Strangled Silence (17 page)

'
Mister
Shang,' Domingues corrected her. 'He
was a surgeon, and you call surgeons "Mister", not
"Doctor". Yes, Anthony Shang. He was definitely
involved.'

'Involved in the . . . the plot?' Amina prompted
her. 'You talked about some kind of Communist
plot.'

'Oh yes,' Domingues said, nodding. 'I didn't see
much of Shang; he didn't work in the main hospital.
He was always off somewhere else, but he showed
up every now and again to consult on some of the
patients, but I never found out where he spent most
of his time. I didn't like him from the moment I set
eyes on him. Creepy sort . . . and he was Chinese,
of course.'

'Not too fond of the Chinese?' Amina asked.

'Don't get me wrong,' Domingues assured her.
'It's not because they're
Chinese
that I don't like
'em. I'm not a racist, y'know! I don't like 'em
because they're all
Communists
! People talk like the
Communist threat disappeared when the Berlin
Wall came down. But they're wrong; it's looming
larger than ever on the horizon and it eats its dinner
with chopsticks.

'It's on track to be the most powerful country
in the world now; over a billion people, all brainwashed
into hating the West! That Shang was a
typical example. He sometimes worked with the
trauma surgeons. Plastic surgery was his thing, y'see?
Making awful injuries look normal again.
Manipulation of the flesh.
Fooling the eye
. And he
was good at it; I could tell by the way the other
surgeons treated him. That was what made me
suspicious at the start. Anybody needing plastic
surgery was sent back to the hospital in Germany.
So what was he doing in Sinnostan, eh?'

She leaned forward, sipping her cocoa and
tapping the table in front of her.

'The Chinese don't like us being in Sinnostan.
It's too close to their border, but they won't go in
and clear out those terrorists themselves. Why not?
Because they're allies! And the Russians too! Notice
how they're not committing many troops. And it's
almost in their back yard too! Communists, the lot
of 'em! And don't tell me the Russians stopped
being Communists; a leopard can't change its spots.
It's in their blood, the red swines!'

The irate woman stopped to take a breath and
sip her cocoa.

'So . . . anyway. Shang. Right. There were a lot
of wounded being brought in at night by chopper
and it was hard to keep track of it all. Then one
night, I was out on the roof having a smoke when
a chopper landed on the helipad. Shang was on
board with a couple of medics and they called me
over to help them. Nobody seemed to wonder
what a plastic surgeon was doing on a chopper
coming from a battle zone. There were six
wounded and one had just sprung an arterial bleed
in his leg. Blood everywhere, like a garden hose!

'I climbed into the chopper to help with the
other wounded while they tended to the bleeder. It
was a typical batch; shrapnel injuries mostly. I think
a landmine had gone off under an APC or something
like that. Ugly business. One soldier's dressing
had come loose – on his arm – and I went to
change it. That was when I noticed something odd.'

Domingues leaned forward again and spoke in
a not-so-quiet whisper.

'The wound was clean.
Perfectly
clean. Ever seen
a wound caused by an explosion? I mean up close,
fresh after the event?'

Amina and Chi shook their heads.

'They're filthy. They've been caught in a blast,
right? Apart from the shrapnel, there's bits of dust
and sand and stone chips, sometimes glass or worse.
Major risk of infection. You normally have to pick
out the big bits with tweezers and then scrub the
small stuff out with soap and a stiff brush. Not a job
for the squeamish, I can tell you.'

Amina went slightly pale. Chi relished the
gritty details of the horror that was war.

'But this guy's wound was lovely and clean.
Shang and the others were busy, so I took a peek at
some the others' wounds. Same thing. Battle
wounds, but
without the dirt
.'

Domingues sat back and folded her arms,
raising her eyebrows at them. Amina glanced at Chi
and then sat further forward, her eyes opened a little
wider to display riveted interest.

'But what does it mean?' she asked.

'Somebody cleaned the wounds before they
were put on the chopper,' Chi mused.

'Or . . .
or
the wounds were
grown
there,'
Domingues exclaimed with one finger raised.

The two journalists sat and waited for the next
line, knowing it was going to be a cracker.

'I think that Shang is creating doppelgängers,'
she went on. 'The Chinese have come up with a
technology that allows them to change a man's
body to exactly match another's. Like a photocopier
for humans. They are taking Chinese agents
and re-forming their bodies into perfect copies of
genuine wounded soldiers.'

Amina exhaled softly. What was it with some
people that the simplest answer was never good
enough?

'Think about it,' Domingues continued.'These
soldiers are coming in from a supposed war zone
with nice hygienically clean wounds. They're confused,
they doubt their own memories, they're
being supervised not by a trauma surgeon, but by a
plastic
surgeon. After their injuries, many suffer
abrupt changes in personality. It all fits, see? The
Chinks are sending in sleeper cells – moles who
will return to the West and wait for the day they're
to be activated.

'You see, I heard him talking about it once. I
was coming out of the ladies' room and I saw him
coming and hid back behind the door. Shang was
with one of the other weirdo doctors who followed
him around sometimes; he thought they were alone
in the corridor, but I could hear him just fine. He
was really hacked off about something and he was
saying: "It sometimes takes three
days
to break them
down and rebuild them! After that we have a few
hours
to make sure their injuries fit their stories.
Does she think I can work miracles? We're not dealing
with modelling clay here! If she thinks she can
do a better job with her . . . her
zombies
, let her
come down here and try!"' Domingues paused for
a second. 'And then just as he was walking round
the corner, Shang says: "Still, it's nice to know
they'll all be taking a little bit of China back home
with them, eh? Ha ha!"'

Domingues finished the last dregs of her cocoa,
then slumped back, regarding her listeners with a
triumphant expression.

Amina stood in front of the photocopier,
hypnotized by the light sliding from one side to
the other under the cover, the soft hasty clacking of
the originals being fed in, the whishing, clucking
sound of the copies sliding out.

Communists. For decades, they'd been the bad
guys. For her grandparents' generation, fear of the
Red Menace had clawed its way into the daily lives
of everyone. The Reds weren't just behind the Iron
Curtain, they were among us. It could be anyone –
your friend, your neighbour. They plotted against us.
Everyone was afraid of what might happen. Fear of
'The Bomb'. It was hard to get her head round;
the idea that the Russians could have attacked the
Americans, or the Americans could have attacked
the Russians and that would have been it. The end of
the world. Nuclear holocaust. She had read a lot
about it. It had come closer than most people ever
suspected.

And yet it hardly seemed real now. Fear of
Communism had spawned thousands of spy
thrillers and action films and science fiction stories.
But it was difficult to think of the Russians as the
bogeymen now. For a start, she knew too many of
them on a first name basis.

As she often did, Amina imagined being back
in that time, when everyone was so afraid. It had
reached a level of hysteria in the United States in
the fifties. People would be accused of being
Communists and to prove they weren't, they would
point their fingers at others. It's not me – it's him.
It's her. The accusation was enough to ruin somebody's
life. Blacklists were made. Suspicion ruled.

Amina was sure she would never have betrayed
others like that. Who knows, back then she might
even have been a Communist herself – a socialist
revolutionary!

She found herself thinking about Ivor again. It
was hard to know whether it was the man or his
story she found so intriguing. There was something
. . . haunted about him. Even more than the
injuries, she thought, it was the sense that he'd been
betrayed that troubled him. It had made him older
than his years. She would have liked to see him in
uniform: younger, arrogant, fearless.

The light from the photocopier swished back
and forth, lulling her into a trance. She didn't
believe Agatha Domingues' story about Chinese
sleepers. The Chinese were not the new Russians,
or the new Nazis. They were not the new alien
invaders. There were no foreign devils coming over
the horizon.

Somebody was lying about this war, and that
was a betrayal of the men and women who went to
fight in it. The thought outraged her. She was a
soldier's daughter – she knew that the safety she
enjoyed today had been paid for down the generations
with the lives of soldiers.

All they would ask in return was that we
remember their sacrifice – and try and stop it from
happening again.

Ivor snapped awake with a cry, his limbs twitching
as the nightmare faded. The bloody roulette wheel
again – he wished he could figure out what it
meant. He had fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for
his friend in Kurjong to text him. There was a sour
taste in his mouth, so he went into the kitchen to
get himself a glass of water.

He had got into the habit of taking a nap in the
afternoons. When you didn't have to work for a
living, it was amazing how easy it could be to fill all
that time. Since being discharged and getting his
disability benefits, he had been unable to get work
and then, when he won the lottery, there was no
need. But the boredom had started getting to him
and when he began to suspect he was under
surveillance, he gradually sank into the scared numbness
that had prompted his desire to tell his story to
the press. Now he had a new purpose and he was
relishing the activity. But he still enjoyed the odd nap.

Amina had called to tell him about the interview
with Agatha Domingues. Ivor had assured her
that, to the best of his knowledge, he was not a
surgically altered Communist spy. But if Shang had
carried out some kind of operation on him, it
might explain why Ivor had vague, but disturbing
memories of the man. The idea that he might be
some kind of
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
-style
double made to replace his original self was just a
little far-fetched. Just because he had recently discovered
he was being watched by shadowy
government agents did not mean he was going to
buy into every conspiracy theory going. You had
to have standards.

He was in the middle of boiling milk for a hot
chocolate when a vibration in his pocket alerted
him to a text. Opening it, he read that Jenny was
ready for his call. He grabbed his jacket and a
minute later he was on the street, making for the
Tube station.

Chi had gone over his flat and shown him the
surveillance devices he found there. It had been a
chilling experience. While it was gratifying to discover
that he wasn't completely paranoid – they
were watching him after all – it was terrifying to
know that there really were people out there who
might mean him harm, and who had invaded the
privacy of his home. He could not help thinking
back to all the embarrassing things they might have
picked up since he had won the lottery – or even if
they had been listening in before that.

Ivor wanted to remove the bugs, but Chi told
him there was no point. They would be replaced.
On top of that, parabolic microphones, lasers
bounced off his windows and other long-range
listening devices could all be used and kept out of
his reach. It was better to know what was there and
watch what he said. Chi said it encouraged good
habits anyway. You never did know who could be
listening. He said this quietly, under the cover of
loud music from the stereo.

So Ivor had phoned Jenny from a cheap calls
internet café a few miles from his place, and she had
said she'd text him when she found something out.
Jenny was an ex-girlfriend; one of those who didn't
bear him a grudge. She owed him too.

The British army didn't tolerate bullying, but
there were still some young recruits being driven to
suicide by constant abuse. The army considered this
a military problem and kept the public in the dark
about it. Jenny's little brother had been victimized
during basic training and was on the edge of
despair. Ivor was in the same platoon. He dealt with
the problem by picking out the worst offender and
gently placing his hand in a bowl of water while he
slept one night. The bully woke up in the morning
to find he'd wet the bed. Ivor disposed of the bowl
of water before it was discovered. Nobody took the
bully too seriously after that.

Jenny was a lieutenant in the Signals Corps
now, working in the Media Operations Unit, and
still had a soft spot for him.

The internet café, imaginatively named Mr
Internet, was a dingy place with Silicon Valley
aspirations.

Plastic chairs were pulled up in front of old
wood-laminate school desks. The computers were
old, but in good working order, and each one was
slightly different, suggesting that the place had
evolved over time from spare parts rather than
being built to design. Mr Internet was run by a pair
of young Pakistani brothers, who had probably put
all these machines together themselves. It was open
twenty-four hours a day and there was always at
least one of the brothers behind the counter, along
with two or three other members of their family.

Ivor sat down in a white, chipboard-walled
booth, put on a headset and logged on, punching in
Jenny's home number. She picked up on the first
ring.

'Hi, babe,' she chirped. 'How's the rain?'

'Cold and wet,' he replied. 'It would make you
homesick just to see it. What have you got for me?'

'Yeeeesssss,' she muttered, and from the sounds
he could tell she was tucking the phone under the
side of her head while she reached for her keyboard.
'Anthony Shang. Couldn't find anything on
him in the personnel database – but that's not
surprising, if
anything
of what you told me is true. I
dug around for anything in the usual channels and
got nothing. Then I tried a web search on the
inconceivable off-chance that you hadn't. You didn't
do a search, did you?'

Ivor frowned.

'No. I figured anything on him would be . . .
y'know, secret.'

'Nothing's too secret for the web, babe. I
love
it.
I know you didn't do a search because if you did,
you'd have found out he has a
book
!
Making Faces:
How China's Leading Plastic Surgeon Became a Secret
Weapon in the World of Espionage.
I'm sending you
the link now.'

Ivor opened his email and clicked on the link.
The cover of the book came up, showing Shang –
definitely the same guy – in a white coat, leaning
nonchalantly against a blank white wall with his
arms folded. He wore a smug grin and an expensive
haircut. The blurb for the book read:

Ten years ago, Anthony Shang defected to
the West. He brought with him an extraordinary
tale of cosmetic surgery, Chinese politics
and high-level espionage. As the most celebrated
Chinese surgeon of his generation, he led a
double life: giving facelifts to top-ranking
Communist Party officials while also working
for Chinese intelligence, using his unparalleled
skills to change the faces and fingerprints of
key spies infiltrating Europe and the US.

Judged by British intelligence to be the most
valuable defector in decades, Anthony Shang
tells his story here for the first time. Welcome
to his world.

'Bloody hell,' Ivor exclaimed.

'Yeah,' Jenny chuckled. 'Nothing like keeping a
low profile, huh?'