Could Captain Chen be trusted with those lives?
Maybe Captain Chen thought that Dalong Fada was a dangerous enemy that needed to be stomped out. Maybe he feared cults in general. Maybe there was a secret Captain Chen that Fong had never met who harboured ambitions within the Shanghai police force and would use information like this to advance his own career.
Maybe Chen was as irrationally jealous of him as he had been of Geoff.
Fong stared at the man. “How’s my daughter, Xiao Ming?”
Chen blushed, “Getting used to having me around. She knows I’m not you. It’s clear she misses you. But I try to give her what little I can. I am not much of replacement for you, sir.”
Chen’s answer was so devoid of guile that Fong relaxed. Chen was exactly what he seemed to be – an honest, absolutely good man. And loyal. Xiao Ming was lucky to have such a man in her life.
All that was true, but what Fong failed to consider was: loyal to whom?
Fong handed Chen the CD-ROM. Chen then wrapped the CD-ROM with the hard drive in newsprint he took off Fong’s desk, turned on his heel and headed toward the door.
“How’re you going to destroy those things?”
“I’m not. There’s no sure way to do that. I’m going to lose them.”
“What?”
“I’m going to take a stroll across the new bridge to the Pudong and they’re going to happen to fall into the muddy waters of the Huangpo River. The silt is so thick there that even if they sent divers down there’s no chance they’d ever find them.”
He smiled. Fong smiled back.
“That’s all right, sir?”
“It’s fine . . . and thanks.”
As the door closed behind Captain Chen, Fong wondered at the new alliances that were now central to his life. Fu Tsong used to quote Shakespeare about just this sort of thing. Something about circumstance making strange bed-fellows. Then Fong stopped. Another of Fu Tsong’s favourite quotations from English writing had popped unbidden into his consciousness: “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.”
Fong eyed the first number on the list he had taken from the CD-ROM. He knew there was no point trying to find an address from the phone number because Shanghanese used cell phones almost exclusively and almost everyone prepaid for time used so there was no billing required. In theory, cell phone buyers had to give an address when they got a phone number, but everyone lied. Even Fong, on a reflex, had lied when he got his first cell phone. In fact, there was no incentive to tell the truth since there was not even a remote chance of being caught for such a violation of the law. Shanghanese purchase thousands of cell phones a week. In fact, without cellular technology there was no way that the economic miracle that had taken place in Shanghai could have happened. It would have been an insurmountable expense to have wired all of Shanghai.
Fong punched in the number. The cell phone was answered on the third ring, “Dui.”
The accent was Shanghanese, the background noise that of a large kitchen.
Fong spoke using the first word in the coded sequence. There was a brief silence on the other end. Then a coded word was buried in the man’s response. Fong looked at his notes to find the word’s meaning. The word was soup – tang - and it meant be careful, I’m being watched.
The man on the other end of Fong’s call was not the only man being watched at that time. Captain Chen’s stroll along the bridge to the Pudong was observed as was his entrance to central stores and his exit with a small plastic-covered package – by another set of wary, feral eyes. These eyes belonged to Shrug and Knock, who quickly reported to Li Chou.
As Chen returned to Fong’s office with the bug for the cell phone that had the wireless Internet access for Xi Luan Tu, the desk phone in Fong’s office rang. “It’s for you, Captain Chen,” Fong said holding out the receiver.
Chen hesitantly took the phone, listened for a moment then said, “Thanks. I owe you one or maybe two.” He handed the phone back to Fong.
“Captain Chen?”
“It’s good to have friends in low places, sir. They help situations become opportunities not problems.”
Fong laughed. It was the first joke that Chen made that Fong understood. Chen blushed. “Is your friend more powerful than our friend’s friend, Captain Chen?”
“Much, because he’s lower.”
“And you’re sure that you were followed?”
“Oh, yes, quite sure. They didn’t pay any attention to what I dropped off the bridge to the Pudong but I made sure they saw me pick up these. ” Chen smiled and unwrapped the two electronic bugs. One was attached to the other. Then he held out his hand for the cell phone with Internet access.
As Fong gave him the phone, a darkness crossed Captain Chen’s features. “What?”
“Remind me how following the cell phone will help us find who killed Mr. Hyland?”
“Mr. Hyland was involved in a pretty risky enterprise. Perhaps someone in Dalong Fada, perhaps someone in the Beijing security services, perhaps someone who’s only peripherally involved with all this had it in for Mr. Hyland. I don’t know exactly, Captain Chen, but at this point in a murder investigation every lead has to be tracked down.”
Chen thought about that for a moment then asked, “Are you going to tell the commissioner about the data on the CD-ROM?”
Fong hesitated then said, “No.”
“I assume you haven’t told the two men from Beijing who were with Mr. Hyland either?”
Fong said nothing.
“I see,” said Chen. He opened the cell phone and planted one of the electronic bugs. “This tiny guy sends out a signal that I can receive on my PalmPilot. It lets you and me track the phone wherever it goes. And this little fellow . . . ” he said, placing the second bug in the cell phone snuggly against the first one, “. . . this one lets them follow the phone too – as long as we want.”
“And when we don’t want them to follow it anymore?”
“I dial 555 555 555 1.”
“And dialling that number . . . ?”
“Cancels the signal from their bug and starts up a new signal from our third little friend.” Like a magician at a country fair, Chen produced a third bug from the recesses of one of his baggy pant pockets and held it in the palm of his hand.
Fong watched Captain Chen complete his task.
He did not fail to notice that all of Chen’s last statements were said without the use of the word: sir.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Xi Luan Tu hoped it was like being a mist inside a fog – either that or this hiding in plain sight was just a way of fooling himself. No doubt the truth would be evident soon enough. He glanced over his shoulder. The southern alley entrance to what as a kid he called “the warrens” was just a quick bolt away. As boys, he and his brother had explored this massive underground network of tunnels and caves that stretched for miles beneath the streets of Shanghai. Almost every section of the Old City could be accessed by one of the hundreds of underground alleyways. Some of them were now being widened for use in Shanghai’s new subway system, but most of the passageways were still secret. The warrens ran beside, beneath and behind the buildings of the Old City. They had been used by thousands of Chinese people since their inception in the mid-1800s when the British, French and Americans had been given the only useful lands in Shanghai in the disgraceful Treaty of Nanjing. The Chinese had been forced from their homes and moved into the lowlands, the swamps by the river. At first, the warrens were a way for the Chinese to avoid the British and French rulers of their city. Year by year, Chinese hand by Chinese hand, they had expanded until they became an intricate underground world. A secret world. A world where white men were not welcome. Where a Chinese man could hide from the authorities. Tunnels, caves, stores of food and water, booby traps, false exits, culs-de-sac and abandoned subterranean pathways stretched, unmapped, for miles. Xi Luan Tu had grown up playing in the warrens. If things got too hot for him above-ground, he’d head for the warrens. It was his best chance – not to escape, because there were no escape routes out of Shanghai from the warrens, but to hide.