The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  Chan had been through the process of interrogating underworld cognoscenti once already, when the vat was first discovered, but the records he had kept were scanty. The related deaths of three policemen from radiation sickness, though, imparted a new spirit of formality to the investigation. It was likely that in time the case records would be mulled over by security forces, diplomats, politicians and even, perhaps, historians. He wanted to be able to show that he’d questioned the usual suspects, fired up the usual informants, recorded the usual dead ends.

  Although part of him resented it, he was feeling good. He was working again and officially rehabilitated, despite those who maintained that anyone that lucky could not be entirely honest. At the funerals of Higgins and the divers he had stood at the back, left early. Now Saliver Kan, foot soldier in the Sun Yee On, was sitting in the chair on the other side of Chan’s desk for the second time in a month. Aston had nicknamed him the Walking Spittoon.

  “I told you, Firstborn,” Kan said, “this wasn’t triad.” A snort executed on an inhalation temporarily cleared his troubled nasal passages. “Nice work, though. Maybe we’ll use a mincer on the 14K next time they try to take over Nathan Road.”

  “You want a Kleenex?” Chan asked.

  “Fuck your mother.”

  “It was just a hope.”

  “Pass the wastepaper basket. Thanks. Heard you found the machine? Will that be, you know, auctioned, like old police cars?”

  “No.”

  With an internal rumble Kan made a substantial contribution to the contents of the wastebasket. “Too bad. Doesn’t matter, you can buy them, right?”

  “Suppose there’s money in it. A lot of money?”

  “Money doesn’t make it triad, Firstborn.”

  “Three people were tortured to death. There had to be screams, struggle. They had to be taken to where they were killed; then the vat had to be removed and taken to that warehouse-probably by truck with lifting gear. Somebody must have seen or heard something.”

  Kan sniffed loudly. “How much money?”

  Chan had checked with Commissioner Tsui that morning. There was no limit to what the government was prepared to pay at this stage.

  “Maybe a million Hong Kong dollars.”

  For the first time Chan felt he had Kan’s full attention. The triad rubbed the blue singlet across his chest, hoicked thoughtfully. “Fuck your mother. For three little murders? They mince the emperor of France or something?”

  “If you hear anything-”

  “I’ll be knocking down your door, Firstborn.”

  “It has to be-”

  “I know. ‘Information leading to the arrest’ et cetera. You had a wanted poster out on me once. Five thousand you were offering, for a bank heist. Next time I’m using a mincer. A million! Fuck me slowly down the Yangtze. Wait’ll I tell the red pole. He might put me on it full-time.” Getting up to leave, Kan paused. “Come to think of it, maybe I won’t tell the red pole. If it was, you know, really good evidence-”

  “I confirm the figure’s negotiable,” Chan said.

  Kan nodded. At the door he paused again, gathered together a bolus, which he swallowed. “Million’s just the starting figure, right?”

  Throughout the day the same chair was occupied by other assassins with pebble eyes, hewn-rock features and cartoon names: Fat Boy Wong; Four-Finger Bosco; High-Rise Lam.

  Joker Liu said: “Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree, Chief. Maybe it was an industrial accident.” He stood up to mime his theory. “Sort of thing that happens all the time. The mincer stops, so victim one sticks his hand down to fix it, like this. Whoops! It starts up of its own accord-it was a mainland model, right?-it pulls victim one down, look, headfirst. Hearing his screams, victim two rushes to the rescue, grabs victim one’s foot while he still has one, like so. Hangs on too long, fuck your mother, he’s trapped too. Victim three to the rescue-same thing.” He sat down. “Lucky the whole of Mongkok wasn’t minced, seeing as how we care about each other so much.”

  “We’re offering a million for hard evidence.”

  Joker Liu paused on the brink of more black humor, nodded slowly, scratched his face. “No kidding.” At the door he said: “A million-that’s the starting price, right?”

  Chan’s standard lecture to recruits who came under his care, usually delivered at the moment of the recruit’s first experience of an investigative dead end, had not varied in ten years: “Most criminals inform on their colleagues at some stage in their careers, motivated by greed, envy, spite, malice or no good reason at all beyond a love of treachery. Such one-off aberrations can be valuable, but a successful detective needs at least one source for whom informing is a vocation.”

  To young recruits to whom he took a liking, he would add that a detective’s career could rise or fall depending on the quality of his most important informants. If you were exceptionally lucky and made contact with an informant of genius who trusted you, then you were a fool not to cultivate him, pamper him, put up with him, no matter what the price. You’d be a fool too not to make this person’s identity one of the most closely guarded secrets of your life.

  Chan never allowed Wheelchair Lee to come to his office and always took elaborate precautions to avoid being seen when he visited him. Leaving Aston to write out the reports of the day’s interviews with some of Mongkok’s more prolific killers, Chan slipped out of the police station complex, crossed Nathan Road between the bumpers of gridlocked cars, from which exhaust fumes rose steadily like steam from a throbbing morass, took turns down alleys with Chinese names only, then finally down a footpath with no name at all. The footpath led to the back of a computer store open at both ends. Chan walked through the store to exit into a small road with lockup garages more or less dedicated to the storage and onward dispatch of stolen goods and the illegal copying of computer software. A complicated knock on the heavily fortified door of one of them brought a curse in Cantonese and, eventually, the unlocking of the door, which began to open vertically. Chan ducked under before it was fully open. Lee maneuvered his wheelchair to pull the door down again once Chan was inside. A battery of lights illuminated the garage with its half dozen trestle tables piled with computer hard disks, coaxial cables, highly colored boxes of software, screens and cardboard boxes full of floppy disks.

  Lee: under a navy cutaway T-shirt, the magnificent musculature of a paraplegic. Neck and arm muscles bulged as he twisted to shoot a heavy iron bolt across the steel door, then twisted his head up again to look at Chan. Overbright eyes scanned Chan’s.

  “How’s business?” Chan asked.

  Lee shrugged. “Which side? Computer repair never ends; there’s a hundred beginners every day panicking because they’ve lost a masterpiece on their word processors or can’t log on to the Internet. I have people all over town now. We charge on an hourly basis. That’s the legal side. You don’t want to know about the other. Illegal copies still sell like hot cakes, though.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Something new? After the Mincer Murders, what next? The Hamburger Homicides?”

  “I’m still with the mincer.”

  Lee spit on the floor. “I told you, no one’s talking about that. Everyone I speak to, they act baffled. It looks like triads, it smells like triads, but if it was triads, someone would be boasting by now. Foot soldiers never keep their mouths shut. Not unless they’re very frightened anyway.”

  “There’s more money available now-a million, maybe more.”

  Lee nodded slowly. “So, it is something special. I was right.”

  “There’s an extra dimension. We’re not talking about it, though.”

  “Extra dimension? Who’s paying the million, government or private?”

  “Government.”

  “So, there’s a China side. Only China gets them that excited.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anything new?”

  “There were drugs found in a light fitting over the vat. Heroin. Pure white,
number four.”

  Lee raised his eyebrows. “How pure?”

  “Almost hundred percent. Uncut.”

  “Export quality. You don’t get it on the streets, not even gross. They’d rather make the markup in New York or Amsterdam. Very strange, but at least it gives me more questions to ask.”

  As he was leaving, Chan said: “I’d like you to have the million. But there’s competition.”

  Lee shrugged. “Money-who gives a shit? If I can give them pain, that’s what counts.” The eyes burned still brighter. The hysteria under the surface burst in him like a boil. Chan hurried to open the door. He didn’t want to hear what always came next. Too late. The cripple’s hand shot out to grasp Chan’s arm. Lee was stronger than he looked. Even if he strained every muscle in his body, Chan could not have loosened that iron grip, not without smashing Lee in the face anyway, and the paraplegic had ways of dealing with that maneuver. Shackled to the wheelchair, Chan turned his face away while Lee hissed: “To kill a man is one thing. To cripple him is one thing. But to make him watch in a mirror-in a mirror-while they cut his spinal cord-to make him watch-you understand, Chief Inspector? You understand?”

  Outside, Chan stood in the road sweating. Most informants demanded money. Lee demanded something more. He demanded the right to unnerve you, to suck you into his private agony, to make you see the world if only for an instant through eyes of total hatred. No, I don’t understand.

  It was early evening; he pushed through the crowds on his way home, automatically scanning faces. In the underworld army of Mongkok one could discern every human calling except honesty. All in all, it would be a relief to spend the next morning at the university with a lethal radioactive isotope.

  29

  The University of Hong Kong at Pok Fu Lam boasts some of the best colonial architecture in the territory. Neo-Roman arches beckon to cloisters and courtyards where the furious sun hardly penetrates. There is a clock tower of the kind beloved by predigital Europe. Quarters for senior academics enjoy high ceilings and an allocation of floor space of a magnitude that the commercial world reserves for the CEOs of multinationals. Even though the age of air conditioning had grafted onto it the usual low-ceiling designs from the rectangle school of architecture, the new wings were hidden as far as possible behind the original buildings.

  Chan always enjoyed visiting the university, breathing the air of disinterested inquiry into the nature of reality. In a different age and with different luck he might have brought his natural flair for detection to bear on a subject more uplifting than the squalid murder of three losers in Mongkok. In any event it was a pleasant early-morning fantasy with the sun on his back as he climbed the long stairway to the science wings.

  He showed his police identity card to the security guard at the block of laboratories that conducted research into radioactive substances. The three-bladed orange symbol for radiation twirled from every surface. In case the message was unclear, there was a skull and crossbones and warnings in English and Chinese. In addition to the usual security at the doors, Chan saw armed tall Englishmen in exceptional physical condition standing in twos at various points along the corridor. Cuthbert wasn’t taking any chances.

  He was led to room 245. Vivian Ip, thirty-three years old with cropped black hair and tiny diamonds in her ears, was bending toward a lead-glass screen. Her arms were thrust into two white concertina cylinders that penetrated the glass and ended in various steel instruments intended to replicate the functions of the human hand. She nodded to Chan, who stood and watched while she fumbled with a brush and white powder.

  “This has got to be the weirdest thing anyone has ever asked me to do in a radiation lab.”

  On the other side of the screen Chan recognized the trunk he had first seen on the bottom of the ocean. Its lid had been left open; in front of it were its contents. Three of the world’s more sophisticated small arms lay together: a Czechoslovakian Skorpion; an Israeli Uzi; an Italian Beretta. Next to them were three fragmentation grenades. To one side lay a long, narrow lead box. To another side was a small block of gold.

  Chan stared at the lead box, which he knew contained a bar of uranium 235, the highly enriched isotope that had killed Higgins and the two divers. The box looked harmless enough; one could imagine a musical instrument inside, a silver flute perhaps, or a clarinet. He studied the Skorpion. Compact black with a thick snout. He’d never heard of a Skorpion in Hong Kong, but it was a Chinese as well as an English adage that money attracts the best.

  He left the guns to focus on another item.

  “Any idea yet what that is?” He pointed to something reddish and shapeless about the size of a paperback.

  “No. It’s malleable and keeps whatever shape you give it. It has absorbed a lot of radiation. There’s no way I can analyze it at the moment.”

  Chan stared at the dust in the cabinet. “I thought you were going to use the laser?”

  Vivian nodded toward an instrument with a long barrel in carbon black plastic and gleaming steel on a heavy-duty tripod. A lens gleamed like a single eye.

  “Laser stands for ‘light amplification through stimulated emission of radiation.’ Argon ions are used to control the wavelength of the light. I’d be willing to bet my last dollar that it wouldn’t have any effect whatsoever on uranium two-three-five. I’d bet there wouldn’t be any reaction at all. I can’t even think of a reason why there would be. Nor can anyone I’ve spoken to. But there’s no literature on it, and I don’t really want to try. Do you?”

  Chan remembered the two divers in the hospital. Higgins. The funerals. “No.”

  “Exactly. So I thought I’d go back to the Stone Age.”

  As she spoke, the steel pincers dropped the brush.

  “Shit.”

  “May I?”

  Vivian removed her small hands from the cylinders. “Sure, you’ve had more practice.”

  Chan slipped his hands into the cabinet, tried to use the brush to paint the fingerprint dust over the handle of the Skorpion. The brush fell from the grip of the steel jaws.

  “Shit.” He withdrew his hands.

  Vivian Ip cocked her head to one side. “Just out of interest, how likely is it that any prints would be left after immersion at sea, retrieval by divers and exposure to radiation?”

  “I really have no idea,” Chan admitted. “But as the British say, you never know. Did you try the gold? People love to handle gold.”

  “Not yet. I was hoping you would be a better duster than I am.”

  Chan pulled out a box of cigarettes, remembered the strict rules, replaced it in his pocket. He tried again with the steel jaws. The trick was knowing exactly how much pressure to apply. There were no nerve endings in the instruments; it was all trial and error. When he was able to maneuver the small brush, he found it easier to dust the gleaming surface of the gold than the more complicated surfaces of the guns. Little by little it became clear that there were no prints on the gold.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep trying.”

  “But there may be no prints at all?”

  Chan hesitated. “That could be important too.” Vivian raised her eyebrows. “If there are not only no prints but no signs of handling except by the divers who wore gloves, that’s a negative indication.”

  It was difficult not to feel embarrassment under the Chinese woman’s steady American gaze.

  “Negative indication? Am I right in thinking that’s copspeak for it would prove that someone wiped all the evidence?”

  “Okay, I’ll do it myself if you think it’s a waste of time.”

  Vivian waved her hands. “No, no, please. I don’t mind. It’s kind of interesting. It’s like science. Half the time you’re setting up ways of proving you’re wrong. Hoping you’ll be proved right, of course.”

  Chan wished he could conduct the conversation over a cigarette. “The case is a puzzle. If this evidence was carefully wiped, that would at least help to confirm the nature of the puzzle.”

/>   Vivian was gazing at him again, that American stare that tested ego.

  “Would you like to go outside where you can smoke? I did some lab assistance work once to help pay for my graduate degree. Nicotine on rats, withdrawal et cetera. You’re showing all the signs.”

  “You must have learned a lot about people, working with rats.”

  Outside they walked across an open space to the canteen. Over a Styrofoam mug of coffee, a cigarette in his right hand, Chan watched the youth of Hong Kong. There were a few foreigners, Americans and Europeans, the odd Indian and quite a few Eurasians; the vast majority, though, were local Chinese. He wondered how they felt, growing up under one of the most aggressive capitalist systems in the world, knowing that within two months they would have to learn a new system under new masters. Probably they felt the way he felt: cheated and scared.

  “What do the kids say, about June?”

  Vivian looked around at the young faces in the canteen. “That they’ll have to adjust. Mostly they’re glad to be free of the stigma of colonial rule, but they know it’s not going to be easy. I guess they don’t realize how tough, though.”

  “You do?”

  “I saw corruption in the Chinese community in the States before I came back. I can guess what it’s like over the border. No one seriously expects anything else here after June thirtieth.”

  “These kids look so innocent.”

  “Actually, they are. Compared to the States, they’re pure beings who only aspire to develop their minds, be good sons and daughters, bring up their children in the traditional way. They hardly drink or smoke; the drug problem is mostly related to other nationalities; they’re careful about sex. I came back here from a research post in Berkeley like a good Chinese because my parents wanted me with them. I was kind of ashamed how many vices I’d managed to pick up in the States. Compared with these people, I’m contaminated by the wicked West. Tell me about your puzzle.”