The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller)

by Aston, Tom

You plan, you kill a man, you leave. It was simple. Best of all, he had the advantage that the place was full of white Europeans, Russians, South Americans, you name it. Was there anywhere else in China where he would find an assassination easier?

  Lucky for him, then, that last job spec had come through when it did. Because two assassinations – unconnected – were a different proposition. The second must be completed before the first has been discovered. Or while the hunt is on for the killer from the first hit. Then there’s the likelihood of being spotted near the two events, and being the obvious suspect. The risks are infinitely greater.

  The second target would be the more challenging. Ethan Stone. It was tempting to wrap that one up, leave, then deal with Oyang elsewhere. But this Zhang from the Gong An had insisted Oyang be dealt with before he left the Country Club. It was exactly the kind of challenge that made it all worthwhile for Ekström. He had to come up with a way of killing Oyang (which was trivial), and dealing with Ethan Stone at the same time.

  Ekström was wearing polo gear of white trousers and polo shirt of crimson and white quarters. The colours of the Royal Bengal Club, Buenos Aires. He had on riding boots and was carrying the thick leather leg guards of a polo player, concealing the Glock handgun in his waistband. Seventeen round magazine, with suppressor. Is that a silencer in your pants, or are you pleased to see me?

  And of course the polo helmet with face guard. No point taking unnecessary risks with security cameras. Ekström walked down the corridor to Oyang’s suite at four fifteen. Two minutes max. No need to spin it out. He hadn’t been paid to do that. He’d found out that Oyang had given the butler time off until six. Idiot. By the time the butler discovered Oyang, Ekström would be watching the main event: the last moments of Ethan Stone.

  Ekström stood outside the door of Oyang’s suite, and shielded his hands from view of the security camera with his body. He snapped on the latex gloves, swiped the master key through the door lock, and slipped inside. No alarm. No guard. Oyang was making this all too easy.

  -oO0Oo-

  Johan Ekström hated surprises. At least he hated this kind of surprise. He’d just been cheated out of what was rightfully his, and he’d had to change his plans. Worse still, a clean, simple job had just turned into a messy one.

  No wonder he hadn’t needed to deal with any security or Oyang’s “butler”. Oyang had sent them away deliberately. Ekström picked up the dining chair that was lying on its side on the thick carpet, stood up on it and took out his trusty Swedish Army knife. He sliced though the white rope. As it sprang back, he realised Oyang had used the belt from a white cashmere bathrobe to hang himself.

  Oyang’s body collapsed lethargically to the floor. This was no good. In order for Ekström to frame Ethan Stone for a murder, Oyang had to have been murdered. Now he had to make a suicide look like murder.

  After the business with Alban, Ekström would have guessed it would be difficult to get a cadaver to sit up properly. But not this difficult. Ekström put the chair on its side, and managed to balance Oyang’s back up against it fairly straight. But then the head lolled back badly. Hardly surprising given that the neck was broken. The eyes were still staring, bulging slightly, and the mouth hung open obscenely.

  Ekström got there in the end. He couldn’t shoot the body on the ground. For one thing the round would come out the other side and damage the floor. For another, ballistics tests would show how near he had been. Ekström stood back to take the shot from ten paces as planned. He took twelve for good measure, then placed a .22 round in the centre of Oyang’s forehead, execution-style. Reminded him of that idiot soldier he’d executed on camera in Afghanistan.

  Chapter 55 - 3:17pm 12 April - Balong Polo Resort and Country Club, Zhejiang Province, China

  Stone tracked Carslake down to his room in the Seasons hotel. He was lying on a sofa, watching TV.

  ‘You been here all the time, Carslake?’

  ‘Sure. I gotta save some money, man. It’s gonna cost me if I even breathe outside this room. Those people out there. Designer clothes, cocktails, goddamned Maseratis. They look at me like I’m a piece a shit.’ Carslake’s eyes stayed doggedly at the TV as he spoke to Stone. He was lying of course.

  ‘Did you notice Virginia Carlisle’s here?’ said Stone.

  ‘The babe-licious Virginia Carlisle? No. Why should I? You really think she wants to hang out with me?’ He laughed.

  Stone cut him off. ‘You contacted her didn’t you? You called Carlisle and told her to come here.’

  ‘You think she takes notice of me? After I sent her to the wrong end of Sichuan looking for the Machine?’ he said.

  ‘Chuck it, Carslake. You couldn’t resist getting yourself on TV.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Carslake snorted, coming clean. ‘If I were you I’d find out what Carlisle knows. She’s made the weather on this story and she knows a lot more than she’s letting on. And FYI, I didn’t bring her here. I contacted her with some ideas to get my name on TV, and next thing she’s following me. In fact she was here before us.’ Carslake was still looking at the TV. ‘What puzzles me is: why? Why was she so keen to come down here and talk to me, Doug Carslake? Have you any idea, Stone? Because it beats the hell outta me.’

  It was sinking in that Carslake had just hit the nail on the head. Virginia really did have hidden depths, and Stone had just distracted himself from them. He’d been looking everywhere, but some of the answers had been right in front of him. Stone went over to the computer. It was time to do a little extra checking up on Virginia Carlisle herself, rather than Semyonov.

  The word “Semyonov” may have been embargoed from the search engines, but Virginia Carlisle was most emphatically not. Stone found articles of every shape size and colour on Virginia Carlisle. Youtube clips by the hundred. Fan clubs, Facebook groups. Profiles of her in every magazine from The Economist, through Vogue, Psychology, Forbes and a Virginia Carlisle lookalike posing in Playboy for the real fantasists. Not a bad likeness either.

  Stone soon found the details he was looking for. He realized he was staring at the screen, at the same thing for a good thirty seconds. The game had suddenly changed. The key person in the story about Semyonov and the Machine, was not Oyang, or Junko Terashima, or Ying Ning. It was Virginia Carlisle. He got up and walked to the door.

  ‘Where are you going, Stone?’

  ‘I’m going back to find Carlisle,’ he said. ‘I just realised why Virginia Carlisle hightailed it here to join us. She wants to stop the truth leaking out.’

  Chapter 56 - 5:17pm 12 April - Balong Polo Resort and Country Club, Zhejiang Province, China

  Back outside the Country Club, questions slid around Stone’s mind in geometric patterns, like pieces on a chessboard. He had to find Carlisle. He was sure now what she was up to. He also had to find Ying Ning. She’d disappeared and he didn’t trust her any more. The last time she’d disappeared like this she’d been with Panchen, and things had not turned out too well. Ying Ning could be decorating Rupert’s silk shirt with angry saliva at this very moment. Or going after Oyang with a kitchen knife.

  Stone walked back in front of the glitzy concession stores in the atrium of the clubhouse, making his way toward the GNN studio. Super-rich Chinese textile barons circulated with Western bankers from Shanghai and Hong Kong. Not often those bankers found their chargecards so completely outgunned like this. Stone quickened his pace as he approached the car dealers’ concessions.

  Outside, a scrum of polo players was waiting to test drive the Porsche and Maserati cars. Before textile exporters from Ningbo and Hangzhou bought them for cash to drive home. Stone saw her in their midst, in the middle of the crowd. Virginia, with the polo lads fawning over her still. Two cars were brought up. A well-heeled lad stepped up to take the first. Latino. Argentinian, possibly, or Uruguayan. The Italian salesman wasn’t looking at the polo guy. He’d seen Virginia, and was beckoning her forward to ignore the line and try the car straightaway. She had this effect on pe
ople.

  The next few seconds passed in slow-mo. Stone was trying to make his way towards Virginia. Her saw her give a flick of the hair to the Maserati salesman - which had the Italian guy practically genuflecting. All very amusing for her. Stone waved toward her, but she didn’t see. Stone saw the Italian bow and open the door for her. But the passenger door for some reason. A polo player politely shut the door of the Maserati for her and made another gallant bow before taking his place as her driver. But then Stone saw a blond haired polo player moved right up behind the first one before he could get in the driver’s seat. Caught him a punch in the kidneys. Precise and discreet, two knuckles. And completely brutal. The first player’s legs buckled beneath him. The blond polo player walked round to the driver’s side. Smiling. White jeans. The same dark blue shirt with a red dragon on the breast. The shirt of the Shanghai Polo Club. The bastard shot a look of triumph towards Stone as he bent to get in the car beside Virginia Carlisle. That look from the head-cam video. Ekström.

  Stone bolted after them through the crowd of polo boys, but the Maserati’s tyres had already spun in the gravel and pulled off. A Latino kid was feeling for the seatbelt of the second car when Stone hauled him out onto the ground.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Stone landed low in the bucket seat, hit the accelerator and the engine erupted behind his head. Blue and red polo shirts scattered in front of him as the Porsche took off with preternatural acceleration. The needle stood at one hundred by the time he hit the asphalt, but still, the Maserati was already a distant blur of dust disappearing up the hillside. Maserati, Porsche. Porsche, Maserati. Stone backed himself to catch the Maserati, however good a driver Ekström was.

  And for a simple reason. It was a trap.

  Ekström had set some kind of trap for Stone. What it was, was anyone’s guess. He’d have to deal with that when he caught up with him. Always supposing he didn’t hit a tree beforehand, of course.

  Rupert said there were over fifty kilometres of roads on the Balong Estate. Ekström could be leading him anywhere – even off the Estate and back to Shanghai on the gaosu expressway. Stone wound the car up cleanly, and it held the road gloriously, the backend drifting predictably on the corners, and then gripping positively again to accelerate.

  Stone looked ahead to guess at Ekström’s plan. Realistically, Ekström had to be the better driver. Stone wasn’t bad, but he hadn’t owned a car for four years and in any case, Ekström wouldn’t try this unless he were confident. The plan may well be simple. Draw Stone into a maneuver he couldn’t handle at high speed.

  In that case Ekström shouldn’t have given him the Porsche. The thing could practically drive itself, and cornered like it was on rails.

  He thought of Virginia. She’d got in the car voluntarily. She hadn’t even seen him when she got in that car. She would be completely unaware. She’d never seen Ekström in her life. Just another handsome polo player. Was he going to stop the car in some remote spot and coolly shoot Stone in front of the doyenne of the world’s media? Unlikely. And if he killed Virginia, it would cause a stir. To say the very least.

  The Maserati thundered down a hill toward a blind left hand bend and disappeared. Dust billowed at the corner. Stone’s mind said caution but he couldn’t let Ekström get away. He sped up down the hill. There was a stream flowing away to the right. Water in the road? And a stand of trees for the Porsche to skid into? He thought of Panchen’s primitive ambush just days ago.

  It hadn’t been dust behind the Maserati. It was smoke. Ekström had hit the brake hard just before the bend. Stone stood on the brake in the last fifty metres with the car still straight, lurching forward in the seat. Just enough, too. The car aquaplaned in the water as it hit the bend. The front-left wheel gripped just in time to pull the backend clear of a heavy stone wall on the shoulder.

  So that was Ekström’s game. Crude but effective.

  Well then. Stone could be crude but effective too. He floored the car again and closed up to 200 metres from the Maserati, then kept it there, turning sharply with Ekström through a succession of bends. The Porsche handled like a dream. It wasn’t even that difficult.

  The road ran straight again and Stone saw his chance. A fork. Ekström was letting up on the gas, allowing Stone to close up on the Maserati. Stone played ball. Flipped back on the gear paddle and the Porsche eased up closer. One hundred metres. Ekström would give him to have no time to react next time. As the Maserati curved off to the right, Stone hit the anchors and flipped down into the second gear. With shriek of the engine and a judder of the anti-lock, the Porsche slowed to a crawl. No hint of a skid. He turned off to the right and let the Maserati disappear.

  Stone had given up the chase. He’d drive back to the clubhouse, and leave Virginia to her afternoon’s drive with Ekström. There was a woman the Swede couldn’t harm without attracting some attention. Make that a lot of attention. It would make the evening news if he so much as farted in her presence. Virginia’s fame would protect her. In fact Ekström was probably using her as the perfect alibi. The bastard thought he had it all worked out.

  Stone drove along past another fork and a sign in Chinese and English, which read Balong Polo Resort and Country Club in one direction and Gaosu Expressway, Shanghai, Ningbo in the other. He followed the road back to the club. Perhaps Virginia would be there when he got back, having a cocktail with her new friend.

  After what he’d seen in that Atrium building, and after what he’d seen in Oyang’s factory, Stone should have been ready for what happened next. The Porsche appeared to lose power, but in fact the accelerator pedal was pushing back against the sole of his foot. The car slowed to a roll. Then the steering wheel spun in front of him and the car made a handbrake turn on the gravelly surface. Which took some doing with a four-wheel drive Porsche. Whoever – whatever – was driving this thing, knew what he was doing.

  Stone sat in the stationary car in the middle of the road. He tried the door. Locked. The engine burbled at rest behind his head. Stone’s seat belt released itself, and a warning light came on in front of him. Then another, indicating the airbags had been disabled. Naturally. And here it comes. Two more lights to go. The traction control and anti-lock braking were switched off. Stone was already searching for the remote control box. Under the steering wheel, in the glove box? It must be accessible…

  An angry, bloodthirsty roar behind Stone’s head from the engine, and the tachometer needle swung way up into the red. The Porsche took off with a wild power that forced him almost into the back seat. Stone braced himself against the racing bucket-seat and began to kick with his heel at the dash and the front fascia of the car to find the remote box that was driving this thing.

  Never say those Germans don’t make a solid piece of equipment. It took Stone over a minute to completely smash in the radio and SatNav, and then lever off the top of the dash, pulling off a large sheet of plastic over a metre in length. Stone was pulling out leads and wires wherever he could. It made no difference. And the remote driver knew his stuff. Without the seat belt, Stone was thrown across the car about every ten seconds.

  The odd tree and a wall flashed by, but Stone knew where he was going. Ekström has taken him round that blind bend earlier to show him where he was going to die. Not good enough to do the job. Ekström had to be sure Stone knew what was coming, and who was doing this to him. The car was swerving, slaloming down the straight. It was all Stone could do to stay in one place on the smooth leather.

  He slithered into the back of the car and tried to pull the seats out. The engine was rear-mounted. It could be the remote control box had been placed back there. Maybe it had, but it made no odds. Stone made no impression on the back seats at all by hammering away at them with the heel of his boot. He was bent over, hunched, no room to move or brace himself. The car swerving and turning like a demented teenager on a skidpan. He felt like a contestant in a Japanese game show – decidedly unfunny and slightly pathetic for even being there.

 
The car went into a kind of power slide onto the grass at the top of the hill, the kind of thing you only see on TV. Then he was back on the road. Whoever was driving had a swagger about them. A perverted élan. After the slaloming and sliding, Stone was set for the main event. The car accelerated down a long straight incline, back towards the blind bend and the stream he’d passed earlier.

  Stone squeezed out of the backseat, having barely scuffed the leather with his efforts. Plan B. He wrenched the long hunk of plastic from above the dash, then squeezed to fold it lengthways. The car fell into top gear as it neared the bottom of the hill. 200 km/h. Not a hope of making that corner, stream or no stream.

  But something told him the driver would give it a try. And send him slamming like a hockey puck into that stone wall - suitably spectacular for the headlines. Wild man Ethan Stone steals car and dies taking corner at ludicrous speed. What crime was Stone running away from?

  The car swung slightly outwards to take the bend. Stone shoved the plastic dashboard down through the steering wheel, jamming it hard. The wheel tried to turn back, but too late. The car held its trajectory, beyond the outside of the bend. Stone braced himself, arms and head against the steering wheel. The wheels left the edge of the road, with the engine shrieking in the second or so the car was airborne.

  The Porsche slammed into the bed of the stream. Not quite what the engineers had in mind when they designed it. The car slid and rolled on for another seventy metres, then thunked into the rocks in the water.

  The remote driver had been trying to regain control throughout. The brake pedal was still flattened as the car sat immobile in the riverbed. As he sat in the stationary car, Stone saw the gearshift move optimistically into reverse and the engine screamed in frustration. No chance. The transmission was probably about fifty metres back up the hill. This piece of German engineering had lived fast. But sadly, died young. Stone lay back on the seat again, shielded his eyes, and kicked out the remainder of the broken windscreen.