Darkness Under Heaven

by F. J. Chase

  Judy looked up at the whistle and saw Pete waving at her. She zipped up her bag and jumped from a chair up to the counter like crossing a stream from rock to rock, leaping over to the other side.

  Avakian fired four rounds and blew the lock out of the door that separated the bank lobby from the rest of the building. A kick opened it up because even armored doors didn’t have armored locks. He had no idea why bank robbers always left the way they’d come in, with the police usually waiting outside, when every bank in the world had a back door.

  You were always most vulnerable when you were pulling out. Avakian reached in the duffel bag and got his hands on one of the tear gas grenades he’d liberated from the police car. He yanked out the pin and rolled it into the lobby. A mild pop, the loud hissing sound as the white chemical smoke came billowing up, and he could hear the stampede out the front door begin.

  Making sure Judy was with him, he fired a round down the hallway to announce himself. A couple of employees who hadn’t been able to resist sticking their heads out dove back into their offices and slammed the doors.

  “Watch our back,” he said to her as he trotted down the hall. They passed a pair of elevators. The gunfire had in fact properly announced them and the hallway was empty. There was no doorway at the end, only a stairway up and down. He began to turn his mind to that problem.

  Judy saw a head appear in the doorway they’d come through, then vanish back. But then something else came around the corner. She screamed, “Gun!”

  Avakian whirled about. She was already on the floor to give him a clear field of fire. Some rapid fire pistol shots cracked by and he could see a hand holding a pistol, just sticking it around the corner, unaimed. But he aimed, not for the pistol but the corner the shooter was behind. He gave it a ten-round burst and watched the splinters fly into the air. The pistol dropped to the floor.

  “Go!” he yelled to Judy. “Get out in front!”

  She bounced up and sprinted down the hall.

  Dammit, Avakian thought. He shouldn’t have done that. He had to look both ways and be ready to fire, and she was almost in the next county. He abandoned his plan and ran after her.

  Giving none of that any thought, Judy ran flat-out to the end of the hallway but skidded to a stop before the stairs, stymied by the choice of whether to go up or down.

  Avakian caught up and ordered, “Back behind me,” as he started down the stairs.

  One short flight and there was a fire door. Avakian kicked it open. No one took a shot. He bobbed his head out. If there were any jumpy cops out there, they wouldn’t be able to resist. No gunfire.

  Out the door and another sprint across an employee parking lot. He covered her while she climbed the fence at the edge, then replaced the rifle in the duffel bag and followed. There was a face looking out from just about every window in the bank building, and without a doubt most of them were on the phone.

  A twenty-yard run down a side street and they hit the intersection to Xiang’er Hutong, an un-hutong-like Beijing back road in that it was actually a relatively straight line to the next north-south main drag. They’d parked the bike on it and walked all the way around to the bank.

  “Warm-ups,” said Avakian.

  They stripped them off and left them in a pile, revealing jeans and shirts. Judy had forgotten all about her hated sun hat so he plucked it off her head for her.

  He had baseball caps for them both, and white surgical masks. Common riding attire in Beijing pollution, and just the thing to conceal those Caucasian features. As did the sunglasses, which were a necessity for driving anyway.

  Yes, the bike was still there. He took her shoulder bag and jammed it under the rifle in his duffel.

  Avakian was reattaching the spark plug cable when she patted her pockets and turned to him helplessly. “I left the screwdriver in my warm-ups.”

  Without a word he flicked open his pocket knife and pried out the loose lock cylinder. Sticking the blade in the hole he found the ignition switch cavity and twisted his wrist. “Kick it.”

  She pushed the electric starter, and just before the bike roared to life he heard sirens. He slapped her on the rump in the universal signal to get the hell going.

  Judy opened the bike up, but perhaps a hutong road was not the best place for that. Between cars, bicycles, and pedestrians there wasn’t much room to spare. Barely enough for him to stretch out his arms. If he’d been inclined to do so, which he wasn’t. “Take it easy!” he yelled.

  A cyclo emerged from a lane and Judy swerved to avoid it, nearly scraping Avakian off onto an oncoming car. Or so it seemed to him. “EASY!” he yelled, a little louder this time.

  There were three cars ahead of them waiting to pull out into the next intersection. And Avakian watched with horrified disbelief as Judy passed them not on the inside but the outside, where one would normally expect to greet approaching traffic. Then barely braked as she bombed out into the main avenue, Jiaodaokou Nandajie.

  Judy leaned the bike on its side as she went into the hard right turn. Something she hadn’t done until now. And Avakian, in his usual tense upright posture, experienced G-forces he had not experienced before and felt himself being pulled right off his seat.

  His first instinct was to press his thighs together like he would riding a horse. Except he immediately realized that inserting his trousers into the spinning rear wheel of a motorcycle was not a solution but rather the start of a whole new problem. Feeling himself being sucked off the back of the bike unleashed a blast of pure terror, and he frantically grabbed at her waist. “I’m falling off the fucking bike!”

  Judy couldn’t see what was going on but she felt it as she tried to come out of the turn. They were going to dump. “Lean to your left!” she screamed, throwing her own weight that way. The bike was on its side, barely hanging onto the road. She gunned the throttle. Only speed was going to save them.

  It was a complete accident of physics that Avakian, who had passed beyond the ability to follow simple directions at that point, saw the road coming up to greet him and instinctively threw himself away from it.

  Their combined weight and the property of inertia righted the bike, almost miraculously.

  Judy throttled back, the near miss having supplied her own bracing blast of adrenaline. “You’ve got to relax and lean into the turns!” she shouted.

  Avakian was trying to rearrange the duffel bag, whose strap was strangling him, without releasing his grip from her waist. “What?”

  Now he was twitching all over the place, and she was bouncing back and forth in the seat trying to counterbalance his moves. The bike was shimmying all over the road. “Relax, goddammit!”

  “What?” It was easier for her to hear him, since he was yelling right in her ear.

  “RELAX!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  “Are you kidding?” came the reply.

  “You’ve…got…to…relax…and…lean…into…the…turns! Turn…with…the…bike! OR YOU’LL DUMP US!”

  Well no shit, Avakian thought. Nice to know that now. Evidently everyone else in the world just had that information imprinted on their fucking DNA, so they didn’t need to be told about it. Okay Pete, you can do this. Deep breath. Loosen up. You’re going to die on this fucking thing anyway—you might as well die relaxed.

  And that took both conscious thought and considerable effort, since every muscle in his body was currently as hard as tempered steel.

  Just as he was getting the hang of it, the traffic ahead stopped. Judy weaved through until it settled into a solid unmoving mass, all the cars out of their lanes and packed together, not even enough room for a motorcycle to get through.

  This temporary respite from the sheer terror of motorcycle riding gave Avakian a chance to check out his surroundings. There seemed to be a lot of people milling around in front of the businesses on the street, as if they were waiting to get in. And then there were a couple of shop owners pulling their shutters down. He checked his watch. Way too ear
ly to be closing. Could it be no water? Oh, yeah.

  Judy revved the engine a couple of times. Just as he was about to say it was okay, they could wait, she gave it the gas. As he went back to hanging on to her waist for dear life she went up over the right-hand curb, through a line of low border bushes, and down into the bicycle-only lane. And then speeded back up, flying down the lane with all the bicyclists shaking their fists at them.

  Oh shit, Avakian thought. This was definitely not the way to keep from attracting attention to themselves.

  Sure enough, a siren started wailing behind them. Avakian looked over his shoulder. A white police motorcycle, lights flashing, was coming up fast in the bike lane.

  “Stop!” he shouted to Judy, before she could speed up and start a chase.

  As she stopped so did a few bicyclists who were looking forward to seeing them get their comeuppance.

  Avakian unbuttoned the front of his shirt. It was both a little too big for him and not tucked in. He’d cut and modified one of the police holsters to fit inside the waistband of his jeans, and the pistol was riding at an angle right above his groin. He took a firm grip and tugged to loosen it in the holster. His left hand was on Judy’s shoulder, and he gave her a reassuring pat.

  The cop pulled up right behind them. Once again Avakian was struck by Chinese incongruities. The cop was in the standard blue police uniform, complete with tie, that must have been a bitch on a motorcycle. The only difference from a regular patrolman was a white crash helmet and white pistol belt. The radio microphone was dangling from his shoulder epaulet.

  As soon as the cop put the kickstand down Avakian swung his leg over the seat so both feet were planted on firm ground, settled the pistol front sight on center mass, and shot the startled cop right off his bike. A shriek rose up from the stopped bicyclists, and they began to scatter.

  “Go,” he told her, remounting the seat. He flicked the safety to de-cock the pistol and replaced it back under his shirt.

  Judy peeled out so fast she nearly left him standing bowlegged in the street. He regained his grip on her waist but could barely keep up with the side-to-side leaning as she tore through the bicycles.

  “Next left, next left!” he yelled. Never run in a straight line.

  As usual for Beijing the cars were stacked up in the middle of the intersection and refusing to relinquish even an inch of the right of way. What made it hard for a commuter made it easier for a motorcyclist. Avakian remembered to lean this time.

  As they turned, he caught a glimpse farther up the road of two white panel trucks of the Water Resources Ministry, lights flashing, stuck in traffic. It was the only pleasing part of the whole drive.

  Now they were on another reasonably straight hutong road that was so jammed with cars Judy was forced to slow down to negotiate her way through. Small favors, Avakian thought. They were very near Houhai Lake and the scene of their original crime.

  One, two, three, four intersections. “Next right!” he yelled in her ear. “Stick to the speed limit and stay in the car lanes!” There were no cops behind them, but the next avenue would tell the tale.

  Judy turned onto Jiugulou Daije. No roadblocks, just traffic. In less than a quarter of a mile they passed under the 2nd Ring Road and over the Andingmenxibin River. The inviting green space of the North River Bank Park flashed by on their left.

  After that short trip north they headed east, cutting across the top of Beijing and through the lake parks of Rending-shu and Liuyin. Avakian kept them off the main roads that were usually well covered by traffic cops this time of day. He was finally seeing some benefit from all those months in Beijing and all Kangmei’s traffic avoidance tricks.

  Four more miles of slicing through bumper-to-bumper traffic and they were once again within sight of the SAS Royal Hotel. But Avakian approached it from the opposite direction this time, not wanting to bump into a motorcycle owner searching the streets for a missing ride. The poor schnook was going to have troubles enough once the cops ran the license down.

  He pointed under Judy’s arm to a space between two cars. Nothing like finally gaining some confidence now that the motorcycle ride was over.

  As soon as the engine was off he had her arm and they were walking away as if they’d never seen that motorcycle before. The hats and surgical masks went in the next trashcan they passed. The sunglasses stayed on.

  The Xiali was where they’d left it, but with a parking ticket stuck to the windshield. “Keep walking,” Avakian said under his breath.

  He had to give that some thought. Did Chinese meter maids just write tickets, or did they run numbers looking for stolen cars?

  Still, he made a large circle within visual range all around the car, looking for anyone who might be staking it out. The coast was clear, but there was no sense in being careless. Beijing was an easy place to be paranoid in. There was always a crowd everywhere you went, and someone was always watching you.

  With the car door unlocked, since he did not have the key, someone had taken the opportunity to remove the radio and rifle the glove box. They were welcome to it. As long as the car ran, that is. He patted himself on the back for disconnecting the trunk latch.

  He dumped the duffel bag between the front seats and sat down. It felt so good to be sitting in a car again he almost got a little misty over it. Now all it had to do was run. He plucked the ignition cylinder out with his fingers and turned his knife in the socket. The engine caught.

  Avakian leaned forward and planted a heartfelt kiss on the steering wheel.

  19

  Soon it took all of Commissioner Zhou’s investigators and all their radios to keep track of what was happening in the city. So much effort that the hallway no longer offered enough space to work. The apartment, of course, was still smoldering from the explosion. Rather than commandeer someone else’s apartment the commissioner had the makeshift command post moved down to the building lobby.

  Where the apartment manager watched mournfully as they tacked sheets of paper to a wall to use as an improvised chalkboard. He supposed he should be grateful they were not writing directly on the wall.

  Commissioner Zhou was once again standing before a map tacked up alongside the paper, lost in thought. Nine underground explosions or water main breakages. Explosions on two trains and one subway car. All the rail systems shut down until the remaining tracks and trains could be checked, which meant tens of thousands of commuters stranded. Between the normal rush hour and the detours around flooded streets traffic had come to a halt. The incidents marked on the map formed an almost complete oval around the city. Only the upper left part of the oval hung open. Why was that? Then he leaned forward and put his finger on the place where the abandoned police car had been discovered. The open part of the oval. You were interrupted, he thought. But was that an important clue, or only an intriguing dead end?

  He would never have thought of water. Or that it could be accomplished without one person, one police officer making a report. None who survived a meeting with Avakian, he reminded himself.

  Inspector Cheng said, “Comrade Commissioner, the Industrial and Commercial Bank on Dungsi north has been robbed by two white foreigners, a man and a woman. The man carrying a Type 95 rifle. Many shots were fired, all by the robbers. None hurt by gunfire, but a guard clubbed unconscious. A tear gas grenade was used in the escape.”

  Commissioner Zhou did not imagine that there were many other foreigners with infantry rifles robbing banks in the city. And it seemed that Avakian still had the doctor with him. “Tear gas? Is that confirmed?”

  “Yes, Comrade Commissioner.”

  Where could he have obtained tear gas? Of course. From the abandoned police car. So that question was definitely resolved. Commissioner Zhou thought about other standard equipment Avakian might have taken from the car. Did he kill the missing policemen just to obtain their weapons and equipment? The man was as ruthless as he was daring. “Physical description?”

  “Red training suit, short bea
rd, bald.”

  “The nose?”

  “Not mentioned, Comrade Commissioner. But estimated height 165-167 centimeters.”

  That settled it. “How much money was taken?”

  “Approximately 220,000 yuan.”

  A tidy sum to finance an escape. “GPS tracking?”

  “No, Comrade Commissioner. The tellers were ordered to the floor, and the robbers chose the money themselves. None of the bundles with the trackers was taken.”

  “I assume they escaped with no pursuit.”

  “That is correct. A motorcycle policeman on Andingmen Neidaije was shot dead after stopping a motorcycle speeding in the bicycle lane. Two riders. It was not reported if they were foreigners, but they were not wearing training suits.”

  They would have changed. “The training suits were for us to concentrate our minds on, as we have,” said Commissioner Zhou. “Any sign of the motorcycle?”

  “No, Comrade Commissioner. The area traffic cameras and traffic units were concerned with the road problems. But all units have been alerted to the motorcycle license and description.”

  Commissioner Zhou interlaced his fingers together. “This is all one plan. The motorcycle was chosen to surmount the traffic jams. It has almost certainly been abandoned. How much of the city is without water?”

  “Only sections, Comrade Commissioner. The latest estimate is thirty percent of the city with full water service.”

  Commissioner Zhou turned to look up at his towering assistant once again. “So you are saying that seventy percent of Beijing is without water.”

  Inspector Cheng knew what was coming. “Yes, Comrade Commissioner.”

  “Once again please refrain from attempting to put a fine face on bad news. At least with me.”

  “Yes, Comrade Commissioner.”

  Commissioner Zhou had hopes that one day Cheng would learn. He said, “How do we proceed? Inspector Cheng, Inspector He?”

  Cheng was still smarting from his rebuke, so He answered. “Track down the motorcycle, Comrade Commissioner. Even if stolen, where it was stolen is valuable information. Have our own people review the traffic and bank video cameras. Assemble the evidence from both crime scenes.”