartland—it don’t bear thinking about. We jest better pray—’ ‘Yeah, but what I mean is, do we know it’s a bomb for sure? The creature may just have, I don’t know, eaten a bloody alarm clock or something, you know what I mean? It sounds unlikely that anyone could put a bomb into a live animal.’
‘You’d need too much explosive material, you mean?’
Donaldson thought about this. ‘Well—I don’t know. You’d need a hell of a lot of material. I mean, to have a reasonably big effect.’
‘Plastic explosive?’
‘Got to be. Probably Semtex. If you had Semtex, I guess it could be done.’
‘How do you figure that?’
Donaldson saw a gap suddenly open up in the traffic and he skipped through it, powering a good hundred yards before having to ease off and sneak into a space between two buses, creeping forward.
‘Semtex is malleable,’ the bomb expert continued. ‘You could take the stuff and flatten it to fit in the fat layer, under the skin, under one of the layers of epidermis, I suppose. I mean, arguably they could even shape it to fit around the creature’s organs in some way. That’s why plastic explosive is used so much in demolition—you can flatten it or shape it in any way you want and get the bang exactly where you want it.’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 23