Macau Airport, China
TRAPPED AND SHACKLED in the hideous iron ‘tiger chair’, head forced back by two police goons and a hand clamped over his mouth, the only thing Luke could see was that little brown bottle of chilli oil hovering above his face. It had become, in this moment, the entire focus of his world. The State Security man was holding it above his nose, ever so lightly between his thumb and forefinger, so lightly that it looked to Luke as if he might drop the thing at any moment. He knew it was too late to say anything that would save him from the agonizing pain he was about to experience but, still, he tried to shout a protest. The hand on his mouth just clamped tighter.
Luke Carlton braced himself for the flaming inferno that was about to erupt inside his body. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and waited for the inevitable. Seconds went by. Nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The man with the chilli oil was gone, the policeman took his hand off his mouth and now he could hear voices coming through the open door to the holding cell. It sounded like an argument and he strained to hear what was being said but it was all in Chinese.
Suddenly the man from the Ministry of State Security was back. He had something in his hand but it wasn’t the bottle of chilli oil: it was Luke’s passport. He signalled to the policemen, who released their grip on Luke’s head. Now someone was unlocking the clamps around his wrists and ankles.
‘Mr Blanford.’ The man handed him back his passport with something that looked almost like a bow. ‘You are free to go. My officers will escort you to your flight. It has not yet departed.’
Luke stayed silent, not wanting to say anything that could somehow incriminate him, but his mind was in turmoil. Someone, somehow, had said something in that adjacent room that had saved him from an excruciating fate. Luke was no stranger to torture. He had undergone some deeply unpleasant things during his time, like the agony of having a Colombian narco gang drill a hole through his foot. But chilli oil down the nostrils? No, he didn’t think he could have coped with that. He would have told them absolutely everything if they’d inflicted that on him.
And so, as the uniformed policemen lifted him out of the tiger chair, he wondered who or what had saved him at the eleventh hour. It was as they set him on his feet and he shook his arms free that he heard a voice he recognized immediately. It was coming from the next-door room. It wasn’t Jenny’s. It was that of Miss Xinyi.