The elevator doors opened and the first thing she saw was a pair of People’s Army guards in their dress blues, hefting machine guns. Odd, she thought. How was this a military matter?
They waited for her to dig out proper identification. One guard examined Lu’s credentials with flat, expressionless eyes, then motioned for her to follow him.
At the door to the hotel suite, Lu gloved up and passed two more guards before entering. Inside, the room looked almost like an ordinary SAR crime scene: police photographers still snapping shots, print-dusters and fiber-finders and half a dozen other crime-scene technicians staring large at small spaces as they worked, bagging evidence before exiting.
Lu made her way toward the shadow of a body on the bed. The shadow was mostly ashen gray, but streaked with hot pink—so vivid that at first Lu mistook it for a dust of ashes shot through with hot embers. There was, however, no heat rising from the shadow. Notecards lay scattered upon and around it. At the middle and the head of the shadow, respectively, rested a laptop computer and a pair of what looked like heavy wraparound sunglasses. Both the computer and the wraparounds were partially melted into surreal shapes.
Behind her, evidence techs speculated quietly about Kwok’s booze and cigarettes and piles of scribbled notecards. Also about the computer, with which he had apparently been working at the time of his decease.
Trying to keep focused on her work despite the military presence, Lu had to fight down her awareness of some sort of political miasma rising around her. That task was made easier by the fact that she knew the graying, bespectacled coroner’s assistant on scene—Charles Hui. At least she could talk shop with him.
“Have you solved this one for me yet, Mister Hui? Who found the body?”
“Hello, Mei-lin. What body? You tell me. One of the cleaning staff, a Mrs. Quian, was the first in the room. Smelled ‘something funny,’ she says. Not right. Like smoke or chemicals. And lightning.”
“Ozone, maybe?” Lu suggested, but Hui only shrugged. “Electrical fire? Then why didn’t the smoke alarms go off and send everyone running?”
“Maybe the fire was too small,” Hui said, shrugging again. “Maybe, as a smoker, he purposely disabled them. Maybe the alarms’ batteries were dead, or they malfunctioned somehow. You’ll want to check. I don’t even know if the alarms have batteries, or need them. I’m not even sure there was a fire, exactly. Hey, you’re the detective. Like I said, you tell me.”
“No fire?”
“No raging inferno, anyway. Some of the notecards are browned a little on the edges. The bedclothes appear to have gotten a little smoldery—but that might have been from cigarette burns.”
“But look at the computer he was working with. All misshapen, like it was melted—”
“I thought so too, at first,” Hui said, picking up the computer and handing it to Lu, “but look closer.”
Lu examined the lightweight device. Its aerodynamic shape had been warped and altered—but by what remained unclear.
“No evidence of charring, or even blackening,” Lu said, returning the distorted machine to the exact place it had occupied on the bed. “I see what you mean.”
“That’s right. Same with the sunglasses, or whatever they are. I’ve been here two hours and all I’ve seen is this stuff in the shape of a body on the bed, and some notecards spread on it that look like maybe they’ve been singed a little.”
“What about that stuff on the bed?”
“We’re calling it ‘ash.’ The working hypothesis is that Kwok was drinking and smoking and somehow set himself on fire. But take some of that ash between your fingers, Mei-lin.”
Lu did so. It didn’t smudge the way ash should have. She sniffed it tentatively. For her trouble, she smelled only a barely detectable tang—yes, it was ozone. She looked at the stuff more closely.
“As much like lint as ash. Gritty, gray-pink lint.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“Some strange kind of spontaneous combustion?” Lu asked, half joking.
“Is there a kind that isn’t strange?” Hui countered, then shook his head. “A great deal of spontaneous and not much combustion, from all I can tell. But then, maybe I missed something. I think a military hazmat team saw all this, before we did. Who knows how the stuff cooled or congealed in the meantime?”
“Why the delay before allowing us in?”
Hui nodded his head in the direction of the soldiers, then walked toward the door himself. He had just left when everything in the room changed.
“Detective Lu, hello!” said Wong Jun. “I wasn’t aware you’d been assigned to this case.”
“Yes, sir, I have,” Mei-lin said warily, shaking Wong’s hand. Mister Wong was a rising governmental operative, working the New Territories area of the Hong Kong SAR for Guojia Anquan Bu—Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security.
“Good, good!” said Wong. “So you’ll be the lead investigator on this, then. May I introduce you to Mister Robert Beckwith? He’s from the US consulate. The deceased was an American citizen, as you probably already know.”
Detective Lu shook hands with the tall, thin American. Graying, looked to be in his forties. The fact that the deceased was an American almost explained the presence there of a US consular official, but not quite. Lu grew still more wary. The last thing she wanted to step into was some kind of international political mess.
“Don’t let us interrupt your work,” Beckwith said, smiling a politician’s smile. “You go right on with it, and don’t mind us.”
Happy to oblige, Lu quickly turned back to her examination of the scene. She wasn’t able to “not mind” Wong and Beckwith, however.
Each of them was jockeying for control of the materials found at the death scene. Wong subtly argued that the materials should be kept by the PRC as part of Lu’s police investigation. Beckwith parried with the suggestion that they were the deceased’s personal effects and, since the deceased was an American citizen, the materials found at the scene should therefore be returned with his remains to the relatives who survived him in the USA.
Detective Lu had the distinct impression that Wong had no intention of allowing Kwok’s remains and his other properties to go to local police. Nor did Beckwith intend them to go to Kwok’s American survivors.
A plague on both their houses, she thought, frowning. She’d be damned if she was going to do Wong’s dirty work for him. She was grateful when the two jockeying officials finally left the room. As they departed, Hui returned. She didn’t think it was a coincidence.
Politics, and on a global scale. Out of her league, but she would have to play anyway, at least for as long as they would let her. Which would probably only be as long as they thought they could use her.
“The American says an important computer specialist is on the way from the States,” Hui said, his voice mockingly casual. “To offer his help.”
A cold case with no corpse, and a foreign computer geek coming to “help.” Great, Lu thought. What could be better?
“Where’s this cleaning lady, this Mrs. Quian?” she asked. “I should talk to her—get a statement for the record.”
“Ask Wong. He probably knows.”
Lu nodded. How many agencies were going to be looking over her shoulder as she did this investigation? Guoanbu at least—and who else? CIA? FBI?
Better and better.
ENANTIODROME
SHA TIN
Rising in the elevator to the tenth floor of the Royal Park Hotel, Ben Cho felt a wooziness that was more than just vertigo, or jet lag, or even culture shock. It had been less than sixteen hours since he had been extracted from the Sierra Nevada backcountry, given moments to shower and shave in an airport hotel, provided with a full set of luggage and clothes, then put aboard a flight to Hong Kong with his escort, FBI Special Agent and Deputy Legal Attaché DeSondra Adjoumani. There had been a buffer of empty seats all around them on the jet.
He didn’t quite know, even now, what the FBI had
to do with all this, or why the situation merited a SEAL extraction team, but he was learning.
“I’m glad you’ve been brought in on this, Dr. Cho,” Agent Adjoumani had confided to him in an undertone. “Where we’re headed can still be such a closed society, especially in the computer realm. It’s often hard to figure out what they might be up to, behind the Great Firewall of China.”
She looked at him meaningfully, but the look had little meaning to Ben. He could only nod. He had relatively limited previous experience in China, and what little he remembered didn’t strike him as being particularly “closed.” Then again, he had traveled mainly in the Special Economic Zones and Special Administrative Regions of the New Territories and Shanghai.
From those previous travels he gathered that the SEZs and SARs were in some ways a very Chinese approach to handling the periodic incursions of foreign influences. Centuries back, an emperor faced with the increasing presence of foreign devils along the coastline merely decreed that the Chinese people were to evacuate certain coastal areas, and move more than one hundred miles inland. Emptying those areas of Chinese inhabitants had resulted in ceding temporary control to the foreigners and their strange ideas. In some ways it had been rather like a buffer zone, or even a quarantine: the foreign contagion would be allowed to run its course, but would never be allowed to reach the heart or even the vital organs of the Chinese body politic itself.
Ben had been struck by the fact that the Communist government, in coping with global capitalism via SEZs and SARs, had come to essentially the same “solution” the Imperial bureaucrats had adopted centuries earlier.
The flight from San Francisco International to Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport was otherwise uneventful, but not particularly pleasant. The only thing truly out of the ordinary was that the two passengers in closest proximity to them were in fact both machines.
The flight attendants had handed Ben and the other passengers a brochure explaining that the machines were a cesium atomic clock and a supercomputer, part of a series of experiments underwritten by billionaire iconoclast and autodidact David Fahrney.
The idea was to investigate whether or not the Big Bang had been an explosion into space, rather than of space. Atomic clocks were being flown on outgoing and returning commercial flights in particular cosmic directions—toward 11 hours 40 minutes 36 seconds in the constellation Leo, or toward 23 hours 40 minutes 36 seconds in Aquarius. If the time differences, as measured against a stationary ground clock, were the same for the flights regardless of their cosmic direction, then Einstein’s theory of relativity would have passed its most rigorous test yet. If time were slowed more in one cosmic direction than another, however, then the original Lorentz-Fitzgerald theory of absolute motion through absolute space would be proven true: space would be proven infinite, superdense and superelastic, possessing an anti-energy a million times the mass of the Earth per cubic inch. Matter would have to be made of energy waves “all the way to the bottom.”
Ben was skeptical of such an outcome. Fahrney, who had lost the sight of one eye to a childhood accident, had often been accused of “Cyclopean vision” by his detractors in the mainstream scientific community. Still, if the man wanted to spend his own money in the furtherance of his ideas, more power to him. Ben wasn’t particularly bothered that two of his fellow passengers were artificial. It made the flight quiet enough that he could concentrate on his research.
Delving into the briefing materials assembled by Beech, Lingenfelter, and Wang, Ben began to formulate his first theories on how he’d come to be mixed up in the world of SEAL extraction teams and FBI legal attachés. He knew already that NSA and its Chinese counterpart, Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security, were both bent on the production of the “ultimate weapons” of information warfare.
The crux of that arms race was the development of a fully operational universal quantum computer, one of such awesome power it could manipulate information densities approaching the “bandwidth” of the entire universe—and therefore capable of breaking any encryption. The Chinese seemed to believe such a device would prove to be their “great equalizer” in any contest with the West.
What he’d seen in the briefing materials, however, seemed to suggest that this “universal key” was somehow intimately entangled with its opposite number, a similarly powerful universal quantum cryptograph—or “universal labyrinth,” as Kwok called it—capable of generating an encryption impossible to break. Ben couldn’t see the analogy, though. When he thought of labyrinths, about the only things that came to mind were convoluted paths in parks and gardens.
Turning back to his briefing materials, he read that both the NSA and Guoanbu feared the full weaponization of information might result in a “secrecy gap” which could nullify, overnight, all code and cipher efforts affecting electronic privacy, electronic commerce, and national security. Even the much-touted message cylinders—for all their biometric identification programs, tamperproofing, and ridiculous levels of superencryption—would be vulnerable.
Both sides appeared to be coming at the informational superweapon through some combination of quantum crypto and binotech. The classified literature Ben read suggested that whoever got the full quantum capability first would also have it last—and only. It was the ultimate killer app.
Why the powers at NSA had decided to make a defrocked intellectual historian like Jaron Kwok their point man on this, Ben had never yet been able to figure out. The man had such strange ideas—and strange terms for them, too. Kwok referred to the crypto arms race as the “looking-glass war” or, even more bizarrely, the “Enantiodrome.” Ben didn’t know the word, and couldn’t find it in his PDA’s dictionary, so he looked up its roots. It seemed to refer to a racecourse where the runner was always running into his mirror-opposite self. Ben wondered if Kwok had made the word up.
Tired of spinning on global and personal politics, Ben quickly finished off the crossword puzzles in the in-flight magazine. Always too easy, alas. So he’d put away the magazine and spent the last half hour of his flight watching a 2-D version of the weird virtual worldmovie Kwok had sent out.
On the trip from the airport on Lantau Island to the hotel in Sha Tin, Ben Cho found himself thinking a lot about that strangely filmic fragment. The odd little flick raised a number of curious questions. Warnings, too. Yet Ben gathered from the briefing materials that Beech, Lingenfelter, and Wang were far more appalled by Kwok’s security breach, in leaking word of “binotech research,” than by any of the other issues and speculations Kwok’s last holographic testament had put forward.
Ben decided that, whatever he did here in China, he would say nothing about binotech. He didn’t know all that many specifics, anyway—just what he’d read about the new “implants” NSA had funded for Jaron.
The elevator door opened. He and Special Agent Adjoumani were met by Wong Jun and Robert Beckwith. He would have recognized the pair as government functionaries even if he hadn’t been briefed. Despite the fact that they worked for wildly disparate governments, the only thing that might distinguish these two apparatchiks from thousands of others like them was that both appeared to be struggling against exhaustion. Ben thought it likely each of them had gone considerably more than twenty-four hours without sleep.
Examining their papers, Wong nodded at Adjoumani. At seeing the passport for Benjamin King-hon Cho, however, a question flickered across Wong’s face just long enough for Ben to notice it.
He knew the puzzled look, for he had seen it many times before—in America. Although his father was descended from nineteenth-century miners and railroad workers who fled Hong Kong for “Gold Mountain” California, Ben was nearly as dark-complected as Ms. Adjoumani. Not so very unlikely, given that his mother was a descendant of African slaves. Probably of a woodpile slave master or two as well, along the way. Ben’s mother had once joked nastily that his coloring was “high yellow,” unlike her own father’s “red bone.”
As a boy, such terms had only con
fused him.
Ben’s coming into the world hadn’t been so very easy, either: lots of ART—assisted reproductive technology, like fertility treatments and in vitro work, at least from what he was able to gather from his parents’ rare and vague mentions. Ben had sometimes let himself hope that, although it might not be easy, it was possible to be Asian and African and American all at the same time. Neither the world nor the USA, however, had yet grown as enlightened on that point as he might have expected.
Most white people he’d met either couldn’t believe he was part Asian—or before Ben could say a word, they were already telling him how much he looked like Tiger Woods, back in the days when that legendary golfer was “just starting out.”
Wong motioned the two of them down the hotel corridor toward what had been Kwok’s suite of rooms. The guards required them to glove up before they were allowed to enter the suite. Making his way to the bed with the Hiroshima man-shadow on it, Ben picked up and examined the partially melted laptop and virtual reality shades he found there. Adjoumani, Beckwith, and Wong looked on, attentively.
“The coroner and the police investigators have finished up most of their work here,” said Wong. “They haven’t had much luck with the computer hardware. You’re an expert in these systems, Dr. Cho?”
“I know a few things about them. I’m not much into implants and deep-immersion environments, though. Kwok clearly was. These shades are a DIVE mask. Pin-sets on the temples, for electrode links beneath the skin, see? Not a DIVEr, myself. Like the old joke says, ‘When it comes to plugs and drugs I draw the line at pins and needles.’ Augmented reality is more my speed.”
Wong nodded, perhaps more from politeness than understanding.
“We intercepted a fragment of some sort of holographic virtual-reality scenario, generated by the deceased not long before his death,” Wong said. “Apparently he sent it while using this equipment. Do you know anything about that?”
Ben glanced at Beckwith, who gave a discreet nod. Better to ’fess up, since thousands of people might have seen that fragment already. Beckwith himself seemed to be among those thousands.
The Labyrinth Key Page 6