The Machine

by Tom Aston

  Ekstrom did the smile again. Glanced up from his menu cheekily. Women loved it when he did that. At least Jessica did.

  Her blouse was open a button lower than usual, her eyes smouldering. And this was before the entree. A man with Ekstrom’s looks and physique shouldn’t need to work on his “game”, but the “S and A” (Seduction and Attraction) program at Special Circumstances' academy was the real deal. Ekstrom had refused to use the “S and A” program before now — as if learning seduction techniques somehow demeaned his masculinity. But this was business, and for Jessica he had deployed the full three-day program of dates, calls and text messages. It worked like a dream — before they even met. Ekstrom wondered what she would be like in bed. Grateful, was his guess.

  He was interrupted by a movement on the other end of their table of ten, near the window. Alban. He had got up. Ekstrom glanced at his watch. He gave it forty-five seconds then stood up himself.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Ekstrom, and made for the restroom. On the staircase he checked round one last time for cameras, though he knew there were none. Just ambient music, which sounded vaguely French. Pretentious crap. In the bathroom, Antonio Alban was just doing up his zipper. He was five-ten, and a moderately fit 168 pounds, according to the Special Circumstances file. Ekstrom loitered as Alban turned to the washbasin, then stepped up and took the VP of Vision’s neck from behind. Ekstrom stared intently into Alban’s terrified eyes in the mirror. His long, powerful fingers pressed into the carotid arteries, steadily increasing in pressure. Alban grabbed at his throat, his face contorted. Ekstrom smiled at him in the mirror. The smile he’d just used on Jessica. ‘Mr Alban. Your employers said I should persuade you to be quiet about Mr Semyonov. I can be very persuasive.’

  Ekstrom pushed Alban’s face into the wall. The strength drained from the man. This Alban had nothing, no fight at all. Ekstrom had killed women and children with more spirit. His forearm pressed on the back of Alban’s neck, squeezing him against the wall. The body collapsed. Ekstrom was supporting the whole of Alban’s weight on his left elbow, pinned against the back of the man’s neck. With his right hand Ekstrom felt in his own coat pocket and produced the hypodermic. He pulled Alban’s shirt up and felt for the profile of the ribs. He pushed the hair-like needle in between the third and fourth rib, five centimetres to the left of the spine.

  Sodium tripentol, used in some states for lethal injections. Death comes quickly when the heart stops. Ekstrom carried Alban into one of the cubicles and sat him on the can, locking the door behind him. He pulled down Alban’s pants and leaned him forward. That was the most difficult part of the whole operation — to balance a deadman on the toilet.

  Ekstrom vaulted back out over top of the cubicle and smoothed himself down. Checked his watch. One minute forty-five seconds in all. Ekstrom relieved himself in the urinal, washed his hands, then walked back to join his date.

  It was over forty minutes later when Alban was discovered, dead from an apparent heart attack. An ambulance came and went. The staff at L’Eventail were as discreet as one would hope at such an upscale venue, and there was little to disturb the other diners. Jessica was less bothered than she might have been. She’d left early with Ekstrom, well before the body was found. She had something else on her mind.

  The sodium tripentol would be discovered at the routine autopsy. But by that time, Ekstrom would be long gone. Of course, it was risky to get involved personally in a hit so close to home. There was even the possibility that Ekstrom himself would be recognized, and the finger of suspicion would point at him. However, as the paymaster for Alban’s death had again had been SearchIgnition Corporation, Ekstrom was sure that more than enough money and influence could be called on upon to hush the thing up.

  As he drove away from Jessica’s apartment later that night, a question flitted through Ekstrom’s mind. SearchIgnition was paying good money to silence individuals who might squeal about whatever Semyonov had been doing. But who was it who had dealt with Semyonov himself? And what had Semyonov been doing to deserve this kind of attention?

  Chapter 38 — 1:15pm 6 April — Shuangliu International Airport, Chengdu, China

  The Road to Sichuan is Hard. That was the title of a poem Ying Ning’s father had taught her as a child, and she had told Stone all about it on the flight from Shanghai. Not quite the thing a girl should be learning in the years just after the Cultural Revolution, apparently. Far too civilized and classical. ut with Ying Ning, there could be no better spur to study the classics than to tell her it was forbidden. For Ying Ning, even her knowledge of Tang Dynasty poetry was an act of rebellion. As a daughter in a rural village, she was expected to finish school at fifteen and “go out”. Go out was shorthand for becoming a migrant worker. Travelling to the city and taking to some shitty job so she could send cash home to her parents.

  So learning Tang poetry was rebellious — different, intellectual. Didn’t rank alongside killing her boss with a screwdriver maybe, but… To a factory girl like Ying Ning, born dirt-poor, it was probably one step above throwing away a university career like Stone had.

  Du Fu was Ying Ning’s favourite — a dissident poet, an anti-war free thinker in the harsh militarism of the Tang Empire. He was a proto-feminist, a lover of women who rhapsodized their beauty and dress, but lamented too their frustrated intellects.

  Ying Ning’s views were strongly held — violent even. She used them as a suit of armour, as a way to deflect any questions about herself. And now she’d started to open up, her views could be entertaining:

  “Fuck Oyang… Oyang is a liar and a thief… the Machine belongs to Chinese people and Oyang is trying to steal it…” OK. Got the picture about Oyang. Then it was Carlisle (“Barbie Doll Bitch”) or even Professor Zhang (“Part of hypocrite clique”). So talking Tang poetry on the plane with her was a kind of progress. If the way to relate to the spiky haired, hard-faced, spitting refusenik was through her intellectual side, that worked for Stone. And though he was hardly a fan of poems, he could see they fitted well with the Fox Girl part of Ying Ning’s image too.

  Stone saw that in her closed, defensive way Ying Ning was a talented self-publicist — although the polar opposite of someone like Carlisle. There was nothing real about Ying Ning’s image, anymore than there was about Carlisle’s. The just went about things differently.

  What about Stone’s image? Stone despised himself for even having an image. The student papers had once called him “a true believer”, “a man without hypocrisy”. All that because he lived in a student room, had no car, no bank account, no possessions, all that crap. The image was mostly true — Stone just hated the idea of it. Being a soldier — now that was real. You follow orders, you fight, you kill. Or get killed. Anyone can respect that. Except, it would seem, for Stone himself.

  Stone respected Ying Ning’s brutal, in your face honesty. And considering she used the word “hypocrite” more than Jesus, she hadn’t said it to him yet, which was praise indeed. It would have hurt coming from her. The most she said was that his title of “Peace Professor” was “decadent Western bullshit”, and Stone wasn’t going to argue with that.

  As the plane began to descend, Ying Ning explained that Sichuan was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, now a province of one hundred fifteen million people, sandwiched between the Kunlun Mountains in the East and the Tibetan Plateau in the West. Cut off in ancient times, because the road over high mountain passes and treacherous river gorges was so difficult. Hence the famous line from the poem — The Road to Sichuan is Hard.

  Despite its remoteness, Sichuan is no backwater. Its hot, wet climate makes it outstandingly fertile. Travellers who braved the mountains were astonished to find the rich and leafy metropolis of Chengdu at the end of their journey — the “Brocade City” of Du Fu’s poem.

  Modern Chengdu is no longer the green Brocade City of even twenty years ago. Its avenues are choked with traffic and the relentless tread of the concrete and the skyscrapers keeps the greener
y to a minimum. Nevertheless, Chengdu still has the feel of a city of twenty million placed absent-mindedly into a subtropical forest. Trees grow everywhere, on the smallest patch of earth, and its markets still carry under their awnings the tang of its green humidity and the aroma of the Mapo tofu, the chili-laden local dish.

  The flight from Shanghai had taken them seventeen hundred kilometres west into the deep hinterland of China. By Stone’s reckoning, the Machine was located another five hundred kilometres West at least, in the deserted foothills of the Himalayas, close to Tibet, in the very centre of the Chinese landmass.

  Stone’s plan to get near the site of the Machine had annoyed Ying Ning initially. The idea was to get them very close to the mine workings called Death Hole in the high plateau of Western Sichuan, and let them stay there unnoticed. He made Ying Ning contact the monks of a Tibetan Buddhist temple saying they were tourists, requesting lodgings for a few days. It put them outside of the system of hotels, passports and ID cards, and the Tibetan monks would be the last people to talk to the Gong An.

  Stone would be a Western Tourist with Ying Ning his girlfriend. Ying Ning had bristled at this. Was it because she had to be girlfriend? More likely on account of her typically Chinese prejudice against Tibetans. She wasn’t above a bit of casual racism, despite her progressive image.

  ‘Act nice. You’re supposed to be my girlfriend,’ Stone teased as they walked through the arrivals hall at Chengdu airport.

  ‘Bull. Shit,’ she replied in careful English. He knew it would annoy her. Sex was fine in Ying Ning’s worldview. Boyfriends certainly were not. There were a few women back in England who would accuse Stone of having the same issue with girlfriends. He didn’t. At least he thought he didn’t.

  The terminal was cavernous in the usual Chinese fashion, and not busy. Built for the hordes who would be using it in future years. As they walked on, Ying Ning pointed to one of the large TV screens showing Global News Network. ‘Your friend,’ she said and stopped to look. Virginia Carlisle was up there, talking in English, with Chinese subtitles streaming across the bottom of the screen. It seemed Virginia had a young guy with an electric fan who followed her, so she could always get that breeze-blown effect with the hair. Looked good though.

  ‘Billionaire founder of SearchIgnition, Steven Semyonov was tragically killed in an auto accident a week ago. Conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere in the US remain convinced of foul play on the part of the Chinese authorities. A recent online poll for MSNBC revealed that eighty-nine per cent of respondents thought Semyonov had been lured into giving up his fortune to China and then crudely assassinated after he arrived in the People’s Republic.

  Despite public doubts over his death, any evidence that this was anything other than a tragic accident remain elusive. Hundreds of the world’s media have descended on the intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, bringing with them retired investigators from the LAPD and forensics experts posing as cameramen. Not a shred of evidence has been found to suggest that the super-intelligent billionaire was the victim of anything other than driving on the wrong side of the road. Psychologists have also put in their two cents, pointing out that deaths from head-on collisions are usually the result of suicide bids. But again, there is no hard evidence to back up this theory.

  The investigative frenzy has been turbocharged by the revelation about the death of Antonio Alban, a fellow member on the board of SearchIgnition Corporation with Semyonov until little over a week ago. Rumors are emerging from senior staffers at SearchIgnition, who refuse to be named, of continual fights and disagreements over the direction the corporation was taking. Semyonov, the rumors say, was supported by Alban in pushing for a different vision for the corporation, based on completely new technology. He was opposed by other board members who simply wanted to leverage the stranglehold SearchIgnition already enjoys in the market for Internet search systems.

  Boardroom battles are not unusual in Fortune 500 firms, but it appears Antonio Alban, VP of Vision and Semyonov’s only ally on the ten man board of SearchIgnition Corp, may have been murdered. Alban was discovered with coronary heart failure in the restroom at Mountain View’s exclusive French restaurant, L’Eventail. The death showed every sign of natural causes, but the autopsy findings at three separate labs now reveal traces of sodium tripentol in the tissues of the Alban’s heart muscle. The chemical agent, used in coronary surgery and in lethal injections to stop the heart, can only have gotten there by foul means.

  Stone felt like laughing. Bloggers had picked up like lightning on the speculation Stone had begun about the Machine, but Virginia Carlisle was still lagging behind, dumbly following the narrative she’d probably agreed on at a news meeting a week ago. Meanwhile the bloggers and Internet sleuths were going after the real story. At least one blogger known to Stone had repeated the location in Western Sichuan Stone had posted online for the Machine. Was Carlisle even in China anymore?

  With Alban known to have been murdered, the speculation over Semyonov’s death will only increase. The attention of the Internet’s community of amateur sleuths has now turned to the real reason for Semyonov’s defection to China. Did Semyonov simply want to build another business empire in China based on search technology? Or, as Chinese officials have been briefing in private, have Chinese scientists made a discovery of such importance that Semyonov simply had to become involved? At any rate, with the Mountain View PD expected to open a homicide investigation on Antonio Alban, the attention has shifted from the examination of tire marks at an intersection in China, back across the Pacific to California, only a few miles away from where Steven Semyonov held his final press conference just days ago.

  Something to be thankful for, at least. Virginia Carlisle and her cohorts would indeed be heading back East across the Pacific and the spotlight should be off for a few days.

  ‘Why she doesn’t tell us about Semyonov?’ said Ying Ning. Perceptive. Right on the money as usual. The whole thing was more confused than ever after that news report. It made no mention of the Machine, Semyonov’s weapons trading, or even the death of Junko Terashima, who had been one of GNN’s own staffers.

  Carlisle and the mainstream media couldn’t grasp that the whole enigma revolved around Semyonov himself. They should be looking at the kind of person he was, his motivations. GNN must at least have some kind of obituary file on the man, but they had barely even shown that. There had been no information about Semyonov the man at all. Instead the mainstream media, TV and newspapers, were obsessing with the idea of foul play by the Chinese, even though by Carlisle’s own admission, they’d analysed tire marks and angles for days and come up with nothing. Carlisle had admitted to Stone herself that she’d seen the body. Why no interviews with people who knew Semyonov, building up a picture of where the great brain was heading?

  To make it worse, Antonio Alban, the man who could shed most light on what Semyonov had wanted to do with SearchIgnition, was dead too. Silenced by a hired hitman.

  Stone shook his head and set off towards the exit, but Ying Ning stopped once more. Pulled him back. She was pointing at the TV screen. Virginia Carlisle was still there with that gorgeous mane of hair.

  Stone was happy to watch, but why had Ying Ning stopped? Why was she so concerned with Carlisle?

  Then Stone saw what Ying Ning had been pointing at.

  Virginia Carlisle reporting from Chengdu, China

  Chengdu. She was there already. Carlisle was right there, in Sichuan, and she had arrived before them. Stone had underestimated her.

  Fascinating. Stone already had an idea what had brought her here, but he’d find out soon enough.

  — o0°0o-

  On the bus into town from the airport, Ying Ning started talking Tang Dynasty poetry again.

  ‘Your friend Ms Carlisle reminds me of another poem. Called Song of the Lovely Women, also Du Fu. Du Fu is watching the women of the super-rich of those days. It’s like a party for Berlusconi, or Trump, or some billionaire. There are fine
women bearing noble names. Du Fu is star-struck by the women. The clothes, the hair, their confidence. Du Fu’s description of them in the poem is almost erotic. But all that money wasted on clothes and fine scent — it disgusts him too. He hates the lovely women, and he envies them. But mostly he desires them.’

  ‘How does that remind you of Carlisle?’

  ‘Not her,’ said Ying Ning with her trademark wry smile. ‘You. It reminds me of you. You talk about her. Your feelings to Carlisle are like Du Fu’s for the lovely women in the poem. You are jealous of her, and you’re disgusted by her money and clothes. But mostly you desire. Like Du Fu — you say you despise, but really you desire.’

  So you’re jealous of Virginia, Miss Ying Ning? thought Stone. It was unusual for Ying Ning to express any emotion, even in such an indirect manner as this. Nonetheless her description of Stone’s feelings about Virginia Carlisle was creepily accurate. For Stone had already decided himself to track down Virginia Carlisle in Chengdu.

  ‘Ying, that reminds me,’ he said, after a pause. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  A wicked smile spread across the Chinese girl’s features.

  Chapter 39 — 3:18pm 6 April Chengdu, China

  Stone approached the desk in the knowledge that the average Chinese hotel clerk believes implicitly what a European person is saying. Even better if the tone is Hong Kong Officers’ Club circa 1950, and no attempt is made to speak in Chinese.

  Stone spelled out his name as if to an idiot child. ‘My wife has checked in already and I need a room key,’ he said. The clerk offered the key card with a pleasant smile. ‘Oh, and what room is that?’ asked Stone. It disturbed him how well the arrogant foreigner voice worked. And how easy it was to slip into the role.

  Virginia Carlisle was not a difficult woman to track down. First look for the most expensive hotel in town. Second, get Ying Ning to ask around about a woman followed by an entourage of cameramen, makeup artists and flunkeys. Stone needn’t, either, have bothered to enquire about her room number. Just ask for the largest suite in the hotel.