Beijing Smog Read online

  Beijing Smog

  Ian Williams

  Copyright © 2017 Ian Williams

  Original colour photo by Ian Williams

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

  the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781788032469

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Serena, Millie and Ollie

  Ian Williams is a former foreign correspondent who was based in Russia and then Asia for leading British and American news organisations. He has reported from across China. This is his first novel.

  “Online rumours undermine the morale of the public, and if out of control they will seriously disturb the public order and affect social stability.”

  The People’s Daily

  “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

  Otto von Bismarck

  – Contents –

  1.The Cyber Guy

  2.Mr China

  3.The Gasping Dragon

  4.Airpocalypse Pale Ale

  5.@Beijing_smog

  6.The Moment On Time

  7.The Colonel

  8.Shadows on the Bund

  9.Fatso

  10.Myopia

  11.Shanghai Bull

  12.Shanghai Dumplings

  13.The Professor

  14.Funny Money

  15.Robert

  16.The Girl In The Corner

  17.An Invitation to Tea

  18.The Workshop of the World

  19.Dot-com Billionaire

  20.Mr Fang

  21.Hand-Job Machines

  22.Happy Birthday to Wang

  23.Dipsy

  24.The Video

  25.Lamma Island

  26.The Hack

  27.What the Fuck?

  28.Something Weird

  29.The Red Ferrari

  30.Subverting State Power

  31.Macau

  32.The Harbin Express

  33.Ice City

  34.Tigers

  35.Baccarat

  36.Fisherman’s Wharf

  37.Macau Rubdown

  38.Up the Garden Path

  39.The Alien Revolution

  40.Ritan Park

  – 1 –

  The Cyber Guy

  The hotel described itself as an intelligent building, the smartest hotel in Beijing, full of sensors to make stuff happen without pressing buttons, but the way Chuck Drayton saw it, the place was retarded.

  He called the front desk, which tracked down the general manager, a German called Wolfgang, and he told Wolfgang they needed to work on the intelligent bit.

  “Not just once, three times, man. I was up half the fucking night.”

  Wolfgang said he was sorry to hear that and he’d be straight up, meeting Drayton five minutes later in the executive lounge on the thirty-fifth floor, where the American was standing beside one of its big windows looking for a view. The first thing he told Wolfgang was that the view sucked. He said that it reminded him of one of those over-priced Chinese landscape paintings they sold in the hotel shop, mountains shrouded in mist. Except the mist was smog, thick smog, pierced here and there by the dark shadows of grey skyscrapers and apartment blocks.

  He said he could feel his life expectancy shrinking just looking at it.

  Wolfgang ordered coffee and said, yeah, but don’t you think it’s kind of moody, and he apologised again for what he called the hiccups with the technology. He said it was a new hotel and they’d had teething problems with the sensors that were supposed to detect movement in the room and switch stuff on and off.

  “There was no movement, Wolfgang. I was asleep,” Drayton said. “Then suddenly the curtains open, the TV and the lights come on. I went to sleep last night thinking I’m in a hotel, then next thing I know I wake on the set of Paranormal Activity. You get what I’m saying?”

  Wolfgang said he got what Drayton was saying and apologised again. He said it was definitely a hotel, and offered a complimentary dinner, lunch, drinks – whatever the hotel could do to make things good; Drayton said he’d take the lot. With a final flurry Wolfgang said he would deal with the matter personally, right now, and excused himself to go and find someone to yell at.

  The German had sweat dripping down his forehead as he left. He looked stressed, and Drayton suspected his wasn’t the first complaint about the hotel’s IQ.

  Drayton made a note in his iPhone, a reminder to speak later to the US Embassy security guys, who’d recently given the place full clearance as safe for American diplomats, and tell them that giving a green light to a hotel with a mind of its own, a forty-floor poltergeist, might not be the way to go.

  Then he looked again for the maestro. Where the fuck was he? They’d agreed to meet in the lounge at two and travel together to the concert, scheduled for late afternoon, but it was now nearly a quarter to three.

  He found an internal hotel phone and called down to the maestro’s room, but it went straight to voicemail, meaning that the guy was either on the phone or had it on do-not-disturb mode. Maybe he’d taken a nap and overslept, though the maestro didn’t strike Drayton as the type that took naps.

  He decided to go and bang on his door, but the maestro’s room was on a different floor to Drayton’s and the smart lift wouldn’t take him there since it wouldn’t accept his smart key to get access to the maestro’s smart floor. And since the smart lift didn’t respond to yelling or to banging on the lift’s smart console, Drayton went back to his room and phoned down again for Wolfgang.

  A woman on the front desk said Mr Wolfgang was in a meeting, but she had a message from Mr Abramovich.

  “He says he’ll meet you at the concert and that he’s taking the car,” she said, and Drayton said that was just great and could she call him a taxi? The woman said sure, only there weren’t many around right now and the traffic was terrible.

  Drayton hung up and opened a taxi-hailing app on his iPhone. He could see taxis. They looked like rows of termites on his screen. Usually it didn’t take long for one to respond, changing colour from white to black when they accepted the fare. Only today the termites weren’t nibbling, stuck in little white clusters.

  He refreshed the app, but the termites were still stuck. He could barely make out the road below from the window, but at that moment the smog cleared just enough to see what had paralysed the termites. The receptionist was right. The traffic on the ring road was at a complete standstill.

  Maybe the maestro hadn’t travelled too far, and could still tu
rn around, bring the embassy car back and collect him. He picked up the maestro’s business card from his desk: “Alexander Abramovich, composer, conductor and cultural ambassador”. Drayton called the cell phone number on the card, an American number, and after three rings the maestro picked up.

  “This is Abramovich.”

  “Mr Abramovich, this is Chuck Drayton. I was surprised to hear you left without me. It’s very important we stick together.”

  But before Drayton could get to the bit about turning the car around, the maestro interrupted him, saying he’d had to leave earlier than planned because of the traffic, and wasn’t going to be delayed by Drayton’s petty squabbling with the hotel. He said he had a concert to conduct, that this wasn’t just music, it was diplomacy, and that you, Mr Drayton, still had a few things to learn about that.

  “And another thing,” the maestro said, “I want my laptop back.”

  “Can we talk about that later?” Drayton said, not trusting the telephone line.

  “I want it back, Mr Drayton, and you have until tomorrow to return it to me.”

  “We still have a few tests.”

  “Fuck your tests, Mr Drayton. I want it back. It was nothing. I overreacted. And anyway, I no longer want to pursue it, and I no longer need you. What I’m doing here is too important to be undermined by your cyber stupidity and paranoia.”

  Drayton wanted to yell, you were hacked, you moron, and I just hope your pretentious bullshit about cultural diplomacy is being read by somebody who cares more than I do. But the maestro had already hung up.

  Drayton decided he’d have to take the metro, and he hated the metro. The nearest station was just around the corner from the hotel. That was the easy bit. When he got there the entrance was packed, and he was swept inside on a human tide, which carried him down two escalators and to a platform on which there was barely room to breathe. The platform had markings, little lanes, for getting off and on the trains, which was encouraging, but meant nothing. As the train approached, the crowd on the platform steeled itself like a team facing off with hated opponents in a grudge football match, and when the doors opened both sides charged. Drayton was carried onto the train by the weight of the crowd behind him.

  He’d now almost certainly miss the pre-concert reception at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing’s modern egg-shaped arts centre, usually just known as that, the Egg, where Abramovich was performing. Drayton reckoned that at this rate he’d be lucky to get there for the concert itself. Not that he was too bothered, since he found the guy, this maestro, insufferable. He had an ego the size of Tiananmen Square, maybe bigger.

  And the loathing was mutual.

  The guy’s laptop had been hacked soon after he’d arrived in Beijing, there wasn’t much doubt about that. He’d opened the machine in his hotel room to find it had connected itself to the internet, the cursor roaming around the screen and doing its own thing, like it had a mind of its own. The laptop was hyperventilating, fan whizzing around and doing all sorts of stuff, but without the maestro at the controls.

  He was a childhood friend of the US Ambassador, so he’d taken the machine straight to the US Embassy, yelling and ranting, saying the laptop contained sensitive plans, emails and notes as well as semi-finished compositions. The Ambassador said he’d have specialists look over it, do the forensics, look for digital fingerprints. That had calmed the maestro down a little, but still he ranted, like the future of world peace was at stake.

  Like it was all the fault of the embassy.

  The first thing Drayton did when he was put on the case was to make sure it wasn’t, that nobody at the embassy had been poking around the guy’s data. Abramovich had just been to North Korea, part of a tour that started in Russia and would take him on to Vietnam. The way Drayton saw it, the guy had kept some pretty unsavoury company in Pyongyang and Moscow. But nobody at the embassy put their hand up.

  He’d hit it off badly with Abramovich from the start, calling his concerts the Tyrant Tour, thinking he was being funny, making a joke of it. But the maestro had called him an idiot, saying that America had lost the moral authority to lecture anybody about anything. He said he was using music to build bridges. That bridges were needed right now because there was a clown in the White House, a dangerous clown, and that he, Abramovich, was the real American diplomat.

  Now, a week later, he and Abramovich could barely stand the sight of each other, and Drayton was seething because thanks to this jerk he was stuck on a train that was beyond crowded, four stops from the Egg, four stops too many as far as Drayton was concerned, the crush getting worse at every station.

  He didn’t think he’d ever be able to get off, but salvation came in the form of a bunch of what he took to be students, who’d clearly done the journey before and lined up in a wedge-like formation as the train pulled into Tiananmen West station, the closest to the Egg. Doors opened, and a dozen heads were lowered, shoulders tensed, before the wedge drove its way off the train; at its arrow-like point a lanky kid with his arms outstretched in front of him was holding an iPad to slice through the crowd. Drayton followed in their wake, thinking it was the smartest use of an iPad he’d seen all week.

  Only they swept out of the wrong exit for the Egg, and he had to double back against the tide and into another dark corridor, this one lined with posters and with another barely penetrable crowd. Then he found himself face to face with the maestro, or at least a giant poster of the man, looking grim, about to fire up an orchestra, baton in hand, his chin raised, eyes wide open. Which was pretty scary. The caption said, “A Concert for Resilience and Hope”.

  Drayton paused for breath under the poster, thinking he could do with both if he was ever going to make it to the hall.

  At least the forensic guys still had the maestro’s laptop. Abramovich had started to have second thoughts twenty-four hours after he’d handed it over to the embassy, seduced by all the bullshit receptions, as Drayton saw it, Chinese officials telling him they were honoured. Privileged. That this was a special moment. An historic occasion for Beijing, for China-US relations, for classical music, they’d said, raising a glass. And the maestro lapped it all up, all the fawning, as if it meant something.

  Drayton had trailed along, one reception after another. One Chinese official had told him they were excited to have in Beijing America’s greatest living conductor, and a true statesman, performing with a Chinese orchestra for the first time, and Drayton didn’t have the heart to say he’d never heard of Abramovich before the guy had arrived in Beijing.

  But it all played to the maestro’s ego, and he’d said to Drayton that maybe he’d made a mistake, that maybe he’d just been tired and nothing really was going on with the cursor and stuff. And anyway, he said, it really wasn’t worth making a fuss over.

  Drayton had tried to change the subject, asking Abramovich, “What’s with the Leningrad thing? Why are you playing that? It’s Russian.”

  The maestro said that was the point, that music has no boundaries. He said his grandparents on his father’s side were Russian, that he’d inherited a passion for Russian classical music, but it was really all about the message.

  “On one level the Leningrad Symphony is about the defence of that great city during the Second World War, Mr Drayton, but Shostakovich saw it essentially as a tribute to human resilience.”

  “And this Shostakooooovik, he’s Russian?”

  “He’s Russian, Mr Drayton. But if it makes you happier, after the break I’ll be conducting the New World Symphony, written in New York, and a reflection on America. Neil Armstrong took a recording to the moon. Is that American enough for you?”

  Drayton said he liked the sound of that, but why couldn’t he put the music by the American guy first?

  The maestro said the American guy was Czech, his name was Dvořák, and would Drayton please excuse him. With that he headed
back towards a podium, where more tributes were flowing, telling his assistant along the way to please keep that moron from the embassy away from him.

  Which would have been just fine by Drayton, but he still had a job to do, and this was bigger than Abramovich. Much bigger.

  He continued his slow progress down the corridor and into the Egg, though this time without the help of the student battering ram.

  Eventually the corridor opened onto a vast concrete-walled lobby area, the Egg’s main glass doors up some steps to one side, the ticket office and cloakrooms on the other. A wall of metal detectors blocked the route down to the main concert halls, though security staff in badly fitting uniforms, frisking people at random, seemed mostly to ignore the madly pinging machines.

  No sooner had Drayton been through a metal detector when a group of perhaps twenty police and plain-clothes security agents, some with barely concealed weapons, entered through the main doors. They swept down the steps, shouting to clear out of the way, and forming a cordon around a short balding man with thick-rimmed glasses. The short man just looked straight ahead, walking briskly, or as briskly as people could be cleared from his path. What Drayton noticed most was the way the man’s big glasses framed a child-like face. Most people backed away instinctively.

  The short man and his escort barged through the metal detectors, since there was no way round them, and the pings turned into one manic high-pitched wail, which lasted well after they’d moved on.

  “Who’s that?” Drayton asked one of the Egg’s security men, who was looking at his metal detector like it might blow up at any minute.

  The man just shrugged. Didn’t know, and cared even less.

  Much to his surprise, Drayton had arrived with twenty minutes to spare before the concert, so he found a bar and ordered a beer, a local Tsingtao, which was lukewarm but went down so well he ordered another, thinking all the time, who was that guy? Maybe the maestro was the real deal after all. Drayton hadn’t really got a good look, since the guy was dwarfed by his bodyguards, but there was a stern, serious look on that baby face, that was for sure.