John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

The man opposite-he had lean cheeks in which a single furrow had been plowed from cheekbone to just behind the corner of his mouth-nodded. He turned to Chan. “Hear that? These officers saved your life. I’d like you to appreciate their efforts on your behalf.”

The gunman in front of Chan turned to look him directly in the face. “Okay, Chinaman?”

There didn’t seem to be any physical threat in the way they acted, Chan did not fear they were about to throw him from the helicopter. They seemed to rely for intimidation on the innate menace that emanated from who they were and what they’d done and, perhaps most of all, the psychopathic quirk that had driven them to volunteer for the SAS’s training program in the first place. Chan was still in shock. Deeper than shock, distress. The object of policing was peace, but now Moira’s daughter was dead, and so were her two companions, butchered in an unnecessary paramilitary siege. It took him minutes to wind his mind back from a condition of passive despair to deal with the man in front. Finally he leaned forward and spoke with controlled contempt.

“Put what you like in your report, soldier, but if you call me Chinaman one more time, I’ll find a way to squeeze your balls in a vise. Got it, cunt face?”

Chan leaned back in his seat, feeling marginally better. On occasion infantile hostility could revive the spirit when mature self-restraint merely left one feeling depressed.

The man exchanged a glance with his colleagues but said nothing more. At Stanley, Cuthbert was waiting. He ignored Chan and locked himself in a room with the soldiers to debrief them. Chan was sent back to Central in a government car, as if he’d not been at the scene of the slaughter at all.

In his office Chan paced in front of Aston, refusing to answer questions, forcing his black hair back in a juddering motion every few seconds, trying to control the aftershock. Finally he took the Sony Dictaphone from his desk drawer, slipped it into his pocket and went home.

More in sorrow than in anger he found a piece of A4 size paper, wrote with a black ballpoint in large letters: “She’s dead, Chan.”

At his fax machine in the kitchen he pressed the only autodial number he had ever programmed. He watched the paper make its mournful way through the machine.

He took a beer from the fridge to steady his nerves. He was on the sofa sipping from the can when the telephone rang.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

There was a noise of a throat being cleared. “A chopper came. I heard shots, so I ran.”

“Smart.”

“What about the money?”

“I think they’ll pay. So long as you didn’t see a chopper or hear shots.”

“What chopper? What shots?”

“Good. And when you get the money, disappear. That would be my advice.”

“Sure.” There was a pause. “This is big, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You remind me of a triad foot soldier. You’re just obeying orders, and you don’t really know where they come from. Right?”

Chan replaced the receiver without replying. “Right.” He said it to the beer can. Two more cans later he found the strength to face the grille on the Sony Dictaphone.

“File reference one-two-eight/mgk/HOM/STC. This note is to record a development that took place in the western New Territories at about eleven A.M. seventeenth May 1997…”

When he finished, he took the lift to the ground floor to walk around the block. In the lobby he remembered to empty his letter box. On a quarter sheet of paper a wheelchair had been sketched, and instructions scrawled in English. The date of the proposed meeting was May 17, around midnight.

At Asian borderlands immovable objects meet irresistible forces and come to arrangements. The irresistible force of communism had been reaching lucrative agreements with immovable British capitalism for almost fifty years-before Thatcher and the Joint Declaration, before and even during the Cultural Revolution.

Chan used his police ID card to cross the checkpoint into the restricted zone in the extreme northeast of the New Territories. From his taxi he recognized the first evidence. Huge quantities of cardboard boxes under corrugated iron shelters were to smuggling what aluminum foil and outsize cigarette papers were to marijuana: not conclusive proof of possession but a reliable indication. Human figures with crates moved in and out of blinding lights like stagehands.

The taxi dropped him farther down the road outside an unmanned office; the title CUSTOMS COMPOUND in English and Chinese was surely facetious. Behind the office the black Lexus on the end of a hook belonging to a small pickup truck seemed to his expert eye to have suffered damage only to its license plates; they were missing. As his vision adjusted to the mixture of halogen glare and primeval night, he saw that he stood on plain earth over which had been built a contraband town of open ironwork with sloping sheetmetal roofs. Articulated flatbeds waited with diesels running in deep shadow or under a white glare: the chiaroscuro of sophisticated crime. Instinctively he slipped into shadow from which he peered at the frontier hypermarket. The PRC section was mostly vegetables, fruit, cotton products, down-filled garments and low-quality ironware for kitchens and workshops. The nearest Hong Kong shelters stacked boxes of videos on boxes of televisions on boxes of laptops. Entrepreneurs with clients in the Communist state browsed ranks of Mercedeses, which respectful salesmen offered tax-free for cash, so long as it wasn’t renminbi, the official People’s currency that nobody wanted.

Despite the concentration of people, Chan was pleased to note an un-Chinese hush over the market town, a kind of lip service to nonexistent law enforcement. Apart from quietness, though, numbers of people, amounting here and there almost to a crowd, moved around with the kind of freedom that exists only in no-man’s-land. With so much democratic openness, where would a man in a wheelchair hide? Chan made for the desktops warehouse fifty yards in the direction of China.

Hide a leaf in a forest, hide a spy on a border: Lee was no fool. Men dressed only in shorts and clearly in a hurry unloaded boxes bearing famous names in information technology from five large vans carrying no advertising and no illumination over their number plates, even though their lights were on and engines running. Many languages described the contents of the boxes as “monitors,” “CPUs,” “keyboards,” “CD-ROM players” and “speakers.” Lee had never told him of this other side of Wheelchair Enterprises. The sixth van was shut at the back. It waited about ten yards from the others. Chan tapped an elaborate tattoo on the rear door and climbed in when it opened. From his chair Lee beamed with a sadist’s goodwill. Chan checked the interior of the van: a cripple, his wheelchair, another chair, a tower CPU on the floor, a desk and monitor glowing with the tropical colors of Windows 95.

“You work all hours,” Chan said.

“For the pleasure you have brought me, I’d give up sleep for the rest of my life. It’s not often a man gets the opportunity to start a war. And when the war is between the two groups he hates most in the world…” Lee raised his arms, kissed his fingers and dropped his hands in his lap. Chan had never seen him so close to peace.

“I know about the couriers-the American girl and her two Chinese friends,” Lee said.

“They’re dead.”

“That’s what I mean-I know.”

Chan stared. “You know?”

“This morning some British soldiers shot them. It’s the advantage of information technology: I network, people E-mail me.” He opened his palms. “Kids talk to kids who talk to parents.” Lee’s eyes glistened. “News travels at twenty-eight thousand eight hundred bps, and that’s a relatively slow modem these days.”