Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Read online

  Li pulled his chair closer to read the document which Hart had written.

  A careful comparison of the first of the three graphs in each folder with the known sequence of photographs shown to each subject has enabled us to identify which of them was briefed on the murder for the purposes of the demonstration. MERMER responses to the ‘probe’ photographs, all of which related to the murder, were easily identified on the graphs. As a result, we were able to pinpoint A, B and C as the ‘murderers’, thereby eliminating them from our attempts to identify subject D, whom Professor Pan had labelled a ‘Liar’.

  Li sat stunned. He knew who had been briefed on the murder, because he was one of them. And the Procurator General and Commissioner Zhu were the others. Which meant that Zhu was not the liar, and therefore almost certainly not the killer.

  ‘That blows a bit of a hole in your theory about the Commissioner,’ Margaret said helpfully. ‘Who’s left?’

  Li said, ‘His deputy, Cao Xu, the Deputy Minister, and Yan Bo, the Director General of the Political Department.’ And he remembered Yan Bo scribbling in red ink on his notepad.

  ‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘So now we’re climbing even higher up the ladder.’

  Li turned back to the screen, agitated now. There was more.

  Identifying why Professor Pan labelled subject D a ‘Liar’ has proven more difficult. Apart from a continuity of response to the ‘probe’ pictures – that is to say, none of them showed a MERMER response – the graphs relating to the ‘target’ and ‘irrelevant’ pictures appear to be anomalous.

  And that was as much as Hart had written.

  ‘Is that it?’ Li said.

  Lyang shook her head, scrolling up and down the page. ‘There’s nothing else. If he knew more than that he’s taken it with him.’

  ‘But what does he mean, anomalous?’ Li said.

  ‘Hang on,’ Margaret interrupted. ‘You two are way ahead of me here. Would someone like to explain what targets and probes and irrelevants are? It’s like another language.’

  Lyang turned towards her. ‘Three of the six subjects were briefed on a murder, for the purposes of the demo. When it came to the test all six were shown nine photographs relating to that murder – things that only the ones who’d been briefed would recognise. They’re called probes. They were also shown nine photographs of things that were known to them – their apartment, their dog, their car. And these are called targets. The idea being that the brain’s response to these things that are known to them will be the same as the response to the probe photographs. In the case of the ones who were briefed, that is. And not, in the case of the other three.’

  Margaret was nodding. ‘Okay, and let me guess. The irrelevants are photographs that don’t mean anything to any of them, so they have negative responses to compare to the positive ones.’

  ‘You got it,’ Lyang said. ‘And they get to see thirty-six irrelevants.’

  ‘So what did Bill mean by anomalous?’ Li asked again.

  Lyang rubbed her tired and swollen eyes. ‘I don’t know. It may be that they were getting a MERMER response from some of the irrelevants.’

  ‘You mean recognising pictures of things they weren’t expected to?’ Margaret said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Lyang said. ‘It can happen. Sometimes an irrelevant is accidentally known to them. Usually they are given a list of things in advance, so that if they might be shown something they recognise it can be changed before the actual test. That wouldn’t have been done for the demo.’

  Li was shaking his head, baffled. ‘So how could Lynn Pan possibly tell from any of these responses that somebody was lying? I mean, lying about what? Lying how? All they were doing was looking at pictures.’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Margaret said suddenly. She looked at Li. ‘You remember Mei Yuan’s riddle?’ He looked at her blankly. ‘The one about the two deaf mutes in the paddy field.’

  Li blinked in surprise. ‘So she tried that one out on you after all.’

  But Margaret wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing off on lateral plains. ‘Each of them thought he was left in that field on his own,’ she said. ‘And that the other one had sneaked off with the food or the drink to keep it for themselves.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Lyang said, looking from one to the other through a haze of fatigue.

  So Margaret told her the riddle, but didn’t wait for her to work it out. ‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘That’s why they couldn’t see one another. They were both there, and neither of them was lying about it. They were both telling the truth, but they just didn’t know it.’

  ‘You’ve lost me now, too,’ Li said.

  Margaret was searching for a way to unfuzz her mind, to express herself clearly. She waved a hand at the computer. ‘This MERMER thing. It can’t tell if you’re lying, right? Your brain sees something it recognises, it makes an involuntary response. You record it right there on the graph, and it’s plain for everyone to see. You see something you don’t recognise, you have no response. That’s also on the graph. So it’s got nothing to do with lying. But it’s got everything to do with telling the truth.’

  They were both looking at her, concentrating hard, waiting, still not getting it.

  ‘Don’t you see? You can’t help but tell the truth, because you have no control over how your brain responds. Lynn Pan must have known there were anomalies in the irrelevants. But that’s neither here nor there. If you have a MERMER response to something you’re not supposed to, well that’s just a measure of the imperfect conditions in which the test was being conducted. But if you don’t have a MERMER response to something you should have, then that’s weird. That’s really off the wall. That doesn’t make any sense at all.’

  Light began to dawn in Li’s eyes. ‘It’s one of the targets,’ Li said. ‘He didn’t recognise something he should have.’ Then he frowned. ‘What the hell could that be?’

  Lyang said, ‘Well, we only have to look at nine photographs in relation to the graph to find out.’

  She went into the Graphs D folder and double-clicked on the first of the graph icons, and the MRM software decoded the document. A window opened up on the computer screen showing a jagged graph line running from left to right. Using the mouse to capture the scroll bar at the bottom of the window enabled Lyang to scroll through the length of the graph. Its peaks and troughs related to a bar running along the top of the screen which held tiny icons of the images being shown at that moment to the testee. Each image was labelled probe, target, or irrelevant. So it was a simple matter to compare the graph responses to the target pictures, while enabling them to ignore the other forty-five.

  Li focused all his attention on the graph. The MERMER responses, indicating knowledge or recognition, were represented by distinctive peaks that stood out well above the average flat response. The tiny icons of the photographic images were hard to make out. Li saw a car, but it just looked like any other ministerial car. No doubt Subject D, as Hart had called him, would have recognised its number plate. He saw the pink and white ministerial apartments where he had called on Commissioner Zhu first thing the previous morning. But there was nothing in that to give away the identity of Subject D. All five of the senior officers who had taken part in the demonstration with Li that day would have apartments in those blocks. Only Li, as by far the most junior officer, was allocated an apartment in the ministry compound. There was a picture of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. A son, perhaps. Li did not recognise him. There was a photograph of the exterior of a restaurant. It was not one Li knew. A favourite eatery, perhaps. Another showed the main entrance of Beijing Police Headquarters in East Qianmen Avenue. Any one of them would have recognised that one. Infuriatingly, there was nothing that indicated to Li the identity of Subject D.

  Lyang suddenly stopped scrolling. ‘There,’ she said. And she pointed at the screen, almost triumphantly. She had followed in the footsteps of her dead husband and found what he found. ‘No MERMER.’ T
he graph showed a flat response to a picture clearly labelled target, where there should have been a MERMER response.

  ‘What is it?’ Margaret squinted at the picture, but it was too small to be identifiable.

  Lyang double-clicked on the icon and the photograph opened up on top of the graph to reveal an orange sky at sunset, framed by the branches of trees drawing the eyes towards two serrated towers in silhouette rising against gold-edged clouds.

  ‘What’s that?’ Margaret asked.

  Li frowned. ‘I’ve no idea. Looks like a couple of pagodas.’

  ‘It’s the Double-pagoda Temple,’ Lyang said, taking them by surprise, and they looked at her to see tears making slow tracks down her cheeks. ‘Also called the Yongzuo Temple. I only know because when he first came here, Bill did the whole tourist bit. Dragged me round every tower and palace and tourist attraction in Beijing. And then we did trips. Overnights to places like Xian and Taiyuan.’ She nodded towards the screen and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. ‘Which is where that is.’ She forced a smile. ‘It was typical of Bill. He knew more about China than the Chinese. The twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple is the symbol of Taiyuan. But if you don’t come from there you probably don’t know that.’

  Margaret said, ‘Well Subject D certainly didn’t.’ She shrugged. ‘But I don’t see the significance of it. Why were they showing it to him in the first place?’

  Li slapped his hand on the desk. ‘It has to be his home town,’ he said. ‘It’s the only category of the nine target pictures that it would fit. They showed all of us pictures of our home towns.’

  Margaret ran her hand back through tangled, tousy hair. ‘But why wouldn’t he recognise his home town? I mean, if those pagodas are the symbol of the place …’

  Li sat staring into space, his brain working overtime. Finally he said, ‘There can only be one reason he didn’t recognise it.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘It’s not his home town.’

  She frowned. ‘You mean they made a mistake?’

  ‘No. I mean he’s not who he says he is.’

  Margaret threw her hands out in despair. ‘And we don’t even know who he’s supposed to be.’

  Li pressed fingers into his temple, screwing up his eyes in concentration, trying to get his mind to focus. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We can find that out easily enough now.’ He was thinking back to the MERMER test itself. Lynn Pan had shown Li a list of his target pictures. He knew he was going to see a picture of his home town in Sichuan. She must have shown the man who killed her a similar list. And he must have known that he wouldn’t recognise the place that was his home town. Even before she showed him it. And there was nothing he could do about that. His brain would respond in a way over which he had no control. It would tell her the truth, and reveal his lie. She must have known instantly that there was something far wrong. And he must have been watching for it, knowing she would see it, and planning how he would get rid of her even before the test was over.

  But if he wasn’t who he was supposed to be – a high-ranking officer in the Ministry of Public Security – who the hell was he?

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture the three men. Deputy Minister Wei Peng, squat, toad-like, arrogant, a stickler for protocol. Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu, tall, languid, unpredictable. Director General Yan Bo, older, shrunken, a man who enjoyed exercising his power. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s Cao Xu! It’s the Deputy Commissioner.’

  He opened his eyes and found Margaret and Lyang staring at him. ‘How can you know that?’ Lyang asked keenly. She had a vested interest. This was the man who murdered her husband, or had him killed.

  ‘Because the figure in the video, the one caught posting the parcel with the kidney in it at the EMS post office, was tall.’ One hundred and seventy-seven point five centimetres, Forensic officer Qin had been able to ascertain from the AutoCAD graphic. Five feet, eleven inches. ‘And he took a size forty-three shoe. There’s no way either the Deputy Minister or the Director General fit that profile. It has to be Cao.’

  ‘How can you prove that?’ Lyang said.

  ‘By finding out where he says he was born. If it’s Taiyuan, that pretty much clinches it.’

  Margaret was having trouble dealing with the concept, and she recognised the truth of what Mei Yuan had said to her that morning. Li’s mind worked better on the practical than the abstract. He could solve a real problem better than he could solve a riddle. ‘But if he’s not the Deputy Commissioner, who is he?’

  ‘Oh, he’s the Deputy Commissioner, alright,’ Li said. ‘He’s just not Cao Xu.’

  Thursday into Friday

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  Li stood on the edge of the concourse and looked at the clock on the west tower. It was six minutes past seven, and the eastern sky was yellow beneath the deep blue of the vanishing night. He shivered, more from fatigue than the cold. He was well wrapped up against that, with his long coat and thick red scarf. He wore a pair of soft leather gloves and a dark blue, soft peaked cap. His breath billowed around him in the chill of the early morning breeze. There were hundreds of people criss-crossing the vast paved square in front of Beijing Railway Station, all of them insulated against the winter air that swept into the city from the icy plains of the Gobi desert. The last breath of autumn before winter set in.

  Li seemed to be the only person there standing still. A tall, dark figure surrounded by animation. Anonymous creatures hurrying, heads down, to the station or the metro, to the bus stops or taxi stands. They moved around him, like the currents of a river around a boulder, talking on their cellphones, or setting grim faces towards the day ahead. Women with the blue overalls and white face masks were already out with their brooms and shovels, clearing away the detritus of the crowd, raising dust to carry grit in the wind into sleepy eyes. Crowds of travellers, dark-skinned peasants up from the country, sat on the steps atop huge piles of tattered luggage, smoking and laughing and watching the early morning world go by.

  Li felt a tap on his arm and found Wu standing there, looking as bad as he felt, if not worse. His hair was unkempt and whipping about his head in the wind, his face pallid and puffy. His moustache seemed even more sparse that usual. Li had phoned him shortly after 4a.m. to ask him a favour, and heard a woman’s voice in the background. Wu had not sounded too pleased to hear from him. But here he was at the crack of dawn, as arranged, clutching a dog-eared folder. He could have had little more sleep than Li. The nicotine on his fingers seemed more pronounced than usual, and Li surmised that he had spent most of the rest of the night with a cigarette in his hand.

  ‘What did you get?’ Li said.

  ‘Everything you wanted.’

  ‘And it’s him?’

  Wu nodded. ‘Yep. Born in Taiyuan City in 1948 and raised in an orphanage in the southern suburbs. It’s all in there.’ He thrust the folder at Li. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu but were afraid to ask.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  Wu grinned. ‘Off the internet mostly. The ministry’s own website.’ And then his smile faded. ‘And the police net. His registration records. If anyone cared to check, they’d know I was in there. So you’d better get this guy or I’ll be in as much trouble as you.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Li said grimly. He was no longer fighting a phantom, some elusive, faceless enemy. He knew his man. And the playing field had just levelled off.

  ‘Why do you have to go to Taiyuan City?’ Wu asked. ‘Haven’t you got enough already?’

  Li shook his head. ‘In the normal course of events I would go straight to Commissioner Zhu. But Cao’s done such a good job of discrediting me I’m going to need better proof than a handful of graphs. There are still too many questions I don’t have the answers to.’

  ‘And you think you’ll find them in Taiyuan?’

  ‘I have no idea. But it seems like the best place to start. At the beginning.’<
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  Li was about to turn away towards the ticket hall when Wu put a hand on his arm. ‘Something else you should know, Chief.’ Li turned back. ‘We finally made contact with that guy, Thomas Dowman, the one who wrote the Jack the Ripper book. Apparently he had dinner a couple of times with Deputy Cao and his wife when he was here for that legal exchange a couple of years ago. He says Cao was real pally and kept in touch with him by e-mail.’ He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and cupped his hands around it as he lit it. Smoke whipped away from his mouth on the breeze. ‘Dowman sent him an advance copy of the Chinese translation of the book eight weeks ago.’

  * * *

  As the train puffed slowly away from the industrial southern fringes of the Chinese capital, a pretty girl in a red jacket checked his ticket and gave him a plastic token in return. Li took a small chrome flask from his satchel and emptied into it a sachet of wiry, dry green tea leaves. He leaned down to take out the big flask from below the table at the window and pour boiling water from it into his own. Then he screwed the top back on the smaller one and set it aside to let it infuse.

  There were two other passengers in his soft class compartment. Both looked like businessmen, in dark suits and plain ties. To Li’s relief, neither of them seemed anxious to indulge in conversation. One had his face buried in a newspaper, and the other was asleep before they left the city. Li opened Wu’s folder and settled down to read all about Deputy Beijing Police Commissioner Cao Xu.

  The second in command of the Beijing force had come from humble origins, abandoned by an elderly widowed aunt following the death of his parents in an agricultural accident. He had been two years old then. His aunt had been childless, and he was without family. The authorities had placed him in the care of a state orphanage.

  He never graduated from school, being inducted, as many of his generation were, into the ranks of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s teenage missionaries of ideological madness travelled all over China during those years of chaos and persecution. Cao had been no different from the rest, spending several years in various southern provinces before coming to Beijing to join the cheering throngs in Tiananmen Square where Mao would make regular appearances, urging them to greater efforts in rooting out the enemies of the people. But then Mao, and subsequently the Gang of Four, had passed into history, and China returned from the brink to start reinventing itself. Like everyone else, Cao shrugged off those years and started over. He sat and passed the necessary exams to gain entry into the University of Public Security, where Li himself was later trained. When he graduated, he married Tie Ning, a girl he had met during his Red Guard years. Their first child had died aged three, and then Ning had belatedly given birth to a baby boy, now a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.