by Greg Dragon
“It could be a religious thing. You know, the Rapture.”
“Eschatology doesn’t seem to be their thing, either.” He shook his head. “No, it’s technology. And it really terrifies me seeing the amount of money pouring into this group. I mean, these people are super serious.”
“Why does that scare you? Let them waste their money playing their little fantasy games, as long as it doesn’t affect me.”
“But it might. Like I said, I get this feeling that they know something’s coming. Or . . . .” He shook his head. “Or that they’re behind it.”
Angel chuffed at him.
“You put that much money into something,” he said firmly, “you expect a return on your investment. I can’t help wondering if 6X is bent on making sure that end is realized.”
“Now you’re saying they want global destruction, that they’re crafting some massive disaster to make a point?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m saying. But money does make the world go round, so I suppose it could just as well make it stop. These people could very well be gleefully driving us toward some apocalyptic precipice of their own making. Self-fulfilling prophecies are the easiest to render.”
“Apocalyptic precipice. That sounds positively grim.” She frowned playfully at him, but the look on his face made her stop and look away. For just a moment, he looked utterly terrified, and it scared her.
He coughed uncomfortably. “Sorry, alcohol tends to take me to gloomy places.”
“Well, you can raise your suspicions with the man himself,” she said, jutting her chin at the mirror behind the bar. “Here he comes.”
Between the cut crystal display bottles of Glenfarclas, Macallan, and Dalmore behind the bar, they could see the reflection of their host making his way toward them across the darkened room. Angel was almost relieved to see him, though at the same time a feeling of dread had settled over her. What if DeBryan were right? Don’t be silly. They turned and stood, and when Cheong reached them he nodded and gestured toward the dining room. He still wore his gloves. He didn’t bother with the courtesy of removing them.
“I’m pleased to see that you’ve made yourselves comfortable,” he said, wending his way between candlelit tables. “And afforded yourselves of all the hotel’s amenities.” At this, he turned to DeBryan with a knowing glance. “You found the business lounge computers to your satisfaction?”
Once more, DeBryan coughed uneasily, but Cheong seemed nonplussed. “Good. It means we can dispense with the formalities and get right down to business.”
He waved at a server, who hurried over to seat them, and ordered three bottles of Lauquen Artes water. “Virgin glasses, please. Standard treatment. No ice. And open everything at the table.”
“Of course, sir.”
“For someone who believes the end of the world is nigh, you spare no expense,” DeBryan said.
“Precisely why I do. What good is all the money in the world after it ends?”
“Bet you don’t believe in rainy days, either.”
Cheong gave him a wry smile. “Let’s just say I’ve hedged my bets on several different horses, including the long shot. Nobody knows when the end will come, just that it will.”
“Might be a hundred years from now,” Angel said. “Or a thousand. Your bones could be dust when it finally happens. Your dust could be dust.”
She silently cursed the way her tongue felt in her mouth, the way her words seemed to trip over each other. She hoped they didn’t notice.
“A hundred years? Possibly. Certainly not a thousand.” He stopped when the waiter brought them their menus and told them the day’s specials. Angel noticed that the server was now also wearing gloves, except that his were white. When he left, Cheong said, “We are on the brink of a great transition, my friends. I believe we will see a massive global event within the next two decades.”
“Bet you use that line on all the girls, trick them into going back to your room with you.”
Angel gasped in shock and threw a hand over her mouth. But Cheong just laughed at DeBryan’s crude remark. “One’s outlook does certainly shift when the end is clearly in sight.”
“So you’re not denying it, the girls, I mean.”
“I am a faithfully married man, Mister DeBryan.”
“With children?”
“No, it would be irresponsible to bring children into such a world, wouldn’t it? But you already know these details about me.”
DeBryan nodded without hesitation.
“Seems fair,” Angel said. “You seem to know a lot about us.”
“It’s standard practice for an employer to do background checks on prospective hires.”
“I didn’t realize we were interviewing for jobs.”
“Well, I was hoping to hire just you, Missus de l’Enfantine, but I’ll take you both if necessary.” He made no apologies to DeBryan, and instead simply gestured at their menus, suggesting that they make their decisions.
Suddenly, Angel wasn’t hungry. She’d been looking at the swordfish, but now she wondered what her host might think if she ordered it. Was he some kind of environmental nut who only ate free-range, non-GMO, organically grown and humanely harvested foods? Maybe he was a vegetarian.
“The Milanese sounds delicious,” he said, referring to the exact dish she had been eying. He lowered his menu slightly and peered over the top edge at her.
“I— I think I’ll just have a salad.”
He shrugged.
After their bottled water arrived in a curious sleeve of black metal and was served, they ordered their meals. Finally Mister Cheong made his proposal. He wanted Angel — and DeBryan, if he were so inclined — to work for 6X investigating a series of mysterious disasters which had been occurring across the globe. “We know they’re linked, we just don’t know precisely in what way or who’s behind them.”
“Why me?” Angel asked, resisting the urge to rub her temples. Her buzz was wearing off, and her head was starting to pound.
“You have a unique skill set. With your medical background and your journalistic mind, you know which questions to ask, how deeply to look, and you’re not afraid to do what’s necessary to uncover the truth, even if it means getting your own hands dirty.”
“I’ve never taken a bribe in my life!” she snapped.
“Apologies. I didn’t mean to imply. I was referring to the article you wrote for Newsweek this last fall, the one exposing Israel’s secret cloning program. That is just the kind of effort and focus we need right now, assertive and keen yet evenhanded, undeterred by political agendas. “He grinned at her. His teeth were yellow and badly aligned, desperately in need of orthodontic work. “Fearless,” he finished.
Angel frowned. There was talk that the article might win her a Pulitzer, but it had also earned her enemies. She was persona non grata right now in the international Jewish community, despite the fact that she’d defended much of the group’s foundational work and believed in their stated mission to alleviate human suffering. It was the militaristic applications which she had criticized. After initially denying the existence of this arm of the program, the Israeli government tried instead to discredit her. But their efforts fooled nobody. Notably, her article had convinced Israel’s neighbors enough to unify them into a rare coalition.
“Undeterred?” she muttered, laughing dryly. “Fearless? Like I was today?”
“Something tells me you haven’t quite given up on Huangxia,” Mister Cheong said, still smirking. “I hope to dissuade you, at least for the time being, not to disprove my judgment of your character, but by convincing you that there is a bigger prize to be had. Huangxia is nothing but a small jewel in a very large, very intricately designed crown.”
“You mentioned several disasters,” DeBryan said. He was feeling a little left out. It chaffed at him that Cheong included him in this conversation only as an afterthought. He felt like a consolation prize. “Which ones specifically do you mean?”
“
I have a list,” Cheong said, turning to face him. “I’ve sent it to both your phones.”
“Which were smashed.”
“Ah, of course. Again, my apologies.” He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a pair of cell phones and handed them over. They were the exact same makes and models as the ones they’d lost earlier in the day. “I also have a replacement for your missing camera. I’m afraid it was — ahem — never recovered. Oh, and I’ll have to ask for your burner phone.”
DeBryan sniffed in surprise. After they’d been able to debark from the coast guard boat without another search, Angel had offered to give back his micro-flash card, but he’d asked her to hold onto it for the time being. “And if I refuse?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
DeBryan reluctantly reached into his pocket and handed the phone over. It quickly disappeared into Cheong’s jacket.
The food arrived then, and they waited as the server offered them cracked pepper and grated cheese. Cheong ordered three more bottles of the water. Once more, they were delivered inside the strange black sleeve. Finally, they were left alone again.
“The list details a series of relatively small disasters, a few dozen to a few hundred casualties at most occurring at each, which the group suspects are trial runs for a global event,” Cheong said, testing the firmness of his fish with his fork, though he didn’t take a bite. Angel gave it a yearning look before lowering her eyes to her meager salad. She grabbed another roll from the basket and wrenched it apart.
They better have a damn good dessert menu, she thought.
“I won’t bore you with the details tonight,” Cheong went on. He sat with his hands to either side of his plate, not eating, though he gestured for them to go ahead. “You can look at the list later and do your own cross-checking. Right now I only want to talk about the one which happened two days ago.”
Angel glanced over at DeBryan to see if he had heard anything, but the look of consternation on his face indicated that he was just as much in the dark about it as she was.
“There was a train wreck,” Cheong said, “a few hundred miles north of here in Inner Mongolia, near a place called Baoyang.”
“A train wreck?” Angel repeated. “What was on it?”
“People. Two hundred and twelve, to be precise.”
“Just . . . people?”
“That’s what we need you two to go and verify.” He removed a slip of paper from his breast pocket and slid it over the table to her. “There’s the name and number of a contact. I’d like you to start with him.”
“But—”
He waived the server over and murmured something in Chinese. Then Cheong pushed himself away from the table and pulled his coat back on. “Please, stay and finish your dinners. Order whatever you like; it’s all paid for. I’ll expect your answer in the morning.”
And with that, without taking a single bite of his hundred dollar swordfish, Alvin Cheong excused himself.
Chapter Six
DeBryan stood by his door across the hall and watched her as she slid her card key into the slot in the security mechanism. Angel sensed that paternal instinct in him again, and it both irritated and amused her. The light turned green and beeped. She bade him good night, which he politely reciprocated, and entered her room.
A long entryway preceded the suite, opening onto a large, sumptuously adorned entertainment area. A kitchenette branched off to the left. None of this was visible at the present, as she’d neglected to leave any lights on when she left, a lapse for which she now scolded herself. Behind her, the tiny circle of light from the peephole in the door offered no assistance and instead felt like an accusing eye focusing its laser sight upon her back. In a moment of pique she imagined DeBryan standing on the other side of the door looking in through it, trying to check up on her, and she chastised herself for being so self-absorbed.
The only other light came from the glowing green digital panel on the room’s thermostat a couple meters away.
Angel sighed and unbuttoned the top of her blouse so she could remove her traveler’s wallet from around her neck. The thin pouch held her identification papers, passport, credit cards, and a small amount of cash, mostly American bills, though she still had a handful of South Korean banknotes from her brief stay in Seoul. The damn thing had a loose stitch, and it had irritated her all evening.
Feeling along the wall, at last her fingers settled upon the switch. The panel was one of those with the wide, low-profile buttons set nearly flush with the wall, and she had trouble flicking it on.
She couldn’t blame the alcohol. That had worn off hours before, as she and DeBryan sat in the hotel’s smoky cocktail lounge and talked by the massive stone fireplace. She had cut herself off at dinner, after sheepishly ordering a glass of white wine to go with Cheong’s uneaten fish, which she’d helped herself to, and instead stayed with colas. Meanwhile, DeBryan ordered snifter after snifter of some sinfully expensive brandy and never seemed to show any sign of becoming intoxicated.
After realizing that the lists on their phones required specialized software to open and read, they both decided that whatever it was could wait. Neither of them was all that eager to return to their rooms to retrieve a computer. The relaxed atmosphere in the lounge made it easy to forget the matter entirely. Or at least dismiss it for the time being. After a while, in fact, the whole 6X situation began to feel more and more like some ridiculous prank, the whimsy of a cult of spoiled and disillusioned conspiracy theorists.
Angel found it easy to listen to DeBryan. He had one of those gravelly voices, and he spoke with an easy drawl as he vividly recounted many of his adventures in the wild. He had a way of describing his escapades in a humorous way, which made her feel warm and young and wishing she could be as carefree as he seemed to be, even though he was easily her senior by a good ten, fifteen years. He confessed a secret lifelong fantasy to document some newly discovered or poorly understood Amazonian tribe or Pacific Island culture, though he acknowledged that his opportunity to do so was permanently lost to globalization and technological advancement. “Thanks in part to Google World, I’m afraid there simply are no more great anthropological discoveries left to be made.”
Sitting there with his drink in his hand, deep in thought, he looked more like a philosopher than a photographer.
He did not ask her again about her family, and for that she was grateful. It wasn’t just that it was a dark part of her life that she would rather not bring to light. After Cheong’s mention of the Newsweek article, she feared the subject might be resurrected, inevitably leading to her husband, and that was a subject she certainly wanted to avoid.
Finally, after excusing herself for about her hundredth yawn, she forced herself out of the chair. It was warm and soft and only relinquished her with considerable reluctance. But she was exhausted. And she had to pee yet again. It was half past one in the morning and she wasn’t looking forward to the long trek to the elevator. Or getting up in a few hours. Especially since she still had no plan for what to do next.
As they exited the elevator, she felt she needed to make herself perfectly clear regarding Cheong’s offer. They hadn’t spoken outright about it after the frustration of not being able to open the files, certainly hadn’t made any decisions. Nevertheless, she was pretty sure they’d come to some sort of unspoken agreement not to take the assignment. As a seasoned reporter, to her the opportunity just smelled wrong. Cheong struck her as an over-indulged millionaire with too much time, money, and imagination on his leather-clad hands. But she needed to make sure DeBryan was on the same page.
“I’m going back to Huangxia,” she told him. And he nodded and didn’t look surprised in the least. “So, we’ll decide what to do in the morning.”
“It is morning.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Goodnight.”
“ ‘Night.”
And that was that.
At last the switch on the
wall yielded to the pressure in her knuckles and clicked into the ON position. The entryway flooded with light. Ahead of her, the plush white couch jumped out of the shadows deeper in the room, and the lamps and vases twinkled at her. Stepping briskly forward, she found another switch and turned it on, then placed her traveler’s wallet onto the table.
She frowned, sensing that something wasn’t right.
Her eyes shot to the sliding door and the balcony beyond. The curtains were still drawn shut, but they fluttered slightly. Had she closed the door before leaving? She wasn’t sure she had. And as she crossed the space she found herself looking at the gap between the floor and the bottom of the curtain for the telltale tips of an intruder’s shoes. But there was no one there. She pulled the heavy curtains aside and slid the door shut, cutting off the distant traffic sounds and the other noises of Shanghai city eleven stories below.
Everything in the room was in its place— the television on the stand against the left wall, the chairs, lamps, magazines, and fresh flowers were all there. Nothing seemed disturbed. And yet—
She couldn’t place her finger on it exactly, but she could sense it. A faint smell, maybe. The air felt different, disturbed. Someone had been here, maybe still was.
“Allo?”
She turned down the next hallway and glanced quickly into the bathroom.
Nothing. Her toiletry bag was right where she’d set it on the marble countertop. The courtesy hairdryer still resting beside the sink where she’d let it cool. A baggie with her toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste.
The shower was empty. She could see that from the door, could see through the glass enclosure. The towel she’d dropped, still a wet mass in the corner, though it would be mostly dry by now.
Across the hallway, the door to the master bedroom. She pushed it open—
The room was in complete disarray.
Pins prickled the skin on her palms and neck. The sensation spread down her back, breaking her out into a cold sweat. If she weren’t wide awake before, or completely sober, she was now.
