The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The more time she spent with Ma, though, the more Meilin doubted that he was working for Guoanbu. She hadn’t seen any evidence that he had any particular interest in the Party line, at least not so far. On the other hand, even Wong himself—who was undeniably Guoanbu—had been keeping a relatively low profile, as if playing the good political mentor. So who knew what to believe?

  Detective Lu shook her head.

  Nearby on its tall pediment stood the bronze statue of Dr. Sun, three times life-size. The founder of the first Chinese republic leaned on his cane, seemingly more out of a sense of style than any need for support. There was a flowerbed nearby, with signs in English and Chinese. The English translation of one of the signs read Protect Gardening Against Treading On—an interesting rendering of Chinese characters that said Don’t Walk On The Flowerbeds.

  As they climbed the first set of low stairs to the Memorial Hall itself, Derek Ma took from his pocket a schematic of the building, and broke out his own camera.

  “Paul,” he said, turning to Kao and pointing out locations on the schematic, “why don’t you shoot the exterior, then take the entrance at the loading dock. Go downstairs here, to where they build the sets and store the props. We’ll do the interior spaces that lie aboveground.”

  “Will do,” said Kao. “Any suggestions on what I should be looking for?”

  “Nothing specific,” Lu said. “Just keep your eyes open for anything that looks out of place or unusual.”

  Kao grunted an affirmative and strode away. By the time Lu and Ma had climbed the second set of stairs, to the red-pillared portico of the main entrance, Ma was recording everything.

  “Derek, I just can’t figure you out,” Mei-lin said, glancing at the thin guy who stood beside her, reading glasses propped on his forehead.

  “How so?”

  “Here you are, the techno geek, but I know at least one person who thinks there’s more to you than meets the eye. Patsy—that lab technician I moved onto my schedule?—she doesn’t say much, but even she has noticed you. I think she’s sweet on you. She says you’re a top alumnus of a big martial-arts school.”

  “That’s right,” he said with an odd smile, as if he knew what was coming. “The biggest—Ta Gou Academy. Near the Shaolin temple, outside Dengfeng.”

  “But weren’t you supposed to become a monk or something?” she asked, watching him as he methodically recorded every detail of their surroundings.

  “Not at all!” he said, laughing. “My parents sent me there hoping I’d come back to Hong Kong a martial-arts movie star. Their goal was to have me support them luxuriously into their old age.”

  “A movie star? I can almost see that. How did you end up a police tech?”

  “I started training in computing and image analysis during my time in military service. After I left the military and became a police officer, I just kept working in that vein.”

  “That makes more sense,” Lu said as they pushed through the doors into the performance hall proper. “For a while there I thought you were playing at being someone you weren’t. You didn’t look geeky enough to be a tech.”

  “Like Paul, you mean?” he asked, dropping the camera enough to toss her a sharp look. “He’s not very big on social skills, but he’s a nice guy, when you get to know him. So, who did you think I really was?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, trying to figure out how to downplay her response. The space inside the hall—an open dome one hundred fifty feet high and covering nearly forty thousand square feet, with no pillars to interfere with the view—was undeniably impressive. It was also somewhat cold inside, even on a sunny autumn day. “A spy, sent to keep tabs on me, maybe.”

  “How do you know I’m not?” he asked, grinning mysteriously. Glancing around the large interior space, he said dramatically, “Remember, Citizen Lu, that joint cooperation with the USA only goes so far. Your efforts may well prove pivotal in our government’s containment of that rogue imperial military superpower!”

  “Not bad,” Lu said, laughing, but Ma was already panning across the hall’s interior with his camera.

  “Seriously, though, any idea what Kwok thought he found here?” he asked.

  “No,” Lu said, growing quickly more sober, “but something about it mattered a great deal to him. He spent an entire day here. He didn’t go to any of the other tourist sites in Guangzhou—not the Six Banyan Temple, not the Chen Family Memorial Hall, not the Light Tower Mosque. Just here. And he included it in the holo-cast, where the characters discuss their ‘wellness plague.’”

  “I know,” Ma said, thoughtful. “Mixed in with all of those scanning electron micrograph images.”

  Lu wondered what Ma—and especially Wong—would say if they learned that she had sent other electron micrographs to Ben Cho in California. But she said nothing of that. Only as an afterthought did she remember to thank Ma again now, for finding that hidden material for her.

  “Given the context,” Mei-lin said, walking down one of the aisles toward the stage, “it was completely out of place. At least as much as that Renaissance painting.”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” Ma said, following her and recording images of the hall. “Why did he go to the trouble of embedding those images? Everything else we found seemed to be electron micrographs of some kind of nanotech.”

  Detective Lu thought about it as she began to walk the perimeter.

  “Why indeed,” she agreed. “And what about the caption that was embedded in the painting?”

  “If those are Kwok’s words, then to what do they refer?” Ma asked, taking the camera from his face for a moment. “The painting itself? The part of the holo-cast in which they’re found? Both? Neither?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, peering under one seat, then another. “The painting is cryptic enough.”

  “Cryptic?” Ma said with a grunt, taping Lu as she searched. “That’s an understatement. It’s practically impenetrable. I haven’t even been able to identify the source yet.”

  Section by section, Ma recorded the whole of the hall’s interior—from the top of the dome to the floor of the hall and all the way around—then they left the performance hall proper. Abandoning the enormous interior space, they walked down corridors toward restrooms and dressing rooms.

  “The holo-cast’s sneering reference to our country was obvious enough,” Ma said. “I really had to pay close attention, though, to find the image of this memorial hall, and the painting, and the caption. All were carefully hidden in the holo-cast. I don’t know about the ‘in plain sight’ part of that caption at all, since even that was more deeply encrypted than your standard digital watermark. I had to search around plenty and do a bunch of uncloaking and decoding, just to find what I did.”

  “I appreciate the effort,” Lu said, smiling gratefully. “Maybe hiding something in plain sight only works if the searchers don’t know what it is they’re looking for, or if they’re taking something for granted and missing what’s actually there.”

  “Maybe the same thing applies to what we’re supposed to find here in the Memorial Hall,” Ma commented, innocently enough.

  “Perhaps,” she said with a sigh. She was quickly growing frustrated with shooting empty dressing rooms and bathrooms, but they still hadn’t covered nearly enough of the place. “Maybe we need to see if we can’t open up the image of the Memorial Hall in the holo-cast, manipulate it to see if it yields up any secrets, like you did with the painting.”

  “Yes,” Ma said, nodding, “but I already tried the same filters and data decryptions on the image of the Memorial Hall. Nothing jumped out when I did that.”

  “Could you try something different, then?” she asked, perhaps a little too sweetly. “Holograms, fractals—those fill up a lot of dataspace, right? You can hide a lot of ciphertext in them, if you really want to.”

  Derek Ma frowned.

  “Mei-lin, how did I let you talk me into working on this with you? I get the feeling you’re holdin
g back more than you’re telling.”

  “You asked me not to reveal my sources,” Lu protested wryly. “Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to tell you everything now?”

  “No, no! If working on this might end up getting me in trouble, I want to be able to claim plausible deniability.”

  “I understand,” Lu said. “But the longer you work with me—”

  “—the more implausible my deniability will seem. Believe me, I know.”

  They were interrupted by a noise—a sound like the clamor of a bird trapped inside a great drum, trying to get free. A sound like muffled firecrackers. Lu and Ma looked at each other.

  “Gunshots,” Ma said.

  “Downstairs,” Lu agreed, then thought of Kao. They both ran for the stairs. On reaching the lower floor, they practically collided with a crouching man, clad in camo fatigues, who had been creeping toward Paul Kao. Both Lu and the man in camo fired, but in the confusion their shots went wide of the mark.

  Lu again fired after the man and a similarly clad comrade. She only succeeded in blowing a hole through an onion-domed minaret for what looked like the stage set of Scheherazade. The two men fled through the jumbled mess of wooden facades and canvas panels in the set workshop. When she looked back behind her she saw Ma kneeling beside Paul Kao. The blue visor Kao had been wearing now lay in a spreading pool of blood.

  “Go on!” Ma said. “After them! I’ll handle this!”

  Moving stealthily, carefully, and swiftly, Lu made her way to the ground floor portico without further incident. A moment later, Ma joined her there. As they stepped out from under the blue roofs of the building to stand under the taller blue roof of the sky, they saw a battered and faded green SUV tear across the lawns and beds in front of the Memorial Hall. Shots rang out. A security guard, hit by gunfire, went down. The few people out and about on the walks and promenades jumped for cover.

  “Back!” Mei-lin shouted to Ma. “Behind the pillars.”

  Lu, behind one red pillar, quickly checked the.50 caliber ammo of her Desert Eagle. Crouching behind another pillar Ma pulled out a police radio and called over a tactical channel. Lu heard snatches of “officer down” and “heavily armed attackers.” Seeing Lu’s cannon coming into play again, Ma shook his head and frowned.

  “I’m no kung fu wizard—like some people I know!” Lu said.

  Ma nodded, and disappeared.

  Lu stepped out from behind her pillar and took aim at the hurtling vehicle. Her first round blew a hole through radiator and engine. Her second took out the windshield. The third shot took out the driver. The SUV hit the first set of steps at speed and rolled, flipping over once completely before coming up and rocking to steady on all four wheels in a large flowerbed.

  Men in bargain-basement desert fatigues leapt from the vehicle, running for cover behind shrubs, sprawling behind bushes at the sound of Lu’s cannon, which was firing again. From their quasi-uniforms, Lu identified them as New Teachings Warriors, the same Muslim extremist group that had captured the Huaisheng Light Tower Mosque, two years back.

  The rattle of automatic weapons fire and the sound of rounds blowing chips from concrete and tile clattered around her. The boom of her heavy-barreled handgun punctuated the sound of her own footsteps as she ran from pillar to pillar, trying to keep the attackers pinned down enough that they couldn’t outflank her.

  Far off to her left she saw a swift-moving shadow strike down first one New Teachings Warrior, then another.

  It was Ma, arming himself with captured weapons and ammo as he went. Not that he much needed the weapons. Mei-lin smiled. Ma’s fast flips into and out of Eagle and Praying Mantis stances were like something from one of her father’s crime novels. They would no doubt have pleased Ma’s parents, too—even more so had their son been doing them on the silver screen.

  The wail of police sirens rose, growing steadily closer. Two of the Warriors made a last desperate charge onto the portico, spraying rounds against the red pillars. Flying concrete shrapnel—from Lu’s rounds, impacting pillars near their heads—were enough to drop the attackers, dazed and bloodied. The remaining extremists withdrew, retreating to the battered SUV in an attempt to escape.

  Lu turned toward the wounded attackers on the portico, only to find that Ma had already disarmed them and had them covered with their own weapons. The SUV in the flowerbed, its engine blown, wasn’t going anywhere. Police cars swarmed onto the lawns in a semicircle around it, blocking all potential escape routes. Three Warriors exited the SUV with their hands raised.

  Lu and Ma shouted their presence, identifying themselves to the armed officers warily approaching from their patrol cars. Lu marched their prisoners forward, turning them over to the Guangzhou police, where they joined their fellow thwarted terrorists in police custody. A pair of paramedics appeared, carrying a folding gurney, and Ma led them toward the stairs, and Kao. He returned a short time later, wearing a grim expression.

  “That got my blood pumping!” Mei-lin said to him, after she had finished handing over their prisoners.

  “My heart works fine without any such assistance,” Ma said, shooting her a penetrating look. “Dammit, Mei-lin! Kao is dead!”

  “Oh,” Mei-lin said, brought up short. “I’m sorry.”

  Derek Ma stared at the handcuffed Warriors in disgust. “Don’t you find it a bit strange that these rebels just happened to be here, visiting the Memorial Hall?”

  “What makes you think it’s anything more than a coincidence?” she asked.

  “It’s just too coincidental for me.” He took a data disk and waved it in front of her face before popping it into his video camera. “You asked him to look for anything unusual. Well, this is from Kao’s camera. He found something ‘unusual,’—something ‘out of place,’ all right. Told me about it, just before he lost consciousness. He recorded it, too.”

  Ma thrust the camera into her face. Reluctantly, she watched the images play. They showed men who might have been construction workers—except for the guns they were carrying. They shoved aside props. Lifted sheets of plyboard. Moved aside painted canvas flats.

  “So?”

  “Think about it, Detective. They were after something. Looking for something. Just like us. Paul caught them in the act. And then they caught him.”

  He stalked back toward their car. Mei-lin didn’t know what to say. The whole ride back from Guangzhou to the New Territories, the ghost of Paul Kao leaned forward between them, from the empty back seat, killing all conversation.

  First Charlie Hui, now this. She felt as if her luck had gone bad. “Better to be lucky than smart,” her father always said. At the moment she felt neither.

  Frustrated with the silence, Mei-lin checked virtual mail on her palmtop while Derek drove. She found a note from her daughter about a late dinner, and an electronic return receipt from the courier company confirming that her message to Ben Cho had been delivered in the United States—verified by his thumbprints.

  Mei-lin Lu stared at the fingerprints for a long time. They reminded her of prints she had seen before. So similar, so familiar, but she was too tired by the day’s events to remember. After a time the whorls grew blurry in her vision. Drowsy with the lullaby of the highway, she drifted off to sleep.

  SIX

  CONFESSIONS AND CONUNDRUMS

  NEW BURLTON

  “I suppose you have a reason for wanting to meet me here, Doctor Cho?” Cherise LeMoyne asked as they greeted each other at the edge of an otherwise empty parking lot. “You could have returned Jaron’s documents to me just about anywhere.”

  She’s in some kind of mood, Ben thought as they walked. Something odd about the tension between them, too. He shook his head, trying not to think about it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go there.

  New Burlton wasn’t far from Santa Cruz, so the drive shouldn’t have inconvenienced her too much. At least she was wearing a small daypack, as he had suggested—nearly identical to the one he wore himself.

  �
��Coming out here to New Burlton,” Ben said, turning and walking toward the Information Center, “might throw off anyone who might be following me. Or you.”

  “Well, it certainly doesn’t fit my ‘profile,’ I’m sure. I told you I don’t like these sorts of games—and see? You’ve got me doing it! I don’t know why you’re so determined to give those documents back to me in the first place.”

  “Because somebody broke into my house,” he explained. “Disarmed the alarm and ransacked the place yesterday morning, in broad daylight. Just dumb luck that I happened to have Jaron’s materials with me at my office.”

  “If you had Jaron’s stuff with you at the office,” Cherise said, frowning as she quickened her stride to keep up with him, “then how do you know that’s what the burglars were after?”

  “I don’t know it, at least not for certain. But there was something odd about the way they went through my house. Not really a burglary. Nothing appeared to be missing. And I’ve had a lot of weird late-night calls on my telephone, but there’s never anyone on the other end. An unusually high number of hits to my university website—especially when you consider that I’m very obviously on leave. Too many creepy coincidences.”

  “Why not just report it all to your mentors at the NSA?” Cherise asked.

  “I have,” he said, “but it’s always possible they might be the ones doing it, you know? I’m not sure I can trust them any more than I can trust the Chinese.”

  “Great,” Cherise said, shaking her head. “Just great. This is exactly why I didn’t want Jaron to get involved with those Friendly-Fascist Crypto Commandos in the first place.”

  “Look, I’ve got to go to Hong Kong again,” Ben said, plowing ahead, “and I definitely don’t want to risk carrying the documents with me overseas. My place isn’t secure—at least not as secure as that hidey-hole in your house. And no one has tried to break into your place, right?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  They fell silent as they approached the New Burlton Information Center, a space dug into a hillside and browed with ferns, dogwoods, and redwoods. Decidedly low-tech, Ben observed. At least once they got away from the perimeter, there shouldn’t be many surveillance cameras here.