The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  Cindy asked the duty officer for a copy of the city plans used by the search team.

  The lower level comprised a rectangular arrangement of underground rooms inside the larger square of the building’s foundations. Two flights of stairs led off the enfilade of main entrance spaces, in opposite directions. The right, eastward flight led down and round on itself into the wine cellar, which pointed back into the center of the house. The westward flight followed the mirror opposite path, into the underground cinema – the end of which almost met the end of the wine cellar, but not quite. This had to be the location of the mausoleum. “I’ll check the wine cellar approach first,” Cindy said, hurrying off with her Maglite and Glock drawn. Natalie followed.

  The floor plan had simplified the cellar system greatly. Yes, there was a main, barrel-vaulted passageway – but off it ran innumerable spur cellars, each dedicated to a different age. They had iron grille gates, several rusting off their hinges. Damp mustiness pervaded all. They were unable to find the light switches, relying on Cindy’s powerful flashlight instead. She held it over her left shoulder, her gun drawn in her right hand.

  They walked down the main passageway. There was a strange humming sound, perhaps the heating system. Or did Towse have a generator? The ages chalked beside the cellars announced that they were getting older, now down to the 1900s – no, 1890s. The hum grew louder. But they’d taken a wrong turn, Natalie felt sure.

  She said: “I’m going back to the main floor.”

  “Good idea. Wait for me there,” Cindy said. “I’ll just check the far end.”

  Looking over her shoulder, Natalie saw Cindy’s flashlight reflect off naturally uneven rock surface, perhaps the far end.

  There was barely enough light to find her way back, but Natalie managed. She waited on the main floor for a moment. Then she acceded to a deeper curiosity, descending by the opposite flight of stone steps, back into the bowels of the building.

  The opposite path, taking Natalie down to the cinema, was much grander. Wide stone corridors turned right and right again, back into the center of the building. Soon she found herself in the hundred-seater picture house. The light switches she located easily enough in the entrance vestibule; the original gas-lamps in the wall torches and ceiling chandeliers had been swapped out for candle-effect bulbs, flickering dim orange. There was enough light to make out the blood-red velour seats and wall coverings under decades of dust. Over the front screen was a delicately patterned curtain, dead and brittle like pressed moths’ wings.

  She tried to imagine this underground cinema in the time of Sullivan B. Wentworth: early Hollywood’s dapper, dinner-suited elite, tucking into a Fatty Arbuckle comedy or a von Stroheim masterpiece. As she looked around the long-ago deserted rows, she could almost imagine the commotion there: how real it must have all seemed to those tense limbed men and women in the audience, dwarfed by twenty-foot high planes and trains and the rest of the modern age hurtling towards them, in silent black and white. But wait, what was behind that screen?

  As Natalie came closer to the curtains, she could make out a rectilinear pattern. She parted them. No screen. The screen had been raised – recently? – into a concealed, tightly coiled roller above. Ahead was a metal portcullis-like structure. A hinged section inset, ajar. And in the wall beyond, an ancient looking arched doorway, the wooden door just outlined with light. It looked awfully like a crypt.

  She opened it. There was a narrow staircase, the steps hewn from bedrock. Many steps, taking her much deeper, until finally she was in another, cooler corridor, which felt considerably older – except that she could hear that humming sound, and see pullulating light reflecting off rock surface.

  The first thing she came across was a display rack of swords. The one nearest eye level bore an engraved plaque: ‘Shuang Shou Jiàn – two-handed Chinese fighting sword’ – over five foot long. Looking down, she noticed one of the shorter swords missing.

  She rounded the corner, into a larger, cavernous space, the light and sound source becoming clear: a giant curving HD screen, somehow set into the rock surface and even bigger than the cinema screen of the picture house above. The image was familiar from just a few hours before, the immersive scale less so: the aftermath of a medieval battle, with a dead knight in black armour hanging by one leg from a stirrup, the legs forming the upside ‘4’ of the hangman. Facing the curving screen was a chair equipped with a floating keyboard and other computer-related peripherals.

  He sat slouched with his slip-ons at odd angles on the floor. His head hung back out of view, his arms dangling straight down. Rising vertically out of his chest was the missing sword, his shirt and business slacks soaked darkest vermilion.

  She took a step towards him. He was still breathing, very shallow. The sword had smashed in his sternum, from which blood was still bubbling up. He hadn’t quite managed to kill himself.

  “Natalie.” It was almost a whistle. “Finish it.”

  She stood.

  “Before I tell you something, that will change everything.”

  She half reached for the sword handle, clasping its metal ridges, finding the purchase that eluded him, that would send the blade in an inch or so deeper, into his heart – and yet she couldn’t.

  “You know that your father, he … Our paths crossed. You know that,” and he gave a strange-sounding cough, almost a gargle: “– that he was a client of mind, when I was just starting out, with my Leading Ladies,” and he coughed again, in way Natalie had never heard before.

  “Though,” he smiled thinly, “he graduated on to other things altogether in Budapest.”

  The cough was thoroughly wet, ragged now.

  “He went native out there Natalie,” Towse hissed into nothingness, the darkness rushing in.

  By the time Natalie became aware of Cindy’s presence, his face had sunken into its death mask. She sensed Cindy’s arm round her shoulders. “You found him,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Dead.”

  “Quite so.”

  “I need to call in a few folk, to take care of this.”

  “Please do.”

  “Then maybe we can get out of here.”

  “That would be nice.”

  EPILOGUE

  Lauhu Bridge Station, the key border checkpoint between Hong Kong and mainland China. At peak hours, it processed more than a quarter of a million people through the main floor of its chaotic three-story structure, the transit point for trafficked women from Fujian Province and much further afield, destined for Jinshan, the ‘Mountain of Gold’ – America.

  From her observation point, Natalie Chevalier could see the late straggling commuters crossing back from neighboring Shenzen into Hong Kong. There was an almost metallic smell about the place. Closer to hand, the odour of earth. Possibly urine too.

  Hong Kong had a peculiar history. The Brits had taken it under a war that sat somewhere between the good, the bad and the unmentionable of their colonial past. By eighteen forty something, the thirst for oriental fineries had become so constant, the trade imbalance with China so great that the Chinese were demanding silver, exclusively, in exchange. Silver was a reserve metal and not one the Brits wished to give up lightly, so they started filling the trade gap with opium instead. Before long, addicts were slumped across dens the length of the Chinese coast – all the way up to Shanghai, soon renamed the ‘Whore of the Orient’. The Qing dynasty declared the narcotic illegal. The Brits sent in gunboats, the superior technology of the time. Upon a successful conclusion to the Opium Wars, they’d not only won Hong Kong but various other ‘free trade’ concessions to boot. It made you wonder exactly what trading lessons the local merchants had learned and passed down the generations. Certainly none of it was easy for Natalie to square with the fabled British sense of fair play but, hell.

  We all have our public and private sides, don’t we?

  She lay face down in the darkness. She wore thin-soled sneakers, loose black mobility pants, a plain roll
-neck sweater and a scrunchie tying her hair back. She brought the little finger of her right hand to her mouth, pressing the signet ring to her lips. It bore the insignia of the Knights Templar Order, victorious in the first great age of MultiQuest.

  It was uncanny how the game had pegged her true identity. Upon first joining, she’d chosen the role of “enchantress” – a sort of fluttery southern butterfly, as she’d so often seen herself reflected in the perceptions of others. But the game had quickly renamed her Caerleone, an old soul – a knight errant no less. An existence predating the excrescences of modern society. Bizarrely, it had then all made complete sense to her – that yearning for a true cause in life: a worthy quest...

  All that time spent at her old company, pushing email around, sitting on calls or in meetings, trying to work around whatever was in the way of some software release, or something. All she cared to remember now was her old technical mentor Ray Ott arguing that good security engineering proceeded not from cool technology to “product” – rather, from requirements to solution. Which first meant defining the threat model, and only then selecting the technology that suited.

  Her right hand returned to the underside of the high-powered rifle, forefinger on trigger. Where Agent Adam Lau had obtained it from, she didn’t care to know. Just in case it was Tom Nguyen’s impounded weapon after all. Again, she felt a sense of equivalency with the guy, now serving four concurrent life sentences in San Quentin. Were their actions really so different, in the end?

  She shuffled, slowing her breathing right down, letting her body settle into the dry earth like a sack of soft sand. There was some pressure on each elbow and her left breast pinched a little, but not too much, actually. Her right hip was raised, right leg gathered up slightly, her dominant right eye aligning with the scoping. Through it she could see into the main room of a wooden building, perhaps fifty yards back from the border station’s perimeter. Certainly it was within earshot of the immigration officials and newly changed police guard standing outside the three-story structure. How could they not know what was going on in there?

  A single, hanging light bulb divided the dusty room: on one side stood a young man, on the other sat a young girl.

  A squat man sat guarding the door behind: a ma zhai – ‘little horse’, or enforcer.

  The briefing had been spot on. The standing man was indeed Xiao Lin. For a moment, Natalie wondered again what he was doing there, in person, at Lauhu Bridge. Then she recalled reading how ‘hands on’ he was as an executive, like a Head of Retail who takes over the cash till, just to show he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

  “No blowback,” Cindy had insisted.

  Usefully, the FBI Special Agent was in-country for Google’s hacker-spat with the Chinese authorities, the Mountain View-based search giant falling squarely within her jurisdiction. “No blowback,” Natalie had confirmed, while acknowledging that in an ideal world, there would be unimpeachable local policemen, cooperation across borders, fair extradition treaties. In an ideal world, hell, people may even behave decently towards one another in the first place. But this was not an ideal world. Just ask the girl sat in that dusty room, whose face Xiao was now stroking. Natalie could almost hear him sweet-talking her, all tian hua luan duo, ‘flowers dropping from the sky’. Her expression wasn’t so rosy however. Perhaps because her infant daughter had just been wrested away from her, removed from the building altogether.

  Not good.

  She – the mother – was being readied for the air route from Hong Kong International. But apparently Xiao wanted to sample the merchandise first.

  There were a lot of things about the human trafficking trade that had confounded Natalie’s expectations. For example, as between the air route and the sea option: she’d expected air to be vastly quicker, easier. Even large cargo ships took months to cross the Pacific, and that didn’t allow for embarkation and disembarkation time. Yet it turned out that by air, the wait alone averaged two-and-a-half months: the time it took to obtain forged documents, notably the fake ‘photo-sub’ passport, altered by photo substitution. Actual journey time ran more than 100 days on average, due to the many transit points involved. People from places such as Fuzhou City in Fujian Province couldn’t just go abroad for the first time from their local airport. They had to fly out of Hong Kong. And from there, they may pass through three or more countries. It was not uncommon for them to be sold on to other ‘snakeheads’ en route.

  All of which represented a market consolidation opportunity for an entrepreneurial and well-connected and man like Xiao Lin.

  The girl opposite Xiao wasn’t taking in anything he was saying anymore. He was becoming impatient, gestures all big and sweeping … all magnified into the four quadrants of the rifle’s crosshairs. But the girl wasn’t to be reasoned with. Evidently she just wanted her daughter back in her arms.

  All of a sudden Xiao clapped his hands over the girl’s ears like two cymbals smashing together. The forced air would perforate at least one of her eardrums, possibly both. The more painstaking version of this move, Natalie knew, involved chopsticks: from that, there could be no recovery of hearing. But this was quite enough to do psychological damage, for life.

  The girl’s head hung for a stunned second then slumped, a dark rivulet of blood running down her slackened jaw. Even the guard looked away. Xiao couldn’t conceal his grin, his chin and chest puffing up in victory.

  His eyes glowered down at the girl.

  Natalie’s parted lips pressed softly back together again. Vital not to lose focus. Any microscopic movement could mean missing. Once that bullet smashed into the building, either he’d be dead or on the move – and if on the move, impossible to sight at from this range. It was what had saved her life on the Monterey Peninsular, when Tom Nguyen was shooting at her. You simply can’t track a moving target through telescopic sights at this distance. Not successfully, at least.

  Nguyen had in fact come damn close.

  But damn close wasn’t nearly good enough here.

  Very gracefully, Natalie retracted her right eye further from the metal rim of the scoping, in anticipation of the kick. Xaio’s raised chin blurred slightly in the lens.

  That made it easier.

  The stock thumped back – and a second later, his head smudged pink.

  She was already on her feet, breaking down the rifle. She made her way down from the dark hilltop. She saw the lights glitter on the horizon. One of the firecracker bursts heralding the Chinese New Year should have coincided with the rifle report, but there was a growing sense of commotion down at the Station. Her very soul already felt strafed with remorse: Xaio Lin had a mother, father, siblings, cousins – who doubtless thought the world of him, as a ‘guest of the beautiful country’.

  Doubtless they had no idea.

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