Peter May - Snakehead

‘Tomorrow, little one,’ Margaret whispered, and she tried very hard to stop her eyes filling with tears.

‘We gonna make dumplings tomorrow?’

‘Sure we are, sweetheart.’

A little smile flickered across Xinxin’s lips. ‘I love you, Magret.’ And her eyes closed, and the slow heavy sound of her breathing filled the room again.

Margaret stood up quickly, the light from the hall blurring in her eyes, and she hurried out past Li, wiping them quickly dry as he pulled the door shut behind him. It was as if she had never left. But one thing at least had changed. She turned to Li. ‘You know what?’ she said hoarsely. ‘That’s the first time I ever had a conversation with her in English.’

Back in the kitchen, she sat watching as Li poured her a vodka tonic in a glass filled with ice and fresh cut lemon. He remembered how to make it just the way she liked it. The fizz of the bubbles tickled her lip and nose as she took a long pull at the drink, and she felt the alcohol hit her bloodstream almost immediately. With it came a wave of fatigue, and she remembered it was a long time since she had slept — there had been precious little of it the night before.

Li sat astride a chair opposite her, leaning into the ring of light with a bottle of cold beer in his hand. He had pulled on a tee-shirt and kicked off his shoes, moving barefoot around the cold kitchen tiles. Now, as he took a long suck at the neck of his bottle, she looked at his fine, strong arm, and saw the contours of his muscles below the stretch of his tee-shirt. She felt that same falling sensation inside again. She took another drink of her vodka and forced her mind to focus on other things. And as she did, the events of the day flooded back into it, along with a big wedge of depression. She thought about the bodies she had autopsied, the injection sites in the the semi-lunar fold of the buttock, the revelations about the Spanish flu, and the box of horrors that the vile Anatoly Markin had opened up at Fort Detrick. And she thought about poor Steve through the glass in the isolation ward there and wondered how many more poor souls were lying sleeping tonight with the virus nested away in their DNA, awaiting some unknown trigger to unleash it upon an unsuspecting world.

She said, ‘I don’t understand why they want me on this task force. They have the entire resources of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at their disposal.’

Li said, ‘You are the medical examiner in Houston. That is where the investigation will be focused. It is essential that you are on board.’

She looked at him. ‘And you?’

‘I am a political inclusion,’ he said, his voice laden with irony. ‘But my people want me involved, too. They want an end to this just as much as the Americans. Contacts have already been set up between FEMA and my Embassy.’

‘FEMA,’ Margaret said, and she remembered the three unexplained FEMA representatives who had sat at the table at Fort Detrick. ‘I know I should probably know, but what the hell is FEMA?’

‘The Federal Emergency Management Agency,’ Li said. ‘Since this is a multiagency task force, FEMA will finance and administer it.’

She looked at him in wonder. ‘How do you know all this, Li Yan?’

He smiled. ‘It is my job, Margaret. I have spent ten months in Washington familiarising myself with every law-enforcement agency they’re prepared to tell me about, and some they aren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘There has been a great deal of empire building here over a great many years, and now a huge number of vested interests are jealously guarding their budgets and their turf. US law enforcement is the most labyrinthine and arcane field of study I have ever undertaken. I was never quite sure if there was any real point to it, until now.’

She drained her glass. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’

He rounded the table as she stood up, taking her by the wrist and turning her into him almost before she knew it, his body hard and strong, pressed against hers, his arms enveloping her. She felt his breath on her face, and smelled the sweet fresh alcohol on it. He kissed her softly, and she looked up into his eyes. She sighed. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Li Yan,’ she said. And she felt his hold on her slacken and he moved very slightly away from her.

‘What do you mean?’ She heard both the disappointment and the hurt in his voice.

She struggled to give form to her thoughts. ‘I think maybe we should, you know, keep things between us on a professional basis for a while. When we start getting personal, you and I…’ she gasped, exasperated by her own inability to find the right words, ‘…we only ever seem to generate pain.’

‘I don’t remember there being much pain between us last night.’

And he was right. There had been only pleasure. But how could she tell him that the pleasure never made up for the pain that followed. Seeing Xinxin tonight had brought it all flooding back. She needed time and space to find her perspective again. ‘Things are always just too complicated with us, Li Yan,’ she said feebly. And she wondered if she wasn’t simply taking the coward’s way out. Afraid to confront the contradictions of a cross-cultural relationship in her own country, afraid to face the disapproval of her peers. Or maybe she was just afraid to grasp the thing she wanted most in the world in case it all slipped away from her again.

The telephone shattered the tension between them, its long, single ring spiking the dark like electricity. Li moved catlike across the kitchen to answer it before it woke Xinxin.

‘Wei?’ He spoke automatically in Chinese, then quickly corrected himself. ‘Hello.’

A voice heavy with sleazy innuendo said, ‘Didn’t get you out of your bed, did I?’ It took Li a moment to realise it was Hrycyk.

‘No,’ he said.

‘She’s there, though, huh?’

‘What do you want, Hrycyk?’

‘I want you both on the seven a.m. flight to Houston. My people have set up a series of raids in Chinatown. We’re going to start pulling in as many illegals as we can find. And I want my agents properly protected in case any of them have got the flu. So we need the little lady along.’ He paused. ‘Is she there, or do I need to track her down somewhere else?’

Li said reluctantly, ‘She’s here.’

There was an almost imperceptible chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘Thought so. Sweet dreams, Chinaman.’ And he hung up.

Li stood for a moment, anger and humiliation smouldering inside him. Slowly he replaced the receiver and turned to tell Margaret what Hrycyk had told him.

She listened in silence, and then nodded. ‘We’d better get some sleep then.’

And when he had taken her upstairs and left her in his room to go off and sleep on an unmade bed somewhere else, she stood by the window bathed in the moonlight that slanted in through the trees, and wished she had told him to stay. She was lonely and confused, and then with a sudden sickening start remembered her promise to take Steve the photograph of his little girl tomorrow. Impossible now. Another failure. Her great talent, it seemed, was for inflicting hurt on the people she cared about most.

There were fifteen INS agents, including Hrycyk, in two unmarked white vans parked in the shopping plaza opposite the two-storey Dong’an apartment block. Margaret had spent most of the day securing supplies to ensure that the raiding party was properly equipped. They were all crouched uncomfortably in their white Tivek tear-resistant suits, hoods pulled tightly over their heads. Each wore a flimsy plastic face mask, filtered air blowing down over their faces from portable, battery-powered HEPA filter systems held in the small of their backs by a belt around the waist.