Rare Earth Read online

  “Didn’t they have a point?”

  “What?”

  “About the economy? Markets are not efficient. Look what happened to Lehman Brothers.”

  “Now you’re doin’ it!”

  “What?”

  “Arguing, bitching, disputing - what the fuck do you know about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis? Anything? Look, fella, this economic crisis is just a blip - OK, it’s big signal that America is fucked long-term, but a blip for capitalism, believe me. I graduated from Tsinghua - that’s like the MIT of China; and the Stern School is the number five B-School in the world. Think they’re gonna teach you a bunch of dumb shit on purpose? Efficient Markets is right!”

  “So why did you come back?”

  She waved her hand at the flying wedge of motorcycles and dust.

  “The money is here. The future is here. Don’t get me wrong: we love your system. The free market, the rule o’ law, separation of church and state - Oh Boy! do we love that one. Basketball, securitised finance, independent regulation and central banking. We love it all. It’s just you guys are determined to fuck it up with all this conflict shit!”

  “Capitalism doesn’t work without freedom and conflict. Didn’t they teach you that at NYU?”

  “They teach it but they don’t mean it. Look I know you never been to Beijing, Shanghai-but believe me those places are swarming with Western business guys. Goldman, Citi, the London School of Economics, Deutsche; every shyster law firm you ever heard of and every shyster consultancy firm. You think they give a shit about freedom?”

  “So this is Chinese capitalism in action?” Brough gestured to the grit-hazed squadron.

  “I had you down as smart, Mister. No, this is Chinese Communism. We’re Communists till we die!”

  “But you operate outside the law!”

  “There is no law says you can’t have a motorcycle club. Listen - half of these girls been fucked-over by the Party: Chi had a dotcom fashion startup until some motherfucker in the Shanghai Party made a forced acquisition under threat of a wire fraud prosecution. But in the end Marxism is all-powerful because it is true! The CCP is essential to the peaceful transition to a market economy. The CCP will ensure social order from here to eternity.”

  He could feel, through the joy in her shoulders, that she was elated.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  He had twenty years’ start on Miss Lai in the processing of ruling-party bullshit.

  She dropped a shoulder to glance back at him:

  “Ever seen the inside of a Chinese jail?”

  ~ * ~

  4

  Li Qi-han’s arms were still shuddering from the brick-hod torture and his left eye had swollen from where Hard Man Han hit him in the face a few seconds after he’d regained consciousness. His ribs were stinging from where they’d yanked the taser barbs out and his trousers reeked because, at the point of being tasered, he had let go both shit and urine. But he was in a strange way happy.

  They had not, despite verbal threats to do so, shoved a cattle prod into his anus, nor smothered him, nor hung him upside down and flailed him. These were the standard tortures Li had always fantasised about inflicting upon Tang Lu’s petty criminals; indeed they were the standard tortures, full stop. So he was getting away lightly and, at the same time, impressing the hell out of Grandfather Li, who was hovering in the corner of the cell.

  Grandfather had been answering every insult the two-man beating squad threw at Li with his own highly surreal and comical ripostes, which had at one point made Li laugh out loud-but not the beating squad, who couldn’t hear him.

  Now the squad had gone: some kind of meal-break or shift change. Li had no way of knowing the time of day. They had kept him awake with forcible squatting half the night, then a tape loop of Without The Communist Party There Is No New China played so many times that, for an hour after it stopped, Li felt like his entire body, blood, heart rate and breathing were happening in time to the Mao-era marching song. Then, finally, Grandfather Li had showed up.

  “You think this is harsh?” Grandfather said, once they were alone. “It’s nothing. Should have seen what they did to us in the bauxite mine! Should have seen what we did to the Americans in Korea! You caved in or something? You confessed?”

  Li wanted to say no but his throat was swollen. He’d had no water for the last six hours. They’d taken his shoes and belt. It felt like the temperature in the cell was up around 40 Centigrade. Presently he’d summoned the energy to shake his head. No.

  “Listen carefully. They think you’re some kind of Communist princeling with Beijing connections.”

  “Li Qi-han,” Li Qi-han said hoarsely. Venerable communist name.

  “My father idolised Li Qi-han, that’s why I left instructions -to give you Qi-han’s name.” Grandfather Li leaned forward and peered into Li’s eyes.

  “Great-grandfather knew him?” Li croaked.

  “No - glimpsed him. Wuhan in 1926. Big speech. Big crowd. Great-Grandfather Li was there. Wipe your nose, you have snot and blood on your lip. The real Li Qi-han was a workerist, just like my father. Never wanted to go - to the countryside with Mao I mean. When the Long March began, father left us in the pit village: just me and mother. We had a dog but it died.”

  “Those journalists have destroyed my life,” Li moaned.

  “Not yet...” Grandfather Li closed one eye and made the other fizz as if a wasp was hovering inside it; and he pulled a face signifying, with just a subtle tightening of his paper-cool skin, wisdom from beyond the grave:

  “Two of them have been taken to the hospital in Ordos by the Chinese assistant. She is wily and has seven senses. The third one is still in the desert. I watched him shit a little plastic thing out of his backside.”

  “USB stick,” Li whispered.

  “What is that?”

  “Memory stick. You can save information from something called a computer.”

  “Think I don’t know what a computer is!” Grandfather Li snapped.

  “The camera footage will be on the USB stick. He take anything else away from the crash site - the foreigner I mean?”

  Grandfather shook his head. Xiao’s team had scooped the whole scattered contents of the van-socks, tampons, laptops, camera lights, tapes, stale cakes-into plastic bags, working fast to beat the Inner Mongolian cops to the evidence.

  “This memory stick,” Grandfather Li seemed to play with the concept of a stick with memory, mentally holding it up before his eyes like a kid with Asperger’s, turning it around and around, “ - the stuff that’s on it, the memories, can they be copied onto another stick?”

  “Only with a computer.”

  “So if we get it off him before he copies it onto a computer, then the Westerners can’t make their news report?”

  Li nodded and started laughing with pain.

  “Apart from that, no problem! I’ve only killed one shitty-assed police informer and a pedigree racehorse, written off a Honda belonging to the People’s Republic of China, totalled some gangster’s Audi and opened fire on a police officer...”

  “Plus you have threatened suicide in a public place, importuned the owner of a brothel to commit premeditated murder, and they have got you in possession of a firearm technically still belonging to the PLA,” Grandfather chuckled. “You have a true Li family charge sheet there!”

  “What shall I do?”

  Grandfather squinted at him and said:

  “Today the Communist Party is just a fascist party in disguise, you know that? Fascist methods of control. Fascist levels of surveillance. Fascist police tactics. Even under Mao - even during the anti-rightist campaign - it was never as bad as this. And remember you’re talking here to a victim of grave injustice.”

  Li scowled: “That’s Rightism talking! No wonder they put you in a bauxite mine!”

  “Rightism, leftism? It doesn’t matter to them. When they need to fill the jails they just go along through the party scooping up everybody with a br
ain, like those lucky shoppers who win the lottery and get to raid the supermarket for sixty seconds without paying.”

  Li placed his fingers in his ears. The Communist Party was, to him, a given. With its order and hierarchy it was the world. It was a perfect mechanism and it was only idiots like his dad, with his stupid petition, that made it malfunction. And now Grandfather was talking dangerous bullshit.

  “Outside they are planning what to do,” Grandfather butted in to Li’s thoughts:

  “That big one, Xiao, he’s scared. Han, the one with the bull neck, he wants Xiao’s job. Both of them are crapping it about the State Security Police. Can you believe it? Three Western journalists on the loose and they never told the secret police? Zheng, your boss...” Grandfather shook his head, “he’s going to Tibet unless we get the memory stick thing. You-you, they will either execute or let go free.”

  Li’s eyes betrayed total incomprehension.

  “Look. The unquiet dead can’t physically interact with the world. I can’t touch anything or move it, otherwise I would slice Hard Man Han’s balls into the shape of an origami goldfish, I promise you. All I can do is give advice and collect intelligence - and right now I am going to listen to them plotting their interrogation campaign. In the meantime, don’t sign anything. When Xiao comes in he will be playing the soft cop. You just listen to me and start out angry. Angry and outraged. Believe me, power is the only language these fascists understand.”

  ~ * ~

  5

  When the beating team returned, they limbered up by making him squat for ten minutes with his arms outstretched, holding the brick hod again, shouting insults into his face. When he collapsed, they kicked him in the ribs and one urinated over him. Then they left him, sodden, on the floor.

  After a while the door burst open and Hard Man Han swaggered through it, still in his stab vest and twirling a cattle prod around his forefinger by its leather strap. Next came Xiao in full Superintendent’s uniform, a red Communist Party pennant fixed to his sleeve with four safety pins. Then came Grandfather Li floating along at head height in the lotus position, eyes closed, taking the piss out of authority as usual.

  “Li Qi-han, you have committed murder, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder of a police officer, wanton destruction of property, theft of a firearm from the People’s Liberation Army and dangerous driving,” Xiao began, using that tone of voice they use in soap operas when pronouncing the death sentence.

  “In addition, you have called into question the legitimacy of Communist Party Rule in China, advocated Rightism and procured ammunition from an arms-dealing network linked to Al Qaeda.”

  “Just let them do the act,” Grandfather muttered, his eyes still closed.

  “If you do not sign a confession in the next five minutes, four minutes fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty seven,” Hard Man Han yelled at him, like a robot, “we will be forced to hand you over to the State Security Police, giving them a full list of your political misdemeanours. Also sexual harassment of colleagues and derogatory attitudes to the Hui minority and the religion of Islam.”

  Li stayed silent and looked at the floor.

  Han leapt to his feet and kicked the plastic chair from under him, grabbing Li’s flailing arm and twisting it to breaking point so that he let out a scream.

  “Hold on!” Xiao shouted, pulling Han away and pushing his own face into Li’s. “Hey, little boy, it’s hot in here and you smell.”

  Xiao fixed the chair back into place and sat Li down on it.

  “Go and get me some tea,” he ordered Han. “And get some water for this little idiot.”

  When the door closed Xiao drew up his chair knee-to-knee with Li and thrust a clipboard under his nose. On it, Li noticed, was a typed confession by himself admitting to threatening suicide on the roof at Mrs. Ma’s, causing the car crash, and possession of the Type 51. There was no mention of shots fired, no mention of Western journalists, and nothing about crimes against the state.

  “This is a plea bargain,” Grandfather, hovering two feet above Xiao, sneered over his shoulder. “They threaten you with political crimes and get you to sign for the ordinary criminal stuff in return for leniency.”

  “Tang Lu people stick together,” Xiao’s voice was full of menace. “Tang Lu’s reputation for social order is second to none. Sign this and your crimes against the state will be overlooked as the actions of a mental case.”

  Now Han burst through the door, agitated, hyperventilating, his eyes deranged.

  “What? He has refused to sign?”

  Han ripped his pistol out of its holster and jerked Li’s head back by the hair. He thrust the muzzle of the gun inside Li’s mouth, shouting wildly while Xiao screamed for him to stop and maintain self-control. Meanwhile Grandfather Li shouted wildly too - a full litany of Mao-era political insults - so there was cacophony.

  When it ended, Li found himself sitting once again on his plastic chair and the two men staring at him, with evil faces. Grandfather was at his side now, feeding him lines in a whisper:

  “You two provincial dick-heads really do not get it do you?” Li sneered through a film of snot.

  Han raised his fist and Xiao caught it; this time neither of them was play-acting.

  “Get what?” Xiao gasped at him, becoming flushed.

  “I, Li Qi-han, graduate of Beijing Party School and great-grandson of a Long March Veteran, solemnly declare that in pursuing a team of unauthorised Western journalists, posing an acute threat to social order and in possession of state secrets, I was sabotaged by members of the Tang Lu Public Security Police, operating beyond their jurisdiction inside the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Province.”

  “I will kill him now, slowly,” Han hissed, but Xiao’s mouth stayed open, silent.

  “Furthermore, one senior officer, Superintendent Xiao,” Li glanced at Xiao’s name badge as if to check, “opened fire without provocation while I was in the process of apprehending evidence vital to national security!”

  Li spat the last words out with genuine venom, beginning now to see where Grandfather Li was taking this.

  “You little shit, you were going to kill them!” Xiao exploded.

  “Maybe I was going to rescue them from you? Where are your witnesses? Ordos General Hospital? Or maybe five unauthorised carloads of Ningxia Province cops fresh from - oh yes did I forget? - the attempted murder of a petty criminal in the cell block of Tang Lu Police HQ?”

  Xiao and Han tried not to stare at each other in amazement, but failed.

  “Think we’re going to let you go?” said Xiao.

  “He’s kidding right?” Han shook his head, as if hallucinating.

  “I will sign a receipt for the return of the Type 51. It’s a family heirloom. My grandfather was a war hero in Korea. Famous war hero. I will sign for dangerous driving if you need it to clear things up with the Mongolian cops.”

  There was a moment of silence while everybody in the room struggled to comprehend what was going on.

  “Finally, I urge you to expedite my release and return to duty. Because,” here his delivery faltered as the statement was totally false: “I know what’s really going on inside Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride.”

  Han, who did not, blinked. Xiao, who did, put his head in his hands and groaned.

  ~ * ~

  6

  It was late afternoon by the time the Snow Leopards GPS-ed their way to a supply dump. Miss Chi waved them into a circle where, after a bit of prodding with tent poles in the sand, and a lot of gratuitous throttle revs, they began digging up jerry cans of gasoline. At 40mph and eight hours on the move, Brough - a habitual calculator of mileage and headings-knew they must be somewhere close to Ordos now.

  Soon there was a charcoal fire and the smell of lamb sizzling. Somebody handed Brough an inexplicably cold bottle of Rolling Rock, and a few minutes later he was slouching against the still-warm fuselage of a Chiang-Jiang surrounded by a handful of women cradling canapé-sized burgers and sipping
from old, scarred-glass bottles of Pepsi.

  “Why all this vintage stuff?”

  “It’s our youth subculture, Mister Brough,” said one, wearing a green silk flying jacket with the name “Terry” embroidered in loopy writing next to a USAF patch.

  “But what does it signify?”

  “What it signifies is,” another began, pushing her fringe off her face and straightening herself as if to make a statement, “our love of the free market. Free market is the new Chinese religion!”