The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (20 page)

‘Name six famous vegetarians,’ said Red Hair, who was still suspicious, her lips shutting so tightly that they disappeared once more.

‘What?’

‘Name six famous vegetarians. If you are really a vegetarian, you should be able to do that.’

Joyce took a moment to compose herself, and then said, sniffing: ‘Er, Einstein, Elvis Costello, Mahatma Gandhi, Reese Witherspoon, Bob Dylan, Michael J Fox, Natalie Portman, Alicia Silverstone is a vegan, so is Moby, and Shania Twain. In fact, most geniuses were veggies, like, er, Isaac Newton—and did I say Einstein?—and Steve Martin, Damon Albarn from Blur, and—’

‘Paula McCarthy,’ put in Wong. ‘And Eleanor Rugby.’

The two women in black looked at each other. Japan Girl sighed. They
were
veggies. This was a bloody awful mess.

Joyce was still angry and glared critically at their captors. ‘There’s too much death around. More birds and mammals are raised and slaughtered in a single year in the United States alone than the entire human population of Earth. We need to cut the number of deaths in the—’ Red Hair turned on her: ‘Listen here, bitch. I am in charge around here, and no one tells me what to do. If you are very, very lucky, I may allow you to escape with your lives. But I haven’t decided yet, so I would advise you to SHUT UP. Got it?’

Cowed, Joyce shrank back into her shoulders and nodded.

The door opened and another Child of Vega marched in, a European woman not much older than Joyce. She didn’t have her mask on, and her face was as white as a sheet. ‘Jesus, Minnie, I need to talk to you,’ she said. ‘I just got a call from Harriet. There’s—there’s some really weird stuff happening. He’s—you need to know what’s he really—what’s happening out there. I—’

Red Hair lifted up her hand to stop her. ‘We’ll talk outside.’ She and Japan Girl followed her out of the room. They slammed the door and locked it carefully behind them.

Wong and McQuinnie waited in silence. Just outside the windowless basement cell, the women talked in low voices. The minutes ticked on and five painfully slow ones grew to eight and then ten. There seemed to be some sort of dispute going on. The voices, although whispering, were emotionally charged. It appeared that there had been some development that had the Children of Vega passionately divided.

After two or three more minutes, the whispered conversation came to a halt. Wong tensed himself for the reentry of their captors, but they heard footsteps decreasing in volume. The women were walking away, perhaps to gather opinions from other members of Vega’s team, or members of the local groups who had been co-opted onto it.

This is our chance, he decided. He examined the room to see if there was anything they could use to break out with. There was nothing—except a copy of the
Shanghai Daily
that Red Hair had used to cover the table while she carefully dissected Joyce’s tortilla. It would have to do. He unfolded it and dropped to his knees in front of the door. Then he opened the pages and slid them out through the crack between the door and the floor.

‘You got anything I can use to push key out?’ he said.

Joyce searched her pockets. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I had a penknife but it’s gone. They must have taken it out of my pocket after they knocked us out.’

‘I need something, anything. Something thin, long, like a pencil. Did she take her pen when she went outside?’

She looked at the table, and even lifted the tortilla to see if it was underneath. ‘She did. Bugger.’ There appeared to be nothing they could use. Then her eyes fell upon the half-demolished wrap on the table. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said. ‘How about this?’ She picked up a chilli pepper.

He shook his head. ‘Too soft. Any hard vegetable?’

Joyce bit her bottom lip as she searched through the detritus. ‘We always put a piece of nice raw stuff in the bottom of a vegan pack—hang on, what about this?’ She pulled out a small, peeled carrot stick. ‘This is hard.’

Wong peered at it. ‘Too fat. Eat some, please.’

Joyce nibbled at it with her front teeth, Bugs Bunny style. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘It’s quite good. We sprinkle balsamic vinegar and black pepper on it to bring out the sweetness.’

After a frantic minute of sculpting the carrot with her teeth, it had become a thinnish twig. ‘Will that do?’

‘Let me try,’ he said, taking it from her. The carrot was still too thick to fit into the keyhole, but he forced it in and the middle part of it entered. He wriggled it a bit from side to side and then came the sound he was waiting for—the clink of a key falling. They heard it bounce.

‘Cheese, I hope it landed on the newspaper,’ Joyce said, crossing her fingers. ‘That sounded like a big bounce.’

‘Old key very heavy. Not bounce too much.’ He carefully pulled the sheet of newspaper back into the room. Almost at the end of the sheet, they both saw it at the same time: the key.

‘Yay.’

‘Shh. Keep quiet. We are not out yet.’

He picked it up, listened carefully at the door, and then gingerly unlocked it from the inside. It swung open with a B-grade movie creak. There was no one outside.

They tiptoed out of the room and found themselves in a dark corridor with several doors leading off it. Voices came from a room about four metres ahead of them on the left. Four or five people were talking simultaneously, and one was sobbing. ‘This isn’t what we thought it was,’ the crying voice was saying. ‘This is evil. He’s going to blow up the whole bloody place, isn’t he?’

‘We don’t know that,’ came another voice, a stern one which Wong recognised as belonging to Red Hair. ‘We don’t know that for sure.’

‘Get real, Minnie. We do,’ a third voice said. ‘He is. You just don’t want to admit it to yourself.’

‘How many people will be killed? All this killing is wrong. There may be vegetarians in the crowd. That’s different. They don’t deserve to die. And children! Babies.
Babies
. We can’t be part of this,’ the distressed voice continued. ‘This is mass murder.’

No one replied to this. Then a young man’s voice spoke: ‘Can’t we just call the Grand Theatre anonymously, and tell them that there’s a bomb? Tell them to cancel everything, evacuate the place?’

‘Who’s going to believe us?’ Japan Girl replied. ‘They get hundreds of crank calls like that every day when something like this is going down. Look at the size of the anti-American demo. No, there’s nothing we can do. I think we should split.’

The crying voice sniffed and added: ‘Perhaps if we give them precise details, tell them that the bomb will go off at six eighteen, tell them how we know, who we are, maybe they will believe us.’

Another voice spoke, a voice they recognised as the white-faced woman who had entered the interview room. ‘I say we split right now, cover our tracks. If Vega succeeds in killing the leaders of the two most important nations on earth and we get blamed for it, there’s going to be nowhere to hide. We are going to be hunted down and killed by every member of every military organisation on earth. Killed slowly. If the Americans Abu Ghraib us, everyone in the whole bloody world is going to applaud. Are you ready for that?’

‘Let’s just go,’ said the male voice.

Wong and McQuinnie heard the sound of chair legs scraping against the floor. Holding their breath, they raced through a fire escape door and ran up the stairs. At the top, they moved into another corridor and then found an unlocked door leading to something that looked like an adult education classroom.

They raced into a walk-in closet at the back of the room and then stopped and looked at each other, each wanting confirmation from the other about what they had overheard. ‘
Aiyeeaa
,’ the feng shui master whispered. ‘Vega is going to bomb the two Presidents. Did you hear? Big bomb, kill lots of people.
Aiyeeaa
.
Ho marfan
.’

Joyce was enraged. ‘That is SO not a vegan thing to do. That is like so
totally
non-veg.’ She stamped her foot. ‘And to think, I made him dinner.’

‘What is the name of this guy again?’

‘Vega. Like Vegan without the “n” on the end.’

‘Weega?’

‘No, Vega. With a “V”.’

Wong’s mind began racing. ‘No, I think
Weega
.’

‘Look, I know how to spell Vega.’

‘This man, he have any connection with western China? Far west? Northwest?’

Joyce nodded. ‘Yeah. He’s from this family in one of the provinces in the west. They were unhappy there so they moved to London and—’

‘Xinjiang? Urumqi? Is he from Urumqi?’

‘I don’t remember. Maybe. I know it was something I couldn’t pronounce, anyway. Room something.’

‘You mean Urumqi, Xinjiang province,’ Wong whispered to himself. His eyes were wide and full of fear. ‘Now I understand. Now it make sense. The bombs. The targets.
Wah
.’

‘What, what, what?’

He breathed out slowly before replying. ‘I tell you why he calls his name Weega. It’s for a reason. Is not really short for vegan. He just want you to think that, so that you support him. Really, his name is not Vega, but Uyghur. U-Y-G-H-U-R. He is the Uyghur bomber, I think.’

‘Who?’

‘The Chinese government have big problems in a place called Xinjiang, where the Uyghur people live. They don’t treat the people so good. They are not Chinese.’

‘If they’re not Chinese, how can the Chinese government do stuff to them?’

‘The place they live in is part of China, but they are not the same as Chinese people. Wrong race. They are Muslim. They have strange names. Some of their buildings have—how do you say it in English? Onion-shapes.’

‘Like domes? Okay, but what has this got to do with bombs?’

‘The Chinese government treat the Uyghur people badly. Always bullying, fighting with them. Some get lost, get shot, get killed, disappear. Thousands locked up. Some of the Uyghurs campaign against Chinese government. Some get explosives, start bombing campaign.’

‘So you think our Vega is one of those?’

‘He is using your group and other Shanghai vegetarian groups to help him get secret network in this city. But his real mission is not this. He want to explode bombs in the name of the Uyghur people. Probably he want to get notice worldwide.’

‘How come I never heard of any of this stuff?’

There was an obvious answer to this—idiot Westerners were only interested in pop music, Hollywood movies and hamburgers. ‘If he sets off bomb near the Chinese leader and the US leader, then the whole world will be talking about what is happening in Xinjiang. For the Uyghur people, this is a very clever plan.’

‘I guess.’

‘But we got to stop it.’

Less enthusiastically: ‘I guess.’

A minute later, Wong and McQuinnie peered out of the classroom at the corridor. They had still not been traced. The building was a maze of corridors, all of which looked exactly the same.

‘How do we find our way out?’ Joyce asked.

Wong was staring at his compass. ‘Big question is: how old is this building?’

‘What?’

‘If it is before 1949, maybe it is built with feng shui principles. But after that, no good, unless very recent.’

‘We better just go out of a window or something. We can hardly call the guards and ask them whether they have a book detailing the history of the building, can we?’

‘No need for book,’ said Wong. ‘I can tell. This building very bad, very boring architecture. Communist style, 1960 something. No feng shui.’

‘So how do we find our way out?’

‘We find something from before 1949—that will help.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like that,’ said Wong as they turned a corner and saw a guard shuffling along a corridor away from them. He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties.

Wong raced to the shabby workstation the guard had just left and found what he was looking for: an old picture of a green dragon taped on the wall for good luck.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So this mean front wall is that way and back door should be over this side.’ He pulled out his compass to check the directions. ‘Back way faces northeast. Back door will not be so heavily guarded. Probably there is also delivery bay or staff entrance on back side.’

They raced through another corridor until they found the back entrance—but it was heavily guarded, probably by a security company hired by Vega. So they turned and ran back along the corridor, trying door handles until they reached one which was unlocked. They raced into the room—another empty classroom—and then carefully climbed out of the window into a Shanghai back alley. They were free.

‘I can’t believe we broke out of that place so easily.’

‘That was the easy job,’ Wong said. ‘Now come the hard one. Now we have to break into the place where the Presidents of China and USA will have their meeting and tell them to cancel it.’ He paused. ‘Or…’ He lapsed into silence.

‘Or what?’

‘Or we go far, far away. So when bomb blows up, we are not near.’

‘Let’s do both. We’ll race over to the Grand Theatre, tell them that there’s a bomb in the place, and then we’ll get as far away as possible, leave the bomb squad to switch it off or whatever you do with bombs.’

Wong ran to a fruit shop and offered to slip the vendor a small sum of cash for permission to use her phone. She quickly agreed. He expected her to point to an old bakelite handset, but the woman reached into her apron and brought out a tiny, shiny chrome mobile phone. ‘Twenty yuan a call,’ she said in Mandarin.