The Firemaker (48 page)

‘Hey,
I’m
not going to do it.’ He seemed shocked that she should think him capable of such a thing. ‘I never hurt anyone in my life.’

‘Of course not. You only infected half the world’s population with a lethal virus.’

‘Hey, come on,’ he said, still advancing as she backed away. ‘I didn’t do that on purpose. It was an accident.’ His eyes were darting all around now, in expectation. ‘I’m sorry, all right?’

But she wasn’t listening any more. She was looking past McCord. She was sure she had seen something move in the shadows beyond the temple.

McCord toppled forward as a dull crack split the night air, pawing at Margaret as he fell, dragging her down and pushing her over so that he landed on top of her. Something hard rattled away across the flagstones and she felt warm, sticky, wet stuff all over her hands. Blood, she realised. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t get the breath. She dragged herself out from beneath McCord’s dead-weight and tried to stand, feet slipping on the patch of dark blood oozing across the stone. She fell again and found herself looking into McCord’s wide, staring eyes. An expression of complete surprise was frozen on his face in death. This time the scream came, quite involuntarily. But it sounded to her as if it had come from somewhere far away. She scrambled on all fours away from his body and her hand came down on something cold and hard – whatever it was that had rattled across the marble when McCord fell. A small handgun. She grasped it, and got to her knees, and saw a figure coming towards her from the shadows of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Raising the gun at arm’s length and clutching it with both hands, she closed her eyes and fired once, twice, three times in the direction of the approaching figure. But when she opened them again, she could see nothing and no one. She got to her feet, tucked the revolver into the waistband of her jeans, and starting running, slipping as she went, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. Across the marble terrace to the gate they had passed through from the corridor, all the time waiting for the bullet in the back. It didn’t come.

In the darkness of the corridor she felt momentarily safer. She stopped, gasping for breath, and looked back. Still she saw nothing, but she had no intention of waiting around. She turned and started running again, on weakening legs that wanted to buckle under her, pillars flashing past, the shadows of trees blurring beyond, dark and sinister. She could hear nothing but the air rasping in her lungs, the smack of her feet on the cobbles. She looked over her shoulder. She thought she saw a figure moving through the shadows, maybe a hundred yards away. She let out a little cry of despair and almost fell down the steps at the end of the corridor.

She staggered through the green-roofed gate and saw the cypress-lined avenue stretching ahead, exposed and bright in the moonlight. Beyond that, the lights of the city. It seemed an eternity away. She knew she would never make it. She heard a clatter from somewhere in the darkness of the corridor behind her, and found the motivation to get her legs moving beneath her again. She staggered more than ran, gasping for breath, a pain in her side. The heady scent of pine in the hot night air was almost intoxicating, like some drug robbing her of the will to fight for life. It would be so easy just to give up, and lie down and wait for death. But something more than fear drove her now, something more than anger. There was a reason to live, a secret to share.

She reached the first gate. But it was locked now. She grabbed the railings and almost collapsed, tears of despair running down her face. The gate was maybe seven or eight feet high. She had no strength in her arms to pull herself up. She was sure she could hear footsteps running down the avenue behind her, but could not bring herself to look. Then she saw the big round hinges at the gateposts. Big enough to provide footholds. Deep sobs tugging at her breast, she got one foot, then the other up on the hinges and pushed herself upwards, flinging an arm over the top and dragging herself over to drop with a clatter to the other side, sprawling on the warm tarmac. Her knee hurt like hell. Her jeans were torn and she was certain there was blood oozing down her shin. She glanced back through the railings and saw a figure jogging towards her between the rows of cypresses. Fifty, maybe sixty yards away.

It was enough to get her back on her feet and limping the thirty or forty feet to the outer gate. It, too, was locked now. She didn’t know how she would ever have the strength to get over it. She lunged up and caught hold of the top bar. She could see the blood on her hands in the light from across the street. Her feet slithered and scrambled for a solid hold, but the hinges were smaller. ‘Come on, come on, come on!’ she shouted at herself. Her right foot got little more than a toehold. But it was enough to give her the leverage to swing her other leg up and over the top. For a moment she hung there, waiting to hear the shot that would signal an end to it all. But still it didn’t come, and with one last effort she dragged herself over the gate and fell on to the sidewalk.

This time she didn’t linger. She was on her feet and limping across the deserted cycle lane towards the stream of traffic in the road. She saw a flash of yellow. A taxi. One of the crude baby vans they called ‘bread cars’ because they looked like loaves of bread. She ran into its headlights, waving her arms, and it skidded to a halt, the driver banging on his horn. She ran round the side of it, ignoring his curses, slid the door open and fell in. He looked back at her in astonishment. This blonde-haired, blue-eyed
yangguizi
covered in blood, her face blackened and tear-stained, shouting at him over and over again. ‘The Friendship Hotel! The Friendship Hotel!’ He saw the gun tucked into her jeans and decided not to argue. He crunched into gear and accelerated north towards the city lights.

IV

By the time the bread car reached the Friendship, Margaret’s hysteria had subsided, to be replaced by a deep, black depression. She was physically and emotionally numb. Fear had left her, and she was consumed now by only one thing: a dark, simmering anger. She wanted justice, revenge. She wanted to expose these people: Grogan Industries, Pang Xiaosheng, whoever else was complicit in this madness. She despised their brave new genetically engineered world that had put her under sentence of death, and threatened the very existence of the human race. She despised their greed for money, their hunger for power, the bloody-minded arrogance of the scientists who had used mankind as their guinea-pigs in a world they had turned into a laboratory. And most of all, she despised their cowardice in the face of overwhelming failure. There were, it seemed, no depths to which they would not sink in order to hide their guilt, to squirm away from responsibility. And she knew that since she was now the only bearer of the torch that could illuminate their culpability, they would do everything in their power to eliminate her. But she was not daunted or afraid. For she was already dead. They had done their worst. They could not kill her twice. And the worst that could happen to her was that she would fail.

She made the taxi stop in the street a hundred yards short of the hotel and thrust some notes into the driver’s hand. It was far too much, but he was not about to take issue. He was just glad to get her out of his cab so that he could report as quickly as possible to Public Security that he had been forced to pick up a wild-eyed, crazy foreign lady covered in blood and carrying a gun. It was not the sort of thing that happened to you every day in Beijing. He lit up and puffed anxiously on a cigarette as he drove hurriedly away, watching her vanish in his rear-view mirror.

She stood for a moment or two in a pool of darkness between streetlights considering what she was about to do. It was too soon, she hoped, for anyone to be waiting for her at the hotel. However, the moment she walked in covered in blood to ask for her key, she knew that the desk staff would call Public Security – probably about the same time as the taxi driver, who had watched her so carefully in the rear-view mirror all the way across town. But she desperately wanted to change her clothes, and to pick up her passport. When she went hammering on the door of the American Embassy at this hour of the night, she wanted to be able to identify herself without difficulty.

She wondered briefly about Li, what had happened, what his uncle had advised. And she felt sick at the thought that he would only have two years left before the rice virus would start destroying his life. And not just Li. Everyone in this country, and millions more beyond. She could not imagine how the hospitals and doctors would cope. They couldn’t. It was a nightmare, beyond visualisation, beyond comprehension. She looked at the traffic, the cyclists passing in the street, lights in the windows of apartment blocks. All these people. They had no idea that they had already eaten the seeds of their own destruction.

The burden of that knowledge weighed almost unbearably on her. She desperately wanted to shed and share it. But who would want to know? She had no words of comfort, could hold out no possibility of hope. The secret she wished to share with others was the intimation of their death.

Bitter tears burned her face as she turned towards the lights of the hotel and walked determinedly in the direction of its floodlit forecourt. As she passed beneath the shadow of the hoardings that marked its boundary, heading for the steps, a figure moved out of the darkness to block her way and whisper her name. She almost fainted with fright. The man stepped forward and his face was caught in the light cast by a distant streetlamp. It was Ma Yongli. He was clearly shocked by her appearance, and looked at her in open-mouthed amazement. ‘What has happened to you? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’ She had difficulty controlling the urge to fall into his arms and weep. ‘I have to change and get my passport.’ Her brain, it seemed, was only capable of following a single track. Any deviation to left or right might allow other thoughts to crowd in and overwhelm her. Her voice sounded strained and very polite. She was hanging on by a thread and said, absurdly, ‘I have to get to the American Embassy. Do you know where it is?’

‘You cannot go into the hotel,’ Yongli said. ‘The police are waiting in there.’

She frowned, confused now. She felt as if she were drunk and the world was spinning out of control. ‘How can they be there already?’

‘Things have happened,’ Yongli whispered. ‘Terrible things. Li sent me to find you.’ He took her arm. ‘I will take you to him.’ She allowed him to lead her through the darkness, away from the hotel. They turned down a side street to where a battered old Honda was parked at the kerbside. He opened the door and she slipped into the passenger seat like an automaton pre-programmed to do his bidding. All she could think was that Yongli, too, had the virus in him; that he, too, would have his life taken prematurely. Her tears fell silently in the dark. And there was so much to live for. Perhaps it would be easier for those who went first. Easier than living on while everyone around you was dying, and knowing that your turn would come. The only thing worse than death, surely, was the knowledge that your own was imminent.

‘Are you sure you are all right?’ Yongli touched her arm.

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

He peered at her for a long time in the dark, then started the engine and drove carefully off into the night.

*

The Honda eased its way gingerly through the maze of crumbling
hutongs
, picking out the life of the back streets in its headlights – card games and family meals, and groups of people just sitting about talking and smoking. Men in singlets stared curiously as the car inched by, their eyes glassy in the lights. They were all dead, Margaret thought. They just didn’t know it yet.

They were somewhere in the north of the city. Margaret had no idea where. She hardly cared. They had left the bright lights of the main street behind them more than ten minutes ago. Yongli turned left, and then right, and they found themselves in a long, narrow lane running down a slight slope. Telegraph poles rose into the night, power cables looping from one to the other. But there were no lights here. The surface of the lane was potholed and bumpy. Margaret saw that every few yards the crumbling brick walls had been daubed with large white characters within circles. Her curiosity finally aroused, she asked, ‘Where are we? What is this place?’

‘Xicheng District,’ Yongli said. ‘All these
hutongs
are condemned, marked for demolition. They will be pulled down to build new workers’ apartments.’ Near the foot of the lane, he bumped the car up on to a sliver of sidewalk and told her to get out. He got out himself, took her arm and led her away down another deserted lane, constantly glancing back to make sure they were not seen. But the area had been cleared of people in preparation for demolition. It was completely deserted. They turned through a broken archway into a courtyard littered with rubble. It was very dark, and they had to pick their way carefully to the other side. Windows all around were boarded up, and there was a stench of rotting garbage and old drains. Yongli nudged a broken old pram away with his foot and knocked softly on a wooden door with no handle. After a moment there was a soft-voiced female response from within. Yongli whispered a reply and the door creaked open. Lotus peered out at them, pale and frightened. Even without a trace of make-up she was still very pretty. She saw the state that Margaret was in and beckoned them inside. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Come quick.’ Yongli pushed Margaret gently ahead of him and Lotus took her hand, guiding her into the dark interior. ‘You okay?’ she asked. Margaret nodded, but Lotus could not see it in the dark. With great concern she led her cautiously across a floor strewn with the remnants of someone else’s life, and into a tiny back room where a candle burned in the far corner, sending flickering shadows dancing around the walls. Behind them, Margaret heard Yongli shut the door.

Li sat on a cot bed, his back to the wall, knees pulled up to his chest, smoking a cigarette. Margaret saw the tracks of tears on his face. He looked dreadful. His jaw slackened when he saw the blood on her jeans and her blouse, and he threw his cigarette away, unfolding his legs from the bed and reaching her in three easy strides. He held her by the shoulders. ‘My God, Margaret, what happened to you?’ She looked up into his face and saw the concern in his eyes, felt the heat of his hands on her shoulder.