The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (32 page)

‘Don’t worry, Minnie. Let me tell you somefink. That’s just a subsidiary job. That’s a small job compared to what’s goin’ down over here. Our names will be glorified in ’istory for ever more, fanks to what’s ’appening ’ere. I’m sorry your fing has gone down, but believe me, baby, it’s only a sideshow.’

‘Vega, I don’t want to go down in history. They’re going to do us for murder, Vega, do you understand? Murder and kidnapping. I don’t want to be part of anything else violent or which will kill people. None of us do. We’re Vegans, Vega, we—’ ‘Gotta go, babe, see yer.’ He rang off.

Memet turned to his deputy, Dilshat. ‘Shite. The vegan thing’s gone pear-shaped on us. Bloody typical. It was goin’ fine while I was runnin’ it, and the moment I leave someone else in charge, it bloody well collapses into a bloody heap of dung.’

‘Sorry, boss.’

‘Don’t matter. Those bloody bitches will get what’s coming to them. I hope the cops beat them black and blue and lock them up for years and
years
. It’s what they deserve for lettin’ me down.’

He slumped back into the expensive armchair and put his boots up on a delicate wine table. It was a shame the veggie project had collapsed, but it was not a big deal. He had only been using the veggie groups to get himself a good network in this town so they could pull off the operation they had been planning for the past year—ever since a date for a China–US summit had been announced. That project was not going to fail. He owed it to his family, to his cousins, to his people.

Memet, though raised in London, had been brought up in an atmosphere of bitterness and resentment against the Chinese government. The house in bland, chilly Crouch End had been such a step down for his parents, who had previously lived as royalty under the shadow of the sweeping plains and glorious mountains of Xinjiang. His father had continually stoked his children’s anger by telling them that they would have been kings or princes of a place bigger than Western Europe had not the Chinese invaders made their lives intolerable.

When he had first visited China himself, three years earlier, he had been taken to a Uyghur restaurant in Shanghai. His countrymen were there, dressed in ridiculous clothes, dancing and prancing like buffoons for the entertainment of a party of Chinese officials. He quickly learned that in the main cities of China, Uyghur restaurants were thought of as places to go for a laugh. You ate disgusting food from a shocking menu and watched primitive ethnic people cavort in colourful clothes. And the menus really were revolting, particularly to a vegetarian like himself. A standard Uyghur restaurant menu in Shanghai would offer kebabs and lamb pancakes, but people inevitably ordered the more bizarre items on the menu so that they could sneer at the weird stuff ethnic people ate. Adventurous diners would roar with laughter at the menu and then fashion themselves nightmare meals from it. They would typically start with Raw Cold Jellyfish (20 yuan), and then move on to Drunk Horse Intestines (25 yuan), before focusing on Raw, Cold Sheep’s Head (39 yuan).

Chinese and Westerners would laugh and gloat over the horrors of the menu, and then sneer at the dancers. The men would wear white or red Russian-style outfits with belts that were thicker and more bejewelled than anything Elvis ever wore in Las Vegas. The women would be subservient, well-covered up in trouser suits and hats, flitting around the restaurant laying down dishes for people to guffaw at.

On that first visit, Jappar had watched with morbid fascination. His father, sitting next to him, had tears rolling down his cheeks at the circus acts to which his noble people had been reduced.

Previously Jappar had felt distanced from his past, thinking of himself more as a Londoner than a Uyghur, but that evening something angry and cold was born inside him: a patriotic fury against the people who had turned a rich, proud people living in majestic mountains into an oppressed and poverty-stricken tribe of desperate souls selling their millennia-old traditions for a few paltry yuan.

And then he had met Zhong Xue Qin. Initially, he had nothing but contempt for the willowy Shanghainese activist who was causing trouble in the family-owned supermarkets run by his uncles, but underneath her slogans he quickly found much to admire: she hated the Chinese government just as he did. She was a passionate vegetarian just as he was. She knew how to channel her anger into fighting for what she believed in—something that he wanted desperately to learn to do.

They had become lovers, then a married couple, and then partners in crime. He had encouraged and financed her operations—including the raid on Shanghai Second Medical University that had killed her. Her death had driven him to suicidal despair for months. But he had emerged stronger, harder, meaner, and more determined to fight for his beliefs and the causes for which she had died. It was the Chinese government that had cruelly destroyed the ancient Uyghur culture. And it was in China that the cruellest meat-eaters dreamed up the most evil ways to torture and kill live animals. And so he had founded the Children of Vega, to revenge Xue Qin’s death and get China’s oppression of the Uyghur people right to the top of the international agenda.

And how better to achieve that than to kill the world’s two most powerful individuals: the pair of Presidents identified in his complex plan as Px2?

Bomb disposal officer Sam Donaldson arrived on the biggest bike they had. Dooley abandoned the Caddy XLR to Ari Tadwacker and climbed onto the back. ‘You drive. We’ll go together. We kin tock. Git on the sidewalk if you have to.’

Donaldson twisted the handlebars and the 1450 cc Harley Davidson Electra-Glide Classic roared into life, skidding its 800 pounds of shiny heft smoothly up onto the pavement. It seemed effortless. Dooley felt like he was sitting on an intercontinental ballistic missile. Now this was American power at its best.

The bomb disposal expert was clearly still struggling to get a grasp on what was going on. He flipped up his visor and talked through the side of his mouth at the man behind him. ‘I know you heard something ticking inside the elephant, but how likely is it that there really is a bomb in the elephant?’ he shouted. ‘I mean, this could just be a trick that the Chinese are pulling, couldn’t it? Something to distract us so that they can get POTUS?’

‘Ah realise that. The whole thing cud be a set-up. A plot to kill POTUS. The trouble is, that makes it worse. Terrorists are bad enough, but to have the Chinese against us, here in their heartland—it don’t bear thinking about. We jest better pray—’ ‘Yeah, but what I mean is, do we know it’s a bomb for sure? The creature may just have, I don’t know, eaten a bloody alarm clock or something, you know what I mean? It sounds unlikely that anyone could put a bomb into a live animal.’

‘You’d need too much explosive material, you mean?’

Donaldson thought about this. ‘Well—I don’t know. You’d need a hell of a lot of material. I mean, to have a reasonably big effect.’

‘Plastic explosive?’

‘Got to be. Probably Semtex. If you had Semtex, I guess it could be done.’

‘How do you figure that?’

Donaldson saw a gap suddenly open up in the traffic and he skipped through it, powering a good hundred yards before having to ease off and sneak into a space between two buses, creeping forward.

‘Semtex is malleable,’ the bomb expert continued. ‘You could take the stuff and flatten it to fit in the fat layer, under the skin, under one of the layers of epidermis, I suppose. I mean, arguably they could even shape it to fit around the creature’s organs in some way. That’s why plastic explosive is used so much in demolition—you can flatten it or shape it in any way you want and get the bang exactly where you want it.’

‘So you’re telling me that it really is possible.’

‘It might be. If you want God’s honest truth, I reckon it just might be. A thin slab of plastic explosive might work,’ Donaldson said, adding: ‘It’s probably Semtex A.’

‘Relevance?’

‘Hard to detect and, until recently, quite easy to get hold of. Comes from Semtin, a place in Bohemia.’

‘There’s a real place called Bohemia?’

‘You live and learn, Doolster. The stuff is made by Explosia, a company in Bohemia. Semtex A is strong stuff: it’s ninety-five per cent PETN, which stands for Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, and five per cent RDX, which stands for Research and Development substance X.’

‘Sounds like something from a James Bond movie.’

‘In the explosives business, true life is way weirder than any James Bond movie. The story goes that a military research and development department created the stuff, and then temporarily labelled it RDX while they thought up a proper name. They blew themselves to pieces before they came up with a name, so RDX is what we’re stuck with.’

‘How much Semtex do you need to cause a big bang?’

‘Hardly any. That’s the problem. That’s why it’s such a headache. With two fifty grams, you can take down a 747.’

‘Geez.’

‘A single suicide bomber can carry sixty pounds of explosive. But we’re talking about an elephant. If they had a hundred or two hundred pounds of the stuff in there…’ ‘You could cause a pretty big bang.’

‘Yeah, I guess you could.’

The bus on their left moved slightly, making a gap big enough for the Harley to squeeze through. Donaldson spun the accelerator and the Harley sped back onto the pavement and roared forward.

They nipped nimbly between the bollards blocking vehicles from proceeding into the Nanjing Dong Lu pedestrian precinct and revved up, sending crowds of shoppers and sightseers scrambling out of the way.

‘Thank God. Now we got ’em,’ Dooley said, the ghost of a smile finally illuminating his cracked lips.

‘Does the name Vega mean anything to you?’ Sinha was sitting in Shang Dan’s luxurious apartment, a minimalist loft-style residence hidden behind a red-brick façade in Old Town.

Shang Dan stroked his long thin beard and considered the question. Dressed in silk robes, the local
ming shu
expert had clearly modelled his image on the statue of Confucius in the temple on nearby Wenmiao Lu.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

This was followed by a lengthy pause. Sinha said: ‘Would you like to share it with me?’

‘Hmm? Oh yes. Of course, of course.’

But nothing more was forthcoming for at least a minute. Shang Dan, like a nervous witness undergoing cross-examination in a court, liked to think about his answers before delivering them. ‘Vega is a star,’ he said eventually. ‘It is in the constellation called Lyra. It is a key element of our astrological system, along with the Pole Star. We use Vega in many of our calculations in the
ming shu
.’

‘Would there be any political relevance to an activist of some sort naming themselves after the star Vega?’

Shang Dan thought quietly for a minute. ‘No.’

Sinha sat back in his chair. This was proving frustrating. He seemed unable to elicit any information from the astrologer that could prove useful. What other line of inquiry could he take? Perhaps he should lay the entire situation before the man and see what conclusions he drew from it.

‘There have been a number of odd things happening over the past day,’ he said. ‘We need to find out whether they are connected and where they are leading. First, Mr Wong’s office was unexpectedly demolished. Then, an associate of Joyce McQuinnie, Mr Wong’s assistant, had her child kidnapped. This was followed by Mr Wong and his assistant being kidnapped by another branch of the same gang—a gang which appears to be run by someone named Vega. The gang is very interested in the meeting of the two Presidents.’

Shang Dan pondered for a while, and then shook his head. ‘This is Shanghai. Offices get demolished every day. Kidnappings are not so common, but they happen. The newspapers usually do not report them. Everyone is interested in the meeting of the two Presidents. Everyone in the world. And Vega. That name means nothing to me.’

Sinha was disheartened. But then something that Joyce had said when he had dropped Linyao in the city centre stuck in his mind. She had told him to find out anything he could about Vega. And she had added: ‘Oh yeah, Wong says it might not be Vega. It might be pronounced
weega
.’