Beijing Smog Read online

  A buzzer, a five-minute warning, sounded, and Drayton made his way to his seat, in an elevated section at the back of the hall. The place was packed, but he really wasn’t in the mood for this.

  The lights went down, and an announcement asked valued customers, out of respect for the artists and the law, to kindly refrain from any recording, videoing or photography.

  As the orchestra entered the stage, dozens of smartphones were raised in the air to record, video and photograph. They were joined by still more, as the maestro entered, clad in black jacket and black bow tie, bowing deeply to the smartphones, spotlights highlighting his shiny balding head and round rimless glasses.

  Attendants who’d been showing people to their seats scrambled into action. Each had a small laser pointer that they trained on the offending devices, moving the beam up and down. The laser beams were soon dancing all over the auditorium.

  The orchestra looked like they’d seen it all before. If the maestro was surprised, he didn’t show it. He looked serious and solemn. Just like his poster. And just like the music he was about to conduct.

  The smartphones were lowered, driven away by the lasers, or maybe because they already had what they wanted and were now posting online with captions saying, “Hey, look where I am”.

  Drayton loved those small acts of defiance.

  The maestro lifted his baton and the symphony began with a rousing melody from the string section, which Drayton hadn’t expected and rather liked. But it didn’t last; the Nazis were on the march and so was the maestro, waving his baton as if the defence of Leningrad depended on him alone, the music growing in intensity.

  The first movement seemed to go on forever, and as it reached a climax, Drayton felt exhausted, drained. Then he felt a sudden trembling that seemed to rise up through his chair. Those sitting nearby felt it too, and they looked around like maybe the Führer’s Panzer tanks had entered the hall and were about to take out the maestro. It stopped, but then started again, which is when Drayton realised he was sitting on his phone, which he’d switched to vibration mode and stuck in his back pocket. Somebody was trying to get hold of him.

  The first movement ended, and as throats were being cleared, noses blown and smartphone messages checked, he ducked for the aisle, winding his way towards the exit, his body bent forward like a stressed orangutan criss-crossing the floor of its cage.

  “No re-entry once the music starts again,” said an attendant, one eye on Drayton, one on the lookout for smartphones.

  “That’s fine by me,” Drayton said.

  The security detail, the Praetorian Guard for the little guy, was now huddled in small groups outside the main hall. Other plainclothes security patrolled past the doors of the hall with curly earpieces and big bulges under their jackets.

  Drayton reached a quiet corner of the foyer between a pillar and a big gold artwork, a grotesquely contorted head of a buffalo mounted on a wooden plinth, when his phone vibrated again, a call from an unknown number. He took the call, but said nothing, waiting on the caller to speak first.

  “Chuck, it’s Dave.”

  “Hey Dave, what’s up?”

  “We need to talk. We have a breakthrough.”

  Drayton said that was great, but he was still at the Egg, at the concert, baby-sitting the maestro.

  “Fuck the maestro,” said Dave. “We have what we need.”

  Drayton said he could be at the embassy in twenty minutes or so, and Dave said, “No, don’t do that. I’ll meet you in Tiananmen Square in front of the portrait of Mao. It’s more secure.”

  Drayton left by the main entrance of the Egg. He raised the collar of his thick black overcoat, with matching scarf and thick woollen beanie hat, strapped on a pollution mask and stepped out into the frigid gloom. Police cars were lined up in front of the Egg’s titanium and glass dome, with more armed men, and Drayton wondered again who the little guy was and why he needed that level of security.

  It took him ten minutes to walk to Tiananmen; he thought the giant square was atmospheric in all the smog. The blurred outlines of the Great Hall of the People to his right. National Museum to his left. Tall street lights, smudge-like, lining the edges. The closer ones had halos of haze, but in the middle distance they faded to nothingness.

  He stopped close to the portrait of Mao Zedong, at Tiananmen Gate, hanging above a tunnel into the Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace. Guards stood rigid in the foreground, and crowds jostled for photographs in front of them, selfies mainly. Drayton took one himself, on his iPhone, and then looked back down the square trying to spot Mao’s mausoleum, but it was lost in the smog. He decided he’d pay the old despot a visit at some point, see him in the flesh.

  There were a lot of people mingling there. Drayton guessed that was why Dave had chosen this place, figuring there was anonymity in the crowd. But it was sometimes difficult to tell what was going on with Dave, a guy who thought his job was so secret he didn’t even have a second name. At least not one he wanted to tell Drayton.

  He reckoned it was probably a turf thing too, the Beijing spooks wanting to keep control, wary of the upstarts like Drayton from the Shanghai consulate. It was stupid really, but Drayton never felt particularly welcome at the embassy.

  He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever find Dave when he felt a hand gripping his arm, and Dave said, “Hannibal Lecter, I presume.”

  “Yeah, you like it? I figured it might add a year or two to my life expectancy.”

  Drayton’s big black pollution mask was an all-encompassing studded contraption that covered half his face. He imagined it did make him look pretty scary, that he should keep away from kids, though he thought it more Darth Vader than Hannibal, the Hollywood cannibal. But it seemed to do the job, keeping out the filthy air, though at times Drayton found he was struggling to breathe at all through its multiple filters.

  “This one’s pretty useless,” Dave said, pointing to his own mask. “Maybe worse than useless.”

  He was wearing a simple white surgical-style mask with the words PM2.5 Mega Blocker printed on the front.

  “I think it refers to the tiny bits that do the most damage,” he said. “Someone at the embassy bought a whole bunch of them online, while we wait for fresh supplies from Washington.”

  Drayton said they had plenty at the consulate, smirking beneath his mask, scoring an easy point for Shanghai, which Dave ignored.

  “There’re a lot of fakes online,” Drayton said.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” said Dave.

  And then he said, “Let’s walk”, and they headed east away from the square along Chang’an Avenue, the wide thoroughfare running across Tiananmen’s northern end.

  “I’m really sorry you got landed with this guy, this Abramovich,” Dave said. “Sounds like a real pain, but hey, you’re the Cyber Guy.”

  They walked for a while in silence before Dave said they’d got the forensic results back from Fort Meade, and the National Security Agency had confirmed the maestro’s laptop had been infected with malicious software, malware that allowed somebody else to take remote control and read his files, messages and emails.

  “They were having a poke around when he got back to his room and he saw the cursor dancing all over the screen.”

  “Why the maestro?” asked Drayton, and Dave said there was some interesting stuff on his computer, that he’d had some quite high-level contacts in China and in North Korea. In Russia too, where he met the President.

  “He had some less than flattering things to say about us, the American Government, that is,” said Dave. “There was a lot of gossipy stuff, emails, notes to himself, and a pretty full address book. The guy does have some decent contacts.”

  “I can imagine. And you happened to just stumble upon all this?”

  “Well, we were inside his computer. We had to look
to see what might be of interest to the hackers.”

  “Or to you.”

  Dave ignored that and said, “The key thing, Chuck, is not whether this guy had anything interesting on his computer. It’s the pattern, the fingerprints. It’s what it tells us about their capabilities. The hackers didn’t cover their tracks very well, and Fort Meade says it’s consistent with other attacks we’ve seen against US companies and business people, hoovering up information wherever and whenever they can.”

  At that moment, a pair of police cars raced out of the gloom of Chang’an, their sirens wailing, lights flashing. Both men instinctively turned away, raising the collar of their thick coats. Drayton pulled down his black woollen beanie hat to just above his eyes.

  “You know that building?” said Dave, pointing to the fuzzy outline of the Beijing Hotel, overlooking Chang-an. Then without waiting for an answer he said, “It was from one of those rooms on the left that the famous images were taken. Tank Man. The guy standing in the street facing off against a tank during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. It was right here.”

  Drayton said yeah, he remembered the photo. He said he’d read that Tank Man had never been identified, that nobody had ever figured out who he was, and he asked Dave whether he thought that could ever happen again.

  Dave said from what he could make out, the Communist Party leader seemed in control, locking away his rivals, saying they were all corrupt. And Drayton said the guy was making a lot of enemies. That maybe it was a sign of weakness.

  Dave just shrugged, and Drayton said the maestro wanted his computer back, that he was making threats.

  “He can have it back,” said Dave. “In fact the sooner the better. We’ve installed a little something of our own in case the hacker returns for another look around his laptop.”

  “And what little something is that?”

  “That’s not important right now, Chuck. What matters is that the hackers have left quite a digital trail, and we’re close to pinpointing where these attacks are coming from.”

  “That does sound like a breakthrough,” said Drayton. “Where are we talking about?”

  And Dave said Drayton needed to get back to Shanghai, just as soon as he could.

  *

  By that time at the Egg the final movement of the Leningrad Symphony was building into a frenzy, and so was the maestro. His face was contorted, grimacing, his arms waving manically as he drove the orchestra on, marshalling the defences of Leningrad.

  The little man with all the security was dabbing his eyes, overcome with the emotion of the music. He was seated alone in a box high on one side of the hall, with carefully arranged curtains making him all but invisible to the rest of the audience below.

  He was an elderly man, who’d trained in what used to be the Soviet Union. He was hard, uncompromising and feared. Sentiment was not something he was known for, but he did have one private weakness – for Russian music, especially at its most intense and moving. And none more so than the Leningrad Symphony, even if it was conducted by an American.

  He saw it as more than just a tribute to the resilience of a city. It was about determination and resolve. It was about strength. All of which he felt he needed now more than ever, to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party which he’d served for almost fifty years. To defend it against the enemies he saw everywhere.

  As the music reached its climax, the smartphones came back out, as did the laser pointers. The phones stood firm this time, like the defenders of Leningrad, determined to capture the stirring finale of the symphony.

  One laser beam, this one directed from high above the stage, seemed to wander away from the main area of the hall and the main concentration of smartphones, climbing up the steep sides of the hall and into the darkened area behind the curtain. It came to a halt squarely on the forehead of the little man in the box, who seconds later toppled backwards off his chair as a single bullet followed the beam to its target.

  – 2 –

  Mr China

  Anthony Morgan rubbed the train window with the sleeve of his coat, thinking it might have fogged up. But it made no difference to the view; the grey outlines of high-rise apartment blocks remained the same, lost in the thick smog and the fading afternoon light. Behind the apartment blocks, the vague outline of a power station billowed vast plumes of smoke and steam.

  The view hadn’t changed in two hours, not since the high-speed train from Shanghai slowed, shuddered and then came to a standstill in some faceless suburb of South Beijing.

  He phoned his wife, figuring Cindy Wu would know what was going on, what was holding up the train. She usually did. But she said she wasn’t sure, that the railway company wasn’t saying anything. She said there seemed to have been some sort of security alert, an incident in Beijing, at a big concert hall they called the Egg. She said stations had been closed and that social media was filled with all sorts of crazy rumours. The usual stupid internet stuff.

  “And the smog’s pretty awful,” she said. “I hope you brought a good mask.”

  They hung up. He didn’t need Cindy Wu to tell him about the smog. It had been bad in Shanghai too, but not this bad, and as his train had approached the capital it felt to Morgan like he was passing through a grey tunnel without end.

  It was the reason he tried to avoid Beijing. The relentless smog. But he needed to sort out Bud, Bud from Alabama, and he had to do it in person. His reputation was at stake.

  He was planning to dine with him early at one of the finest restaurants in Beijing. After that, they were going together to the National Museum on Tiananmen Square, where Morgan had got Bud an invitation to a reception for top foreign business leaders and policy-makers, and hosted by the Prime Minister himself. Trying to make Bud feel important.

  He looked at his invitation, requesting the company of one Anthony Alastair Morgan OBE, China Director, MacMaster and Brown. The reception started at seven thirty. Dinner was already looking very tight, and the train still wasn’t moving.

  Every five minutes or so, a looped recorded announcement said they would soon be arriving at Beijing South and to remember all your belongings. A carriage attendant just shrugged when angry passengers cornered him, asking what was happening. Eventually he retreated to his small cubicle at the end of the carriage, locking the door behind him.

  Then Morgan’s iPhone rang. It was Bud and he wasn’t happy. Ranting, telling Morgan it was no fucking way to do business. Not when you’re about to move an entire fucking production line to China. He said it was a big fucking deal, and asked how the fuck the Chinese guy who was supposed to be his business partner could just disappear. What the fuck was that all about?

  “You vouched for him, Tony. You said he was solid, that he had the connections to make the deal happen.”

  Anthony Morgan said weird things happened sometimes. This was China. Calm down, he said, don’t worry, there was probably a simple explanation, that he’d figure it out.

  “The guy’s got a good track record, Bud. He’s dependable. He’s honest.”

  “Honest isn’t the issue here, Tony. It’s whether he can deliver on the deal.”

  Morgan suggested they talk about it later over dinner, and Bud said, “Sure, let’s do that. But we have to sort this out, Tony. I trusted you.”

  Then Bud hung up.

  And Morgan felt like screaming, “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  Bud was an idiot. But that wasn’t unique to him. It was the same wherever they came from. Whether they were German toy makers, British shoe companies or Aussie retailers looking for cheap shirts, most first-time buyers or investors in China didn’t have a clue, thinking business could be done just like at home. Except a good deal cheaper. That wasn’t really what bothered Morgan, since that was how he made his money, guiding them around the obstacles. He could deal with idiots. Did it all the t
ime.

  No, the real issue was his credibility as the go-to man on doing business in China. He was Mr China. He couldn’t afford for that to be damaged. Bud was right, it was an issue of trust, and Morgan and his wife had done the due diligence on Bud’s Chinese business partner, who seemed to tick all the right boxes, with top-level Party connections. He’d been personally recommended to Morgan by a senior aide to the Prime Minister. But now the guy had gone missing. Just before he was supposed to sign the deal. Just like that.

  It was another hour before the train shuddered, creaked and began to move again. Morgan looked out at the smog, the train crawling past the distorted outlines of tall trees, which morphed into monster-like power transmission lines. The whole carriage smelt of soot. His head was starting to ache, a dull pain that seemed to get worse each time he lifted it. Or looked out of the window.

  He messaged Bud, apologising because he wouldn’t now make dinner, and saying he’d meet him at the reception. Bud messaged back saying he understood, not to worry, that it was no problem. Sounding like he’d calmed down a bit. But Morgan did worry, convinced that Bud would see it as another black mark against him.

  He opened his bag on his knee and after digging beneath clothes he found a small silver hip flask, which he opened and from which he took a sip of whisky. He replaced the top, but then had second thoughts and removed it again, a bigger slurp this time.

  There were several small compartments in the inner lining of his bag, where he kept a collection of pollution masks, ranging from simple surgical-style devices to thicker and fussier models with bulbous external filters, an array of indecipherable numbers, and names like Dust Busters and Smog Beaters.

  The ‘Rolls-Royce’ of his armoury was a big grey contraption with a replacement filter guaranteeing “maximum ventilation without sacrificing filtration”, according to the blurb on the packet. He removed one of those as the train edged into the station.