Snakehead

I

Ellington Field was a vast expanse of grass and tarmac south-east of Houston, on the road to Galveston. It was where Air Force One would land the President when he came to the city, and where the governor would fly in and out on official trips to Washington. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration also maintained a substantial presence on the base with a huge white hangar near one of the main runways. It had three enormous air-conditioning units supported on scaffolding along either side, and vast doors that slid shut, making it an ideal staging area for handling mass casualties and multiple autopsies. It was 8 a.m., and a dozen pathologists were about to start post-mortem examinations of the bodies of the ninety-eight Chinese immigrants just over twenty-four hours after Deputy J. J. Jackson had found them on Highway 45.

Six refrigerated semitrailer rentals stood in a row on the tarmac outside the hangar doors. Four of them had sixteen bodies stacked inside on a double tier of makeshift plywood staging. The other two contained seventeen. Two teams of two from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner had worked late into the night removing the bodies from the container that had been brought down from Huntsville. Each body had been assigned a number, marked in black on a six-inch yellow plastic placard placed next to it, then individually and collectively photographed. They had been examined for gross injuries or blood and assessed for rigor mortis. Core body temperatures had been taken by making tiny incisions in the upper right abdomen and inserting a chef’s type thermometer into the livers. Finally, each foot had been tagged with the same number as the yellow placard, then zippered into a white body bag, with the corresponding number tied on to the zipper’s pull tag. Stacked in rows in the refrigerated semitrailers, they now awaited the full process of US autopsy procedure. It was not the America these Chinese migrants had dreamed of.

Margaret walked briskly through the hangar, blinking in the fierce glare of the 500-watt halogen floodlamps that illuminated the nearly twenty stations that had been set up along one side. Plastic sheeting stretched across tubular frames formed partitions between them. Twelve of the stations were purely for autopsy. Mobile tables had been wheeled into each, plastic buckets hanging below drainers to catch body fluids. Other stations were dedicated to ancillary procedures like the collection and review of personal effects, fingerprinting, dental examination, total body x-ray. Opposite the stations, tables had been set up with computers for recording their findings. Each table was manned by at least three assistants, two of whom were earmarked to help with the work in the station. The sounds of voices and the hum of computers echoed around the vast corrugated space.

It always struck Margaret as ironic that it took so much time, money and effort simply to record the passing of life. The human obsession with death. Perhaps, she thought, we imagined that by examining it in all its guises we might one day find a way of defeating it.

‘Dr. Campbell, good morning.’ Steve stepped across to greet her from the station he had been allocated. ‘Fine day for wielding the knife.’ He waved an arm around the hangar. ‘Spectacular set-up you have here.’

‘I think I gave you permission to call me Margaret,’ Margaret said.

Steve’s eyebrows, behind the anonymity of his surgical mask, were still animated. ‘So you did. I was just being polite — in case you’d forgotten.’

They cut bizarre figures in this NASA hangar in their green surgical gowns and plastic aprons, shower caps, masks and goggles.

‘Are we about ready yet?’ he asked.

‘First bodies are coming through the line now.’

Steve’s grin stretched his mask across his face. ‘See you at lunch, then.’ And he headed back to his autopsy station.

In spite of the face she had put on for Steve, Margaret was filled with apprehension. There was an encounter today she could not avoid, a confrontation with the man she wished she could hate, but knew she still loved. She turned toward autopsy station number one and felt her hackles rise at the sight of Hrycyk standing by the table waiting for her. He wore a surgical gown over tee-shirt, jeans and trainers and looked ridiculous with a green plastic shower cap pulled down on his head.

He glanced at his gown. ‘Came prepared,’ he said. A body bag was wheeled past on a gurney destined for autopsy further down the line. He grinned. ‘I guess that’s what you’d call a Chinese take-out.’

Margaret walked briskly into her station. ‘You’re a very sick man, Agent Hrycyk.’

He was quite unabashed. ‘So I’ve been told.’

Margaret spread out a cloth of gleaming knives on a stainless steel side table, and lifted the French chef’s knife that she used as her main cutting tool. ‘I’ll look forward to opening you up one day to find out why,’ she said.

II

Li was met by Fuller at Houston Hobby airport. It was the first time he had met the FBI agent, although they had spoken on the telephone. And it was his first time in Texas, although he had been in the United States for almost a year. They shook hands warmly on the concourse and Fuller took him out to the short-term car park where he had left his Chrysler Jeep.

‘Li Yan,’ he said, as if trying out the name for size. ‘I hear you guys have your family name come first.’

‘That’s right,’ Li said.

‘So that would make you, uh, Mr. Li, or Agent Li, or whatever?’

‘Just plain “Li” is fine.’

‘Uh, okay. But if I was to call you by your first name it would be Yan, right?’

‘If you wished to be familiar,’ Li said, ‘you would call me Li Yan.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Fuller glanced at him. ‘Your English is pretty good.’

Li had lost count of the number of times he had been told this, as if it was an extraordinary thing that a Chinese could speak English as well as an American. But it was his job to foster good relations between US and Chinese law enforcement agencies, and so he was always polite. ‘I was taught by my uncle from an early age,’ he said. ‘And then I spent time in Hong Kong with the British police before the handover. I also spent some time in Chicago where I learned some interesting new vocabulary.’

‘Like what?’ Fuller asked.

‘Like “motherfucker”, and “shithead”.’

‘Hey!’ Fuller laughed. ‘You almost sound like a native.’

Li had learned long ago that it amused people when you could swear in their language.

Fuller negotiated a network of roads leading through a forest of advertising billboards out on to Highway 45, where they turned south for the short trip to Ellington Field. ‘So…’ he said. ‘Criminal justice liaison. What kind of job is that exactly?’

‘Just what it sounds like,’ Li said. ‘I provide a bridge between the criminal justice organisations of both our countries. And I make myself available to help in any investigations that your people have on-going that may have Chinese involvement. Drugs, people-smuggling, computer fraud, that sort of thing.’

‘I guess,’ Fuller said, ‘you probably have your hands full just trying to keep track of the number of law enforcement agencies we have here in the US.’

Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘When I bring senior Chinese police officers to the United States to meet with senior American police officers, the Chinese are outnumbered around ten to one. My people cannot understand why you need so many agencies: the Justice Department, the FBI, the INS, the DEA, the Secret Service, the NSA…When your people come to my country it is a one-stop shop.’

Fuller laughed. ‘I like your sense of humour, Li.’

Li said, straight-faced, ‘I did not know I was being funny.’ Although he did. But now Fuller wasn’t quite sure. So he changed the subject.

‘You know about what’s going down here in Houston?’

‘Ninety-eight dead Chinese found in a truck. Almost certainly renshe, illegal immigrants. Autopsies begin today.’

‘Ren…what? What d’you call them?’

‘Renshe. Human snakes. It is the name we give to smuggled Chinese, because of their ability to wriggle past tight border controls.’

The FBI man nodded. ‘Right.’ He paused. ‘The thing is, Li, this is starting to get embarrassing.’ Fuller flicked a wary glance in Li’s direction. ‘Now it’s not my job to get into the politics of all this, but folks in Washington are unhappy at the number of incidents where Chinese illegals—renshe—are turning up dead on boats in American waters and trucks on American soil. It’s been on the increase since all those people died when the Golden Venture sank off New York nearly ten years ago. Your people were supposed to be doing something about it. But the numbers just keep going up and up.’

‘There has been a huge campaign against illegal immigration in China,’ Li said, without any hint of defensiveness. ‘As soon as we arrest the little snakeheads, others take their place. It is the big snakeheads, the ones who finance the traffic, that we need to catch. Like Big Sister Ping in New York. You cannot kill the snake without first cutting off its head.’

‘And how do you propose we do that?’

‘Most of the Chinese immigrants now come in from Mexico,’ Li said. ‘Houston is the hub. From here they fan out all over the rest of the country. Since we cut off the supply of money from New York, it might be fair to assume that the operation is now being financed out of here.’

‘That’s quite an assumption.’

‘It is somewhere to start,’ Li said.

The roads on either side of the freeway were thick with billboards raised on single stalks advertising everything from adult movies and massage parlours to used cars and ice-cream. Tiny flags fluttered in great profusion over sprawling used-car lots, and enterprising people sold hardware out of what looked like wooden shacks. They turned east off the freeway, and the rising sun shone straight in their eyes. Fuller flicked down his visor and snapped on a pair of sleek wraparound sun-glasses that gave him a slightly sinister air. He turned and grinned at Li. ‘Almost mandatory now for any self-respecting FBI agent. Kind of inscrutable, huh?’ And then he remembered that’s how they always described the Chinese. ‘Uh, no offence,’ he added quickly.

Li smiled. ‘None taken.’

‘Just about there,’ Fuller said. The road took them through small clusters of single-storey housing, past green watered lawns and stands of shady trees. On their left Pete’s BBQ House advertised boiled crawfish as its speciality. ‘You’ll meet INS Agent Hrycyk. He’s an ass, but unfortunately we’re going to have to work with him. He, uh…’ Fuller glanced nervously again in Li’s direction, ‘…he doesn’t much like Chinese.’

Li shrugged, ‘I have been here long enough, Agent Fuller, to know that a lot of people don’t much like Chinese.’

Fuller nodded, embarrassed, glad that he could hide behind the shades. ‘You’ll also meet the Chief Medical Examiner. Attractive enough, but I don’t figure any of us are going to like her much. She’s a real hard case. Dr. Margaret Campbell.’

Li felt as if he had just left his insides somewhere back on the road, and his heart was beating so hard he was sure Fuller must be able to hear it. But apart from a slight colouring of his high, wide cheekbones, not a trace of it showed on his face.

III

In spite of the air-con, Margaret was perspiring under the heat of the halogen lamps. The body lying face down on the table in front of her was a pale jaundice colour, almost hairless. She was working her way through the external examination, shouting out brief sporadic observations for the assistant at the table to tap into the computer. She would write a full report later and fill out the avalanche of paperwork that would have to go with it.

The knuckles of the subject were severely bruised where, she assumed, frantic attempts had been made to break out of the container. Several of the fingernails were torn and had bled. Dried blood was clotted around the nail beds, and there were smears of blood on the notebook and pencil that had been found with the body. She had identified petechial haemorrhaging around the eyes and in the mouth. She expected to find the same on the surfaces of some of the chest organs. Fingertips, toes and lips were tinged with blue.

‘So what does it all mean?’ Hrycyk asked. He had been watching the process carefully and listening to every word. ‘Petechial haemorrhaging…what is that?’

‘Pinpoint haemorrhages where tiny blood vessels have burst,’ Margaret said. She sighed. ‘On the face of it, it looks like you might have been right, Agent. The haemorrhaging, along with the blue tinging on the fingers, toes and lips, are all consistent with suffocation. But I’m not about to commit myself just yet.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Hrycyk said. ‘I already examined the air intake on the container.’

‘So did I.’

He looked faintly surprised. ‘So you’ll know it was closed?’

‘I know it was closed when I examined it.’

‘Jesus, you people never want to commit, do you?’

‘Oh, I’ll commit alright,’ Margaret snapped. ‘Murder, if you don’t get out of my face.’

Margaret then turned her attention to a tiny bruise and pinprick in the semi-lunar fold of the left buttock, on the medial aspect, almost at the point where the left met the right.

Hrycyk’s eagle eye was on to it immediately. ‘What is it?’

‘Looks like an injection site.’

Hrycyk frowned. ‘You mean he was taking drugs or something? Injecting himself?’

Margaret tutted her irritation. ‘Have you ever tried injecting yourself in the buttock?’

Hrycyk made an effort to picture it. But his imagination came up with a blank. ‘Can’t say I have.’

‘And it’s a single puncture mark, so clearly not a regular occurrence. And very recent. Probably within the last twenty-four hours.’

‘So what was he injected with?’

‘I have no idea. But tox might tell us when we get the results back.’

‘How long?’

‘Ask Major Cardiff. His people are doing all the toxicology.’

‘Dr. Campbell…’ Fuller’s voice separated itself out from the racket beyond Margaret’s autopsy station. Someone, somewhere, was playing rock music very loudly. Some pathologists Margaret knew could only work with music playing, as if somehow the music could drown out the heightened sense of mortality that always seemed to accompany a body on a slab. She turned. Fuller said, ‘This is the criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.’

Margaret found herself staring at an oddly alien figure standing awkwardly at the entrance to her station, next to a wary-looking Agent Fuller. She had forgotten how Chinese Li looked after a separation. When she had been with him, she never noticed. He was just Li Yan. The man she made love to. The man she talked and laughed and cried with. Now he was a stranger. A tall, strongly built Chinese man with a square-topped crewcut, and big ugly features that she had once grown to love. She had traced every contour of them with her fingers. He wore a simple white cotton shirt that fitted loosely across his broad chest and shoulders, and was tucked into the narrow waistband of dark, pleated slacks. She had forgotten how beautifully clothes hung on the Chinese frame.

They stood, simply staring at each other, for a prodigious amount of time. ‘Hello, Li Yan,’ she said finally.

‘You know each other?’ Fuller asked, amazed. Li had given no indication of it.

‘Yes,’ Li said. And he knew that Fuller was wondering if he had spoken out of turn about her in the car. But he didn’t take his eyes off Margaret for a minute. The icy sensation in his chest was almost painful. How often had he seen her like this? Hidden behind the mask and the goggles, almost every inch of her covered by cotton or plastic. Except for the gap between the tops of her gloves and the short-sleeved gown. And he saw the freckles there on pale skin, the down of soft, fair hair. He wanted to touch her so much it hurt.

The momentary spell was broken by the almost brutal way that Margaret turned over the body on the table. ‘Mr. Li and I met when I assisted the Beijing police during a couple of murder enquiries. He was deputy head of their Serious Crime Squad.’ Her voice was cold and controlled. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘Since none of us read Chinese, maybe you can tell us what it was this man was writing in his diary.’

Li looked at the body in front of him for the first time, and it felt for a moment as if the world had stopped turning. He put a hand on the end of the table to steady himself. ‘Wang,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.

‘You know this guy?’ Hrycyk asked, incredulous.

‘Wang.’ Li’s voice cracked as he said the name again. ‘Detective Wang Wei Pao. Senior supervisor, class three, Tianjin Municipal Police.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t really know him. I briefed him.’

Margaret saw that Li was affected by this man’s death and immediately regretted her callousness. She had spent her life regretting the things she did and said, and the hurt she inflicted on the people she loved.

‘So what the hell was a Tianjin cop doing on that truck?’ Hrycyk demanded to know, untouched by the moment.

‘He was working undercover,’ Li said, regaining some degree of composure. He saw Fuller and Hrycyk exchange glances. ‘An operation we mounted more than six months ago. He volunteered for the job, and he was ideal for it. He was born in Fujian Province, which is the departure point for most of the illegal immigrants. He spoke the dialect. It was easy for him to make contact with a local snakehead and get the next boat out.’ He remembered Wang’s enthusiasm. He was fed up with the routine in Tianjin, his marriage had broken down and he’d been looking for something else to fill his life. ‘He phoned us whenever he could, under the pretence of phoning home. And he posted several reports, so we were able to follow his progress. But we never knew that it would take so long.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or that it would end like this.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Fuller said. ‘Are you telling me you people mounted a unilateral operation here, without keeping us informed?’ He looked at Hrycyk. ‘Did the INS know about this?’

‘We sure as hell did not.’ Hrycyk glared at Li as if he was the embodiment of everything he hated about the Chinese.

Fuller’s face was flushed with anger. He turned on Li. ‘So what kind of liaison are you, that sends an undercover Chinese cop on to US soil without telling us?’

Li remained calm. ‘We took a clear policy decision on this. We decided to do nothing that might put the life of our operative at risk.’

‘And keeping American law enforcement in the loop would be putting your man’s life at risk?’ Fuller was incredulous.

‘It is a matter of trust,’ Li said evenly.

‘What, you don’t trust us?’ Hrycyk threw his hands in the air as if it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

Li said, ‘The history of cooperation between US and Chinese law enforcement is not exactly an illustrious one. You might remember the goldfish case.’

Fuller sighed his impatience. ‘That’s ancient history!’

Margaret asked, ‘What is the goldfish case?’

Li spoke to her directly for the first time. ‘A gang operating out of Shanghai in the late eighties was filling condoms with heroin and sewing them into the bellies of large goldfish that were then shipped out with live fish to San Francisco. It is normal for a number of fish to die in transit, but officials in San Francisco became suspicious when they saw stitching in the bellies of some of the fish.’

‘This is completely irrelevant,’ Fuller insisted, but he was on the defensive now.

‘Is it?’ Li asked. He said to Margaret, ‘When gang members at the American end of the operation were brought to court, the prosecution here asked the Chinese to release one of the gang members from Shanghai to give evidence in court. The Chinese agreed. It was the first cooperative US — Chinese drug prosecution. But when the guy got on the stand he changed his testimony and claimed political asylum. That was more than ten years ago. He is currently walking around a free man in the United States.’

‘He said he was tortured by the Chinese police. Beaten and blindfolded and stuck with an electric cattle prod,’ Hrycyk said.

Li’s laugh was without humour. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And in a country where people are prepared to believe the worst that anyone wants to claim about the People’s Republic of China, the odds were pretty much stacked in his favour.’

Hrycyk stabbed an accusing finger at Li across the prone form of the dead detective. ‘You telling me stuff like that never happens in China?’

‘No,’ Li said simply, taking the wind out of Hrycyk’s sails. ‘But it’s never happened on my shift. And if you could put your hand on your heart and tell me a prisoner’s never had a confession beaten out of him in the United States, then I’d call you a liar.’

Hrycyk looked as if he might be about to leap across the table and take Li by the throat.

Margaret said caustically, ‘I don’t think Detective Wang gave his life just so that China and America could go to war.’ She brushed past them and lifted a plastic evidence bag containing Wang’s bloodstained notebook from the computer table and held it up to Li. ‘His diary,’ she said.

IV

V

Margaret looked up as Steve sauntered into her station. She was on her second autopsy, nerves stretched by the ordeal of performing a post-mortem examination of Detective Wang, concentration shattered by the arrival of Li. Fuller and Hrycyk had been in a huddle at the computer desk for a long time now, each making several lengthy calls on their cellphones. So she was relieved to see Steve’s friendly smile.

‘Hi,’ he said. He had pulled down his face mask. He nodded toward the body on the table, a young woman in her early twenties, chest gaping, ribs exposed like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. ‘Your second?’

‘Yes.’ She heard the strain in her own voice.

‘Notice anything you might say they both had in common?’ His question was so casually asked, it made her stop and look at him very directly for a moment.

‘Are we talking injection sites in the buttock here?’ she asked.

‘Hey,’ he smiled, ‘nothing gets past you, does it?’

She pulled a face. ‘I take it they’re not unique.’

‘One hundred percent to date. That’s more than twenty. I got one of my investigators checking the rest of the bodies out in the trailers.’

‘It’s a strange place to choose to inject anything.’

‘Certainly is. And it would take a professional to do it.’

‘So what do you think they were injected with?’

‘I have no idea. But I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t be taking extra precautions here. We don’t know what these people might be carrying, or why someone felt the need to inject them at all.’ He paused, still the smile playing around his lips. ‘I did a little reading up on illegal immigrants before I came down. Apparently 34 percent of illegal Chinese taken into custody have been found to be chronic carriers of Hepatitis B.’

‘Wow,’ Margaret said. ‘That’s a high percentage.’ Then she shrugged. ‘But we have perfectly adequate protection against hep B, or any other nasties in the blood. As long as we’re careful.’ She paused again, looking at him very carefully. ‘What makes you think we might need extra protection?’

For the first time, Margaret saw his mobile brows furrow in a frown. ‘I don’t know, Margaret. I get kinda spooked sometimes, you know, when I don’t know what I’m dealing with. I was paranoid about my first AIDS case. I even wore boots with steel toe-caps in case I dropped a knife or something…’ He laughed uneasily at his own vulnerability. ‘It’s just strange, that’s all.’

‘What’s strange?’ Fuller, with Hrycyk in tow, had come back into Margaret’s station.

‘Injection sites on the underside of the buttock,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s not a place you would normally choose to stick a needle.’

‘You mean there’s more than one of them?’ Hrycyk asked.

‘It looks like they might all have been injected,’ Steve said.

Fuller scratched his head. ‘So why would someone pick the underside of the buttock?’

Margaret shrugged and glanced at Steve. ‘Maybe so it wouldn’t be spotted on a cursory examination. I mean, I don’t figure anyone expected them to be laid out on an autopsy table being subjected to this kind of scrutiny.’

‘So do you have any idea what they were injected with?’ Fuller persisted.

‘A vaccine against West Nile encephalitis.’ Li’s voice startled them, and they turned to find him standing in the entrance to the autopsy station.

‘How do you know that?’ Margaret asked, and she saw immediately that he had been crying. There were telltale red dots around the corners of his eyes that she had seen before. And in that moment she wanted just to hold him, and would have forgiven him anything. But she gave no outward sign of it. Not even the hint of a crack in her cold façade.

Li said simply, ‘Wang’s diary.’ Whatever demons he had had to wrestle with had been banished for the moment. ‘Wang describes how a doctor came and vaccinated them all the night before they crossed the border.’ He dropped the diary, back in its evidence bag, on to the table and peeled off his gloves. ‘They were told it was against West Nile encephalitis.’

‘Bullshit!’ Hrycyk said. ‘Snakeheads aren’t going to spend money vaccinating illegals against anything.’

‘Well, not against West Nile encephalitis, anyway,’ Margaret added. ‘The only cases of West Nile I’ve heard about in the last six months involved a couple of crows.’ She looked to Steve for confirmation.

He shrugged. ‘It’s not a serious problem. I mean, I doubt if any of us round this table have been vaccinated against West Nile. And it’s not a requirement for visitors to the US.’

Li frowned. ‘So what were they injected with? Is it possible they were murdered?’

Hrycyk was scathing. ‘Of course they weren’t murdered. Why would anyone murder them? These people were worth six million bucks — alive.’

VI

A line of stainless steel sinks had been set up at one end of the hangar, supplied with hot and cold running water and dispensers of antibacterial liquid soap to allow the pathologists to scrub down at the end of the day. They had each completed four autopsies and were now halfway through the task of examining all ninety-eight bodies. Conversation along the line of sinks was animated, revolving around important questions like where they were going to get a drink that night, and the best place to get something to eat. Everyone had been booked into the Holiday Inn on West Holcombe Boulevard on the edge of Medicine City, including Margaret.

She stood next to Steve soaping her hands and arms. She had already dispensed with her surgical gown and apron and changed back into her jeans and tee-shirt. Her hair was scraped back from her face and held in a band at the back of her head. She was hot, and tired, and distracted.

Li had left some hours earlier, and she was not sure when, or even if, she would see him again. Their encounter had been unsettling, blowing away the protective fabrications she had built up around herself over the last fifteen months, since she had returned from China determined to put him behind her. The little half lies she had tried to convince herself were absolute truths: that the differences between them of language and culture were too great to overcome; that she would be happier here in the US without him; that he would be happier in China with a woman of his own race.

And now he was in America. Had been here, she knew, for nearly a year, making no attempt to get in touch with her. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know that she had taken up a lecturing position at the college of criminal justice in Huntsville, because she had told him that was where she was going. But from his reaction to meeting her across the autopsy table here in Houston, it was clear he had been unaware that she was now the chief medical examiner for Harris County. At least until today.

‘So…’ Steve’s voice sounded beside her, ‘…suffocation?’

‘That’s how it appears,’ she said. ‘Although they’d probably been in the truck for about twenty-four hours — right through the heat of the previous day.’

‘Ah,’ said Steve. ‘Core liver temperature.’

‘Mine were all a hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit or higher.’

‘Mine, too.’

‘They’d also eaten, and all of my bladders were pretty much empty, so it would seem they had been allowed out at some point to relieve themselves.’

‘Which means that the air vent was open when they set out…’

‘…and closed, either accidentally or on purpose, when they stopped somewhere en route.’

‘And they died either of suffocation or hyperthermia.’

‘Or a combination of the two.’

A thoughtful silence hung between them, then, for a moment, and Margaret noticed a trace of blood in the water in Steve’s sink. She looked at him, immediately concerned. ‘Where’s the blood coming from?’ And she saw for the first time how pale he looked. His smile was almost convincing.

‘Ah, it’s nothing.’

‘You cut yourself?’

He took a long time to compose his reply. Finally he said, ‘Usually I leave the organs piled at one end of the table before I section them. When I went back after coming through to talk to you about the injection sites, they had slid down the cutting board, and when I went to lift them I felt this little jag in my finger. I had left my knife lying on the cutting board and the organs had slipped over the top of it. My left hand is well protected. I wear chain mail under the glove in case of a slip. But on my cutting hand, my right, I usually only wear the latex. That’s the hand I lifted the organs with. The tip of my knife made a tiny puncture about halfway down the middle finger.’ He held his open right hand out for her to see, and she saw a tiny fleck of blood oozing from an almost imperceptible nick. ‘At the time I didn’t think I had cut the skin.’ He grimaced. ‘Guess I was wrong.’

‘Jesus, Steve,’ Margaret said. They both knew that this smallest of accidents would have made him vulnerable to contracting any viral or bacterial infection carried in the blood of the victim. ‘What have you done about it?’

He shrugged. ‘What could I do? I’ve taken a lot of samples from the guy and asked the AFIP people at Walter Reed to do a complete blood screen. I’ve drawn some of my own, for a baseline, and I guess I’ll be checking it every six weeks for the next year for HIV and hep B and C.’

Margaret felt sick. She looked at him with the heartfelt concern of someone who is only ever a split second’s carelessness from exactly the same predicament. ‘You said you thought you hadn’t cut the skin.’

He grinned ruefully. ‘Hey, you’re talking to paranoid Steve, here. I never take chances.’

But Margaret didn’t smile. ‘What about whatever it was these people were injected with?’

‘I’ve asked the lab to do several specific panel tests to cover as wide a spectrum as possible. Between PCR and the virus panel we should find out what it was pretty fast.’ He smiled bravely. ‘If it was West Nile, then with luck I get free immunity.’ He dried his hands and stretched a flesh-coloured Band-aid over the cut. He looked up at Margaret. ‘I was going to ask you out to dinner tonight. You know how the line goes: I know this great little place…Only, I don’t. At least, not in Houston.’

All thoughts of Li now banished, Margaret said, ‘You know, funny you should say that. ’Cos I know this great little place…’

VII

Li gazed from the rear passenger window in wonder as Consul-General Xi’s driver took them west on Bellaire, under Sam Houston Parkway, and into the heart of Houston’s Chinatown. Li did not know what he had expected, but it was not this. In Washington, Chinatown consisted of a couple of blocks of old tenements, with a few restaurants and Chinese foodstores. Here, one modern plaza followed another, set back off the boulevard. Walkways under green-tiled roofs over shops which advertised their wares and services in Chinese and English. Peggy’s Skin Care. China Fast Food. Asian Pacific Travel. Sweet Country Café. A brick apartment block with a neon Kung Fu sign next to a notice announcing the E-W Cultural Exchange Association. A billboard advertising ‘Immigration Passport Photos and Greencard Citizenship’, next to an acupuncture centre.

‘You see? Wherever we go, we create little China.’ Consul-General Xi grinned at him, and Li saw that his bad teeth had been patched up to give him an American smile. There were, he had noticed, dental practices everywhere in Chinatown. Perhaps it was what you did when you got a little money, fixed up your teeth so that you felt a little more like an American citizen. Bad teeth were endemic in China.

There were also, he had observed, a proliferation of psychics. Perhaps they offered the hope of future citizenship. And a large number of vasectomy reversal clinics appeared to be trying to make up for decades of the one-child policy, a chance to procreate without punishment — or fear of your children starving.

But Li did not see China in any of it. He saw America plastered with Chinese characters, like graffiti.

‘In terms of area, Houston has the third largest Chinatown in the United States,’ the Consul-General said, stubbing out his cigarette. He opened a window to let out some of the smoke, then closed it again to preserve the air-conditioning. ‘On the surface, perhaps, it looks like a quiet city suburb. But beneath the surface, there is a lot of crime. Gambling, prostitution, protection rackets. For the most part, the local police stay out. So crime flourishes. And, of course, the Americans estimate that the illegal smuggling of Chinese generates revenues of more than three billion dollars a year.’

They passed a large shopping area off to their right, called Diho Square. The parking lot was nearly full, and Li could see only Chinese faces. An old man wearing a white cotton jacket and pants, with open sandals and a white Stetson, turned his ramshackle bicycle on to the road. ‘So who runs the criminal syndicates?’ Li asked.

‘Most of the major businesses, legitimate and otherwise, are run by organisations known here as tongs. The tongs employ street gangs as enforcers to guard the massage parlours and gambling dens. The gangs finance themselves by collecting protection money from small traders with shops and restaurants. It is a very rigid structure, with a very clear hierarchy, all the way from the ma zhai, the little horses, or ordinary gang members, through their leaders, the big brothers, or dai lo, to the shuk foo, the uncles who are their liaison with the tongs.’

‘Who is the ah kung, Consul-General Xi? Do you know?’

The consul-general looked at him, surprised, and a little annoyed. ‘I am wasting my time telling you all this, Li, since obviously you are already well informed.’

Li inclined his head slightly. ‘It is always useful to gather intelligence based on local knowledge, Consul-General.’

The consul-general raised an eyebrow. ‘They were right when they said that you were like your uncle.’

Li glanced at him. ‘You knew him?’

‘Only by reputation.’

Li sighed inwardly. Even here in America he was still haunted by the ghost of his uncle. Since his first day at the University of Public Security in Beijing, he had had to bear the burden of his uncle’s reputation as one of the finest police officers ever to grace the Beijing municipal force. He had either had to live up to or live down that reputation. Never judged on his own merits, always against the yardstick of his Uncle Yifu — a man he had loved dearly. ‘I am not really like him at all,’ Li said. ‘But I try to honour his memory by following his teachings.’

He remembered the dreadful vision of the old man lying murdered in the bloody bath, skewered by his own ceremonial sword. It was as vivid now as it had been then, and the pain of it never diminished.

‘Each of the tongs has an ah kung,’ the consul-general was saying in answer to his question. Li forced the image of his uncle from his mind. ‘But it is generally recognised that one of them is supreme. He is the grandfather. But outside of a very small inner circle, no one knows who he is.’

‘His name, or at least his nickname, is Kat,’ Li said, and he felt the consul-general’s eyes turn toward him.

‘How do you know this?’ the consul-general asked.

‘Because one of those who died in the truck at Huntsville was an undercover Chinese police officer.’

The consul-general was clearly shocked. ‘You are sure?’

Li nodded. ‘I briefed him for the job. He was to come to America as an illegal immigrant, and infiltrate the gangs at this end, hoping to pick up clues to the identity of the ah kung.’ Li paused. ‘I have read his diary. At least he was able to give us a name.’

‘Kat,’ the consul-general said thoughtfully. ‘My wife always presents me with a tangerine plant for luck at Spring Festival.’ He took out his cigarettes and offered one to Li, who declined. Since coming to America he had made a determined effort to give them up. Only when he was with other Chinese was he tempted to fall back into his old ways. The consul-general lit up. ‘I will open the door and look at the mountain with you, Li.’ And Li smiled to himself. Whenever anyone told you they were going to be straight with you, it usually meant the opposite. ‘There are no flowers dropping from the sky in Beijing over the matter of these illegal immigrants.’

‘Nor in Washington,’ Li said.

‘I have spoken today with the minister of public security. The government is embarrassed by the high profile nature of this case.’

‘Particularly since they are in the process of trying to negotiate a more favourable agreement with the World Trade Organisation.’ Li couldn’t keep the cynicism out of his voice.

The consul-general looked at him sharply. And then he smiled. ‘I see you have also accumulated a little political acumen on your journeys.’ Then his smile faded just as quickly. ‘The minister would like to put an end to this business, once and for all. There is to be a major crackdown in Fujian and Canton. He wants you to put a stop to it at this end. The Americans have been told that you will be entirely at their disposal. But one way or another, the authorities in Beijing want you to cut off the head of the American snake, with or without their help.’