The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  ‘We’re all going to die some time,’ she said bitterly.

  He took another step towards her.

  She stepped back. ‘Don’t you come fucking near me,’ she hissed at him.

  ‘Hey, I’m not going to do it.’ He seemed shocked that she should think him capable of such a thing. ‘I never hurt anyone in my life.’

  ‘Of course not. You only infected half the world’s population with a lethal virus.’

  ‘Hey, come on,’ he said, still advancing as she backed away. ‘I didn’t do that on purpose. It was an accident.’ His eyes were darting all around now, in expectation. ‘I’m sorry, all right?’

  But she wasn’t listening any more. She was looking past McCord. She was sure she had seen something move in the shadows beyond the temple.

  McCord toppled forward as a dull crack split the night air, pawing at Margaret as he fell, dragging her down and pushing her over so that he landed on top of her. Something hard rattled away across the flagstones and she felt warm, sticky, wet stuff all over her hands. Blood, she realised. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t get the breath. She dragged herself out from beneath McCord’s dead-weight and tried to stand, feet slipping on the patch of dark blood oozing across the stone. She fell again and found herself looking into McCord’s wide, staring eyes. An expression of complete surprise was frozen on his face in death. This time the scream came, quite involuntarily. But it sounded to her as if it had come from somewhere far away. She scrambled on all fours away from his body and her hand came down on something cold and hard – whatever it was that had rattled across the marble when McCord fell. A small handgun. She grasped it, and got to her knees, and saw a figure coming towards her from the shadows of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Raising the gun at arm’s length and clutching it with both hands, she closed her eyes and fired once, twice, three times in the direction of the approaching figure. But when she opened them again, she could see nothing and no one. She got to her feet, tucked the revolver into the waistband of her jeans, and starting running, slipping as she went, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. Across the marble terrace to the gate they had passed through from the corridor, all the time waiting for the bullet in the back. It didn’t come.

  In the darkness of the corridor she felt momentarily safer. She stopped, gasping for breath, and looked back. Still she saw nothing, but she had no intention of waiting around. She turned and started running again, on weakening legs that wanted to buckle under her, pillars flashing past, the shadows of trees blurring beyond, dark and sinister. She could hear nothing but the air rasping in her lungs, the smack of her feet on the cobbles. She looked over her shoulder. She thought she saw a figure moving through the shadows, maybe a hundred yards away. She let out a little cry of despair and almost fell down the steps at the end of the corridor.

  She staggered through the green-roofed gate and saw the cypress-lined avenue stretching ahead, exposed and bright in the moonlight. Beyond that, the lights of the city. It seemed an eternity away. She knew she would never make it. She heard a clatter from somewhere in the darkness of the corridor behind her, and found the motivation to get her legs moving beneath her again. She staggered more than ran, gasping for breath, a pain in her side. The heady scent of pine in the hot night air was almost intoxicating, like some drug robbing her of the will to fight for life. It would be so easy just to give up, and lie down and wait for death. But something more than fear drove her now, something more than anger. There was a reason to live, a secret to share.

  She reached the first gate. But it was locked now. She grabbed the railings and almost collapsed, tears of despair running down her face. The gate was maybe seven or eight feet high. She had no strength in her arms to pull herself up. She was sure she could hear footsteps running down the avenue behind her, but could not bring herself to look. Then she saw the big round hinges at the gateposts. Big enough to provide footholds. Deep sobs tugging at her breast, she got one foot, then the other up on the hinges and pushed herself upwards, flinging an arm over the top and dragging herself over to drop with a clatter to the other side, sprawling on the warm tarmac. Her knee hurt like hell. Her jeans were torn and she was certain there was blood oozing down her shin. She glanced back through the railings and saw a figure jogging towards her between the rows of cypresses. Fifty, maybe sixty yards away.

  It was enough to get her back on her feet and limping the thirty or forty feet to the outer gate. It, too, was locked now. She didn’t know how she would ever have the strength to get over it. She lunged up and caught hold of the top bar. She could see the blood on her hands in the light from across the street. Her feet slithered and scrambled for a solid hold, but the hinges were smaller. ‘Come on, come on, come on!’ she shouted at herself. Her right foot got little more than a toehold. But it was enough to give her the leverage to swing her other leg up and over the top. For a moment she hung there, waiting to hear the shot that would signal an end to it all. But still it didn’t come, and with one last effort she dragged herself over the gate and fell on to the sidewalk.

  This time she didn’t linger. She was on her feet and limping across the deserted cycle lane towards the stream of traffic in the road. She saw a flash of yellow. A taxi. One of the crude baby vans they called ‘bread cars’ because they looked like loaves of bread. She ran into its headlights, waving her arms, and it skidded to a halt, the driver banging on his horn. She ran round the side of it, ignoring his curses, slid the door open and fell in. He looked back at her in astonishment. This blonde-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi covered in blood, her face blackened and tear-stained, shouting at him over and over again. ‘The Friendship Hotel! The Friendship Hotel!’ He saw the gun tucked into her jeans and decided not to argue. He crunched into gear and accelerated north towards the city lights.

  IV

  By the time the bread car reached the Friendship, Margaret’s hysteria had subsided, to be replaced by a deep, black depression. She was physically and emotionally numb. Fear had left her, and she was consumed now by only one thing: a dark, simmering anger. She wanted justice, revenge. She wanted to expose these people: Grogan Industries, Pang Xiaosheng, whoever else was complicit in this madness. She despised their brave new genetically engineered world that had put her under sentence of death, and threatened the very existence of the human race. She despised their greed for money, their hunger for power, the bloody-minded arrogance of the scientists who had used mankind as their guinea-pigs in a world they had turned into a laboratory. And most of all, she despised their cowardice in the face of overwhelming failure. There were, it seemed, no depths to which they would not sink in order to hide their guilt, to squirm away from responsibility. And she knew that since she was now the only bearer of the torch that could illuminate their culpability, they would do everything in their power to eliminate her. But she was not daunted or afraid. For she was already dead. They had done their worst. They could not kill her twice. And the worst that could happen to her was that she would fail.

  She made the taxi stop in the street a hundred yards short of the hotel and thrust some notes into the driver’s hand. It was far too much, but he was not about to take issue. He was just glad to get her out of his cab so that he could report as quickly as possible to Public Security that he had been forced to pick up a wild-eyed, crazy foreign lady covered in blood and carrying a gun. It was not the sort of thing that happened to you every day in Beijing. He lit up and puffed anxiously on a cigarette as he drove hurriedly away, watching her vanish in his rear-view mirror.

  She stood for a moment or two in a pool of darkness between streetlights considering what she was about to do. It was too soon, she hoped, for anyone to be waiting for her at the hotel. However, the moment she walked in covered in blood to ask for her key, she knew that the desk staff would call Public Security – probably about the same time as the taxi driver, who had watched her so carefully in the rear-view mirror all the way across town. But she desperately wanted to change her clothes, and
to pick up her passport. When she went hammering on the door of the American Embassy at this hour of the night, she wanted to be able to identify herself without difficulty.

  She wondered briefly about Li, what had happened, what his uncle had advised. And she felt sick at the thought that he would only have two years left before the rice virus would start destroying his life. And not just Li. Everyone in this country, and millions more beyond. She could not imagine how the hospitals and doctors would cope. They couldn’t. It was a nightmare, beyond visualisation, beyond comprehension. She looked at the traffic, the cyclists passing in the street, lights in the windows of apartment blocks. All these people. They had no idea that they had already eaten the seeds of their own destruction.

  The burden of that knowledge weighed almost unbearably on her. She desperately wanted to shed and share it. But who would want to know? She had no words of comfort, could hold out no possibility of hope. The secret she wished to share with others was the intimation of their death.

  Bitter tears burned her face as she turned towards the lights of the hotel and walked determinedly in the direction of its floodlit forecourt. As she passed beneath the shadow of the hoardings that marked its boundary, heading for the steps, a figure moved out of the darkness to block her way and whisper her name. She almost fainted with fright. The man stepped forward and his face was caught in the light cast by a distant streetlamp. It was Ma Yongli. He was clearly shocked by her appearance, and looked at her in open-mouthed amazement. ‘What has happened to you? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She had difficulty controlling the urge to fall into his arms and weep. ‘I have to change and get my passport.’ Her brain, it seemed, was only capable of following a single track. Any deviation to left or right might allow other thoughts to crowd in and overwhelm her. Her voice sounded strained and very polite. She was hanging on by a thread and said, absurdly, ‘I have to get to the American Embassy. Do you know where it is?’

  ‘You cannot go into the hotel,’ Yongli said. ‘The police are waiting in there.’

  She frowned, confused now. She felt as if she were drunk and the world was spinning out of control. ‘How can they be there already?’

  ‘Things have happened,’ Yongli whispered. ‘Terrible things. Li sent me to find you.’ He took her arm. ‘I will take you to him.’ She allowed him to lead her through the darkness, away from the hotel. They turned down a side street to where a battered old Honda was parked at the kerbside. He opened the door and she slipped into the passenger seat like an automaton pre-programmed to do his bidding. All she could think was that Yongli, too, had the virus in him; that he, too, would have his life taken prematurely. Her tears fell silently in the dark. And there was so much to live for. Perhaps it would be easier for those who went first. Easier than living on while everyone around you was dying, and knowing that your turn would come. The only thing worse than death, surely, was the knowledge that your own was imminent.

  ‘Are you sure you are all right?’ Yongli touched her arm.

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  He peered at her for a long time in the dark, then started the engine and drove carefully off into the night.

  *

  The Honda eased its way gingerly through the maze of crumbling hutongs, picking out the life of the back streets in its headlights – card games and family meals, and groups of people just sitting about talking and smoking. Men in singlets stared curiously as the car inched by, their eyes glassy in the lights. They were all dead, Margaret thought. They just didn’t know it yet.

  They were somewhere in the north of the city. Margaret had no idea where. She hardly cared. They had left the bright lights of the main street behind them more than ten minutes ago. Yongli turned left, and then right, and they found themselves in a long, narrow lane running down a slight slope. Telegraph poles rose into the night, power cables looping from one to the other. But there were no lights here. The surface of the lane was potholed and bumpy. Margaret saw that every few yards the crumbling brick walls had been daubed with large white characters within circles. Her curiosity finally aroused, she asked, ‘Where are we? What is this place?’

  ‘Xicheng District,’ Yongli said. ‘All these hutongs are condemned, marked for demolition. They will be pulled down to build new workers’ apartments.’ Near the foot of the lane, he bumped the car up on to a sliver of sidewalk and told her to get out. He got out himself, took her arm and led her away down another deserted lane, constantly glancing back to make sure they were not seen. But the area had been cleared of people in preparation for demolition. It was completely deserted. They turned through a broken archway into a courtyard littered with rubble. It was very dark, and they had to pick their way carefully to the other side. Windows all around were boarded up, and there was a stench of rotting garbage and old drains. Yongli nudged a broken old pram away with his foot and knocked softly on a wooden door with no handle. After a moment there was a soft-voiced female response from within. Yongli whispered a reply and the door creaked open. Lotus peered out at them, pale and frightened. Even without a trace of make-up she was still very pretty. She saw the state that Margaret was in and beckoned them inside. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Come quick.’ Yongli pushed Margaret gently ahead of him and Lotus took her hand, guiding her into the dark interior. ‘You okay?’ she asked. Margaret nodded, but Lotus could not see it in the dark. With great concern she led her cautiously across a floor strewn with the remnants of someone else’s life, and into a tiny back room where a candle burned in the far corner, sending flickering shadows dancing around the walls. Behind them, Margaret heard Yongli shut the door.

  Li sat on a cot bed, his back to the wall, knees pulled up to his chest, smoking a cigarette. Margaret saw the tracks of tears on his face. He looked dreadful. His jaw slackened when he saw the blood on her jeans and her blouse, and he threw his cigarette away, unfolding his legs from the bed and reaching her in three easy strides. He held her by the shoulders. ‘My God, Margaret, what happened to you?’ She looked up into his face and saw the concern in his eyes, felt the heat of his hands on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s not my blood,’ she said in a dead voice that seemed to belong to someone else. ‘It’s McCord’s. They killed him.’ She saw a frown form between his eyes and then his face blurred as tears started to run down her cheeks. Her legs buckled and she felt his arms around her, lifting her, carrying her quickly through the flickering light to the bed and laying her down. Fingers lightly brushed away her tears and she saw his face very close. Beyond it, Lotus and Yongli looked on, disembodied masks among the shadows.

  ‘Can I get her anything?’ she heard Lotus say, but it was in Chinese, and she couldn’t understand why the sounds formed no words.

  Li shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. We’ve got plenty of water. You’d better go.’

  Yongli pulled her gently away. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I hate to leave her like this.’

  ‘She’s in capable hands,’ Yongli said. And to Li, ‘We’ll be back at first light. If not, you’ll know we’ve been picked up.’

  Li nodded grimly. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He turned and the two men made a brief eye contact that forestalled the need for more words.

  ‘I’ll bring her some clean clothes,’ Lotus said, and let Yongli lead her by the hand away through the outer room and out into the courtyard.

  When he heard the door close behind them, Li turned back to Margaret, but her eyes were shut and she was sleeping.

  *

  When she emerged from the strange, dark, dreamless chasm into which she had drifted, she was curled up on the cot bed and Li was sitting on the end of it smoking another cigarette. A candle still burned in the corner. He turned as she raised herself on to one elbow. ‘How long was I sleeping?’

  He shrugged. ‘An hour maybe. I don’t know what time it is.’

  She peered at her watch in the dancing half-light. ‘It’s just after one.’ She swung her legs off the bed and sat up, rubbing
her eyes. He moved alongside her and put an arm around her, and she let her head fall against his shoulder. The familiar musky-sweet smell of him was reassuring. ‘Why are we here?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  She felt him tense and he drew a deep, tremulous breath. ‘They stitched me up, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I walked right into it. Never even saw it coming.’ She lifted her head and pulled away so she could look at him. His eyes were moist and wouldn’t meet hers. ‘They killed Lily and murdered my uncle …’

  Margaret uttered a tiny, involuntary cry. ‘Oh God, no … !’ Not that lovely, harmless old man. ‘Why? Why would they kill him?’

  Silent tears rolled down Li’s cheeks. ‘To make it look like I had done it.’ He gasped in frustration. ‘As if I ever would.’ He turned towards her, the futility of it etched in the pain on his face. ‘I don’t know why, Margaret. But I feel like it’s my fault, that I got something wrong, that if I’d done something differently my uncle would still be alive. I don’t know what it is that would make them want to kill an old man, just to discredit me and stop my investigation. If only I knew what it was we’d got too close to, maybe I’d understand.’ His despair was heartbreaking.

  She lowered her head and looked at the floor. She no longer wanted to share her secret, for the pain and the horror and the hopelessness it would bring. She wished she could keep it to herself, close and hidden, so that maybe she would just wake up one morning and it would be gone. But she knew it wouldn’t. And she knew she had to tell him. She looked up again and wiped the tears from his face. He should save them, she thought, for there were many more to spill. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Both why, and who.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  Friday

  Li sat gazing into inky blackness. The candles had all burned out long ago. Just the acrid, waxy smell of them remained. He remembered being afraid of the dark as a small boy, of all the ghosts and monsters that lurked there in his childish imagination. As he grew older, he stopped being afraid, for he knew that the real monsters lurked within; fear and conceit, greed and evil. Only now, someone had let them out, and they were stalking the world, like latter-day dinosaurs, devouring and destroying everything they touched. They were out there somewhere now, looking for him. But they didn’t live in the dark, like the monsters of his childhood. They worked in offices and lived in houses. They had wives and husbands, brothers, sisters, children. They controlled and manipulated the lives of those around them, exploited the weak, starved the hungry, reaped rewards from the work of others. And they thought they were gods. Li’s hatred of them was tempered only by his sorrow for those he loved. Old Yifu; dead. His father, his sister, her little girl, her unborn child; their death warrants already signed. Margaret. He could hear her gentle, regular breathing. She slept now, but she, too, was under sentence of death. He thought of his country. All those people, their hopes and aspirations, their lives and their loves. He could see their faces in the dark. The children, happy and innocent, unaware that their future was already lost. Five thousand years of history had brought them to this dead end. He wanted to scream, to pull the house down around them with his bare hands. He wanted to tear those monsters limb from limb. But he did not move. He did not make a sound. Dead men don’t fight back. He might have thought that true once. But this dead man was going to fight, with every ounce of strength, every last breath, every final second that he had.