The Armageddon Machine

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Twenty-One

  Beijing, People’s Republic of China

  June 8 -- 05:30 UTC/1:30 pm local time

  Jimmy Chen put down the comic book he had been reading and looked at the closed-circuit monitor. There were three monitors in all, each screen broken into quadrants that gave him views from different cameras. He had placed the cameras around the building himself, making them as discreet as possible. On one screen, in the upper left quadrant, he could see the elevator letting off on his floor. Jimmy’s real name was Chen Wei, but he had taken the name “Jimmy” after the first time he saw the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. He had also tried to make himself look like James Dean, but he had been given a face only a mother could love--or so his mother told him--so he had given up the affectations, but kept the name.

  The monitor screen showed Lu Ping getting off the elevator. She was alone. A second camera--viewed as the upper right panel on the screen--picked her up as she walked through the hall leading away from the elevator, and a third camera watched over her as she turned into another hall, at the end of which was Jimmy’s door. He watched as she walked up to the door. Sight and sound synced up as the onscreen Lu Ping raised her hand and made a knocking motion and Jimmy’s ears registered those very same knocks.

  Jimmy got up from the desk where the monitors were set up and walked to the door, unlocking the multiple locks and opening the door for Lu Ping. She stepped past him and into the apartment without a word, and he shut the door and slid a single deadbolt into place.

  “Still paranoid as ever, Jimmy,” Lu Ping said.

  “It pays to be careful,” he responded. “There are many dangerous people in the world. You should know this as well as anyone.”

  She took a cursory glance at the bank of closed-circuit monitors on which Jimmy Chen had watched her approach, from the moment she pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where he lived, up until the knock at the door just a moment before.

  “You should really get out more, Jimmy. There’s a whole wide world out there.”

  “Yes, but for how long?” he said.

  She turned sharply to look at the slim man. She wondered what he knew of the current crisis; she had not told him very little about the Recovery Team, and hadn’t yet told him what the Team was trying to recover. He was a clever man, however; that’s precisely why she had come to him.

  Jimmy Chen was staring back at her, and she looked away from him, pretending that his comment had meant nothing to her. She picked up a folder sitting on a small table and opened the cover, flipping through the first few pages.

  “That’s not for you,” Jimmy said. “You should respect the privacy of my other clients.”

  He rushed over and gently took the folder from her, setting it back down on the table.

  “I have your report over here,” he said.

  Jimmy walked over to the desk where the monitors were set up and moved a few papers around until he found a folder identical to the one he had just taken out of Lu Ping’s hands.

  “Here it is,” Jimmy said, holding the folder out to Lu Ping.

  She took the thick folder, opened the cover and scanned the first page of Jimmy’s report. She riffled through the pages, reading bits and pieces. She closed the folder and slipped it under one arm, satisfied; she would give the report a thorough read-through later and elsewhere.

  “Uh, there is still the matter of compensation,” Jimmy said.

  “My memory works just fine,” Lu Ping said.

  She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and retrieved an envelope, which she handed to Jimmy. As moments before she had inspected the pages contained within the folder, now Jimmy Chen inspected the contents of the envelope. He opened the envelope, slipped the ends of a different kind of paper out of it and thumbed through the bulk of it, doing a quick count. The envelope contained eight thousand yuan in a mix of denominations, mostly fifties and twenties. This was what Jimmy usually charged for a job like the one he had performed for Lu Ping, but in this case this money was only the second half of what he had asked of her due to the higher level of danger involved. She had accepted the higher cost and had paid him the first half of the payment up front. The money had come from a funds account used to pay low-level informants in the employ of the Ministry of State Security, which her security clearance gave her access to.

  “Very good,” Jimmy said, having finished a quick count and slipped the bills back into the envelope. “Will you be needing anything else?”

  “Maybe. If I do I will find you.”

  “You do that.”

  Jimmy showed Lu Ping to the door, throwing back the bolt and holding the door open for her. He watched her walk away until she turned a corner, and then he shut the door and relocked all of the locks. He moved back to the monitors and watched her as she made the trip down in the elevator to the ground floor, then out of the building and to her car. The car pulled out and exited the parking lot. With nothing else to see on the monitors Jimmy went to put the envelope of cash in the safe that was hidden in the wall of his bedroom closet.

  An hour later, in the privacy of her office inside the Ministry of State Security building (she had yet to take General Zhang’s advice and post guards at the door), she sat behind her desk and slid the contents of the folder onto the desktop. She took a deep breath before digging into the report. She read each page--there were forty-three in all--hoping that there would be an answer within those pages, and that she would soon know whether what she had suspected for some time was correct or not. If what she suspected was in fact correct, she hoped that those pages would reveal the identity of the traitor in her midst.