John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“So what?” Aston’s voice had risen an octave. “You bribed them. We have the bag.”

Chan pushed the hair back from his forehead. “Yeah, I bribed them.” He looked out to sea, hesitated, spoke into the distance. “But the people who gave them orders to intercept the bag, they’re the ones who’ll be running Hong Kong in two months’ time. See?” He looked at the young Englishman, so typical of the raw recruits who had been coming out of England for as long as he could remember. “Everything has already changed. The rules are different now; they just haven’t got around to telling us yet.”

Chan waved a hand in the direction of Hong Kong Island, which had begun to appear full ahead. “Enjoy the view, why not? You don’t have to live here after June. This is a vacation for you.”

Aston gulped at the implications of what Chan was saying, then obediently stared out through the bridge window. For the moment the wind had died again, a calm before the storm. In the twilight of an early tropical evening lights were being switched on from Aberdeen to North Point, burning electricity and money with an exuberance like nowhere else in the world.

It was an awesome skyline, not dissimilar to Manhattan’s except that it was surmounted by a mountain and the scores of office towers presided over a huge harbor where some of the largest ships in the world lay at anchor. Neither the city nor the harbor ever slept. And it all happened on a rock not ten miles long that hung west to east off the south coast of the largest remaining Communist country in the world. Thirty miles north there lived 1.4 billion people whose collective attention was focused on Hong Kong just two months before its reversion to rule by the People’s Republic of China. It was like living in a spiritual wind tunnel: You could feel the pressure of uncontainable envy, loathing and longing pressing in from over the border. Somebody said Hong Kong was a borrowed place living on borrowed time. That time was now being measured in hours: about fifteen hundred at the moment, but reducing quickly. The Communists were coming; they were almost here.

He left Chan to his private chat with the captain, stood at the bows again, where he had spent most of that afternoon. Hong Kong was the first hot country he’d visited. Standing in the warm, damp breeze created by the boat and gazing at the constellation of lights on the island were like a dream he’d never dared to believe could come true. He didn’t care that he’d be made redundant in June. He would have had almost three years. Three years! He couldn’t believe his luck.

Swinging around into the harbor itself, they slowed to the regulation four knots. Aston watched a tiny woman in a wide-brim straw hat fishing from a sampan, her silhouette balancing against the bucking of the tiny boat. The Star Ferries, lit up from stern to bow, were crossing from Hong Kong to Kowloon and back every fifteen minutes. A jetfoil bound for Macao rose up on its skis like a praying mantis. There, crawling up the mountain toward a saddle near the top, were the lights of the Peak Tram, a funicular railway that had put the coolies with their sedan chairs out of business nearly a hundred years ago. To the far west a fleet of green fishing trawlers, just visible in the dusk, was making for the typhoon shelter at Aberdeen where they’d raft up until Alan was spent.

As the launch drew closer to Central, comparisons with Manhattan no longer held. There was no grid system; the jam-packed futuristic city had sprung up without any planning at all. It was as if a giant spaceship had stopped by one day and hurriedly unloaded ten thousand assorted buildings for storage; from the sea it was hard to understand how traffic, or even people, managed to squeeze between them.

It was this intensity, physical and mental, Aston knew, that gave the place its fascination. There was no time to stand still and no space to stand still in. Weeks, then months, then years had flashed by at ten times the speed to which he was accustomed. He had been drunk with excitement since arrival; he liked the sensation of never quite catching up with himself. But it was true what they told you when you first came out: The longer you remained in the Far East, the less you understood. Take today. A detective he had never thought of as brave had stubbornly, cleverly held on to evidence in an inquiry that the same detective expected to be aborted for political reasons. Perhaps he’d risked his life and Aston’s too. It didn’t make sense.

During the transit of the harbor the rain returned, a sticky, wet blackness that swallowed huge tankers and cut the launch off again from land. He’d told his mother she wouldn’t believe what fell from the skies out here. And it was warm. What in the world could be more exotic, more wonderful, more mysterious than the warm, stench-enriched rain of this tropical city?

It was weird how the East changed you. There was more life and more death, and you felt twice as real for it. Soaked to the skin in a second and clutching the safety rope as he made his way back over the flooding deck to the wheelhouse, he caught Chan’s eyes and grinned. God forgive me for loving these Hong Kong storms full of money, sex and corpses. If there was a way to stay after June, he would find it.

At Queen’s Pier Chan showered and dressed in the cabin, then told Aston to stay with the heads on the boat while he found a car to collect them. The captain dropped him off at the concrete steps, then backed out into the harbor to escape the crowd of small craft using the public pier. It was rush hour in the rain; all streets and pavements were flooded with people who seemed to be fleeing some disaster over their shoulders. Above high-rise office buildings the remains of a savage light glared between charcoal clouds. In half an hour it would be night.

At the Star Ferry Terminal, next to Queen’s Pier, the sergeant at a small police incident cabin let Chan telephone for a car to meet Aston at the pier to collect the heads and take them to the morgue.

“Heads?” The sergeant was accustomed to writing out reports of pickpocketing and loss of credit cards. He stared at Chan, silently begging for details. Replacing the telephone, Chan mimed decapitation.

“Then they cut off the lips, ears, nose, eyelids.”

The sergeant let his mouth fall open. “Fuck your mother.”

Chan nodded. He had made one man happy this day.

He knew there was no point trying to find a taxi, still less to hope for a car to collect him within the next forty minutes. Aston would be on the boat with the heads until the rush hour was over. On the other hand, he wanted to discuss those Chinese coastguards with Chief Superintendent John Riley at Arsenal Street Police Headquarters without delay.

Ordinarily Chan would have reported to his immediate superior at Mongkok Division, the assistant district commander/crime. Recently, though, headquarters had required officers in charge of sensitive cases to report important developments to a designated officer at Arsenal Street. After the media interest arising from the extreme cruelty of the murders he was investigating (CNN and the BBC both had carried clips of Chan saying, “I have no comment to make at this time”), and following his discovery that his telephone had been tapped and case files tampered with, he had been ordered to bypass the command line at Mongkok and report directly to Riley. He decided to walk to the complex of buildings that constituted headquarters for the Royal Hong Kong Police.

Edinburgh Place, City Hall, Murray Road, Queensway: British names whose sell-by date was fast approaching. Queensway Plaza was an air-conditioned Oriental shopping mall crammed with Chinese tailors, Chinese takeouts, Chinese computer stores, Chinese jewelry shops and Chinese pedestrians. People moved in tidal waves in both directions. As Chan allowed himself to be carried forward into the mall, the cool from the air conditioning froze the rain and sweat on his body. He could smell on himself and everyone near him the musty odor of tropical damp as it cooled.