by Greg Dragon
He gave them a brisk nod, told them he’d ride back with them, and left the room.
They formed a line — two soldiers in front, two between her and DeBryan, and three bringing up the rear — and they marched down the unlit emergency stairs in the corner of the hotel. The men kicked aside loose debris that had been washed into the stairwell. They didn’t speak — refused to speak — even as Angel demanded answers.
She wracked her brain as they descended. She tried to remember if she’d ever heard of a group called 6X. Who were they? What were they about? Clearly the man had more influence over the soldiers than he tried to impress upon them. The men obviously deferred to him, despite his claim to the contrary.
But she came up with nothing.
She saw him standing off to one side in the destroyed hotel lobby, a lit cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other. Both hands were gloved, but not in blue latex as were the soldiers’, rather in black leather. His back was turned, and he was speaking to someone. He didn’t acknowledge them as they passed, or the noise of their feet crushing the glass of the shattered lobby windows. He just kept right on talking in some language that was neither English nor Chinese as they pushed out through the empty frames of the front doors and made their way into the bright morning sunlight. It sounded Greek.
The fullness of the smell hit them almost immediately, bringing tears to their eyes and forcing them to cover their mouths and noses with their elbows. Several soldiers, also dressed in masks and gloves, were standing in a circle beside an army vehicle a couple dozen meters away, one with a massive track. Protruding out the front was a beveled plow. One of the men broke off and jogged over to them. He handed Sergeant Zhang some objects in a clear plastic bag, who held them up for Angel and DeBryan to see. “Is these belong to you?”
They nodded. The bag was opened and inverted. Both phones clattered to the ground and were crushed into the gravel. No apologies were made, no explanations offered.
“What about my camera?” DeBryan asked. He didn’t look very hopeful.
Sergeant Zhang turned and spoke to the other soldier in Chinese, who nodded and jogged back. “They will find and return. Now go.”
“Tell them they don’t have to break anything,” DeBryan said. “I’ll give you the memory cards.”
Sergeant Zhang grunted, but didn’t relay the message. He gestured toward a second army truck, also tracked instead of wheeled, and indicated that they were to climb aboard. The tailgate was unlatched and lowered. A soldier stepped up and pulled the flap away, revealing bench seats running the length of the bed. Two more PLA soldiers stood sentinel, one on either side of the truck, and watched them approach with wariness in their eyes. All of them wore masks and gloves.
“My apologies for the rough transport,” Mister Cheong said, startling them with his sudden appearance at their side. He climbed into the bed of the truck and reached down for Angel with his gloved hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she thrust her pack up at him, then climbed aboard without his assistance.
The two reporters chose to sit on the bench opposite their guard, for that’s what he seemed to be, and were flanked by soldiers. He sat alone. “The ride is going to be bumpy,” he warned, and indeed it was. The roar of the engine and the sound of the debris being crushed beneath them made talk impossible, so they gripped the hard wooden rails of their seats and held on, gritting their teeth and watching out through the back as the vehicle bucked beneath them.
Soon after departing, Angel thought she heard a series of gunshots — not the rapid fire sound of a machine gun, but several distinct pops. She counted a half dozen, though there were likely more. But when she looked over at the others in alarm, none seemed to have noticed.
Chapter Four
Estranged.
It had always seemed such a horrid word to Angel, full of negative innuendo and outright accusation. The French equivalent, éloigné, meant literally driven away, and she supposed that much of it was true. She had driven David away with her paranoia.
They had been married two and a half years before separating. More than enough time for him to become aware of the darkness that clung to her. Invisible during their whirlwind courtship, it only became apparent afterward, as if the mind’s eye took time to adjust to a different light, or the act of wedding caused a shift in the psychic spectrum. Ever since late adolescence, the darkness drove a wedge between her and anyone she ever spent any amount of time with, not just him. But after they met, she had fooled herself into thinking that maybe this time would be different, that she had changed because of him. She had never met anyone so passionate, so brilliant.
The day he moved out, he told her he still loved her, but that he couldn’t live with her, with her mood swings, her obsessions. He’d been threatening it for the previous six months, since Jacques moved back into the house with them. He told her, as if he weren’t aware of the irony, that her family estate in Lyon was tearing them apart. Hadn’t she’d resisted his pleas to move there in the first place? Hadn’t he ignored her, even patronized her?
And then, just as Jacques needed her, he insisted that they move back to the States. It was the only way to save the marriage, he told her. So she went, and he’d been wrong because she hadn’t changed. Lyon still drew her to it, and she could not resist its pull.
Of course, her friends misjudged the situation, jumping to the wrong conclusion that David had used her to gain access to her family’s money. But it had been her idea to invest in his fledgling tech company, not his. It was she who had used him, hoping he could somehow help her to sever ties with her own past.
A year ago, on the advice of a lawyer whom David had hired for his company and then soon afterward fired for his poor advice, he had filed divorce papers. He admitted later that it had been a mistake and never pursued the case. Neither had she. The paperwork was a matter of public record, which is probably why Cheong had misconstrued their relationship. It made her wonder, as they rode in the back of that truck through the wreckage of the island, why he’d checked up on her like that. What was his interest in her? What was this dossier he had? What more did he know about her?
But the roar of the engine prevented them from talking, and so all she could do was speculate. It got her nowhere but more and more frustrated.
The smell of the salt sea air grew stronger the closer they drew to the port, though it was never thick enough to sweep away the stench of decomposition. Finally, the vehicle stopped, and Mister Cheong pushed himself off the bench. He held up a hand for them to remain seated. “There’s a boat coming for you,” he shouted, leaning over at them. “It’ll take you to Shanghai, where a driver will pick you up and take you to your hotel. We’ll meet for dinner at—” He checked his watch, carefully pulling back the sleeve of his coat with a gloved fingertip. “Dinner at nine. Instructions will be left for you at the front desk.”
“Why?” Angel yelled back. “What instructions?”
“To discuss your assignment.”
“What assignment? Who are you? You haven’t told us anything! Who’s this 6X group you work for?”
His brow knit for a moment as he considered how to answer. Then he said, “You might say that 6X is an international consortium of concerned citizens.”
“Concerned about what?”
He tapped his wrist impatiently. “I’m terribly sorry for leaving you in such a lurch like this, but I have a very important meeting and my guest will not tolerate being kept waiting. I’ll explain more at dinner tonight.”
“What assignment?” Angel shouted after him as he climbed over the tailgate and jumped to the ground.
“Tonight,” he said over his shoulder.
With a signal from his hand, the truck lurched forward, its motor growling. A puff of black smoke spewed from the stack and whipped behind them as they accelerated away. Angel watched as Alvin Cheong jogged to the waiting chopper, ducking his head as its rotors began to churn the air. The sleek machine was shiny black, meant only to ca
rry a single passenger.
Angel committed the tail number to memory.
* * *
DeBryan hadn’t dared to bring out his spare cell phone sooner, fearing that it would be confiscated by the Chinese Coast Guard sailors assigned to escort them back to Shanghai. But once the patrol boat left Huangxia Island behind and the two reporters had been taken to the vessel’s galley, they were pretty much left alone. He slipped it out of the secret panel in his pack and turned it on under the table.
“Just letting my contact know what’s going on,” he quietly told Angel. “Don’t want him showing up in that situation.” He shook his head grimly. “Whatever the hell is going on, it’s huge. And if the military is involved, who knows what they’ll do.”
“We shouldn’t have left.”
“You can’t argue with rifles,” he muttered. “Or the PLA.”
She watched him for a moment as he typed in a message below the table surface. “What do you think those soldiers did with the boys?” she asked him, clearing her throat as another sailor stepped into the galley. DeBryan dropped the phone into his lap and brought his hands up, resting them on the table with his fingers loosely twined. She watched the sailor warily as he went and helped himself to some coffee from the urn on the table behind her.
“What do you mean?” DeBryan asked. “Sergeant Zhang said he’d take care of them.”
“But what does that mean?” She didn’t wait for him to answer before adding, “I heard gunshots. Right after we got on the truck.”
He frowned at her, but didn’t deny her claim. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.” She let out a deep breath and slumped in her seat. She was shaking, both from emotion as well as hunger. A warm, beefy smell rose from the ship’s kitchen, and she considered getting up to ask the sailor if they could get something to eat. She started to rise, but stopped when DeBryan whispered for her not to move.
“Just sit tight for a moment.” He kept his voice low and his head tucked down a bit. After a moment, he brought his hands back up and gestured for hers. She slid them over and he gripped them firmly, as if he were trying to console her. The sailor wandered back over and stared aggressively at them as he passed. Steam rose from the cup in his hand. The aroma, though bitter, made Angel’s head swim.
“Do you think we could get something to eat?” she asked him.
The sailor kept staring at their joined hands as he rattled something off in Chinese.
“Soup?” She pulled her left hand out of DeBryan’s and made a drinking motion.
“Coffee?” The sailor grunted and nodded, then said something else, also in Chinese, before pointing at the urn. Then he left in a hurry, probably afraid she’d ask him something else.
DeBryan released her other hand and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. Angel could feel the small object he had left in her palm and guessed that it was either a SIM card or a memory disk. She gave him a querying look.
“I suspect they’ll probably search us before we debark. They probably already know I’ve sent a text and will be looking for the phone. I’ve replaced the card with a blank and will leave it where they can easily find it. Hopefully that’ll satisfy them. If they do a more intensive search, you’re more likely to be able to slip it past them than I am.”
She nodded. “And what’s on it?”
He took a deep breath. “Honestly? I’m not exactly sure.”
Chapter Five
They waited for nearly an hour in the hotel bar before Alvin Cheong showed up and whisked them to a table in a dark back corner of the restaurant. Angel had already downed three martinis by then, very dry, and was feeling the effects of the alcohol. She seldom drank, but under the circumstances, and considering all the hassles she’d endured over the past several days, she was in no mood to care very much.
It helped that the drinks were insanely expensive. Indeed, they tasted that way, although it might’ve been her imagination; she wasn’t exactly the best judge. She could easily afford to pay the tab, but she took a secret pleasure in telling the bartender to add the charges to the room bill, which was under Cheong’s name. The spacious and richly appointed suites they’d been assigned also had to have cost him a mint. Though it helped dull some of the rage, neither they nor the drinks made up for the way he had jerked her and DeBryan around.
She wondered obliquely if the photog was also feeling the effects of the alcohol. He was on his third bar drink, too, but she knew he’d started before her in his room. She could smell it on his breath, the sickly sweet smell hanging about him like a fog when he showed up at her door to accompany her to dinner. He hadn’t bothered to iron his shirt and slacks, wrinkled from being packed tightly away. The ruffled look somehow suited him. She herself had given the room’s service bar only a passing glance, mostly out of habit and knowing it so seldom contained anything of interest to her.
The conversation had been awkward to begin, but once the liquor began to work its wiles on her, it muted her internal censor enough that she found herself actually enjoying his company. As the minutes ticked away and Cheong still didn’t show, she hoped he wouldn’t. His tardiness, however, only seemed to irritate DeBryan, and he started cracking jokes about him.
“What the hell is up with that name, anyway?” he said. “I mean, Alvin Cheong? Really?”
Angel had been studying her nails. She’d noticed that one of them had broken sometime, probably during the truck ride that morning and it kept catching on her clothes. Now she turned her head and blinked at him. Both of these actions seemed to take abnormally long and much more effort than necessary. “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” she said, and snorted, remembering an old LP her ex used to play at Christmas. “They must’ve teased that boy something terrible in school.”
“No way he grew up with that name. It’s too . . . Anglo.”
“That’s a bit racist, don’t you think? You don’t know where he was born. Maybe he grew up in Chicago.”
DeBryan gave her a quizzical look. “Chicago?”
“I don’t know,” she hiccupped. Although she suspected she’d said it because Chicago was where David had been born, and he’d been on her mind a lot lately. “His English is better than mine.”
“No, he was born here in Shanghai. His real name’s Lizhen, Cheong Lizhen. Born and lived here till he was thirteen, then his parents moved to Hawaii. He attended college in Massachusetts. MIT. Studied accounting and made his money in the Chinese stock market.”
“Well, Alvin’s a — how do you say? — a preppie name. He could’ve picked it up there. Wait, you’re making this up, aren’t you?”
He chuckled. “No, it’s all true. I looked him up after we checked in, him and this 6X group.”
Angel straightened up in her seat. “How did—? I looked, too, but I couldn’t find anything on either of them. And that helicopter, I emailed a friend to find out who it’s registered to.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Good thinking. I actually had to dive pretty deep into the ‘Net, call in a few favors of my own. There’s this guy I know in NSA, he told me about his real name, so that helped. I’m not sure how much of it I understand or even believe. It’s definitely a strange little . . . . Well, I guess you could call it a pretty damn good plot twist to this story we’re working.”
“What do you mean?” She placed a hand over the top of her drink to signal to the bartender that she was done, and asked for water instead. The buzz was making her regret the martinis, the sloppy way the alcohol made her feel. She didn’t like not being her sharpest when working.
“The group is named for something called the Sixth Extinction.”
“Sounds like a bad John Cusack movie.”
“There are good ones?” He laughed, but quickly sobered up. “The Sixth Extinction is an event that some folks in academic circles and the press believe is happening right now as a result of human activity. The massive extinction of animal species. I’m still trying to understand how 6X fits in w
ith Huangxia.”
“Maybe it doesn’t. I mean, the disaster there was natural, which would explain Cheong’s lack of interest in it. Although,” Angel mused, “some people believe that human activity is causing more extreme weather events.”
“An earthquake is not a weather event.”
“But sea level rise is a direct result of global warming, and that would exacerbate a tsunami.”
“6X’s main focus is technology — artificial intelligence, robotics, smart bullets, and nuclear war, that sort of thing — with the dangers that inevitably arise from unfettered technological advance, not climatologic dangers. Huangxia, an earthquake-created tsunami?” He shook his head. “That’s not really their thing.”
“Well, our buddy Alvin did say we wouldn’t find answers there.”
“Not the answers he’s interested in, anyway. That much is clear.”
“The answers he and this 6X group want us to find? I wonder what they might be. A way to stop the extinctions?”
DeBryan was quiet for a while, peering deeply into his drink. He looked troubled. “Their manifesto, 6X’s, said nothing about preventing extinctions, just preparing for them, as in our own. They seem convinced that the end of the world is a done deal, like it’s just a matter of time before it happens.”
“Great,” Angel said, letting out an unhappy exhale. “Another psycho whack job with an agenda. It’s 2012 and the Mayans all over again.”
“More like Dr. Strangelove.”
“Never saw it.”
“This is the End? No? Not a Seth Rogen fan either?”
Angel shrugged. She didn’t watch much television anymore, not since David left, and she never went to the movies.
“According to my guy, this group is very well-funded and well-connected. The names of lots of very influential folks popped up. So, the question is, are we dealing with a legitimate concern with this extinction thing? Do they know something the rest of us don’t? Or are they just a rich bunch of Doomsday followers?”
