Citizen One
Authors: Andy Oakes
Andy Oakes’s first novel
Dragon’s Eye
introduced us to Sun Piao, one of the great modern detectives and a hero for our times.
Dragon’s Eye
was both a critical and commercial success. The winner of
The European Crime and Mystery Award
for 2004 it has been translated so far into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian.
Here are a few comments:
“I don’t know if Oakes’s picture of China is accurate, but it is something better: convincing, filled with both impressionistic atmosphere and precise detail, scents and textures, sweat and silk, mud and guns, burning charcoal and peasant food. The poor old critic’s cell door suddenly opened wide after the long Christmas bang-up:
Dragon’s Eye
is a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for the imagination.”
Jane Jakeman in The Independent
“For a debut novel,
Dragon’s Eye
is a remarkably assured piece of fiction. In terms of structure, Oakes displays a natural gift for suspense, and manages to tease the reader at all the right moments with just the right amount of information to keep the pages turning. The narrative pace is also impeccably created, with just the necessary amount of restraint at key places to keep things ticking along nicely. Add to that a real flair for description which immerses the reader in the strange and wonderfully alien world of modern urban China, and you’ve got a debut novel that will surely attract plenty of acclaim.”
Doug Johnstone in Scotland on Sunday
“The most compelling character in Oakes’ melancholy, evocative new conspiracy thriller is the present day city of Shanghai itself: dark and decadent and pulsing with menacing energy, with suggestion of the lawlessness of an Old West town or gangland metropolis.”
Publishers Weekly
“Eight gory, ritualistic murders discovered in a muddy river in the dead of night. A bitter loner detective with a troubled past. A web of deceit drawing together corporate greed, political corruption, gangsterism and a lot of dark, rainy, moody street backdrops.”
The Scotsman
“The pictures conjured up of Shanghai and of the complexities of a corrupt and claustrophobic China is gripping. Accurate or not, it is the long, stealthy shadow of the state falling across its pages that marks this crime novel out as something of an original in its genre.”
Ranti Williams in The Observer
“Yaobang, a marvellous creation of gluttony, stained ties, expletives and improbable, boisterous good humour.”
James Urquhart in The Independent on Sunday
“The following investigation is described in detail as brilliant and meticulous as the sanguine but relentless investigator, Sun Piao, around who the novel revolves. Oakes is a master of research and evocation and, with more twists and turns than a gyrating Chinese dragon, the story peels back the many layers of the country’s society to reveal a web of corruption and deception.”
The Big Issue
“It’s an excellent bit of storytelling – coarse, nasty and gritty – while at its centre is a decent and humane man. If you only read one detective novel this year …”
Eugene Bryne in Venue
*****
“The chain-smoking detective at the centre of
Dragon’s Eye
is, naturally, cynical and jaded, but also metaphysically challenged – he hates his job, but could not be and, perhaps, would not choose to be anything else and is thus condemned to patrol the streets of Shanghai, a lonely and haunted figure. As the plot, which can fairly be described as labyrinthine, builds, so does the feeling of claustrophobia as the circle of investigation becomes wider and the people Sun Piao can trust become fewer. All told, a gripping and deeply involving genre piece.”
Michael Harcourt in The Leeds Guide
To Annie and Tom …
always
Fsi yp rz kfrnqz ufxy fsi kzyzwj … n znxm ymfy n mfi pstzs ztz.
This book is dedicated to Manchester United Football Club, its players, past and present … and to its manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, and the memory of the great Matt Busby. Thank you for the dream.
This book is written in memory of Molly and Cliff Wyatt, true and honest people. Alan Fisher, writer, teacher, cravat wearer, and gentleman. And Gary Jewell, a friend who I think about every day. Rest in peace.
A book like this cannot be written without the help and support of many people, their expertise and skill. My special thanks goes to Juri Gabriel and Eric Lane, for their patience, insight, hard work, and faith in me. My manuscripts would simply be at the back of a bottom drawer if it were not for them! I would also like to thank Sean McMinn for his expert help on the diving scene within the book. Gaurav Kumar for his tutorial on NetBIOS computer hacking. Lee Geering for explaining the tutorial on NetBIOS hacking. And a thank you to Joel Griggs for our very enjoyable lunches together and our challenging conversations about writing … all of my best wishes go to you for success in your own writing projects. My thanks also go to my colleagues and friends at William Parker Sports College, Hastings, for their constant support and enthusiasm which have really re-fuelled me at the times when I have needed it the most. Also to my colleagues in the Youth Development Service, Hastings. A special mention must go to the CONNEXIONS team of Intensive Support Personal Advisers, who do such valuable work, ‘beyond the call of duty’, with young people and their families. It is a constantly moving pleasure working with you all. Thanks especially go to Sue Fenwick, Sally Thompsett, Bev Gibbs, Sarah Church, Ruth Adams, Steve Carter, Patrick Flynn, and Richard Lewis. A debt of gratitude must also go to all of the young people that I have worked with … your strength, resilience, and perceptiveness, amazes me. I am sure that you have given me more insights than I have ever given you.
Part One
Chapter 1
THE NEW NATIONAL STADIUM. SHANGHAI, THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.
A Red Flag pulling up. Four men piling from it. Four men fashioned from the same blueprint: flat-foreheaded, dull-eyed, gash-mouthed. And their smell, of strong fingers and hard hearts. Pulling the girl from the automobile. Red Flag. Prodding her forward with pistols nods and shakes. Following behind, as they herded her through mid-calf mud. Slipping. Hands, knees, into ooze. Pulling her up by her arm-pits. Pushing, prodding her on. Laughter. Taunts. But still no words from the girl. The sound only of rasped breaths, and a breeze, keen and sighing through a forest of scaffolding.
Behind wire net fencing, curves of concrete. Skeletal banks of stairs, leading from mud to nowhere, and, rippling in the breeze, ribbons: red, yellow, black and blue in arc-lit shadows above two mud-spattered, five inter-linking ringed banners. One with the legend
THE PEOPLE’S OLYMPICS … 2008
The other.
OLYMPICS 2008 …
The eyes of the world watching the People’s Republic of China
Beyond the fence, darkness; at its centre floodlit constructs, arc illuminated concrete edifices and bamboo forests of scaffolding. A country of the partial, a continent of the incomplete. The Olympic dream made real in rough textured materials, a vast oval enclosing a static ocean of mud. Half-lit, half-unlit. Around its edge, dark, shored-up pit holes, the foundations for the enormous banks of incomplete stands, that would seat the worshippers at the altar of the struggle between the clean and the doped bloods.
At the far end of the crescent moon, activity, noise. A machine turning out its life. A rhythmic effort of cogs and pneumatics. As they approached, figures around the machine moving away into the night, as if a plague were approaching.
Ankle deep mud, the shoeless girl dragged to the very centre of the oval. Left on her knees, wild-eyed, as the men separated, receding into darkness. Equal metres of black mud between them. Laughing as they knelt. Joking as they mimicked the pose of sprinters waiting for the starter’s pistol.
Disembodied, a rasp of a shout.
“On your marks.”
Out of the night, a serrated whisper to the girl.
“Run. Your last chance for life.”
Head craned over her shoulder, the girl starting to run, slip, fall. Running again.
“Get set.”
In imaginary blocks, the men rising. Eyes pinned to the rag-doll fifty metres ahead, toppling, rising back up in an ungainly slip.
Laughter, whistles, cat calls.
“Go!”
Four shadows in darker shadow, rising, slipping, sprinting, falling. Through darkness, gaining on the string-snipped puppet ahead. A cry as she saw them emerge from a floodlit oasis. Skidding towards her. Falling. Scrabbling back to their feet. Hearing their breaths, ripped. Closer. Closer. And in their hands, so bright, so sharp … cut throat razors, stainless-steel teeth aching to bite. Sobbing, falling, just picking herself up as the first was upon her. A blur of darkness and silver. So bright, never brighter. Hearing its slash through the air. Through the material of the back of her blouse. Through her brassiere strap. And instantly, a chilling coldness, followed by a roll of sticky heat. A wave, as warm as caramel, down her back. Falling to her knees, but unaware of the biting coldness of the muddy pool that she was kneeling in. Aware only of the darkness turning; of a fist, silver blade in its clasp. Black, her blood upon its razor edge. Watching as it fell in a deep track across her face, shoulder and arm. Watching, as her blouse succumbed to the warm tide. Cuts upon her as stinging rain. Frenzied fever of violence, sharp breath indented. Sable faces, shot with diamond-beaded sweat and panted exhilaration. Suddenly to his order, silence. Just breaths, excited breaths. And then he was over her. Slowly, as with a lover’s touch, a cut-throat razor gently slipping between the edges of her blouse. Buttons in slow fall. The sodden material eased aside. Silver blade to her skirt. Hands clawing at the material, pulling it adrift. Her clothes thrown aside, falling as kites’ tails. And then a pain set within so much other pain. Almost lost within it. The man with the pockmarked face making deep carvings into her abdomen. Each stroke of steel through her skin’s weak resistance, matched with a squeeze of his irises. Faintly laboured breaths of papercut lips. So much concentration, in mutilating. A comrade of immense focus, even in killing. With all of her effort, through lacerated lips, one word, falling faint against his cologned cheek.