“Maybe we’ll find out at the Hilton,” Susan said absently. Seeing that she had only added to Soxster’s befuddlement, she continued “Oh, I forgot to tell you. He’s invited us both to lunch at the Hilton. Something to do with some theme park ride.”
Soxster rolled his eyes. “Will we have to kill what we eat?”
2332 Local Time
The Spa, Lower Level of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel
Beijing
“You know who I am?” Brian Douglas asked the man on the other side of the steam room.
“Of course, Mr. Douglas. You arrived here on your diplomatic passport using your true name,” Wi Lin-wei replied in American-accented English. “I am sorry for the venue, but I have established a pattern. Patterns do not raise suspicion. I have a late-night massage and steam here two nights a week. You happen to be staying at the same hotel, using the same health club after your long flight. And meeting here, I can see that you are not carrying a weapon or a recording device.”
“Perhaps you have seen too many American gangster films, Mr….”
“I love movies, American, British. My name is Wi Lin-wei. I work in the office of President Huang.” He walked through the steam and dripping moisture toward Brian. “Your talent spotters would call me a midlevel functionary in a high level office.”
Brian Douglas was surprised at how high level the office was that this source worked in. “Your cousin, Hui, whom you have used as a cutout with us until now, said you had something so sensitive that I should fly my carcass all the way from London to hear it,” Brian said, continuing his tactic of placing the source on the defensive. “Are you here on your own or has somebody sent you?”
Wi looked at the low ceiling, where water droplets were hanging. “Let us say that there are a few who would be glad that I am providing you with this information, but if I am found out they could deny me three times, as Peter did to our Lord. And like our Lord, I would be crucified. I have placed my life in play here tonight, Mr. Douglas. You know what would happen if we were found together. My sources would not be able to save me. But they are high level, the highest.”
Brian Douglas considered his source. Perhaps he was just a very good actor. “And what is your motivation, Lin-wei, if I may be so direct?”
Wi Lin-wei used both hands to do a minor push up on the ledge and then swung his body back against the wall. Adjusting his large white towel, he began slowly: “I believe in what President Huang is building, a nation that is not only prosperous and has modern technology in the cities, but one that cares for the less successful, one that gradually allows more self-expression and institutions other than the Party.” He paused. Brian let the silence hang in the steam. Wi continued, “Mr. Douglas, I have spent some time on trade delegations. In Helsinki, in Stockholm, and even a little time in Edinburgh. No one there wants to overthrow the system, but they are allowed to worship as they choose and to join civil society organizations, to say and write what they want. Also, the governments provide for the less successful, even those in the countryside. I drove for a week throughout the countryside of Scotland with two colleagues. It is so green.”
When it was clear that there was no more coming, Brian asked, “So you love China and just want to see it better? And who does not, eh?”
“The PLA. The military leaders want order. They want the big companies they own to make money, not to share their profits with the poor and the villagers. More important to them even than money is the honor of China. They will sacrifice economic growth for that honor. And Taiwan is an offense to that honor, especially when it shoots down the PLA’s jets.”
It had all poured out of Wi so quickly and with such a tone of bitterness that Brian’s confidence in him increased. “The money we are paying you—that is not a factor in our meeting?” Brian queried.
Wi jerked this head around to face Brian. “Hui keeps all the money you give him. I told him I do not want your money. I do this for China.”
“You are a patriot, then, sir,” Brian responded, trying to offset any implied insult he may have made. “We cannot stay here much longer. They close the gym at midnight. What is the sensitive information that you want us to have?”
Wi leaned forward. “It is for the Americans, but I do not trust their people to get it to the top there. They lose important information and they leak it. Can’t connect the dots. You, I believe, can, your Sir Dennis and what The Economist called his English-speaking network of intellocrats.”
Brian could not suppress the smile that Wi’s observation produced.
Wi continued. “President Huang cannot always keep the PLA in line. He has let them go on an alert, moving the fleet out into the Pacific, arming missiles.”
“We’ve noticed,” Brian deadpanned, hoping that was not what Wi thought was sensitive.
“A dozen years ago, President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to waters off Taiwan when the PLA threatened. The American Navy claims publicly that it forced our fleet to turn around in the Indian Ocean during the Islamyah crisis a few years ago. If the U.S. Navy comes to Taiwan now, the PLA will not back down or run away, not without bloodying the Americans. And that could get out of control.”
“And the PLA thinks the American Navy is coming to defend Taiwan?” Brian asked.
“You tell me, Mr. Douglas.”
Was this all a ruse to get the answer to that question or to urge the U.S. to keep the 7th Fleet away? Brian wondered. “They don’t tell me their sailing plans. And if they did, of course, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“The PLA thinks that they will come—not just to defend Taiwan, but to retaliate for the bombings in America,” Wi replied, the tension rising in his voice.
“So the PLA did the bombings in America?” Brian said, almost casually.
“I don’t know. Neither does President Huang,” Wi insisted, “and if I did, I would tell you.”
If it was true about Huang, that was an interesting fact, Brian thought. “So what should I tell my cousins in America, Lin-wei?” As he spoke, the miniature device inside his ear canal beeped three times, stopped, and beeped three times more. Then he heard three clear code phrases. “Trouble,” Brian said, and moved quickly to the steam room door. He turned and looked at Wi, who was standing up, looking frightened. “Come with me now. Move!” Brian yelled at him.
“What? What is happening?” Wi asked in the locker area outside the steam room.
“There’s a police sweep, checking IDs in the lobby. Special Security police. Some are on their way down the stairs that lead to this spa, now. Grab your shoes, wrap them in your clothes,” Brian ordered. Grabbing his own things from his locker, Brian moved quickly to the rear of the room and jumped up on a bench. Wi followed quickly. Brian reached up and swung open a grate over a large air-conditioning panel. A flexible plastic ladder fell out. “Climb up as fast as you can,” he said to Wi. When Wi disappeared into the ceiling, Brian followed him and pulled the grate back up behind him. “Keep climbing,” he urged Wi. “Push on the grille up there on the left. Don’t let it bang. Let yourself down into the room.”
Brian heard voices, calling out in Chinese, from the spa locker room below him. He leaped down into the baggage storage room and saw Wi hurriedly hiding amid the suitcases. “The woman at the spa desk will have told them that there were still two people inside,” Brian said to Wi.
“No, I doubt it,” Wi said, shaking his head. “I pay her much money, twice a week.” Douglas looked skeptical. “I get happy ending after massage,” Wi admitted.
Brian chuckled, not only at Wi’s admission but at the sight of himself standing half-naked off the lobby of a five-star Beijing hotel. “All right, then we stay here for a while. You were saying…what I was to tell Washington’s pooh-bahs?”
The Chinese man dropped his towel and stood there in his briefs. “President Huang has some people in the Ministry of State Security that he trusts. He has them investigating the PLA’s role in the bombings in America. But he do
esn’t know what to do when he gets the answers, doesn’t know how to stop the PLA and their supporters in the Politburo from doing something to Taiwan and its Independence Party. He needs help, Mr. Douglas.”
“The Special Security police don’t normally check IDs in a five-star hotel at midnight, Lin-wei. I would be very cautious, were I you.” Brian noticed that Wi was literally trembling. Then he noticed a yellow stain on Wi’s briefs. Apparently, he was a genuine source, or a truly excellent actor.
Noon PST
Quark’s Space Station Bar, the Hilton Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada
“I ordered you their blue Romulan ale. They don’t have pinot noir,” Will Gaudium said as Susan Connor and Soxster joined him. They were seated in a restaurant that looked like a movie set for some space-travel saga.
“Interesting choice of cuisine. Hi, call me Soxster.”
“It’s not the best place to dine in Vegas, but if we stayed at the Mandalay, I’d get hounded by the people at Infocon Alpha,” Gaudium said. “Besides, I want you to take the ride here, if you haven’t already. You get chased by the Borg.”
That figures, Susan thought. The Borg was a Star Trek creation: creatures that used to be human but had machine implants and were now part of a greater computer consciousness called The Collective. Gaudium was riding his hobbyhorse again.
“Do they catch any tourists?” Soxster asked. Susan scowled at him.
“It’s not fiction anymore,” Gaudium insisted to Soxster. “Did you hear my speech? Combine the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project with this Living Software monster, and then tell me how that’s different.”
Soxster looked at Susan. “May I?”
“Have at it,” Susan said, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in the chair to watch.
“Look, Mr. Gaudium, I have enormous respect for what you did at Jupiter Systems, but I think you’re really overreacting. We’ve had human-machine interface for a while now. Cochlear implants that connect to the auditory nerve that connects to the brain—those are twenty years old. Artificial-vision devices connected to the optical nerve have been around for five years. Brain stimulating electrical systems for depression and other diseases for a decade or more.”
“But they weren’t connected to the internet,” Gaudium countered. “They weren’t memory boards to increase retention or processing, like with the nanotech they are fooling around with now…”
Soxster shook his head, disagreeing. “The human brain’s access to memory and knowledge made a quantum leap when we got the internet and then Google’s search engine. What difference does it make if I have to use my hands and fingers to access that ‘collective’ or if I just have to will the access with my brain? People who can’t move their arms were able to move a mouse around on a computer in 2004. If I wear a visor that lets me see the internet projected holographically in front of me, that’s fine, but if I see it in my mind’s eye, that’s not?” Soxster was on a roll. “And as far as Living Software being a monster, would you rather have the wild cybercrime and hacker penetrations we have now? Punctuated periodically by cyber disasters like in 2009? Living Software is nothing but a program that knows how to spot errors in computer language and then rewrite the language to fix them. And like Linux and the Open Source Movement, which you used to support, Living Software kernels communicate with each other about what they have seen and done so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s cool shit. Awesome. Something like the young Will Gaudium would have come up with.”
“I can refute everything you just said, but say you’re right—which you’re not, by the way.” Gaudium turned to look at Susan. “There is still the problem of nano and—let me finish, I listened to you—of genetic engineering. It’s one thing to write out the defects in human biological code, but another to add new capabilities and new chromosomes! How the hell does anyone know what they will do?”
“Okay,” Soxster said, “nanotech has to be regulated so we don’t all inhale tiny computers into our lungs every time we take a breath, I agree. But I’m no expert on DNA and genetics—are you saying that human evolution is over?” Soxster pointed his finger at Gaudium. “Please don’t tell me that you don’t believe in evolution, like your pal, Senator Bloviater. If he gets elected president, this country will become a theocracy, and then we can all act out Heinlein’s Revolt in 2300.”
“Of course, I believe in evolution, and no, I don’t think it’s over,” Gaudium agreed. “I’m a scientist. Senator George is just the only person willing to make the regulation of scientific and engineering advances a big issue, to promise that he will stop this unthinking leap into a posthuman future.”
“He can slow it, but he can’t stop it—no one can,” Soxster insisted. “Come on, you know that. Science and technology advance, that’s what they do. Your pinot noir grapes are highly cultivated hybrid clones that wouldn’t occur in nature. How do you know that humans altering their genetics isn’t the next step in evolution—a life-form becoming sentient and deciding how to adapt itself? That’s what Teilhard de Chardin thought: Technology leads to the ultimate evolution. And he was a Jesuit. Not your Breakpoint, but his Omega Point. If Neanderthals could talk, they might have sat around their caves jerking off worrying about the post-Neanderthal future. You talk about the Borg and space travel. How the hell do you think this sentient life-form is going to do deep-space travel without downloading brain function or doing significant genetic alteration? Maybe this is the beginning of the evolutionary step that permits deep-space travel? Maybe orthogenics is right and this is where evolution has been pointed all along.”
Sensing a pause in the oral combat, Susan jumped in. “Will, you said something in your speech about a lab that was already generating people with extra chromosomes. Is that really true?”
“Of course. Why would I make it up? I pay people to go out and track down these things. There’s a lab in the Bahamas where at least several hundred children have already been born with the additional chromosomes. The parents pay one hundred thousand dollars for it. The additional chromosomes are what their inventor called a ‘universal delivery vehicle for gene modules.’ Once the structure is in place, the parents can pick any number of attributes and input them into the embryo like options on a car. Don’t want to pass on your hairline? They have a modification for that. Mother die of breast cancer? They can help. Don’t like the weight you put on after college? They have a metabolic enhancement. ADD, dyslexia, almost anything predetermined by genetics, they can fix now or will be able to later. Do you think democracy will last long once we have a wealthy elite like that?”
“Can you prove it?” Susan asked.
“Want to see for yourself? I’ll have my pilot fly you there, Marsh Harbor. One of my men will meet you there and take you over to Man-O-War Cay, that’s the island where the lab is. You asked me to help you find underground technology that the Chinese might want to eliminate. Well, that’s certainly a candidate, don’t you think? They’ll want to eliminate an American super race. And maybe we should let them!”
“It’s a deal,” Susan replied quickly, “I’ll go.”
“I’ll set it up,” Gaudium said, getting up from the table. “I’ll call you with the details, but now I have to run to a press conference. Don’t leave here, however, without taking the ride.”
Susan and Soxster sat quietly until Gaudium had left the restaurant. Soxster took a drink of the blue ale and spat it back into the glass. He looked up at Susan. “How are your Memzax pills doing?”
“I remember. Will just said Man-O-War. Packetman knew about it, too. Something to do with penetrating their network. Stopping something.” Susan closed her eyes and repeated.
Soxster was quiet for a moment. Susan kept her eyes shut. “While I’m testing the strength of your biochemical memory enhancement,” Soxster said, looking at his watch, “Tell me this. What’s today’s date?”
She opened her eyes. “Friday the thirteenth. Why? Ar
e you superstitious?”
Soxster shook his head no and smiled smugly. “Do you know why Friday the thirteenth is supposed to be bad luck? It’s the day in 1307 that the King of France lured the head of the Knights Templar, Jacques DeMolay, to his palace in Paris to capture him while simultaneously rounding up hundreds of Knights throughout Europe. Didn’t you read all that DaVinci crap a few years ago?”
“I had better things to do,” Susan said, and sipped the ale. With a pained look on her face as she swallowed, she asked, “So is there some moral to that story?”
“Yeah. Don’t do like DeMolay and get lured someplace where the other side has all the weapons.” Soxster put his hand on Susan’s. “Don’t go.”
“Are you kidding? I have to. If Will’s right about the place, it’s a prime candidate for whoever’s taking down our technology. The President thinks it’s China, and Sol and Rusty think he’s going to decide on retaliation in a matter of days. If we can uncover an attack before it happens, maybe we can find out who’s doing the attacks.”
“Then take Jimmy, or me—don’t go alone,” Soxster urged.
“Jimmy is convalescing with his wife in Manhattan. You need to get back to the Dugout and see what you can find in cyberspace about all this. I’ll be fine.”
Soxster looked unconvinced, but said nothing more. As they stood up to leave, a group of tourists came running into the restaurant, the kids screaming, being chased by actors dressed up like a cross between men and machines.
Soxster looked at Susan. “Let’s skip the ride.”
7 Saturday, March 14
1130 EST
Brighton Beach
Brooklyn, New York
“I’m coming in with you,” Jessica Foley said as she parked the car at a meter under the old metal of the elevated train tracks.
Breakpoint Page 17
