“And if I find him first?”
“Don’t let him out of your sight before I get there.”
Mei-lin was surprised to hear a sigh. She tried to puzzle out the emotions behind it—frustration? embarrassment?—but couldn’t quite pin them down.
“He’s at a place called the Temple of the Ten Thousand Beauties,” Adjoumani said.
“You mean Ten Thousand Buddhas, don’t you?”
“No, I do not. I mean Ten Thousand Beauties. It’s a hostess club. He said he was ‘heading out to follow up a lead,’ but I have my doubts as to which head is leading him.”
As she looked up the Temple of the Ten Thousand Beauties on her phone’s map guide, Mei-lin tried to process that information. Cho really didn’t seem the type for the hostess scene, but who could say? Her thoughts were interrupted when Adjoumani beat her to the punch. The FBI legat read out the address, an instant before address and directions came up on Mei-lin’s own screen.
She knew the area. Cheng crime-family connections were rumored to be very strong there. Which made the Temple of the Ten Thousand Beauties most likely a recent offshoot of the Chengs’ more established—and very expensive—hostess clubs in Tsim Sha Tsui East and Wan Chai.
“I’ll meet you there,” Mei-lin said, starting her car.
“I’m already on my way, Detective,” Adjoumani said, breaking their connection.
Driving from the parking lot, she switched on the lightbar and siren. Mei-lin called for backup patrol officers to rendezvous with her, and to assist Adjoumani if they arrived on scene before she did. For once she hoped Guoanbu—or the CIA, even—was shadowing Cho.
Slaloming through traffic, Mei-lin Lu said a prayer to the Taoist patron god of police officers—who, incidentally, also happened to be the patron god of gangsters.
UNDER MALLWORLD
SHA TIN
Dressed stylishly in black slacks, a white silk shirt, and a shark gray suit jacket, Ben Cho walked along the promenade of a rather aged and dingy open-air mall in the seedier part of Sha Tin. All-too-frequent pseudoholo advertisements lurked about him, ubiquitous flashbar pop-up screens topped with motion-activated sensors and eye trackers. Their high-tech sheen only managed to make the old mallway look even more dated and dingy than it already was.
The ads were particularly thick now, with the Christmas season coming on. Trying to ignore the adverts aimed at holiday shoppers, Ben found himself jostled by horse racing fans he couldn’t ignore. The mob had just finished up a Wednesday night at the track and were off to celebrate their winnings, or drown their sorrows in liquor.
The slow stampede of horse fanciers left him disoriented. He walked along the front of a pocket theme park called Snoopy’s World, reading the signs declaring the rules of the park in very polite English and Chinese. Snoopy, Woodstock, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Sally, Linus, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, other characters he couldn’t name from the various eras of the “Peanuts” comic strip—all seemed to have withstood, with less visible wear, the weathering that had eaten away at the concrete high-rise apartment blocks that stood behind the theme park and mall.
On closer inspection, however, he saw that the Peanuts characters were chipped and faded. The dozens of forlorn statuettes and statues, in their many different sizes, put him in mind of the thousands of variously sized figures in the Temple of the Ten Thousand Buddhas.
Bodhisattva Brown, Ben thought, shaking his head.
Thinking of his visit to the Ten Thousand Buddhas reminded him of hell money, and Helen Sin, and his errand for this evening. Not far from the Ten Thousand Buddhas he had seen specialty paper shops selling products to be burned for the dead, consumer goods to be turned into smoke and ash so that their essence might pass into the realm of the afterlife, and make the daily existence of departed ancestors better there. Not only money from the Bank of Hell, in beautiful colors and outlandish denominations for burning, but paper automobiles and paper houses, combustible credit cards and fancy dress, anything from this world that could be virtualized by fire.
Smoke—and mirrors.
That was the other aspect of Chinese mysticism Jaron’s notes talked about at length. Manchu shamanism, particularly the shaman’s panaptu, the mirror through which he found the souls of the dead, located kind spirits, dispelled evil ones, and upon which the shaman rode to other realms. Since Jaron seemed so taken with that soul-searching and hell-trekking paraphernalia, Ben wondered if Kwok had visited Hong Kong during the Hungry Ghost Festival. Might that experience have affected Jaron’s claim—in the holo-cast—that the world was a simulation?
Ben walked on, feeling a wave of fatigue. Alone for the moment, he paused in front of a pseudoholo advert for Krelltek Limited. The commercial featured a life-size 3-D President John F. Kennedy, good as new despite his motorcade mishap in Dallas. “Ask not what technology can do for you, but what you can do for technology!” the metal-pated Kennedy ’borg commanded.
Had Ben’s investigation turned a corner? Or gone ’round the bend? Ben found it increasingly hard to tell.
He kept trying to remember moments from that time in college when he and Kwok were roommates. They’d shared late-night bull sessions over drinks and other intoxicants, both legal and misdemeanor. In fact, Ben’s only complete memories of that time involved such altered states of consciousness.
Jaron at the time was all too fond of smoking marijuana grown at a friend’s ranch and drinking a German liqueur called Jägermeister—which was also a cough medicine, a fact Ben sometimes found too easy to recall. On one such dope- and Jäger-fueled outing, they took a trip to the ranch, to clean the roof of a stable that served as the grower’s woodshed and drying area.
The stable was surrounded by oak trees. Over many years, under a succession of indifferent owners, a mass of leaves and debris had accumulated on the sloping galvanized-tin roof, until it looked ready to collapse under the weight. The edges of the roof were only flimsy metal with no support beams, so a ladder would bend them all to hell.
After surveying the situation, Jaron bent down and, weaving his fingers together, made a cup of his hands and a circle of his arms.
“Here,” he said to Ben. “Give me your foot and I’ll boost you up from the side.” Ben was drunk enough to trust him. With that boost Ben managed to clamber up onto the roof—or rather, onto the six-inch-thick mat of oak debris that covered it. Standing unsteadily, he found the roof a bit rickety, but able to support his weight. Jaron handed a large rake up to him.
He unburdened the stable of its debris, breaking up the mass of detritus into smaller mats and shoving them in leaf-mold cataracts off the roof. By the time the job was finished, he was almost sober enough to worry about breaking a leg while coming down.
Ben shook his head and smiled crookedly, remembering.
What he mainly recalled of Jaron, beyond that single rooftop adventure, was a young man intelligent and articulate far beyond his years. Jaron had a sophomore’s love for Oscar Wilde’s idea that “All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are staring up at stars”—to the point that he took to calling himself a “gutter astronomer.” He was also someone who loved watching team sports and was very fond of gambling, but who also had a lot of anger. Someone who said of his family, “We weren’t glamorous enough to be ‘working class.’”
Ben supposed something similar could probably be said of his own family, too—which made him wonder: If some Authority had manipulated both Jaron and himself even before the womb, then why hadn’t that Authority seen to it that he and Jaron were raised under better circumstances?
That Authority, if it existed, didn’t seem to have been interested in such trivial matters.
A pseudoholo popped up in front of him, Venus on the half shell selling pearls for a jewelry store. “You don’t have to be shellfish,” the come-on goddess said, “to make the world your oyster.”
Sidestepping the advert, Ben wondered why he hadn’t ended up as angry as Jaron. Kwok, however, had had his own sp
ecial burdens to bear. Jaron had complained frequently to Ben that his parents were both “sweet but clueless,” and his mother in particular “nervous” to the point of neurosis—but still, they were tech-savvy clericals and wannabe geeks who had named him Jaron, after an early virtualist.
Then again, Jaron’s quirky and technophobic grandmother had, according to Jaron, always mispronounced her grandson’s first name as “Jiren”—Chinese for “paradoxical man.”
“Nitrophony,” said a young dancing woman in a faux 3-D pop-up. She whispered loudly to a couple who, walking along not far to Ben’s right, had tripped the motion sensors. From Ben’s point of view, the image was a bit distorted. “The perfect party pleaser. When you’re ready to leave the party behind, your brain is, too!”
Paradoxical man. Virtuality pioneer. Maybe both versions of the name fit. Even back then, Jaron was already talking about giving up his physics and electrical engineering double major, and changing to European history. Mainly he seemed peeved with all those “white bwana intellectuals” he’d met, who thought Asians only excelled in mathematics and the sciences.
“I have too much personal integrity to become obsessed with making money,” Jaron had said, a little too smugly for Ben’s taste.
“What once was politics,” declared a clothier’s adscreen, “is now fashion.” The screen intercut from Mao-jacketed minions to models on catwalks wearing very similar clothes.
Seeing the adscreen made Ben wonder about Kwok’s political persistence. He had talked about it a little with Cherise, about the column the younger and more “radical” Jaron had written for the school newspaper all those years ago, under his “Kwok X” byline.
The national security agencies must have forgiven him his youthful indiscretions. And Jaron must have been pretty hard up, to take work with NSA.
Must have been quite a blow to him when, upon receiving his PhD, he was forced to confront the fact that the profession he had trained for showed no interest in accepting him into its ranks. And, when his blond wife slid easily into her role as a professor of Chinese and comparative literatures—that must have rubbed salt deep into his wounds.
“Wasn’t much fun/When Jesus got his nails done,” sang a live-action, eye-level billboard for Interstellar Road Songs, the latest release by Skandalon, a Christian punktronica band.
Still, Jaron had soldiered on—stubbornly, patiently—even after his hopes for a tenured position had been dashed. Was that persistence born of hope, or ambition? Whichever, he had persisted until he came into possession of the Forrest materials, the notes and encrypted documents the CIA had only belatedly handed over to the NSA.
Ben wondered why the CIA had kept the Forrest documents to themselves for all those decades. Were they embarrassed to admit that they hadn’t been able to crack the enciphered materials? Or had Felix Forrest’s notes and documents just gotten filed away—lost for years in the bureaucratic shuffle?
It was clear from Jaron’s notes that, once the materials had come into his hands, he had tracked down and minutely examined Forrest’s other works—including the scholarly papers he had published when he was a professor of Asiatic Studies, first at Duke and then at Johns Hopkins. It was out of that research that Jaron had developed a thorough chronology of the documents—and Ben was thankful he had.
The original, heavily encrypted source materials had been buried in the Chinese Imperial Archives for more than three centuries, until they came into Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s hands, upon the collapse of Qing dynasty rule. Felix C. Forrest’s father, Myron Forrest, had served as a Western advisor, fund-raiser, and gunrunner to Dr. Sun. In gratitude for his services, and well aware of the elder Forrest’s fascination with puzzles and codes, the good doctor had handed over the archival documents.
On his deathbed, Myron Forrest gave them to his son. Upon his own death, Felix Forrest willed them—much annotated and expanded—to the CIA. And so their journey had continued.
Ben descended a flight of stairs that took him from the mallway down to street level.
Felix C. Forrest’s notes indicated that he had never quite cracked the complex of algorithms that veiled the encrypted texts. Kwok’s annotations, however, claimed that Felix Forrest’s pseudonymous writings—particularly his science fiction stories—provided “paradoxical evidence” of his familiarity with then-secret CIA projects. What was more, “in their fractured, but strangely predictive and realistic depiction of the future” they provided proof—for Jaron, at least—that Forrest had, in fact, cracked many sections of the ciphertext.
Meanwhile, Forrest had begun to attract attention with his second career, as well. In 1964, a reviewer had written of his work that the author was more than “just a science fiction writer. He is a wanderer out of the future.” Jaron seemed to take that tongue-in-cheek comment quite seriously. Even given that, though, what did the stories have to do with cracking an ancient ciphertext?
Jaron’s annotations, in any event, asserted that Felix Forrest was first to relate the cipher system found in the old Chinese documents to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Jesuit ciphers, made available to the Chinese through the efforts of Matteo Ricci. Ricci had prostrated himself before the empty throne of Emperor Wan Li, handing over a raft of mnemotechnic materials as his gift to the absent ruler.
Notes on notes on notes, Ben thought. Commentary spawning metacommentary spawning meta-metacommentary.
Ben interrupted his pondering to glance again at the address on the ticket Sin had given him. He nodded distractedly, then crossed into the grimmer and grimier streets that wound below the mallway and Snoopy’s World. His shoulders hunched as he walked along the urine-smelling under-street. Life is like spelunking….
It had been the Vatican files on Giordano Bruno, supposedly lost for four centuries—since Bruno himself was burned at the stake—that had proved, to Jaron at least, that Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits had been privy all along to Bruno’s hermetic and Kabbalah inspired encryptions.
Toward the end of his notes, Jaron hinted tantalizingly that he himself might have found the final, critical piece of evidence for mastering the complex of algorithms, in the writings of Shimon Ginsburg, a German-Jewish scholar of the Kabbalah who had escaped to China from Nazi Germany. What that final critical puzzle piece might be, however, and where exactly he had discovered it, Jaron Kwok had not said. Not long before he went missing, however, Jaron had spent an awful lot of time at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial.
Crowd noise and a pounding techno beat blaring from a bar caught his attention. He looked up and saw an Amazon woman in armor standing beside some sort of heraldic device. In blue and white neon and questionable Latin, the motto of the device read: Bellatrix non pugnat quia pulchra est—ea pulchra est quia pugnat. The device in turn framed a small, realtime come on screen, which had just switched on. Motion sensor, no doubt.
Judging from the screen images, of women engaged in various forms of kicking, pummeling, and grappling, Ben guessed Bellatrix was a female fight club of the Thai sort. He was sorely tempted to step inside. Ever since he’d seen his mother and aunt—two scrappin’ sistahs, if ever there were—go at it when he was a boy, he’d had to struggle against the temptation to enjoy such spectacles.
But he hurried on, watching more carefully for the telltale sensors. Yet, despite his care, he was soon faced with another apparition, though different from the rest, softer-edged, more like a waking vision or true apparition than a flashbar advertisement. Ben wondered for a moment if it might be a true holojection, but no; no one would spend the money for a real air-bender, especially not here.
“Data plus context equals information,” announced a majestic woman of mixed race, dressed in white, with an Argus-eyed cloak draped over her shoulders. “Information plus understanding equals knowledge. Knowledge plus compassion equals wisdom.”
The woman, her dark hair streaked with blond and red tones, was identified in silver cursive only as “Sophia.” Something about her reminded Ben of Reyna,
of Cherise LeMoyne, of Marilyn Lu, of DeSondra Adjoumani—all of them rolled into one, and so powerfully that he blinked and shook his head. When the apparition disappeared, Ben retraced his steps, trying to trip the sensor again, but try as he might, no Sophia reappeared.
With a sigh, he continued on at last.
At the end of the next block and across the street, he spotted the sign for the Temple of the Ten Thousand Beauties. Its no-nonsense, sans serif gold neon was tasteful by comparison with most of the nightclub signage down here. Tasteful, too, was the antiqued anteroom he found inside the glass-paned front door. A Chinese woman of carefully uncertain age and flawless pale skin presided there.
Seated beside a rolltop writing desk, the receptionist, if that was her role, was dressed in a black, full-sleeved, Empire-waisted number with plunging décolletage—a mode of dress Ben’s mother-in-law favored and which his wife Reyna used to call “wares-without-tears.” In the case of the woman at the desk, her ensemble showcased her bosomy wares while hiding whatever tears gravity might have made elsewhere in the fabric of her beauty.
“May I help you?”
Embarrassed at pulling the tacky neon pink ticket from his pocket, he nonetheless did so. Introducing himself by name, he waited in silence as the woman examined the paper.
“Helen will be waiting in the Gehry suite,” the woman said, giving her bobbed black hair a little flip. “Take the elevator at the end of the hall to the third floor, then turn right.”
Thanking her, he left the room and proceeded down the hall. The name of each suite shone in backlit white letters to the right or left of the door. Some of the doors were closed, but some remained open. From the open ones he caught sight of rooms decorated to resemble different places and times. He also saw, inside, very attractive women of varied ethnicities and body types, all dressed in revealing outfits as they chatted, dined, or slow-danced with their male companions. The men were a varied lot too, but most of them looked to be well-heeled alpha males. Ben wondered how much the “complimentary ticket” Ms. Sin had given him might be worth.
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