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.”
“Why not?” Sun Bin says.
“He’s an ex-soldier. Tough as hell. Is he going to have the sensitive fingers of a microsurgeon?”
“Maybe not for working on the donee-but the donor is going to die anyway. What’s to be careful about, so long as he doesn’t damage the organ? Obviously, they must have trained him.”
“Psychologically, it would make sense. Give a pariah work, a profession, something to be proud of. Bring him back into the economic system, pay him well. Maybe he owns a house, a car, and a bank account. What more could anyone want in terms of human identity?”
“Something that gives him face?” Sun Bin says. “That’s sounds like a Chinese point of view.”
“So after he shot those three in a jealous rage, he removed their organs-for what?”
“Practice, of course. And don’t forget, he’s an understudy to the Yips.”
“But why didn’t he do it in the tunnels?”
“He did. That’s why there was almost no blood.”
“So why did he then bring the cadavers back up here where they were bound to be discovered?”
All three of us are seasoned cops. We know the answer to that one.
“He’s proud of himself.”
“He wants recognition for his achievement, his mastery of a difficult and respected skill, his power over life and death. It’s his final demand: that he be permitted to crawl out of his tunnels and reveal himself to the world as an expert surgeon.”
“But he cut off the fingertips?”
“Just because he’s insane doesn’t mean he’s stupid. His victim To was a real high-flyer. He didn’t want him identified.”
End of conversation. We are unable to look one another in the eye, because none of us has stopped thinking about Chan. I take over Sun Bin’s laptop for a moment in my constant search for the inspector, who is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Om. As I continue to scroll from one green image to another and from one page to another, both Sun Bin and Lek become interested in the underground society.
“It’s like they don’t want to see him yet.”
“Or maybe they can’t get into the operating theater.”
“There’s been no contact with him so far.”
“The Yips aren’t even going in that direction. They’re heading toward Zinna and his aide.”
“That’s a kind of communications center.”
“That’s right. That PC must be hooked up to the surveillance system.”
We stare at the two soldiers and the two American advisers, bathed in green in the cellar of the third house, sitting at a table with a tower PC and a set of monitors. They also seem at a loss as to what to do next. Now the four of them look up. Has there been a knock at the door? The aide takes out a pistol and stands flat against the side of the door, then pulls at a couple of bolts. The door opens. The Yips enter, with Om between them. Om looks upset, frightened, and angry. The Twins and the soldiers remonstrate with her. She shakes her head with a wild look in her eyes. One of the Twins slaps her face. Om stares at her in disbelief. The four of them herd her back into the tunnel system.
Sun Bin has become adept at manipulating the software, and we are able to follow the progress of the group until they come to a steel door. It must be one of the doors to the operating theater. It seems that Om has decided to obey her captors. She knocks on the door and seems to be speaking, even shouting. We switch to the operating theater, where Manu has frozen with one of the faces in his hands. He replaces the face-it is To/Wong-in the fridge and walks to the door. In another square, Om is pleading with her face to the door. In the next square, Manu seems to be squealing in anguish, quite beside himself. He picks up a machine pistol lying on one of the operating tables and stands by the side of the door, then releases some bolts. The door opens. Om steps inside. Manu slams the door shut and bolts it. We watch while Manu approaches the camera and points his pistol at it. The square on the monitor is full of his destroyed face for a moment, then it turns black.
We switch to the screen where we can see the closed door to the operating theater, with Zinna, his aide, and the Twins standing outside. Perhaps they expected Om to produce a docile Manu within minutes. They seem to be fretting and arguing. Zinna’s aide disappears, then comes back with a black backpack. He takes something out. It is another bag. From that bag he takes something that needs unwrapping. Now he is holding a black sausagelike object about twelve inches long in his hands. He kneels at the door to the operating theater and presses the puttylike substance around the edges of the door next to the locks. Now he takes some electric cable out of his backpack and presses one end of it into the explosive, then retreats while unwinding the cable. Zinna and the Twins retreat with him. Now they are back in the control room. The aide connects the electric cable to a switch. Sun Bin returns us to the door of the operating theater. We see a sudden cloud of dust envelop the camera lens. From the tunnel exit in the garage we hear a muffled explosion. All the screens go dark.