Peter May - Snakehead

Margaret walked briskly through the hangar, blinking in the fierce glare of the 500-watt halogen floodlamps that illuminated the nearly twenty stations that had been set up along one side. Plastic sheeting stretched across tubular frames formed partitions between them. Twelve of the stations were purely for autopsy. Mobile tables had been wheeled into each, plastic buckets hanging below drainers to catch body fluids. Other stations were dedicated to ancillary procedures like the collection and review of personal effects, fingerprinting, dental examination, total body x-ray. Opposite the stations, tables had been set up with computers for recording their findings. Each table was manned by at least three assistants, two of whom were earmarked to help with the work in the station. The sounds of voices and the hum of computers echoed around the vast corrugated space.

It always struck Margaret as ironic that it took so much time, money and effort simply to record the passing of life. The human obsession with death. Perhaps, she thought, we imagined that by examining it in all its guises we might one day find a way of defeating it.

‘Dr. Campbell, good morning.’ Steve stepped across to greet her from the station he had been allocated. ‘Fine day for wielding the knife.’ He waved an arm around the hangar. ‘Spectacular set-up you have here.’

‘I think I gave you permission to call me Margaret,’ Margaret said.

Steve’s eyebrows, behind the anonymity of his surgical mask, were still animated. ‘So you did. I was just being polite — in case you’d forgotten.’

They cut bizarre figures in this NASA hangar in their green surgical gowns and plastic aprons, shower caps, masks and goggles.

‘Are we about ready yet?’ he asked.

‘First bodies are coming through the line now.’

Steve’s grin stretched his mask across his face. ‘See you at lunch, then.’ And he headed back to his autopsy station.

In spite of the face she had put on for Steve, Margaret was filled with apprehension. There was an encounter today she could not avoid, a confrontation with the man she wished she could hate, but knew she still loved. She turned toward autopsy station number one and felt her hackles rise at the sight of Hrycyk standing by the table waiting for her. He wore a surgical gown over tee-shirt, jeans and trainers and looked ridiculous with a green plastic shower cap pulled down on his head.

He glanced at his gown. ‘Came prepared,’ he said. A body bag was wheeled past on a gurney destined for autopsy further down the line. He grinned. ‘I guess that’s what you’d call a Chinese take-out.’

Margaret walked briskly into her station. ‘You’re a very sick man, Agent Hrycyk.’

He was quite unabashed. ‘So I’ve been told.’

Margaret spread out a cloth of gleaming knives on a stainless steel side table, and lifted the French chef’s knife that she used as her main cutting tool. ‘I’ll look forward to opening you up one day to find out why,’ she said.

Li was met by Fuller at Houston Hobby airport. It was the first time he had met the FBI agent, although they had spoken on the telephone. And it was his first time in Texas, although he had been in the United States for almost a year. They shook hands warmly on the concourse and Fuller took him out to the short-term car park where he had left his Chrysler Jeep.

‘Li Yan,’ he said, as if trying out the name for size. ‘I hear you guys have your family name come first.’

‘That’s right,’ Li said.

‘So that would make you, uh, Mr. Li, or Agent Li, or whatever?’

‘Just plain “Li” is fine.’

‘Uh, okay. But if I was to call you by your first name it would be Yan, right?’

‘If you wished to be familiar,’ Li said, ‘you would call me Li Yan.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Fuller glanced at him. ‘Your English is pretty good.’

Li had lost count of the number of times he had been told this, as if it was an extraordinary thing that a Chinese could speak English as well as an American. But it was his job to foster good relations between US and Chinese law enforcement agencies, and so he was always polite. ‘I was taught by my uncle from an early age,’ he said. ‘And then I spent time in Hong Kong with the British police before the handover. I also spent some time in Chicago where I learned some interesting new vocabulary.’

‘Like what?’ Fuller asked.

‘Like “motherfucker”, and “shithead”.’

‘Hey!’ Fuller laughed. ‘You almost sound like a native.’

Li had learned long ago that it amused people when you could swear in their language.

Fuller negotiated a network of roads leading through a forest of advertising billboards out on to Highway 45, where they turned south for the short trip to Ellington Field. ‘So…’ he said. ‘Criminal justice liaison. What kind of job is that exactly?’

‘Just what it sounds like,’ Li said. ‘I provide a bridge between the criminal justice organisations of both our countries. And I make myself available to help in any investigations that your people have on-going that may have Chinese involvement. Drugs, people-smuggling, computer fraud, that sort of thing.’

‘I guess,’ Fuller said, ‘you probably have your hands full just trying to keep track of the number of law enforcement agencies we have here in the US.’

Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘When I bring senior Chinese police officers to the United States to meet with senior American police officers, the Chinese are outnumbered around ten to one. My people cannot understand why you need so many agencies: the Justice Department, the FBI, the INS, the DEA, the Secret Service, the NSA…When your people come to my country it is a one-stop shop.’

Fuller laughed. ‘I like your sense of humour, Li.’

Li said, straight-faced, ‘I did not know I was being funny.’ Although he did. But now Fuller wasn’t quite sure. So he changed the subject.

‘You know about what’s going down here in Houston?’

‘Ninety-eight dead Chinese found in a truck. Almost certainly renshe , illegal immigrants. Autopsies begin today.’

‘ Ren …what? What d’you call them?’

‘ Renshe . Human snakes. It is the name we give to smuggled Chinese, because of their ability to wriggle past tight border controls.’

The FBI man nodded. ‘Right.’ He paused. ‘The thing is, Li, this is starting to get embarrassing.’ Fuller flicked a wary glance in Li’s direction. ‘Now it’s not my job to get into the politics of all this, but folks in Washington are unhappy at the number of incidents where Chinese illegals— renshe —are turning up dead on boats in American waters and trucks on American soil. It’s been on the increase since all those people died when the Golden Venture sank off New York nearly ten years ago. Your people were supposed to be doing something about it. But the numbers just keep going up and up.’

‘There has been a huge campaign against illegal immigration in China,’ Li said, without any hint of defensiveness. ‘As soon as we arrest the little snakeheads, others take their place. It is the big snakeheads, the ones who finance the traffic, that we need to catch. Like Big Sister Ping in New York. You cannot kill the snake without first cutting off its head.’

‘And how do you propose we do that?’

‘Most of the Chinese immigrants now come in from Mexico,’ Li said. ‘Houston is the hub. From here they fan out all over the rest of the country. Since we cut off the supply of money from New York, it might be fair to assume that the operation is now being financed out of here.’

‘That’s quite an assumption.’

‘It is somewhere to start,’ Li said.