Chapter 4
Corner of Hongfeng Road and Jinxiu East Road, Shanghai, China, eight years ago.
It was hot and sticky, humid and oppressive. The air was dusty and heavy with fumes from the incessant Shanghai traffic. A westerner was walking along the pavement, ignored by Shanghai's cosmopolitan residents, but gawped at with either curiosity or hostility by visitors from the countryside. She had olive skin and jet black, frizzy hair that the humidity had rendered untameable. Her skinny frame was clad in black, baggy clothes, and she was wishing she had had the sense to wear a colour that did not absorb the light and heat quite so well. She was walking, and wishing also that she had had the sense to catch a bus. It might have been hot and armpit-fragrant, but at least she would not have been walking. She was making for the China Europe International Business School, and wondering to herself - again - why on earth she had chosen to walk the long way round from her apartment. She halted to wait for the traffic lights to change so that she could head up Hongfeng Road towards her first lecture of the day.
The lights seemed to be taking an age to turn in her favour. The pavement adjacent to the junction was becoming increasingly crowded, and motorists waiting for a green light were becoming increasingly impatient. She knew from experience that the interval granted by the idiosyncratic traffic lights for pedestrians to cross was all too short, so she wormed her way through towards the front of the crowd. She kept her head down, watching where she was putting her feet - she had concluded that Shanghai was a city of spitters - and she had headphones in her ears and a CD in her Sony Discman. So, she neither saw nor heard anything amiss. But, somehow, she felt it.
The crowd started to surge forward. The lights had not quite changed in their favour, but seasoned pedestrians knew that the ones to watch were those controlling the motor vehicles, not the flow of pedestrians. So, the surge was not quite synchronised with the lights. A taxi driver, impatient to get round the junction, raced for the corner in defiance of the changing traffic lights, and instantly had to slam on his brakes and slap his car's horn because of the pedestrians in the roadway.
The girl in black, somehow, knew something bad was happening. She felt a lurch in the pit of her stomach and a flash of light behind her eyes, illuminating an image of a taxi hitting a small boy with a splash of blood. She blinked and the image was gone, but somehow…
She stepped quickly forward, and there, ahead of her, was a laughing boy running onto the road. And there off to the side, a taxi driver's face twisted in anguish as his car skidded, wheels locked, straight at the boy. She acted reflexively, not consciously. She grabbed the boy round the waist and pulled him off to the side, away from the taxi, and to safety. She felt the thud of the taxi hitting her in the side. Somehow, she rolled across its hood and found herself face down on the tarmac of the road. Her headphones came off and for the first time her ears registered shouts and screams, the squeal of tyres and brakes, and the crunch of cars hitting cars.
Dazed, she rolled over and looked around in confusion, not quite sure of what had just happened. Then the image of the laughing boy surfaced once more and she looked for him. She found she could not stand and crawled to the front of the taxi. Suddenly, people were clustered around her, asking was she hurt, did she need help. A man in an expensive looking suit asked, in perfect English, "Please remain still, miss, and tell me where does it hurt?"
She blinked, found it hard to get her answer together in English, and replied in standard Mandarin. "I believe I am unhurt."
The man switched to Mandarin too. "That may be shock. I am a doctor, and if you have no objections I can check you quickly for broken bones."
She nodded. As the doctor ran his hands down her limbs and gently palpitated her rib cage, she asked, "The boy?"
"Unhurt."
Another voice cut in. "Come, come, please step away, all of you, please step away. Let the medical technicians through. Are you a doctor, sir?"
The doctor answered, "Yes, I am. This young lady does not appear to have any serious injuries, but I recommend the ambulance gets her to the emergency room for x-rays and tests. There may be minor fractures and possibly a concussion."
A man in the blue uniform of Public Security Bureau loomed over her. He glanced at the doctor, and asked if she spoke Chinese. He looked down at her, and said, "Miss, can you please tell me what happened here?"
With the doctor's help, she managed to sit up. "The car - I think the driver drove through the traffic light as it turned red. It was going very fast and I saw the boy running ahead of everyone else on the crossing. I just reacted. I ran forward and pulled him out of the way."
"Yes," said the policeman. "That is what other people are saying, too. You moved very fast! You had the boy out of the car's way before half these people realised what was happening. I think the boy owes you his life."
The policeman gestured to one side, where she saw the boy in a bear-hug in the arms of a hysterical elderly woman - his grandmother, she guessed - who was alternately weeping and scolding over him. The elderly woman caught her eye, and pointed, babbling away in words that the young woman could not understand.
"What is she saying?" she asked the doctor. "I don't understand her dialect."
"She is from the countryside. I doubt if she speaks Mandarin. That is probably Huizhou dialect that she is speaking. Her accent is strange, and I am only getting a few words. She is rambling about a mother goddess."
The old woman was jabbing a finger repeatedly in the direction of the young one, and addressing herself to the doctor.
"She is saying something about her prayers to Guanyin having brought you here. That is a goddess of mercy, in the old Taoist beliefs. And she keeps mentioning Peiyang Niangniang, who is a mother goddess according to superstitious country dwellers." The doctor grinned. "So, it seems that you are a goddess!"
The policeman intervened. "Goddess or not, we will need a statement for our investigation. When the hospital releases you, please come to Zhangqiang Police Station in Longdong Avenue to sign a statement. Can I have your name?"
"Let me write it for you," she said.
He handed over his notebook, and she wrote: 'Peri Carlton'.
***
Captain Li Lixia glanced out of the window of her office, and the dark sky and street lamps told her it was later than she had realised. She stood up and stretched, and walked around her tiny room. Almost time to head for home. Just one last thing to do: the evening mail bag would have arrived a couple of hours ago, so she walked to the mail point in the corridor outside to see if anything had come in for her.
There was her weekly beige envelope from the Public Security Bureau. Captain Li's duties included liaising with the Shanghai civil authorities to ensure the security of her building and the staff working there. The building was one of several in the Pudong New Area and greater Shanghai used by the People's Liberation Army. This one housed a secretive unit administered by the Third Department of the PLA Joint Staff Department. The sensitive nature of the work carried out here was of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, so naturally the presence of foreigners in the vicinity was of interest to Captain Li.
She opened the envelope and quickly scanned its contents. There were lists from the PSB's Entry-Exit Department, of newly registered foreigners, departing ones, and re-registering ones. She put it aside for the morning. Then there were summaries of incidents - crimes, accidents or other occurrences that had come to the attention of the PSB. There were few of them this week. Some lost - probably stolen - passports; the usual pickpocket reports; a couple of hotel rooms ransacked; and a British student who had saved the life of a boy crossing a busy road.
"Well, good for you, Miss -" she said aloud. She read the name again and frowned in concentration as she worked on the pronunciation. The letters 'R' and 'L' were especially hard to render flawlessly. "Miss Peri Carlton."
The summary was sloppy, and she shook her head in disgust. First the British woman was a 'student', but two
sentences later she was an employee of the British Government. Li sat at her computer and tapped a few keys to get into the PSB database, logged in, and started browsing the reports.
Miss Carlton, it seemed, really was a student, attending the China Europe International Business School, but the courses she was enrolled in were being paid for by the British Department of Trade and Industry. She was a government employee, too. Li pondered that, and decided it was plausible.
Miss Carlton was a fluent Mandarin speaker, and had opted to take courses exclusively in Mandarin although there were English language options available.
"Why are you making life difficult for yourself, Miss Carlton?" she said aloud. But she guessed the answer. Miss Carlton wanted an immersive experience because her first objective was the language skill, not the business skill. "Are you -" she started, then switched to English. "Are you a spook Miss Carlton? I bet you are a spook." She made a note to open a file on the girl.
She read some of the witness statements, enough to know that nobody had seen anything of the little boy's rescue. Curious. She came to the grandmother's superstitious ramblings about goddesses. Bizarre. There was a witness statement from the traffic division supervisor, describing what had been caught on the CCTV camera monitoring the road junction. Basically, it said little more than, there was a car, it blew through a red light, and we should prosecute the driver.
Her curiosity aroused, she started poking around the PSB's traffic video archives. It was an unfamiliar system, but she managed to find what she was looking for, and played back the few minutes of video, before and after the incident, that the traffic division had archived as evidence for the prosecution of the taxi driver. She frowned, and played it back four more times before figuring out how to move through frame by frame.
She sat back in her chair, unwilling to believe what she had seen. There was a frame showing the boy running out ahead of his grandmother, and Miss Carlton back on the pavement, standing still. In the next frame, the British girl had an arm wrapped around the boy and was starting to pull him away. She had moved a good four, maybe five, metres between frames. She knew it was common for video to be recorded at 24 or 30 frames per second, meaning that the girl had covered the distance at well over one hundred metres per second.
Li turned back to the grandmother's statement, and this time, she paid closer attention. Setting aside the nonsense about praying to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and Peiyang Niangniang, the protector of children, it seemed that the woman knew it had been divine intervention because, she said, the girl had a blue aura, which only supernatural beings ever had.
Li shook her head, impatient with herself. Superstitious nonsense!
And yet … more than one hundred metres per second from a standing start? Ten times faster than the best Olympic athletes? She opened a file on Miss Peri Carlton.
Chapter 5
London, England: 30 March, Last Year
A woman sat alone in a corner of a wine bar near Carnaby Street with a large glass of chilled amber-coloured Samos Anthemis. She was attracting glances from the bar's male customers, some admiring, some speculative, and some hungry. Her long blonde hair was too golden to be natural, and it fell straight down beyond bare shoulders to frame the deep vee shape of her dress and an amount of bronzed flesh that strayed just beyond the tantalising. Her skin tone, her generous breasts and her pouting lips were obviously all fake. She looked like a fine tribute to the cosmetic surgeons' trade in that unsubtle way that suggests either 'trophy wife' or 'porn star'. The absence of any rings on her fingers suggested the latter was more likely than the former. Naturally, at first glance she looked considerably younger than she really was. She took the tiniest of sips from her glass, and moistened her full lips with it, enjoying both the sweet flavour she remembered from her youth and the effect on her observers of her pink tongue swiping across her red lips. Men were complete idiots.
A mobile phone rang, playing the opening bars of Demis Roussos' 'Forever and Ever'. She looked surprised, and rummaged in her bag to find the handset. She turned away from the bar and seemed to fold in on herself, shrinking down, hunching her shoulders, abruptly ending her performance.
She put the phone to her ear and answered it in Greek. "Hi, this is Helene."
"My little Lene, it has been such a long time," was the reply, also in Greek, in a deep gravelly voice. "Why do I never see you? Where are you these days?"
"Uli! I am so happy to hear from you! You sound more like Orson Wells than ever! How are you?"
"Ah, Lene, Lene. Always evading the question. Seriously, I am not making small talk, my love. I ask because you may be able to do a small favour for me. If you have some free time, and you are not at the other end of the Earth, of course."
"For you, Uli? I would fly right around the world for you, you know that."
"Ah, Lene. You almost convince me that you are sincere."
"Only almost? I must be slipping."
"No, it's that we know each other too well." The man laughed. "So, are you receptive to an offer?"
"What is it, then? You want someone killed? Seduced? Robbed?" The woman laughed. "I am receptive, Uli, but I don't know what you can offer that I might need. So, tell me all."
He laughed in return. "I know what you need, Lene, you need excitement."
"Perhaps, perhaps. Tell me about the excitement you offer me."
"A little bit of acting, a little bit - no, a very large bit - of seducing, and who knows, probably a little bit of death and destruction too."
"You have my interest. Go on."
"I hate to admit it, but someone beat my people to an artefact that I have been hoping to find for a very long time."
"You want this artefact?"
"Not exactly. This artefact contains information that could lead to something the Roman Army buried in England. I have been interested in finding it for a long time. It occurs to me that this someone who possesses it can save me the trouble of looking for what was buried. If you were to - let us say - get close to this person, you can help him to disinter what I really want. And there you have it - acting, seduction, stealing, death and destruction. What more could a lady desire?"
"Well," she said slowly, "I see the acting and seduction, but how much death and destruction are we talking about? It would need to be a lot."
"It would be. Once the buried thing gets out, there will be chaos."
"I know you, Uli. I know what you want. You want the chaos, don't you?"
"Yes." He paused, as if hesitant to go on. "Chaos is the midwife of opportunity, and I am the ultimate opportunist."
She laughed. "'The midwife of opportunity?' Come on Uli, be honest with me, you've wanted to say that for a long time, haven't you! I bet you rehearsed that phrase in front of the mirror before you called me. How long ago did you think it up? Years?"
"As I said, darling Lene, we know each other too well. Guilty. I did rehearse it, but be honest with me, it is rather good, isn't it?"
"I admit it, Uli, it does sound good."
"So you are in?"
"Well, it just so happens that I am between projects. And bored. This could be fun. So yes, I'm in. Email me with all of the target's details, and I'll get him in my sights." She laughed again. "The poor man won't know if he's coming or going. Well, as it happens, you know me, Uli. You can be sure he'll be coming! Ciao, darling, I'll call you later."
"Ciao," the man chuckled.
The phone went dead. The woman dropped the handset into her bag, a broad smile on her face. Then she straightened out, lifted her head, pushed her chest forward, took a large mouthful of her wine, emitted some potent pheromones and resumed her performance. She was again the centre of the male customers' attention, and she breathed in deeply, savouring the scent of male arousal and snacking on the energy of their lust.
Another mobile phone rang, this one playing the opening bars of Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'. The woman extracted it from her bag, glanced at the screen, and hit the gree
n 'answer' button. In a high-pitched Essex-accented voice, she said, "Hi, this is Tori Amore."
She listened, and then laughed, apparently delighted. "Marcel! Sweetheart! How's things with you?" She noted with approval that just about everyone in the bar was hanging on every word. She carried on,
"What can I do you for, babe?"
There was a pause. Then, "Ooh, Marcel, that does sound like quite a project! What? Marbella?"
There was another pause. "And who are you gettin' in as the headline name? Oh, Sophie? Yeah, cool, she's got those gorgeous fuck-me eyes. Sophie's great! And Tanya? That's terriff, babe."
There was another long pause. "Airline uniforms? Cool! Who's supplying the lingerie?" She mentally broadcast an image of herself writhing in crimson lingerie to infiltrate the minds of all the men in the bar.
"And what's that? A gang bang? That turns into an orgy? Fantastic climax, as the actress said to the bishop!" She laughed as she broadcast images of herself, naked, breasts swaying, astride a generic male that the men in the room could fantasise as themselves. The temperature in the bar was rising with the sexual energy, and she breathed in the delicious smell of men in heat.
"Yeah, Marcel, I can still do that thing with my hips, and my tongue, all day long if necessary."
Male customers were wriggling uncomfortably in their chairs and bar stools, as the woman listened to the caller, and drew the raw energy that charged the atmosphere into herself with a sigh of contentment.
"I know, babe, I know what you want," she said, letting a tone of regret enter her voice. "But Marcel, listen, I just signed up for a new gig as a favour to a really old, really dear, friend. Sorry, babe, but I'm off the menu for a bit. Yeah, I know, I'm gutted. But if a girl don't have integrity what does she have? Tell you what, babe, why don't you give me a call in June? We can see what we can do then, right? Yeah, very good Marcel, we'll see who I can do then. Cheers, babe, see ya!"
Island of Fog and Death: A sci-fi horror adventure Page 2
