The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller)

by Aston, Tom

  ‘Thought you might enjoy it,’ said Stone, flashing a smile. ‘No seriously. I’ve only really thought about it since you told me what you saw down there. Besides, going to Sichuan was only one part of the research plan. I also sent off to my students in England to look into some stuff. Not quite as exciting as what we’ve been doing, but that research was just as important.’

  Carslake was half-angry, half-intrigued. He didn’t mind being used by Stone. But he hated feeling he was out of the loop. On the other hand, after Carslake had posted online about the Machine before he even arrived in China, what the hell did he expect?

  ‘Research about what?’ asked Carslake, guardedly. ‘What did you get your students to look at?’

  ‘The true ownership of New Machine Technology - the people who are making the weapons, filing all the patents, and making all the money. It’s the number one unanswered question.’

  ‘But it’s owned by the Chinese – the Chinese government.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that. But that’s just an assumption – as if everything is state-owned in China. I also heard it’s owned by ShinComm, and ShinComm has regular shareholders – one of whom was Semyonov. Semyonov put in the money for sure, but like all Chinese joint ventures, New Machine must be at least fifty-one percent owned by a Chinese person or company.’

  ‘OK. So ShinComm owned fifty-one percent. Even though Semyonov supplied all the cash and the ideas.’

  ‘So you’d think,’ said Stone. ‘But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Oyang knows the answer. He was in there when New Machine was set up, and he told me it’s a subsidiary of ShinComm - but he also likes to tell stories. He makes things up. Tells us what we want to hear. So we can’t rely on him. What I do know is that that none of the shares are owned simply by Semyonov or ShinComm. They’re held through mysterious nominee companies.’

  Carslake looked confused, but Stone was busy. He had already retrieved his laptop from the closet at the house and was logging into the NotFutile.com system.

  ‘You left your computer here?’ cried Carslake. ‘What if the house got raided?’

  ‘It’s all online,’ said Stone. ‘On the secure server. They’d get the hardware, but nothing else.’

  ‘So what’s the answer? Your team in England found who owns New Machine yet?’

  Stone opened his email and scanned over it. ‘No,’ said Stone, looking intently at the screen. ‘I didn’t think they would. Someone has been hiding his tracks too well for us to find the ownerships that easily. It’s one of those complex web of ownerships that investigators take months to uncover. It just means someone's hiding something.’

  Stone’s fingers rippled across the keyboard as he began to write a blog post on the site. ‘My students had a couple of days and got nowhere. We’re not going to do any better. I’m going to try something else. I’m going to experiment with Oyang. I’m going to do things to him, and see how he reacts.’

  Carslake watched the words as Stone typed the blog post for the NotFutile.com web site.

  Semyonov Case – The Switzerland Connection

  Anonymous sources in the Swiss Finance Ministry have contacted NotFutile.com to reveal that Swiss tax investigators, under pressure from the US and the EU to root out tax evasion and money laundering, have been following a mysterious trail of money all the way back to China. Very large deposits in Swiss banks, received through a complex web of financial intermediaries, have been found to originate with New Machine Technology Corporation, of which SearchIgnition billionaire Steven Semyonov was a major shareholder and investor.

  The Swiss authorities of course made no comment, and our anonymous source in the Switzerland refuses to specify the size of the deposits – although we can assume they must have been huge to attract the attention of the Swiss. In the absence of further information, people will assume that the $25 billion fortune of Steven Semyonov, recently invested in New Machine Technology, has already been laundered and found its way to mysterious accounts in Switzerland. The hunt is on for Chinese officials with Swiss bank accounts.

  ‘Anonymous sources in the Swiss Finance Ministry. Are you shitting me? How did you figure all that out?’ asked Carslake as the words spread across the page and Stone finally hit submit.

  ‘I didn’t. I made it up,’ said Stone.

  ‘Yes, but it’s bullshit right?’

  ‘Your idea, Doug. Remember? You can post all kinds of shit on the Internet, right?’

  ‘Sure. But it is still bullshit.’

  ‘And so was your idea of a UFO hidden under the hills of Sichuan,’ said Stone. ‘This Swiss connection makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with. Oyang's a Chinese official with accounts in Switzerland, so let's call it an educated guess. Anyhow, so long as it gets a reaction, who cares?’

  Chapter 50 - 4:34pm 10 April – United Flight 857, San Francisco to Shanghai

  Ekström insisted on first class for this kind of flight. The client was paying of course, but the reason was that he needed a little privacy when he was planning his work and thinking things through. And, of course, it was way beneath a man of his standing to sit cheek by jowl with all those snotty kids, backpackers and college lecturers behind the curtain.

  Ekström had been requested to personally perform a “hit” in mainland China. The assassination itself was not at all difficult. The target would not present any problem and for that matter even the location looked tailor-made. On the other hand, performing a hit in Mainland China would always present certain risks.

  Thankfully, the order had come from the Chinese Public Security Bureau – which is why his corporate bosses at SCC had been so excited. It was a way-in to the Chinese market, and his bosses were seeing dollar signs. Ekström had agreed, but had asked some stiff questions before he left for the airport. If he was going personally to do a job where he risked the firing squad because some minor Chinese official screwed up, he demanded to know more about who was behind it. Whoever was hiring him, Gong An Public Security Bureau or not, he had better be able to protect him if the shit hit the fan.

  Q Y Zhang was the client’s name. A full colonel in the Gong An Beijing Public Security Bureau. He was a big cheese all right – impeccable credentials – and it appeared he operated with impunity throughout China.

  But as Ekström sat flying high over the Pacific, the natural question was – why? What need had the Gong An for a foreign assassin to do a job they themselves could have accomplished with impunity in China? An even bigger question – why Ekström in person?

  As he sat in first class, twelve kilometers above the Pacific, Ekström was beginning to work it out. It gave a perverse thrill. The Chinese were all over the Semyonov-SearchIgnition affair. They must have been watching Alban and they knew it was Ekström who had killed him. Now they wanted the same man to carry out the hit in China. Everyone who was anyone in a US corporation knew that it was the SearchIgnition board who ordered Alban killed. Who else would it be? The Chinese knew it too. And by using the same assassin in China, they wanted suspicion for the next killing to fall on SearchIgnition also.

  This Zhang was a clever guy.

  Chapter 51 - 9:04am 12 April - Hongqiao International Airport, Shanghai, China

  Du Fu’s Road to Sichuan may have been hard, but getting back to Shanghai was not. The following day, Oyang emailed Stone asking to meet urgently. Stone played it cool, didn’t say where he was. Meanwhile, the messages from Oyang became more and more desperate. Stone had certainly hit a nerve with that blog posting. He’d as good as accused Oyang of taking ShinComm’s money and salting it away in Switzerland. Evidently it was too close to the bone, too near the truth. Oyang had panicked, and his messages were increasingly urgent. Stone would leave it a few hours longer before replying. Let’s make the bastard sweat.

  By the following morning Oyang had offered to send a ShinComm private jet to wherever Stone was in China. Late in the day, Stone decided to put him out of his misery, and the following morning boarded the
plane at Chengdu with Ying Ning and Carslake.

  Oyang’s personal assistant from ShinComm was sent to meet them in Shanghai. She wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. Oyang, she informed them, was at a place called Balong. A car would take them there from Shanghai.

  Balong, it turned out, was not some new, guarded hideaway of Oyang’s. There would be no guns or strip searches this time. Oyang was at was a country club called Balong, which was, bizarrely, the venue, of the Shanghai International Polo Tournament for the next few days. Evidently a must for the likes of Oyang and the Shanghai super-rich. But not exactly the natural habitat of Stone and Carslake. Still less Ying Ning.

  -o0o0o-

  ‘And then there were eight,’ said Stone as he shook hands. His trip had begun in Kowloon – Cantonese for “Nine Dragons”. Now they had arrived at Balong, which means eight dragons in Mandarin.

  ‘Eight?’ said Rupert Rowley-Phipps, the Englishman who ran the Balong Resort. ‘No idea what you’re talking about, old man.’ Rupert had spent five years living in China, but had not a word of the language to show for it. Rowley-Phipps was little sniffy about Stone, Carslake and Ying Ning. Not the “quality” of guest he was looking for at the Country Club.

  The feeling was mutual. When Rupert shook Ying Ning’s hand she looked down as if she’d just had dogshit pressed into her palm.

  Rupert may not have gone native, but you couldn’t fault the man’s ambition. He’d arrived from England with no money, armed only with the vague knowledge that China was the “land of opportunity”. Where others wanted to get toys manufactured or buy a couple of container-loads of bikes, Rupert’s dream was to introduce the game of polo to a fifth of the world’s population.

  With the help of some old friends in the Hong Kong banks, he’d leased twenty square kilometres of land from the Chinese Navy and built a golf course, a yachting marina, a country club of Babylonian luxury, and of course, the polo fields.

  There were two hotels. The Seasons - merely five-star and luxurious, and then the Shui Hu, which ached with sensuous, deep wealth, and where every spacious suite came with its own servants. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a small island, a few hundred metres off shore, on which was a single villa. The pinnacle of exclusivity, even here.

  ‘The business plan,’ said Rupert as he showed Stone and the others round, ‘is based on the extraordinary number of new millionaires in China. We’re not catering to a middle class,’ he said. ‘We’re catering to the rich. The super-rich, in fact. And I have to give them what they want.’ Rupert waved his arm at the seeming acres of marble and the uber-expensive boutiques in the atrium of the club. Bulgari. Louis Vuitton. Hermes. And many more, selling Italian jewelry and French handbags at eye-watering prices.

  Carslake strolled up, gawping at the watches. Ying Ning stood there in stony-faced contempt, itching with disgust. As if it soiled her somehow to even stand on the marble floor.

  ‘Five thousand bucks? For a watch?’ Carslake exclaimed.

  ‘One of the cheaper ones. The sports model,’ said Rupert without irony, but he eyed Carslake with concern. He turned to look at Stone. ‘Can’t you tell him to lose that jacket? And the bandana. Please?’

  Ying Ning spoke finally. ‘If he was Chinese, you’d throw him out,’ she said.

  Rupert grinned. ‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘I’d have all three of you thrown out if you weren’t friends of Robert Oyang. It’s a wild guess, but I’d say you’re a few million short of financial qualification for this place,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m also under no illusions about what you think. It’s vulgar, it’s over the top. The paintings on the wall are crass - look at that one over there – a pastiche of an eighteenth century Fragonard. Disgusting.’

  Stone hadn’t noticed this artistic faux pas. And beneath this unprepossessing Fragonard or whatever it was, there was a cluster of polo players in white jeans and coloured shirts, playing video games. They’d pulled their Eighteenth century reproduction chairs up under a logo’d black canopy, incongruously playing motor racing games on wide screens.

  ‘The more money your guests have, the more tasteless it has to be?’ asked Stone.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Rupert, turning to go. ‘Anyhow, gentleman and lady. I must leave you. You’ll be sharing a room in The Seasons, with the TV crews.’

  ‘How come he spend so much time with us?’ asked Ying Ning.

  ‘Checking us out,’ said Stone.

  Rupert called to them over his shoulder, ‘Mr Oyang has a large suite at the Shui Hu. Quite unusual. You should take a look if you get the chance!’

  Stone would be doing just that. In the next half-hour if possible. The less time he spent at the Country Club the better – for whole host of reasons.

  -oO0Oo-

  Rupert had said that Oyang’s suite in the Shui Hu Hotel was “unusual”. He wasn’t kidding. The room felt about as big as a tennis court, and the décor was half Jane Austen movie and half Santa’s grotto. It had an effeminate languor about it, that lazy feeling unique to very expensive places. Perfect for Oyang, in fact.

  Stone was shown in by a fellow dressed up like a butler, who was very obviously carrying a handgun beneath his jacket. Oyang looked at Stone for a good minute when he walked in, but he didn’t show any surprise. In fact he didn’t show any emotion at all. Just sat there on the furry white sofa. It might have been real fur, too.

  ‘We went there, to the Machine,’ said Stone.

  Oyang seemed distracted, compared to last time. Something on his mind. ‘You did? It was fascinating I suppose,’ he said.

  Fascinating? Stone’s mind filled with the image of the monks, and the truck, and the driver getting his head stoved in. ‘Fascinating’s not quite the word. We didn’t discover what the Machine is. But there’s definitely something out there, a thousand metres below the surface. Is that what you flew me here to talk about?’

  ‘Yes. No. You know it isn’t,’ said Oyang.

  Of course it wasn’t. He had a guilty conscience, Oyang, and was suddenly feeling very threatened by what Stone had posted on the NotFutile.com site. But Oyang didn’t look worried. He looked distracted if anything. Like he’d taken one too many valium.

  ‘Semyonov said it was somewhere out there,’ said Oyang. ‘It is quite fascinating.’ Oyang looked anything but fascinated. ‘I suppose I knew there was something,’ he said. ‘Semyonov went out there to Sichuan twice in the last year, to the Machine. He always came back with something exciting.’

  ‘What do you mean, “exciting”?’ asked Stone. Oyang had just repeated that the Machine was out there in Sichuan, and he didn’t look like he was lying.

  Oyang was playing with an ivory chess set, turning the pieces around in his fingers. ‘Do you think they will kill me?’ he asked.

  ‘Who would want to kill you?’ asked Stone. ‘The people who killed Semyonov?’

  ‘Yes. The Gong An,’ said Oyang. His hands were shaking slightly. ‘It was the Gong An who sent that Switzerland story to your web site. No one in Switzerland would leak information in such a way.’ He’d still barely looked up at Stone. ‘And besides, it’s completely false. None of Steven’s money was sent to Switzerland.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Stone. He’d actually found himself comforting Oyang. As though he should put his arm around the man or something.

  Oyang turned the chess piece in his long, feminine fingers. ‘The Gong An knows about the Machine,’ he said. ‘Of course they do. I knew as soon as they killed Steven. Steven said the Machine was so powerful, it would change the world. But the Machine destroyed him, and now it will destroy me.’

  Oh dear. It was even worse than it looked. Stone allowed a suitable pause.

  ‘Be sensible Oyang.’

  ‘I knew as soon as I saw the Japanese woman at the press conference. In San Jose. I knew it would go this way.’

  ‘What is the Machine, Oyang?’

  Oyang’s face was blank and resigned. He
wasn’t listening. Just shaking his head.

  ‘The Machine, Oyang? Don’t you want to know what’s going on there? What Semyonov was doing there?’

  ‘How should I know? Semyonov told me nothing but stories. Anyway, it’s over. I know what the Gong An sent to NotFutile.com, Stone. They told you that I had to stop taking from the Machine, or it would destroy me in the same way it destroyed Semyonov. Isn’t that true?’

  He was a clever guy, Oyang. But right now he was gibbering, confused. ‘I think maybe the Machine is just a story, Stone, just a kind of a legend Semyonov made up to confuse me about what he was doing.’

  ‘You don’t really think that.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? I don’t know whether the Machine exists or not, and neither do you. But I can see what comes out of it. For over a year, the Machine gave and gave and gave. Maybe it did the same with Lin Biao in 1969. Now Lin Biao is dead, and Steven Semyonov came to China for it, and he is dead too. Now they’re after me. How much more of a warning do you need?’

  ‘You’re saying the Machine gave and gave,’ said Stone. ‘What did it give you?’

  ‘Power, money. You know what it gave me, Stone,’ said Oyang. ‘You’ve seen it. Do you think technology like that came from nowhere? That it grew like bean sprouts out in Sichuan? Be serious. Anyway, I don’t care anymore. Sometimes I think that Steven was using all those visits to Sichuan as a smokescreen. That there is no Machine, that everything came from his imagination. Nothing has come from the Machine since he died.’

  Oyang was a bright fellow, and he’d worked with Semyonov closely. He said he didn’t care, but he cared more than anyone. Like half the world, he had been in awe of Semyonov. Semyonov’s intelligence engendered a kind of dumb hero worship. Admiration without understanding. An intellectual crush. Stone had seen it at that party in Hong Kong – both women and men with that dreamy look in their eyes. Like dogs looking up at their master.