Peter May - The Runner

‘You got it, Chief.’ Wu shoved a fresh stick of gum in his mouth and hurried off.

Tao walked with Li to his Jeep. He took out a cigarette and offered him one. Li took it without thinking, and Tao lit them both. They stood for nearly a minute, smoking in silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tao said eventually.

‘About what?’

‘About everything.’

A car pulled in behind Li’s Jeep, and the tall, bespectacled figure of Professor Yang stepped out, wrapped tightly in his warm winter coat. ‘Section Chief,’ he called, and as Li and Tao turned, he hurried carefully through the snow towards them. ‘I’ve been trying to reach Margaret for hours. They told me at Section One that you were here.’ He glanced around. ‘I thought she might be, also.’ Fastidiously, he waggled each foot to flick off the accumulated snow from the shiny black leather of his polished shoes.

Li shook his head.

‘Well, then, I should pass the information on to you.’

‘I don’t really have time just now, Professor.’

‘I think it could be important, Section Chief. I know Margaret thought it was.’

It was enough to catch Li’s attention. ‘What?’

The Professor removed his rimless glasses to polish them with a clean handkerchief as he spoke. ‘Margaret asked me this morning if I knew anyone who could perform a genetic analysis on a sample of blood that she had taken from the swimmer she autopsied.’

‘Sui Mingshan?’

‘That’s him. Well, I took her up to see my friend at Beida. Professor Xu. He’s head of the College of Biogenic Science there. Margaret wanted him to analyse the sample to see if he could find any evidence of genetic disorder.’ He shrugged and placed his glasses carefully back on the bridge of his nose, smoothing back the hair behind his ears. ‘She didn’t really confide in me. In either of us. But I know she was hoping for more than that.’

‘And what did Professor Xu find?’ Li asked.

‘Oh, he did indeed find much more than that,’ Yang said. ‘But not a genetic disorder. Genetically modified HERV.’ He waited for Li to be impressed.

But Li only scowled. ‘HERV? What the hell’s that?’

Yang’s face fell as he realised he was going to have to explain. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s not a particularly easy concept for the layman.’

‘Try me,’ Li said.

Yang cleared his throat. ‘HERV. It’s an acronym, I suppose. From the English. Human endogenous retrovirus.’

‘Retrovirus.’ Li remembered Margaret talking about retroviruses the previous night. ‘Margaret told me something about that. It’s in our DNA or something.’

‘So you’re not a complete beginner,’ Yang said.

‘Maybe not,’ Li said. ‘But I don’t have much time. Get on with it, Professor.’

Yang glanced at Tao. ‘Endogenous,’ he said. ‘Means it’s something produced from within us. These HERV, they’re in all of us. The viral remnants of primeval diseases that afflicted the species during the earliest stages of evolution. No longer harmful to us, but there nonetheless, subsumed into our germline DNA and passed on from father to son, mother to daughter. An integral part of the human genome.’ He looked around him. ‘A bit like footprints frozen in the winter snow. But footprints which cross the borderland between genes and infection. Because, really, they are not genes, they are retroviruses, or bits of retroviruses, to be found in every human cell.’ His face was a study of concentration in trying to distil the complexities into bite-sized chunks that his audience might understand. ‘The thing is, although they are dormant, some scientists believe that occasionally they can be activated…’

‘By a virus,’ Li said, remembering Margaret’s spoken thoughts.

Yang smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Viruses could do it. There could be other factors. But the point is, that once activated, it is possible that they could be responsible for some very dangerous human diseases.’

Li began to see a glimmer of light. ‘Like thickening of the microvasculature of the heart?’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose so,’ Yang said, and began himself to see the first glimmers of light.

Li said, ‘And you’re saying someone has…genetically modified these HERV?’

‘It appears that some of them had been removed from our swimmer, modified in some way, and then put back.’

‘Why?’

Yang shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have absolutely no clue, Section Chief. And neither has Professor Xu.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But I have an idea that Margaret might.’

Li said grimly, ‘If I knew where she was I’d ask her.’

Yang frowned, but he had no chance to ask.

‘Thank you,’ Li said, and he tapped Tao’s arm and nodded towards the Jeep. ‘Get in.’

Tao looked surprised. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Detective Sun’s apartment.’

The van lurched and bounced over a frozen, rutted track. From the rear of it, where Margaret and Lili had been tied hand and foot and forced to sit with their backs to the door, Margaret could see headlights raking a grim, winter landscape. The skeletons of cold, black trees drifted in and out of vision. Big, soft snowflakes slapped the windshield before being scraped aside and smeared across the glass by inefficient wipers.

She was racked by pain now, and knew she was in serious trouble. She felt blood, hot and wet, between her legs, and every bone-jarring pitch of the van provoked a fresh fork of cramp in her belly. Lili was absolutely silent, but Margaret could feel her fear.

The only sound which had broken the monotonous drone of the engine during their journey was the whimpering of the man Margaret had set on fire. She could smell his burned flesh and singed hair. He lay curled up in the back, almost within touching distance, wrapped in a blanket. Margaret suspected it was fear more than pain which made him cry. His burns were severe enough to have destroyed the nerve-endings. It was possible he felt no pain at all. But he must know he would be disfigured for life.

When they had dragged her from the copper pot, they pushed her to the ground and kicked her until she thought they were going to kill her there and then. She had curled into the foetal position to try to protect her baby. They did not care that she was pregnant. Eventually they had dragged the two women to the Donghua Gate and bundled them into the back of the waiting van. Margaret thought they must have been on the road for more than an hour and a half since then.

She saw brick buildings and slate roofs now, walls and gates, the occasional light in a window. Stacks of bricks at the roadside. Pipes projected from the sides of houses, issuing smoke into the night sky. Margaret could smell the woodsmoke. They were going through a village of some kind. Margaret had no sense of the direction they had taken when they left the capital. They could be anywhere. But wherever it was, she knew, there was no chance that anyone was ever going to find them there. After a few minutes, they left the village behind, and entered a dense copse of trees before emerging again into open country. A solitary light shone in the blackness, and gradually it grew brighter as they got closer, before the van finally juddered to a halt outside the gate of a walled cottage. The double green gates stood open, and the light they had seen was an outside lamp above the door of what appeared to be an L-shaped bungalow.

The driver and his passenger opened the van doors and jumped down. After a moment the back doors were thrown open, and Margaret and Lili nearly fell out into the snow. Rough hands grabbed them and pulled them out into the freezing night. Margaret was bruised and aching, and the joints in her legs had seized up, buckling under her. She could barely stand. The two men crouched in the snow to untie their feet, and they were led through the gate, along a winding path to the door of the cottage. Margaret could see that the red brick dwelling had been renovated some time recently. The windows were a freshly painted green, the garden trimmed and manicured beneath a layer of snow. Gourds hung drying from the eaves and the orange of frozen persimmons lined the window ledges.