Snakehead (4 page)

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 strong-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 exactly 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.

Six refrigerated semitrailer rentals stood in a row on the tarmac outside the hangar doors. Four of them had sixteen bodies stacked inside on a double tier of makeshift plywood staging. The other two contained seventeen. Two teams of two from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner had worked late into the night removing the bodies from the container that had been brought down from Huntsville. Each body had been assigned a number, marked in black on a six-inch yellow plastic placard placed next to it, then individually and collectively photographed. They had been examined for gross injuries or blood and assessed for rigor mortis. Core body temperatures had been taken by making tiny incisions in the upper right abdomen and inserting a chef’s type thermometer into the livers. Finally, each foot had been tagged with the same number as the yellow placard, then zippered into a white body bag, with the corresponding number tied on to the zipper’s pull tag. Stacked in rows in the refrigerated semitrailers, they now awaited the full process of US autopsy procedure. It was not the America these Chinese migrants had dreamed of.

Margaret walked briskly through the hangar, blinking in the fierce glare of the 500-watt halogen floodlamps that illuminated the nearly twenty stations that had been set up along one side. Plastic sheeting stretched across tubular frames formed partitions between them. Twelve of the stations were purely for autopsy. Mobile tables had been wheeled into each, plastic buckets hanging below drainers to catch body fluids. Other stations were dedicated to ancillary procedures like the collection and review of personal effects, fingerprinting, dental examination, total body x-ray. Opposite the stations, tables had been set up with computers for recording their findings. Each table was manned by at least three assistants, two of whom were earmarked to help with the work in the station. The sounds of voices and the hum of computers echoed around the vast corrugated space.

It always struck Margaret as ironic that it took so much time, money and effort simply to record the passing of life. The human obsession with death. Perhaps, she thought, we imagined that by examining it in all its guises we might one day find a way of defeating it.

‘Dr. Campbell, good morning.’ Steve stepped across to greet her from the station he had been allocated. ‘Fine day for wielding the knife.’ He waved an arm around the hangar. ‘Spectacular set-up you have here.’

‘I think I gave you permission to call me Margaret,’ Margaret said.

Steve’s eyebrows, behind the anonymity of his surgical mask, were still animated. ‘So you did. I was just being polite — in case you’d forgotten.’