Snakehead

I

There were fifteen INS agents, including Hrycyk, in two unmarked white vans parked in the shopping plaza opposite the two-storey Dong’an apartment block. Margaret had spent most of the day securing supplies to ensure that the raiding party was properly equipped. They were all crouched uncomfortably in their white Tivek tear-resistant suits, hoods pulled tightly over their heads. Each wore a flimsy plastic face mask, filtered air blowing down over their faces from portable, battery-powered HEPA filter systems held in the small of their backs by a belt around the waist.

‘Just don’t fart,’ she had warned them, and their laughter had broken the tension in the build-up to the raid. Both she and Li were similarly equipped, and they all knew that they would present a bizarre spectacle as they stormed the building.

Police back-up had been requested to deal with any traffic and crowd control problems that might arise in the street outside. They were going to have to stop the early evening traffic on Bellaire to let the INS vans cross its six lanes and enter the pot-holed parking area alongside the crumbling apartment block. There were two minutes to go.

Outside, the sinking sun was burning the sky red and the heat of the day was starting to fade. It had been a stark contrast to the icy temperatures they had left behind them in Washington. The parking lot was quiet. There were a few cars scattered across its undulating tarmac. In Susie’s nail salon, a group of Chinese women sat in the window waiting for a manicure. In the café next door a couple of old men sat sipping at mugs of green tea and eating hot, sweet dim sum straight from the steamer.

Hrycyk was crouched on Margaret’s left. He leaned in very close. ‘You get a buzz out of it, or something?’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He lowered his voice. ‘Sleeping with Chinamen.’

If there had been space she would have swung a clenched fist into his face. Her anger boiled inside of her, and she turned to hiss in his face, ‘Yeah, and I’d sleep with every last one of them before I ever slept with you.’

She heard the radio crackle from the front of the van and a voice screamed, ‘Go, go, go!’ They heard a screech of tyres out on the boulevard, and their engines which had been ticking over on low rev suddenly fired up and they lurched forwards, the underside of their vehicle scraping on the road as they bumped down off the sidewalk and slewed across the boulevard into the parking lot. The back doors flew open, and they were spilling out into the fading light, running left and right, securing the exits.

Margaret was last out, just behind Li. They were the only members of the group not carrying a weapon. They followed the main body of agents along the cracked and uneven paving stones that marked the front of the building. Margaret glanced up at rusted wrought-iron balconies on windows with neglected-looking ornamental shutters. In a tree opposite the arched entrance to the main courtyard, a red squirrel sat frozen in terror as these bizarre-looking creatures in white rushed past.

In the courtyard, a metal staircase ran up to a mesh walkway running left and right into open corridors leading to the upper apartments. At the far end, a man carrying a bucket emerged from a cellar door. For just a moment he was like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car. Then he dropped his bucket and a foul cocktail of urine and human excrement spilled across the cobbles. He turned and ran, jumping up to try to catch a handhold on the top of the back wall. Two agents caught his legs and pulled him on to the ground, turning him face down in the shit and handcuffing him almost before he could scream. Several other agents clattered up the metal stairs to secure the corridors. The rest funneled through the door from which the man with the bucket had emerged.

At the briefing, they had been given hand-drawn plans of the block, with key areas marked in red. They knew from intelligence previously received from Yu Lin that the illegals were kept in a large cellar area below the main apartments. So far the drawings had been completely accurate.

Nothing, however, had prepared them for what they would find in the basement. The stink of human waste, hot and fetid, rose to meet them as they ran down cold stone steps. Their HEPA filters did not protect them from the foul stench of captive humanity. It was dark, and the walls ran with condensation and dampness. As Margaret stumbled to the foot of the stairs, grabbing Li’s arm to steady herself, someone flicked a light switch, and they found themselves looking down a long, narrow room with a concrete floor, double tiers of rough, wooden bunk beds lining the walls on each side Dozens of pairs of dark, frightened eyes peered at them in the harsh yellow light. Somewhere toward the back of the room a woman screamed, and a child started crying.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret whispered. ‘There are children in here.’ She had not been expecting that.

A young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket tried to make a break for the stairs. A chorus of INS voices called on him to stop, and he found himself staring down the barrels of several guns pointing directly at his head. He stopped, resigned, and raised his hands, a sick smile on his face. Margaret heard Hrycyk’s voice. ‘He’ll be one of the ma zhai. Get him outta here!’ An agent stepped up to pull his arms down and cuff his hands behind his back. ‘Bring the vans in now.’ Hrycyk’s voice again, barking into a handset. He turned to the other agents. ‘Let’s get these people up the stairs before I throw up.’ He turned to Li. ‘Tell them no one’s going to hurt them. If they come peaceful they’ll be fed and watered, and get the chance to clean up.’

Li spoke rapidly in Mandarin to the frightened faces that peered back at him out of the gloom, depressed and resigned, knowing that their dreams of the Golden Mountain were over. Reluctantly they began gathering together what few miserable belongings they had and filing out toward the stairs under the watchful eyes of the men in white.

One woman sat on her bunk, making no effort to move. Silent tears made tracks through the dirt on her face. Li made his way toward her and crouched at her knees. He took her hand. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked her.

She shook her head. ‘My husband died on the journey,’ she said. ‘I lost my baby. I have no family to go back to. Only his family. And they don’t want to know. They wouldn’t pay my snakehead.’

Li said, ‘Anything must be better than this. Surely?’

She looked at him bleakly and said, ‘Death, perhaps.’

Li lifted her pillow. Beneath it were a few items of clothing neatly laid out, a broken wrist watch, a faded colour photograph, the glaze cracked where it had been folded. A couple smiled for the camera, standing erect, arm-in-arm before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square. Li realised, with a shock, that it was the woman who sat on the bed. ‘Your husband?’ he asked. She nodded. He slipped the pillow out of its stained and filthy cover to make a bag and put her clothes and her watch and her photograph inside. ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said. He took her arm to help her to her feet, and she flinched away in pain. He looked round and saw Margaret standing there.

‘Let me have a look at her,’ she said, and she leaned over to draw the skimpy cotton dress off the woman’s shoulder. It was striped with dark bruising. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘This woman’s been beaten.’

‘Who beat you?’ Li asked her.

‘The ma zhai,’ she said simply. ‘Because I couldn’t pay. They said I would have to give massage, and when I said no they beat me. They said, then I have to work in clothing factory to pay my debt, and live here for many years until it is all cleared. They said I have to pay for my husband, too, even though he is dead.’

Li was sickened. Could life possibly have been so bad for these people in China that it was worth enduring this? He knew that virtually none of them was fleeing political persecution. They were what the United Nations would call ‘economic migrants’. The idea that in America they would find the fabled Golden Mountain was an illusion. And yet the myth persisted.

Margaret said, ‘Ask her if she was vaccinated before they brought her across the border.’

The woman nodded to confirm that she was.

‘How long ago was that?’ Li asked.

She shrugged. ‘Five weeks, maybe six.’

Li told Margaret, and they were silent for a moment. The implications were not lost on them. At the briefing, Hrycyk had told them that the INS estimated around eight thousand illegals crossed the border into the US every month. If these people were being injected with the flu virus as long as six weeks ago, then already there could be up to ten thousand carriers in the country. It was a terrifying prospect, and raised the scale of the whole thing beyond anything any of them might have imagined.

Margaret said, ‘I’m calling in the Department of Health. We can’t just lock these people up. They’re going to have to be held in isolation and individually examined.’

Hrycyk came hurrying down the narrow passage between the rows of bunk beds. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said. ‘There’s no toilets or running water in this place. They’ve been shitting all over the floor.’ He paused and looked at Margaret. She could see his concern through his visor. ‘There’s another room through the back there,’ he said. ‘And there’s a guy sneezing and coughing his lungs up. I think he might have the flu.’

Margaret pushed past him to hurry back toward the other room. Hrycyk grabbed her arm. ‘This mask’s gonna protect me, right? I’m not gonna get the flu as long as I got this on?’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘You’ve already caught something a whole lot worse.’

She saw the alarm on his face. ‘What do you mean? What have I got?’

‘It’s a nasty disease of the intellect called racism,’ she said. ‘And I’m not sure if there’s any cure for it.’

He let go of her and sneered, ‘Yeah, very fucking funny.’ Then, ‘Hey,’ he called after her as she headed down the aisle. ‘Better not stick around for the next port of call. Little whorehouse down the road. You might get squeamish about picking up your own kind.’

Li came at him out of left field, catching him totally unawares. The two men crashed backwards, demolishing one of the flimsy beds and tumbling to the floor. Hrycyk was overweight and seriously unfit. He was no match for Li who grabbed a handful of Tivek at the American’s neck and raised a fist to smash down into Hrycyk’s face.

‘Yeah, go on, do it!’ the INS agent urged him. ‘Fucking do it, and your feet won’t touch the ground till you hit Tiananmen.’

Li felt Margaret pulling his arm. ‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, grow up! Didn’t your uncle ever tell you that violence was the first resort of the moron? Don’t get down there in the gutter with animals like him.’

Li shook his arm free of her and stood up. Hrycyk scrambled to his feet, trying to recover at least a little of his dignity. He stabbed a finger through the air toward Li. ‘Gonna have you, Chinaman,’ he said, spluttering all over the inside of his visor. ‘Gonna fucking have you.’

II

Hrycyk’s Santana cruised slowly across the parking lot before drawing gently to a stop, engine ticking over quietly. The row of shops below the green-tiled roof at the far side looked innocuous enough. There was a video store, a grocery shop, a hairdresser’s, a restaurant. Yellow light fell in slabs across the tarmac, loud music playing somewhere nearby drifted across the warm night air. If it wasn’t for the Chinese characters on the shopfronts, you could have mistaken this for any suburban shopping plaza in America.

The raid on the Dong’an apartments had netted more than fifty men, women and children. None of them had papers. They were all, almost certainly, illegal. Margaret had determined that the man Hrycyk feared might have the flu was suffering from a bad head cold. They had also picked up half a dozen ma zhai, and were holding them in company with the same people they had once held prisoner themselves. Under Department of Health supervision, the INS had already dispatched the immigrants on buses north to Huntsville, where FEMA had rented an entire unit from the state prison to keep them in secure isolation until they could be brought in front of the immigration court.

Li sat in the front seat beside Hrycyk, Margaret in back. The tension in the car was tangible. They still wore their Tivek suits and HEPA filters, each aware of how ridiculous they appeared to the other. There might have been something faintly comic about their situation were it not so grave. They were waiting for the vans to go in first.

Finally, Margaret could contain her curiosity no longer. ‘Which one’s the whorehouse?’

Hrycyk was clearly striving to come back at her with some caustic comment. But nothing came to him. He said lamely, ‘The hairdresser’s.’

She looked at the hairdressing salon. A brightly lit picture window gave on to the interior of the salon. They could see what looked like a group of women sitting waiting to take their turn in the chair. ‘Looks like they’re waiting for a perm,’ she said.

Hrycyk sneered. ‘Those aren’t women in there,’ he said. ‘That’s men waiting their turn in one of the back rooms. Massage, they like to call it. But anything goes, depending on how much you’re prepared to pay. Still takes a lot of blow-jobs to pay off your snakehead, though.’

They heard the squeal of tyres, and two white INS vans and three black and whites careened across the lot, brakes burning rubber as they drew up in front of the salon. They saw the silhouettes in the window jump to their feet, alarmed. White-suited figures poured from the back of the vans and into the salon. Uniformed police officers got out of their vehicles and stood around outside, hands on hips, daring anyone to interfere.

‘Time to go,’ Hrycyk said. And he got out of the car. Li and Margaret followed him across to the hairdresser’s. By the time they got inside, the half-dozen male customers were sitting down again sheepishly on the bench. Hrycyk grinned at them. ‘In for a haircut, boys?’

One of his agents emerged from a corridor leading to the back shop. ‘Three rooms in back, chief,’ he said. ‘Two of them occupied. Just giving them time to make themselves decent. Apparently the girls live in. There’s an apartment up the stairs.’

‘Let’s take a look,’ Hrycyk said.

They went down the corridor past two shut doors on the left. A third, on the right, stood open to reveal a small room almost filled by a makeshift massage table covered with white towels. There was a single chair against the back wall, below a cracked mirror. The other walls were scarred and dirty and pasted with old posters from Chinese movies. The air was heavy with the unpleasant smell of human body odour. And there was something else in the air, Margaret thought, high-pitched and disagreeable. The stink of sexual slavery.

A narrow staircase at the end of the corridor dog-legged up to the second floor. Another corridor with two bedrooms off it, a bathroom, and a sitting room at the far end. A couple of INS men were escorting one of the girls down the hall. She was wearing an obscenely short sleeveless blue cotton dress and white, high-heeled shoes. There were bruises on her arms and legs. Her face was hidden by the long black hair that flowed across it from her bowed head. As they approached, she threw her head back defiantly, flinging the hair out of her face. She was a pretty girl, late twenties, but her face was thin and haunted. Her eyes met Li’s, and she stopped in her tracks, and for a very long time they stood staring at each other.

Hrycyk looked from one to the other. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

Suddenly the girl bolted, breaking free from the grasp of the INS agents. She threw herself into the bathroom, slamming the door shut in their faces. They heard the key turn in the lock.

‘Hey!’ One of the INS men rattled the door handle.

Li pulled him roughly aside and threw his right shoulder squarely against the door. There was the sound of splintering wood, but the door remained intact.

‘For Christ’s sake, Li, what are you doing?’ Hrycyk screamed.

Li ignored him and threw himself at the door again. This time it burst open, in time for them to see the girl climbing out of the bathroom window. Li shouted at her, but none of them knew what it was he said.

The girl dropped from view, and they heard her land on a tin roof below. Li was across the bathroom in two strides. He put his foot through the glass, smashing the frame and started climbing out after her.

‘Li, if you don’t stop, I’ll fucking shoot you,’ Hrycyk bawled after him. ‘You’re just an observer here.’

But like the girl before him, Li dropped from view and clattered on to the tin roof below. Hrycyk ran across the bathroom and peered out after him. Margaret followed and craned to see over his shoulder. The tin roof covered a small outbuilding that housed the bins. The girl had jumped down into the alleyway at the rear, kicked off her shoes, and was running barefoot toward high mesh gates at the end, caught in the full glare of security lights which had snapped on. Li was going after her like a man demented.

Hrycyk turned to Margaret. ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ he hissed.

Margaret was at a loss. ‘Damned if I know.’

‘Jees…!’ He turned and ran back down the stairs, breathing heavily, Margaret following in his wake.

Out back they saw that the girl had reached the gates. But they were locked. She turned, her back pressed against the mesh, and watched Li approach. He had slowed to a strange, almost loping gait. Hrycyk, his breath coming now in stertorous gasps, ran after them.

As Li finally approached the girl, she seemed to cower below him. He stood for a long moment, then lifted his open hand as if about to strike her.

‘Li!’ Margaret screamed. She overtook Hrycyk and drew level with Li. ‘What are you doing?’ She looked at the strange, almost twisted expression on his face. She had never seen him look that way before. He stood breathing hard, unable to take his eyes off the girl. Margaret turned her gaze toward her and for the first time thought that there was something vaguely familiar about her.

Hrycyk caught up with them, several INS men running up behind him. His gun was in his hand, but hanging loosely at his side. Years of smoking and the strain of being a hundred pounds overweight, had taken their toll. Gasping for breath, he said, ‘For fuck’s sake, what is going on…?’

Li still had his eyes fixed on the girl, something like hatred burning in them now. He said, ‘She is Xiao Ling. My sister.’

Margaret looked quickly from one to the other in astonishment. She had met Xiao Ling only once, in a tearoom in Beijing two years ago. She doubted if she would have recognised her.

Hrycyk was unmoved. He nodded to his men. ‘Take her away.’

Li stepped in front of them. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said with a dangerous intensity. ‘She is my sister.’

‘I don’t care if she’s your sex-change uncle,’ Hrycyk told him happily. ‘She’s an illegal-fucking-Chinese-alien-prostitute, and she’s going to jail!’

III

The lights of Huntsville were spread out below like clusters of fireflies dancing in the warm Texas night. Margaret could follow the line of the Interstate snaking north by the headlights of the cars. But at this time it was not busy and there was little traffic. She saw the landing lights of the tiny Huntsville airfield, and on the other side of the highway the blaze of light around the perimeter of the Holliday Unit, where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice processed criminals also suspected of being illegal aliens. Some comedian had nicknamed it the Holliday Inn, and the name had stuck. Now the facility had been turned over exclusively for the use of the task force.

The small army helicopter touched down gently on the tarmac. A journey that would normally have taken an hour had been accomplished in less than fifteen minutes. Ducking under the downdraught, Margaret ran toward the lights of the terminal building, little more than a shed with windows. She crossed through the headlights of the car that was waiting for her and climbed in the back. The army driver turned and nodded. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘you wanna go straight there?’

‘Please.’

He engaged the shift and as he turned the car, its lights raked across the runway, illuminating rows of tiny single-engined aircraft lined up along either side. They drove slowly over a pitted road past playing fields, rows of bleachers erected to accommodate the faithful who came to watch the Huntsville Hornets on a Saturday.

They turned right past a filling station and the lights of the Hitchin’ Post restaurant before making a left and passing under Interstate 45. In less than two minutes they were on the access road to the Holliday Inn, which shimmered silver under the floodlights raised around its perimeter, light glinting on miles of shiny razor wire curled around the top of high mesh fencing. As they pulled into the brightly lit car park out front, Margaret could see the guard in the watchtower above the main gate following their progress. She stepped out into the glare of lights that bathed the prison in what felt like permanent day and walked toward the gate.

The guard called from the tower. ‘Stand below.’ Margaret did as she was told, and watched as he lowered a red plastic bucket on the end of a rope. ‘Put your ID in the bucket,’ he shouted. She dropped in her plastic photocard from the Medical Examiner’s Office, and he drew the bucket back up the tower. He took several moments to examine the ID before making a phone call. ‘You’ll get it back on the way out,’ he called. ‘Stand by the gate.’

As she reached the gate, she saw a black female officer approaching it through a corridor of fencing that led from the administration offices in H block. She unlocked an inner gate, before opening the outer gate to let Margaret in. They shook hands.

‘I’m Deputy Warden Macleod,’ the officer said. ‘You gonna have to get in one of these white suits to go in back. But I guess there ain’t much I have to tell you about that.’ She locked the gates behind them, and as they walked toward H block she said, ‘You people don’t hang around. They tell me they’re going to have the first hearings tomorrow morning. Usually it’s a week before we’re processing people over to Goree.’

Margaret said, ‘They’re not going to Goree. The Immigration Court there’s too small, and we can’t exactly evacuate a whole prison unit to keep these prisoners isolated.’

Deputy Warden Macleod looked surprised. ‘Where you taking them then?’

Margaret said, ‘The dean at the College of Criminal Justice has agreed to let us use their courtroom. It’s bigger, and they’re just going to shut down the college for the day.’

The deputy warden raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s a new one on me.’

Margaret said, ‘They used it once for a real-life capital murder trial. Some guy from Conroe with financial problems. Kidnapped his neighbours’ kid for ransom, but ended up killing the child. They found him guilty and gave him the death penalty.’

The deputy warden whistled softly. ‘You know, I ain’t never been too sure that we got the right to take a man’s life, no matter what he’s done. I figure the Big Man’s the only one with the right to make that judgment.’

‘Then you’re in the wrong job, in the wrong town,’ Margaret said. ‘They say it’s going to be a record year for executions over at the Walls Unit.’

Deputy Warden Macleod pressed her lips together in an expression of silent disapproval.

In the main hall of H block, the floor was polished to such a shine Margaret could see her reflection in it. A large notice read: HARD WORK APPLIED WITH INTELLIGENCE AND RIGHT THINKING WILL LEAD TO SUCCESS. The deputy warden followed Margaret’s eyes. ‘Warden’s a religious man,’ she said. ‘We believe in encouraging all our prisoners to take the right path.’ Clearly a shiny one, Margaret thought. The deputy warden opened a door to their left. ‘You can get changed in here.’

After she had passed through the security ‘airlock’ gates leading to the rest of the prison, Margaret was met by another female officer in a Tivek suit and face mask. ‘All of the staff beyond this point are suited up,’ the officer said. ‘We got Department of Health people advising us on everything we do.’

They walked down a long, broad, tarmacked area between low prison buildings on either side, passing through locked gates in fences that cut the main drag into sections. ‘They call this Main Street,’ the officer said. ‘This is where the prisoners get their exercise.’

Almost on cue, a group of immigrants emerged from a building away to their left, led by a single officer in a protective suit. There were, perhaps, a dozen of them. They were sorry figures in their white prison-issue jackets and trousers, several sizes too big for their slight, Chinese frames. At least, Margaret, noticed, they looked cleaner.

The officer said, ‘We’re feeding them in batches. Never seen such a compliant bunch of prisoners. They just do what they’re told. No questions.’

They passed through another gate. This one had a sign attached to it. THE USE OF PROFANITY IS A DECLARATION OF STUPIDITY. And below it, in Spanish and English, NO HABLAN; NO TALKING. They were going to have to start thinking about getting Chinese translations, Margaret thought grimly. They had three hundred beds here. But it was never going to be enough. This place was going to start filling rapidly.

In the processing block, at the top right-hand side of main street, sad Chinese faces sat in a caged area waiting to be interviewed, fingerprinted, photographed and documented. They displayed no curiosity about the white-suited figures with their plastic face masks. That uniquely Chinese sense of fatalism that had served them through five thousand years of turbulent history, and most recently the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, had descended on them like a soporific cloud.

Li sat in an office on his own through the back. Margaret closed the door behind her and sat opposite him at a scarred desk. Somewhere, in the hours since she had last seen him, he had acquired a pack of cigarettes. The air was laden with his smoke, an ashtray overflowing in front of him.

‘I thought you gave up,’ she said.

‘So did I.’ His eyes met hers only for a moment before flickering away again.

They sat in silence for a long time before she said, ‘The news isn’t good, Li Yan. INS have been pulling in illegal Chinese immigrants all over — in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco…Seems most of them crossed the border from Mexico. Houston’s just a staging post for moving on.’ She paused. ‘Early intelligence from interviews suggests they’ve been getting “vaccinated” as they crossed the border for nearly three months now. That could mean as many as twenty-five thousand illegal Chinese infected with the virus.’

Li looked at her. He heard the despair in her voice. He knew what it meant. These were numbers that it would be almost impossible to deal with. But right now he found it hard to care. He tried to focus on what she was saying. ‘…and because they’re illegal, they’re not going to come forward, no matter what kind of appeal we make. Even when they get sick. Jesus…!’ She stood up, unable to contain her frustration. ‘These poor bastards really are the ideal delivery system for a bioterrorist attack. I mean, how are we supposed to deal with these numbers? We’re going to have to build a quarantine facility, never mind the legal implications of trying to keep them all locked up. And your government’s not going to want them back. Christ, can you imagine what’s going to happen when this all gets out? As it will. There’s going to be panic. There’s going to be vigilante groups hunting down and murdering Chinese — whether they’re illegal immigrants or not.’

She stopped and looked at Li. And she knew that no matter the scale of the nightmare, Li was battling his own demons. She sat down again and took one of his hands in hers.

‘Have they let you see her yet?’ He shook his head. ‘But do you know? Have they told you?’ she asked. ‘Was she one of the ones that got vaccinated?’

He looked at her, and she saw the pain in his eyes. All he could bring himself to do was nod. And she knew that for him, the nightmare had just got very personal.