A Killing Air

by Nigel Price

  He checked his watch. It would be light soon. He hadn’t slept at all. For a second he considered trying to. No. Better to reach a decision about actions to take. But hadn’t he already done so? Do nothing. Hardly an action, but there it was. His chosen option. He sat on, allowing the decision to sink in. He had punched senseless two plainclothes policemen, watched a beaten woman blow out her brains, run from the scene, and he had decided to say nothing to anyone. It wouldn’t be the first horror he had kept to himself. Sometimes it was best to do exactly that. For a quiet life.

  He chuckled, the whisky finally starting to take the high ground. A quiet life. Who was he kidding? His had been anything but.

  He drained the glass, contemplated the savagely depleted bottle, and decided against a refill. Opting for a shower instead, he pushed himself to his feet and fought a momentary nausea as the room contended with his sense of balance until their old relationship had been re-established.

  He was undressed and testing the heat of the shower jet when he was amazed by something that had not occurred to him until then. Was he traceable? It was his fingers in the stream of water that triggered the question. Watching the droplets cascade from their tips. Their prints. He stepped into the shower and began to soap his body with the hotel’s tight-fisted offering of complimentary gel. He had probably left a print on the gun, though the woman’s grasp and her fumbling for the safety might have destroyed it.

  The car? He had certainly touched the handle, but more with his palm. He was fairly sure he had touched nothing else, neither bodywork nor window, either of which would have taken a more faithful likeness. Would they even try to recover a print? The very clandestine circumstances of their assault indicated that even they understood they were up to no good. Perhaps it was more likely that they would try to get clear of the whole wretched place and put the episode down to experience.

  And what if they did try to recover a print and managed to do so? What then? Unlike the airports in Bangkok and Tokyo, Beijing didn’t routinely use fingerprint recognition technology at immigration. Sure, they had fully automated entry points, but use of them was optional. And Harry never did. They too often malfunctioned leaving the user gormless and stuck until rescue arrived. He opted for the old manual system. He was made to stare blankly into a small bubble-like camera as his photograph was taken, but so what? His fingerprints remained his own. To have and to hold.

  For a master criminal he didn’t doubt the Beijing police could tap into an international database. But for this? Unlikely. Especially given everything else.

  He finished showering and stepped onto the mat, reached for a towel and dried himself. Only then did he realise that he was starving. In a few hours he would be expected to behave as if nothing had happened. It was extraordinary. Though he’d done it before. Not quite the same as this, but similar. He’d be expected to stand up at conference and give the address that he had travelled here to give. The irony of his subject matter was not lost on him. ‘Crisis management and disaster planning in a dangerous world.’ His field. His expertise. Nowadays.

  He found the room service menu in a drawer and ran through the offerings. Breakfast would not be served in any of the dining rooms for an hour or more. He couldn’t wait that long. In any case, the last thing he needed now was dutiful conversation with fellow delegates, or existing or potential clients. Right now he needed time alone. At least until the day was properly underway. Launched and out to sea.

  He made his selection, picked up the bedside phone and rang through his order, battling past the scrupulously polite but robotic responses of the girl at the other end who grasped six words out of every ten. Replacing the receiver he sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the lifeless phone. He pondered what he had he just done. He had watched a woman blow out her brains, and he had just ordered scrambled eggs on toast, bacon, coffee and orange juice.

  Harry felt his body sag. He let out an immense sigh as if his soul was leaving the casing of bone and flesh. For a moment it seemed to hover in mid-air, somewhere up near the ceiling, level with the aircon, considering whether to make good its escape or return to further games and torment in the earthly realm. It chose the latter. Harry talked it down. He stood, feeling his stomach muscles tighten with anticipation at the continued battle. Life. For now.

  Three

  Harry undid the buttons and shook open a clean shirt, remembering as he put it on that he hadn’t shaved. He leaned into the mirror for a closer inspection. His cheeks and chin rasped under his fingernails. It would do. He would shave tomorrow. He dumped his night things into a bag ready to send to the laundry. They would be returned in due course, purged of the whole strange night’s proceedings. Would that the human soul could so easily be cleansed.

  Slipping into his fresh clothes, he left the tie for after breakfast. Which then arrived with ceremony, carried aloft by a young Chinese waiter who was clearly enjoying the magnificence of his estate. Harry signed for it, stole an appropriate Yuan note from the desktop and presented it, then watched the waiter exit while studying his tip with the intensity of a scholar deciphering a rarely beheld script.

  Alone again, Harry slumped before the tray. He lifted the lid covering the plate and a waft of eggs and bacon was wonderfully kind to his nose. He tested the coffee pot and an aroma more beatific than salvation rescued his senses. He poured a mug and downed it, feeling it work through his systems, flicking all the right switches. With a tug of the forelock, Scotch retired for the night. Coffee took command on the bridge.

  He dug in his briefcase and came up with a sheaf of papers, the notes for his address. Propping them against a cushion, he scanned them as he let his hunger loose on the plate of bacon and scrambled eggs. He didn’t really need to rehearse. He knew the words by heart. He had delivered them multiple times. But there was a comfort in re-acquaintance with the known. The familiar. Especially after a night such as his. There was little humour. Just a couple of light-hearted anecdotes. It was a serious subject. Who was going to hire a clown? People wanted someone serious if they were to be entrusted with crisis management, planning for the disasters that rarely happened, but that – when they did – could blow apart lives and organisations and countries. Harry Brown was such a man. Or that’s how the company literature and website portrayed him.

  His background led easily into it. The military. Active service. Operations. Death. He had seen them all in depth. The trick had been to make the transition to civilian life, and successfully. He had managed that too. So far. Though he was aware that always in the background something dark and nasty waited like the dormant smell from a bad drain. It would only take the flush of a sudden rainfall for the foulness to waft out and upset the house. It was like that with all old soldiers home from the wars. Now as ever. Over the hills and far away. He presumed it had been like that for the legionnaires of Rome, the warriors of Carthage, the Imperial Guard back from Napoleon’s sally into the Russian wastes. Old soldiers certainly died, but before they did so they were prey to a thousand vengeful torments.

  He ran through his subject headings. Types of crisis, team organisations, levels of response, successful and unsuccessful examples. There were plenty of both. Being in China, he had given extra time to the political angle. Government attempts to cover up something nasty. He knew he had to be careful. He didn’t want to offend and find himself unable to get a visa the next time he needed to enter the country. His audience was mostly expat members of foreign companies, using Beijing purely as the conference venue. Even so, there would be observers in the audience noting what was being said and reporting back to this or that ministry. Names would be recorded, attitudes noted. Whether sympathetic or not.

  It was a strange country. Trying to walk the razor’s edge between free market capitalism balanced with the tight control of an unforgiving state. Past attempts at freeing up public opinion had all ended badly. Savage crackdowns the result every time, just as soon as the public had started to ask for too much. That was the p
roblem with freedom. It was the old genie-and-lamp metaphor. Mao had tried it in the ’50s: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.’ Problem was, it couldn’t be limited to just a hundred. And once people started to criticise the Communist Party, they seemed to rather enjoy it. So they carried on. The following year Mao had decided this wasn’t such a good idea after all, and the crackdown had begun. Everyone who had taken him at his word, exposing their views, was rounded up and dealt with. That was that.

  Others had tried it after Mao. Hu Yaobang had made himself popular. His death had led to Tiananmen Square, the initial outpouring of popular grief turning into something far more threatening to the regime. Then Zhao Ziyang. He had replaced Hu as Party General Secretary. Sympathising with the student demonstrators, when it all went sour and the tanks moved in, he shouldered the blame and ended up under house arrest for the next fifteen years until his death. Experiments with free speech and ideas had a way of ending badly in China. Harry would watch what he said. After all, it wasn’t his country. What business was it of his if the people were kept on a tight leash? It wasn’t his problem. China would carry on, pragmatic as always. It would take what it wanted from the West and reject what didn’t suit it. Of course, it was questionable whether that would work forever. Anyone with half a brain could see that the effort required to stuff the genie in its lamp acted as a brake on the very thing needed to keep the country successful – the economy. If that ever started to fail, it would be the great mass of the people that would lose faith in the Party, not just a relative handful of earnest students. Who could say what would happen then?

  He finished his breakfast and contemplated the daylight intensifying beyond the window. He had opened the curtains. The pollution was going to be crap today. Visibility was down to a few hundred yards. He guessed the readings would be off the scale again. There was an air quality monitor in the grounds of the US Embassy in Chaoyang district. The readings from there were the only ones you could trust. No doubt the Americans posted them with a degree of smug schadenfreude, but so what? You needed to know whether to breathe or not. Schools would be closed, masks fastened to scrunched-up faces, even though largely ineffective. Harry couldn’t wait to get on a plane and get out. He wondered whether he should have done so immediately. Before there was any search for him. If there was even to be one.

  He reasoned that on balance it was best to carry on as normal, assuming he could manage that. Complete the conference, or at least his address this morning. After that he could reconsider. He could easily put it around that some lead or other had caused him to leap on a plane in search of new business. He would decide later. Let the dust settle first.

  He got up and went over to the window. He put a hand on the balcony door but one glance at the pollution made him change his mind. That wasn’t the only reason he didn’t want to step out onto the balcony, but the moment he started to delve into that he felt an anger building. Get over it. Move on.

  He sunk his hands in his pockets and stared morosely into the yellow-brown murk. Across the city, millions of pairs of lungs were feasting on it. It was quietly rotting entire generations. No one knew the figures of those who gave up the struggle. Respiratory and other diseases caused by the smog were out of control. Over half a century ago London had wrestled with the same problem. Now it was China’s turn, playing catch-up.

  He noted the time and reckoned he’d might as well get his tie on and make his way down to the auditorium. He could run through his presentation with the staff laid on by the conference organisers. Check the sound system was working. All that stuff. It always paid off.

  Halfway back across the room he stopped. A woman had died right in front of him. Blown out her brains while he looked on. He felt a hollowness in his gut. Post-traumatic shock? Bollocks to that. He’d had enough of all that nonsense. Ghosts and ghouls could come in their legions. Harry didn’t give a shit. He had recovered. And with an ease that sometimes shocked him. His ransacked breakfast tray sat rudely on the small round table as evidence of his cold-hearted nonchalance.

  What else could he do? Given his circumstances, what other way could he react? He had suppressed feelings that might have devastated someone from more normal roots. Harry on the other hand, had downed half a bottle of whisky and moved on. Amidst the swirl of emotions he was proud of himself. What had happened to him? And when?

  He forced his feet to move. Ordered his hands to take up his tie and fix it in place. Obediently they did so. He went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. His head was close cropped. He stared briefly at the blond stubble but avoided contact with his eyes. Then he looked into the eyes. What was there to see? He arched his brows the better to study his soul. Grinned. What the hell was the point?

  His jacket was in the cupboard. He put it on and stuffed his papers in his briefcase. A quick check in the full-length mirror beside the door showed the tall, trim executive that everyone expected to see. Forty something. Still muscled and fit. Not someone to mess with. A man in control of his destiny. It made Harry want to burst out laughing. The irony of it. Hilarious if it wasn’t so bloody desperate.

  He went to open the room door and did a final check that he had everything before venturing out into the day. Key card. Where had he left it? The bedside table showed only his travel clock and a book that he was reading for the umpteenth time. The desk was cluttered with all sorts of stuff but not the key card. Then he remembered. Jacket pocket. When he returned he must have stuffed it back into the pocket after using it to come in.

  He opened the cupboard door. Nothing. He glanced around the room. There it was. Slung across the back of the armchair, exactly where he had tossed it when he had got back from his walk. He snatched it up and quickly hunted through the pockets. The key card was there. He shoved it into the breast pocket of his suit, scrunched up the jacket and went to throw it back onto the armchair. As he did so, something small and black fell from it, bounced once on the carpet and went under the chair.

  Shit! He was impatient to get into the day now. To get started and put some distance between him and the events of the night. He knelt down and felt under the armchair. His fingers found whatever it was and pulled it out. He looked at it nonplussed. It was a memory stick. His? Didn’t look like it. There was no time to investigate now though. He had to get downstairs and sort out his address. With breakfast in full flow in the dining rooms, the lifts would be busy. Being on a high floor it could take him an age to get down to the mezzanine where the conference was set up. He would look at it later.

  Four

  “Good talk, Harry.”

  Harry looked up from stirring his coffee. The mid-morning break had come not a moment too soon. Not having slept the previous night, he was feeling exhaustion catch up with him. He nodded appreciation at his colleague, a sound but pedestrian operator with one of his company’s competitors. Against his advice, Harry had once been instructed to try and recruit the man. Jim Brannigan. Big, beefy, beer-swilling.

  “You should have come over from the dark side when you had the chance,” Harry replied, trying for some light-hearted banter, which was all these conferences seemed to produce.

  “Your offer wasn’t good enough,” the predictable answer returned over the net. “Besides, as far as we’re concerned, you’re the dark side.”

  God, how bloody dull, Harry reflected. To the speaker he beamed gamely, projecting the image that people were used to seeing. The same old Harry. The same old lie. He enjoyed his work but the industry certainly had its share of deadbeats. When he’d first entered it, shortly after leaving the forces, he had naively assumed it would be peopled with flinty-eyed hard-men. There had been some of those, but in general the characters he encountered were tired has-beens. The sort who hadn’t made the higher ranks in any of the services, so had slunk away to earn their crust elsewhere. That wasn’t wholly fair. There were also evangelists, though they were rare. People who genuinely believed in what they were trying to do. To te
ach individuals and organisations how to protect themselves and those they served.

  What type was Harry? He had often wondered. As a young officer he’d had a reputation for being army mad. That was long before the wear and tear had taken its toll. Initially he had brought that same early enthusiasm to his new profession. Eventually there, too, time and the constant encounter with idiots had worn him down. Now he just wanted to get by. To be left alone. Nothing more.

  He finished his coffee and found a table to set down the empty cup and saucer. The next address was one he had quite wanted to listen to. It was being given by one of the men who had advised the Japanese after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown following the tsunami in 2011. The main points of interest for Harry were the lessons learnt from the initial Japanese desire to save face by pretending they could handle it by themselves without outside expertise. They were lessons he had gleaned himself on past occasions. It would be interesting to compare notes.

  He looked at the wall clock. Time to spare. He found the staircase and went down to Reception. He wanted to book a taxi to get him to the airport when the conference wrapped. It never hurt to book early and avoid the customary panicked rush. The attendees might count amongst them crisis management specialists, but that didn’t mean their personal admin wasn’t rubbish.

  As he crossed the cavernous marble-floored atrium, the first thing he saw was a uniformed policeman leaning over the Reception desk. He appeared to be checking something being shown to him by one of the desk clerks. Harry felt his blood run cold. So was this it? Had they tracked him down after all? He wondered if it would be like ET. The men with bunches of keys at their belts and listening devices, slowly closing in on his hideout, getting inexorably closer day by day, until he ended up zipped into a body bag, his potted flower wilted.