John Burdett - Vulture Peak

I look nervously at the CCTV cameras, but Chan claims to have neutralized them. Instead of the front door, he takes me to the back of the house and points to a shuttered window on the second floor. I stand while he climbs on my shoulders and manages to hoist himself up to the window ledge. His burglary skills are so well honed, he has opened the shutters and the window in moments. I walk back to the front of the house to wait. Now there is a sound of bolts, and the front door opens. With all shutters and doors closed, it is dark inside the house, despite that the sun has started to appear in the east.

Chan takes out a pencil flashlight. “I had to cut the electricity where it enters the building,” he explains. He gives the impression of familiarity with the house’s purpose. He traces the frame of the front door with his flashlight. “See anything unusual?”

“Looks like the doorway has been enlarged.”

“Right. Why?” I shrug. “Hospitals also have extrawide doorways, to allow for the passage of gurneys flanked by medical staff.” I flash him a look. “I knew three things: a place like this must exist; it could not be in Hong Kong or I would have found it; you would sooner or later lead me to it.”

“What do you call your technique, parasitical policing? You could have admitted you were riding on my back.”

He sighs. “Still the medieval mind-set, the fixed cosmology, the stunted Old Testament sense of truth and justice, right and wrong. Ever hear of cloud policing?”

“What?”

“It’s going to be the next phase in humanity’s descent. No one cop will have all the evidence-it will be shared out among significant players. A cop will need to maintain high-level contacts, like a diplomat. Guilt will be only one factor in any investigation and by no means conclusive. Negotiation, relative politico-socio-economic status, guanxi, all become relevant.”

“Did you take your lithium yet today?”

He grunts. “You don’t believe me.”

I lose it and hiss at him, “What’s to believe? Every time I meet you you’re someone else.”

“That also is a feature of modern policing. I believe we already touched on it. A fixed sense of personal identity will be a fatal impediment in law enforcement of the future. A murder squad detective will have also to be a murderer in some sense. See?”

“No identity, no loyalty, no rulebook?”

“Oh dear,” Chan says, and shakes his head.

“You need to meet Vikorn.”

“I have,” Chan says with a smile. “Medium height, in his sixties, prowls instead of walks, a criminal genius almost on a level with Mao, if I was not mistaken.”

I’m shocked. “Where?”

“China,” Chan says. “Don’t worry, he wouldn’t recognize me. I was just some little cop in deep background.” I scratch my jaw. “You need to stop trying to work it out. No one person has all the answers.”

“Not even the Yips?”

“Those little girls? So long as they’re allowed to be as naughty as they like, they don’t ask questions either. They don’t know.”

“Cloud killing?”

“You could say that.”

I follow Chan in his examination of the house. Now we are standing in what was once a bedroom with a view over the mountain. It is empty, like all the others we have checked: no people, no furniture. We return to the ground floor and notice a new hole in the wall. On examination it turns out to be a doorway that we missed because it is designed to be invisible when shut. It obviously leads to a cellar. We stare at each other: Someone must have gone down or come out while we were checking the house.

I watch Chan become seduced by the big black rectangle presented by the open door. It smells musty when we poke our heads into the cavity. A set of raw concrete stairs leads downward, like an invitation to sink into a lightless ocean of infinite depth. Only the inspector would find it irresistible.

“I’m going down,” Chan says. He raises an eyebrow at me. “Why don’t you stay here where it’s safe, Third-World Cop?”

I groan and follow.

The underground room is a kind of operating theater. The stairs drop down into the huge chamber with-so far as I can make out-a dome-shaped roof. It is as vast as an emperor’s tomb. Chan’s pencil flashlight cannot penetrate from one end to the other. Little by little Chan edges forward while I cover his back.

There is a bank of refrigerators against one wall, shelves full of bandages, disinfectants, anesthetics, boxes labeled CYCLOSPORINE. There are five stainless-steel gurneys with drainage outlets, two operating tables side by side, red blankets, and some high-tech electronic gadgets on portable stainless-steel tables, including what I suppose are three heart monitors. It is cool down here, and there is a slight breeze from a ventilation system.

“They even have a backup generator,” Chan says, pointing, “just like a real hospital. Look, see how close the two operating tables are? They wouldn’t get away with that in a legal clinic-the donor and donee have to be decently separated. In the parallel trade, of course, it’s all no-frills.”

“So who are the donors?”

Chan stares at me in the gloom. “Don’t you see? Anybody. Anybody at all. A young person coming home from school in India, a minor felon from China, a Western tourist led into a trap in Malaysia, desperate Africans without travel papers searching for work, unemployed Brazilians from shantytowns, orphaned kids in Isaan-in this business, nobody cares where the meat is grown, so long as it’s still on the hoof and breathing when it arrives. Right now, I guess you could say we are in danger of becoming donors ourselves.” I meet his gaze. “I told Interpol, but they didn’t take me seriously. The Yips are too smart and the operation too big-it boggles the mind.”

“Tell me how it works.”

“Take Lourdes, the Yips’ favorite hunting ground. They find someone with, say, terminal liver problems. In the course of a number of interviews, they dismantle whatever faith the patient has left in their god. Now you have a true citizen of the twenty-first century, a totally confused human soul with no identity, no direction, no faith, no religion, no politics, no instinct other than to survive. The Yips impose a culture of absolute secrecy, which is sealed by hints that if the authorities find out, the patient, also, will be an accessory to a serious crime. By this time, the patient, nailed to a cross of hope and terror-a real Christian at last-will do whatever they’re told.

“They are given to understand they are being taken to China, where they will receive the organ of an executed prisoner who would have died and had his organs sold by the state in any event. That’s the great Yip innovation. Everyone has heard of China’s organ sales. Everyone with a serious problem with a solid organ has been through the thought process: Well, I don’t agree with it, of course, but if the poor bastard’s going to die anyway, why should someone else get the liver? And of course they tell the patient they’re flying to China in a private jet.

“They are heavily sedated before they arrive at Phuket-as far as the patient is concerned, it could be anywhere, but they’ve been told it’s somewhere in China, and they’re happy to go with that. They have also paid a great deal of money by now, perhaps the whole of their wealth. They’re committed. You could say they have finally become believers. They are already under the anesthetic when the chopper brings them up to Vulture Peak.”

“And the donor?”

“Sometimes it really is an executed felon. Why not? The organ is popped into a chilled Jiffy Bag minutes after the bullet, but there simply are not enough legal executions to go around. The list of people in need of livers, kidneys, eyes, faces grows by the hour. In Shanghai you told me the Yips showed you some of the e-mails. And what happens when the disposable income of average Chinese and Indians reaches a point when, say, half a billion people are looking for organs to buy… perhaps even for frivolous reasons? You’re a cop-you know to what lengths narcissism can drive people. What we do to poodles today we do to ourselves tomorrow. Suppose someone is sick of the face in the mirror and decides to buy another. D’you see?”