Chapter Two
I
Ellington Field was a vast expanse of grass and tarmac south-east of Houston, on the road to Galveston. It was where Air Force One would land the President when he came to the city, and where the governor would fly in and out on official trips to Washington. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration also maintained a substantial presence on the base with a huge white hangar near one of the main runways. It had three enormous air-conditioning units supported on scaffolding along either side, and vast doors that slid shut, making it an ideal staging area for handling mass casualties and multiple autopsies. It was 8 a.m., and a dozen pathologists were about to start post-mortem examinations of the bodies of the ninety-eight Chinese immigrants just over twenty-four hours after Deputy J. J. Jackson had found them on Highway 45.
Six refrigerated semitrailer rentals stood in a row on the tarmac outside the hangar doors. Four of them had sixteen bodies stacked inside on a double tier of makeshift plywood staging. The other two contained seventeen. Two teams of two from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner had worked late into the night removing the bodies from the container that had been brought down from Huntsville. Each body had been assigned a number, marked in black on a six-inch yellow plastic placard placed next to it, then individually and collectively photographed. They had been examined for gross injuries or blood and assessed for rigor mortis. Core body temperatures had been taken by making tiny incisions in the upper right abdomen and inserting a chef’s type thermometer into the livers. Finally, each foot had been tagged with the same number as the yellow placard, then zippered into a white body bag, with the corresponding number tied on to the zipper’s pull tag. Stacked in rows in the refrigerated semitrailers, they now awaited the full process of US autopsy procedure. It was not the America these Chinese migrants had dreamed of.
Margaret walked briskly through the hangar, blinking in the fierce glare of the 500-watt halogen floodlamps that illuminated the nearly twenty stations that had been set up along one side. Plastic sheeting stretched across tubular frames formed partitions between them. Twelve of the stations were purely for autopsy. Mobile tables had been wheeled into each, plastic buckets hanging below drainers to catch body fluids. Other stations were dedicated to ancillary procedures like the collection and review of personal effects, fingerprinting, dental examination, total body x-ray. Opposite the stations, tables had been set up with computers for recording their findings. Each table was manned by at least three assistants, two of whom were earmarked to help with the work in the station. The sounds of voices and the hum of computers echoed around the vast corrugated space.
It always struck Margaret as ironic that it took so much time, money and effort simply to record the passing of life. The human obsession with death. Perhaps, she thought, we imagined that by examining it in all its guises we might one day find a way of defeating it.
‘Dr. Campbell, good morning.’ Steve stepped across to greet her from the station he had been allocated. ‘Fine day for wielding the knife.’ He waved an arm around the hangar. ‘Spectacular set-up you have here.’
‘I think I gave you permission to call me Margaret,’ Margaret said.
Steve’s eyebrows, behind the anonymity of his surgical mask, were still animated. ‘So you did. I was just being polite — in case you’d forgotten.’
They cut bizarre figures in this NASA hangar in their green surgical gowns and plastic aprons, shower caps, masks and goggles.
‘Are we about ready yet?’ he asked.
‘First bodies are coming through the line now.’
Steve’s grin stretched his mask across his face. ‘See you at lunch, then.’ And he headed back to his autopsy station.
In spite of the face she had put on for Steve, Margaret was filled with apprehension. There was an encounter today she could not avoid, a confrontation with the man she wished she could hate, but knew she still loved. She turned toward autopsy station number one and felt her hackles rise at the sight of Hrycyk standing by the table waiting for her. He wore a surgical gown over tee-shirt, jeans and trainers and looked ridiculous with a green plastic shower cap pulled down on his head.
He glanced at his gown. ‘Came prepared,’ he said. A body bag was wheeled past on a gurney destined for autopsy further down the line. He grinned. ‘I guess that’s what you’d call a Chinese take-out.’
Margaret walked briskly into her station. ‘You’re a very sick man, Agent Hrycyk.’
He was quite unabashed. ‘So I’ve been told.’
Margaret spread out a cloth of gleaming knives on a stainless steel side table, and lifted the French chef’s knife that she used as her main cutting tool. ‘I’ll look forward to opening you up one day to find out why,’ she said.
II
Li was met by Fuller at Houston Hobby airport. It was the first time he had met the FBI agent, although they had spoken on the telephone. And it was his first time in Texas, although he had been in the United States for almost a year. They shook hands warmly on the concourse and Fuller took him out to the short-term car park where he had left his Chrysler Jeep.
‘Li Yan,’ he said, as if trying out the name for size. ‘I hear you guys have your family name come first.’
‘That’s right,’ Li said.
‘So that would make you, uh, Mr. Li, or Agent Li, or whatever?’
‘Just plain “Li” is fine.’
‘Uh, okay. But if I was to call you by your first name it would be Yan, right?’
‘If you wished to be familiar,’ Li said, ‘you would call me Li Yan.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Fuller glanced at him. ‘Your English is pretty good.’
Li had lost count of the number of times he had been told this, as if it was an extraordinary thing that a Chinese could speak English as well as an American. But it was his job to foster good relations between US and Chinese law enforcement agencies, and so he was always polite. ‘I was taught by my uncle from an early age,’ he said. ‘And then I spent time in Hong Kong with the British police before the handover. I also spent some time in Chicago where I learned some interesting new vocabulary.’
‘Like what?’ Fuller asked.
‘Like “motherfucker”, and “shithead”.’
‘Hey!’ Fuller laughed. ‘You almost sound like a native.’
Li had learned long ago that it amused people when you could swear in their language.
Fuller negotiated a network of roads leading through a forest of advertising billboards out on to Highway 45, where they turned south for the short trip to Ellington Field. ‘So…’ he said. ‘Criminal justice liaison. What kind of job is that exactly?’
‘Just what it sounds like,’ Li said. ‘I provide a bridge between the criminal justice organisations of both our countries. And I make myself available to help in any investigations that your people have on-going that may have Chinese involvement. Drugs, people-smuggling, computer fraud, that sort of thing.’
‘I guess,’ Fuller said, ‘you probably have your hands full just trying to keep track of the number of law enforcement agencies we have here in the US.’
Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘When I bring senior Chinese police officers to the United States to meet with senior American police officers, the Chinese are outnumbered around ten to one. My people cannot understand why you need so many agencies: the Justice Department, the FBI, the INS, the DEA, the Secret Service, the NSA…When your people come to my country it is a one-stop shop.’
Fuller laughed. ‘I like your sense of humour, Li.’