Change Agent

by Daniel Suarez

  Durand interjected, “How has it changed, Thet?”

  Win turned to Durand. She spoke in Shan but looked into Durand’s eyes.

  Thet’s English words overlaid her own. “I have beseeched my leaders on your behalf. I await word from them. My people may do a great deal more than merely deliver you to the capital. We may try to help you succeed.”

  She added in English of her own, “Mr. Durin.”

  Durand felt shame. The intensity in her eyes had many dimensions. Was it faith in him? Conviction of her cause? He looked down and then placed his hands together before him, bowing deeply to her.

  Durand then spoke to Frey without looking. “Give her the money.”

  “What do you mean, give her the money? We’re not—”

  “We’re alive because of her. I trust her and Thet with my life.” He looked up. “You should, too.”

  “Oh, and you’re a great judge of character all of a sudden?”

  “I trusted you, didn’t I?”

  Frey was about to argue but stopped.

  “Give her the code for the wallet.”

  “The entire four hundred thousand?”

  “Yes. Let’s be done with this. They’ll need the money. Look around you.”

  Frey was already nodding. “Okay. I’m just not used to changing a deal.” He looked up to Thet. “Can you please give me a pen, Thet?”

  “Yes, of course.” Thet searched in his shoulder bag and came up with a pen and a worn leather-bound notepad.

  “Oh, I like this. Can I keep this?”

  “Bryan.”

  Frey cast an irritated glance at Durand, then jotted several codes onto the paper. He stabbed the last dot with a flourish before handing over the pad and pen. “There you go.”

  Thet nodded and placed his hands together. “Thank you, Dr. Frey. The money is very much needed by our cause. Particularly in light of upcoming expenses.” He spoke to Bo Win as he handed her the notepad.

  She examined it and then nodded to Frey and finally turned to Durand. She then departed.

  Durand watched her go. “What now, Thet?”

  Thet grimaced. “It will take some days until our leaders make a decision. Until then, we have concealed rooms in the monastery. Please follow me.”

  Chapter 37

  Over the next several days Durand walked the grounds among ancient wats, stupas, and crumbling statues. Thet insisted Durand remain out of sight—though the same prohibition wasn’t extended to Frey, who had taken to working with the genetically altered orphans in the ward.

  At times Durand could see Frey interacting with patients through grillwork that provided a veiled view into the main hall. It was as though a stranger had possessed Frey. Durand barely recognized the gene hacker he’d hired back in Johor. Frey was kind and patient with the deformed children in his care. Making kid jokes that another monk translated. Durand supposed Frey could identify with these children—trapped as they were in bodies they did not choose.

  It was an increasingly common malady.

  Durand remained hidden, pacing around a courtyard, circling the base of a towering Buddha damaged in some ancient war. Burmese cats were his main companions. No one else seemed to come to this place. The cats climbed onto his lap to sleep, and purr. They distracted him from his anxieties for a time. But then he’d remember his daughter’s toyger and start to worry about the Shan leadership’s decision. And what was taking so long.

  Two days had already passed since their payment.

  • • •

  On the third day, late in the afternoon, an elderly monk wearing printed plastic eyeglasses and a saffron robe entered through an ironbound wooden gate. He looked to be in his late eighties and clicked along with a cane. His exposed shoulders still looked fit.

  The monk’s expression changed from serenity to apparent surprise at the sight of Durand. It occurred to Durand that very few knew he was here.

  The elderly monk bowed a shallow wai in greeting, smiling.

  Durand stood up from a stone bench, a cat leaping from his lap. He bowed a deep wai in return.

  The monk then commenced slowly walking around the base of the Buddha shrine, deep in contemplation. He worked beads in his free hand as he did so. Every so often he would pass in front of Durand as he walked ancient stone slabs.

  On one of his laps, he looked to Durand and softly said, “Dukkha.”

  Durand looked up. “Sorry, I don’t speak—”

  “The word refers to suffering,” he said in English. He gestured with his free hand. “A longing for what isn’t. I see it on your face. Worry.”

  “You speak English.”

  The monk spoke with a British accent. “Some still learn English.” He refocused on Durand. “You are consumed with worry.”

  Durand nodded. “I have good reason to worry.”

  “Do you?” The old monk moved over to him and eased down onto the bench. “And what do you worry about?”

  Durand looked toward the mountains. “I need to get home.”

  “Craving leads to disappointment and sorrow. This we call dukkha. Suffering. It is one of the two characteristics of sankhara—‘conditioned phenomena’ through which we perceive the physical world.”

  Durand sighed in irritation. He appreciated the old man’s concern, but at the same time, platitudes weren’t going to solve anything. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “What you do is up to you. But be conscious of what you do. Why do you worry?”

  Durand recalled the compassion these monks displayed to the disfigured orphans in their care, and he took a more conciliatory tone. “I worry that I will never see my home or my wife and daughter again.”

  “But at some point this will be true. No matter what you do.”

  Durand paused. “Very powerful people want to make sure it happens now.”

  “And so you suffer.”

  Durand nodded.

  “I was a biochemist until my fifties.”

  Durand looked up in surprise.

  “Oh, yes. In Hyderabad. That was fine for many years.”

  “Why did you leave it?”

  “Because everyone I loved perished. In a flood.”

  “My god . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “No one was to blame.”

  Durand remained silent.

  “Theravada Buddhism follows the Pāli Canon—a collection of the oldest Buddhist texts. They teach us that life has but three characteristics, the first of which is anicca—impermanence. All conditioned phenomena are subject to change: physical characteristics, assumptions, theories, knowledge. Nothing is permanent because all things are bound together, recursively, and as one changes, so, too, do the others. It is the longing to stop this change that causes the second characteristic—dukkha. Suffering.”

  “Why wouldn’t we want to stop some change? If you could go back, wouldn’t you? To be with those you love?”

  “But I cannot go back. And if I did, I am already a different person than the one they knew.”

  Durand stopped himself. An image of stabbing a man repeatedly in the back came into his mind again. His voice hoarse with rage. Of standing in the darkness next to Bo Win.

  He looked back up at the monk.

  “I’m losing myself. I can feel the person I knew slipping away. I need to get back.”

  “And if you did get back, Mr. Durand . . .”

  Durand cast a wary look at the old man.

  “. . . would you be back?”

  Durand strained to answer honestly. He finally straightened and looked into the elder monk’s eyes. “That doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. I want to be there for them. Even if I’m not completely the same.”

  “They tell me you have been genetically edited.”

  Durand suddenly realized he was not speaking with
merely an elderly monk. “Yes. This”—he gestured to his body, his face—“isn’t who I am.”

  “And you believe your genomic sequence is intrinsically your identity?”

  “Part of me. Yes.”

  “It is not something you chose but something the universe thrust upon you. Yet you call it you.”

  “It’s the form my daughter calls Dad. And it’s half her DNA. What I brought to the union my wife and I made.”

  “Anatta—the third characteristic of life. The not-self. There is no permanent atta—or self. From the moment we begin, all entities—including living beings—are subject to a process of continuous change.”

  “I understand that wise men might tell me it’s foolish to cling to the physical. That all things turn to dust.” He gestured to the ruined stone statue. “But I want my body for as long as I can have it. I will let it go. But not yet.” He searched the monk’s eyes. “Being a husband and father, that was taken from me not by fate, but by men. Selfish, cruel men who enslave millions—who have created and cast away the deformed children you care for. I want to take back from them my physical form and make certain they never do this to anyone else.” He shook his head. “You may be wiser than me, and I may have a lot to learn about suffering and impermanence, but I would crawl through fire to get back to my wife and child. To see them look at me with love in their eyes just one more time. I would give anything for that. Anything. Am I a perfect man? No. I’m not even a particularly good man. I have in the past done . . . horrible things. I lie awake at night thinking of the harm I’ve done to people I’ll never know. But just this one thing that is wholly good that I helped create—my little girl. I promised my wife that I would try to make the world a better place for her. And if I’m going to die here, then let me at least do that. Help me destroy the Huli jing. Help me stop them, even if it kills me.”

  The monk sat in silence regarding Durand for several moments. Then he got to his sandaled feet. “Bring an end to your suffering, Mr. Durand.”

  With that, the elderly monk clicked his cane on the slabs of ancient stone as he walked away, through the gate and into the monastery beyond.

  Chapter 38

  That evening Durand, Frey, and Thet sat in Durand’s tiny cell eating wooden bowls of a chicken-and-coconut curry. Thet refused to discuss the elder monk Durand had met, but he was willing to discuss the Huli jing.

  “You’ve seen the results of some of their experiments. They do this to those they’ve enslaved, in prison camps outside the city. But there is much going on inside the city. Private jets come and go at all hours. Foreigners from around the globe. Our people check the tail numbers. Many are untraceable.”

  Durand looked to Thet. “Do these planes have windows or no windows?”

  Frey looked up. “You think they might be renditions?”

  Thet shook his head. “These planes have many windows. Very luxurious service staff. Many domestics. Some are big planes—Boeing, Comac, Airbus. Privately owned. Many bodyguards. Arab. Russian. Chinese. American. Many nationalities.”

  Durand pondered this information. “Some services people are willing to pay big money for.”

  Just then a monk in saffron robes appeared in the doorway and bowed, smiling. Incongruously he held a device shaped like a laser pistol. He spoke rapidly to Thet, who got up from his perch in the window frame. Thet nodded and accepted the device from the young monk, who then departed, closing the door.

  Thet turned to Durand and Frey as he powered on the device. “Gentlemen. If you would please disrobe.”

  Frey raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  “What’s going on, Thet?”

  “I need to scan your bodies. For an accurate reading”—he tested the scanner against the wall, red laser light splayed across it—“you should ideally be nude.”

  • • •

  The next day Durand and Frey were confined to their shortened wing of the monastery. The confinement was to all evidence voluntary, but Thet asked them not to leave their rooms, and they honored his request.

  Instead Frey spent his time pacing back and forth in Durand’s monk cell while Durand lay on the cot. It was mercifully not as hot near the lake, but their shutters had been closed, sealed from the outside, making it stifling just the same. It was beginning to feel as though they were prisoners.

  Frey stopped. “What the hell did you say to that old monk, anyway?”

  “We talked about impermanence . . . and dukkha—suffering.”

  “From what I’ve experienced, suffering is reliably permanent.”

  “I think he just wanted to meet me.”

  “Do you think you’ve worn out our welcome?”

  A knock.

  They both looked up to see the door open. The elder monk stood in the doorway with several other monks in robes standing behind him. The elder monk nodded to Durand and then Frey, then entered, clicking his cane on the stone floor. The younger monks followed and began setting up what looked like mirrors and folding dressing tables.

  “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  Durand stood and bowed a wai, as did Frey.

  Frey asked, “Pardon my asking, but are we your prisoners now?”

  The monk laughed and shook his head. “You have been exceptionally kind to our lost children, Dr. Frey. You help make the burden of life easier for some.”

  “I’m glad I could make some use of the machines I brought. And children usually find me hilarious.”

  “What’s all this?” Durand gestured toward the monks, who were laying out what looked to be expensive dinner jackets, black bow ties, and shoes.

  The elder monk turned. “Your new identities. An American businessman and his colleague are missing tonight in Rangoon. They had an appointment with the Huli jing. You might wish to take their place.”

  Durand stood and examined the black-tie outfits. “You’re helping us?”

  The monk motioned to another monk, who produced a corrugated carbon fiber briefcase with a chain leading to an open handcuff. He also held the key. The young monk placed the briefcase on the bed and clicked it open, stepping back.

  The elder monk looked to Durand. “A great deal of corrupt money has entered our country. It poisons men’s hearts.”

  Durand and Frey walked up and looked into the case. Inside were individual jewel sleeves snugged into slots in a black velvet interior. Durand drew out one and pressed its sides to open its mouth. He drew a breath, then poured a dozen large rubies onto the bed.

  Frey examined the dozens of other packets, peeking into several, weighing them with his hands. “My god, these must be worth millions.”

  “Forty-three million US dollars at current prices, Dr. Frey.”

  Momentarily speechless, Frey turned to look at the elder monk.

  Durand slipped the jewels back into the sleeve, and the sleeve back into the case. He snapped it shut. “Why?”

  “It is the cost of entry to the Huli jing facility. Thirty million, up front, nonrefundable to create an account. Up until now I did not have anyone who would be able to pass for clients of the Huli jing—whom I could also trust. But you, Mr. Durand, and your genetic consultant”—he nodded to Frey, then turned back to Durand—“will seem like just another couple of devilish foreigners here to take the change agent. To become someone else. In fact, the businessman’s invitation fob is in this jacket.”

  Durand pondered this. “They’ll have biometrics on the client. Iris, fingerprint—”

  “You forget what the Huli jing is doing, Mr. Durand. Anonymity is what they’re selling. True anonymity. A post-identity world. A cleansing of earthly sins. There are no fingerprints or iris scans or even DNA scans that can identify their clients. There is only money and desire.”

  Frey nodded. “It does rule out the lookie-loos.”

  Durand gestured to the case. “And once we’re
in, what then?”

  The monk moved to the dinner jackets. He opened one coat and motioned to the sleeve. “Concealed pockets—made specifically to hold ampoules of their change agent. We know the precise size and shape of the glass ampoules because we’ve ambushed their supply trucks before. The reagent itself does not seem to leave the facility. But we hope you and Dr. Frey will change that.”

  Frey’s brow furrowed. “How on earth are we going to get away with samples of their active change agent? I don’t expect they’ll be letting us into their labs.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” The elderly monk moved Durand in front of the mirror. “Realize that among the Nine Tails of the Huli jing, faces and ethnicity are always changing. Instead, they have other means of proving their identity. Their marks of rank.”

  “Tattoos.”

  The monk nodded. “We are told Huli jing chromatophores reflect light at varying frequencies—notably ultraviolet. The patterns represent a unique three-dimensional key that, combined with its spectrographic signature, identify the bearer who activates them.”

  Durand pulled off his tunic and stood looking at his bare chest in the mirror. As he focused his will, he saw the tattoos begin to fade in. The more he concentrated on the Huli jing and what they had taken from him—on the stranger’s face in the mirror—the darker his tattoos became.

  Soon he stood before the mirror as Marcus Wyckes, leader of the Huli jing.

  The elder monk gripped Durand’s muscular shoulder. “You will become your enemy, Mr. Durand, and you will go where you will within his domain.”

  Frey cleared his throat. “Surely clients are watched at all times.”

  “In fact, they are tracked at all times, Dr. Frey. Every Huli jing client wears a tracking bracelet. Which is why we’ve included these in your coat . . .” The old monk removed a long Vantablack glove from one of the coat pockets. It looked like a two-dimensional hole in reality. “Slip this over your bracelet arm. It will act as a Faraday cage—blocking the client-tracking signal.”

  “But security guards—”