The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Kwok disappeared, Cho disappeared,” she said, shaking her head, “and you’re not looking too substantial yourself. I don’t know if I should follow you there, Don. Why’s everyone so interested in Kwok and Cho, anyway? Do they have this super-duper quantum DNA computer, or what?”

  Don paused for a moment, thinking about it.

  “Maybe they don’t have it,” he said at last, “so much as they are it, somewhere in the labyrinth of their chromosomes. If you were that, if the two-way mirror of your DNA unzipped in just that quantum binotech way, then no code would be unbreakable to you. Nothing would be beyond your access. No electronically stored information anywhere would be secure against your intrusion. You’d become the ultimate spy!”

  “Or God. Or Santa Claus,” Karuna said, shaking her head.

  “My benefactors have more money and more tech than you can imagine, Kari. You should see what they’re paying me—which is probably what they’ll pay you, too.”

  “Money’s not the issue.”

  “Then what? Freedom? How free are you now, hiding out the way you are? Trust me, Kari—the way I trusted them. I haven’t regretted it. Neither will you.”

  “Give me some time to think about it,” Karuna said, then she smiled shyly. “At least a few hours. Then contact me again.”

  “I’ll do that. See you then.”

  Don felt strangely relieved after talking to Karuna. The idea that she might agree to join him here—under the mountain beside the lake, in this dusty-damp dungeon thrumming with power—that prospect pleased him immensely.

  Only a small part of his mind considered that in doing so, he might also be placing her in danger. In danger of what, he couldn’t say—not for her, nor for himself.

  TEN

  THE FLOUR OF HIS BONES

  GUANGZHOU

  The trip by jet from Kowloon, the landing at a very private airfield, the transfer to another ambulance, then eventually to a truck, then to still another truck—it all should have been a blur for Ben. But it wasn’t.

  When they weren’t in public, Zuo and Sin turned off the neuroparalytic implants—and he was able to relax his muscles. They often blindfolded him, though whether to keep him from seeing the people or their location, he couldn’t say.

  His captors apparently thought the paralysis cut off his senses. They were mistaken, but he was careful to do nothing that might disabuse them of their misconception. He remained fully and painfully aware. And awake. He feigned sleep, but he did not want it. When he relaxed enough to let his guard down—that was when morbid thoughts about his situation assailed him. Especially when he realized he’d seen Zuo and Sin before. They were the couple necking on the Victoria Peak promenade, that night when he first met Marilyn Lu.

  Somewhere along the way Sin changed out of her silk sheath dress and into jeans, work boots, and work shirt. Along with the rest of his crew, Zuo exchanged his urban attire for well-worn desert gear. More men in camo fatigues, and a few in black business suits, joined their party as they traveled toward their destination. All of Ben’s captors had automatic weapons, but the camo-clad men also carried grenades, and wore belts with gas masks and what looked like mines or explosives attached. Several seemed to be lugging big cans of gasoline.

  Ben wondered at the level of firepower. Surely they didn’t need all that just to hold him hostage? They had had no trouble keeping him bound and gagged, and he caused them none when they freed him to eat or void his bowels. With Sin’s help Ben had talked them into not blindfolding him while he slept. He faked sleep well enough, however, that it sometimes became real.

  Not this time.

  Finally his watchfulness paid off. As the truck slowed, and before they could wake him from his “sleep” to blindfold him, Ben’s eyes flashed open for an instant, and he caught a glimpse of their destination. He knew the place from pictures—and from the fact that both Marilyn Lu and Jaron Kwok had visited here. He immediately recognized the tiered blue roof of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, and wondered at the fact that his captors should be bringing him to a place he had planned to visit himself, as part of his investigation.

  Ben knew they were ready to unload him when Zuo snatched off his blindfold and neuroparalyzed him once more. Two of the heavily armed crew loaded Ben into a coffinlike crate that smelled of cedar. They bound his hands with a chain that passed through a ring in the board above his head, then hammered down the lid.

  Sealed inside the crate, he couldn’t see what they did next, but from the sound and feel of it he guessed he was being moved onto a loading dock and hauled by some sort of forklift. The machine dropped the crate onto a floor—wooden, and inside the great hall, by the echo of it. When he felt the floor descending, however, Ben realized he must be on a freight elevator, probably one that served the stage.

  When the elevator stopped, he felt the crate being hefted upright then dumped out onto a floor. Unable to brace with his hands, he fell forward, smashing his face into what had been the top but was now a side of the crate. Somewhere not far away he heard the elevator rising again, leaving him there below.

  Metal bars pried up the lid. Ben avoided falling to the floor only because the chain caught him as he slumped forward.

  What he saw in front of him, through slitted eyelids, looked like some sort of theater workshop area, with table and stools, circular saws, and other carpentry tools used for building stage sets.

  “Turn off that paralyzer!” Helen Sin ordered. “Look at him. His nose is bleeding.”

  Despite her anger, aimed at Zuo, Sin managed to wipe carefully at Ben’s nose and face with a tissue. Behind her, doors led off into what looked like costume and prop storage areas.

  “So he got a little damaged in shipment,” Zuo said with a sneer. He didn’t turn off the neuroparalytic. “He can be touched up.”

  “Our American friends won’t be happy about this,” Sin said, continuing to clean him up. Ben would have thanked her, if his mouth had worked.

  “Then let them do their own dirty work!” Zuo said, flaring. “Not that they ever do. Nation of two-faced monsters! Fickle, arrogant hypocrites! They make a mockery of ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ whenever they say those words—just a cover for all the thievery and killing they do in their own economic interests. I lost good men in this very building, and for what? Searching for something no one can find? A diversion to keep police investigators from finding something no one can describe?”

  “I don’t suppose you ever considered the fact that it allowed us to get our own security people on staff here,” Sin said, satisfied with her cleanup of Ben’s face at last, slowly crumpling up tissues and moving to throw them away. “So we could get access to this space anytime we needed it. So I could use it for my exhibit. So you could wire it up to go boom, if need be. Look, if you hate them so much, why do you work with them?”

  “I use them, and their money,” Zuo said. “The Americans say ‘Keep your friends close…and your enemies on the CIA payroll.’ Fine. They don’t consider what ‘foreigners’ think, or how they’ll live. Just what will line American pockets. That’s a weakness I can exploit. Manipulate the manipulators! In the struggle against the godless infidels who control the Chinese state, the New Teachings Warriors will be America’s well-paid ‘friends.’”

  “I said turn off that paralyzer,” Sin repeated. At last Zuo complied, and Ben felt his body begin working again. “Thank you. Better watch what you say. He’s coming around now.”

  “I don’t need to watch what I say!” Zuo continued, without subsiding. “Why should I fear a nation of moral weaklings, addicted to expensive automobiles and prescription antidepressants? Hey, Cho, where do you worship—Christco, or Jesus Depot? Empires like the one he comes from always end up victims of their own excess. They collapse because they fail to adapt.”

  Shaking her head, Sin motioned for Zuo’s crew to tighten the chain on Ben so that he didn’t slump forward quite so much. The men dispersed then—taking up guar
d positions throughout the building? Planting charges and mines? Ben wondered—but the black-clad gangsterish types stayed close to him and Sin.

  The woman turned away and tended to a pile of mannequins stacked like cordwood. She went calmly to work on one of the realistic-looking dummies, which stood apart from the rest. The mannequin had been posed and altered to resemble a painting Ben had once seen, depicting the martyrdom of San Sebastian. The mannequin Sin labored over, however, seemed a sort of working-class martyr, with construction tools instead of arrows piercing his body, and a tool belt instead of loincloth girding his waist.

  “Maybe you’re just jealous of America’s success,” Sin said over her shoulder, to Zuo. “Jealous of a great state that offers wealth, opportunity, the abundance to satisfy all desires—”

  Zuo made a rude noise.

  “Wealth! Opportunity! Abundance! That’s the worst of the West’s lies! China, too, has swallowed it, head to tail. And what is their wealth, their better world, their glorious tomorrow? To be able to consume an ever greater percentage of the world’s goods while others must go without, that’s all. But they fear that justice might someday take their luxuries away from them. And how to quiet that fear? Why, by consuming more goods while they still can, of course!”

  Ben watched as Zuo did a heavy-footed little dance toward him.

  “Round and round it goes! Capitalists, communists—they’re all temporal imperialists. They colonize the future with the unholy idea that life will become better as time goes on. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of the world’s people, life is getting worse! All their ‘better tomorrows’ are a lie!”

  “And what alternative do you offer?” Sin asked as she absently touched up the paint on her Working-Class Martyr.

  “The salvation of mankind can only be found by recreating the days of the Prophet Muhammad’s life on earth,” Zuo said. “As a Wahhabi Muslim I know this to be true. Face it. The time colonizers think they can rule the future by getting us to buy their lie of progress, but most people don’t like the world the imperialists are shaping for them. We are oppressed, not only by daily misery, but by the future they hold out to us! We must drive the colonizers out of our times and out of our minds the way we earlier drove them out of our lands. Only in that way can the Prophet’s teachings be made forever new, as they must be.”

  “Those who repeat the past,” Sin muttered, “are not condemned to remember it.”

  “I heard that!” Zuo said, looking over Sin’s mannequins. Each had been modified to “revisit” a great work of art from various times throughout history. “And what of this ‘art’ you exhibit upstairs in the foyer, under a name that’s not your own?”

  “I can explain it to you,” Sin said, her voice cold, “but I can’t understand it for you.”

  “If you have nothing to say,” Zuo said, barking out a laugh, “at least say it forcefully.” At that moment, one of his men ran in and spoke to him in low, urgent tones.

  “Sorry, Shin Heung-lin,” Zuo said to Sin, “but we have to zap your boy here into a coma again. Our client has arrived.”

  Ben heard the stage elevator coming down. People moved and voices called from outside Ben’s range of vision. If he hadn’t been paralyzed, he would have shown great surprise when the salt-and-pepper-bearded face of Baldwin Beech stared in at him in his makeshift coffin—with the goatee-bearded visage of Ike Carlson right beside him.

  “This is Ben Cho, all right,” Beech said, examining Ben’s wide, staring eyes then nodding to Zuo. “Jaron Kwok’s dark twin. Let’s get started then, Ms. Hon.”

  A small-framed woman bustled into view and nodded vigorously. Pulled and braided so tightly to her skull, Hon’s hair bobbed not at all. With perfect economy of movement she signalled to Zuo’s men to help her. They pushed a padded piece of medical furniture toward Ben, one that reminded him unpleasantly of a combination wheelchair and dentist’s chair.

  “Are you certain he can’t hear or see us when he’s like this?” Sin asked.

  “Why?” Beech asked, propping his eyeglasses absently on his forehead. “Has he shown any indication that he’s conscious while he’s neuroparalyzed?”

  “No,” Sin said as Zuo’s men freed Ben from his coffin and lugged him toward the medical chair. “I was just curious.”

  “Always good to stay observant,” Beech said with a nod and a smile that reminded Ben oddly of a game-show host’s.

  The men carrying Ben arranged him in the chair. Beech, Hon, and Carlson strapped him in.

  “The only way we can really know what’s happening will be to monitor his brain activity—but that’s going to be more of a challenge than it would have been with Kwok,” Beech said to Sin. He turned and spoke, more quietly, to Hon. “The MEMS pain-deadening implants, put in when his wisdom teeth were removed, were experimental. They’ve been in there for years, and may not be functioning optimally. We’ll need to check that. He isn’t a DIVEr the way Kwok was, either, so there’s no reinforcement. No hardware on the surface of his skull—no temporal pin-sets or electrode links, see? We’ll have to use a dermatrode net and augmented reality glasses.”

  Ben felt a prickling sensation across his scalp as Hon snugged a net of dermatrodes to it. Beech placed the AR glasses onto Ben’s face. The glasses began running system checks before his eyes.

  “Doctor Beech,” Hon said. “I’m getting some initial readings on neural activity.”

  “And?”

  “From the cerebrospinal patterns I’m seeing here, I’d say his musculoskeletal paralysis is thorough—but I’m willing to bet that he’s quite conscious of what’s going on around him.”

  Beech frowned and brought his face close to Ben’s own, grasping Ben’s jaw in his hand. The dark-suited Carlson brought up an even darker-barreled machine pistol.

  “Ah, Dr. Cho—we’ve been playing possum, have we?” Beech said. “Do you ‘know too much,’ as they say in the old thrillers? Knowing too much can be quite unhealthy.”

  Beech stood up, his expression thoughtful, stroking his beard, before glancing at Hon and deciding to continue.

  “On the other hand, your current condition may be a good thing. I thought we’d have to deactivate your neuroparalytic implants so we could begin our little experiment, but this simplifies things. Seems we can count on your remaining conscious—without my having to gag you or even restrain you. Very efficient, really.”

  Beech patted Ben on the head and disappeared from view. When he returned, Hon was with him. Both had donned surgical masks and gloves. Hon was carrying some sort of biohazard box, which she placed with care on a stainless steel table they wheeled up beside Ben. She tied off his bicep and swabbed the crook of his left arm, while Beech did the same to his right.

  From the moment he was abducted, Ben had felt a hollow anxiety. The same morbid thoughts had blossomed whenever he’d come to the edge of sleep. In that twilight state, he felt like grain being ground between the two great millstones of China and the United States. Between the empire that dared not say its own name, and the empire that said it wasn’t one—over and over.

  He had wondered what bread would rise from the flour of his bones, once the grinding was done.

  Yet now, faced with the prospect of enduring some undefined medical torture, at the hands of this man, this pale flabby devil risen out of that shadow machinery behind everything that had happened—first to Jaron, and now to him—only now did Ben begin to feel real fear.

  “Now, Ms. Hon, if you’d be so kind, please fill your syringe with the red-coded binotech sample,” Beech said. “Detective Lu thoughtfully preactivated those for us, with Mister Cho’s own blood. Good. I’ll fill mine with some of the untreated Kwok ash Mister Z in his unsubtle camo fatigues, obtained for me. Why beat around the bush—we’ll hit him with both.”

  Ben watched with mounting horror as Hon and Beech each took a small vial from a rack inside the biohazard box. As each of them plunged the needle of a 100-cc syringe into the rubber-disked center of t
heir chosen vial, Ben noticed that the vials’ metal caps were indeed of different colors. Hon was taking her extract from a red-capped vial, Beech from a blue.

  Ben didn’t much concern himself with the meaning of the color coding. Never a fan of needles at any time, he still felt more comfortable with syringes that were taking something out of him, than those that were putting something in.

  “I’m afraid this will hurt a bit,” Beech said, “given the way this ash reacts to your blood. But don’t fret. Just think of it as a pointed little reminder that pain is a reality, and reality is a pain.”

  Ben watched, unable to blink or turn away, as Hon and Beech each took an arm. Even during his college partying days, when he had no problem ingesting or inhaling all kinds of interesting recreational poisons, Ben had always shunned injecting anything. Breaking the integument of the skin was just too intrusive, too unnatural, for him. He had disdained pin-sets and other invasive electronics for the same reason.

  He thought of Reyna’s last days, with the needle in her arm, below the painkiller bag and drip-line. That image, too, never far from his mind’s eye, had only hardened his profound dislike for all such piercings of the flesh.

  Hon and Beech each chose a vein, grown prominent from tourniquet and turgor, and jabbed him simultaneously. Ben wanted to retch or pass out, but he could do neither. He couldn’t even clench his fists, or loosen them.

  “When you get too used to the pain—that’s when you can really get hurt,” Beech said, patting him on the shoulder. He bent down and spoke quietly into Ben’s ear. “I know you’re probably thinking I’m some sort of racist bastard who toys with nonwhite lives, but you’d be wrong. I’m an equal opportunity voyeur. Given that modern humans came out of Africa only 50,000 years ago—a mere eyeblink, geologically speaking—then we’re all Africans under the skin, aren’t we? If we made Jaron and you look the way you do, what makes you think we’d stop at two—of whatever color? Hm?”