Free Mr Wong Goes West by Nury Vittachi Page B

luck signs around—fortunately, for the British, that’s a simple enough affair. We make sure that we don’t have thirteen seats at the table, we check the calendar to make sure it’s not Friday the thirteenth, we chuck a bit of salt over our left shoulder, hope it lands on a black cat, and that’s pretty much that. For the Chinese, though, we understand that it’s all a bit trickier, a bit more detailed. That’s where you come in. We want to be able to say to our visitors that we have one of the world’s finest feng shui masters on our team, and that we can assure you on his behalf that any negativity has been completely excised.’
    ‘Very hard to do this in one day. Better you have the meeting in another place,’ Wong said.
    ‘That would seem to be the obvious answer. But, Mr Wong, we are selling a place. A building. A very fine building that happens to be a flying building. A flying building that we are saying is the very best place to hold a meeting in any city in the world in which it lands. Thus it stands to reason that the meeting has to take place in Skyparc. It would be absurd for it to happen anywhere else.’
    Sir Nicholas clasped his hands behind his back and thrust his chest forward. Clearly, he was a former military man.
    ‘One of the sales angles for Skyparc is that it has the sort of first-class conference rooms that is ideal for top-level summits, be they business meetings or political ones. We have to demonstrate that that is true. We have to imply that now that Skyparc has landed in Hong Kong, the best meeting room in the city is not at the Mandarin Oriental, or the Four Seasons, or the Grand Hyatt, but inside an aircraft on the apron of Chek Lap Kok airport. Furthermore, Skyparc is unique in being ameeting place beyond the concept of national boundaries. We can organise a summit on this aircraft and fly it to a place where it is subject to no jurisdictional boundaries of any kind. It will be the only place in the world ideal for inter-governmental summits dealing with tricky territorial issues: the Israelis and the Palestinians can meet here, as can the Singhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils, and so on and so forth. Do you understand?’
    ‘Understand.’
    ‘Fine. Now Ms Teo will take you into Skyparc itself. She will arrange for you to have access to the parts you’ll need to go into.’ He dismissed them with a short bow of his head.
    As they walked out of the hangar and onto a gantry leading to the aircraft, Wong decided to ask Teo about the murder. After all, she was clearly talented at memorising facts. ‘Who died? Who killed the man who died?’
    ‘There’s not much we can say,’ she said. ‘The whole thing is
sub judice
now. A man from BM Dutch Petroleum was shot, and an intruder was caught red-handed. An environmental activist. Someone who has been waging a war against the petrol company for years. That’s it, really.’
    The feng shui master nodded. ‘But if I do a reading of this airplane, to make sure there are no bad vibration there, then better you tell me more detail about exactly where the man was shot, how he was shot. Or let me talk to someone who know about it.’
    ‘I see. Well, there are a couple of cops still here. Would you like to meet them? I think you’ll find them in the aircraft.’
    As they approached the enormous, double-decker plane, Wong was curious about how much it appeared to differ from other aircraft. The entry door seemed wider, and seemed to be made of wood and brass. The windows were not a line of small portholes, but were long, thin and rectangular.
    The public relations woman noticed his surprise, and gave a laugh. ‘Strange, isn’t it, the first time you see it? They’ve gone to town to make this different. It’s the iPhone of the aircraft world. It is amazing what a difference you can make, just by getting the designers to think outside the box for a change.’
    As he got closer, it became clear that the wood and brass were faux artistic