The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller)

by Aston, Tom

  Boom! The first blow to his kidneys. Then another. Heavy blows, expertly applied. A few more blows like that and he was dead. Stone let himself vomit after the third, half-digested rice spilling down his chest to the tiles. He’d have to play dead - pretend to be finished, out of it. Not much of a plan, but…

  Stone opened his eyes for a second. The prisoners were all gone. Whoever was left in that room was there to assist at an execution. Stone had been wrong about the Malaysians. They were nothing to do with it. Probably they’d wanted to warn him. Now they’d left him to his fate. Once again Stone had gone looking for one fight too many.

  He let himself hang limp, felt himself dragged backwards towards the showers. He had to form a picture of what was happening before he could try anything. There were definitely two of them on him. A third would arrive any second. The executioner. Neither of these two was going release him. Someone else was going arrive for the deed. Shit. Stone realised who it would be.

  Stone cursed himself for being taken in. Williams. That bastard had been crouched in the corner, cowering and snivelling to hide his appearance. Anyone who could contort himself like that must be seriously fit. Williams was no whining businessman. He was a trained hitman.

  Stone made no move. He let his hands trail limply over the faces and shoulders of the men behind him, made himself a dead-weight, to force them to hold him beneath the shoulders - they wanted him upright for some reason. He looked through half-open eyes at his killer, and considered kicking out. Williams was shorter than Stone – about 1.80m – and had the fit, spare look of an infantryman about him. Short neat hair – he could just about pass as a civilian. He was a professional, Stone would give that. He wasted no time in gloating or taunting his victim. Williams intended to be out of there in seconds. He’d be ushered upstairs and a fast car to the airport. With twenty thousand dollars earned undramatically for his few minutes work.

  ‘Let’s get it done,’ said the New Zealander. He dragged Stone’s pants down. ‘Turn him around!’ Stone was swivelled to face the white wall of the shower cubicle, his face slammed against the tiles. Facial bruising to make it look realistic. Prisoners the world over die from internal bleeding after brutal male rapes. Stone was to be one small addition to that unhappy list. Unremarked, unnoticed, forgotten after a perfunctory enquiry to determine cause of death. What was Williams going to use, a mop or a broom handle?

  Stone kept his nerve, stayed loose, his hands by the faces of his two assailants. He could hear Williams crouch down behind him, and then the noise of a wooden mop handle clattering on the side of the shower cubicle. ‘Go, go!’ shouted the one at his left shoulder to Williams. His accent wasn’t Chinese, and he wasn’t a guard. But he was nervous all right. Four of them were crammed in a shower cubicle, and there were three of them who didn’t want blood on their clothes. Stone had something else on his mind. He had to do it now.

  Eyes or windpipe? Or both? His thumb was already jabbing hard into the eye of the man to his left. He felt the side of the eyeball squash as his thumb slid into the socket. A piercing shout, right by his ear. The guy let go, yanking the thumb from his face. Stone swivelled around, jabbing a short punch at the windpipe of the other, who collapsed, sliding down the tiles in a wheezing scream.

  The crouching Williams had fallen over on his backside behind Stone. Slithering backwards away across the floor and turning for the door. Williams was aborting the mission, scrambling for the exit. His plan had failed and he was about to walk away. No twenty grand, but the fast car to the airport was still on offer. He’d be on a plane in two hours wearing a business suit.

  Williams’ hand was almost on the steel door when the mop handle hit his skull. Stone swung the wooden handle a second time, breaking the New Zealander's fingers as he tried to protect himself, and then connecting with another vicious blow to the skull. The assassin went down, two ragged splits reddening on his short-cropped scalp. Scarlet liquid ran across the tiles. No point asking Williams who he was working for. He wouldn’t even know.

  Stone grabbed his clothes and walked out of the shower room, jamming the mop handle under the door behind him. He went to the sink and washed before he went back to his cell. None of the three guys in that room were real prisoners and they wouldn’t be missed. There was silence as he strolled past the other cells, no warder in sight. The two Malaysian men gave him a thumbs-up sign.

  Back in Stone’s cell, the bottom bed had been stripped. There was no evidence Williams had ever been there.

  Chapter 19 - 5:02pm 30 March - San Francisco, California

  Patent lawyer Abe Blackman had fixed another meeting with the Taiwanese gentleman, Mr Shin, in order to give his formal decision on whether he would accept him as a client. It was not exactly a difficult decision, but he always tried to play hard to get.

  Blackman had drawn up the contracts ahead of time. This time, he told himself, he had really hit the motherlode. Shin was going to make him rich. He’d even placed a bottle of champagne on ice in his personal refrigerator by his desk. Blackman was an experienced lawyer, who’d pulled off a lot of sweet deals, but he found himself as excited as a ten-year-old.

  As before, Shin insisted on their meeting alone. Blackman had dismissed Rayanna, his secretary, early, and Shin arrived punctually at five-thirty. Blackman ushered him in.

  ‘Before we begin, there is another file on which I would like your opinion, Lawyer Blackman,’ said Mr Shin stiffly.

  ‘You got more?’ said Blackman. This just got better. ‘Sure. Let’s take a look…’

  Shin produced from his large briefcase another black plastic ring binder, similar to the three he’d given Blackman at their first meeting. ‘You need only ... glance,’ said Shin. Blackman flashed a smile at the lynx-eyed Mr Shin, and took the binder. He opened it as he walked toward the table.

  Then something weird happened. There was an odd rustling, a fluttering. A large insect crawled from the papers of the binder. Blackman threw the whole thing from him in horror. ‘What in God’s name?’ He stood back, his eyes wide in shock as a large, multi-coloured bug crawled over the scattered papers. It bore a hard, glossy shell, which shimmered with a poisonously bright pattern. Yellow, red and black.

  Blackman stood back to keep the creature from his feet, looking round for something to kill it with. The damned thing was three inches long at least, with vicious-looking, stag-like mouthparts. ‘You got some god-awful bugs over in Taiwan, Mr Shin,’ he said.

  ‘Harmless,’ said Shin. He was smiling. Blackman hadn’t seen him smile before. Both men watched transfixed as the creature’s six legs stopped abruptly, and the coloured carapace on its back suddenly flicked open. A pair of wings, iridescent and transparent, like the finest paper Blackman had ever seen, fluttered and then made an invisible, buzzing blur. The bug rose into a smooth, noiseless hover above the table.

  Blackman gaped, but Shin had come to life. He was grinning broadly, standing there, in his cheap suit, arms apart like a magician who’s just completed his best trick. ‘Be honest, Mr Blackman. You doubted my designs for the hovering robots. You supposed they were too small.’

  ‘I, I, I…’ Blackman realised he was stammering, gasping. Like a kid at a circus.

  ‘I can understand you were surprised, Mr Blackman, and curious,’ said Shin, looking up proudly at the hovering creature. ‘But I thought I made it plain that confidentiality was important to me.'

  Shin was still smiling. He bent again and rummaged again in his oversized black case. Then he looked back at the hovering bug and calmly held an aerosol at arms length.

  ‘Insecticide? So is it a real bug or what, Shin? You just said it was a robot.’

  ‘It is much more than a robot,’ said Shin, holding out the aerosol. But instead of spraying at the bug, he quite deliberately sprayed Blackman’s neck and shoulder with an odourless mist. The flying bug turned and floated towards Blackman, and as it neared it sped up and made for his neck. Blackman flapped desperately. He knocked it away, and
stepped right back against the wall, but it came back. It had huge, devilish, insect eyes, and its back had a malign pattern of black, yellow and red.

  ‘OK, Shin. Just get the damn thing off me will you?’

  But Shin was smiling, watching the lawyer flap at the insect. Back it came, inexorably hunting for Blackman’s neck where Shin had sprayed him. Each time it came near, its vicious mouthparts suddenly flicked outwards – two mandibles which had the look of greyish steel, sharp as needles. Blackman screamed and started to panic. ‘Make it stop, you bastard, make it stop!’ Blackman shouted. ‘What the fuck is it? What do you want?’

  The Taiwanese was back in the centre of the wide office, his shoulders shaking gently with laughter as Blackman panicked. The bug was whirring round his neck, buzzing by his ear.

  ‘I’m gonna sue you, Shin. I’m gonna sue you for every fucking cent you got!’ Shin still gave no assistance. Finally Blackman clamped both hands on the back of his neck in blind panic. A second later the whirring stopped and he felt the insect’s feet, strangely cold and heavy, on the back of his hand. He screamed again. Shin strolled up to watch the insect’s mouthparts open, as if he were watching the Discovery Channel. A needle-like probe shot out to into Blackman’s hand.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Blackman flung the hand from him, trying to crush the bug against the window, but the creature flipped out its wings and was hovering again, whirring around his head.

  ‘What the hell?’ Blackman held his hand by the wrist. It felt like it was twice the size. A burning pain enveloped it, like it had been doused in acid, and the fingers stuck out rigid. The whole hand was livid red, spasming uncontrollably. Blackman screamed in pain.

  ‘My God!’ screamed Blackman, panting against the pain in his hand. It was getting worse. ‘Make it stop, make... it... stop!’

  His strength was fading. He was struggling to breathe. ‘What... the hell... do you want from me?’ he gasped. But his legs were buckling and he gulped for air. The bug was still hovering at head height three or four metres away.

  Blackman was paralysed. He’d stopped screaming, and he couldn’t move his arms or stand up.

  ‘You broke our agreement, Mr Blackman,’ said Shin finally, standing over his man. ‘You signed my confidentiality agreement. Yet you telephoned the FBI.’ The searing pain advanced up Blackman’s arm, yet he was unable to speak. His jaw opened in a silent scream, his eyes wide in terror, looking at Shin.

  ‘This is working model of Japanese hornet,’ said Shin, as if he were a schoolteacher. ‘Including the venom, which is quite deadly. I regret this outcome. The patents could be hundreds million. Maybe one billion,’ Shin continued, scolding Blackman like a child. But it was too late. Blackman could hear nothing any more.

  Chapter 20 - 9:45am 31 March - Old Bailey Prison, Hong Kong Island

  Stone blinked in the harsh electric light of the interview room. The formalities were over but his hands were still manacled, and a couple of the policemen had their batons drawn. There was an atmosphere of residual fear in the room. Stone stood, his cuffed hands in front of him, holding his possessions in the small backpack. He’d been right; they’d had to release him. They’d had no evidence at all, and Zhang was nowhere to be seen. Evidently something had happened and maybe Zhang had been too busy to manufacture evidence against him.

  The officer spoke. ‘Your visa is revoked. You must leave Hong Kong Special Administrative Zone and People’s Republic of China in twenty-four hours.’

  Twenty-four hours.

  Stone had no time to think. He was led from the room and the heavy wooden door of Old Bailey Prison opened onto the steaming, honking traffic of Hong Kong, and immediately there was a volley of camera flashes. Stone found himself on a busy sidewalk in Central district facing a fusillade of boom-microphones, flashguns and two GNN men with Sony TV cameras on their shoulders.

  And there she was in the midst of it all, full war zone garb replacing her preppy Fifth Avenue look. Virginia Carlisle. Drink her in. Five feet ten inches of blond, windswept gorgeousness, ripe and ready for the camera. Stone could be live on GNN this second. She stepped forward with the microphone. ‘Is it true you killed Junko Terashima, Mr Stone?’ shouted a voice. ‘What about Semyonov? Do you have any comment to make?’

  No sense Stone hiding his face. Always looks guilty. But then so does saying nothing. Stone loathed cameras and publicity, but this time he made straight for Virginia Carlisle. He’d play her at her own game. Stone dodged the microphone and took her hand, like she’d done to him in the airport.

  In the melee Stone kept hold of hand and spoke in the reporter’s ear, making it look like they were old friends. Let her put that on TV. It would look all wrong on camera and she’d never use the pictures. ‘You know I won’t talk to you, Virginia,’ he said in her ear. ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘You’re in a whole heap of trouble, Stone,’ she said back. ‘But there’s something I can do for you.’

  Translation: there was something he could do for her. But worth a try. ‘OK. Let’s get in your car.’

  -oO0Oo-

  ‘This time lock the damn doors!’ Virginia called to the driver. ‘He’s not jumping out on me a second time.’

  ‘Oh dear. That’s plan A out of the window,’ said Stone, only half-joking. But something in Virginia’s demeanour had changed. In contrast to the first ime they’d sat in that car, her shoulders were turned towards him, and she talked animatedly. The body language towards him was positive, not at all defensive.

  Stone and Virginia Carlisle sat in the back of the same black Mercedes they’d taken from the airport two days before. He looked calmly out of the window as the driver dropped the deadlocks on the doors and pulled away.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Well what?’ said Virginia. Oh yes. She definitely wanted something.

  ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ said Stone. ‘Zhang hears someone’s died, and suddenly he’s calling the media to the jail and releasing me into the mob.’

  She said nothing. ‘Zhang can’t spend any time on me,’ explained Stone. ‘But he doesn’t want me to talk to any other Chinese police investigators.’ Stone’s eyes interrogated her. Someone else had died. Logically there could be only one candidate. This really was a surprise. Stone was careful not to turn his body towards her. His body remained “hard-to-get”.

  ‘You’re well informed, Stone. Not bad for someone who’s been locked away below ground.’ said Virginia. She took out an iPad from her purse and began to run the video of a news clip.

  ‘It’s my new friend, Virginia Carlisle,’ said Stone, looking at the picture.

  ‘Looks good on camera, doesn’t she?’ she said, preening as she watched herself. Stone’s sarcasm was lost on her.

  The video was a GNN news report. Virginia Carlisle was over the border in Mainland China. Shenzhen, a hundred-odd kilometers from Hong Kong. Stone had already worked out who died, but his eyes still widened in disbelief.

  Virginia Carlisle smiled at the TV image. Her on-screen look - combining shock, intelligence and moral outrage - was pitch-perfect for what had happened. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it either. Most things I see coming. I’ve got a talent for being in the right place at the right time,’ she said.

  ‘Talent for modesty too, I heard.’

  ‘But this one came completely out of left field,’ Virginia said.

  Chapter 21 - 10:20am 31 March - Zhonghua Hotel, Hong Kong

  On the forty-third floor of the Zhonghua hotel, the Hong Kong Harbour spread below them in the heat haze. Stone was in Virginia Carlisle’s hotel room. She was changing from her “work” fatigues back into a black silk dress (stylish, yet professional) and heeled shoes which for some reason she called “pumps”. She sat with her long legs artfully arranged, dangling one of the patent “pumps” from her toe. Trying to distract him? Stone gave her legs and hips the glance she was expecting, then watched the GNN news report through again.

  L
ess than seventy minutes after he shocked the world by signing away his whole fortune of some twenty-five BILLION dollars to the Chinese, the genius search engine entrepreneur, Steven Semyonov has been killed outright in an auto accident. The fatal smash occurred just minutes after Semyonov drove his own car over the Lo Wu border crossing from Hong Kong into Mainland China. The SearchIgnition founder, who only last week was at his desk in San Jose, drove head on into a coal truck as he traveled in the wrong direction down the off-ramp of the freeway. He was alone in the vehicle.

  ‘Was he drunk?’ asked Stone.

  ‘No chance. Semyonov had the image of the party animal, but he didn’t drink a thing. Ever. He was weird about his health,’ she said.

  Despite all the acting and artifice – the sheer, upfront, in your face falseness of her professional persona – Virginia Carlisle knew her stuff. She ought to. She had a whole team of newshounds working for her.

  ‘Do you buy this tragic accident stuff?’ asked Stone. ‘I mean: he’s dead less than two hours after signing his money away. And aren’t head-on collisions always suicide?’

  The TV Virginia Carlisle appeared to answer.

  ‘The Chinese authorities are saying that the body was positively identified at the scene, but it has now been flown directly to Beijing for a post mortem. What we can say for certain is that Semyonov’s car – a revolutionary electric-powered sports car of his own design – is here, and it has been in collision with the coal truck. CCTV at the Lo Wu border crossing just five minutes away shows clearly that Semyonov was at the wheel of the car. The Chinese police won’t permit us to film blood or human remains.’