The Firemaker

I

Sunday

The world tilted to the east and the sun slid up over the far horizon. There was a strange, desolate beauty in this desert dawn, sunlight painting the edge of every swaying blade of grass yellow as the wind ebbed and flowed through the long stems like an invisible hand ruffling the still surface of a vast ocean. The grey pick-up rattled and bumped steadily northwards, a plume of fine dust rising from its tail then dipping to the west in the prevailing breeze. The road cut like an arrow through the high grasslands, straight and unbending, heading inexorably to the north and the mountains and deserts of Mongolia. They had not seen another vehicle all night.

They passed through two small villages, neat brick buildings and tidy flower-beds, streets lined with saplings. But there was no sign of life in either. It was still early, not yet six. Another hour, and the larger buildings of a town began to form themselves on the distant shimmering horizon. The sun was well up in the sky now, and the heat in the cab was building. Li was asleep, slumped against the door column. Margaret sat between the two men, staring off into the distance, lost in a fog of random thoughts and memories and regrets. Yongli lifted the map from the dash and glanced at it, keeping the pick-up one-handed on its undeviating course. This had to be Erhlien, which was no more than a kilometre or two from the border. Here, trains passing in either direction were shunted into huge sheds to have undercarriages replaced for the change of gauge between China and the old USSR. Yongli breathed an inner sigh of relief. They had made good time, were now perhaps only two hours behind their original schedule.

As they approached the town Margaret said, ‘Could we stop here?’

Yongli looked at her, surprised. ‘Why?’

‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

For the first time in nearly three days she saw him smile with genuine amusement. ‘This is not a good time to think of having a bath,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘I mean toilet.’ She clutched her lower abdomen ruefully. ‘I’m getting cramps. Probably all that fruit we ate yesterday. I’d say just stop at the roadside, but I don’t see any bushes.’ She grinned, embarrassed.

He smiled. ‘Sure. We’ll find you somewhere.’

Li still slept as they drove into Erhlien. It was a neat and tidy little town, with a post office, a large hotel, a shirt factory, a great railway shed, and rows of squat brick houses with tiled roofs. The population was already up and about — square, high-cheeked Mongolian faces, skin tanned and leathery. A group of workers painting a fence stopped to stare as the pick-up pulled up in front of the hotel.

‘You should get a “bathroom” in there,’ Yongli said, and he stepped down to let Margaret out at his side so as not to disturb Li.

A line of schoolchildren, with fresh faces and clean white blouses, gawped in amazement as the blonde-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi skipped across the road and into the hotel. A babble of excited chatter arose in the street. Yongli looked into the cab at the sleeping Li, hesitating for a moment before climbing carefully back in.

When, a few minutes later, Margaret emerged from the hotel, slinging her purse over her shoulder, a crowd of around forty or fifty townspeople had gathered in the street, word spreading quickly about her arrival. The twice-daily train from Mongolia was all that usually broke the monotony of their lives. This was unusual, something not to be missed. Others were hurrying along the street to join them and catch a glimpse. Margaret stopped on the steps, taken aback, uncertain how to react. She smiled nervously, but the faces that gazed back at her were blank. ‘Ni hau,’ she said, and to her amazement received a spontaneous round of applause.

Li woke with a start, sitting up, blinking furiously, assimilating where they were. ‘What the hell’s happening?’ he asked.

Yongli said, ‘She needed the “bathroom”.’ Li frowned. Yongli explained, ‘The toilet.’

Li looked at the crowds in the street. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘This is the last thing we need.’ Margaret hurried across the street and Yongli jumped down to let her in. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Li snapped at her.

His words hit her like a slap in the face. ‘I had to go to the toilet,’ she said, defensive, hurt by his tone.

‘And how long do you think it’ll be before Public Security hear there was some blonde-haired, blue-eyed foreigner at the hotel? Now they’re going to know where we are. We can’t afford to wait till tonight. We’re going to have to cross the border as soon as we can.’

Margaret sat in silence, pink-faced, stung by the rebuke, and realising the justification for it. But Yongli leapt to her defence. ‘Lay off her, Li,’ he said. ‘She’d have created a much bigger stir squatting at the roadside.’ He chucked the map at him. ‘I’ve been looking at this. The main road crosses the border a couple of kilometres north of here. There’ll be some kind of border post there. But if we take that smaller road west…’ He leaned across to stab at it with his finger. ‘… we can probably get close enough to the border to see how the land lies without committing to a crossing.’

Li examined the route Yongli had pointed out. It made sense. He nodded. ‘Okay.’

As they drove out of town, heading west on a road that was little more than a dirt track, he glanced at Margaret, wanting to apologise but not knowing how. She resolutely avoided meeting his eye. She felt guilty, and ashamed, and angry with herself for putting them so thoughtlessly at risk. She could easily have squatted down behind the pick-up out on the open road. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any traffic, and she would have seen anything coming miles before it would have seen her. She felt his hand seek out hers and give it a tiny squeeze. She squeezed back, and wanted to kiss him and hold him and tell him she was sorry. But she didn’t. She sat staring straight ahead through the windscreen at the immensity of nothing that stretched before them.

Erhlien had vanished into the shimmering heat haze behind them. The dust kicked up in their wake was blowing ahead of them now on the edge of the wind, reducing visibility to less than thirty or forty yards. Yongli fumbled to light a cigarette, and she noticed that his hands were shaking. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ he said, but he didn’t look it. He was ghostly pale.

Suddenly a dark shape emerged from the dust up ahead of them on the road.

‘What the hell’s that!’ Li sat bolt upright, and Yongli jammed on the brakes, bringing them to a skidding halt. The engine stalled, and the silence that followed was almost eerie, broken only by the whistling of wind through grass. They sat, without a word, watching as slowly the dust cleared to reveal a black Mercedes sitting facing them on the road, perhaps twenty-five yards away. There appeared to be a single figure sitting on the driver’s side, a silhouette against the immensity of sky and grass beyond.

‘Who is it?’ Margaret whispered, as if the occupant of the other vehicle might hear her.

‘I don’t know,’ Li said, but he had a sick, gnawing fear that perhaps he did.

Yongli stubbed his cigarette out with trembling fingers, and the occupants of both vehicles sat regarding one another without sound or movement for nearly a minute. Then the driver of the Mercedes opened the door and stepped out on to the track. Still they could not see his face. He wore a dark suit, the jacket flapping open, a white shirt and a tie, and he started walking, slowly, steadily, towards the pick-up. Li sat tensed, every muscle and sinew straining as he peered through the dusty windscreen, trying to bring form to the face of the approaching figure.

‘Shit!’ he hissed under his breath.

‘What!’ Margaret was very scared now.

‘It’s Johnny Ren.’

Ren stopped, almost as though he had heard, took out a red-and-white pack of Marlboro, and lit a cigarette. Then he resumed his progress towards them, his smoke whipped away in the wind.

Li reached under his jacket to remove his uncle’s revolver from his shoulder holster. His fingers froze on the leather of its empty pocket. The gun was gone. He turned, slowly, to find Yongli pointing it at him. Margaret sat perfectly still between them, not daring to move. She had no idea what was happening here, or why.

‘They said she would be shot,’ Yongli said. A tear ran silently down his cheek. He was desperate for Li to understand, to know that there was justification in this. ‘You said you would help, but I knew you wouldn’t. And I was right. They came to me that day. Made it clear I had two choices. Lotus or you. She’d still have been there now, in some cell, if I hadn’t agreed. Next week, next month, it would have been a bullet in the head.’ Li must understand — there was nothing else he could have done. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘I love her.’ His face was wet with tears now. ‘I’m sorry, Li Yan.’

Johnny Ren arrived at the passenger side of the pick-up and pointed his gun in at Li. ‘Get out,’ he said. He had a large pink plaster across one side of his forehead. He was nervous, eyes dark-ringed and wary. Li remembered that face looming over him in the park, in the rain, the intent in those same eyes, the iron fist that had smashed repeatedly into his face. So they had won. He felt sick. All those wasted lives. For what? To buy a reprieve for those terrified executives at Grogan Industries, for Pang and his ambitions. To perhaps find a cure that would get them off the hook. He slipped out on to the dirt road, overcome now by a sad sense of despair in the knowledge that no one would ever know what he and Margaret knew. Guilty and greedy men would escape justice. Ren waggled his gun at Margaret and she climbed out after Li, who ached at the thought of a bullet piercing that pale, freckled flesh, spilling her blood in the dirt of this empty place. He hoped she would have no pain. There had been enough of that in her life. He glanced at her, but she had her eyes fixed on Ren, a strange, wild quality in them, the chipped ice-blue of her irises almost chilling in its intensity.

Yongli came round the front of the pick-up, the revolver hanging loosely in his hand by his side. He was unable to meet Li’s eye. Johnny Ren held out his hand towards him. ‘Give me the gun,’ he said, not taking his eyes from Li. Obediently, Yongli placed the revolver in his hand. Ren weighed it up and down for a moment, as if measuring its worth, then cocked the hammer, turned his head and shot Yongli twice in the chest. His eyes were on Li again before the young chef hit the ground. Ren had no need to check his handiwork. He knew that Yongli was dead.

Both Li and Margaret were struck by the shock of it as if by a physical blow. Moments earlier Yongli’s face had been stained by warm, wet tears of pain and regret. Now they were turning cold in the wind that ruffled his hair as he lay dead in the dirt, blood spreading darkly around him. Life could be extinguished so easily, the human body such a frail vehicle for the weight of thought and pain and history that it bore.

Johnny Ren glanced at Margaret, meeting the eyes that never left him, and for a moment he was disconcerted by them. Then he smiled and tapped the plaster on his forehead. ‘A lucky shot in the dark,’ he said. ‘Lucky for me. Unlucky for you.’

His eyes flickered back to meet Li’s. Unfinished business to complete. Then, perhaps, a little entertainment. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

Li felt the physical impact of the shot, watching in disbelief as blood trickled from the small round hole that had appeared in the middle of Ren’s forehead. There was the merest hint of surprise in Johnny Ren’s expression as his legs buckled under him and he tipped forward on to his face. Li saw that most of the back of his head was gone. He turned to see McCord’s gun trembling in Margaret’s hand. And still the wind blew, bending the tall grasses, whispering relentlessly through the empty spaces. The only sound, it seemed, in the whole world.

Margaret watched in silence for a long time from the cab of the pick-up as Li went through the Mercedes, very carefully, like a policeman searching for evidence. Which, she reflected, was what he was. She had no idea what he was looking for, or why. She suspected he was filling his mind with anything that would shut out his friend’s betrayal, squeeze out the guilt and regret. They had not spoken since he had taken the gun gently from her hand and embraced her and told her to wait in the cab. She had done what she was told without question or feeling. She had never spilled living blood, and the shock of it was greater than she could have imagined. She felt numb now, but knew that the pain would come later.

Li emerged from the Mercedes, a dark object not much bigger than a cigarette pack in his hand. He seemed to be prodding it with his finger and then listening to it. It was a moment or two before she realised what it was, and she leaped from the cab and sprinted the twenty-odd yards to the car. She snatched it from him breathlessly and checked the display. ‘We’ve got a signal,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘The battery’s very low.’

She looked at him. ‘Who do we call?’ And even as she asked she saw the cable trailing in his other hand, and beyond him, on the back seat of the Mercedes, Johnny Ren’s Apple Powerbook computer. She thrust the phone back into Li’s hand and slipped into the seat, opening the laptop on her knees. It took several infuriating minutes for the operating system to load before the screen presented her with its options. She hardly dared look. But there it was. The Internet Explorer icon. ‘Jesus…’ She looked up at Li’s perplexed face framed in the doorway. ‘We don’t need to call anyone. We can go on-line. We can put the entire goddamn story on the Internet and the whole world’s going to know about Grogan Industries and Pang and RXV.’

Li understood at once the implications of what she was saying. ‘Do you know how?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I think so.’ She tapped a few keys and opened up a document template on which she could type up their story. ‘It’s crazy,’ she gasped, her face shining with excitement. ‘We’re just about as far from anywhere as we can be…’ She glanced out of the window at the endless expanse of grass and desert. ‘… and yet we can talk to anyone in the world — several millions of them simultaneously.’

The computer beeped and she froze.

Li leaned in, troubled by her consternation. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Battery’s low on this, too.’ A box on the screen told her she had less than fifteen minutes computing time left. ‘God, how can I write it all in fifteen minutes?’ She starting tapping furiously on the keyboard.

Li could do nothing but wait and watch, anxious and frustrated. He walked around the car, avoiding looking back in the direction of the pick-up. He still couldn’t bring himself to think about Yongli, never mind look at his friend’s body lying in the dirt. The incessant tap, tap of the computer keys punctuated the gentle whine of the wind. He saw, through the windscreen, the concentration on Margaret’s face, the tension there. He heard the computer beep again and saw her despair.

‘Less than five minutes. Jesus, I’ve got to get on-line! Give me the cellphone.’ Her voice was shrill and insistent. He quickly rounded the car and handed her the phone. She plugged it into the modem socket on the back of the Powerbook and clicked the Internet icon. Almost instantly the melody of touch-tone numbers rang out, followed by the familiar white-noise sound of computers talking to each other across the ether — Ren’s password and ID sent automatically by his software. Then she was connected.

Li watched in awe as her fingers rattled back and forth across the keyboard, her eyes flickering up and down between keyboard and screen, the occasional grimace contorting her lips. Then there was a gasp as the computer screen suddenly went black, and the single, high-pitched wail of a disconnected line emanated from the earpiece of the cellphone. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.

‘Well?’ Li asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her response.

She opened her eyes slowly and looked at him. ‘I sent it to every website and bulletin board and e-mail address I could remember. It’s out there now, Li Yan. It’s not just our secret any more.’

The fence that marked the border ran off to east and west as far as the eye could see. Beyond lay Mongolia. A few miles to the north and east, the town of Dzamin Uüd, where it would be possible to catch a train for Ulaanbaatar. They stopped on a slight rise and gazed across the emptiness. They had left behind them, with the Mercedes and the pick-up and the bodies, the elation of sharing their secret with the world, and stood now facing a future of bleak uncertainty.

Li glanced back. China, in all its vast diversity, spread away to the south. His home. His country. In these last moments, as they had walked away, with every word of explanation, and with every step towards another country, his heart had grown heavy with the bitter burden of regret. Now he felt the eyes of his ancestors upon him, looking across five millennia. He had a responsibility to them, as well as to his country and to the oath he had taken as a police officer. He could not simply walk away. Margaret might have told their story to the world, but he had unfinished business in China.

He looked at her, her face stained by sweat and tears, her eyes strained by tiredness and death. And he put the flat of his hand on her cheek and felt it smooth and cool. He wished with all his heart it could be some other way.

He took a wad of dollars from his back pocket and pressed it into her hand. ‘They’ll take dollars,’ he said. ‘They always take dollars.’ He gazed beyond her across the desolate wastes of Mongolia. ‘It’s only a few miles to Dzamin Uüd. Will you manage on your own?’ She took the dollars without surprise and nodded. She had known he would not go to Ulaanbaatar with her. She had seen it in his eyes, had felt it in his touch. And she knew why. She understood. In his place she would have done the same.

‘I’ll always love you,’ she said.

He could not meet her eye. How could he make her understand how hard this was for him? He took both her hands and forced himself to look at her. ‘Even if they find a cure, what kind of existence would it be, living out my life in some foreign place, a fugitive from my own people?’

‘I know,’ she said.

He searched her eyes for understanding and saw only the reflection of his own pain.

‘I’ve got to go back, to clear my name, to wipe away the lies. Would they ever believe me if I didn’t?’

‘I know.’

‘I owe it to my uncle. I owe it to myself.’ He knew it meant losing her. And that was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life. ‘Margaret…’

‘Just go,’ she said, and she bit her lip to stop the tears.

They stood for a moment in silence, the wind tugging at their clothes, her hair flying out behind her, shining golden in the sun like a flag of freedom. He stooped to kiss her and they embraced, and clung to one another for a long time. Finally they broke apart, a little at a time, as if breaking the bond of a glue that held them. He turned without another word and started walking back towards the road through grass that ebbed and flowed like water on the shore. In the far distance he could see the black dots of the pick-up truck and the Mercedes where they had left them, the only break on a horizon that cut low across the immensity of blue overhead. His friend and his enemy lay dead there. His love lay behind him. Ahead of him, only uncertainty.

He waited for the call of her voice, turning in his mind’s eye to see her running through the tall grass to tell him that she was coming with him. But there was no call, and he knew that if he turned he would not be able to walk away, to leave her to face a precarious journey across a hostile land on her own. And the urge to turn back was almost irresistible. He knew she would be standing there on the rise, watching him go. He glanced over his right shoulder, an entirely involuntary movement. Just one last look. But she was gone. Down the slope, out of sight and heading for the fence, resolute, determined not to weaken. He could almost see the set of her jaw. Then he heard a swish, swish, swish, and turned to his left to find Margaret keeping stride with him. She smiled and said, ‘You didn’t really think I was going to let you go, did you? I mean, I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a Chinese prison.’ She held his arm and made him stop. Her smile faded. She said, ‘Whatever future we have is for sharing.’