The Golden Library, page 15
Ben thought for a moment. ‘How old are these things?’
‘In terms of Chinese history, not that old,’ she replied nonchalantly. ‘They only date back to around 200 BC. In our culture that’s almost like yesterday. But the terracotta army warriors are still regarded as one of China’s most precious ancient treasures.’
‘And as such, they’d be pretty closely guarded.’
‘Anyone who tried to steal them wouldn’t live very long.’
‘Then it’s unlikely that our mystery package contains cash or drugs,’ Ben said. ‘Why go to the trouble of bypassing a ton of armed security to hack into one of these statues and plant the goods in there, when there are a thousand other much more practical ways of passing them on? And even if they did, and Dan Chen was “supposed” to find the tube inside, that was depending too heavily on chance. How could they have guaranteed he’d find it, and not one of his team? And who could have predicted that the earthquake would happen just at that moment and give a pretext to his movements by breaking the statue open? If that was just a lucky coincidence, it was a one in a billion shot.’
She nodded. ‘Agreed. I say we need to ditch that hypothesis and look at this from another angle. Perhaps, instead, whatever’s inside the tube is something very old and historically important in its own right.’
‘That would make more sense,’ Ben said. ‘Or a little more, at least. By a stroke of pure luck, Dan Chen happens to find this amazing thing inside the broken statue. Being an archaeologist, he’s aware of what an incredible discovery he’s made. It’s worth a fortune, and he’s the only one who knows about it. Suddenly he’s thinking about quitting his humdrum life for one of wealth and luxury. But he’s got to act fast. There are alarms sounding off all over the place, his colleagues are banging on the door and the whole building could collapse at any moment. And so on the spur of the moment he takes a huge gamble. He decides he’s going to steal it. Now, this guy’s no master thief. Probably shoved it down his trousers in the hope nobody would notice. Then he manages to smuggle it past his colleague who drove him to the hospital, or thinks he does. It’s a narrow escape but eventually he’s safe and sound back at his apartment with his trophy. He’s home free. But next he does a very strange thing.’
‘Two very strange things,’ Shi Yun said. ‘First, why doesn’t he keep it for himself? Who are these “friends” he decides to pass it on to?’
‘Stolen art fences?’ Ben had encountered the world of illegal antiquities trading enough times in the past to have a rough idea of how things worked in their business. When you needed to offload a hot item quickly for as much money as you could grab, you often needed the help of specialist dealers.
‘But why doesn’t he pass it on to them personally? Why get his girlfriend to do it for him? That’s the second strange thing.’
‘He was afraid of them,’ Ben suggested. ‘They’re crooks and he isn’t.’
‘Is that why they snatched Lara?’ she asked. ‘Just a bunch of really, really mean and vicious bastards jumping at another opportunity? How on earth did a guy like Dan Chen hook up with such people? And come to see them as his “friends”? Was he really that naive?’
‘Still doesn’t explain what he meant by “the best possible cause”,’ Ben reminded her. ‘What kind of cause? Sounds more like an idealistic thing than a criminal enterprise.’
‘And then somehow, in the middle of it all, two people are murdered for their organs.’ Shi Yun gave a sigh. ‘I can’t make that part fit into the rest of it.’
‘We’re missing something,’ Ben said. ‘One extra piece of the puzzle that’ll make the rest all fall into place.’
‘But we’re getting closer to the truth,’ she insisted. ‘I can feel it.’
‘I’m confused,’ said Sammy. ‘None of this makes any sense to me at all.’
‘Nor me,’ admitted Stefan, who was slouched in the back of the car looking pasty and ill.
‘There’s our flyover,’ she said, pointing ahead. It had taken a while to hack through the chaotic traffic and it was now nearly ten a.m. Pulling off the main boulevard she sped down a sharp incline, scraping the underside of the car chassis as the suspension bottomed out, and pulled up with a squeal of brakes next to where the recovered kidnap van was parked under the shadows of the massive concrete overhang. Beside it were two marked police squad cars and four cops in uniform, waiting for their superior to take over. They’d coned off the area around the van, leaving a narrow lane for other traffic to trickle through the underpass.
Ben was first out of the car. He said, ‘Let’s see what we have.’
Chapter 21
The kidnappers’ stolen conveyance had been a plain white Dongfeng panel van, a few years old, unmarked and unremarkable with nothing to distinguish it from a million others on the roads of every Chinese city. The uniformed cops watched Ben detachedly and he ignored them as he walked around the vehicle, taking in details. Stefan and Sammy had climbed out of Shi Yun’s car and were hovering uncertainly in the background. The detective herself stood by with her arms folded and a serious expression.
What Ben was seeing all seemed to fit with what they’d learned so far. The registration tallied with what Mr Chung had told them last night. The van’s lower skirts were spattered with dirt, and some trailing bits of vegetation from the forest track were stuck in the plastic trim. Ben yanked open the passenger door, opened the glove box and saw the half-empty cigarette pack that the cops hadn’t yet taken away. As Shi Yun had said, they were the same brand as the stubs they’d found in the forest.
‘Shuangxi,’ Ben said. ‘Do a lot of people in China smoke them?’
‘A couple of billion, perhaps,’ she told him.
‘That narrows our search right down. What does the name mean?’
‘It means “double happiness”.’
Double happiness. Ben thought he could do with some of that. He took one from the pack, pulled out his Zippo and lit it up.
‘Hey! That’s evidence!’
‘Oh, please.’
Ben went on with his tour of the van. The rear doors were open, revealing the cargo space inside which had been lined with heavy-duty plywood, presumably by its legal owner, little knowing that his modification would transform it into the perfect kidnap vehicle. Apart from that, there was nothing to see here.
The cigarette was something of a disappointment, too. Ben couldn’t say it was giving him twice as much happiness as his trusty Gauloises. Maybe not even half as much. But he went on smoking it anyway as he stepped away from the van and looked keenly around him. Sure enough, the location under the flyover had been chosen as a surveillance camera blind spot. The van hadn’t been alone under here; nearby were some tyre marks where a stationary car parked beside it had taken off in a hurry. That would be the getaway vehicle, Ben thought. Possibly stolen, like the van, or possibly belonging to one of the kidnap crew.
Further across from the van, out in the middle of the narrow lane beyond the cone barrier, he noticed a dark patch where oil or some other automotive fluid had been spilled, and a couple of scratches on the road. That got him curious.
The occasional vehicle was coming through the underpass, with one of the uniformed cops diligently signalling them by. There seemed to be relatively little traffic using this route. Ben thought that the kidnappers would have been easily able to transfer Lara from the van to their getaway car unnoticed. He waited for a small rattly truck to pass, then stepped out between the cones for a closer look at the oil patch. On examination it was still wet, and smelled like two-stroke oil, the kind he mixed into his chainsaw fuel back home. Still fresh, like the scratch on the road next to it.
‘It’s just some oil,’ Shi Yun said.
‘To you it’s oil,’ Ben could have replied. ‘To me it’s an action replay of what happened here.’ But he said nothing. Then as he crouched there thinking, he noticed something else, something colourful lying in the gutter on the other side of the van.
Plastic fragments. Some were no more than little shards, but the largest covered his palm. The colour that had caught his eye was part of a graphic design. The way they were lying in the gutter looked as though someone had carelessly swiped them there with their foot.
Ben was wondering where they might have come from when a little delivery scooter entered the underpass and slowed for the cops. The rider was some skinny kid with an oversized orange crash helmet that made his head look like a giant pumpkin. Scooters and small-engined motorcycles were a ubiquitous sight on the city roads, and normally Ben wouldn’t have given it a second glance. Except for two things. The first was the way the rider slowed right down to a crawl, turned to peer at the spot where the oil spill on the road was, then shook his pumpkin head and accelerated onwards, the nasal buzzing of his two-stroke engine echoing under the concrete flyover. The second was that the rear-mounted top box on the scooter had the same colourful graphic on it as the fragment in Ben’s hand.
‘Are you going to talk to us at any point, or are we supposed to guess what you’re thinking?’ Shi Yun asked impatiently, arms still folded.
‘Yeah, Ben, what have you found?’ Sammy called out.
Ben told them, ‘The driver of the getaway car was in such a hurry to get out of here that he pulled out without looking and hit something.’
‘Hit what?’ Shi Yun asked.
Ben pointed at the disappearing delivery scooter. ‘One of those,’ he said.
They found the fast food outlet nearby. It was a busy, greasy little joint currently cooking up mid-morning brunch and coffee orders to send out to nearby offices and building sites. Shi Yun flashed her police ID for the girl at the serving counter and asked her if their scooter riders used the flyover underpass on their delivery route. The girl blinked nervously back at the stern lady detective and her three male companions and stammered that yes, she thought they used it as a shortcut.
Shi Yun asked, ‘Tell me, please, did one of them have an accident there last Friday evening?’
The girl looked suddenly twice as nervous, biting her lip. ‘You’d better talk to Mr Wang.’
Wang was the manager, a scraggy little guy who came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on his apron and wearing an ugly leer that became uglier when he laid eyes on Shi Yun’s detective badge. He led them into a grungy office where she repeated her question. Wang was cagey at first, but then was forced to admit that yes, there had been a minor incident under the flyover that evening, involving one of their delivery riders and a car. He was even cagier when asked why the accident hadn’t been reported to the police. Under her steely-eyed pressure he had to confess that the delivery kid had been underage to be riding a scooter. Wang had had to drive over there in his three-wheeler truck and recover the stricken machine personally.
‘Seems like nobody reports anything to the police any more these days,’ Shi Yun commented in English to Ben and Stefan. Pressing Wang for more information, she got out of him that the scooter hadn’t been irreparably damaged but that its top box had been broken and all the food inside was scrambled. The kid himself had been shaken but unhurt. Then after a brief argument, the bastard in the car had driven off. But the kid had been smart enough to get the registration number.
‘Could I have that?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have it,’ Wang said dourly. ‘You’d need to talk to the kid.’
‘Then give me his contact details.’
‘Don’t have them either.’
She pointed at the filing cabinet behind the desk. ‘You don’t keep records on your employees?’
Wang spat. Spat right there on the carpet, in his own office. A real charmer, this guy. ‘He’s just a kid. Working off the books, you know? That’s business.’
Shi Yun gave Wang a card. ‘Make sure he calls me very soon. Understand? Or I’ll have you arrested for employing minors, and the government will close down your premises and strip all your assets, and you’ll spend the next six months in a state re-education facility. And believe me, all the nasty things you’ve heard about those places are true.’
Wang spat again.
‘That was good work,’ Shi Yun told them contentedly as they left the fast food place. ‘Come on, I’ll treat us all to a late breakfast somewhere with a bit more class than this dump.’
‘If they can sell us some aspirin,’ Stefan groaned, clutching his head, ‘that’ll be even better.’
‘I tried to warn you about drinking that terrible stuff,’ Sammy chided him.
Ben was still thinking about what she’d said to Wang. ‘Re-education facility?’ he asked her on the way back to her car. ‘I thought your government’s lovely internment camps were mainly just for torturing and indoctrinating the ethnic Muslim community.’
She looked at him. ‘I was just saying that stuff to scare Wang. I don’t believe those places even exist, and you shouldn’t believe it either. It’s all just anti-China propaganda cooked up by your western media. Anyway, you think the British and the Americans are so ethical and pure? It was your country who invented the concentration camp, long before there were Nazis.’
Ben could find no reply to that.
They got back in Shi Yun’s car and set off again, ploughing through the city traffic with her characteristic driving style. Stefan was still bemoaning his hangover and Sammy was scolding him like a mother hen, while Shi Yun had reverted back to her cheerful, smiling mood and was telling Ben about the pleasant little café-restaurant she was taking them to not too far away across town, where they served her favourite kind of steamed rice breakfast dumplings. The more she dropped the hard-boiled cop act and showed her real self, the more Ben found himself liking her.
‘You can get any kind of filling you want,’ she was saying animatedly as she slowed for a red light. It was a busy, wide four-way intersection with traffic hurtling by in all directions. The signal lights were up on tall masts. Modern high-rises in the background, with a few traditional Chinese buildings interspersed. She added, ‘They do a special kind of spicy red bean paste that’s really delicious, if you don’t like meat.’
‘Meat every time for me,’ Ben replied.
‘Then you should try the pork and chestnuts filling. It’s a little fatty for some people, and a little salty, but it’s the b—’
Then the side window behind her head as she sat turned towards him suddenly imploded into the car. A stunning, violent impact like being hit by an express train sent them spinning weightlessly into the air.
Chapter 22
The articulated truck had been just one of the countless vehicles roaring by the intersection when it suddenly veered out of lane and, without warning or slowing down, slammed right into them.
The massive collision sent the car spinning and tumbling like a tin can kicked down the street. It came down on its roof, bounced, and righted itself to land back on its wheels, broken glass and bits of bodywork strewn all around. The truck’s momentum had been reduced almost to a halt by the impact. Now the unseen driver floored his throttle and the huge cab came on again with a dieselly rasp, closing in for a second impact. This time the car was smashed over on its side and spun like a top on the road.
For its occupants, there hadn’t been time to register what was happening before they were being helplessly flung about inside. Both front airbags instantly deployed, trapping Ben and Shi Yun securely in their seats during that first crunching impact. In the back, neither Sammy nor Stefan had been wearing a seatbelt.
Disorientated and stunned, it took Ben a few moments to understand what had happened. There was a high-pitched ringing in his ears that drowned out all other sound, and his vision was blurry. As his senses quickly began to return he realised that he was lying on his side against the passenger door, which had now become the floor under him. Shi Yun was sprawled half on top of him, partly suspended between the front seats by her seatbelt. The airbags had deflated after the initial collision and were hanging spent from their panels on the dash and steering column. Broken glass was everywhere. Above them, what had been the driver’s side of the car was completely smashed in with all the windows gone.
Struggling to twist around, Ben reached up to grasp Shi Yun by the arm and shake her. Her eyes fluttered open and hazily focused on him. She tried to speak, but was too stunned to make any sound.
That was when Ben realised that he was spattered with blood. So was his seat, the roof of the car and the dashboard. It wasn’t hers. And as far as he could tell it wasn’t his, either. Where had it come from? His mind was still confused from the shock of the collision and he couldn’t understand. A groan from behind made him crane his head around to peer with difficulty into the back, wincing at the pain in his neck and shoulder from where the seatbelt had restrained him in the collision. And that was when Ben came fully alert again and realised with a cold shock of horror whose blood he was covered with.
In the rear passenger’s seat directly behind Shi Yun when the truck had slammed broadside into them, Sammy had taken the full brunt of the impact. He must have been sitting with his head close to the window, because now that whole side of his face and skull had been caved in flat like a dropped eggshell. As the car had flipped over on its side he’d been flung across the back seat and now was lying on top of Stefan. His remaining eye seemed to be staring right at Ben between the gap in the front seats, with an expression of pure amazement, as if to say, ‘What happened?’ Except Sammy wasn’t thinking that, because he was no longer thinking anything at all.
Poor Sammy. But there was no time to lament him now.
The groan Ben had heard had come from Stefan, who was trapped between the rear door and Sammy’s body on top of him. Ben managed to release his seatbelt catch, reach between the seats and haul the dead man’s weight off him. Stefan was all spattered in blood, but that was mostly Sammy’s too. At first the only wound Ben could see on Stefan was a gash on his cheek where he’d been hit by flying glass from the imploded window. Then he saw the grimace of pain on Stefan’s face and the way he was holding his arm.
