Daylight on Iron Mountain (30 page)

Shen Fu was the one who was asked to deal with the media – to make sure that those who knew were quickly warned not to breathe a word; that it would be in their worst interests – their
very
worst interests – to pursue
this. His death-like presence, there in their offices, convinced them. Say a single word, he told them, and your lives will be made a living hell. He, personally, would make sure of it. And they believed him.

Not a word
was
said. Thanks to Shen Fu, the scandal passed, reduced to an internal problem by his timely actions.

The rest was history.

Three days later he was summoned to meet the First Dragon himself. There, at the meeting, he was offered Chang Li Chen’s job.

Again he refused. This time not from any instinct, but because – as he said to the First Dragon himself, prostrating himself humbly as he did – he lacked experience.

But the First Dragon would not listen. He was to be a junior minister. He would gain experience. Given time.

Thus, against his will, he became a Dragon. And not just any Dragon. The Edict was perhaps the single most important document ever drafted, and he would be in personal charge of it: forging it clause by clause, paragraph by paragraph, word by word, until it expressed the will of those who had envisaged it, the seven great lords, Tsao Ch’un’s chief ministers, known simply as the Seven.

And so, step by inexorable step, he had risen, until, after the untimely death of the First Dragon five years back, he had found himself thrust into that role, young and inexperienced as he was.

He remembered how it had been, that first day. How he had looked about him at the luxury, the sheer opulence of this chamber and vowed to himself that it would change – that his would be a simpler, purer reign than that of those who had preceded him. And so it had been. Puritan by nature, he had swept away all of the clutter, all of the misplaced pomp and ostentation that had grown like barnacles on the great hide of the beast. At the same time he had set himself the task of hunting down every last trace of corruption and, in so doing, had built a new pride in the Ministry; the same pride that had existed when the Thousand Eyes was but eight men, operating out of two rooms in Tsao Ch’un’s palace, all those years ago.

He had rebuilt it well, in his own severe image. And now it would be tested. Both he and it.

Shen Fu stood, the sudden movement making the candle flame dance, the shadows waver.

Who are you?
the voice inside him asked, as it so often did.

I am Shen Fu, who lost everything.

It was that loss – of his wife and children, of all his hopes and dreams – that had made his rise possible, for a man with nothing more to lose could achieve a great deal, especially within an organization like the Thousand Eyes, where emotional detachment was the greatest of virtues. But chance too had played a hand, and at those crucial moments in his career when he
had
gambled, he had invariably made the right choice. Luck, some called it, others said audacity, but it was neither. It was chance that favoured him, for chance favoured the dead.

This night, however, would be the greatest gamble of them all. ‘Double or nothing’, to use the old, forbidden parlance of the West.

Sitting back, he spoke to the air. As he did, a screen came down to the right of where he sat, its sudden brightness filling the chamber. For the next half hour he called up image after image from the past, from before Tsao Ch’un’s great City – things that were forbidden to other, lesser men.

He watched Picasso paint, bright colour falling upon the whiteness of the canvas; saw Hitler standing in his staff car as it drove beneath the Eiffel Tower, his arm held upward in a stiff salute. Kennedy’s assassination, the Moon landing, Hiroshima, all followed in quick succession, those and a hundred more, some in black and white they were so old. But most of them in colour. And then the sequence slowed, showing a young boy, eight or nine at most, shaven-headed, walking slowly through a Russian cornfield, as in a dream.

Shen Fu sighed. Dead as he was, this single image could yet touch him.

Tarkovsky…

He stared at it, fondly almost, then whispered to the air. ‘Blow him away… Blow them all away.’

Shakespeare and Beethoven, Michelangelo and Einstein, Planck and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Mozart, Bob Dylan and James Dean, Muhammad Ali and the Beatles, Churchill and Stalin, Newton and Copernicus, Van Gogh, Monet and Chaucer, Erasmus, da Vinci and Columbus, Voltaire, Chaplin and Edison, Martin Luther King and Xerxes, Hitchcock, Cortez and Darwin, Gandhi and Lord Byron, Werner von Braun, Elvis Presley and Nelson Mandela, Washington, Napoleon and Marilyn Monroe, Henry Ford, Luther and Mercator, Michael Jackson, Wordsworth and Neil Armstrong, Julius Caesar
and Karl Marx, Faraday, Roosevelt and Tchaikovsky, Freud, Wagner, Tolkien and Jimi Hendrix, Benjamin Franklin, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens, Lenin, Alexander and Lincoln, Judy Garland and Neil Young, Cleopatra and Moses, Cromwell, Turner and Lord Nelson, Charlemagne and Jesus… and all the rest.

Names that had once meant something in the world. Names he had come to know in the performance of his duties.
Yin fa chi
, they were…
Triggers
.

Let them all disappear; let them rot in the desert sands of Time.

Yes. Let it all vanish, as if it had never been.

He understood now. People could not be left to choose their destiny. They must be guided by those who knew better. Those who were willing to make the sacrifice on their behalf. Men like himself.

Two hours had passed. Outside the night was slowly drawing on to morning. For Shen Fu, who had sat there most of the night, those last two hours had seemed interminable, unendurable, and yet they’d had to be endured, for there was a need – a very great need – to ensure that he was right.

He had considered a great deal in that time: the role of the Minor Families; how fit the Seven were to fight a war; whether the companies would commit themselves and get involved, or whether they’d just keep their heads down. And then there were the Banners and the New Confucians. Where would
they
stand if push came to shove?

The Seven, it was obvious, would need to fight or go under, but the rest?

The Banners were almost certainly Tsao Ch’un’s. They would remain loyal to him. Only if Jiang Lei came out of retirement might there be a question.

The rest? Well… the rest were ineffective. They might seem powerful, yet when the chips were down…

Shen Fu almost laughed. Here he was, contemplating war, and for once he was thinking in cliché. And Western cliché at that!

‘Push and shove’. ‘When the chips were down.’

Shen Fu stood. The time for consideration was at an end. The First Dragon had come to a decision. It was time to let his fellows know. To seal their fates with his.

He spoke to the air, knowing they were at their desks right then, awaiting his decision.

‘Things are finely balanced,’ he began. ‘Indeed, as things are, Tsao Ch’un will win this war, despite his disadvantages. Why? Because he is one and they seven, and who among them will make those crucial, momentous and utterly vital decisions? Yet even if he wins, what then? The Seven, of course, will die – they and all their families, to the last generation. But Tsao Ch’un too will die. Not now, perhaps, but some day soon. Ten years from now. And what then? Who will rule after him? Which one of his three bone-idle, useless progeny?’

He went on. ‘We have seen this many times before in our long history – how new dynasties have been formed through the strength and vision of a single man; how chaos has been turned into order through such a channelling of power. Yet when that great man died, what then? Did his sons build upon what he had achieved? Or did they fall upon each other like hungry wolves?

‘We must not let that happen to our world. We have worked too hard to let it happen. That is why our role in this cannot be passive. We must act, and act now,
against
our Master. In fact, we must use every last shred of our influence to rally opposition to his rule.’

Shen Fu paused, looking about him at the darkness.

‘I know what you are thinking. That we have all sworn oaths of loyalty. That if we cannot be trusted, then who can? But there are precedents. History teaches us that when a Son of Heaven forgets his responsibilities, when he steps beyond just and acceptable behaviour and stumbles into tyranny, then the Mandate of Heaven is broken and… well, I do not have to say. The Mandate
has
been broken. Tsao Ch’un’s treatment of Fan Chang cannot be borne. We cannot cover our eyes and keep our heads bowed. Not in the face of this.’

Afterwards, alone, the First Dragon sat at his desk, his fingers steepled beneath his chin. Already six of those he had addressed earlier were dead – killed by Ministry assassins to prevent them from going straight to Tsao Ch’un. Not only that, but contact had been made with three of the Seven, as well as with Amos Shepherd, declaring that the Ministry would support ‘those whose righteous actions against an act of tyranny will prevent our world from sliding once more into chaos’.

The words were Shen Fu’s. Now, alone again, he sat in the darkness, looking at images of his darling wife and children, wondering if they would have understood what he did here today. As their image faded, so a voice sounded, informing the First Dragon that his cruiser was awaiting him on the roof.

Shen Fu stood. It was two hours until dawn and the die had been cast. He was to go to see Li Chao Ch’in at Tongjiang – that is, if Tsao Ch’un had not anticipated his treachery and already sent cruisers to blast him from the air. But he was not afraid. Let the heavens fall, it did not matter now. Nothing had really mattered since the bomb went off. The rest had been a game; a filling-in of time until he too was crated up and offered to the oven man.

As his cruiser lifted from the roof, Shen Fu watched the newscasts as the first few skirmishes took place. All seemed normal. Most people, waking, would think this another ordinary day. But it was far from ordinary. Even as he sat there, in the comfort of that cushioned space, the sound of the engines a constant dull vibration, countless life-changing decisions were being made.

Forces were being rallied and deals made. Already, almost certainly, hundreds had been killed, maybe thousands, and more – many more – would die violent deaths in the hours to come. But Shen Fu, one-time oven man, was completely unperturbed. For he knew what few others guessed – that Death, not Tsao Ch’un, was the only true Master.

He who had not smiled but once in twenty years, now smiled again at the thought. Did Tsao Ch’un know? Or was he yet ignorant of his Dragon’s flight? And when he learned of it, would he rage and curse him for his ingratitude? Or would he take a calming breath and appreciate the move, as one Master to another across the board?

Shen Fu hoped it was the latter. Hoped that in this, his most trying hour, Tsao Ch’un would prove the man Shen thought he was. It was rare for Shen to like any man, but he revered Tsao Ch’un.

Shen Fu looked up at the camera, as if addressing the great man directly.

‘No hard feelings, neh?’

He looked down again, then nodded. A week he gave it. One week… then one or other of them would be dead.

T
hey got the message from the court last thing at night, just after eleven. At ten past, Chi Lin Lin was knocking on Jake’s door once again, hammering hard, not caring who he woke.

‘
Shih
Reed!
Shih
Reed! We’ve news!’

Inside, Jake sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes.
News?

Then he remembered. The case. Young Chi was talking about the case.

Jake had been having dreams again, and Chi had woken him from one. A dream in which he’d met Alison for the first time, outside Blackwell’s, on a sunny day in late September, a million years ago.

He edged across the bed, then stood, blinking his eyes, trying to get fully awake. Then, and only then, did he unlock the door.

‘Chi Lin Lin… what’s to tell?’

‘We are to be in court,
Shih
Reed. First thing.’

‘First thing?’ For a moment he was confused, then, ‘You mean at eight?’

‘And not a second later. Earlier, if at all possible.’

‘I’ll be there… and Chi…’

In that pause between words he had changed his mind. He would tell Advocate Yang about GenSyn in the morning. After all, there was nothing he could do right now, and it would be nice to see his face when he found out.

They had promised him a team of three lawyers. Specialists in company law and pensions agreements. He would have to let them know, of course,
but he had the funniest feeling that they probably knew already. They had seemed to know everything about the case.

‘Yes,
Shih
Reed?’ Chi asked, when Jake had said nothing for a full five seconds.

‘Nothing. Just thank you for coming to tell me. And see you in the morning, neh?’