Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  “He’s still down at his shop,” the sergeant replied. “We tried to get him to come in but he says he’s got orders to fill and refuses to move.”

  “Well, we’d better get down there right now and persuade him that he won’t be making any more suits once Dai Choi finds out what he knows.”

  Jonny got up from the desk and headed for the door.

  “There’s more, sir,” the sergeant said, putting a hand on Jonny’s arm to restrain him. “We’ve picked Dai Choi up on PIS and if you think Aw Boon’s evidence stands up, there’s a chance to pull him in before he knows what we’ve got.”

  Jonny opened the folder his sergeant handed him and took out the single sheet which contained a simple three-line message: Dai Choi, Hong Kong Citizen. Travelling on Thai Airways Flight No. TA 625, Depart Istanbul 14.30 Arrive Hong Kong 10.50.

  Terrorist attacks on aircraft have led to a new generation of computers designed not just to provide passengers with boarding passes but also to forward those details to the country of destination so that any names or suspicious characteristics can be matched with the police and immigration database. Known as the Passenger Identification System, which had generated the unfortunate acronym PIS, the data had proved an invaluable weapon not just in countering terrorism. Police forces and intelligence agencies were now able to match passenger information against watch lists for drug-traffickers, money-launderers or just simple criminals. In the international business that crime has become it is a step in the inevitable development of a computerized intelligence response that truly straddles the globe.

  As PIS had coughed out Dai Choi’s name, so the Hong Kong police computer had matched his name with the identical name in their watch file and flagged it for the computer operator. From there, it was a short step to Jonny’s desk.

  “Istanbul. That’s outside his usual haunts,” he thought out loud. There was a pause while he mulled over the possibilities. “OK. Two things. Get a pic of Dai wired to the Istanbul police and see if they have anything on him. Second, let’s get to Aw Boon and see what he has. If it’s as good as you say, then we can go pay our friend Dai Choi a visit.”

  Aw Boon was everything a Chinese tailor should be, Jonny thought: small, old, wizened, shoulders bowed after so many years hunched over the cutting table. But his eyes were bright and his anger still real after the insult of having a body dumped outside his shop. After years of selling his suits, skirts and shirts to American and British tourists, his English was good enough to allow Jonny the luxury of not having to practise his fractured Mandarin.

  “I saw the man in the Mercedes quite clearly, Inspector,” he said, confirming Jonny’s optimism. Jonny held out a black and white photograph of Dai Choi, taken at a recent Jockey Club ball.

  “Yes, yes. That’s him. Although he wasn’t wearing a dinner jacket at the time. He had on one of those baggy suits the young people wear these days.” He gave a faint shudder of disapproval.

  Aw Boon was the perfect witness for a case like this and Jonny was determined not to let him go. He had no immediate family, was law-abiding and found the activities of the Triads deeply offensive. Adding in the insult of the body on his doorstep, the tailor was angry enough to set the law to work. It took ten minutes of persuasion to convince Aw Boon that he would be safer with the police than in his shop. Without police protection, Jonny told him, it was certain that Dai Choi would come after him. With police protection, he could continue making suits and then have a new identity.

  “Gordon, you take Mr Aw Boon back to the Arsenal and I’ll go to Kai Tak and call on Dai Choi,” he told his sergeant.

  The journey from Central on Hong Kong Island to Kai Tak airport on Kowloon can take over an hour in what seems to be a never-ending rush hour. But this time the lights were with them and there were no accidents in the Cross Harbour Tunnel, which links the island with the mainland. Jonny had a twenty-minute wait until the Thai Airways jet banked in over the city for the landing that all international pilots dreaded. Five minutes after touchdown the aircraft was at the gate. As Dai Choi stepped out of first class and on to the walkway he was greeted by the familiar sight of Jonny Turnbull.

  “Inspector Turnbull. You shouldn’t have taken the trouble,” he began with a small smile. “I can find my own way home, thank you all the same.”

  Jonny signalled to the two airport policemen who gripped Dai Choi just above the elbows and swung him away from the crowd and in through an unmarked door. Inside was a simple interrogation room. Dai Choi sat down without being asked and lit a Gauloise Jeune, exhaling blue smoke in a calculated insult as the tendrils wound their way across the room and into Jonny’s face.

  “Whatever you want, Inspector, if it is mine to give, you may have it,” Dai Choi began. “Money? Take what’s in my wallet. An apartment? We have a wide choice available and I am sure we can offer you the rates which many of your colleagues find so attractive. A bank account abroad? Just ask and I’ll open one for you with a healthy starting balance.”

  It was a serious offer which Dai knew would not be accepted. But it was also an offer made by a calculating man who believed in taking and holding the initiative. The gambit usually worked, but this time — for the first, wonderful time — Jonny felt in control.

  “As usual, you are generous with your offers, Dai Choi,” Jonny replied, a slight smile on his face. “This time, I too have an offer, or perhaps I should say an invitation — for you to come down to headquarters for a little chat.”

  “Oh, and just what do we have to talk about, Inspector?”

  “The matter of the murder of the Grass Sandal. You will recall we discussed that at the Mandarin and you claimed to know nothing about it, despite the fact that your trademark was on the body,” said Jonny, gesturing to Dai Choi’s thumb ring. “I knew then as I know now that you killed that man. What is different today is that this time you have been very careless. There is an eyewitness, a man who saw you with the body, who can clearly identify you. What is more, he is one of the few people you and your henchmen haven’t reached. He is prepared to testify.”

  “Impossible.” The rebuttal was harsh, underlined by the grinding of the cigarette in the ashtray as Dai Choi stood to leave. “The witness is a liar. I was nowhere near wherever it was the murder happened and I’ll produce twenty witnesses who will say so.”

  For the first time in their long relationship, Jonny had managed to induce in Dai Choi just a fraction of the fear he routinely induced in others. It was a moment he had wanted for a long time and he was pleased the gangster’s confident veneer was so easily scratched.

  “Cuff him,” he ordered the constable. “We’ll caution him at the Arsenal.”

  He turned to leave the office. As he reached for the handle, the door opened. He recognized Inspector Richard Dearlove of the airport police and saw, too, the anxious look. He followed him out into the corridor, shutting the door behind him.

  “I’m afraid it’s bad news, Jonny,” Dearlove began. “Your sergeant was taking a witness to the Arsenal this morning?”

  Jonny nodded, his stomach already knotting with the foreknowledge of disaster.

  “Their car drove into an ambush just off Pottinger Street. Two cars, four guys with machine-guns. They didn’t stand a chance. The driver and the witness are both dead; your sergeant is pretty badly injured and may not make it. I’m sorry.”

  Grief mixed with anger and frustration had a taste so familiar that Turnbull’s senses were overwhelmed for an instant. Then the thoughts came rushing in. “So near. I was so bloody close to getting the bastard,” he muttered. But once again he had been trumped by the corruption that riddled the Arsenal from top to bottom. Christ, it didn’t even require Dai Choi to be around to issue the orders. His finks knew what he wanted and simply passed on what they thought he needed to know and then his lieutenants acted.

  He pushed his hand through his hair, took a deep breath and then walked back into the interrogation room. “I’ve received some new informatio
n and for the moment you’re free to go,” he told Dai Choi, gesturing to the constable to remove the handcuffs.

  “Your witness get cold feet, Inspector? Or perhaps he got some concrete feet?” Dai Choi chuckled lightly, all his old confidence restored.

  “By the way, Dai Choi, how was Istanbul?” asked Jonny, seeking to salvage something from the wreckage of the morning.

  The Chinese lit another cigarette and exhaled noisily. “I was in Istanbul to sample some of that new Caspian caviar they have started importing from the Republics. Capitalism has done wonders for the business: quality is up and prices are down. You should make sure you try some next time you’re over there.”

  Dai Choi pushed past Jonny, opened the door and strolled out into the corridor, leaving the door open behind him. Jonny watched the broad back until it vanished around the corner, wishing that just once he could bury his principles and shoot until the back was blood and the body was on the floor in front of him. The headquarters of the Emniyet Mudurlugu, Turkey’s Security Police, is a crumbling brown building in the Fatih suburb of Istanbul. Were it not for such a shoddy edifice, its location would make it the most prized police headquarters in the world with the magnificent Topkapi palace towering behind and the blue of the Sea of Marmara in front. The decayed state of the building is an indication of the low esteem in which the police are held in Turkey. But bad pay and poor conditions have not stopped the import of technology essential in the face of the increasing sophistication of the drug-smugglers and international arms dealers who call Istanbul home. The fax of Dai Choi’s photograph had been received that morning at the fourth-floor international liaison centre and fed into the computer data bank which matches picture to picture in the same way as other systems can match voices or fingerprints.

  Two years earlier, the son of an American congressman on a summer tour of Europe had arrived in Istanbul to get a brief taste of Eastern culture. He had wandered into the Taksim district, been picked up by a gorgeously dressed and extremely attractive woman and taken to Valentino’s nightclub. When a hand wandered up the woman’s thigh and discovered bulges where there should have been soft curves, a fight had broken out and the young man had been knifed. Although the wound was not fatal, it was enough to cause the congressman to call the US ambassador who in turn complained to the Minister of Interior who passed the buck to the police with a demand that something be done about the lawlessness in the Taksim area which was hurting the tourist industry.

  Police patrols were stepped up and cars now regularly cruise through the pedestrian precinct to reassure tourists and warn the crooks. But action stopped short of going inside Valentino’s, which would have been seen as an unnecessary provocation to the many pillars of the Istanbul community who pass through the doors each week. Instead, a surveillance camera was inserted in the sign advertising the Bilsak Jazz Club on the opposite side of the road. All those going in or out of the club were photographed and the pictures dumped in the police data base.

  Within an hour of the fax arriving in Istanbul, the image had been matched with a photograph of Dai Choi taken two days earlier. There was regular contact between the police and the club’s owner who cooperated with them in return for tolerance of some of the club’s more unusual activities. The owner confirmed that the Chinese had met with a well-known drug dealer and arms supplier called Selim; their waiter had heard little of the conversation: England was mentioned, there was talk of sailing.

  Five hours after Jonny had sent his original message and only two hours after he returned to the office following his trip to the airport, the reply from the Turkish police was on his desk complete with a brief biography of Selim and the Spiders, showing their influence in the international drugs business.

  The conclusion seemed clear: Dai Choi was trying to expand the influence of the White Lotus Triad with the help of Turkish drug-dealers. Turnbull assumed that Dai Choi was setting up a major drug deal and that the goods would arrive by boat in Britain. The information appeared to be confirmed when British Airways alerted the police that Dai Choi had booked a ticket to Britain for the following week.

  That night Jonny arrived back at the apartment in time for supper. He was in a foul mood, the news about Dai Choi’s travel plans had done nothing to relieve the depression of a truly awful day. After the debacle at the airport, he had returned to Hong Kong and gone to the hospital to see Gordon. He wasn’t allowed into the intensive care unit and could only peer anxiously through the square of glass in the door. The doctors had removed ten bullets from Gordon’s body and he had lost a leg. He would live but it was the end of his career.

  As he looked across the table at Lisu he no longer saw the waif he had fallen in love with, the young Chinese girl whose innocence had captured his heart. The vulnerability which had provoked his love had vanished. He had come to loathe the hurt he could see in her eyes, and hate himself too, for it was his fault. Before Sam had died, they had been so happy, the relationship as perfect as a mixed marriage can be in a country where such events are commonplace.

  They had met when he had interrogated her after a riot in the refugee camp had resulted in two stabbings. Such incidents were common enough but killings were actually quite unusual. Both the guards and the camp inmates knew that certain social boundaries were essential if order was to be maintained in the overcrowded camp and so murder was out of bounds. But this time the camp stewards had been unable to hold the gangs back.

  She had appeared before him, haggard, dirty and defensive. The interrogation had been brief; pointless really. She had told him nothing, obeying the unwritten camp rule of non-cooperation with the British officials. But there had been something about her; her huge, black eyes in the emaciated face had stared at him in fascination and fear, but her answers had been determined, exposing the strength of character under the dirt. He had been intrigued and returned the next day to see her again.

  This time, there had been real fear in her eyes. She was the only one of the women to be called back again and she was certain that a second meeting meant trouble.

  She spoke no English and he no Chinese, either Mandarin or dialect, and so they had to work through an interpreter, a painful and lengthy business, where the emotion of a sentence became a dry string of words that often lost much of their meaning.

  He never really understood what drove him on after that second meeting. Perhaps he was simply lonely in a foreign country; perhaps her vulnerability appealed to him; perhaps it was a subconscious fantasy to have a Chinese woman. But whatever the reasons, he came back the next day and this time he ordered the camp supervisor to make her presentable and he dismissed the interpreter.

  The difference was astonishing. The dark hair that had been lank and streaked with the brown of dust and dirt was a lustrous black, falling to her shoulders. Her face had the fiat features of people from the Eastern provinces with almost no eyebrows and tiny eyelashes. (He would discover later that the rest of her body was also practically hairless, which he found very exciting.)

  When he stood up to greet her, he saw how small she was, her tiny frame only just coming up to his shoulder. But the camp organizers had loaned her a pale blue silk shirt and a pair of baggy peasant’s trousers. He could see that she had a tiny waist, small, tight buttocks and small breasts that he tried and failed to discern through the shift.

  That day and for two weeks afterwards, they struggled to communicate, the language barrier creating an enforced intimacy as he touched her to point to an object, or they shared the laughter at a mistake in interpretation or understanding. It was her laugh that he first fell in love with. She would throw her head back, stretching her neck and opening her mouth wide to expose teeth that had not rotted or fallen out like those of so many of her contemporaries. She was so filled with vitality and good humour that he wanted to catch her enthusiasm in the hope that some would rub off on him.

  Those were the days when refugees were allowed to stay in Hong Kong after the bureaucracy had processed t
hem, fie knew that for her and perhaps for her relatives inside the camp he represented a ticket to freedom. But he never thought her pleasure in his company was faked.

  Instead, they really did like each other and he believed she had grown to love him.

  Once she was free of the camp, she had come to live with him, at first as mistress and then as wife. The promise of those first few days had been fully realized. As she became fluent in English and he in Mandarin, they were able to talk and share thoughts and ambitions. She had proved remarkably experienced at sex but she had refused to talk about her past life at all and so he had never learned where or with whom she had gained her knowledge.

  When Sam was born, their life together reached new heights, especially as his professional life was going well. Joining the Organized Crime Unit seemed like a sound career move and the threats against him and his family were little more than routine — everybody suffered them. But what Jonny didn’t realize was that behind the macho bravado, everyone else paid attention and made the compromises necessary to survive and prosper.

  It was natural that he had blamed himself for Sam’s death. After the grief had lessened, Lisu tried to persuade him to try for another child but he couldn’t persuade himself to take the risk. He couldn’t bear the responsibility of bringing another child into the world who might die because of him.

  Lisu suggested they head back to England but he refused, his obsession with Dai Choi still fresh and the idea of revenge a real goal that he was sure could be achieved. His guilt and rejection of her had driven a wedge between them that gradually became a chasm. Now they had settled into a routine where familiarity sustained a marriage that was little more than a convenience.

  He had arrived in Hong Kong fresh from the police force in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The opportunity of a few years in the Far East had seemed exotic and exciting, offering opportunities that he would never have policing the slums of Benwell and Blaydon. He had happily left the city he loved, for it had been butchered by the social engineering ideas of planners with no understanding of community, and he had been made to feel welcome in an environment where the European policemen, whatever their background, formed an elite club, an Us-and-Them society based not on education and accent but on race. The local police, however well qualified, were always sergeants, and the Europeans always officers. It had been that way since the last century and each side had grown comfortable with the tradition.