INCARNATION by Daniel Easterman Read Free Book Online Page B

poured tea into the cups, Uighur-style, without milk, very sweet. The tea was golden-brown, more suited to Chinese than Uighur taste. David thought there’d be little point in having a word with Arwel or his good lady. He’d get a couple of black tea bricks in London and bring them down. And give Glynis some pointers about traditional Uighur cuisine.
    ‘We have come here with our son,’ said Rotsemi. David took a closer look at her. She couldn’t be more than thirty, but her face was white and drained, and her eyes held a vacant look, as though both curiosity and terror had been wiped from them.
    ‘Is he your only child?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I have other children,’ said Osmanjan. ‘From my first wife.’
    ‘Where is she?’
    ‘Dead.’ He said it in a flat voice, as though to tame an emotion more acid than simple grief. ‘They took her from me. She died in prison. Then they took the children. There are three of them. Perhaps they are alive. Perhaps dead.’
    David did not need to ask who ‘they’ were. Only the Han Chinese authorities could have put a wife in prison and taken children away by force.
    He looked at Rotsemi.
    ‘And you? Do you want more children?’
    Her pale face coloured gently, and she nodded.
    ‘Now, perhaps. Now that we are safe.’
    ‘Why were you in danger? What did you do that made Sinkiang dangerous for you?’
    Rotsemi shrank back visibly. She’d said too much already. Osmanjan sipped from his cup, holding it from behind, as though it had no handle.
    ‘You must speak to my son,’ he said. ‘He knows everything. He will tell you.’
    ‘Was it on account of a man called Hyde? Matthew Hyde?’ Osmanjan did not answer. But David could see he recognized the name.
    He spent half an hour with them, and at the end he was no further forward. The son had led them here, the son knew everything. They were just his hangers-on. When he finished his tea, he made his excuses and left. The last thing he heard as the door closed was Woody Woodpecker’s insane laugh. Stepping on to the landing, he sneezed loudly.
    Chris Donaldson was waiting for him downstairs.
    ‘I’m told you came down by car.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Any chance of a lift back?’
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Hampstead.’
    ‘Well, that’s not too far out of my way.’
    ‘You don’t have to take me all the way there.’
    ‘May as well. But you’ll have to pay your way.’
    ‘I thought you’d say that.’
    David fished in his pocket for his keys, and tossed them to Donaldson.
    ‘You drive. I’m bushed. But I’ve a few questions I’d like to ask you.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
    People‘s Republic of China
    Western Region Military Installation 14 (Chaofe Ling) [Coordinates classified]
    Level 3, Corridor 13

    T he corridor was almost two and a half miles long. Four kilometres, to be precise. Four thousand metres. Engineer Zhang Fengsuo said it was the longest corridor in China, maybe the world, and he should have known - he’d designed it, costed it, and supervised its construction. It never turned, never wavered, never altered, not for an inch of its length. In the ceiling, two thousand light units burned day and night. A team of fitters replaced those in each section on a week-by-week schedule. The corridor was divided into twelve sections, so it took three months to work through the corridor before starting all over again.
    There were forty-one corridors like it in the installation, six on each level, crossing and crisscrossing, one hundred and sixty-seven kilometres in all. Each corridor on level three had a minimum of five hundred doors, and each door …
    Karim Hasanoglu shook his head in bewilderment and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Thinking about this place didn’t help your nerves. He’d been here three weeks now, and still dreaded these long drives through the white, brightly lit corridors, each one exactly like the rest, with no landmarks or markers apart from the Chinese signs that he could not