Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  The tour guide was explaining how they used only artificial snow for sculpting because it was firmer and whiter. Natural snow is dirtier, she said.

  “Is that because of the pollution?” one person asked.

  The tour guide ignored the question and said it was time to move on, that she wanted to show them an incredible maze, and to follow her because she didn’t want them to get lost.

  Wang moved with them into the maze, its walls made of waist-high blocks of ice, and by following the group he was soon in the middle and beside another big sculpture, this one a kind of ship-like chariot topped by a warrior with six arms wielding spears and swords.

  His relief was short-lived. The two men had seen him and now they were trying to find a way through the maze. They looked so cold, with hands in their pockets, red faces sticking out of flimsy hoods, that Wang reckoned it might not be long before they became another sculpture.

  They were quickly frustrated by the maze and began to climb over its ice walls, making it over one before the man in orange slipped again, and hit his head on the sharp edge of the ice. Blood was seeping down his face and the one in black again lifted him to his feet.

  Then another group of children entered the maze. They looked like they’d done it before, quickly finding a route to the centre. The two men followed them in.

  Wang needed to get out fast, but the tour group that he’d hoped would save him were now an obstacle, as the guide invited them to see if they could find their own way back out, and they didn’t seem to have a clue.

  The men now reached the centre, blood splattered down the orange coat of the one in front. So Wang entered a tunnel beneath the big ship-like chariot at the centre of the maze. He then followed children up yet more ice steps and onto its deck, beneath the swinging arms of the warrior.

  More ice steps led to another slide, which twisted back down through the body of the chariot. Wang followed more children to the top, where he waited, doubting the men would follow. He looked over the edge, but couldn’t see them, then looked back down the stairs to find himself face to face with the man in the black coat, the blood-spattered orange coat not far behind.

  The man lunged at Wang, who slipped, but was quickly back on his feet. This time it was his turn to push the kids out of the way, throwing himself onto the slide and hurtling down so fast through the chariot that he almost collided with a wall where the slide made a sharp turn near the bottom before dumping him out on the snow.

  The two men had now reached the top of the slide, where they were hesitating.

  “Best take the steps,” said the one in black, thinking it would be a tight squeeze for them.

  “That’s just what I’m going to do. You take the slide,” said the one in orange, holding a tissue over his gashed forehead. He shoved the other one so hard that he tumbled backwards onto the ice, and shot headfirst down the slide, hitting the bend near the bottom with such force that the whole sculpture shook.

  It vibrated so strongly that the warrior’s arm cracked where its hand was holding a long ice spear, which plunged to the ground impaling the man in black as he emerged at the bottom of the slide.

  The man writhed and screamed, pinned to the ground, the ice spear clean through his chest. Blood oozed around his body onto the snow. By the time he stopped twitching he was lying in a big red puddle.

  Children gasped. Some of them screamed. The tour group turned back to see what had happened and several took photographs or posed for selfies in front of the now motionless body. Then they went back to the coffee shop, which had a Wi-Fi connection, meaning they could more quickly upload the photos to the internet.

  – 34 –

  Tigers

  Wang didn’t see the one in the black coat get speared by the ice warrior. He was too focused on getting away as fast as his legs would carry him through growing crowds of children and along a path with about as much grip as an ice rink.

  But he figured that at least he could keep his balance better than the duo chasing him. As he got to the exit from the park he was confident he’d lost them. What he hadn’t anticipated was their having local help. He was grabbed from behind as he left the main gate and for the second time in just over a week he found himself sandwiched in the back of a car with a hood over his head.

  When they removed the hood the sudden light was so intense he squeezed his eyes closed and looked down. A hand pulled his head back up, and his sight slowly adjusted to what at first looked like a kind of blob with two big panda eyes on top.

  The blob became a face, and the panda eyes above it were part of a white fur hat it was wearing with two floppy white earflaps. The panda eyes were a good deal easier to look at than the real ones, narrow and cold, staring at Wang from the passenger seat. There was a fresh gash above one eye, just below the other pink scar, and the man was dabbing it with a cloth, held between the forefinger and thumb of a pair of big white mittens.

  There were bloodstains down the man’s orange coat.

  “You like the gloves, the hat?” the man said. “Got them at the festival, because you know what? I seem to have lost the others.”

  Then he leaned over and cuffed Wang so hard around the head that his ears rang. He ducked to try and avoid a second blow, which caught the top his head. The man to his left pushed him back upright and into the path of a third punch, straight in the face this time.

  The man in the panda hat then sat back in his seat.

  The car was a medium-sized saloon, its windows tinted. The men beside Wang were wearing near identical padded black jackets and dark woollen hats, pulled low over their ears. The driver was an older man in a Russian-style fur hat and red jacket. He was smoking. For a while none of them spoke.

  They were driving across a long bridge over the frozen Songhua River, leaving the city, Wang guessed, because there was less activity on the ice below, just a trail of people crossing, single file, like tiny black ants.

  The road itself was busy, and very icy. The driver seemed experienced with the conditions, driving slowly amid the white clouds gushing from exhausts and engines, careful with the brakes.

  “I think you have something that doesn’t belong to you,” the man in orange said, turning again to Wang.

  Wang said he didn’t understand.

  “Well, let’s start with this,” the man said, removing from his pocket a folded piece of paper, a printout from the internet, stained with the man’s blood, and which he opened to show a picture of a stick alien.

  “Looks familiar?”

  “I’ve already told you,” Wang said. “That was just a bit of fun. Just an online thing. It’s not real. I’ve never been to a protest in my life.”

  The man cuffed Wang again.

  “You’ve told me nothing. I really don’t give a shit how many protests you’ve been to. And do I look like I believe in aliens?”

  Which told Wang what he already suspected, that he was dealing with something different, somebody different from the people who had detained him in Beijing.

  “Let’s try this one shall we?” said the man in the orange coat.

  And he opened another piece of paper, a screen shot, the cover page that Wang had shared online from one of the documents he’d downloaded from the Shanghai company. It was from the document called Mr Fang, the summary of names and brief biographies under the title “Applicants for SK documents”.

  “You posted it alongside your friend, the alien,” the man said.

  “I don’t know what it is. I swear. I didn’t even read it,” Wang said. “It was a thing I downloaded from some Shanghai company. We cracked their website. I was trying to get some security business from them, wanted to show their cyber defences were vulnerable.”

  “Cyber defences? What the fuck are you talking about?” said the man, totally lost by the geek-speak of this annoying, thievin
g kid trying to sound clever.

  Wang was pleading now, but might as well be speaking to the panda on the man’s head.

  “Look. It’s simple,” the man said. “You have information that doesn’t belong to you. My employer would like to know where you got it, and what you’ve done with it. And he’d like it back.”

  Wang asked him if he worked for Shanghai TT Logistics, and the man cuffed him again. Wang rolled sideways onto one of the black-jackets beside him who pushed him back up, repositioning him like a bowling pin ready for the next strike.

  “I don’t have it, and I really have no idea what it is,” Wang said, repeating that he’d never read it. He was about to say the downloaded document was on his laptop, which had been taken in Beijing by the police, but figured that might just make things worse.

  “You little fucker,” said the man who wasn’t police, and wasn’t from Shanghai TT Logistics, but was getting really mad. “You really don’t understand what you’re dealing with here, do you? What sort of trouble you’re in.”

  And Wang really wished he did understand, and that someone would tell him just that, what he was dealing with.

  “Have you got my parents?” he said.

  The man looked at him like that wasn’t a bad idea. Then he said, “We haven’t touched your parents. Not yet. The question you need to consider carefully, very carefully, is what we might do with you.”

  They were on the far bank of the river now, driving away from the city along a wide road lined with fields of thick snow. A drunk was being helped across the road ahead, but not making great progress. The driver blasted his horn, making no attempt to slow down. The helper slung the drunk over a shoulder and lurched for the sidewalk, where they both fell in the snow.

  Which the man in orange thought was pretty funny.

  They entered a new district of half-built houses, hoardings along the road showing pictures of what the area was supposed to look like when it was finished. If it was ever finished. It looked like a Harbin version of Versailles. There was a picture of a butler serving drinks in an ornate room full of columns and hung with classic old paintings. Another showed ballet dancers.

  Then they turned right, beside a sign for the Siberian Tiger Park, under which were several larger-than-life models of snarling tigers. “The world’s biggest collection of Siberian tigers welcomes you”, said another sign.

  “Well, I guess you’ve been here before,” the man in orange said. “You’re from Harbin.”

  Wang said yes, as a kid, but he was barely audible, terrified now and wondering where this was all going.

  “I think it’s cool,” said the man, telling Wang that the other men in the car were good friends of the owner. “More than 600 hungry Siberian tigers, the world’s biggest collection of the world’s largest and nastiest species of tiger. My friends here say it’s just like Jurassic Park. Very dangerous. You know what I’m saying?”

  They drove slowly through a busy car park, groups climbing from buses to go and see the tigers. Some were posing in the open jaw of a giant model of a tiger’s head, holding the fangs.

  They stopped close to the ticket office, a line waiting to buy tickets and maybe buy some food for the tigers. The tiger menu board was next to the office – a list of animals and the price visitors could pay for watching them thrown live to the tigers.

  “Don’t you just love this place?” said the man in the orange jacket, adjusting his panda hat.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  *

  By late morning the park was getting busy. One tour group lingered at the ticket office, taking its time, looking at the menu for a while before deciding they’d go for a cow, because that would be pretty cool, watching it get eaten alive by the tigers.

  Then they boarded a small bus with grills across its windows, to go inside the enclosures with the tigers, to take a closer look.

  The bus entered the park via a series of heavy electric fences. They went through one gate, waited, and only after that gate had closed did the second one slide open. It was the same process as the bus passed from one icy enclosure to another, each surrounded by a thirty-foot-high fence.

  There was also a long viewing platform that snaked through the park, and from which visitors could pay to dangle live chickens for the tigers, teasing them, driving them into a hungry rage. But the bus gave the best view. Up close and personal with the tigers.

  Mostly, though, the tigers lazed around in the snow looking bored, picking fights with each other from time to time, each roar raising a cheer from visitors on the walkways. The bus stopped when it came across a bigger group of tigers, the tour group crowding at the windows with phones raised and asking when the cow was going to come to the party.

  The driver said it was on its way. The tigers rose to their feet and circled the bus. Others ran over to join them.

  Then a small truck entered the enclosure, about the size and shape of a horsebox. It paused near the tigers, which were now getting excited, snarling at each other, clawing at the side of the truck, knowing it meant fresh food.

  On their bus, the tour group pressed closer to the window, cameras at the ready.

  The truck was a dump truck with a flap at the back, and slowly its rear platform began to tip backwards until the live food came tumbling out.

  There were screams and gasps on the bus.

  “Oh my God, it’s a person.”

  “Do something. Do something,” others shouted at the driver, who just froze at the steering wheel.

  Mostly the tour group just carried on taking videos and photographs.

  The person dumped from the truck wriggled and tried to kick, but he was bound and gagged. The tigers seemed to hesitate at first, seeing something that wasn’t usually on the menu. Maybe the panda eyes staring at them from the man’s hat put them off. Or the bright orange jacket, which wasn’t like any cow they’d eaten before. But they didn’t hesitate for long, deciding this was a real treat. One sunk its teeth into the man’s neck, others tearing at his legs and arms. And soon a shark-like feeding frenzy exploded before the bus.

  The driver tried belatedly to force the tigers away with his bus, sounding his horn.

  But the tigers weren’t in the mood to let anything spoil their lunch, and there was soon little left but a bloodied and shredded orange jacket. The tigers dispersed to different corners of the park where they scrapped over body parts.

  While the tour group went online to upload their images.

  *

  By the time Wang regained consciousness he was in the back of another car, a bigger one this time, an SUV, squeezed between two more men in thick jackets and ski hats.

  Everything had happened so quickly. He recalled being led from the other car, the guy in orange gripping his arm and saying they were going to meet some hungry tigers. Then another group had confronted the man in the orange jacket. The last thing Wang remembered was shouting, a scuffle, and a foul-smelling cloth over his mouth. Then nothing.

  There was a foreigner in the passenger seat of this, his latest car, and he was speaking to another beside Wang.

  “What a fucking place, man. This has nothing to do with conservation. Nothing. These things would never survive in the wild. Tigers don’t hunt in packs. They must be breeding them for their body parts.”

  And the one beside Wang said yeah, too right, and told the one in the passenger seat there was other weird stuff.

  “Chuck man, did you see the ligers? They were breeding tigers with lions? Can you believe that?”

  Then the one called Chuck saw that Wang had woken up.

  “Oh, Wang. Welcome back. Pretty wild place, eh?”

  “What happened to that other guy, in the orange,” Wang said, sounding confused. And Drayton said he’d gone to take a closer look at some of the conservation work, improvin
g the tigers’ diet.

  “And who are you?” said Wang.

  “Well,” said Drayton, “I’m the idiot with the computer security problem. Remember? Shanghai TT Logistics. I think you wanted to help me out. But before you do that, I have one thing I’d like to know. Tell me a bit more about this guy. He’s sure been busy.”

  He was holding up his iPhone with a picture of the stick alien.

  Wang began to cry.

  – 35 –

  Baccarat

  Drayton dropped the kid called Wang back in Harbin, giving him US$100 for his security consultancy. He told him that hacking a website was not the best way to win business and to keep away from Shanghai TT Logistics because its directors were not a very forgiving bunch.

  Wang had spent most of his time with Drayton just whimpering in the back of the car. He’d clearly had a tough few days and was bewildered and frightened, not really getting all the fuss his alien was causing. He was just a kid with a vivid imagination and some dubious computer skills who spent too much time online. At least that’s the way Drayton saw it.

  Whether that was what the Bubble Room would want to hear was another thing, but he’d deal with that when he had to.

  He then headed to the airport for a flight back to Shanghai.

  He was worried about Morgan, thinking that maybe the Englishman already had been fed to some hungry tigers. Maybe worse. He’d been trying to reach him but he never picked up. He tried again, and this time Morgan’s phone didn’t even ring, just went to voicemail. Drayton didn’t leave a message.

  When he reached Harbin airport his phone rang. It was a voice from the past.

  “Hey Chuck, Luis here. Luis Acevedo. How you doing?”

  “I’m doing good, Luis. Been a long time. How’s Macau? Still chasing the bad guys?”

  “It’s still keeping me busy,” Acevedo said. “Which is why I’m calling.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We fished a body from the Pearl River, badly cut up, hard to identify. There was a bag in the water too, with documents and a passport belonging to a Brit called Anthony Morgan, a finance guy by the looks of what was there. You know him?”