The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (21 page)
‘That’s outrageous,’ said Wong, shaking his head and returning his envelope of money to his pocket.
Joyce saw what was happening. ‘Give her the money. We need to call the police. Save all those people locked in the basement.’
Her boss’s face darkened. He passionately hated extortion unless he was doing it. But Joyce was right—there was no choice. Handing over the money, he took the phone and called a contact from the Public Security Bureau to come and raid the premises they had just left. He didn’t give any details except to say that ‘people led by Western foreigners’ had kidnapped ‘high-ranking Chinese citizens’. He knew that would get them excited. Then he dropped the names Tun Feiyu and Chen Shaiming, and could hear the law enforcement official sitting up straight and paying attention. ‘Who are you? Who is this calling?’
Wong rang off, unhappy that if there was any reward going, some petty policeman would get it.
‘Give the old lady some more money,’ Joyce said. ‘I want to call Linyao.’
The feng shui man slowly pulled the envelope out again— and Joyce snatched it from his hands. She opened it wide, and the fruit vendor noticed the huge wad of money inside. ‘
Wah
!’ the old lady exclaimed, and switched to English. ‘Missy, gimme two thousan’
kuai
, you keep phone.’
‘Okay, that sounds reasonable.’ She counted out the money and walked away with the phone.
Wong snatched the envelope back. ‘You don’t spend my money, please,’ he said.
‘This is an emergency,’ she said. ‘Besides, this is a Samsung p735. It costs way more than two thousand.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly. Marker’s got one. It’s five hundred US. It’s got a built-in MP3 player and a one megapixel camera.’
Wong wondered why the woman had sold it cheaply, and then realised that it might have been stolen.
His assistant pounded Linyao’s number into the keypad.
‘Lin? It’s Joyce. Where are you? We have just had the most incredible night. It was totally bizarre. Wait till you—’ ‘I had an amazing night, too, but let’s compare them later. I got an emergency.’
‘So have we. We think there’s a—’ ‘There’s something weird going on at the summit. Someone went to an amazing amount of trouble to get my pass to do something to the animals that are appearing in the show at the Grand Theatre tonight.’
‘Uh-oh. My news is also about the summit. We reckon someone has put a bomb in the theatre. Where are you?’
‘On the way to Renmin Park—the People’s Park, right in the middle of town. That’s where the sum—’ ‘So are we. See you in—however long it takes us to get there. I’ll call you when I arrive.’
‘The key thing to remember is that the earth is square,’ Dilip Kenneth Sinha said. ‘Obviously.’
Buoyed by his triumph in locating Jia Lin, he was treating Linyao to a free lecture on the key principles of
vaastu shastra
as he drove her to the centre of Shanghai. His plan was to drop her there so she could hook up with Joyce and Wong, and then he would track down the union’s local contact. Shang Dan had lived in the city for years, had a good feel for local politics, and was the person most likely to be able to deliver useful information about the bizarre events of the past twenty-four hours.
Linyao, who was sitting in the front passenger seat as he manoeuvred the Renault, not without difficulty, through the Shanghai traffic, was only half listening. Her sleep-deprived, adrenalin-filled head was reeling. It had been hard to tear herself away from her daughter, but she had found the idea of Jia Lin heading out of the city for a few days irresistible. Occasionally, something in his droning voice would catch her attention and she would react.
‘Square? The earth is square?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Not physically, but in cosmological terms. We think of it having four directions: sunrise, sunset, north magnetic pole and south magnetic pole.’
‘But that is just a different way of talking about north, south, east and west, yes?’
‘The Western way just treats them as points. The Eastern way gives each direction its own individual character. For example, sunrise—what Westerners boringly call east—delivers warm, healthy, life-giving, beneficial rays. The other directions do not. The energy of the north is heavy and grand, for example, and is associated with the head. So that’s why we never sleep with our heads to the north.’
It took a few seconds for the apparent contradiction in Sinha’s words to filter into her brain. ‘Run that by me again. The head is north, so why don’t we sleep with our heads to the north?’
‘The body is a type of cosmological magnet. The head is the north of the body. We never sleep with our heads north because two magnets oriented in the same direction repulse each other. This is the opposite of feng shui, which considers north the area of sexuality, and thus recommends that beds be sited with the sleepers’ heads pointing north. But most regions of the planet have their own geomantic systems.’
‘Not Canada,’ said Linyao, who was using the conversation as a means of keeping awake while trying to avoid touching on subjects that might engender emotional strain—such as thinking about exactly what lethal plots the kidnappers’ gang had concocted, and where she fitted in.
Sinha expertly spun the wheel to swerve around a truck which had pulled out without warning in front of him. ‘Even the Western world has its own geomantic traditions,’ he said. ‘Consider
De Architectura
, written by Marcus Vitruvius in the first century BC. It purports to be the first book of architecture, but in fact deals with all sorts of human issues, ranging from art to morality to the gods. In chapter three he talks about the perfect human body.’ The car bumped up onto the pavement to avoid a man wheeling a barrow and squeezed between two coughing, flatulent buses. ‘Vitruvius says the face should be exactly one-tenth of the height of the body. The distance from the chin to the nostrils is exactly one-third of the length of the face, and the same applies to the distance from the nostrils to the space in between the eyebrows.’
Sinha rambled on, meandering from topic to topic as they slowly approached the centre of the city and Linyao felt herself finally surrendering to sleep.
Agent Thomas ‘Cobb’ Dooley did not walk to the front lobby office of the Shanghai Grand Theatre. He surged, tsunami-like, his personality filling the full volume of the corridor the way a subway train fills a tunnel. Even in the widest corridors, people would flatten themselves against the side walls as if he were four or five people rather than one. This quality was so pronounced that he almost needed to be thought of as a plural entity. Here come Dooley, Dooley are arriving, Dooley are here and are surrounding us. Get a bus: Dooley need transporting. It was not because of his physical size. Indeed, he was below average for an American male, topping out at a fraction under five feet nine inches, which qualifies you for the nickname Hobbit in the US military or similarly macho, hierarchical bodies.
Not that he was puny. Hours spent in the gym meant that he had a stocky body which made his shaven head seem two sizes too small. But the muscle was a bonus, and not the key part of his character. He always tried to use his personal presence alone to fill any enclosed space he entered. He attempted never to smile, he worked at keeping his posture aggressive (head down, upper body poised for action, fists clenched), and he kept permanently attached to his face an expression which warned people that they were talking to someone with the shortest fuse in human history. During high-stress, climactic days (such as the next forty-eight hours, which were the culmination of three months’ planning) there would be something about his eyes and forehead which said that he had just lived through the worst hour of his life and if one more thing annoyed him, it would be the very last straw of all the final straws that had ever existed since the dawn of straws.
The first time a person encountered Tom Dooley, they would wonder what terrible thing had happened that day. Some people would actually ask a member of his staff what had put Agent Dooley into such a bad mood, and would be shocked to hear that this state of rabid, bitter ferociousness was normal. If he had the ability to be in moods other than bad ones, no one was aware of it. There was a rumour that he had been caught smiling last week, when a secretary entered his office without knocking on the day he had laid off three staff.
‘Git Carloni. An’ Felznik,’ he growled to the officer following behind him (given the size of his ego, there was no room to walk alongside him).
‘Yes, sir,’ barked GS-9 Special Agent Simon Lasse, his nervous voice nasal and high. He started squeaking rapidly into his walkie-talkie.
Dooley smiled inwardly at the man’s terrified obsequiousness, working hard to keep the downturned set of his lips firmly in place. For the truth of the matter was that the entire tough guy personality was a bit of an act. Well, to be honest, more than a bit. It was entirely contrived. Dooley had been as soft as margarine left in the sun for most of his life, but had spent the past four years perfecting a persona in which he appeared to have the warmth of a glacier. He had been an undersized, bullied wimp during an unhappy childhood in south St Louis and had overcompensated for it every day since he joined the most prestigious department of the United States Secret Service.
He had made his major move four years earlier, transmuting from a smiling wimp to a grim-faced tyrant. His epiphany followed an assignment in which he had been so impressed with the power of the personality of a previous SecTreas (no one in the USSS used full titles for anyone) that he had copied the man’s characteristics with the care of a professional impersonator. Every detail of the way the man expressed himself, from the threatening manner in which he walked, to the shortness and gravelly nature of his utterances, to the hostility of his smile, to the way he seemed to be in a permanent foul temper, had been minutely studied and recreated. Dooley had painstakingly conjured up the SecTreas, complete and unabridged, late at night in front of his bedroom mirror, and eventually rolled his stolen persona out for public consumption when he got a major promotion to number two of the USSS’s highest-profile department.
Only when he had comfortably slipped into the SecTreas’s personality did he make a shocking discovery. He had been suffering from a serious psycho-physiological ailment all his life without realising it: he had been born without a personality. He was a void, just like all the other voids in his department, in his office, in his college, in his school, in his street. He had no passions. He had no interests. His opinions were held lightly and could be swayed from one extreme to the other merely by the reading of a newspaper opinion column. He realised that that was why he had slipped into the older man’s personality so easily—he was like a naked man who had been given a coat for the first time. He made himself comfortable inside it, and he had never looked back. And now, after four years, the coat had bonded to his skin.
The new, revised edition of Tom Dooley suited his present position perfectly. He had achieved high rank, and he was determined to be superlatively good at it. Since his job was to inspire his team to achieve the impossible, he had to scare them into devoting more hours and more energy to the job than was good for their health. That was what good bosses did, wasn’t it? It was the secret of capitalism, that you quietly destroyed other people’s family lives in order to get a good result for your company, aka your paymaster, and ultimately yourself. And once you got to management level, you delegated every part of your job to others, reserving for yourself only the problems that no one else could deal with. And then you made sure things were so tightly organised that there wasn’t anything in that category. Which was the situation he had achieved.
Or had he? One of his staff had dared to call him with a problem they couldn’t handle, that they thought warranted his attention. One of the most important aspects of Dooley’s carefully cultivated image was to regularly demonstrate that he did not suffer fools gladly; that he did not suffer fools at all; that he did not suffer anyone in any way; that the only thing to do was to do one’s job so well that he never had to notice one. This might be another opportunity to demonstrate that, he thought.