Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “But enough about me. How was your day? Catch any smugglers?"

  Salima is one of the few people who know how I make my living. Most of my friends and acquaintances think that Michael Crow is basically just a bum who hangs around Hollywood Road because he's got nothing better to do with his time. To some extent that's true ... but what they don't know—and I hope never find out—is that I have a part-time contract with SCITES. That's the Second Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, you'll recall. It's mostly a bureaucratic nightmare, but it has an Enforcement Agency, which monitors trade in endangered species and bangs up anyone who breaks the rules or is complicit in breaking the rules. Nowadays it's mostly the demand for “traditional medicines” that causes SCITES headaches in these parts; nobody would dare to try to sell a tiger-skin rug anymore, but ground tiger bones and powdered tigers’ testicles as a cure for everything from warts to brain tumors are a different matter entirely. Of course no one advertises such products, but a few winks and nudges are enough to convey the message to a prospective customer. It doesn't make things any easier for the Agency that most what's sold is fake—the bones are often from the cat family, but small ones that go “miaow” rather than enormous ones with stripes. It's not illegal to sell ground cat bones, and no one ever claimed they were from tigers, now, did they?

  What really bug me are idiots who try to buy rhino horn. They can get Ciagris over their wristbands, and that mostly works—unlike suggestively shaped bits of dead rhino—so what's the point?

  I'm kind of leery about anyone knowing what I really do, because most of the trade in endangered species is run by the triads. In conjunction with their Chechen, Kazakh, Tajikistani, and for all I know Tasmanian equivalents. I have no ambition to end my days as part of the next bit of reclaimed Kowloonside harbor. So mostly I keep tabs on what's going down, buy occasional samples from medicine shops and tourist traps, pass them on to SCITES to be tested, and maintain a low profile.

  You can see how much I trusted Salima. I'd been trying to get her to move in with me for the last two years, and we had few secrets from each other now.

  She was wavering, I knew it.

  My mind kept coming back to what the old guy had said. Hunting mammoths? More likely a solid case of Alzheimer's, I thought. But, it kept bugging me. What on Earth was he gabbling about? Was there some nasty truth behind it—elephant poaching, for instance? Raids on zoos? Or was it just senile rambling?

  Shit, who cared?

  To my surprise, I realized that I did.

  * * * *

  I looked for the old man the next time I passed by Hollywood Road, but for once he wasn't there. The steps of the butcher's shop were empty except for black plastic bags of whatever bits of animal even the Chinese considered inedible. Several wet-looking lumps and stringy things had spilled out of the bags, but for all I could tell, they might have been the burial remains of an alien from Fomalhaut.

  That was a thought. Had the old man been abducted by aliens, and hunted mammoths that had themselves been abducted anything up to 150,000 years earlier?

  I decided it wasn't a very good thought.

  Wang saw me staring at the butcher's shop steps. “He's dead, Mike. Feng told me.” Feng was one of the butcher's employees. “Apparently the old guy was some kind of distant relative of Feng's. When he didn't show this morning, Feng called his home, got through to one of the paramedics from the ambulance instead."

  I gave this some thought. “Does Feng know his address as well as his phone number?” I thought some more. “Dammit, Wang—can he tell me the old man's name?"

  * * * *

  He could. It was Tsong: good solid Chinese name. Except that he was Tsong Kapa, and that was rare outside the Xizang autonomous region. Formerly known as Tibet.

  Tsong's apartment was on the thirty-ninth floor of a dilapidated high-rise on a reclaimed section of harbor near Tai Kok Tsui. I had a valid search warrant in my pocket, obtained through the Agency's contacts at Police HQ, and after lengthy scrutiny and a wristband call to senior management it entitled me to an entry card from what was laughingly called the concierge desk.

  I slid the card into the lock and pushed the door open. There was a faintly musty smell, no doubt because the windows were closed but the air-conditioning was switched off. The apartment was hot, humid, and small. Westerners would have called it cramped, but in Hong Kong terms it was, if not palatial, ample for a single person. Often an entire family, plus Filipino maid, would have occupied a smaller space.

  I pulled on rubber gloves and searched the whole apartment. It didn't take long.

  There were the usual consumer electronics—small, Japanese, stylish. A flatscreen, an mp5 player, an old-style wristband-to-landline socket in the wall, a battered deskcomp with wireless Net connection. I couldn't crack the password—I'd have to leave that for the IT fraud squad, who would be very interested indeed to find out whether there was anything incriminating on it.

  There were no books, no photographs. An acrylic painting of a bull elephant silhouetted against a Kenyan sunset hung on one wall, slightly lopsided. In the tiny closet were some drab shirts, a few pairs of worn trousers, and a couple of threadbare jackets.

  The furniture was cheap and ordinary, most likely bought second-hand. Tsong Kapa had led a simple life. Except—

  Under the single bed, with its thin, hard mattress—how do the Chinese sleep on those things?—was part of a tusk. Looked like elephant, a young bull, sawn off at the thick end, two-thirds the length of the bed. It was wrapped in pink tissue paper.

  I lined up my wristband and took some photographs—bed, tusk, clothing, apartment. Painting of elephant. Pink tissue paper.

  Then I called the Agency, who would pick up the tusk, dust for prints, and take the apartment to pieces. I was stuck there until they arrived, holding the fort in case someone came and took stuff away before SCITES got there.

  I stared at the walls, trying to put myself into Tsong's frame of mind ... If I'd wanted to hide something, where ... ?

  After a while, my eyes were drawn to the suspended ceiling. One lightweight tile looked dirtier than the others, as if it had been handled, repeatedly.

  I dragged a chair across, stood on it, and pushed the tile up into the roof-space above. The space was shallow, and the glow from my wristband's screen showed it to be empty. The dirt was a red herring. But I tried the other tiles in turn, slipping them out past their supports, and taped to the back of one of them was an envelope. Inside the envelope was an old-fashioned metal key. Stamped on the key were the digits 244, in Western characters.

  I put the key back in its envelope, slipped both into my pocket, turned the flatscreen to a People's Rep basketball channel, and settled down on the couch for the Agency squad to turn up.

  It was a long wait.

  * * * *

  “Salima—what kind of key do you think this is?"

  She was used to me asking this kind of off-the-wall question, just as she was used to me trying to make our relationship more permanent. She took the key between thumb and nail-varnished forefinger, turned it over, held it at an angle to the light, as if it were some paleontological specimen. Perhaps it was.

  “You don't see many metal keys these days,” she said, her voice muffled by a soft taco.

  I nodded. “Encryption is more effective."

  “Right. But this is no antique, Mike. Looks fairly new, but well-used."

  “What makes you think that?"

  She put down the taco and sipped at her drink. She had a sensuous mouth. “Plenty of bright metal, but also plenty of scratches,” she said.

  I thought about that. “Locker?"

  “Yes. Could be a garage, but most likely a locker. Most of those still have metal keys. Too expensive to change to cryplocks, and not much point anyway."

  “That's what I think, too. A locker is a good place to keep something you don't want in your own home. Drugs, pornography, whatever. Not an air
port locker or a bus station one—those are checked regularly by the authorities. A garage key would be unlikely; he wasn't rich enough to own a car. Though it could be someone else's garage."

  Salima stared at the key, as if willing it to give up its secrets. It did. I saw the smirk spread across her face.

  “Come on, girl. Give."

  “Buy me another margarita."

  “Deal.” I beckoned the waitress over. Salima liked hers frozen, no salt. On the rocks for me, with salt—bad for your heart, I've heard. I'll risk it.

  “A gym,” said Salima, once her drink had safely reached our table. “Very likely a university one. You see this bit where it's been scraped?"

  “Yes. So?"

  “They put a strap on it so you can Velcro it round your wrist. The tag runs through a metal ring. Someone took the ring off, scraped the metal."

  I stared at her. “You can tell all that from a few scrapes and scratches, Ms. Holmes?"

  “Not exactly. I've used a key just like this myself. At the gym on Pok Fu Lam road."

  “Do 70-year-olds train in gyms, Salima?"

  “My grandad ran marathons, Michael."

  The key didn't fit locker 244 in the men's changing room at the gym on Pok Fu Lam Road, but I got the janitor to open it anyway. It contained one sweaty sock and a packet of condoms, only two left out of a dozen. Still in their foil wrappers, which was a mercy.

  I wondered about the women's changing-rooms, but that would have made it difficult for Tsong to gain access. Ruling that possibility out for now, I asked the attendant whether there were any other university gyms. He told me there were two more. One was in Happy Valley; the other, in Sha Tin, was closed for renovation. An hour being shuttled from official to official secured me master keys to both buildings. On a hunch, I started with the one being renovated.

  The key fit—no need to try the other possibilities, then. Locker 244 contained a tin box. I picked the lock, and inside was a media card from an outmoded digital camera—either a Ricoh or, more likely, a cheap Shanghainese copy. Not drugs, then; those had never been more than an outside chance anyway. Something much more interesting.

  My heart was thumping fit to burst—and I didn't think the salt on my margarita was to blame.

  The card went straight into my pocket, sealed inside a static-free envelope. This was what Tsong had taken so much trouble to conceal. I wondered what was on it. I couldn't understand why, having hidden something as small as a media card, he had taken such a risk with a tusk. I totted up possible reasons. One: a tusk wouldn't have fit into a gym locker. Two: he was 70, when logic is not at its peak. Three ... if it was a mammoth tusk, not elephant, there was no risk involved. Perfectly legal, environmental friendship fossle. Who would ever believe otherwise?

  If it was a scam, it was a beauty.

  Was the tusk really mammoth? I had no idea.

  Why hide a smart card from an antique digital camera? I could think of lots of plausible reasons, but the best way forward was to find out what was on the thing.

  At home I have a special card-reader attachment for my wristband, which recognizes obsolete formats and translates them into iPEG. So I went home, downloaded the files from Tsong's card, and brought them up in FotoSwap, my mouth dry, my pulse racing.

  The quality was excellent, the lighting strangely dull, the skies smeared with clouds in multiple shades of gray.

  There were individuals, standing, sitting, lying on the ground.

  There were groups. Young and old together.

  Not pornography. The authorities on the mainland are hot on that, but Hong Kong is fairly relaxed except for kiddie-porn, which this thankfully wasn't. The individuals and groups looked like woolly elephants. Either they were woolly elephants, or they were genuine Mammuthus primigenius.

  Some were living. Most were dead. The dead ones were all bulls, and most of them had gaping wounds where their tusks should be.

  Several of the men in the photos were carrying guns. I recognized the brand immediately: AK-83 assault rifles. The originals were Russian, but these had most likely been manufactured in backstreet machine shops in Kabul.

  Some frames showed piles of tusks roped to battered Toyota trucks, no registration plates. A few showed tusks being hacked from their owners using chainsaws. And in three of the photos, the man holding the chainsaw looked a bit like Tsong. Younger, I'd guess early forties, but the face and hands were familiar.

  Sweat broke out all over my body. The old man had hunted mammoths. Somewhere.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  * * * *

  Lies.

  Shaggy mammoth story.

  Senile old goat.

  Other ways to go nuts.

  Hypnotism.

  Cloned mammoths.

  Genetically modified elephants—ivory looks like mammoth.

  Aliens who abduct(ed) mammoths.

  Aliens who abduct(ed) cloned genetically modified elephants.

  Chemical process that makes elephant ivory look like mammoth.

  Synthetic ivory.

  Drugs inducing the illusion of hunting mammoths.

  Virtual reality mammoths.

  Resurrected mammoths.

  Alien creatures resembling mammoths, hunted on Earth.

  Alien creatures resembling mammoths, hunted off Earth.

  Robot mammoths. Cybermammoths. Mammdroids.

  The brainstorm file on my wristband went on for several pages. I looked at the list for the hundredth time, sighed, and closed the file. I had plenty of wild theories, very few facts, and nothing made any sense whatsoever. The first few theories had been the most likely until my search turned up the tusk, but now I'd deleted them, leaving the remnants in case something caused me to reinstate any of them.

  Everything about this business smelt of organized crime—a mainland tong, a Hong Kong triad. I was treading on dangerous turf. Not for the first time.

  I was having the tusk tested, through SCITES, to find out what animal it was from. Privately, I was betting on “elephant.” The test wouldn't tell me whether the elephant had been the proud possessor of a woolly coat, but the photos were enough evidence of that.

  Some theories I could rule out by making other tests on the tusk, as I intended to once I'd gotten the results of the first test. For instance, if the tusk had been made by a chemical process that makes modern elephant ivory look like fossil mammoth ivory, the result almost certainly wouldn't be perfect. The fine detail of the ivory's structure, under a microscope, would be a dead giveaway. There might even be traces of the chemicals used.

  Other theories were more problematic. For instance, if someone had managed to clone mammoths using preserved DNA from the Siberian tundra burials, would it be illegal to slaughter them for their ivory? SCITES had made that illegal for bona fide elephants, but I didn't need to read the treaty to know that it did not mention live mammoths.

  Could we argue in court that a living mammoth was really an elephant? Could that argument succeed? I'd seen sillier unorthodox interpretations stand up in a court of law. I'd seen more sensible ones thrown out.

  Suppose Tsong had unknowingly hunted robot mammoths, as part of some elaborate scheme to make him think he was hunting the real things. Fake mammoth ivory, chemically transformed from real elephant ivory, would have been implanted in the robot's tusk, so that he thought...

  Crazy. Why would anyone bother? Why would it matter if Tsong thought he was hunting mammoths? Anyway, the old guy was dead and the chances of tracing the triad behind this scam were zero, let alone pinning it on them in court. I'd gone too long without sleep, I was losing my mind. Every explanation was either incredible or stupid. What did I really have? An offhand remark made by an elderly expat Tibetan who was probably suffering from dementia, some images that any nine-year-old could pull off the Net and fake up with FotoSwap, and a tusk that would probably turn out to be made of plastic, carefully wrapped in pink party paper. The puzzle that I was allowing to consume me was thinner t
issue than the pink paper. Mist, dreams, delusions—

  Then my wristband flagged a call. It was a woman's voice, American, east coast. Marcia White, head of SCITES’ Analytical Branch.

  “We have a positive ID for your tusk,” she said. “It's mammoth.” So I'd lost my private bet.

  I flicked through my brainstorm file, and a thought struck me.

  This was definitely a long shot. “Can you do me a favor, Marcia?"

  “Depends what it is."

  “Carbon-date the tusk. I'd like to know how old it is."

  She hesitated, but didn't ask any questions. “Yes, I suppose that information might help identify the source. I'll let you know when the result comes through."

  * * * *

  Two days later, she called again. SCITES had finished testing the tusk—but their Chief Analyst refused to tell me the results over a public channel. Could I come to her office in person?

  I asked why.

  She wouldn't discuss that over a public channel, either.

  I looked at my watch: it was twenty to eleven. I could take a red retro Toyotaxi to the ferry terminal, a ferry across Victoria Harbor—you never had to wait long for a ferry—and another taxi. That would be a lot cheaper than paying to use one of the tunnels under the harbor. A taxi would be quicker than a magbus, and only marginally more expensive.

  “I'll be with you around noon,” I told her.

  * * * *

  SCITES has a suite of offices between the 45th and 48th floors of the HKBBC Building in Ma Liu Shui, overlooking Tolo Harbor. The picture window in Reception frames a view of the jagged, foliage-covered hills of Sai Kung Country Park, to the right, and Plover Cove Country Park, to the left. As always, both were half-hidden by a haze of pollution wafted in from the mainland industrial zones. I showed my ID, checked in, and within a few minutes I was being offered green tea and some tired looking dim sum. I accepted a cup of tea, and Marcia handed me a sheet of paper, a standard lab analysis form. I looked at the brief report.

  “Marcia, this makes no sense,” I said.

  “I know,” she replied, no smile, very businesslike. “That's why I didn't want to discuss it with you on your ‘band."