Vulture Peak (35 page)

The effect on Chan is electric. The expressions that come and go on
his
face bring vividness to the word
bipolar
. Now he has wrinkled his own features and is slowly lowering one of his hands. He points at Manu. “Translate,” he hisses at me. Then: “I love you.”

“He loves you,” I tell Manu in Thai. There is no reaction from that Halloween mask. Only the eyes move. They glow with the dark energy of an edge dweller.

“I’ve been looking for you all my life,” Chan says. “You are more of a pariah than I’ll ever be. You are weirder than me, you live in an extreme atmosphere. I envy you above all men. There is no darkness you have not penetrated with your fearless gaze, no illusion you have not torn apart with your incredible ugliness.”

I translate. Manu makes a gurgling sound in his throat. His eyes are sparkling, and I wonder if the gurgling is not a form of laughter.

“I understand you because I’ve aspired to be like you, but I don’t have your courage. If I looked like you, I wouldn’t have the strength to carry on. I would have done myself in right after the operation, when they gave you the mirror and came out with a whole lot of stupid excuses.” Manu jerks the gun upward, as if encouraging Chan to continue.
“But in my small way I too live on the other side. I’m a crazy bipolar—ask this guy here—he had to rescue me from a public toilet when I was having one of my raving sessions. See, I’m not so different. You could say I’m worse—if they could look at my mind they’d find it even weirder, uglier, stranger, more inhuman even than your mug. I admire you. The integrity of your suffering and isolation is beyond anything I’ve ever come across. You are urban man in his most pure form. I would be honored to be executed by a real man instead of slowly ground down into another clapped-out cipher. Why not make me your slave, keep me here with you in your underground lair, oh King of Hades? Or kill me right now if you like.”

Manu shakes his head and turns his back. He moves like someone pottering around at home. We watch him go to the fridge where the faces are kept and lift the lid.

Chan does not take his eyes off that deformed figure. “You have to get into his mind,” he whispers. “He’s learned that without a face, he doesn’t exist. Therefore he is invisible. Now he is making himself visible to us.”

Manu has pulled out a face—it is To’s—and slapped it over his own with one hand. It remains there for a moment while he turns to look at us. The gray flesh does not resemble anything living, more a macabre mask with drooping mouth. He cocks his head coyly, as if asking if we like his new looks. Then he turns back to the fridge, pulls off To, and puts on the face of the older woman who was To’s secretary. He pirouettes and poses coquettishly.

“He’s using us as a mirror,” Chan explains. “Be polite.” Chan starts to clap, and nudges me. I also clap; the lonely sounds are quickly lost in the huge chamber. Manu takes off the dead face and stares at us. He seems perplexed. Chan has twisted his features into those of a groveling sycophant. Out of the corner of his mouth he whispers: “He is going to become fascinated with me. I’m going to prove to him that I love him. That’s your signal to run. Get the fuck out of here. This isn’t your moment. This case belongs to me. Translate what I say until I tell you to go.”

Chan drops to his knees. Manu’s gurgling is an attempt to communicate, but I cannot work it out. Something in the sounds resembles
Thai words, but there is too much distortion to be sure. Now my mind has flipped to Om: I think of her making love to this monster, perhaps spending the night with him, seeing his face on the pillow, listening to the air passing through the hole that once was a nose. And now I understand what Manu is trying to say. “He wants you to kiss him,” I explain.

Chan stands, embraces Manu, kisses those busted lips, and sinks his tongue into that mutilated mouth. Manu is holding the gun by the barrel while the stock rests on the ground. This would be a good moment to rush him. “Don’t rush him,” Chan says out of the side of his mouth. “Get the fuck out. Run. He’s too far gone to care if you escape or not. I’m his next face. That’s all he knows right now.”

But there is no need to run. Manu seems pleased with Chan. He steps back from him and balances the gun against his stomach with one finger still on the trigger. With a single jerk of his head, he tells me to go. When I turn to find the stairs, though, he shakes his head and points to a door at the opposite end of the operating room. I have the feeling he is laughing at me.

At the far end of the room, I find a door that leads to a tunnel. It is brightly lit with sparkling white tiles and extrasmooth concrete. It is far longer than I expected. I must have run more than two hundred yards when I come to a door locked from the inside. It is wider than most doors. When I open the locks, I find I’m in a garage. After a moment of reorientation, I realize it is the garage belonging to the mansion. When I examine the door, I see that when shut it fits snugly into the wall and becomes invisible. I walk to the garage’s entrance and find a button on the wall. The door folds upward. Daylight. I climb up to the balcony, go to the great glass sliding doors. Inside, the miniature stream is still tinkling over the feng shui master’s lucky pebbles. When I attempt to take out my cell phone, I drop it three times. I sit on the floor and press an autodial number.

“Master, where are you? I’ve been so worried about you.”

“Vulture Peak. Do you have the plans?”

“I have all the docs. It looks like they covered for the tunnels by obtaining a permit for full internal renovation and landscaping.”

“Bring them anyway,” I say, and hang up.

Now I hear the throb of chopper blades through the open doors of the salon. When I go out to look up at the sky, I see a small black dragonfly coming closer. I walk through the house to the front door and stand in the road to watch it land on the hillock. A diminutive figure in
smart casuals with a small backpack emerges. It is Sun Bin. I wave at him, and he runs toward me. My teeth are chattering when I explain what has happened. He seems only half surprised.

“D’you have the plans to the underground system?” he asks.

“No, they pretended it was for internal renovation and landscaping. No tunnel plans registered.”

He nods. “There has to be centralized surveillance connected to the Net. That must be how the Yips keep control.”

“Chan’s down there,” I blurt, despite having told him minutes ago.

Sun Bin spares me a glance. “He has been planning this for years. He has his own agenda.”

“Which is what?”

“Martyrdom, of course. That is his heroic nature. He was the most successful commander of special forces in the history of the Hong Kong police. He is a tactical and strategic genius. He can talk down would-be suicides and hostage takers like no one else—he understands criminals better than any cop I ever met. An enormous IQ of a hundred and sixty or something, but he uses it mostly to torture himself. He is capable of total identification with the perp.” Sun Bin scratches his temple. “In other words, he’s a total crazy. Sometimes he’s Jesus Christ, sometimes Judas Iscariot. Whatever happens, it is because he has decided to make it happen that way. He used you as he used me. He’s a kind of Sherlock Holmes on his last case—he confided to me once—but then he was in one of his bipolar moments, so it’s difficult to be clear.”

“Are you ever clear about anything?”

He shrugs. “For sixty years it was dangerous to be clear about anything in China. It still is. How do you break the habit of a lifetime? Tell me, how realistic is it to be clear about anything?”

“He planned it all?” I repeat, feeling morose. “What happens next?”

“Watch,” Sun Bin says.

As he speaks, we hear the throb of chopper blades. In my confusion I assume it is Sun Bin’s ride taking off; then I remember it took off as soon as he landed. When we go out on the balcony, we see another black dragonfly in the distance, coming closer. We go to the front door and watch from the road.

The chopper swings around to face into the wind as it lands on the big H. The first we see of a passenger is a long shapely leg. Another woman gets out on the other side. The gale from the blades sends the Twins’ long hair fanning out behind them like black wings; they are squinting. Lilly—or Polly—bends into the bubble to say something to the pilot. They both carry large designer bags, which they hoist onto their shoulders as they run to the other house. We watch while one by one they bend to look into the biometric security device. The gate opens, they disappear. I’m thinking:
This has happened before. This is what happened when To and his two assistants were slaughtered. Now that the clerk has disappeared, the whole network is put on high alert and summoned to Vulture Peak
.

Sun Bin shakes his head at the chopper and retreats into the house. He takes a tablet laptop out of his backpack and lays it on a coffee table in the salon. It is the same laptop that I saw in that condo in Shanghai. He doesn’t switch it on. “We need to look for an Ethernet jack. There has to be one somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Because the people who use this house have to know everything that’s happening in that underground network.”

We divide up the house and search for an Ethernet jack. When we hear yet another chopper, we go out onto the balcony. This one is a hefty double-bladed army bird. It dwarfs the landing pad and creates a typhoon that bends bushes and small trees; twigs and leaves take flight. We retreat inside the house and watch from the window in the maid’s room. First emerge the two
farang
election advisers, a man and a woman, who duck and run to escape the wind.

They wait while another figure emerges: squat, broad, indomitable, brutal. General Zinna is followed by his aide-de-camp, a tall, dark, handsome young officer. They walk at a smart pace toward the house. Zinna bends to offer his eyeball to the biometric gadget. The gates open, but when the rest of his party pass the gate, alarms go off. Zinna says something to his aide but does not pause in ushering the others into the house compound. The gates clang shut, and after a few minutes the alarm ceases. Silence.

Sun Bin and I exchange glances. Without a word, we go back to searching for the Ethernet jack. We’re sweating with the effort and frustrated that we can find no leads, when there is yet another noise of throbbing blades. This time it is the little black chopper from the airport. We watch while Om gets out and runs for the house. She too has security clearance. The gates open when she puts her eye to the black box and clang shut behind her. We go back to looking for the Ethernet jack.

Sun Bin has an idea. “The kitchen.”

“We already searched it.”

“It has to be disguised.”

Now Sun Bin finds the Ethernet jack behind the state-of-the-art coffee machine.

“Sneaky,” Sun Bin says. He brings his laptop to the kitchen and finds a cable in his bag to connect to the jack. I wait while Sun Bin uses a software program to search for signals from the security system. Now we are looking at a set of sixteen boxes, each one showing green images from an individual CCTV camera. A couple of clicks on the mouse, and a new set of sixteen boxes appears. In all there are ten sets, making a total of one hundred and sixty CCTV cameras.

“They must be everywhere,” Sun Bin says, looking around. When we examine one of the pages, we find a view of ourselves in the kitchen. We exchange glances. If the Yips have a laptop, which they surely must, then they will be able to see us. On the other hand, we can see them. They are under the other house in the tunnel system. They seem to be having an argument. Manu is alone in the operating theater, playing with his faces. We are unable to find Zinna or Chan.

“That tunnel system is vast,” Sun Bin says, adjusting the program. “Look.” He goes from page to page to show me the system, bathed in green light, which runs under all three houses. It’s difficult to work out from the CCTV cameras, but it seems each house owns a tunnel, and each tunnel ends at the operating theater. We hear a voice calling from the balcony.

•  •  •

“Oh Buddha,” Lek says. He is leaning against a wall of the house, breathless and soaked through with sweat. He is holding a large brown envelope.

“You climbed up the stairs?”

“The cab driver couldn’t work out how to get here—all those lanes are
soo
confusing.” He puts a hand on his heart. I take the envelope, which contains plans of the houses. In the kitchen the three of us pore over the details.

“So it works like this,” Sun Bin says. “The donor and donee are brought here separately by chopper or car and taken into the other house on a gurney. The unwilling donor, who has been kidnapped, also has been sedated. He or she is probably already unconscious on one of the operating tables when the donee arrives. The donee is laid on the other one and hooked up to life support while the diseased liver—or another solid organ—is removed. As soon as the healthy liver has been harvested from the donor, it is placed inside the donee, who has been pumped full of cyclosporine. There is no life-support system for the donor, who is left to die.

“Later, the donee, who is only half conscious for the first few days, is told that they have been brought to Phuket to relax and enjoy Thai hospitality in accordance with the contract. Basically, they wake up in this fancy mansion with a new lease on life and maybe as much as half a million dollars the poorer.

“I would guess that for maximum efficiency the Yips would try to harvest as many organs from the donor as possible, so there are plenty of occasions when two or three patients are lined up to receive different parts of the cadaver: eyes, face, kidneys, sex organs, et cetera.”

“Charming,”
Lek says. “So why were those three corpses left here on the bed in the master bedroom?”

“To and the two women?” Sun Bin looks at me. “What do you think?”

“I have no idea. It makes even less sense now.”

“Unless …” Sun Bin says.

“Oh, no,” Lek says. “You
can’t
be serious.”

I scratch my jaw. “It’s the only explanation.”