The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  They removed his handcuffs before leading him out of the van, an ambiguous gesture since he was surrounded by big men who pressed so close around him he hardly needed to walk at all. The lift, not the public variety but the kind used by teams of medics attending a body on a stretcher, was particularly claustrophobic since everyone wanted to be near Chan. The doors opened to two more Englishmen in army uniforms holding small black automatic guns. They glanced at Cuthbert, then at Chan. Someone had definitely been spreading rumors about him.

  There were two more armed guards at the entrance to the small ward. An English doctor in white coat walked toward them down a narrow corridor formed by light green screens on either side. Cuthbert left the group to speak to him for a few moments. Chan heard him call the doctor Major. A military hospital then.

  “Bring him over here,” Cuthbert said.

  They took Chan behind the first set of screens. His eye traveled from bandaged legs hanging from wires suspended from a frame above the bed, to hands also bandaged and hanging off the edge of the bed, to the distorted face of one of the divers. He gurgled when he saw Chan.

  The diver’s face was a mass of lesions with yellow crusts. His mouth was permanently open, showing large ulcers that had eaten away part of his lips. The man was shivering.

  Cuthbert did not take his eyes off Chan as the doctor spoke.

  “Agranulocytosis-infective lesions, severe ulcerations indicating radiation dermatitis, taking into account the other symptoms.”

  “Tell him about the other symptoms,” Cuthbert said.

  “Acute anemia, swelling in the lymphatic system, severe pains in the gastrointestinal tract, low white and red blood cell counts, beginnings of exfoliation-shedding of the skin.”

  Cuthbert nodded, led the group back to the corridor.

  “The others, please, Major.”

  They followed the doctor behind another set of screens. The other diver lay in similar condition. His eyes burned at Chan.

  The last victim: Higgins. Skin had already shed from his face, hands and forearms, his hair was gone, his skull was bloated more on one side than the other, pink-blind eyes stared at nothing; he looked like a giant fetus. Chan would never have recognized him. On a square plastic board hanging on the end of the bed someone had written in black felt tip: “Higgins, James Malcolm, Senior Inspector, RHKPF.”

  Blood, uncontained by skin, was seeping from the remaining flesh of his face.

  Chan gulped. “Why don’t-”

  “Because he’s dying,” Cuthbert snapped. He looked at the doctor.

  “That’s right. If we hadn’t shot him full of morphine, he’d be screaming the place down. After a certain amount of exfoliation has taken place there’s nothing we can do. Unpleasant way to go, frankly.”

  They marched Chan to a small room off the ward. A set of shelves at the back held dusty box files; there was a large white box with a red cross on the lid lying on the floor, what looked like some ancient sterilizing apparatus in a corner. No table, no chairs.

  Chan’s teeth were chattering. His eyes pleaded with Cuthbert. The political adviser handed him the packet of cigarettes he had taken away when they had arrested him.

  The cigarette waved up and down in Chan’s mouth. “What happened?”

  Cuthbert stared at him. “You tell us.”

  Chan fumbled in a pocket. They had left him his lighter, a sure sign that they didn’t mind if he committed suicide. He moved his eyes from man to man in the group. They all gazed steadily back.

  As a skilled interrogator Chan kept an intuitive checklist of body language indicating dishonesty: flushing with anger, looking away in an evasive manner, overanxiety, confusion, the defeated shoulder slump, wringing of hands, tightly folded arms, displacement activities like heavy smoking. In the course of a couple of minutes Chan expressed the whole repertoire. He wondered how he would behave if he ever committed an offense.

  “You’re making a mistake.” His voice cracked, and his tongue slurred the words at the same time. He could not recall ever sounding so dishonest. “I know nothing.”

  Cuthbert exchanged glances with one of the officers. “Possibly. But how do you explain your miraculous escape? You led the divers to the new dive site where you said you had seen a trunk. They found it, hauled it to the surface and, not unnaturally, opened it. They found some guns and other weapons-and a long lead case. Inside was what appeared to be a piece of pipe. They all handled it, but Higgins handled it the most. He wanted to help with your investigation, Charlie. He liked to play the fool-he’s young-but he was keen, a good policeman. Everyone on the boat that day has some degree of radiation sickness; these three are the worst. Except you. You don’t even have a rash.”

  Chan gulped. “I was taken off. Higgins insisted. I nearly drowned by diving too deep. He thought I might get the bends.”

  “But you found the trunk. You. All alone at a hundred and fifty feet. After abandoning your two companions, against all the rules of scuba diving.”

  Chan’s eyes watered. His right hand juddered. “A hunch. Why assume that only one object had been thrown overboard? They would never have let me dive if they’d known I was going to search around, but someone had to. It was an obvious thing to do. It’s in all the manuals: ‘Check the scene of the crime or the scene of evidence collection in an expanding radius.’ ” He looked into Cuthbert’s eyes. “I’m a detective. And why would I have told them about it if I was bent? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You could have been double-crossed, framed. The point is you knew where to look. Impossible that anyone would have found that trunk by accident; it was in a fault line half hidden by coral.”

  “I followed the smuggler’s route, for God’s sake. I was looking for evidence thrown overboard along the line the boat must have taken when they dumped the mincer.”

  “And then you disappeared.” Cuthbert made a cathedral out of two hands, put the tips to his lips, discarded the gesture in favor of a wagging finger. “That’s what swung us against you. Charlie Chan’s not the type to find a key piece of evidence and then just disappear. Everyone said so. Even the commissioner. Not even a phone call to check on progress? You haven’t taken more than two days’ leave in two years.”

  “Since I divorced.”

  “We had a full radio alert out for you, a stop at immigration at Kai Tak Airport; we even checked the fishing fleets.”

  “You should have checked the Grand Hyatt.”

  Detection was a tedious business, Chan thought, there was no doubt about it. Checking, double-checking, cross-checking. There was no art. Ninety percent of it could be done by a clerk or junior librarian. A detective’s experience culminated in the knowledge that 100 percent of human adults were liars when it came to issues of personal comfort and survival. But each urban tribe habitually lied in a different way. As a general example, the blue collars lied about stolen goods, the white collars about tax. There lay the difference between a professional and an amateur; the pro always knew what kind of person he had before him and wherein lay the preferred lines of dishonesty. Would a chief inspector, for example, lie about checkable details?

  Back at ICAC headquarters Chan sat in silence, politely unimpressed. In a room more inviting than the first only inasmuch as it possessed a window and no Forte, he sat in a chair identical to the one he’d raised in defense against the now-hospitalized South African. On the other side of the desk another officer made telephone calls, sent for Chan’s working files, made more telephone calls. It was extraordinary how reticent people became when told it was the ICAC on the other end of the telephone. And Chan had thought the police had it tough.

  Eventually the tiny pieces of evidence began to form a pattern. The life and times of Chief Inspector S. K. Chan took shape on the brown government desk. A dry life for the most part, full of work and little play, distorted by early trauma, slashed by divorce, with a red flash of romance toward the end. On the plus side, an unusual success rate in the detection of serious
crime, black belt in karate, medal for bravery when young. On the negative, a self-destruct streak manifested in heavy smoking, occasional surliness toward superiors, failure to attend social gatherings that might have aided his career. Borderline antisocial.

  “You’re piecing it together?” Chan asked. The officer glared. “Want any help?”

  Cuthbert had disappeared. Chan suspected him of lurking somewhere to avoid embarrassment. There was a motto his kind of Englishman followed, handed down from imperial times: Never apologize, never explain.

  It was another half hour before the officer picked up the telephone and asked to speak to Mr. Cuthbert. Chan found it heartening when the English used reverential tones to communicate with mandarins. Give them another thousand years, and they’d be starting dynasties.

  “It seems he spent the day and night with his lady friend at the Grand Hyatt, sir. His story holds together on the circumstantial evidence, sir. I don’t think I have anything to hold him with, sir. Shall I let him go?”

  He put down the receiver and looked at Chan. “You’re taking a week’s leave, home leave. Sleep every night at your own flat, and phone in twice a day. Don’t go scuba diving.”

  25

  The considerable bulk of Sir Michael Henderson emerged from the first-class compartment of Cathay Pacific flight CX250 from London and was immediately greeted by a senior immigration official who called the six-foot-three, 250-pound Englishman “sir” and asked if he’d had a good flight, to which the undersecretary nodded and replied in a booming voice: “Excellent.”

  The official quickly led the senior British civil servant to a door marked “No Admittance” and down a corridor that bypassed the interminable row of passport booths and led directly to the other side of the Kai Tak Airport buildings, where Milton Cuthbert waited. The two men shook hands warmly before Cuthbert showed his patron and boss to the waiting air-conditioned white government Toyota driven by Cuthbert’s chauffeur. The two diplomats settled into the backseat as the driver made for Central.

  “Just in time for lunch,” Cuthbert said.

  “It’s mostly lunch that I’ve come for. You’ve no idea how unbelievably awful London’s become; there’s been a measurable decline in civilized values. Nobody dares be seen enjoying a good business lunch these days for fear of incurring some bloodcurdling epithet from the limited vocabulary of the politically correct: ‘decadent,’ ‘wasteful,’ ‘conspicuous consumer,’ would you believe? I’ve even heard a minister described as sleazy because he finished lunch with a cognac. There’s a new fascism about, Milton, and it gives me the creeps. You don’t know how lucky you have been, this past decade, stationed in this bastion of flamboyant laissez-faire.”

  Cuthbert smiled. “Will the club do, or would you prefer haute cuisine at Pierrot’s?”

  “My dear, to this long-suffering proletarian the club is haute cuisine. I snatched forty winks on the plane, and do you know, I experienced the most vivid dream of my entire life, the salient feature of which was that silver trolley at your club bearing a huge slightly underdone slab of roast Angus with bone marrow topping, light gravy and Yorkshire pudding crisp on the outside with a wickedly seductive softness at the center. The other memorable feature was a Bordeaux. I couldn’t quite make out the label, but it looked very much like a St. Julien, or possibly a St.-Estèphe.”

  “Perhaps a St.-Estèphe 1984, Cos d’Estournel?”

  Henderson allowed his large hand to drop onto Cuthbert’s forearm and grip it. “My word, Milton, I do believe you’re developing an Oriental clairvoyance.”

  Cuthbert acknowledged Henderson’s humor with a prolonged chuckle. Rank aside, Cuthbert admired the only man he knew who could solve the Times crossword more quickly than he could himself. And of course the fat man’s mental agility manifested in other equally telling ways. Inside the pampered gourmet there lurked a paper warrior of extraordinary subtlety and cunning. Even if Cuthbert hadn’t liked him, he would have been a fool not to cultivate him. The less influential desks of Whitehall were frequently manned by those who had neglected to pay homage to Sir Michael Henerson.

  The driver stopped outside the revolving doors of the Hong Kong Club in Jackson Road and got out to open the rear door for Henderson. Cuthbert gestured him through the doors into the lobby of the club. To the right was a full-length portrait of the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, on the left two bored Chinese cloakroom attendants. Four eminent Englishmen whom he recognized were waiting for guests. In the lift the chief secretary of Hong Kong was waiting to ascend.

  “Come along, Michael, if you dare test Japanese technology with your bulk,” the chief secretary said.

  Henderson grinned broadly. “Peter, what on earth are you doing here?”

  “I work in Hong Kong, Michael. Surely you knew that?”

  “I did hear a rumor-some sort of secretary, aren’t you?”

  “Something like that,” the chief secretary admitted. “What brings you to this quiet backwater?”

  “He dropped in for lunch,” Cuthbert said as the lift doors closed.

  “In that case I’m going to order on the double, before he eats the whole of the daily roast.”

  The three men laughed on their way to the Jackson Room, where a Chinese maître d’ greeted them with slick charm and showed Henderson and Cuthbert to the diplomat’s usual table in a corner facing the room. Every diner they passed on their way to the table was male; women were not allowed in the Jackson Room at lunch-time.

  They sat simultaneously, pulled napkins from rings, glanced up at the maître d’.

  “Bloody Mary,” Henderson said.

  “Same,” Cuthbert said. He smiled at a Chinese queen’s counsel who was lunching with the attorney general at a nearby table.

  “Your chief secretary is looking haggard these days,” Henderson said, “I do hope he’s not gone on a politically correct diet.”

  “I think rather it’s the future of Hong Kong that’s causing him concern.”

  “Oh, that! Yes, he always was a worrier, even at Eton. That’s why I advised him to come out here, you know. Jolly glad I did; he’s never looked back. He didn’t have quite the sangfroid or the gravitas for the home team. Don’t tell him I said so, though.”

  “Is that why you sent me out here, Michael?”

  Henderson placed his large hands together on the table as if he were about to say a prayer. “My dear, you’re out here because you are the only one who does have the nerve to preside over the last hours of the Holy British Empire-the runt of it anyway.”

  “Really? You said at the time it was because I spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. ‘Like a coolie’ was the phrase you used, as I recall.”

  Henderson tutted. “You never believed that was a reason. You know how I am about languages, especially Asian ones. How on earth you can have a decent crossword with ten thousand characters or whatever it is, I just don’t know. Chinese cuisine, though, that does command one’s deepest respect. Anyway, as I remember, you were keen as mustard. I assumed, to your credit, it was the food you were after, the Paris desk having been bagged by old Moffat.”

  “The food-and China.”

  Henderson allowed his eyes to rest on Cuthbert for a moment. “Yes, China. Well, shall we postpone business until after the main course? You know how strict I am about priorities.”

  Discreetly Cuthbert checked his watch. Just after one. From the way Henderson watched the sommelier open the St.-Estèphe, Cuthbert guessed it would be late afternoon before the undersecretary was ready to talk shop.

  Jonathan Wong also checked his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. The trucks were due at one o’clock but had probably been snarled in the traffic on Queen’s Road. He saw that Sowcross, the director whom the bank had appointed to oversee the operation, was also anxious. Twenty of the bank’s usual security guards with pump-action shotguns stood in half attention around the underground entrance to the vaults, but Wong was most curious about five white men whom the bank had hired from
a different kind of security company. They had taken up their own strategic positions in and around the vault and were waiting after their own manner. They slouched against walls and pillars, but Wong saw alert eyes constantly moving in lean faces. Black machine pistols with wire stocks hung around their necks. The white men had been flown in especially, according to Sowcross.

  He heard a shout at the same time as he heard the security truck approaching the gate. Sowcross pressed a button on the wall behind the entrance to the vault; the steel gate rolled up; the small armored truck trundled up a ramp to the area next to the vault. Sowcross pressed another button; the steel gate rolled down. They were alone with the first consignment. Wong watched while some of the security guards unloaded crude cardboard boxes with Chinese characters on the side. Wong exchanged glances with Sowcross and followed him into the vault, where a team of clerks was waiting. Each clerk sat at a bench set against the wall; next to his or her right hand an automatic bill-counting machine also waited. Wong knew that the aperture of the machine could be adjusted for different-sized notes and the dial was adjusted to the currency.

  Although it had underpinned and structured every aspect of his life for the whole of his life, having usurped the role that some cultures still reserved for God, Wong had never seen money in this quantity before. All around the room the machines whizzed through stack after stack of banknotes, many of them the dull green, black and white of the American currency, others the lurid colors of the Australian dollar, some French francs with the head of Delacroix, plenty of British pounds expressing the national obsession with their queen, small German marks, Dutch guilders, Italian lire, Spanish pesetas, Singaporean dollars-it seemed that all over the world crime paid. Wong realized that he was surrounded by money in all its mind-numbing banality. People died, slaved, prostituted themselves for this monotony. He saw that Sowcross was not of the same mind. The Englishman stared at the mountains of cash, impaled by fascination. When the last machine stopped whizzing, he roused himself to check the dials and enter the numbers on his pocket calculator. Having traveled in a circle, he returned to Wong.