It lit for yes.
"Do it," he said.
The pod next door opened as ordered, lights dancing through a start-up sequence. Slots in the side revealed themselves and the snake-like tubes, which were really something else altogether, blurred into smoke and became familiar: clear tubes ending in long needles.
Chuang Tzu stripped effortlessly, hooking one foot under a handle to steady himself. The jacket he removed was an improvement on Kevlar, self-cleaning, airtight but willing to let his skin breathe in everything except vacuum.
"Major Commissar Chuang Tzu," he told the pod.
"Confirm."
The young Chinese officer put his hand on a ceramic plate and felt nothing as it lit briefly then darkened just as swiftly.
"Preparing for Koebe process."
"Proceed," he told the machine, pleased to discover that his voice was almost steady.
The needles were waiting for him. One entered his arm at the elbow, pumping in sedative, followed almost immediately by an anaesthetic. And then sleep came in a crash of waves and the smell of summer skies.
Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was swimming in a waterfall on the slopes above his grandfather's farm when the pod's first blade cut his throat, a small incision wide enough to take a tube. A second blade opened the femoral artery and pumping began, glycol entering his jugular as blood drained from his groin. Chuang Tzu's stomach was then pumped and his lower bowel flushed clean.
In all the process took three minutes.
And while Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei gave orders for the SZ Loyal Prince to draw closer to the nearest wall and wondered what had happened to the last remaining member of her crew, Chuang Tzu's pod reached the end of its preparations and flooded with liquid nitrogen, reducing its occupant to the fragility of glass.
CHAPTER 20
Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]
"I did it." The boy's words were loud enough to turn every head in the police station. Behind the desk a man looked up. Moz didn't recognize his rank but Mustapha Zil was a sergeant on secondment from Tangiers, part of a plan to build bridges between the two cities. He'd been in Marrakech for three months and still found the heat unbearable.
"Tell me," said the Sergeant, running a finger under the rim of his collar, "what exactly did you do?"
"Took the watch."
Sergeant Zil raised his eyebrows. "Which watch?" he said.
Moz stopped, thought about it and started again. "You've arrested a girl," he said. "From the Mellah... She's called Malika," Moz added, forgetting her other name in his panic. It would have to do.
Sergeant Zil skimmed down a handwritten list. In Tangiers, all crimes were typed onto cards and filed. All the same, he found the entry.
"What of it?"
"She didn't take the watch."
The Sergeant looked at the boy. "You're saying you took it?" And Moz wondered why the man behind the desk sighed.
"Ahmed," Sergeant Zil called to a new recruit. "Take this boy to room three, then wait to see if they want you to bring him back again... Go with the man," he told the boy. "Don't be frightened."
It was a fairly stupid thing to say because everything Sergeant Zil had seen in his last twelve weeks suggested the boy should be very frightened indeed.
At the end of a ground-floor corridor, towards the rear of the police station, sat a row of interview rooms. Number three was the smallest, cloudy with cigarette smoke and already crowded. In one corner stood a young officer in khaki doing nothing. At a table sat two nasrani, a short-haired blonde woman in a silk blouse so sheer it revealed her breasts and a dark, hawk-faced boy with spiky black hair and some kind of hoop stuck through his ear.
Except for the difference in hair colour they might have been brother and sister, though the woman was less thin than the boy and wore white slacks to go with her blouse, while he seemed to be dressed entirely in black.
Standing opposite them was Malika, crying. A plain-clothes officer stood behind her, one hand gripping her neck.
"He says he took the watch."
Major Abbas looked round, obviously furious.
"This boy, Excellency." The recruit sounded apologetic. "He says he took the watch."
"Your name?"
"Moz," said Moz.
He watched the Major pull a nickname from his memory.
"The Turk," Major Abbas said and Malika looked up from her tears. No one had called Moz that for a while. Not since the afternoon behind La Koutoubia when he'd stamped on Hassan's stomach.
Moz nodded.
"You stole the watch?"
He nodded again.
"But its owner saw this girl steal it." Major Abbas gestured dismissively towards Malika. His hands now hung by his sides and Malika was busy rubbing her neck, trying to free it from the after-burn of the Major's grip. Opposite her sat the two foreigners looking unhappier by the second.
"Does someone want to tell me what's going on?" The blonde woman spoke English, her question hanging unheard in the smoky, overheated room.
"You're sure you took it?" Major Abbas looked serious, as well he might. Stealing from tourists was a crime treated severely in Marrakech.
The teenaged boy could get five years breaking rocks in a prison peopled with thugs three times his age. The city might have changed since the old days, when naked prisoners were sometimes made to impale themselves on broken bottles, but the change was not so great that the boy would come out the person he'd gone in.
"What is going on?" This time Celia Vere's question was loud enough to shock the interview room into silence.
"They're deciding how many times to whip her," said Moz, before anyone else had a chance to answer. He spoke broken English. "Which is unfair, because you've made them arrest the wrong person."
"Wrong...?"
"I took the watch," Moz said.
"But Jake saw her." Celia Vere looked worried.
"No," said Moz, "he thought he did. The watch was already gone. Malika was taking food from your plate."
"Why?" said the thin boy with the weird earring, although when Moz looked carefully he realized the dark-haired foreigner was too old to be a boy and that he was wearing make-up. "Why take scraps from Celia's plate?"
The stare Moz gave Jake Razor was withering. One Moz had seen used by imams in the mosque when answers were wrong. "Look at her," he ordered. "Why do you think she was stealing food?"
Catching Malika's eye, Moz sucked in his cheeks and after a second's hesitation Malika did the same, standing there with hollow cheeks and tears drying on her thin face. A bruise closed one of her amber eyes, but that looked old.
"She's hungry," said Jake.
Moz turned to find Major Abbas watching him, a weird smile on his lips.
"Children in this city die every day," the Major said flatly. He spoke French, which only Celia understood, and his tone was such he could have been discussing the heat. "They die of hunger or lack of medicine, even of lack of schooling. You'd be surprised what can kill people in this city." He looked from Moz to the foreigners.
"You accept you got the wrong child?"
Celia nodded doubtfully.
"Okay," said the Major, "so we're releasing the girl." He spoke to Malika. "You can go," he said.
The girl just looked at him.
"Go," said Major Abbas, "before I change my mind."
When the door banged shut, the Major reached into a drawer and pulled out a fistful of forms, dumping them in front of the nasrani couple. "You need to fill these out and make a sworn statement."