Besides, he could use a night free of Beckwith and Adjoumani. No matter how much he might enjoy the company of the latter, she was undeniably paranoid about Chinese motives. With Adjoumani in tow, it was almost impossible to explore the boundaries between permitted and forbidden topics. There were gray-area conversations which, he hoped, might open up some leads for him.
Fortunately, his unaccompanied meeting with Lu had received clearance from somewhere up the chain of command, over Adjoumani’s objections. Ben had been granted the freedom of the city for one evening, at least.
As the touristy Peak Tram climbed upward from the Garden Road station, bathed in the light of sunset, its passage into the dense tropical vegetation of the mountainside forcibly reminded Ben that Hong Kong wasn’t so very far from the equator. Atop the Peak however, the ambience shifted from H. Rider Haggard jungles to Hugo Gernsback futurism.
Leaving the tram at the Peak Terminus and strolling across the viewing plaza in search of Cafe Deco, Ben noted that the metal-skinned Peak Tower—shaped like something between a wok and an anvil—looked as if it should have a zeppelin mast attached to it, with the airships of an unrealized future bobbing alongside, taking on and dropping off superglamorous passengers, the beau monde in tuxedos and evening gowns.
From the viewing plaza, Hong Kong seemed the perfect incarnation of a retro science-fiction megacity. Squeezed between Victoria Harbor to the north and the mountain backbone of Hong Kong Island on which Cho stood, the city hadn’t grown outward so much as it had vaulted upward. Staggering densities of corporate skyscrapers stood sheathed in computerized neon. Astronomically expensive high-rise apartment buildings stratified with light, floor by floor, as night fell. Distilled from starlight, money, and dreams, the city’s skyline looked like an artificial mountain range. Across the broken-rainbowed harbor, Kowloon extended the same theme’s diminuendo into the New Territories.
The cafe proved to be a place of metallic art-deco trim and geometric designs executed in inlaid wood. The bold colors and bright lights of the entry level gave way across the dining area to a tall glass window-wall, presenting views of the city and the night. Ben almost expected to see private aircars whizzing past outside, or to be accosted by a robot maître d’.
“Mister Cho?” inquired a woman dressed in a blue silk jacket and black slacks, who approached him and thrust out her hand. “Police Detective Lu Mei-lin.”
Shaking the proferred hand and taking the card she offered along with it, Ben Cho realized he had expected Detective Lu to be a grizzled veteran cop, and male. He was surprised to find that Lu was a compact, energetic woman, apparently about his own age. Walking across the restaurant toward their table, he wondered if Adjoumani, or certainly Beckwith, might have purposely—and for some unfathomable reason—neglected to tell him.
The view of Hong Kong from their table was as spectacular as Ben could have hoped for. After ordering wine, they exchanged pleasantries about the vista. Ben related to her his impressions of the city as a place where the camel’s nose of the future had gotten under the tent flap of the present.
“I much prefer this view of Hong Kong to the one from across the harbor,” Detective Lu said. “I’m pretty good at filing the trademarks off what I see and hear, but from the harborside promenade in Kowloon there are just too many big, neon corporate logos on the skyscrapers across the straits. Even I’m not impervious to that level of brandwashing.”
Their wine arrived.
“Deep down, Hong Kong is at least as much about old dragons as new technologies,” the detective said, pausing to sip her wine. “Oh, and I go by ‘Marilyn’ for my English-speaking friends.”
Ben Cho nodded. They placed their dinner orders with a bespectacled young Chinese woman whose broad Aussie accent and playful wit belied her serious looks. Jazz from a live band started up in the background.
As they ate, Ben talked about his own work, about his slim acquaintance with the departed Jaron Kwok, even about the loss of his wife. He also learned about Lu’s work on the police force, about the detective’s family and her background in anthropology. As they conversed, Lu proved to be street-smart and also a good deal more intellectually sophisticated than Ben expected. Sharp enough to have some edges, he thought.
Edges notwithstanding, their talk over dinner was easy and forthright. In the soft light she looked particularly attractive, and he found himself warming to her. With dessert, however, the conversation turned to the strange circumstances surrounding Kwok’s apparent departure from this world. Ben reiterated that he didn’t see how Kwok’s gear could have turned him to ashes—if indeed ashes were what he had left behind.
“What about other phenomena, then?” Marilyn Lu asked suddenly, interrupting him in midsentence.
“Such as?”
Lu stared hard at him, then casually glanced around the restaurant. A moment later she seemed to come to a decision—perhaps about their environs, perhaps about him.
“Allow me to pay the charges,” she said. “Then perhaps we could take a walk to Lions Pavilion? The view of the city is particularly impressive from the Lookout.”
Curious, Ben wasn’t about to refuse.
Soon thereafter, they exited the restaurant and walked to the Pavilion and the Lookout. Except for an older man strolling about with his Lhasa apso, the place was deserted, with no one else anywhere nearby—likely because it was late on a surprisingly cool night in the middle of the work week. The vista from the pagoda-roofed gazebo was spectacular, but Lu clearly had something else on her mind.
“Here,” Lu said, taking an electronic viewer from her pocket and handing it to Ben. “Does that help?”
“It does, yeah,” he said, holding the device up to his eyes and looking out over the city. “But what it adds in magnification it subtracts a little in scale and context, you know?”
“This might help,” Lu said. With a movement very close to sleight of hand, the detective palmed a minidisk from her pocket and popped it into a slot on the viewer’s side, simultaneously enabling its player function.
Ben stared again through the viewer, but found to his surprise that the real-time image of the Hong Kong skyline was gone, replaced by a recording. Watching, Ben realized that what he was looking at was a closed-circuit TV record of Police Detective Lu’s very recent interview with Mrs. Julie Quian, the hotel cleaning lady who was first on the scene. Quian appeared unaware of the camera, but from the way she kept glancing in its general direction Ben guessed the record had been made through a two-way mirror. He had always been fascinated by those. They reminded him of the invisible fourth wall that separated the audience from actors on a stage. Or God from mere mortals.
“—not say it was fire. Like fire.”
The interview, or interrogation, between the detective and the graying matron had been conducted in English. Cho thanked the history of Hong Kong as a British colony, and was secretly relieved. Julie Quian’s command of English wasn’t the best, but it was a good deal better than his own Cantonese.
“How do you mean?” asked Detective Lu.
“Not like he burst into flames, but like he flickered. Streamed up. Patchy and see-through.”
“If he became transparent,” the detective pressed, “then what did you see through him? The bedcovers? The other side of the room?”
“No, no, no. He like a TV turned to different channel from rest of world. Sunny day in some other place shining through him. Then he break up into—what you call it? Static? White noise? And nothing left but ashes on bed and strange smell.”
The CCTV record stopped and the Hong Kong skyline reappeared in the viewer. Ben Cho took the viewer from his eyes and turned toward Lu, who stared at him expectantly, leaning with one hand on a railing finial carved in the shape of a lion. Ben slowly handed her the viewer.
“Well?” the detective asked quietly. Ben dropped his voice, as well.
“It may be very important. Then again, everyone knows how unreliable eyewitnesses can be. I have
no plausible explanation for what could have caused the scene Mrs. Quian describes, in any case.”
“How about implausible explanations, then?”
Ben pondered that a moment before speaking again, very quietly.
“Her description makes it sound as if something was somehow…overwriting Jaron Kwok’s very existence. Like a computer disk being overwritten with new information.”
“How is that possible?”
“I’m not sure it is. A person isn’t just data, to be stored or retrieved. Or the medium it’s stored to or retrieved from, either.”
“You’re the expert,” Lu said with a shrug, in a voice just above a whisper. “Could he have been attacked through the distributed system with which he was interfacing at the time, maybe?”
“The worldwide computershare? That’s unlikely in the extreme.”
“But that still leaves us to explain the melting of the laptop and the virtuality visor,” Lu said. “And the ‘ashes.’”
“Yes.” Ben turned back to gaze at the neon-burning skyline before him. “Look, I’m going to be attending Jaron Kwok’s memorial service later this week, so I have to return to the US tomorrow. I owe you, so take what I’m about to tell you for what it might be worth. You might want to follow up on a couple of things….”
Ben paused, on the brink, yet still uncertain. What protocols might he be breaking if he went on? He’d only just met Marilyn, and had only the slightest of professional connections with her. Some of the people who sent him here might consider it treasonous for him to reveal anything to this police detective, so why do it? Wine and conversation over a candlelight dinner, beside a city sparkling below them like a new constellation of earthbound stars—that was no excuse. Nor was the fact that, since Reyna’s death, he had missed terribly the close company of a woman he could just sit and talk to, at ease.
No. He would tell Marilyn because he trusted her, in ways he couldn’t explain.
“I don’t know if anyone told you,” Ben said, taking a palmtop t-com utility out of his pocket and manipulating its display screen with a stylus, “but at about the time Jaron Kwok vanished, a ’cast went out across the infosphere. A number of sites have posted it, some in 2-D form. Here, take this business card I’m printing out. It’s a smart card—see the strip? I’ve embedded my phone numbers and net addresses—along with the addresses of the best infosphere sites on the Kwok ’cast.”
Lu took the card from his hand, glanced at it, and put it in her pocket. Ben returned his gaze to the skyline and the roaring quiet that rose from it.
“That gray-pink ash or gritty lint or whatever it is we’re going to be memorializing at Kwok’s service,” Ben continued, “you took some samples of that, right? You might want to check them for something more than physical characteristics. More than just chemical or biological, too. I’m not certain, but I think those ashes may contain information of another sort. Data.”
“What kind?”
“Could be almost anything. Disk data-storage capacity is at hundreds of gigabytes per square inch these days. Even tiny pieces of a hard drive can contain sizable amounts of information. For years there’s been talk that spies might remove a hard disk, grind it up, and smuggle out its data as pocket lint.”
A laugh escaped Lu. Ben frowned.
“I know it sounds nutty, but it’s less of a laughing matter if the data was originally m of n encoded.”
“What’s that?”
“Like a laser hologram,” Ben said, “for which fragments less than the whole can convey the whole. m of n encoding spreads information over n fragments, any m of which is sufficient to reconstruct the relevant data. A document encoded in thirty-two fragments, say—any eight of which would be sufficient to reconstruct the entire document.”
“In this case,” Lu said, looking at him with narrowed eyes, “how much of the stuff would need to be recovered to reconstruct the whole? And the whole of what?”
“I have no idea. Still, it might be worth your time to follow this line in your investigation.”
Lu looked away at the glittering cityscape, too.
“It sounds crazy, but I believe you,” she said. “Tell me something. Why are you helping me like this?”
They turned their backs on the city and began walking toward the Peak Tower.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Ben countered. “Or just say it was quid pro quo for letting me see that interview.”
“I suppose you could.”
“Then again,” Ben said, puffing a little as they climbed the incline, “maybe there’s more to it than that. My country went through a nuclear arms race and a cold war during the last century. We didn’t learn much, but we did retain a few things. Between us and the old Soviet Union there was a policy called MAD—mutually assured destruction.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“At its heart was a paradoxical idea: that to be safe, you also have to be vulnerable. Paradoxical ideas have never been very popular in my country, Ms. Lu. They’re less popular than ever, today. Maybe they’re not popular in your country, either.”
“No, not very,” she agreed. “Especially given the Nepal-Tibet situation.”
Ben nodded. Since his return from the wilderness, he had heard the media reports. The Chinese government protested that armed Tibetan rebels were using bases in Nepal to harass the Chinese province of Tibet. Depending on which Party official was speaking, Nepal was either a proxy for India, or both South Asian nations were proxies for the United States.
“That’s unfortunate,” Ben said, “because I think your country and mine are getting caught up in a new kind of arms race, a new kind of conflict. Jaron Kwok may be an early casualty of that new kind of conflict, even if no one can yet say how.”
They came up onto the promenade of the viewing plaza. The anvil-wok of the Peak Tower loomed above them in the night. The promenade, too, was empty but for a bearlike young man standing with his arm around his willowy girlfriend at the far end of the platform. Ben noticed that Lu stared at the couple a long moment, before shaking her head as if to clear it. The young couple appeared to be cuddled together out of a desire for romance, at least as much as any need for warmth.
“I’ve often thought,” Lu said, “that the future is too important to leave in the hands of the leaders.”
“A subversive truth, Ms. Lu.”
“Call me Marilyn,” she said, smiling. “Someone said the truth will set you free, but nobody ever said it would make you safe.”
Ben laughed and shook Lu’s hand.
“I’m sure the politicians, the generals, the big money people—they would disagree.”
“No doubt.”
“I’m taking the tram back down,” Ben said, “so our paths part here. I already have your card, and I just gave you mine. Let’s keep in touch.”
“Agreed. And Ben—be careful, especially if you’re the courier for Jaron Kwok’s ashes.”
“I am, but why the worry?”
Hurriedly, Lu surreptitiously popped another disk into the viewer and handed it to him, this time with no pretense that it was intended only for looking at the city. Another surveillance camera record, as near as Ben could tell, though not from the same source as the Quian interrogation. The image showed two men, one a thin, gray-haired gent wearing glasses, white labcoat, and slacks, the other a thick-set younger man in desert camo fatigues. The sound quality was poor, but even so Ben could tell that the younger man was demanding something of the older gent. Everything about the older man’s tone and expression showed how firmly he refused to give the younger man what he was demanding.
Then the older man made a mistake. He glanced away toward something near him in the office or lab. The younger man’s gaze followed that glance, saw what it was looking at. There was a sound of breaking glass. Something glinted in the young man’s right hand, then he struck the lab-coated gent in the chest with it several times. From the blood that followed, Ben suspected the object that had glinted wa
s a knife, and that the older man had suffered multiple stab wounds before he fell to the floor. The younger man fled the scene, a plastic-bagged something in his left hand.
“Looks like a robbery of some sort,” Ben offered.
“Yes,” Marilyn Lu said, her voice cracking for a moment before she cleared her throat and got it under control. “The victim is Charles Hui. He worked the Kwok incident for the coroner’s office. From the way he’s dressed, we suspect the thief and murderer is associated with the New Teachings Warriors. As nearly as can be determined, the only items stolen out of Hui’s possession were the ash samples he took from the Kwok incident scene.”
Ben pondered that for a long moment.
“Are you the investigator on Hui’s murder too?”
“No. He was a friend of mine, though. He was usually so careful—about everything. I never thought he would die this way. I thought you should know, since you’re transporting Kwok’s ashes back to the states.”
“What about you? Don’t you have samples of them in your possession too?”
“Don’t worry about me. Understanding murder is part of my job. Tragic as it is, Charles Hui was at least killed in a way I understand. If Jaron Kwok is the victim of a new kind of murder, then there’s bound to be a new kind of murderer lurking about, too.”
“You think so?”
“I’m almost certain of it,” she said with a shrug. “Try to have a safe trip back to the U.S.A.—no, make sure you do.”
With a wave of the hand from each, they separated then, barely managing to maintain their pretense of casualness for anyone who might be watching.
Waiting at the Peak Terminus, Ben wondered at the way the evening had turned out. Not much like he had planned, admittedly. Was Marilyn Lu a cynic, or an idealist, or—like Ben himself—some quirky mix of both?
He climbed aboard the empty tram. As the car began its controlled fall down the mountain, through the dark density of jungle vegetation toward the bright density of Hong Kong’s lights and the nightlife beyond, Ben wondered if perhaps Lu had duped him. Played him for a lonely fool by getting him to reveal more than she herself had given in return. Maybe made him betray himself, or even his country, in some obscure way.
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