That was how Jericho found her. As part of a collection of bodies scattered over the flight deck: two dead guards, the dead traitor, and Yoyo lying there as though dead, without a pulse, unbreathing, drenched in cold sweat. She hadn’t picked up when Shaw called from her extension, nor when he tried his own phone. One look into Norrington’s office told them that he wasn’t there. This was enough to send him up to the sixty-eighth floor, worried, where he found Diane lying pitifully, her cables wrenched out, and clear signs of a fight. No sign at all of Yoyo but a trail of blood on the floor, on the gallery, the bridge, the steps up to the deck.
The rest was intuition.
He had burst out onto the roof just in time to see the airbike vanishing into the sky, and for a dreadful moment he thought that Yoyo was dead. He sank to his knees beside her, broken by his failure, seeing clearly the grief that would seize Tu and Hongbing when he brought them the news. But then he heard a barely perceptible heartbeat, his ear pressed to her ribcage. Another followed. A slow, faltering rhythm that picked up speed and grew stronger, and then the blood flowed back to her brain and consciousness returned. When he propped her legs up she came to, groggy, confused, just about able to see and speak. Who am I? Headache, tired, sleep.
Xin had let her live.
Why?
Meanwhile Shaw was growing apoplectic. Norrington’s guilt still had to be proved, even if she no longer doubted it. She was prey to a whole swarm of suspicions about what the deputy head of security could have done to damage Orley, and she ordered his data combed, his body searched. They found a datastick disguised as a house key, containing only a single program which uploaded as the image of a nine-headed snake, a shimmering, pulsing sign of his treachery.
That was the point when Jericho decided to give up.
They could fix their own problems. He couldn’t do any more, didn’t want to. It was as though he and Xin had some tacit agreement now that the killer had spared Yoyo’s life and vanished, leaving a curt but unambiguous message: Mind your own business. Maybe Xin had simply recognised that by now Yoyo’s death was unnecessary, since so many other people knew her secret. It would have been pointless to kill her now, and somehow or other pointless actions simply didn’t fit into Xin’s … philosophy, if that was what it was.
Never mind.
He was a detective, and he had kept his promise. He had brought Yoyo back to his two clients, to Tu and Chen. Everything else was for Shaw and the British Secret Services to bother about, none of his business, and he was also horribly tired. At the same time, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink, no matter how hard he was yawning now.
Tu on the other hand hardly appeared to sleep at all, and the shock seemed to have jolted him into a state of unceasing wakefulness, driven by the guilt of not having been there at Yoyo’s side. She had been asleep in her bed for two hours now – all the guest suites in the Big O had several rooms, and spectacular views – while he sat with Jericho in the living room, drinking tea and gobbling down the nuts and nibbles like a maniac.
‘I have to eat,’ he said half apologetically, belching loudly. ‘Food and sex are man’s essential desires.’
‘Says who?’ muttered Jericho.
‘Confucius, since you ask, and he meant by it that we should be sure to eat well so that we can protect our women. Which means I have some catching up to do.’ A handful of Brazil nuts and jelly babies together. ‘And if I ever get my hands on that swine—’
‘You won’t.’
Tu slapped the table. ‘We’ve got this far, xiongdi. Do you really think that I’ll knuckle under and let the bastard get clean away? Think of what he did to Yoyo’s friends, to Hongbing. The tortures he put him through!’
‘Not so loud.’ Jericho glanced at the half-closed bedroom door. ‘No question that you’re right to be angry, but perhaps you should just be grateful that you’re not dead.’
‘All right, I’m grateful. What next?’
‘Nothing next.’ Jericho spread his hands and rolled his eyes. ‘Live. Life goes on.’
‘It’s not like you to take this attitude,’ Tu chided him. ‘The woodworm doesn’t just sit about making comments on the carpentry.’
‘Thanks for the comparison.’
‘So why did we get involved in the first place?’ Tu asked between gritted teeth. ‘So that the bastards could get away with it?’
‘You listen to me.’ Jericho put down his teacup and leaned forward. ‘Maybe you’re right, and maybe next week I’ll see it all differently, but where has all this got us? Following leads in ever-widening circles, all these killers, mercenary armies, Secret Services, coups in West Africa, government ploys and corporation plots, yesterday Equatorial Guinea, today the Moon, the day after tomorrow who knows, maybe Venus? Where has it got us? Corrupt oil cartels, Korean atom bombs, hotels on the Moon, rogue astronauts, oil managers getting shot at, Greenwatch wiped out, theories about China and the CIA, nine-headed monsters? Where? To a baking hot day and a man scared for his daughter. The furniture still in its packing and he’s worried that she’s disappeared, but first of all he has to help me get two chairs out of the bubble-wrap so that we have something to sit on. To be blunt, I couldn’t give a shit about Xin and his Hydra. With the best will in the world, I have no idea what we have to do with Orley Enterprises. There’s a girl in the next room, still breathing, we didn’t have to lay her out in a shroud, and to me that’s worth all the global conspiracies you could pile up together, since it looks as though we’re well out of this game, however the whole thing plays out. We’ve got those sods on the run, Tian, so much so that they can’t see any point in killing us. The story will fizzle out of its own accord. It begins and ends on the Shanghai Pudong golf course when you asked me to bring your friend his daughter back, alive and in one piece. That’s what I did. Thank you, next please.’
Tian looked at him appraisingly, a handful of nuts raised halfway to his mouth.
‘I’m very grate—’
‘No, you’re not following me.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘We’re all grateful, all of us, to one another, but now we’re going to fly off home, you can take care of your joint venture with Dao IT, Yoyo will carry on her studies, Hongbing will sell that silver Rolls that he was telling me about and enjoy his commission, and I’ll wipe Xin’s fingerprints from my furniture and try to fall in love with some woman who’s not called Diane or Joanna. And won’t it just be wonderful to be able to do all that? To lead a perfectly ordinary, boring life. We’ll wake up from this hideous dream, we’ll rub our eyes and that will be that, because this isn’t our life, Tian! These are other people’s problems.’
Tu scratched his belly. Jericho sank back into the depths of the sofa and wished he could believe what he’d just said.
‘A perfectly ordinary, boring life,’ Tu echoed.
‘Yes, Tian,’ he said. ‘Ordinary, boring. And if I can give you some advice, as a friend: talk to Yoyo. Both of you. Talking helps.’
It was rude to talk this way in Chinese culture, even with a friend. But perhaps after all the last two days had brought – how much closer did you need to be before you allowed such trust? He looked out at London as the day began, and wondered whether he should leave Shanghai and come back here. Actually, he didn’t much care either way.
‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed. ‘I know it’s nothing to do with me.’
Tu let the nuts he was holding rattle back down into the bowl, and stirred them with his finger. For a while, neither of them said anything.
‘Do you know what an ankang is?’ he asked at last.
Jericho turned his head. ‘Yes.’
‘Would you like to hear a story about an ankang?’ Tu smiled. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. Nobody wants to hear a story about an ankang, but you’ve brought it upon yourself. This is a story which begins on 12 January 1968 in Zhejiang province, when a child is born, an only child. Nothing to do with the one-child policy, by the way, that was only proclaimed years later, though of cours
e you know that, since you’re practically Chinese yourself.’
12 January—
‘Not your own birthday,’ Jericho said.
‘No, besides which I was born in Shanghai, and this happened in a small town. The child’s father was a teacher, meaning that he was under serious suspicion of harbouring such heinous aims as wanting to educate people, or using his brain to develop an intellectual position. In other words, suspected of thought. Back in those days even knowing the rudiments of your own country’s history was enough to have you beaten in the streets, but when Beijing’s creatures began to destroy our culture in the name of revolutionising it, this teacher of ours adapted to the new circumstances. At first. After all, the capital was a vipers’ nest of Red Guards, but out in the provinces the local Party leaders were fighting the Guards. The peasants and workers out there were doing quite well from the policies of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. So our teacher worked in a tractor factory to avoid the suspicion of intellectualism, and he did what little he could to stop Deng and Liu from being toppled by the Maoists. There was a Red Guard faction established in his town that was openly sympathetic to Deng, the Coordinated Work Committee, and this teacher thought it would be a good idea to join them. Which it was. Until ’68, when the committee broke up under pressure from the hard-liners, who didn’t need to know more than that he had once been a teacher. The day that he began to fear for his life was the day his son was born.’
Jericho sipped at his tea, and a suspicion stole over him.
‘What was this teacher called, Tian?’
‘Chen De.’ Tu tapped at a peanut with his finger, sending it skittering over the table. ‘You can probably guess his son’s name for yourself.’
‘A name meant to show how faithful the father was. Red Soldier.’
‘Hongbing. A clever enough tactic, but it didn’t help much. At the end of ’68 they came to arrest Hongbing’s mother for reactionary statements supposedly, though it was actually because quite a few Guards had been practising Cultural Revolution between her legs, and she wouldn’t accept that it helped the poor peasants one jot if people like them dragged her into bed. They took her off to a re-education camp, where they, well, re-educated her. She came back home very ill, and broken, not the same person as she had been. Chen De started teaching again, sporadically, taking enormous risks to do so, but mostly he worked in the factory and did his best to teach his boy as much as he could, in secret, for instance telling him how to live an ethical life and why – highly dangerous propaganda, I can tell you! Then in the mid-seventies they noticed his links to the old committee. By now Mao liked to spend most of his time with the daughters of the Revolution, making sure that none of them were virgins. Chen De was accused of counter-revolutionary tendencies, seven years late, very quick trial, then prison. Hongbing was left behind, a child alone, looking after his sick mother, so he took over the job in the tractor factory.’
Tu paused, pouring himself more tea.
‘Well, various things changed, some for the better, some for the worse. His mother died, and then Mao soon after, Deng was rehabilitated from having been in disgrace, and Hongbing’s father could teach again – as long as he stuck to the Party line, of course. The boy grows up caught between ideology and despair. Since he has no role-models around him, he falls in love with cars, which were very rare indeed at the time. You can’t make a living from something like that out in the country, so when he’s seventeen he moves to Shanghai, which is as fun-loving as Beijing is sclerotic. He takes a string of odd jobs and falls in with a group of students who are tending the delicate shoots of democratic thought in post-revolutionary China, and they introduce him to books by Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi – the Fifth Modernisation, opening of society, all those enticing, forbidden thoughts.’
‘Hongbing was a democracy activist?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Tu nodded enthusiastically. ‘He was up there in the front line, Owen my friend. A fighter! 20 December 1986, seventy thousand people took to the streets in Shanghai to protest against the way the Party had manipulated appointments to the People’s Congress, and Hongbing was at their head. It’s a miracle that they didn’t fling him behind bars right then. Meanwhile he’d also got a job at a repairs garage, fixing up cadre cars, making influential friends. This was where he lost the last of his illusions, since the new brand of Chinese managers could have invented corruption. Well, never mind that. Tell me, does 15 April 1989 mean anything to you?’
‘4 June does.’
‘Yes, but it all began earlier. Hu Yaobang died, a politician the students had always seen as their friend, especially after the Party made him their own internal scapegoat for the disturbances of ’86. Thousands of people march in Beijing to remember him and pay their respects on Tiananmen Square, and the old demands come up again: democracy, freedom, all the stuff that enrages the old men in power. Then criticism of the regime spreads to other cities, Shanghai as well, of course, and Hongbing raises a clenched fist once more and organises protests. Deng refuses dialogue with the students, the demonstrators go on hunger strike, Tiananmen becomes the centre of something like a huge carnival, there’s something in the air, a mood of change, a happening, and Hongbing wants to see it for himself. By now there are a million people on the square. Journalists from all over the world, and the last straw comes when Mikhail Gorbachev arrives with his ideas of perestroika and glasnost. The Party is in a tight corner indeed.’
‘And Hongbing’s in the thick of it.’
‘For all that, it could have ended peacefully. By the end of May most of the Beijing students want to wind the movement up, happy to have humiliated Deng, but the new arrivals like Hongbing insist that all demands must be met, and that escalates things. The rest is well known – I don’t have to tell you about the Tiananmen Massacre. And once again, Hongbing has the most incredible luck. Nothing happens to him because his name’s not on any of the blacklists. He went back to Shanghai, with the last of his illusions in shreds, decided to concentrate on his job instead and made it to deputy foreman. It’s grown up to be a lovely big garage over all these years, the nouveaux riches have turned their backs on bicycles and nobody knows cars like Hongbing does. Every now and again he gets a trip to the brothel as a gift from a customer, the upper cadre invite him for meals, he’s a good-looking lad, some fat cat functionaries wouldn’t much mind if he got their daughters pregnant.’
‘So he’s adapted to the times.’
‘Up until winter of ’92, which is when Chen De hangs himself. He’s spent all those years keeping his head down, and then he strings himself up. Depression. His wife had died, you see, and the Revolution had destroyed his family. Hongbing explodes with self-loathing. He hates his own name, he hates it when his drinking buddies boast and blather and yell ganbei, profiteers who used to be interested in the democracy movement but have sold out. He wants to make his voice heard. The year before, the dissident Wang Wanxing had been arrested for unfurling a banner on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, right in the middle of the square. It called for the rehabilitation of the demonstrators who had been killed. So the Tiananmen anniversary comes round again, 4 June 1993, and Hongbing demonstrates for Wang’s release along with a couple of like-minded souls. He reckons that this is a small thing to ask, modest enough, that it might have better chances of success than always pissing up the same tree and shouting that the whole system should change. And lo and behold, someone takes notice of him. The wrong kind, unfortunately.’
‘He’s arrested.’
‘On the spot. And this is where things get really despicable, although you might say that it’s all been quite despicable enough. You’d be wrong. So far, it’s just been brutal.’
Tu paused, while the sun climbed higher and flooded the Thames with light.
‘For many years there was a pretty little Buddhist temple a few kilometres outside Hangzhou, in an idyllic spot between rice fields and tea plantations. Until they tore it down to build something in its place th
at was deemed more useful to Chinese society.’
‘An ankang.’
Jericho felt his tiredness vanish. He had heard about the ankangs, though he had never seen one. The literal meaning of ankang was safety, peace and health, but in fact these were the police psychiatric prisons.
‘The ankang at Hangzhou was the first psychiatric clinic of its kind in China,’ Tu said. ‘Based on the belief that there is one perfect ideology, and that anybody who questions it must be suffering from some sort of mental illness, either acute or chronic. Just like you’d have to be mentally ill to believe that the Earth is a cube, or that your spouse is really a dog in disguise. Taking the Soviet Union as their example, China had always made a habit of declaring that its dissidents were crazy, but the Party only gave the psychiatric clinics that cute little name – ankang – at the end of the eighties. Up till then, they had operated in secret.’
‘Tell me, that dissident whom Hongbing was trying to get freed from prison, Wang Wanxing – wasn’t he in an ankang as well?’
‘For thirteen years, and then in the end he was deported in 2005. Up until then, there had only ever been rumours about the ankangs, dark mutterings that they had less to do with caring for the mentally ill than humiliating people who were of sound mind. That was when a debate began, very tentative at first, and it didn’t stop the Party from opening more of these so-called clinics. There’s a constant supply of people with paranoid delusions of human rights or schizophrenic beliefs about free elections. The world is full of lunatics, Owen, you just have to pay close attention: trade unionists, democrats, religious believers, people presenting petitions and lodging complaints about the demolitions and urban planning policy in Shanghai, for instance, and demanding outlandish things like citizen consultation. Not to mention the real crazies, the ones who think that our perfect society could harbour corruption.’