The elevator was empty except for the sound of classical music purring out of concealed speakers. Upon leaving its confines he turned right and searched for the Gehry suite. With no difficulty at all he found the appropriate nameplate, beside a door that featured the clashing retro-cubist planes of postmodern design.
When Ben tried to knock, however, he found that the door was nothing more than an illusion—of such high quality that his knuckles, when they entered the holographic field, triggered a system that sounded a knock, though there was no wood.
“Come right in,” said a voice from inside the room. Ben actually reached for the doorknob before it occured to him that he could step directly through the doorway without opening the “door” that blocked it.
Inside, the walls of the room were wavy, twisting, billowing constructions in the best morphogenetic style. He wondered if he could walk through the walls, too, but suspected they were more solid than the door, despite their fun-house overlays.
On the pillowy gray cloud bank of the sofa, Helen Sin sat in profile, attired in a sheath dress of red and black silk which bared one shoulder. Her perfume floated through the room, surrounding her with a scent that managed to be both floral and earthy at the same time. Watching the end of what looked and sounded like a documentary playing on a flat screen suspended invisibly from the ceiling, she didn’t seem to notice Ben.
Inhaling her perfume and feeling awkward, he shifted his attention to the program.
“Why did even the earliest astronauts speak of space in terms of homecoming?” the documentary’s narrator asked in his smooth baritone. The cloud- and continent-mottled blue ball of Earth dominated the screen. “Perhaps they were right. Perhaps it took going into space to make us see that every human being who ever lived was already an astronaut. To help us understand that all of us live on the observation deck of a spinning stone starship. A gravity-powered generation ship, with a molten magnetic heart wrapped around a core of crystalline metal, going nowhere in particular, but taking forever to get there.”
The music swelled and the program ended. The woman on the sofa switched off the screen, though Ben didn’t see exactly how. As it rose into a recess in the ceiling and disappeared, new music began to play, slow, smooth jazz. Helen turned and stared at him frankly, then patted the sofa beside her. It rippled slightly.
“This isn’t quite what I expected,” Ben said, gazing around the room as he walked over to her and sat down. Her face creased in a frown that was almost a pout. Her expression made him feel as if he’d just asked her for directions to a Hong Kong whorehouse.
“I do hope you’re not one of those Americans, looking for the Exotic Erotic Orient,” she said. “That place is a construct that never existed except in the minds of Westerners, and you can’t get there from here.”
A construct?
First Kimberly the literary lap dancer and now this. Helen Sin, personal escort and postcolonial esthetician? His suspicions were aroused. Surely not all the women in the sex industry were as bright as the ones he kept running into?
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, nodding as she smiled, and his suspicions ebbed somewhat. “Just surprised by the decor, that’s all. It’s pretty cutting edge.”
“It can be pretty kitschy, too,” Sin said, apparently appreciating his conversational recovery, “but we tolerate each other well enough, this room and I. Would you like some wine?”
“I am thirsty. I walked quite a ways to get here—so why not?”
With a smile Helen stood up and went to a flattopped wave that proved to be a liquor cabinet. She moved like a wave herself, Ben noted—lithe and graceful, with a dancer’s fluidity. As she removed a decanter from the cabinet and poured each of them a long-stemmed glass of golden wine, her symmetrically bobbed dark hair bounced lightly where it framed her face.
“An Australian white,” she said, returning to the sofa and handing him his glass, “but a very good one.”
Ben took a generous sip. He was no great connoisseur of the wines of Australia or anywhere else, but he liked this one. To him it seemed to perfectly balance dry and sweet, and he told her so. She smiled and took a sip, then ran her tongue invitingly over her lips.
Impulsively they kissed, and the kiss turned into something more than impulse—something long and lingering.
“Hey,” she said softly, when she broke their kiss. “Do you like to dance?”
“Sure,” he said, although at the moment he was more sure that he would have liked to keep on kissing her.
A police siren began to sound in the distance. In response Helen turned up the volume on the slow jazz playing in the room. They put their wine glasses, each still very nearly full, on the table beside the sofa. Helen stood, helping him to his feet. In time to the music, they moved into each other’s embrace, dancing slowly together.
She was a wave in his arms, small but powerful, fluid but firm. They kissed again, then their kisses moved from lips to neck and throat, to small bites tasting the textures of each other’s skin. It wasn’t his suspicions that were aroused now. Ben felt himself growing erect….
…then felt his legs give out. He very nearly dragged her to the floor with him. His entire body felt like a clenched fist, yet he couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t even blink an eye, not even when Helen, looking anxious, passed her hand in front of his face.
Dimly he heard rumbling noises and popping sounds rising from the floors below.
“What are you doing?” she asked, holding his head and shoulders off the floor. Embarrassed but unable to say or do anything, Ben thought at first she was speaking to him, then realized she wasn’t. “He’s out cold, Zuo!”
“Neuroparalytic,” a man said, coming through the faux door. In one bear’s paw of a hand, the thickset, muscular man lifted up a small black unit like a TV remote control. “Triggered the wisdom teeth implants inside his head. Sorry, but we don’t have time for your drinks and knockout drops. Police in the lobby downstairs, asking questions. One is American—his FBI escort, I think. I’ve got armed men in the lobby and hall, but they can’t hold them off forever.”
Ben’s head thunked on the carpet as Helen let go of him and his torso slumped to the floor. Somewhere behind him he heard what sounded like a window sliding open. Zuo came around behind and grabbed him under the armpits, then Helen hefted him by the shins and ankles. Together they carried him, then toppled him out the open window like a well-dressed sack of potatoes.
Falling through the air, trapped in a body unable to move, cry out, or even whisper, Ben felt less like a man about to dash on the street below than a sentient stone doomed to shatter. Time dilated. His mind and thoughts stretched on the torturer’s rack of his own helplessness and horror.
His descent stopped, not with a thud or shatter, but with a billow. It was as if he’d fallen onto a great airy cushion.
The surface beneath him billowed and bounced again, and yet again as Sin and then Zuo landed to either side of him. He had fallen onto a huge air bag, the kind stuntmen used to cushion the impact of potentially fatal plunges through the air.
He felt Zuo and Sin rolling off, then felt a total of four pairs of hands lifting and dragging him off the air bag and onto a gurney, which his captors wheeled triple-time quick toward a waiting vehicle. At first he thought it was only a van of some sort, but as they banged him in through the open rear doors he recognized medical equipment.
The siren started up. He was being abducted in an ambulance, taken hostage under cover of medical emergency.
NINE
GETAWAYS
SHA TIN
Judging from the radio chatter and the sound of gunfire, the backup officers had already plunged into the thick of things with Agent Adjoumani. So it was that Detective Lu was the first to take up pursuit of the ambulance—only because she was among the last to arrive.
The ambulance careened wildly out of a nearby side street, siren blaring. Detective Lu slammed on her brakes so hard she stalled her car
, and still only narrowly missed slamming headlong into the emergency vehicle. The containment box on the passenger’s side of her car, however, was strapped in tightly enough that it only slid around a bit on the seat. Fortunately.
Such total disregard on the ambulance driver’s part struck Mei-lin as suspicious. Restarting her vehicle, she checked the emergency frequencies. Nothing to or from any ambulance near this location. Talking to dispatchers, she confirmed her suspicion: no medical emergencies were currently under way anywhere within a three-mile radius.
Something was very wrong.
Detective Lu accelerated, but the ambulance was moving fast and already almost out of sight. She again flicked on her siren and lights, reluctant to warn the ambulance driver that he was being pursued, but even more concerned about becoming trapped in traffic.
Drivers pulled out of her way as, engine roaring and siren screaming, she began to gain on the ambulance. Brake lights glittered around and before her and the streetlights began to blur with speed. Lu informed dispatch of her position and called for backup. From time to time she glanced at the containment box strapped beside her—just often enough to make sure it remained secure.
When the ambulance took a bridge over the long, narrow finger of water poking in from Tolo Harbor, Lu followed suit. Over the radio and her own cell link she heard Adjoumani asserting that Cho was nowhere to be found. Witnesses reported seeing an ambulance speeding down a back alley and side street. Lu informed Adjoumani of her discovery, and her pursuit. She had a strong suspicion who the patient inside that ambulance might be—so she shared her theory with the agent and the other officers by radio.
Moments later, she lost the ambulance.
Entering the long tunnel running beneath the MacLehose Trail and the rocky ridges of the Country Parks, however, Mei-lin again spotted the object of her pursuit, far ahead of her in the tunnel. If the ambulance was heading for Kowloon, then why was it traveling the 6 Freeway? Even though traffic was more sparse out here, the 1 Freeway was still faster.
When she came out the tunnel’s other end, below Kowloon Peak, she could no longer see the ambulance. The driver must have killed the lights and siren, she supposed. She decided against doing the same. She could use all the speed and racket she could muster to clear the road, and hopefully catch up to the fleeing vehicle. She kept dispatch informed of her location, hoping to hear of other police vehicles converging on her location—sooner rather than later.
Lu followed a hunch that the ambulance wasn’t headed deeper into the Hung Hom section, nor out toward Yau Tung. She felt oddly certain that its destination was somewhere in the warren of warehouses around old Kai Tak Airport.
She began to doubt her hunch when the road she was skidding along brought her into the warehouse maze. She discovered she had no idea where the ambulance might have disappeared to, and became genuinely concerned that she might have lost her quarry.
Crisscrossing carefully back and forth among the endless truck ramps and roll-up service doors, she searched for any sign at all of the vanished ambulance. Frustrated, and shadowed by a growing sense of failure and futility, Mei-lin looked too often at her watch. Doing so wasn’t in reality making the slow time go any slower—it was only distracting her from her goal.
She had nearly given up hope when she approached a line of air transshipment warehouses close to the airport tarmac. There, inside a hangarlike building, stood an ambulance—a side door still open, as if hastily abandoned.
Stopping her car in front of the building, she got out of the vehicle with her.50 caliber handcannon at the ready. As she headed toward the parked ambulance, she heard the wail of approaching patrol cars, sirens blaring—a sound that, for all its cacophony, sounded like sweet music to her.
She approached in serpentine fashion, moving from scant cover to even scantier cover, gun clasped in both hands. No shots or other noise greeted her, and she began to relax—just a notch.
Reaching the rear of the ambulance, she looked inside and found that no one had been left behind—it was empty. Such wasn’t the case when she came around front, to the cab. The driver and the paramedic were there, and both were dead. Still belted into place, each man had a single bullet hole through the temple.
Lu checked the driver’s nonexistent pulse and grimaced. Killing the two men was beyond scorched-earth paranoia—it was wanton cruelty. She walked back toward the rear of the vehicle, scanning the floor of the cavernous building until she found what she was looking for.
The rubber tires of the gurney had picked up a smear of grease or oil, either when the patient had been loaded onto it in Sha Tin, or when it was unloaded here beside the airport. By following the faint, smeary trace, she was able to determine which way the gurney had been wheeled, at least initially.
The sound of converging police cars was very close now—close enough that she felt comfortable following the gurney’s track out of the warehouse and into the night. As she opened the door, however, she saw something that made her want to dive for cover.
The warehouse opened directly onto the airport tarmac. Perhaps fifty yards away, a stealth Vertical Take Off and Landing jet had just lifted off, rising straight up into the night sky. As its engines swung forward it shot away like an ordinary fixed wing aircraft.
Three men guarded the perimeter of ground where the stealth VTOL had, until recently, been sitting. They spun as she came out. As the VTOL shot away, the men spotted her by the warehouse door.
They were armed with shotguns and machine pistols. Lu had no time to further evaluate the situation, because at that instant the armed men began firing at her.
Taking refuge behind a number of large drums stacked on forklift pallets, she returned fire. She prayed to all the gods that the drums weren’t filled with anything flammable. As bullets thunked into them, what she smelled coming from them didn’t smack of gasoline or fuel oil. It took her a moment to recognize the potent stink.
Shrimp paste.
She had never been particularly fond of the fermented seafood product—not even in small quantities. Surrounded so closely by so much of it, the smell was almost enough to make her gag, but at least shrimp paste wasn’t likely to explode.
She returned fire again, trying to keep her three assailants pinned down until backup arrived.
About the time she realized that neither she nor her ammo could hold out all that much longer, the cavalry showed up, in the form of police and airport security vehicles that quickly surrounded the area. Officers on bullhorns demanded, in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, that the gunmen put down their weapons, lie face down on the tarmac, and fold their hands in plain sight atop their heads.
Despite the fact that they were heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the shooters on the tarmac didn’t seem inclined to surrender. Lu recalled the dead men she had seen in the ambulance, and wondered how much responsibility these gunmen might have for the corpses. She wasn’t very surprised when the gunmen fought on, until two looked to be down forever, and the third appeared seriously wounded.
What with clearing the crime scene and filling Adjoumani in on what she suspected, Lu found that the better part of an hour had elapsed between her arrival at the warehouse and her return to her car. Tired, she couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d failed.
First Charlie Hui’s murder, then Paul Kao’s death, and now Ben Cho’s abduction. Maybe she was out of her league—and out of luck. Maybe it was time to seek help from the very politicos she had been trying to avoid: Wong Jun at Guoanbu, and Ben’s employers—whoever they might be—at the NSA.
So preoccupied was she with her own thoughts that she drove most of the way out of the warren of warehouses before she realized Ben Cho wasn’t all that had gone missing.
She glanced at the empty front passenger seat of her car for a timeless time before she realized what she was seeing—or rather, what she wasn’t. She slammed on her brakes, then stared wildly about the car.
The containment box—with Jaron Kwok
’s binotech ashes, as treated with Ben Cho’s blood—was nowhere to be seen.
THE LAND OF THE SECRET HANDSHAKE
CRYPTO CITY
Black-clad paramilitaries of the Special Operations Unit were stationed at the entry checkpoint. That was the only unusual thing Deputy Director Brescoll noted on the way to his office. Since he hadn’t been notified of any situation, he wrote it off as a drill, or yet another Orange Alert terrorist-threat response.
Brescoll thought about how, all around him and all along the East Coast, in cars and trains and buses remarkable only for their unremarkability, secret workers were going to their secret work. Just another day on the job.
As the morning briefing started, he noted that only two of his Musketeers—Lingenfelter and Wang—had shown up for the regularly scheduled meeting. Beech’s absence surprised him, but several inches of snow had fallen throughout the mid-Atlantic states overnight, and it was Christmas week, so he presumed Beech’s absence had something to do with one or the other.
The deputy director began to get his first inkling of trouble when, halfway through his meeting with Lingenfelter and Wang, he was called away to a secure-line videoconference call. FBI Agent DeSondra Adjoumani was on the hot seat, being interrogated by officials from half a dozen agencies. Ben Cho had been abducted, by parties as yet unknown.
Adjoumani adamantly maintained that, although she had let Cho go out, alone, for his night on the town, she had done so on orders from higher up within the FBI command structure. Strange as the idea was, Brescoll was inclined to believe her—especially when those same FBI higher-ups began trying to shift the blame to the CIA by claiming that the request had originated there. The CIA representatives, in turn, tried to shift blame to the NSA, claiming the CIA had gotten the push from Crypto City. Brescoll denied that—and strongly.
When all else failed, everyone went back to blaming Agent Adjoumani. Hadn’t she already allowed Cho to range once—on the night of his meeting with Detective Lu, atop Victoria Peak? Brescoll listened without comment. He remembered the way Adjoumani and the US Consulate’s Robert Beckwith had simultaneously glanced offscreen, in that long-ago conference call. Given the close working relationship between the FBI’s overseas attachés and the State Department, he suspected that State was involved, too.
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