by Tom Aston
No. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Ying Ning had posted on Stone's site to make contact. After that it was simple to get in touch through the anonymized email server.
Ying Ning. The woman dressed as a tart when Junko was murdered in the Snake Market. That arrogant laconic smile was her trade mark. But she looked better without the lipstick and red wig for sure. So this was Ying Ning, with the spiky hair and the slim, angular body. The source of Junko’s information on ShinComm Corporation and New Machine Technologies.
Stone stood while he poured himself a coffee. Did she think he was going to blush or something? Her eyes stayed on him, drinking him in, and who knows what she was thinking.
‘Did you learn about Semyonov by sipping wine with his capitalist cronies?’ she asked. ‘Did he explain about his weapons factories? No? Or did you learn more from your visit with Professor Zhang?’
‘I found out more than you think,’ he said. ‘But Junko’s file tells me you’re the expert. So you can tell me, since you bought me here.’
‘OK. I tell you one thing. They will execute you, Stone,’ she said, coolly. ‘Zhang gave you one day to leave Hong Kong, but you are still here. If Gong An finds you in China, you will be a spy and you will be shot. Again. But this time it will be the last.’
She’d spotted the bullet wound scar just above his elbow, then. ‘What about you?’ said Stone. ‘They shoot subversives like you, don’t they? Or is it a prison camp in Qinghai?’
‘Could be.’ She shrugged. ‘But I know what I’m doing. I have the contacts, and I am Chinese. For yellow-haired yang guizi like you,’ she used a racist term for a foreigner, ‘A man of a metre eighty-eight — not so easy to hide in China.’
‘Cool,’ said Stone. His calm, grey eyes searched into her. ‘Sounds like you’re the person I need to get me into China. Help me blend in.’
Ying Ning was still lounging back, one leg over the arm of the chair. She chose that point to take out a carton of cigarettes and tap it on the arm of the chair, then carefully take a cigarette and begin to smoke. It was like Ying Ning was marking her territory. ‘I’m the right girl for a lot of things,’ she replied. Stone could see she was thinking. Making a decision in her mind. ‘You ready for a holiday in Jiangsu province, Mr Shi-tou?’
Shi-tou? What did that mean? Stone already knew his Chinese wasn’t up to much. Shi-tou? It meant a stone, or a piece of stone. Something like that.
She helped him out, smiling with disdain. ‘It means Rock-head,’ she said, and breathed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘I heard you learned some Chinese, Rockhead. But you didn’t study hard, I guess. Shi-tou sounds funny in English also, no?’
Stone laughed back into her black eyes. He liked her already. He ran his gaze for a second over her hips. The ones he remembered from the leather miniskirt in the Snake Market. ‘Come on then, Cat-Woman,’ he said. ‘I may just let you come along. We’re going to China to meet a man called Robert Oyang. But first you need to tell me all you know about Semyonov and ShinComm Corporation.’
He turned to get more coffee. Ying Ning lounged in the chair and checked him out from behind, then stubbed out her cigarette in deliberate fashion and walked up behind him. Pulled at his shirt to turn him around to face her.
‘You haven’t explained why you came here, Rockhead,’ she sa id. ‘You have not been honest before we go any further.’
‘I told you. I want to find out about what Semyonov was doing at ShinComm.’
‘You lie,’ she said. ‘You are looking for the Machine. Everybody is looking for the Machine.’
She was right of course.
Chapter 26 — 9:40am 1 April — Hung Hom, Hong Kong
As soon as Ying Ning contacted Stone through NotFutile.com, the question had come into Stone’s mind. Why was Ying Ning happy to have Stone alongside her in her campaigns against “China’s billionaire clique”? Why should she even trust him?
So Stone had done some background work on Ying Ning before he went to find her in that apartment. Even he would have to say what he found out was fascinating.
Ying Ning was an enigma. It wasn’t Ying Ning’s clever arrogance, her sarcasm, her plume of spiky black hair, her sexy angular body or that trademark crooked smile that made her mysterious. It wasn’t just her background story of bad-luck, suffering and violence. Or where on earth she found the information she used to expose and ridicule all those newly-rich businessmen and factory owners she was at war with. All that was understandable. It was just her. Her closedness. Stone sensed Ying Ning had hidden depths, but no one was going to see them.
After a couple of web searches, Stone had realised that Ying Ning was quite a famous individual — in fact she was a cult figure in China. China lacks a “free” press in the Western sense, but has a thriving scene of micro-bloggers. Literally millions of them, and millions more who read the blogs. Ying Ning and her banned protest organization, China21, were very well known, in an electronic-word-of-mouth way that can’t be replicated in the West. For the simple reason that they were banned.
Ying Ning was not a real name of course. As soon as she posted it on the NotFutile.com site, that was obvious. But this wasn’t just any made-up name. Ying Ning was a girl in a Chinese fairy tale. The Fox Girl. The fictional Ying Ning was a shape-changer girl who alternates between being a fox and a beautiful girl. Apparently, Fox Girls are not uncommon in Chinese and Japanese fairytales, and Ying Ning was one of the best known. She was not only beautiful. She used her powers, magical and sexual, to entrance and deceive. This Fox Girl name of Ying Ning, it turned out, was instantly memorable in China. Almost as if Stone had called himself “Robin Hood”. No one would forget it. The modern Ying Ning was known across China on blogs and forums, and she was already a myth in her own right.
The Chinese authorities took a less charitable view of the name Ying Ning, however. The official Chinese news site Xinhua stated that Ying Ning was “one of the criminal class”. In China “criminal” does not mean what it does in the West. China is a harsh country, where social control is tight, and resort to the firing squad commonplace. The Chinese “criminal class” aren’t the same as the lesser enemies of the state such as “dissidents” or “intellectuals”. Certainly not Robin Hood types. They’re desperate thugs with a life expectancy measured in weeks.
So Stone was impressed by Ying Ning, coming and going, travelling around China like a will-o-the-wisp. Ying Ning had long since discarded her real name and ran with a bunch of false identities. That was her real achievement and she wouldn’t tell anyone how she’d done it. No one knew her real name. In a country of over a billion, the ID card number is the bedrock of control. In China you can’t fart without an ID card number, but she had cheated that. She’d turned up all over China in the last two years, making her blogs and videos about billionaires and plutocrats, confronting corrupt officials online, and holding up China’s new class of super-rich to ridicule. Her campaign about the suicide rates amongst the workers at ShinComm had even made it through to the New York Times.
It wasn’t just satire, either. There was a hard edge to what Ying Ning did. A number of people had been arrested on the back of her anti-corruption campaigns. One had been shot.
Yet it was the Fox Girl name that created the Ying Ning aura more than anything. She was her own woman, a force of one — similar to Stone in the way she operated — and she liked to keep people guessing.
Why she might want to have Stone on her side was anyone’s guess. Ying Ning must think he was “useful”. She would have researched Stone since she met him in the Snake Market. Even before that. She must think he would be useful to her, just like Junko Terashima had been useful to her. She might want to use him and the NotFutile.com site for publicity. After all she had no chance whatsoever of putting up web pages in China that weren’t liable to be taken down just hours after they’d gone live. Then there was the weapons aspect. Through NotFutile.com, Stone himself showed a macabre level of understanding of weapons systems. It took an oddly pervert
ed mindset to understand the people who had dreamed these weapons up, and Stone had that. Perhaps that’s why she needed him.
Stone’s cool rational core knew he’d have to be wary of Ying Ning. Stone always worked better alone, relying on himself, shunning the limelight. But Stone couldn’t fail to be impressed by Ying Ning. All she’d done and the way she’d done it. She was like an opposite version of him. Female and Chinese, where he was European and male. And where Stone used Western laws on openness and free speech to evade his enemies, Ying Ning did her stuff in spite of the laws in China.
Stone’s rational mind urged caution, but he wanted to learn more.
— oO0Oo-
Stone had been surprised that Ying Ning had arranged to meet in her own apartment — and of course she hadn’t. Ying Ning had Stone walk separately to another tower block ten minutes away, no doubt having him followed as she did so. It was broiling mid-morning in Kowloon, and it ought to be quiet. Nonetheless there must be two hundred Chinese people on each hundred metre stretch of sidewalk. More on the backstreets in the shade. Street vendors, awnings, hawkers, desultory market stalls. There was no chance of Stone spotting his follower here, and he gave up the effort. Stone made it to the tower block as arranged and walked up an airless stairwell for eight stories.
Ying Ning opened the door. This must be her real place, entirely different from the place where they’d met. The apartment was empty, save some bare sticks of furniture and two of Ying Ning’s comrades from China21. There were introduced as Bao An, the tall biker in the shades, and Lin Xiaohong, shorter, with a shaven head. There really was nothing in that place. Kept that way no doubt so that Ying Ning could move on and there would be no evidence of what she was up to.
The room stank of stale smoke, and the two men had on the usual Hong Kong garb of trouser-legs turned up from the ankle, flip-flops and undershirts. They sat around looking at the ceiling. It smelt like a surfeit of Chinese-brand whiskey the night before had dulled their senses.
Ying Ning had wasted no time setting up a laptop to do whatever it was she was going to do. It looked like some kind of presentation.
So this was it? China21? Four people to protest the exploitation the Chinese workers, the illegal sale weapons and “Semyonov’s capitalist dogs”. Ying Ning stood in the middle, hand on hip. She pulled another cigarette from her bag, and a lighter decorated with an image of Mao Zedong. Then she got on with it, referring occasionally to the laptop and to a file marked “ShinComm” on the table. Stone was barely listening to her at first. He was checking out his situation.
Four people? And that was including Stone. In truth, Ying Ning was China21. The two guys were her lapdogs, in it for whatever reasons. Idealistic or more likely bewitched by Ying Ning.
Ying Ning looked every inch an arrogant, opinionated, intellectual bitch, in her tight-fitted top and her black jeans. Stone let his eyes flit over her once more. A slight ripple of muscle in her legs. She sensed him looking, but made no reaction at all.
Ying Ning talked on, but Stone interrupted. ‘We need to talk about the weapons production at ShinComm,’ he said bluntly. ‘ShinComm is a maker of Western products, yes? Mostly designed in USA and Japan. Smartphones, notebook computers, MP3, electronics, semi-conductor. ShinComm has quarter of a million workers in a city called Dongguan in the South, and as many at a place called Factory City in Shanghai. Work is hard, the pay not bad…now.’
That last remark was for Ying Ning. It had been her campaign that had embarrassed ShinComm in the Western media and forced a forty percent pay increase.
She was immune to flattery however. ‘You miss the point,’ said Ying Ning. ‘ShinComm is not typical Chinese factory. Chinese factory works to plans. Chinese factory does not have ideas. ShinComm was founded only five years ago, and subsidiary New Machine Technology only one year ago. Already New Machine makes its own products. In one year, it made applications for thirty-five patents in the United States. Also other technology come from ShinComm and New Machine, without even bother to patent. Including many weapon technology. This is real mystery about ShinComm.’
Stone picked up the file. Ying Ning was talking up the weapons angle — and that was probably why she wanted Stone’s help. But already it was plain to Stone that Ying Ning was right. ShinComm was a lot more interesting than just the weapons angle. It was no ordinary Chinese firm. In fact it was no ordinary firm at all. Ying Ning’s file detailed one amazing technology after another. New Machine and ShinComm were a conveyor belt of new technology. And Chinese firms just weren’t like that.
Another odd thing in the file was the randomness of it all. Innovations in so many different areas. Some stuff went to patent, some didn’t. The SmoothVision video software, with its seemingly limitless resolution — there was no patent, no copyright for that. It had practically been given away. Yet Virginia Carlisle’s man had said it was based on fractal mathematics, with no similarities whatever to any other software. A fundamental innovation.
‘Take this example,’ Ying Ning went on, and she produced a baggie containing what appeared to be about fifty grams of sugar. She poured a little pile out onto the table. She licked the tip of her finger, dipped it in the sugar, then tasted it. ‘Go ahead. Try,’ she said.
Stone tasted it. Sure enough, the sweet, bland taste of refined sugar.
Bao An appeared with a spoon. Ying Ning crushed the little pile of sugar granules with the back of the spoon, turning them into a thin white powder, then licked her finger once more, looking at Stone in an oddly provocative way. She gestured him to taste it again.
‘Cocaine?’ said Stone. Stone licked his finger and tasted once more. ‘I got a bitter aftertaste on my teeth back there, after the sugar. But no odour or taste. Cocaine, yes?’
‘Not bad, Rockhead.’ Ying Ning was impressed ‘Yes. Cocaine — high quality too. Another ShinComm idea. But how do they do it?’
‘The real question is why,’ said Stone interrupting. ‘Why do they do it? This technology is used to smuggle cocaine to China,’ he said. ‘It says here in the file they use a nanotech system to coat the drug with a layer of sugar only one molecule thick.’ The significance was just sinking in with Stone as he spoke. This was an incredible process, and light years ahead of the big food companies. Worth billions. Food companies could coat healthy food in a nanotech layer of sugar, and they would have the perfect low calorie foods. But here it was, and not even patented. All that work to disguise cocaine for smugglers? Made no sense. This technology was being given away, just like the SmoothVision digital video.
Stone flipped though the file on the table. Full of this stuff. His favourite was the car — like the one he had seen driven by Semyonov, gliding past with preternatural acceleration as Semyonov left the party. Another piece of outrageous technology. The news clipping made out that Semyonov had driven from Beijing to Shanghai in that electric sports car. A thousand miles, without charging it once. Stone had assumed it was bullshit when he first read it. But maybe it wasn’t. It could revolutionize the car industry, yet Semyonov was just driving around in a prototype, and doing nothing with the technology.
‘Do you see what this means?’ Stone said. ‘All of this work has been traced to New Machine and ShinComm, the corporation which worked with Steven Semyonov in China. But where is the innovation coming from? Where are the labs?’
Ying Ning flicked on the computer. She pointed to the screen, and zoomed in on a photo of a factory unit. Perfect resolution, Stone noticed. SmoothVision again.
‘This is ShinComm at Dongguan,’ explained Ying Ning. ‘Less than three hundred kilometres from here. Giant facility, two hundred fifty thousand workers, but…’ Ying Ning paused. ‘But nothing is happening in Dongguan. I have local people watching this place. I have contacts in factory. They make only phones, computers and semiconductors, All design in America. Same thing at ShinComm Factory City in Shanghai.’ Ying Ning flicked through images of the two giant factory sites. ‘No research workers, no labs. The ideas are c
oming from a secret facility. Semyonov and his capitalist whores at ShinComm are selling Chinese secrets for quick money.’
‘Sorry to spoil your story,’ said Stone. ‘But why would Semyonov do it for the money? He just committed twenty-five billion to the corporation. And he’s also dead.’ Ying Ning looked at him. ‘Bank of China confirmed they received every penny of Semyonov’s money. They said so in public. So the question is: why? Why did Semyonov pay that money?’
‘And where does the technology come from?’ said Ying Ning. ‘Including weapons?’
Ying Ning paused, as if she were unsure whether to say something. Then she took out her Mao Zedong lighter and lit another cigarette, again looking perplexed.
‘You want to tell us something?’ asked Stone.
Another slide came up on the screen. ‘This photo was sent to Junko Terashima,’ she said. ‘From a contact high up in ShinComm, called Oyang. But we don’t know where this place is. Junko said she didn’t know. But Oyang claimed that’s where the technology is coming from.’ It was a photo of a high electric fence, with seemingly nothing behind it. Stone leaned forward to the screen and zoomed in once more. No lab or factory, just a few small huts in the distance, with rolling, parched landscape behind, and a clear blue sky, like it was in a desert. The fence was four metres high, electrified, with cameras. It was meant to look menacing.
‘Junko received this photo in USA from Oyang. That is why she comes to Hong Kong.’ said Ying Ning, playing with her Communist cigarette lighter. ‘And Junko say this place is the reason why Semyonov came to China.’
‘This is the Machine?’ asked Stone.
Ying Ning nodded. ‘Oyang sent her this photo,’ she said. ‘He said it was the reason Semyonov came to China.’
‘And it was the reason Junko came to Hong Kong. But now she’s dead, and so is Semyonov,’ said Stone.
Ying Ning nodded.
‘Sounds like we need to have a chat with your Mr Oyang,’ said Stone.
