The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (32 page)

Stone walked back in front of the glitzy concession stores in the atrium of the clubhouse, making his way toward the GNN studio.   Super-rich Chinese textile barons circulated with Western bankers from Shanghai and Hong Kong.  Not often those bankers found their chargecards so completely outgunned like this.  Stone quickened his pace as he approached the car dealers’ concessions.

Outside, a scrum of polo players was waiting to test drive the Porsche and Maserati cars.  Before textile exporters from Ningbo and Hangzhou bought them for cash to drive home.  Stone saw her in their midst, in the middle of the crowd.  Virginia, with the polo lads fawning over her still.  Two cars were brought up.   A well-heeled lad stepped up to take the first.  Latino.  Argentinian, possibly, or Uruguayan.  The Italian salesman wasn’t looking at the polo guy.  He’d seen Virginia, and was beckoning her forward to ignore the line and try the car straightaway.  She had this effect on people.

The next few seconds passed in slow-mo.  Stone was trying to make his way towards Virginia.  Her saw her give a flick of the hair to the Maserati salesman - which had the Italian guy practically genuflecting.  All very amusing for her.  Stone waved toward her, but she didn’t see.  Stone saw the Italian bow and open the door for her.  But the passenger door for some reason.  A polo player politely shut the door of the Maserati for her and made another gallant bow before taking his place as her driver.  But then Stone saw a blond haired polo player moved right up behind the first one before he could get in the driver’s seat.  Caught him a punch in the kidneys.  Precise and discreet, two knuckles.  And completely brutal.  The first player’s legs buckled beneath him.  The blond polo player walked round to the driver’s side.  Smiling.  White jeans.  The same dark blue shirt with a red dragon on the breast.  The shirt of the Shanghai Polo Club.  The bastard shot a look of triumph towards Stone as he bent to get in the car beside Virginia Carlisle.  That look from the head-cam video.  Ekström. 

Stone bolted after them through the crowd of polo boys, but the Maserati’s tyres had already spun in the gravel and pulled off.    A Latino kid was feeling for the seatbelt of the second car when Stone hauled him out onto the ground. 

‘Sorry.’

Stone landed low in the bucket seat, hit the accelerator and the engine erupted behind his head.  Blue and red polo shirts scattered in front of him as the Porsche took off with preternatural acceleration.  The needle stood at one hundred by the time he hit the asphalt, but still, the Maserati was already a distant blur of dust disappearing up the hillside.  Maserati, Porsche.  Porsche, Maserati.  Stone backed himself to catch the Maserati, however good a driver Ekström was. 

And for a simple reason.  It was a trap.

Ekström had set some kind of trap for Stone.  What it was, was anyone’s guess.  He’d have to deal with that when he caught up with him.  Always supposing he didn’t hit a tree beforehand, of course. 

Rupert said there were over fifty kilometres of roads on the Balong Estate.  Ekström could be leading him anywhere – even off the Estate and back to Shanghai on the
gaosu
expressway.  Stone wound the car up cleanly, and it held the road gloriously, the backend drifting predictably on the corners, and then gripping positively again to accelerate.

Stone looked ahead to guess at Ekström’s plan.  Realistically, Ekström had to be the better driver.  Stone wasn’t bad, but he hadn’t owned a car for four years and in any case, Ekström wouldn’t try this unless he were confident.  The plan may well be simple.  Draw Stone into a maneuver he couldn’t handle at high speed.  

In that case Ekström shouldn’t have given him the Porsche.  The thing could practically drive itself, and cornered like it was on rails.

He thought of Virginia.  She’d got in the car voluntarily.  She hadn’t even seen him when she got in that car.  She would be completely unaware.  She’d never seen Ekström in her life.  Just another handsome polo player.  Was he going to stop the car in some remote spot and coolly shoot Stone in front of the doyenne of the world’s media?  Unlikely.  And if he killed Virginia, it would cause a stir.  To say the very least.

The Maserati thundered down a hill toward a blind left hand bend and disappeared.  Dust billowed at the corner.  Stone’s mind said caution but he couldn’t let Ekström get away.  He sped up down the hill.  There was a stream flowing away to the right.  Water in the road?  And a stand of trees for the Porsche to skid into?  He thought of Panchen’s primitive ambush just days ago. 

It hadn’t been dust behind the Maserati.  It was smoke.  Ekström had hit the brake hard just before the bend.  Stone stood on the brake in the last fifty metres with the car still straight, lurching forward in the seat.  Just enough, too.  The car aquaplaned in the water as it hit the bend.  The front-left wheel gripped just in time to pull the backend clear of a heavy stone wall on the shoulder. 

So that was Ekström’s game.  Crude but effective. 

Well then.  Stone could be crude but effective too.  He floored the car again and closed up to 200 metres from the Maserati, then kept it there, turning sharply with Ekström through a succession of bends.  The Porsche handled like a dream.  It wasn’t even that difficult. 

The road ran straight again and Stone saw his chance.  A fork.  Ekström was letting up on the gas, allowing Stone to close up on the Maserati.  Stone played ball.  Flipped back on the gear paddle and the Porsche eased up closer.  One hundred metres.  Ekström would give him to have no time to react next time.  As the Maserati curved off to the right, Stone hit the anchors and flipped down into the second gear.   With shriek of the engine and a judder of the anti-lock, the Porsche slowed to a crawl.  No hint of a skid.  He turned off to the right and let the Maserati disappear.

Stone had given up the chase.  He’d drive back to the clubhouse, and leave Virginia to her afternoon’s drive with Ekström.  There was a woman the Swede couldn’t harm without attracting some attention.  Make that a lot of attention.  It would make the evening news if he so much as farted in her presence.  Virginia’s fame would protect her.  In fact Ekström was probably using her as the perfect alibi.  The bastard thought he had it all worked out.

  Stone drove along past another fork and a sign in Chinese and English, which read
Balong Polo Resort and Country Club
in one direction and
Gaosu Expressway, Shanghai, Ningbo
in the other.  He followed the road back to the club.  Perhaps Virginia would be there when he got back, having a cocktail with her new friend.

After what he’d seen in that Atrium building, and after what he’d seen in Oyang’s factory, Stone should have been ready for what happened next.  The Porsche appeared to lose power, but in fact the accelerator pedal was pushing back against the sole of his foot.  The car slowed to a roll.  Then the steering wheel spun in front of him and the car made a handbrake turn on the gravelly surface.  Which took some doing with a four-wheel drive Porsche.  Whoever – whatever – was driving this thing, knew what he was doing.

Stone sat in the stationary car in the middle of the road.  He tried the door.  Locked.  The engine burbled at rest behind his head.  Stone’s seat belt released itself, and a warning light came on in front of him.  Then another, indicating the airbags had been disabled.  Naturally.  And here it comes.  Two more lights to go.  The traction control and anti-lock braking were switched off.  Stone was already searching for the remote control box.  Under the steering wheel, in the glove box?  It must be accessible…

An angry, bloodthirsty roar behind Stone’s head from the engine, and the tachometer needle swung way up into the red.   The Porsche took off with a wild power that forced him almost into the back seat.  Stone braced himself against the racing bucket-seat and began to kick with his heel at the dash and the front fascia of the car to find the remote box that was driving this thing.

Never say those Germans don’t make a solid piece of equipment.  It took Stone over a minute to completely smash in the radio and SatNav, and then lever off the top of the dash, pulling off a large sheet of plastic over a metre in length.  Stone was pulling out leads and wires wherever he could.  It made no difference.  And the remote driver knew his stuff.  Without the seat belt, Stone was thrown across the car about every ten seconds. 

The odd tree and a wall flashed by, but Stone knew where he was going.  Ekström has taken him round that blind bend earlier to show him where he was going to die.  Not good enough to do the job.  Ekström had to be sure Stone knew what was coming, and who was doing this to him.  The car was swerving, slaloming down the straight.  It was all Stone could do to stay in one place on the smooth leather.

He slithered into the back of the car and tried to pull the seats out.  The engine was rear-mounted.  It could be the remote control box had been placed back there.   Maybe it had, but it made no odds.  Stone made no impression on the back seats at all by hammering away at them with the heel of his boot.  He was bent over, hunched, no room to move or brace himself.  The car swerving and turning like a demented teenager on a skidpan.  He felt like a contestant in a Japanese game show – decidedly unfunny and slightly pathetic for even being there.

The car went into a kind of power slide onto the grass at the top of the hill, the kind of thing you only see on TV.  Then he was back on the road.  Whoever was driving had a swagger about them.  A perverted élan.  After the slaloming and sliding, Stone was set for the main event.  The car accelerated down a long straight incline, back towards the blind bend and the stream he’d passed earlier.

Stone squeezed out of the backseat, having barely scuffed the leather with his efforts.  Plan B.  He wrenched the long hunk of plastic from above the dash, then squeezed to fold it lengthways.  The car fell into top gear as it neared the bottom of the hill.  200 km/h.  Not a hope of making that corner, stream or no stream. 

But something told him the driver would give it a try.  And send him slamming like a hockey puck into that stone wall - suitably spectacular for the headlines. 
Wild man Ethan Stone steals car and dies taking corner at ludicrous speed.  What crime was Stone running away from?

The car swung slightly outwards to take the bend.  Stone shoved the plastic dashboard down through the steering wheel, jamming it hard.  The wheel tried to turn back, but too late.  The car held its trajectory, beyond the outside of the bend.  Stone braced himself, arms and head against the steering wheel.  The wheels left the edge of the road, with the engine shrieking in the second or so the car was airborne. 

The Porsche slammed into the bed of the stream.  Not quite what the engineers had in mind when they designed it.  The car slid and rolled on for another seventy metres, then thunked into the rocks in the water. 

The remote driver had been trying to regain control throughout.  The brake pedal was still flattened as the car sat immobile in the riverbed.  As he sat in the stationary car, Stone saw the gearshift move optimistically into reverse and the engine screamed in frustration.  No chance.  The transmission was probably about fifty metres back up the hill.  This piece of German engineering had lived fast.  But sadly, died young.   Stone lay back on the seat again, shielded his eyes, and kicked out the remainder of the broken windscreen.

If Stone was right about what had just happened, some young man in the Atrium of the club had been taking him for that little test drive, but he wasn’t going to find out who.  For now, what he needed to watch out for were the tender ministrations of a certain Swedish gentleman, got up like a Chinese paramedic.

Dusk was half an hour away.  He could run back to the club and arrive unseen.  There was a Swedish gentleman he needed to pay a visit to, unannounced.  But first, Virginia needed to tell him the truth about Semyonov. 

Chapter 57 -
9:19pm 12 April
- Balong Polo Resort and Country Club, Zhejiang Province, China

The labels were written in English, in Roman letters.  But by a Chinese hand.  It was evidently beneath the High Mistress of GNN to write them out for herself.  She’d tipped some hotel functionary to scribe out the baggage labels.  Fedex papers for all ten bags, trunks and parcels, neatly packed in the corridor outside Virginia Carlisle’s suite. 

VJF Carlisle

GNN Worldwide Television News

293 W 43
^rd
Street

New York
NY

The bird was about to fly – or had she already flown?  And who could blame her after her little joyride with Ekström, and Stone’s own motoring mishap for that matter?  Stone gently put an ear to the door.  She hadn’t left yet.  The noise of urgent activity inside attested to the fact.  So did the voices.  He would wait outside for a few seconds.  Adds to the surprise. 

He pondered for a second on what Oyang had said.  Sometimes it suits people to make up stories and legends.  These things could be true.  Or they could be false.  The real questions were about
who was creating the stories
.  And there were a lot of stories about Semyonov, told and retold.  Oyang, certainly, had come up with all kinds of stuff to put Stone off the scent.  Oyang had tried to have Stone killed, and looked the other way when someone had gone after Junko Terashima.   Ying Ning – most of what she had said had turned out to be true.  The only worrying thing about her was that she had disappeared.  Carslake knew more about Semyonov than anyone.  Where he’d grown up, near Manchester, New Hampshire.  His school.  His real name, Steven Starkfield.  His conviction for hacking, who he’d met in prison, his series of illnesses.

 Add what Carslake knew about Semyonov to what Stone had just discovered about Virginia Carlisle, and the picture became a whole lot clearer.   Carlisle herself was the key.