The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Can you translate?” she asked.

  “I will.”

  As Ben processed information now, he seemed to think with his entire being, with every cell of his body, as if every scrap of his DNA was functioning like a quantum computer. Working on the very sort of cryptanalytic task to which both DNA and quantum systems were peculiarly well suited.

  The key is in the labyrinth, as the labyrinth is in the key. That labyrinth key referred not only to the relationship between the genetic code and the body—to music in the key of DNA, most specifically his own song—but also to the light-path itself—the channel of the ray of illumination making its winding way among the sefirot. The two were reflections of each other. Both were devices of deepest memory, mnemonic systems for recalling a vaster and more pervasive reality, intimate as any sexual conjunction yet divergent as the ensemble of all parallel universes.

  For recalling that reality, and for hacking into it.

  The labyrinth of the painting had mapped the labyrinth of the hall, and at the labyrinth’s center he’d found the tonal key, itself a labyrinth of sound, triggering, through his mind, a rippling of effects in the Kwok binotech, which in turn spread through his physical makeup. With the help of the binotech, the genetic-code molecule’s latent capacity for manifesting quantum phenomena now bloomed into glorious life.

  “His body temperature is spiking,” Patsy Hon said. Only the volume of her voice, not the tone, betrayed any concern.

  “I don’t believe Mister Cho’s predecessor spontaneously combusted,” Beech said, his voice sounding very far away. “But thank you, Ms. Hon. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  That the DNA of his body was functioning as a quantum 4-bit device, taking on four different states—he felt it more than understood it. He knew that the information content of the universe was approximately 4 to the 400th power. Yes. DNA strands of 400 nucleotides in length would do the trick. That strand-length resulted in many smallish proteins of about 133 amino acids, 3 out of every 64 being stop codons, or about 6 stop codons in a 133-triplet sequence. That meant length yielded polypeptides of about 22 amino acids, coincidentally the length of neuropeptides essential for learning, memory, and higher cognitive function….

  How much grander this was, than all the lock picking and lock making the Chinese and Americans had hoped to achieve! Ben began to laugh, and couldn’t stop.

  “His vital signs are all over the map,” Hon said, sounding openly worried now.

  “Ben!” Beech said. “What are you doing?”

  “This wasn’t supposed to be a lethal injection,” Ike Carlson said, his voice flat.

  “Dammit!” Beech shouted. “Stop it, Ben, whatever you’re doing!”

  Ben would have liked to comply, but he couldn’t. He saw the twisted mirrors wrapped around each other in DNA and in photons—and he felt that in his bones. His euphoric edge-of-sleep weightlessness grew to a full out-of-body experience. Interfaced with so much of the planet’s infosphere, he could only observe, only hope to embrace the vastness of it all with his mind—at last.

  And laugh, laugh like a child, with a laughter that called him beyond everything he had ever been.

  “Convulsions!” Hon shouted. “He’s flatlining! Going into coma—”

  “I see it—” Beech called back.

  No anchor of ordinary consciousness yanked Ben back. Instead, the fabric of reality pulled away from him, like a labyrinth cut into a ribbon and stretched into a spiral along a new dimension. Within him the code molecule turned corkscrew roller coaster.

  He felt as if he’d been strapped into a rocketsled, roaring ever faster down a double helix of perilous tracks, through a blizzard of data, information, knowledge, wisdom. Unable to blink or turn away, he was melting with it, melted by the blizzard.

  When, however, the flood of images, the innumerable tiny geometries, the lights, colors, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes had at last strained up to a breaking, overpowering intensity—

  Righty tighty, lefty loosey, unscrewed is unprotected.

  You like it when I touch you there, don’t you, Benny?

  Ants fighting in a matchbox, burning and the pismire smell of their burning.

  —under that datastorm his skull and the universe opened like a heavy trapdoor. Transformed and transported and transshifted in time, he fell upward through the door, passed through the Gate of God. Shed of flesh and past, his mind floated outward into a truth-drowned realm, expanding to infinite airy thinness in the translucent waters of the deepest firmament, the vault of heaven flooded with light.

  Ben had told them he would translate. They should have taken him at his word.

  DURESS CODE

  KOWLOON

  After more than two days working straight through on the Cho disappearance, Detective Lu and Special Agent Adjoumani were off the clock for at least a brief few hours—a New Year’s break, of sorts. Western New Year, not Chinese New Year. Hong Kong was one of the few places in the world that celebrated the two more or less equally.

  To assist Lu, her department had brought in an eager young sergeant who had hopes of rising to detective rank. The FBI had assigned an assistant legat from the Guangzhou sub-office to assist Adjoumani. The “assistants” were taking a shift now, having been brought up to speed on the ongoing investigations.

  Hoping for a diversion from their frustrating and unproductive search, Lu had decided to join Adjoumani at The Jouster II. A medieval theme bar in Tsim Sha Tsui, it boasted a bouncer dressed as a knight in armor and a miniature drawbridge at its entrance. Mei-lin preferred a little more reality with her nostalgia—a nice dark pub left over from the days of British rule, rather than the Las Vegas style of this place—but a break was a break.

  “You know what really burns me, Marilyn?” Adjoumani said, stirring the ice cubes in her second screwdriver. “The way they bring in these assistants, and don’t even have the balls to admit that we’re being used to train our own replacements.”

  Mei-lin nodded in sad agreement, before lapsing into contemplation of the swirls in her third Irish coffee. She thought again of all that had gone wrong over the last couple of days.

  The VTOL jet that had disappeared into the night with Ben Cho had been stealthy enough—and the pilot experienced enough—to effectively evade radar detection. By the time the aircraft had been located at a makeshift airfield outside Zhongshan, it had been on the ground for more than an hour. So far they had only been able to learn that a second ambulance had picked him up at the airfield, but that vehicle had been found abandoned near Shunde.

  Whether Cho had yet reached his ultimate destination, neither Lu nor Adjoumani could say.

  Mei-lin Lu put her coffee aside. Drowning frustrations in alcohol was something her father had done, ever since she was a child, but she had no intention of traveling down that road herself. Least of all was she going to model that for her own daughter. Thinking of Clara and Sonny, she sighed.

  “That didn’t sound happy,” Adjoumani said. “Want to talk about it?”

  “I was just thinking that maybe my daughter was right. She’s been threatening to get herself a cardboard cutout of me, to keep around the house. Before Cho disappeared, before Kwok vanished, I had a system to my life. But everything keeps changing, and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up….”

  “There has to be a way to find him.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. You Americans have all the best global-positioning equipment. You can find anything from miles up in space, can’t you? Why didn’t you have Cho bugged, implanted with a homing device, something?”

  “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble,” Adjoumani agreed, “but you’re giving us a lot more credit than we deserve. We don’t always have that kind of foresight.”

  Was her American opposite holding out on her? She glanced at Adjoumani, who glumly watched as an armor-clad man fought with some sort of mythological beast on the bar’s big screen. No, the FBI attaché seemed as distressed
by this whole mess as she was. Despite the mutual mistrust they’d felt at the outset of this affair, Mei-lin found herself thinking of the FBI agent more and more as a “partner” than an “opposite number.”

  “Any chance your higher-ups might be holding out on you?” she asked.

  “What about your own bosses, kiddo? What about Wong at Guoanbu? Ever think that both of us might be considered small-time mushrooms in all of this?”

  “Mushrooms?”

  Adjoumani nodded.

  “You know. Keep us in the dark and feed us lots of shit.”

  Lu laughed abruptly at that. Adjoumani smiled. Clearly it was an old joke to the American, but it was new to her.

  “They may be withholding information from you,” Adjoumani said, “but they certainly aren’t holding back on much of anything else. Putting a helicopter at your disposal—honey, I wish I could get that kind of support.”

  Lu nodded. Not that she’d had any real use for one yet.

  “Man,” DeSondra said, shaking her head at what she was watching, “he should’ve stuck with making spy movies. This Green Knight flick is a real stinker.”

  Mei-lin glanced up at the screen to see Sean Connery, looking awkward in full medieval regalia.

  “If you like the old 007, there’s Bottoms Up over on Hankow Road,” Mei-lin said. “Bond showed up there on one of his Asian adventures. Kind of a scummy hole-in-the-wall, these days.”

  “Maybe later, then,” DeSondra said. “After I’ve had a few more drinks.”

  Mei-lin nodded and stared down at the tabletop below her glass. At least her working relationship with Adjoumani had kept improving, despite the occasional bumps.

  The same couldn’t be said for the relationship between their countries. The tense political situations in the news had been ratcheting up. The Americans claimed China was not only funding the Californian secessionists, but also engaging in infowar against the states bordering Tibet, as well as making suspicious naval maneuvers in the Taiwan straits.

  Her own government countered that Nepal and Bhutan still had not acceded fully to China’s security demands. As further proof of the United States’ complicity in the worsening situation, Beijing claimed that the Americans, operating in tandem with the Taiwanese government, were using that island as a base from which they were probing SCADA systems, where infostructure met infrastructure, in China itself. And that it was this activity which had necessitated the defensive naval movements.

  She and Adjoumani both had to spend far too much time the last few days getting permission for this and allowance for that, especially since Cho’s disappearance had launched a wave of recriminations.

  Lu could see how they might draw a tenuous line connecting Cho’s disappearance to the infowar, but she couldn’t fathom a serious connection to the international saber rattling about troops and terrorists. Nevertheless, she and the FBI legat were lucky to still be allowed in each other’s company.

  Hell, sometimes she felt as if her work with Adjoumani was the only thing keeping Guoanbu from having the American agent arrested, simply on principle.

  It was frustrating to think that government agencies on both sides of the Pacific might be using her and Adjoumani as pawns, just to play for time. She had no doubt, though, that their superiors would gladly watch to see what the two of them might come up with in their investigations, then shove both of them unceremoniously aside and take credit for any successes they might achieve.

  Lost in her musings, Mei-lin noticed some curious intricacies in the tabletop’s design. The pattern that showed through the protective Plexiglas was a labyrinth with a castellated medieval town labeled Jericho at the center. The path through the labyrinth appeared as a line made from the letters HEARTHEARTHEARTHEARTH, repeated again and again. In the central square of the town, the same five letters were arranged like dots on the face of dice.

  “Hey, DeSondra, take a look at this design,” Mei-lin said. “See the letters?”

  “Yeah. Can you make out what they say?”

  “Hearth Earth?” Lu ventured. “Heart Hearth Earth Earth Earth?”

  “Hear the art hear the art?” Adjoumani suggested. “Doesn’t make much sense. You can’t hear a painting, or a woodcut, or an engraving.”

  “My father, the writer, used to say that kind of thing when he was in his cups,” Lu said. “‘The more you master an art the more an art masters you.’ Zen bullshit like that. Maybe he believed he was some kind of artist. Everybody else treated him like a hack.”

  “That’d be enough to drive a body to drink, I suppose,” Adjoumani said.

  “I don’t know,” Lu said, glancing away. “This whole case, first Kwok and now Cho—it feels like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a maze full of letters and words I can almost make out, but not quite. I keep getting it wrong—but just barely. One minute it seems we’re so close to finding Cho, then the path swings away. That only makes it worse.”

  Adjoumani reached out across the tabletop labyrinth and patted Mei-lin’s hand.

  “Don’t let it get to you, Marilyn. Just because we’re on the right side doesn’t make winning any quicker. The people who took Cho are real pros. Besides, the game’s not over yet.”

  Mei-lin nodded, glancing up at the medieval movie playing on the wallscreen. Suddenly a flicker interrupted it, and an image of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall appeared, looking exactly the way it had the day she and Ma had confronted the New Teachings Warriors there.

  Mei-lin’s back stiffened, and she stared for a moment. The movie came back on. A moment later, it was replaced again by the image of the Memorial Hall.

  “DeSondra! Look at the screen.”

  The image flickered back and forth from movie to Memorial Hall in a dance of images.

  “Hmm!” Adjoumani said. “They’re having trouble with their system. That doesn’t look like merry ol’ England. Maybe somebody messed with their old videotape.”

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll check,” Lu said, getting up from their table and heading toward the bar.

  The bartender, dressed as steward of a noble house, was already staring at the screen as Mei-lin approached. She gestured with a nod.

  “I saw it,” he said. “Damnedest thing.”

  “You having problems with your recorder, or DVD player?”

  “No. It’s a live satellite feed. The problem must be on their end.”

  Mei-lin smiled in agreement, but she doubted the problem was on anybody’s end. She was willing to bet it was happening, not only on this channel, but on all of them.

  The New Year was dawning rich and strange—maybe richer and stranger than she might have liked. Before she could ask him to change channels, to test her theory, Sean Connery reappeared, and the movie returned to normal.

  “There,” the bartender said, relieved. “It’s stopped glitching.”

  Lu turned to Adjoumani.

  “I think I know where Ben Cho is,” Mei-lin said.

  “Where?”

  “Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket.

  “What? You mean that building we saw on the screen?”

  “Right. Kwok went there. When I was there last time, New Teachings Warriors were up to something.”

  “But didn’t you send somebody to check it out? Like the next morning, after Cho was abducted?”

  “Right. Derek Ma. He didn’t find anything. But I don’t think Ben Cho was there yet. I think Ben’s there now.”

  As they left the Jouster II, Lu called ahead, to have the helicopter—the one she didn’t think they’d ever need—readied and cleared for an inland trip.

  “Another of your hunches?” Adjoumani asked, her brow furrowing. “Given our recent track record, I hope you’re right.”

  “I hope I’m right, too.” They climbed into her car and pulled away, headed back toward the police station and its helipad.

  “Look,” Adjoumani said as Lu flicked on
the siren, “we don’t have to tell our ‘assistants’ about this, do we? At least not until after we’re airborne? If this turns into a mess, I’d prefer they weren’t along for the ride.”

  “No problem,” Lu said, “but I’m pretty sure it won’t turn into a mess.”

  Adjoumani said nothing, but even to herself Lu sounded more confident than she felt. Adjoumani took out her cell phone and punched in a text message, then sent it to a wireless uplink.

  “Just in case you’re wrong,” she said, “I’m inputting the duress code Beckwith gave me for State.”

  “Dress code? What do you mean?”

  “Duress code. Same ciphertext, but it can be read in two ways. One way of reading it reveals an innocent message, the other decrypts it into a deeper, more important plaintext.”

  “Oh, I see!” Mei-lin said. “Like the poem ‘Yuan Xiao’ once published in Renmin Ribao—the People’s Daily.”

  “What was that about?”

  “It appeared innocent to the Party censors, but when read along the diagonal, the poem called for the ouster of Prime Minister Li Peng.”

  “I think of it more like the special password a bank employee can use when he’s got a gun to his head,” DeSondra said, still looking at her cell phone. “One that opens the safe, but also triggers a silent alarm. There. This phone is now a homing beacon.”

  Mei-lin was glad that the internal surveillance monitors in police cars operated only at the officer’s discretion. She wasn’t sure how she felt about having the American Department of State as their backup.

  She wasn’t sure, either, whether the “glitch” she’d seen might not be Cho’s own sort of duress code—or what sort of duress he might be under.

  THE SILENCE IN HEAVEN

  LAKE NOT-TO-BE-NAMED

  Once Karuna had agreed to join him, her arrival had been accomplished with surprising speed. As they had walked the high-ceilinged tunnels Kari seemed no worse for wear—though perhaps a bit grumpy with jet lag. When he had showed her the main generator station in its artificial cavern, however, she had enough energy to marvel, particularly at the great service crane.