Strangled Silence (25 page)

Chi spent the Sunday morning online, catching up
with his posse and trading information. He
couldn't go and check Nexus's safety deposit box
until the following morning, so he could only guess
at what Nex had done to get himself nobbled.
Although knowing Nexus, that could have been
anything.

Chi finished up his online liaisons and then
picked up Shang's book. Ros appeared and jumped
onto his lap, curling up in the warmth as he read.
Shang had led an extraordinary life, if you were to
believe everything he wrote. This was difficult
because he wrote with such opinionated smugness
that you didn't
want
to believe anything he
said.

His career in intelligence had begun while he
was studying medicine in Boston, where he had
been tasked with gathering information on
bioengineering research at the world famous
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From there,
he went on to study at Queen's University in
Belfast, learning under some of the most experienced
plastic surgeons in the world, who had
honed their skills during nearly thirty years of the
'Troubles'. His Chinese masters had little interest in
Northern Ireland, however, and once he qualified as
a surgeon, he was persuaded to take a post in
London, where he continued getting involved
in research programmes and feeding the information
back to his government.

Most of the beginning of the book,
Making
Faces: How China's Leading Plastic Surgeon Became a
Secret Weapon in the World of Espionage
, consisted of
one boasted achievement after another. Shang's
career went from strength to strength until the day
he tried to carry out the world's first face transplant
on a burns victim and it went horribly wrong. He
was sued by the unfortunate patient, hounded by
the media and ostracized by the medical establishment,
accused of suffering from 'God Syndrome'. In
the book, he described all this with suitable outrage
and not a hint of remorse, pointing out that if he
had succeeded he would have been hailed as a hero.
He returned to China and built up a successful
practice making the country's new generation of
millionaires beautiful. Soon, he began working on
key government figures too.

By late afternoon Chi was suffering from ego
overload and in need of some food. His cooking
skills did not extend much beyond putting a plastic
container in the microwave or sticking a breadcrumbed
something under the grill, and he felt like
he should get some proper nutrition, so he decided
to go out for dinner.

There were only a few places where Chi felt it
was safe to eat. It would be all too easy for someone
to slip him some kind of drug in his food – a
move that could lead to all sorts of compromising
situations. One of these places was Kato's, a Japanese
sashimi restaurant where you could choose dishes
from a conveyor that glided around the oval-shaped
counter. Chi made a point of picking dishes at
random, just to be on the safe side.

Chi sat alone at one end of the counter, as he
usually did, watching the other punters watch the
chefs. There were a lot of couples, and he felt pangs
of loneliness as he observed the little affectionate
touches they shared, the way some pairs looked
comfortable together, talking casually, while others
were obviously new to each other, self-conscious
and attentive. They all looked so blissfully unaware
of the kind of world they were really living in.

Chi was not a typical conspiracy nerd. A
mixture of wealthy upbringing and cosmopolitan
parents had given him the kind of social confidence
sadly lacking in many of his comrades, and his
journalism work meant he got enough chances to
meet people. He had broken up with his last girlfriend
a few months ago, for the usual reason: his
obsession was too much for her. She told him he
needed to get a life.

His thoughts turned to Amina. There was a girl
who shared his obsessive nature, but he'd seen the
way she had been looking at Ivor lately. It didn't
really surprise him; Ivor had the appeal of being a
more . . .
experienced
man, as well as having that
sadness, that haunted quality that girls seemed to
swoon over. It didn't hurt that he was loaded too, of
course. None of this stopped Chi from daydreaming
about her; a selfish part of him assured him that
her attraction for Ivor would end the first time she
saw him without his glass eye. The fact that she was
a social girl and was probably surrounded by
admirers did little to subdue Chi's fantasies.

By the time he left the restaurant, it was after
eight and an overcast sky meant it was already quite
dark. As he walked home, his eyes moved ceaselessly,
ever watchful for anything suspicious. Once
again, he felt lonely. He was tired of all this. There
were times he wished he was unaware of all the
games that were being played beyond the public
eye. He could be living a much more peaceful life
if only he'd grown up a little less suspicious.

It was his father's fault. Back when Chi was
only ten and his parents were still together, his
father – then only a talented programmer yet to
make his fortune – had told him about a database
he was debugging for the Royal Air Force. The
information stored on it included UFO reports by
air force pilots. There were hundreds of them. Chi's
father, in direct violation of his contract and the
Official Secrets Act, had brought a few of these
reports home to show his son. After one night of
reading, Chi was hooked. Four years later, he was
able to hack into the systems at RAF Headquarters
in High Wycombe and have a look around for
himself.

Trudging along the road towards his house, Chi
thought about those first reports he read, years ago.
He could explain a lot of them now, having become
something of an expert on the subject. Most UFOs
were cases of mistaken identity, misinterpretation,
hallucinations or drugs. But there were a few – a
fraction of a percentage – that defied explanation
no matter what way you looked at them. The RAF
pilots' reports still impressed him the most. These
were men and women who had to keep cool heads
while flying at high speeds with jet engines roaring
behind them. They were trained to observe and
report accurately. They could identify the shapes of
other aircraft, judge their speed and bearing, track
them on radar – if possible – and even chase
after them if they chose to. They were not given to
making sensationalist claims. Most did not want to
be associated with UFO sightings and were reluctant
to call them in. Those were the reports that had
changed Chi's life.

A movement near the roof of a house caught
his eye and he looked up . . . just in time to see
something flicker out of sight behind the roof 's
gable. The sky was a gunmetal grey, mottled with
black, and Chi stared for a minute or two, searching
for the source of the movement. There was a line of
trees silhouetted against the house lights from the
next street and he was just about to turn away when
he spotted something gliding along just beyond and
below the tops of the trees. Then, in a sudden
spiralling motion, it rose straight up into the sky
and disappeared.

Chi stood motionless for some time, willing
the thing to come back. Strangely, he felt inclined
not to believe what he had just seen. He tried to
rationalize it, to work out what ordinary, everyday
sight he could have misinterpreted. After all, hadn't
he just been thinking of UFOs? Was there some
part of him that wanted to see one so badly it
would twist his own perceptions to fool him? Had
he been chasing shadows for so long he was actually
starting to see them?

In a state of disappointed confusion, he made
his way home.

It took some time to convince Ivor, once the
sedative wore off, that he was in a normal, overcrowded,
understaffed NHS accident and
emergency ward and not some secret military
installation. And even then, he insisted on hobbling
outside to take a look around and satisfy himself
that the doctors and nurses were telling the truth.

They were equally bemused by the fact that he
was more concerned about the loss of a ceramic
tooth implant than the danger that his glass eye
might have been damaged, or indeed, the bullet
wound in his side. There were two police officers
waiting to take his statement – bullet wounds had
to be reported – but they were forced to humour
him first by escorting him to the exit while he
carried out his confirmation of the staff 's claims
about their so-called hospital.

When he gave his statement, he kept it vague,
being careful not to mention the fact that he had
started the fight, or that the assailants' faces were
invisible, saying instead that they had been wearing
tights on their heads. The constables did not
seem satisfied, but they took his details and said
they'd be in touch if they had any more questions.

His wound had been dressed; the grazes down
his face where it had hit the ground were too
minor to need bandaging. One of the junior
doctors – a round-faced Indian woman with a cute,
gurgling voice – sat him down and asked to take a
look at his glass eye and the eye socket, to ensure
that the impact had not caused any damage. Ivor
took the eye out, examined it carefully and declared
that it was fine. With everything that was going on
in his mind, the mash of images, memories and
sensations, he found it hard to concentrate on what
the woman was saying:

'Sorry, what?'

'Can you hold back the lids for me, so I can
have a look inside?'

'Oh, right.'

Ivor obliged, pulling the lids open so the doctor
could point the light of her examination lens into
the socket. She rotated the light from one side
to the other, tilting it to examine the roof and floor
of the empty hollow in Ivor's head. She frowned
and leaned in closer.

'There doesn't seem to be any recent damage,'
she told him. 'And there's no sign of infection. But
there's a mark here that looks a bit odd to me. It
could just be part of the original scarring, but . . .'

Grabbing a piece of paper and a pen, she drew
something on it. Then she stared at her own drawing
for a minute.

'It looks almost like . . . Hang on a second.' She
called over to another doctor on the far side of the
room, an oriental man who looked about fifteen
and had a haircut that would have looked more
appropriate on a skateboarder. 'Joe? Can you have a
look at this for me?'

'Anything for you, Immy,' he replied with
mock gusto as he came over. 'What's up?'

'Does this look like a Chinese character to
you?'

He studied the drawing for a moment.

'Could be. Could be,' he mused. 'It's hard to tell
– your penmanship sucks, baby. Where'd you get it?'

'It's in here,' Ivor told him, pointing towards his
empty socket.

Joe picked up the examination lens and peered
into the socket.

'Yeah,' he chuckled. 'That's the weirdest thing.
Like seeing Christ's face on a mossy wall, huh? It's
a word all right. Could mean a few things, but . . .'

'Does it say "Shang"?' Ivor asked.

Joe leaned back, lowering the lens.

'Yeah. That's what it could be. How did you
know?'

Ivor thought about what the Filipino nurse had
heard Shang saying once, some time ago: 'It's nice
to know they'll all be taking a little bit of China
back home with them.' Ivor shook his head at the
arrogance of the man.

'The bastard signs his work,' he said.

It was Monday morning, and Amina sat in abject
misery while Goldbloom listened to all of her
recordings and read her notes. His face was impassive,
but she knew her mother had been on to
him and Amina doubted it had been a pleasant
phone call.

'This was supposed to be a mental health
piece,' he said at last.

'I followed it where it led,' she replied.

'Following doesn't mean going around with
your eyes closed,' he snapped. 'You've got nothing
here except conjecture and wild leaps of imagination.
You can't print anything without some kind
of evidence and—'

'That's why I didn't want to show it to you!'
Amina retorted. 'I
know
it's not ready.'

'I rang some of my contacts in the Ministry of
Defence this morning,' Goldbloom told her. 'I asked
them if the army or the intelligence services had
ever carried out mind control experiments and
they
laughed
. They laughed! You see, it's not that
nobody's tried it – hell, everybody's tried it in one
form or other – it's just that it never works. It's the
stuff of movies and spy novels and conspiracy
theories.'

This was becoming a sensitive subject for
Amina. She was starting to worry that even if she
did find some evidence to back up Ivor's suspicions,
nobody would believe it because of Chi's fanatical
conspiracy network. If their story got lumped
together with the likes of Area 51 or the Princess
Diana 'assassination', it would never make it to
print. She'd have to talk to Chi and Ivor about that.

'So you asked them and they said "no" and
you're leaving it at that, are you?' Amina snorted.
'Whatever happened to investigating a story?'

'Don't take that tone with me, girl. You're on
thin ice as it is.'

'Did Mum tell you about the funeral card?'

'Yes, and she doesn't believe for a second that
it's for real. We've run into the likes of Chi
Sandwith before. They have a tendency to get a bit
caught up in their own stories.'

'It was left in my room while I
slept
,' Amina said
through gritted teeth.

'And you couldn't have picked it up
somewhere by mistake and dropped it there somehow?
Somebody couldn't have slipped it into your
bag, or into your pocket, without you seeing? You
need to keep your wits about you in this game,
Amina. There's a lot of sharks out there looking to
pull a fast one on an inexperienced young girl.'

Amina bridled at his tone. Could he have been
any more patronizing?

'I'm handing this story on to Rob. He'll follow
up your leads and see where they take him, but I
promise you this is all going to turn out to be the
ravings of a few would-be mental patients. I'll make
sure he keeps you informed – you've put a lot of
work into this and you'll get a byline if it ever goes
to print.'

Amina scowled. Rob wasn't much older than
her, and he'd be too precious with his new brief to
let her get involved. Now, on top of the humiliation
of having an investigation taken off her, she'd have
to put up with him lording it over her in his wideboy
way.

This wasn't the end of it. She would call Ivor
this afternoon. There was no way she was going to
be left out of this now.

'And don't think you're going to go it alone,'
Goldbloom said, reading her thoughts. 'You're back
on office duty full-time. If I catch you posing as a
Chronicle
reporter to anyone, you're out of a job,
d'you understand me?'

She glared at the floor, grinding her teeth.

'Yes,' she said. 'I understand.'

Despite Goldbloom's insistence that she return
to her role of office temp, Amina discovered there
was a lull in the need for coffee, photocopies or
typing, so she was left to her own devices. She used
the time to go back over the archives on the server,
searching for stories on Sinnostan or any mention
of Anthony Shang. There was a review of his book
in a back-issue of the
Sunday Literary Supplement
:
'A self-satisfied, conceited and barely believable
trip through the memoirs of one of this century's
leading surgeons. Compulsive but cringe-inducing
reading.'

There was also an article on his 'defection'
to Britain, eleven years before. He had flown to
London for a conference and then refused to go back.
He claimed that the Chinese had tried to have him
assassinated on a number of occasions, because of the
sensitive information he had gained through his
contacts with his nation's leaders. Apparently, he had
only escaped these murderous attempts through sheer
cunning. The Chinese had claimed he was a fantasist
and naturally dismissed his claims as hogwash. Shang
had gone into hiding and it was rumoured that he
was now working with British intelligence.

British intelligence? She sat back, staring at the
screen. Amina remembered how the police had
handed round Shang's name and photo to all the
reporters in the paper, claiming he was a terrorist –
some kind of bio-weapons expert. She wondered
why nobody had recalled this article. Had they just
forgotten, or were they inclined to believe the
police over their own sources? If Shang had been
working for British intelligence, could they be
involved in whatever was going on in Sinnostan?
Maybe some secretive little branch with their own
agenda? Then, if the police were looking for Shang
because the intelligence services were saying he
was a terrorist . . . Amina tilted her head up and
gazed up at the ceiling. Had Shang done a runner?
Maybe he had and they were afraid he'd talk.
He could be thinking about writing another
book.

But what she couldn't understand was why
nobody else had picked up on this gap between his
old story and the police's new one. Anybody could
find out what she'd just discovered. Of course,
they'd have to be looking—

A two-inch-thick document slammed down
on the desk, making her jump. Marie, one of the
crime correspondents, was standing over her. She
was a curiously asexual woman, with a short practical
haircut, no make-up and a rumpled blue suit
that hid her shape. Like many reporters, she always
looked like she needed more sleep.

'Sorry, did I wake you?' she said, smiling. 'Copy
that for me, Amina? Drop two copies in to editorial
and one into legal?'

Amina got a lot of that. A command with a
question mark tagged on the end to be polite. She
nodded and picked up the document.

'Quick as you can, thanks!' Marie grinned
again as she walked away.

Ten minutes later, Amina was wrestling
with the photocopier again. A page had got lost
inside the machine. It seemed to have completely
disappeared. The symbol on the little screen told
her there was a paper jam, but it refused to tell her
where. After a careful look inside the machine, she
tried to switch it off and switch it back on again.
The copier politely reminded her about the paper
jam, reiterating its point that it could not work until
its insides were sorted out.

Sitting on the floor, she braced her feet against
the wall and heaved the machine out far enough to
allow her to reach behind it and pull out the plug.
Then, after waiting a few seconds to ensure that
the last dregs of electricity had drained from the
machine, she opened the copier and began feeling
around between the heavy, finger-mashing rollers.

Amina was so absorbed in what she was doing
that it took her a minute or two to notice what was
going on in the newsroom outside. The place
was erupting into activity. She leaned out of the
door and looked around. Everyone was on their
feet, grabbing jackets, notebooks, recorders and
cameras and making for the doors. Goldbloom and
a couple of the other editors were shouting orders.

'Amina, I have to go to Heathrow,' Marie called
to her, stuffing a bottle of water into her bag. 'Can
you do something for me?'

'Eh, sure. What's going on?'

'Terrorist alert. There's been some kind of
threat reported against the airports. The army's
surrounding them all – big bloody tanks and
armoured cars and everything. Goldbloom wants
everyone to drop what they're doing and get out
and see what's going on, but I promised this old
woman I'd see her today. It's just a small story, but
she's a sweet old bird and I've cancelled on her
twice already. Here are the details.' She handed
Amina a piece of paper. 'Apologize for me, yeah? I'll
give you a byline, OK? See ya!'

And with that, she was gone. Amina looked
down at the sheet of paper. Goldbloom had made it
clear she wasn't to do any reporting, but this hardly
counted. It wasn't to do with her own story and
anyway, she was covering for Marie at her request.
It would be a shame to let the old lady down.

Amina turned her back on the photocopy
room, put on her jacket and picked up her bag. She
scribbled a note explaining where she had gone and
left it on the desk she'd been working at. It would
be a good idea to check with Goldbloom, but he
might say no, and anyway, the woman didn't live
too far away. The newsroom was almost completely
empty. Amina should be back before anybody
noticed she was missing. She hurried out, biting
back a smile.

After Chi and the clerk used their dual keys to open
the safety deposit box, the clerk pulled out the
drawer, leaving the lid closed. She took Chi into a
small room and left him alone to open the drawer,
which was about the size of a box of A3 photocopy
paper. He watched her close the door before lifting
the lid.

As he expected, the box was full of disks.
Nexus's back-ups. Here was what he called 'the
Essentials Collection' – all of the most important,
most sensitive information he had gathered, along
with the theories he was putting together on the
various plots he was intent on cracking. To Chi's
surprise, there was also a Ready-to-Go mobile
phone and a disguise kit filled with wigs, different
kinds of facial hair, make-up and even contact
lenses for changing eye colour. Tucked into a
pocket in this kit were a couple of false passports
with credit cards in the same names, some cash in
pounds, euros and dollars and a small can of Mace
pepper spray. Chi would have expected to find a
gun among all this fugitive paraphernalia, but that
wasn't Nex's style. Deep down, he was a gentle soul.

Chi put everything into his backpack, slipping
the Mace into his pocket, and was about to
close the lid when he paused. There was a certain
finality in the act, as if by committing it, he was
taking over Nex's life. He grimaced and clicked the
lid shut.

His mobile rang as he left the bank and he
lifted it to his ear.

'Hi, it's Ivor. We need to meet up.'

'Fine. My place in an hour.'

'See you then.'

'Bye.'

Chi hung up. It was best to keep phone calls
short and mobile calls even shorter. So much for
keeping their distance. Chi wondered what had
prompted Ivor to break their short-lived silence.