‘So you’re telling me that it really is possible.’
‘It might be. If you want God’s honest truth, I reckon it just might be. A thin slab of plastic explosive might work,’ Donaldson said, adding: ‘It’s probably Semtex A.’
‘Relevance?’
‘Hard to detect and, until recently, quite easy to get hold of. Comes from Semtin, a place in Bohemia.’
‘There’s a real place called Bohemia?’
‘You live and learn, Doolster. The stuff is made by Explosia, a company in Bohemia. Semtex A is strong stuff: it’s ninety-five per cent PETN, which stands for Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, and five per cent RDX, which stands for Research and Development substance X.’
‘Sounds like something from a James Bond movie.’
‘In the explosives business, true life is way weirder than any James Bond movie. The story goes that a military research and development department created the stuff, and then temporarily labelled it RDX while they thought up a proper name. They blew themselves to pieces before they came up with a name, so RDX is what we’re stuck with.’
‘How much Semtex do you need to cause a big bang?’
‘Hardly any. That’s the problem. That’s why it’s such a headache. With two fifty grams, you can take down a 747.’
‘Geez.’
‘A single suicide bomber can carry sixty pounds of explosive. But we’re talking about an elephant. If they had a hundred or two hundred pounds of the stuff in there…’ ‘You could cause a pretty big bang.’
‘Yeah, I guess you could.’
The bus on their left moved slightly, making a gap big enough for the Harley to squeeze through. Donaldson spun the accelerator and the Harley sped back onto the pavement and roared forward.
They nipped nimbly between the bollards blocking vehicles from proceeding into the Nanjing Dong Lu pedestrian precinct and revved up, sending crowds of shoppers and sightseers scrambling out of the way.
‘Thank God. Now we got ’em,’ Dooley said, the ghost of a smile finally illuminating his cracked lips.
‘Does the name Vega mean anything to you?’ Sinha was sitting in Shang Dan’s luxurious apartment, a minimalist loft-style residence hidden behind a red-brick façade in Old Town.
Shang Dan stroked his long thin beard and considered the question. Dressed in silk robes, the local ming shu expert had clearly modelled his image on the statue of Confucius in the temple on nearby Wenmiao Lu.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
This was followed by a lengthy pause. Sinha said: ‘Would you like to share it with me?’
‘Hmm? Oh yes. Of course, of course.’
But nothing more was forthcoming for at least a minute. Shang Dan, like a nervous witness undergoing cross-examination in a court, liked to think about his answers before delivering them. ‘Vega is a star,’ he said eventually. ‘It is in the constellation called Lyra. It is a key element of our astrological system, along with the Pole Star. We use Vega in many of our calculations in the ming shu.’
‘Would there be any political relevance to an activist of some sort naming themselves after the star Vega?’
Shang Dan thought quietly for a minute. ‘No.’
Sinha sat back in his chair. This was proving frustrating. He seemed unable to elicit any information from the astrologer that could prove useful. What other line of inquiry could he take? Perhaps he should lay the entire situation before the man and see what conclusions he drew from it.
‘There have been a number of odd things happening over the past day,’ he said. ‘We need to find out whether they are connected and where they are leading. First, Mr Wong’s office was unexpectedly demolished. Then, an associate of Joyce McQuinnie, Mr Wong’s assistant, had her child kidnapped. This was followed by Mr Wong and his assistant being kidnapped by another branch of the same gang—a gang which appears to be run by someone named Vega. The gang is very interested in the meeting of the two Presidents.’
Shang Dan pondered for a while, and then shook his head. ‘This is Shanghai. Offices get demolished every day. Kidnappings are not so common, but they happen. The newspapers usually do not report them. Everyone is interested in the meeting of the two Presidents. Everyone in the world. And Vega. That name means nothing to me.’
Sinha was disheartened. But then something that Joyce had said when he had dropped Linyao in the city centre stuck in his mind. She had told him to find out anything he could about Vega. And she had added: ‘Oh yeah, Wong says it might not be Vega. It might be pronounced weega.’
‘What about weega? Does the word weega mean anything to you?’
This time the man’s response was immediate. His eyebrows rose. ‘Uyghur?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Minority tribe. Good food. That reminds me. I am feeling hungry. But the Uyghur people are associated with social unrest. Bombs and things.’
‘Ah. Now I think we are getting somewhere.’
Wong looked around and noticed that a People’s Armed Police car had moved onto the pavement and was rapidly gaining on them. ‘Aiyeeaaa! Police is coming! Move faster, move faster.’
Cai and McQuinnie were straining: they had reached a slight uphill gradient and the platform had become extremely heavy. Wong threw his hands onto the elephant’s blanket-covered butt and started to help them push.
Out of the corner of her reddening, sweat-and-salt-filled eyes, Joyce noticed that they were passing what had become one of her favourite haunts in her first week in the city: Mo Jo’s, a café on their right. ‘Special: cappuccino with warm sweet potato and chocolate cake with ice cream, RMB50’, the blackboard said. She would have loved to stop for a drink— although she might have given the potato and chocolate cake a miss. Joyce loved shopping and it felt weird to her to be passing through one of the most famous shopping streets in the world and not be loitering in front of the shop windows. On the other side of the road there was a string of Shanghai boutiques. Several had plaques in the window saying: ‘Shanghai Tourism Consumption Recommendable Spot’. She also noted, out of the corner of her eye, the Shanghai Elephant Dressmaking Shop. Not a very enticing name to women shoppers, surely—and almost as bad as Hong Kong’s Hung Fat Brassiere Company.
‘Let’s go in here,’ Marker shouted, indicating a shopping mall entrance on their right. ‘Must not stop it moving. Must not lose momentum.’
‘Okay, but hang on a minute,’ said Joyce, pulling something out of her pocket. She had several of Megiddo’s smoke capsules with her. ‘I nicked these from the magic guy’s box.’ She pulled out the ignition strings and threw them onto the ground. They exploded silently and purple smoke started to pump out.
With a loud grunt, Marker pushed the platform at an angle and the structure moved to the right, sliding with a bump into a somewhat grubby air-conditioned shopping mall filled with displays of cheap clothes.
A dense cloud of purple-pink smoke drifted over the pavement. Commander Zhang’s police car roared past the shopping mall entrance, lost in the tinted smokescreen. The car emerged from zero visibility to see a street stall selling toys and camera film directly in front of them. The driver, Sergeant Xie Zhen Ting, slammed on the brakes but there was not enough time to stop. The car hit the stall before screeching to a halt and spinning around. A roar of anger erupted from the stallholder, who had stepped out of the kiosk to smoke a cigarette and narrowly missed death. She and several other vendors gathered around the police vehicle and started screaming through the window. Shanghai citizens might normally be respectful of the authorities, but using a car to mow down people’s licensed businesses on a pedestrian precinct—that was well beyond the pale, even for uniformed officers.
Zhang wound down the window to bark at the crowd to move away. But an old man rushed over to the car. He grabbed her lapels and pulled them so that her face was centimetres away from his. ‘Idiot girl—you should be locked up. You drove through my wife’s shop. You will pay, cop or no cop.’
‘Plea
se get your hands off me.’
‘You will pay, idiot police woman.’
‘Look, I’m sorry about your shop. You will be compensated.
You must file a claim.’
‘You will pay now.’
‘Just file a claim with—’ ‘You will pay now.’
The crowd took up his chant: ‘Pay now. Pay now. Pay now.’
Commander Zhang bashed Xie on the chest with her gloved hand. ‘Money,’ she barked. Senior members of the paramilitary forces in China often carried wads of cash for paying stool pigeons, distributing bribes and so on. Xie peeled off a few notes and Zhang offered them through the window.
The old man spat on them.
The crowd expressed the same thought verbally: ‘Give more. Give more. Give more. Give more.’
Zhang grabbed the entire wad of money out of Xie’s hands and placed it in the man’s hands. ‘Here. Now move.’
No one moved, but Sergeant Xie yanked the car into reverse gear and started to move it, unceremoniously bashing people out of the way. ‘Sorry,’ Zhang shouted. ‘Sorry. Please move.’
The crowd cursed them with their hands and mouths as the sergeant disentangled the car from the debris of the stall.
‘I think they went into the building behind us,’ said Xie. ‘We can’t follow.’
‘That’s what you think,’ said Zhang. ‘Switch places.’ She elbowed him hard and slid into his seat, while he got out of the car and ran around the front to get into the passenger seat. Before he had even closed his door, she floored the accelerator and skidded the car back the way they had come, and then spun the wheel, driving straight into the shopping mall. Screams filled the narrow space as the car entered the main corridor and people threw themselves against the walls to let it pass.
‘They can’t be more than a few metres ahead of us,’ Zhang crowed.
13
In ancient China, the fire people of Panyi Lake used to have contests. Whoever could extinguish the temple’s ceremonial floating candles quickest without water would be the headman for the following year.
The Rong family used wooden caps on long sticks to snuff out the flames. They always won the contest.
The wise man went to the Xin family and said: ‘I have a new invention. It is called the bellows. You can use it to puff air at each candle and blow it out.’
The Xin family found that it worked. They bought the bellows from the wise man.
When the Rong family heard about this, they said to the wise man: ‘Make a very big set of bellows for us.’
The wise man did so.
On the day of the fire contest, the temple abbots made the biggest ceremonial fire the temple had ever had. They grouped dozens of large candles together to make powerful flames and set them afloat in the temple pond. The Xin family used their small bellows to blow them out one by one.
Then it was the turn of the Rong family with their giant bellows. But the more they blew air, the brighter and more fiercely the fire burned.
Blade of Grass, if the scale of your response does not match the scale of the problem, your problems grow instead of shrink. Killing a gnat with a rock hammer breaks your table.
Remember that a glass of water is a drink; enough glasses of water is a river; too many rivers is a flood.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
Wong was not just skinny, he was skeletal. Yet here he was, using his weight to move a mountain—almost literally move a mountain, for what was a sleeping elephant but a huge, climbable mound of organic matter? Part of him had still not finished pondering the miracle of how four smallish human beings could transport this tremendous weight. It was one of those principles that provided an interesting mental game for him to play with. It was like rolling a boulder down a hill. It was tough to budge it initially, but once it had begun to roll, it would move of its own accord—and you eventually have the opposite problem: how to stop it moving.
Inside the shopping mall the floor was flat, and the rolling structure had not lost its momentum. The polished granite surface allowed the platform, with its forty-eight rattling, screeching wheels, to move along swiftly. An obese, gaping security guard gave chase, blinking his eyes in disbelief.
Linyao, hoarse and exhausted, had joined the team pushing the platform, while Joyce took over the role of running ahead, shouting at people to get out of the way. She had no idea what the Chinese was for ‘Please move aside, there’s an elephant coming,’ but it didn’t seem to matter. Waving her hands and shouting: ‘Out of the way, please, out of the way,’ seemed to do the trick. Indeed, had she known the right Chinese words, they would probably have done more harm than good, as people would have stopped to point at the lao wai running along and trying to speak Mandarin. As it was, a trundling platform alone was unfortunately diversion enough to cause a significant number of people to stop and stare—even when it was heading directly towards them. ‘Move, please, move,’ Joyce shrieked at people who stood open-mouthed as they were about to be run over. Some people even squatted down on their haunches to watch themselves get flattened, and almost had to be kicked out of the path.
When fresh screams erupted behind them, Wong turned to see what was happening. A strange, low, tearing sound could be heard from the location at which they had entered—and shouts and cries from the same direction. He listened intently—and realised it was the stop-start revving sound of a car engine echoing off the hard-surfaced walls of the mall. ‘Aiyeeaa, ji-seen,’ he said out loud. Those crazy Chinese police officers had driven their car into the building. They were driving along the corridor, nudging people out of the way. In a speeding vehicle, they would catch up in a matter of seconds.
He was about to share these thoughts with the others when an ear-splitting howl filled the shopping mall. The police chief had turned her siren on, causing a diatonic wail to echo around the building like the cry of a giant, wounded wolf. Looking back, Wong realised that it was a smart move, as people turned to see where the sound was coming from—and then leapt to safety in shop doorways as they saw the police car flying down the corridor at them.
‘They’re inside. Inside the building. They’re coming,’ Marker Cai gasped.
‘I know, I know.’
The cart reached the end of the corridor and rolled into an open space—a high-ceilinged area used for temporary shows and displays, the current one being a school concert. Seconds after entering it, they heard Joyce’s voice from in front: ‘Whoa, guys, whoa. We have to do a left. We have to do a left.’
Wong swung his head around the corner of the mound of sleeping elephant to see that they did indeed have to slow down. There was a large escalator directly in front of them. They would have to move left or right, and the corridor to the left looked notably wider, since the right side had seats spilling out of a café, narrowing the space. But slowing down meant that the police would catch up with them for sure.
‘Whoa, guys, you gotta stop and take a left,’ Joyce repeated.
Cai raced round to the front of the platform and managed to slow its forward movement.
At that moment, the police car skidded into the main atrium of the mall. It was now just 100 metres away from them. The vehicle halted and stalled as a woman with a mobile phone and a stroller crossed its path. The shopping mall’s own security guard, who had been chasing Nelson and his group, was now in a state of confusion and was rushing towards the police car.
Wong found himself staring directly into the angry eyes of Commander Zhang, who was revving the accelerator, using the car engine’s roar to scare shoppers out of the way.
‘What do we do?’ Marker said.
‘This,’ Wong replied, whipping the blanket off the elephant. ‘Elephant,’ he called out in Shanghainese at the top of his voice. ‘Come and see the elephant. Real elephant, come and see.’
Two families walking nearby ran over to get a look, and were soon followed by a school party taking a short cut through the building on
their way back from an arts museum. An elephant was much more interesting than anything else they had seen that day. People poured out of a nearby shoe shop and filled the corridor.
‘Come see an elephant, elephant, real live elephant,’ Wong continued to holler at the top of his voice.
The word spread. Two hundred children who had been forced to watch the school concert in the atrium leapt out of their plastic seats and poured into the internal avenue where the elephant lay asleep on its platform.
The police car, which had been creeping forward, came to a halt as a river of infants poured into the increasingly crowded space between it and the elephant.
Commander Zhang restarted the siren and honked the horn at the same time. She leaned out of the driver’s window and shrieked: ‘Out of the way! Move away, move away.’
But the rush to see the elephant had turned into a stampede.
Zhang and Xie stopped the car and scrambled to get out, aiming to pursue their quarry on foot.
‘Time to go,’ said Wong, and all four of them started to push again. Fired by the knowledge that they actually did have the strength to get this seemingly impossible weight moving, they quickly managed to start the platform rolling, this time angled to the left. The rolling show quickly recaptured its momentum, chased by dozens of small children, and was soon speeding down a mercifully straight corridor towards a source of bright light which they hoped was an exit.
Wong looked behind them. He saw that Commander Zhang had leapt back behind the wheel, leaving Sergeant Xie to manhandle the crowds of school children out of the way. ‘Move, brats, move,’ the officer shouted, waving his pistol and kicking at them.
Ahead of them, the light did prove to be an exit—albeit one with three stone steps. Nelson and his handlers raced out of the other side of the mall and bumped down the steps, losing a few wheels on the way. They emerged onto a dark, narrow street and, thanks to a slight slope on the pavement, rumbled straight into the road, knocking over a scooter rider and sending a number of cyclists spinning away. The platform swiftly moved past a startled traffic cop just as the lights changed and cars surged through the centre of the junction. With a mammoth effort from Cai, Nelson’s trolley moved slightly to the right and neatly slid up a cambered kerb onto the opposite pavement.
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 24