Snakehead tct-4 Page 3

  ‘Shir-toe?’ Margaret repeated the Mandarin word with the familiarity of someone who has spent time in Beijing.

  ‘Snakeheads. People smugglers. The fixers who arrange everything: transport, safe houses, papers. Usually Chinese. Mean bastards.’

  ‘So if these people in the truck really are illegal immigrants they would still have owed their smuggling fees to their snakeheads?’

  ‘Hey, now you’re catching on, Doc.’ Hrycyk’s smile was patronising. ‘Their families back home in China will have paid a small deposit. Once they’re here, they have to pay off the rest themselves. A precious cargo. So there ain’t no motive for killing ’em.’ He flicked his head toward the truck. ‘Way I see it? Someone shut the air vent in the refrigerated unit by accident, or maybe forgot to open it. The driver stops here in the middle of the night to let them out for a piss and finds them all dead. Suffocated. He panics, takes off.’ He chuckled. ‘Saving the INS a whole lot of trouble in the process.’

  ‘I’m sure their families will be gratified to hear that,’ Margaret said coldly. The prospect of having to process ninety-eight bodies was bad enough without having to deal with a racist immigration officer as well.

  Hrycyk bridled. ‘Hey! Don’t go feeling sorry for these little runts. They bring a lot of crime into this country. Carry in drugs to help pay off their fees, get involved in illegal gambling and prostitution. When they get caught they claim political asylum, get given C-8 immigration cards so they can be legally employed, then disappear again when the court throws out their case.’ He stopped for just a moment to draw breath. ‘Far as I’m concerned, the only good Chinese is a dead Chinese.’

  ‘Well, as far as I am concerned, Agent Hrycyk,’ Margaret said firmly, ‘these poor people are entitled, like anyone else, to my full and undivided professional attention in determining how and why they died — regardless of race, creed, colour or nationality.’

  There were now three TV trucks queuing up on the 190 at the end of the access road, and at least half a dozen other press vehicles drawn in behind. A group of journalists was standing debating rights of access with two of the sheriff’s men where the crows had earlier sat on the white picket fence. The crows were gone. The vultures had arrived.

  ‘Margaret…’ One of the forensic investigators was standing in the doorway of the container. ‘Stuff up here you might want to take a look at.’

  ‘Give me two minutes,’ Margaret said. She ran back to her car, opened the trunk, slipped off her jacket and shoes and pulled on a Tivek body suit, zipping it up and dragging the hood over her head before snapping on her face mask and gloves. Then she walked back to the truck, clumsy in her booties, carrying a small bag of tools. The investigator gave her a hand up and she stood unsteadily for a moment surveying the scene in front of her. A monstrous heap of arms and legs and bleak, dead faces crammed into the front half of the container. There was something infinitely sad in those pale, frail Chinese figures whose American dream had come to such an abrupt end. The investigator handed her what looked like a small notebook in a plastic evidence bag. Margaret took it out and thumbed carefully through it. Its pages were covered with a frantic scrawl of indecipherable Chinese characters.

  ‘Found it lying on the chest of one of the bodies,’ the investigator said. ‘Pencil was still in his hand.’

  ‘What is it?’ Hrycyk called from below, craning to see what she was holding. He was clearly frustrated not to be closer to the action.

  ‘It’s a notebook.’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, what? What does it say?’ His patience was wearing thin.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ Margaret said caustically, ‘but my Chinese isn’t that good.’

  Hrycyk cursed. ‘Well, at least the Chinese guy they’re gonna send from Washington might come in useful for something, then.’

  ‘What Chinese guy?’ Margaret asked, a sudden thickening in her throat.

  ‘The criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy. This whole thing’s already going political.’

  She turned away, anxious that Hrycyk should have no sense of her distress. To him the criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington was just another Chinese. She knew him better as Li Yan, Deputy Section Chief, Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of Beijing Municipal Police. A man whose intimate touch she knew only too well. A touch that pained her now to remember. She moved into the back of the truck, more ready to face the horrors it contained than the feelings she had spent a year trying to sublimate, feelings of love and betrayal turning slowly to anger and maybe more. ‘Where’s the body you took this from?’ she asked the investigator brittlely.

  They picked their way through two dozen corpses, men and women who had clawed in despair at the walls of the container, even at their own clothing. It was a pitiful sight. A man in jeans and sneakers was half propped against the left side wall. He had shreds of thinning hair brushed back from an unusually dark face, a sparse moustache barely covering his upper lip. Margaret noticed the nicotine stains on the fingers that still held the pencil with which he had scrawled his last desperate words.

  V

  Wang’s Diary

  I first saw Cheng that night in Fujian when they took us offshore in the small boat to board the cargo ship waiting in international waters. She sat at the back of the boat clutching a brown bag, looking very small and vulnerable. She made me feel like such a fraud. This was real for her. This was her life. Full of danger and uncertainty. I know that many of these people make this journey not for themselves, but for their families, for the money they can send home from the Mountain of Gold. I thought of her, even then, as my yazi, my little duck. I know it is the term they use for illegal immigrants, and never did it seem more appropriate than when I thought of poor little Cheng. I decided, then, that I would do my best to protect her on this long, hard trip. If I had known how powerless I would be to save her from the rapes and the beatings I would have taken her off the boat that night and sacrificed this whole venture. All I have been able to offer her since is comfort. I do not know if she knows that I have fallen in love with her. She does not, I think, love me. I am twice her age. She likes and trusts me, perhaps like a daughter trusts a father. I know that when we reach Meiguo I will lose her. I wish I had never made this journey.

  VI

  Li Yan freewheeled down the hill past dark stone mansions lurking in dappled shadow behind gnarled old trees. They had strange, Scottish-sounding names like Dumbarton House and Anderson House, painted placards on wrought-iron gates. He left Georgetown’s grid of tree-lined narrow streets behind him and swung his bicycle toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Sheridan Circle was thick with traffic, and he turned uphill into a maze of residental streets that took him over the rise and down again toward Connecticut Avenue.

  The Embassy had taken over the old Windsor Hotel, two seven-storey blocks set at right angles, backing onto another loop in the erratic meanderings of the slick that was Rock Creek, almost due north from where its mean little mouth oozed into the slow-moving body of the Potomac. Only a ten-minute cycle from the White House.

  They had offered him a car, and he had declined it. He had spent all his adult life cycling between the offices of Section One in the Dongzhimen district of Beijing and the police apartment he had shared with his uncle in the old embassy quarter, not far from Tiananmen. An hour’s cycle. By comparison, the twenty minutes from his townhouse in Georgetown was easy, although it had taken him time to get used to the gradients. Besides, he knew he needed that regular daily exercise to get the blood flowing through his veins, carrying oxygen to his brain, sharpening his senses — and to counter the effects of the thirty cigarettes a day he had been smoking until very recently.

  His neighbours had got used to seeing him this past year, pedal-pushing up O Street in all weathers, turning north and disappearing toward the cemeteries at the top of the hill, sweat streaming in rivulets down his stro
ng-boned face in the summer heat, dragon breath billowing about his head in the winter frost. Today, as he drifted down to Connecticut off Kalorama Heights, he was in shirt sleeves and slacks, the warm fall air flowing past his cheeks like soft silk, gently raking the fine, square-cut bristle of black hair that covered his scalp. There was the threat of rain in a changing sky, and he carried a waterproof cape in his satchel. It had been, nominally, his day off, and he had made plans for that afternoon. Until the call on his cellphone, and the crisp summons to the Embassy. A matter not to be discussed on the telephone.

  He took long, loping strides across the red-carpeted expanse of what had once been the lobby of the Windsor, and climbed the staircase two at a time. The first secretary was waiting for him in a spacious office on the second floor, windows opening out on to the small circle of tree-shaded green below. He dropped an airline ticket on his desk, slanting sunlight burning out across its polished surface, and said, ‘You haven’t been to Houston before, have you, Li?’

  Li felt a stab of apprehension. ‘No, First Secretary.’

  ‘Your flight is first thing tomorrow. The ambassador himself will brief you this evening.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nearly one hundred renshe found dead in the back of a truck by the local police. Given all our promises to try to stamp out the flow of illegals from China, Beijing is acutely embarrassed. A severe loss of mianzi. Yours will be an exercise in damage limitation.’

  For a moment, all that Li could think of was that there was a chance he might have to face Margaret. And he had a distinct sense of foreboding.

  * * *

  From the stand-alone redbrick block of the Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center for Harris County, on the corner of William C. Harvin Boulevard and Old Spanish Trail, Margaret gazed out of her office window toward Medicine City and tried to push thoughts of Li from her mind. She focused instead on the spectacular skyline of shining glass tower blocks and skyscrapers in the heart of Houston, a city within a city. The Texas Medical Center. Forty-two medical institutions serving five million patients a year in a hundred buildings spread over seven hundred acres and twelve miles of road. With an annual operating budget of more than four billion dollars and research grants of more than two billion, medicine city employed fifty thousand people, attracted ten thousand volunteers and one hundred thousand students. Like everything else in Texas, it had ambitions to be the biggest and the best. And probably was. Although not quite big enough to displace Li entirely from her mind.

  Margaret’s little empire was on the southern fringes of this medical metropolis, in parking lot territory. On quiet days she could gaze from her window at the shuttle buses that took employees back into the heart of the city from the acres of parking lot that surrounded her building. But this was not a quiet day. And it was not about to get any quieter. Lucy buzzed through from the outer office. ‘That’s them now, Dr. Campbell.’

  ‘Thank you, Lucy, show them in.’

  FBI Agent Sam Fuller was younger than she had expected, about her own age. He was quite good-looking, in a bland, inoffensive sort of way. Well-defined features, a good strong jaw, soft brown eyes that met hers very directly, a fine, full head of hair. His handshake was firm and dry.

  ‘This is Major Steve Cardiff,’ he said, turning to the young man in the dark blue uniform who stood beside him, peaked hat lodged firmly under his left arm. Margaret looked at him for the first time. He was younger than she was. Thirty, perhaps. He was broad-built with a square head, dark hair cropped to Air Force regulation length, and he had a slightly pockmarked complexion, as if he might have suffered acne as a teenager. She realised with a tiny stab that he looked very much like Li Yan, or at least a Western version of him. It brought a lot of conflicting emotions bubbling to the surface, and she had to work hard to keep them from showing.

  ‘How do you do?’ She shook his hand. It was cool and strong.

  He grinned, and his orange-flecked green eyes sparkled. ‘Just call me Steve,’ he said. ‘Even my exwife does. Though she usually prefaces it with you bastard.’ And in spite of all her tension, Margaret found herself smiling.

  But Agent Fuller wasn’t playing the game. He remained studiously serious. ‘You probably know, Dr. Campbell, that the Bureau has a memorandum of understanding with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Effectively, they are our pathologists. We call them in when we need expert advice. Major Cardiff here is from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, part of the AFIP set-up. He’ll be leading the pathology team on this case.’

  Margaret’s smile faded. Nobody liked the FBI. They took everything and gave nothing. Besides which, they were the organisation that investigated irregularities in all the other agencies. So they were born to be unpopular. ‘Well,’ she said, more calmly than she felt, ‘I appreciate the offer of help, gentlemen, but we are quite able to cope on our own, thank you.’ Which was a lie. She had just spent the two hours after lunch phoning around the pathology departments in medicine city trying to round up a team capable of coping with ninety-eight autopsies. But she wasn’t going to have the FBI walk in and trample all over her.

  ‘I don’t think you understand, Dr. Campbell,’ Fuller said evenly. ‘Washington is anxious that we deal with this as quickly and efficiently as possible.’ He paused. ‘We’re not offering you our help. We’re taking over the case.’

  ‘Well, I have news for you, Agent Fuller.’ Margaret placed her fingertips at full stretch on the desk in front of her to keep herself steady. ‘This is not Washington, DC. This is the Lone Star State. And in Harris County I have absolute jurisdiction over the bodies in my care.’

  ‘The bodies were found in Walker County. You have no jurisdiction there.’

  ‘The bodies are now in Harris County, at Ellington Air Force Base, where I had them moved just over an hour ago. They’re mine.’

  Steve raised a finger, like a schoolboy in class. ‘Excuse me.’ They both turned to look at him. ‘I don’t mean to get involved in the argument, but these are people we’re talking about here, right? They don’t belong to anyone — except maybe the relatives who might want to give them a half-decent burial.’

  Margaret blushed immediately. Of course, he was right. They were fighting over these bodies like vultures at a feeding frenzy. But the FBI man was not about to be deflected.

  ‘How the hell did you manage to move ninety-eight bodies in…’ he checked his watch, ‘…just over four hours?’

  Margaret said, ‘Quite easily, actually. I figured it was going to take most of the day to get a fleet of refrigerated semi-trailers kitted out and sent up there. Never mind the time it would take to then label and bag the bodies. So I got the local police to rent a single tractor unit. We hooked the trailer up to that and took it straight down to Ellington Field with the bodies still on board.’

  Steve waved his finger at her now and grinned. ‘Hey, that was smart thinking, Doctor.’ Fuller glared at him.

  Margaret said, ‘My office has an MOU with NASA, for the rental of one of their hangars down there in the event of a major disaster, like an aircrash. It was my view that this fell into that category. And we have a company here in Houston, Kenyon International, that specialises in providing sophisticated facilities for conducting mass autopsies anywhere in the world. I have already engaged their services. They are setting up in the NASA hangar as we speak.’

  ‘Fine,’ Fuller said tightly. ‘You’ve done a good job, Dr. Campbell. But we’ll take it from here.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. And with an apologetic glance at Steve, ‘You want to challenge my jurisdiction in the courts, that’s okay by me. But by the time you get a ruling it’s going to be a whole helluva lot harder for us to tell how these poor folk died.’

  ‘Hey listen, folks,’ Steve said. ‘Jurisdiction’s a big word, right? I always had trouble with big words. That’s why I got a Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary. But since I don’t happen to have it on me — it won’t exa
ctly fit in my coat pocket — why don’t we agree to put our interpretation on hold until we have a chance to consult it. I mean, how can we worry about whose jurisdiction it is when we don’t even know what it means?’ Margaret and Fuller looked at him as though he were insane. He grinned. ‘That way we just pool our resources and get on with the job.’ He raised his eyebrows, still smiling. ‘What do you say?’

  Margaret realised Steve was offering a compromise — a way out of the impasse that saved face on both sides. Mianzi. How very Chinese of him, she thought. She glanced at Fuller and could see that he was still undecided.

  Steve said, ‘Sam, you wheel in your fingerprint go-team. I’ll fly down a couple of investigators and some of my pathologists and put them at Margaret’s disposal — you don’t mind if I call you Margaret, do you?’ Margaret thought, how could she mind? But he didn’t give her the chance to respond. ‘Now, you can’t tell me you haven’t been having problems getting enough knife-jockeys for the job?’

  She couldn’t resist his smile. ‘I’ll be happy to accept your offer of help, Major.’

  ‘Steve.’ He beamed, and turned to Fuller. ‘Sam?’

  Fuller nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Good.’ Steve pulled on his hat, then pulled it off again quickly. ‘Aw, shit, sorry. Not supposed to put it on till I get outside.’ He waggled his eyebrows again. ‘Regulations. Always forget. You got a phone I can use?’

  Chapter Two

  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.