The Last Six Million Seconds
Praise for
JOHN BURDETT
“John Burdett’s crime novels … are lovely and complex.… The reader is transported to a foreign world made familiar through the voice of his guide.”
—The Denver Post
“Nothing is simple in Burdett’s bawdy, wild fiction.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“You might find yourself addicted to Burdett’s sizzling prose.”
—San Antonio Express News
“John Burdett is writing the most exciting set of crime novels in the world.”
—The Oregonian
“Time and again, John Burdett breaks the crime-thriller mold. And then reassembles it, piece by piece. His narrative becomes more than the sum of its parts.… Thoroughly enjoyable.”
—New York Journal of Books
Books by John Burdett
The Royal Thai Detective series
Bangkok 8
Bangkok Tattoo
Bangkok Haunts
The Godfather of Kathmandu
Vulture Peak
A Personal History of Thirst
The Last Six Million Seconds
JOHN BURDETT
THE LAST
SIX MILLION SECONDS
John Burdett was brought up in North London and worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong. To date he has published seven novels, including the Bangkok series:
Bangkok 8
,
Bangkok Tattoo
,
Bangkok Haunts
,
The Godfather of Kathmandu
, and
Vulture Peak.
www.john-burdett.com
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, MAY 2012
Copyright
©
1997 by John Burdett
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, in 1997.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burdett, John.
The last six million seconds / by John Burdett –
1st Vintage Crime/Black Lizard ed.
p. cm.
1. Hong Kong (China)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.U617L37 2012
823′.914—dc23
2012001207
eISBN: 978-0-307-94861-8
Cover design by John Gall
v3.1
For Laura
PREFACE
T
HE
S
ECOND
T
REATY
of Peking of 1898 was one of the more bizarre treaties of the British colonial era. The British had already occupied Hong Kong, a small island off the south coast of Canton in southern China, by 1841, and extended their occupation to a small part of mainland Canton, known as Kowloon, by 1860. The purpose of the occupations, which were carried out by force of arms, was to establish a base from which to continue the sale of opium to the Chinese mainland, in the teeth of opposition from the emperor of China. The trade had grown so successful by the 1890s (twenty million Chinese were addicted to opium) that the British required more land, principally to ensure that Hong Kong and Kowloon could be defended in case of attack. What they extracted, more or less at gunpoint, in the Second Treaty of Peking was a lease of a larger area of land contiguous with Kowloon and stretching thirty miles north into mainland China. Although the newly acquired territory included some of the more ancient cultivated lands in the world, the British named them the New Territories. The lease of the New Territories was dated July 1, 1898, with an expiration date ninety-nine years hence: June 30, 1997.
By 1982 Hong Kong, as the entire territory was known, had become a financial miracle. The infrastructure had developed in such a way that Hong Kong Island and Kowloon could not survive without the New Territories. The prime minister of Great Britain at the time, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, was therefore forced to negotiate the return of the entire territory of Hong Kong at midnight on June 30, 1997, by means of a document known as the Joint Declaration of 1984.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A
NY
DISCUSSION
OF
Laogai
probably begins with Hongda Harry Wu’s fine and courageous book of the same name (Westview Press). My own certainly did. In addition, I thank John Carroll for telling me more about the RHKPF and Mongkok Police Station than I had found out in twelve years in Hong Kong; H. K. Law was a mine of information on all aspects of Cantonese culture; and Kay Mitchell told me how laser fingerprinting works in practice. If any of the help I received is not accurately represented in the text, it is my fault.
Special thanks too to Jane Gelfman for selling the book and to Ron Bernstein for selling the film rights almost as soon as there was a book.
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTES
H
ONG
K
ONG
IS
A
SMALL
PLACE
. There is but one governor, one political adviser, one chief secretary, only a handful of international law firms of any size and, I daresay, not very many Eurasian chief inspectors of police. To make matters worse for a writer earnestly trying to avoid defaming anyone, the manner in which Cantonese surnames are translated into English results in a narrow selection of single syllables: Wong, Chan, Lau, Kan, etc. In such circumstances one is left with no resource other than to state with even more emphasis than usual that this is a work of fiction and that no character depicted herein bears any relation to a living person.
It is not possible to write about Hong Kong without using the word
gweilo.
Literally translated from the Cantonese, it means “foreign devil” or “foreign ghost.” These days it is used in a nonpejorative sense to describe all Westerners.
It is frequently used by expatriates living in Hong Kong to refer to themselves.
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer
China ’crost the Bay!
—R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
, “M
ANDALAY
”
1
T
yphoons—“big winds” in Cantonese—start to gouge holes in the South China Sea in early April and are well into their stride by the end of the month, when the sea is already the temperature of bathwater and humidity runs at between 90 and 100 percent. Everyone avoids the water during typhoon warnings. Except fools, Chan thought.
He looked at his watch, a fake gold Rolex flaking at the edges: 3:30
P.M.
Ayya!
What had started as a search and recovery operation expected to last no more than a couple of hours had turned into a dangerous drift toward Chinese waters that was taking all afternoon.
Standing at the bows of
Police 66
, a fast motor launch belonging to the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, he moved his eyes in an arc from the sea to the sky. Darkness piling upon darkness. Sometimes the turbulence could be five hundred miles away yet drag down local clouds so dark that visibility disappeared in the middle of the day. Clouds like solar eclipses, except they lasted longer and fascinated no one.
By his side Inspector Richard Aston, twenty-four years of age, blond, imitated his movements.