The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (42 page)

‘Stone,’ said Semyonov’s flat New England voice.  ‘Is that you?  Are you there?’

‘It’s Stone.  Can you wind us up?’

‘Sure.’

‘Give me two minutes,’ said Stone and hung up, his mind racing.  He’d agreed with Ying Ning they’d squeeze into the cage together.  It gave them both a chance at least.  And two people in the cage would probably die sooner than one if it came to it. 

Stone climbed in first and tried to hook his bad ankle behind him.  It was excruciating again.  Then it was Ying Ning’s turn to somehow squeeze in with him.  In she came, slinky as ever, somehow fitting in around him.  He thought of the time she’d sat athwart his lap to seduce him in Shanghai.

Stone remembered for a second of the prisoner of war stories he’d read as a child, where the prisoners stripped naked - to create the extra millimetres of space they needed to escape the prison camp through a tight bend in a culvert pipe.  Was it weird to think like of being naked with Ying right now?  He should have succumbed to Ying Ning's seduction in Shanghai.  What the hell had he been thinking?

Stone and Ying Ning were locked into the cage, unmoving for about thirty seconds before the cage slid smoothly upwards and the utter darkness of the half-mile tube began.  Stone was willing the cage up every single metre of its progress.  He hoped Ying Ning was too, but it didn’t look like it.  She was either meditating, or sleeping.  More likely she was scared shitless, but she was incapable of showing any emotion.  Any genuine emotion at any rate.  The cage rattled slowly upwards, at what seemed like about half the speed it had done before.  Was it the extra weight?  Unlikely.  Stone feared the worst.

Which was borne out after what Stone reckoned was about half the ascent.  In fact, knowing Ekström it would halfway to the exact metre.  Anyhow, the cage slowed to a crawl, then finally stopped altogether, with four hundred metres of solid rock above and below.  Stone had half expected it, but had shut his mind to the possibility.  Ekström was torturing them.  He was going for mental torment, and Stone would be lying if he said it wasn’t working.  Even Ying Ning’s eyes were screwed tight.

Ekström could have walked away off the site and left them stranded for a slow death.  That might appeal to him.  He would really get a hard on about that.  But it wouldn’t work.  If Ekström left them there stranded for a slow death, there was a decent chance they would be discovered and rescued.  Stone weirdly found himself hoping that they would be stranded there for a few hours or days. 

But such feelings pass, when you’re stuck in cage hundreds of metres into the rock.  He tried to take refuge in analysis again,

Rationally, there were two things which could come next: either they would continue upwards, or the cage would go into freefall, and they would have a mercifully quick death as the cage hit the bottom.  If the cage went upwards, it would probably stop again and again, to torment them. 

Sure enough, after who knows how many minutes, the cage began to move slowly upward once more, resuming its painful crawl.  Ying Ning’s eyes screwed even tighter.  She wriggled imperceptibly for space.  It was getting to her.  There was a danger one of them was going to freak out in there and it could be her.  Stone was almost glad of the exquisite pain in his ankle to take his mind off it.

The cage stopped again.  Not for as long this time, but at least a few minutes.  Ekström must find it less satisfying – he’d done it once, and anyway he couldn’t see what was happening.  The cage started up again, and they climbed much quicker.  Stone actually shook his head at the crass, twisted feelings which must be driving Ekström’s sadism.  He actually knew what was going to happen next - not that it would help him or Ying Ning.  Ekström actually wanted the pleasure of seeing them stuck in that cage.  What that it?  He wanted them to beg or something?  The cage, after progressing so slowly, was now going up the tube like a rifle bullet, spinning and rattling.  Ekström couldn’t wait for his fix of sadism.  He was interested only in indulging his crude, atavistic urges.

Then, as Stone expected, the cage slowed up to a stop a few metres below the surface.  Maybe ten metres.  So it was still very dark.  Both Stone and Ying Ning stared upwards through the three-way frame of the cage at the small disc of light ten metres above them, Stone full of anger and Ying Ning with her little pointed face: cute but expressionless, supplicating, like a fox staring upwards out of a snare.  Ekström’s face was there in the distance, laughing wildly, his tongue sticking out and swirling lasciviously over his lips.  Stone imagined the man might masturbate over such things. 

Then Ekström’s face disappeared.

‘Go!’ rasped Stone. 

Ying Ning slithered upwards in the cage, angled her shoulders between the bars of the frame and she was off.  Fast. Out through the gap and climbing up the wire in the narrow shaft.  Shit, she was fast, feet on the side of the tunnel and hands pistoning up on the wire. 

There was a sudden sound of sawing, resonating deeply in the wire and the cage.  What the fuck?  Ekström was making to saw off the wire!  It was pure theatre.  He’d never cut through that steel wire.  The grating continued, but Ying Ning was still climbing.  She was going to get out.

Abruptly the sawing stopped and seconds later, the cage jerked upwards, accelerating up the shaft and out into the air.  Still going.  Stone’s cage shot up out of the shaft.  It slammed into the winding wheel and swung Stone wildly round in the air, like a demented fairground ride, five metres above the ground.  Stone scrabbled for the door latch of the cage, but was thrown back and forth.  A loud, single gun shot below him.

Below him, Ying Ning had jumped aside as she came out of the shaft.  She was on the ground making for the controls, where Semyonov was slumped lifeless.  The Great Man had somehow made it to the control desk while Ekström was playing his sadistic games, and brought the cage sharply out of the hole.  Saving Stone’s life.

Ekström had turned and shot Semyonov through the forehead for his troubles, using only one bullet to snuff out all two hundred IQ points.  Now the Swede was lounging there, half-sitting on the control desk next to Semyonov’s inert bulk, smiling pityingly over his shoulder at Ying Ning.  Unable to credit that the little woman would take him on, but happy to kill her anyway.  Ekström leveled the gun at Ying Ning, grinning, just as he had done with Hooper. 

Stone’s fingers groped blindly for the door latch down the outside of the swinging cage. 
The latch, where was the latch
? 

‘Up here,’ Stone yelled, five metres above them.  He meant to distract, but Ekström was too sharp.  The Swede kept his eyes on Ying Ning.  Cocked the handgun.  Stone still couldn’t get his fingers on the latch. 

Ying Ning ducked and scampered forward at Ekström.  Stone’s fingers hit the latch and his body hurled itself from the cage.  He landed on Ekström’s shoulder, putting him down.  But the killer still had the gun.   Ekström rose to one knee, swinging the weapon round at Stone. 

But Stone had bought enough time.  Ying Ning skipped side-on toward them and made a perfect, iron-hard heel kick to the side of Ekström’s head.  A neck-breaker.  Ekström toppled over like a sickening horse, blood coming from his mouth and ears. 

Stone hobbled to his feet, and hopped over to where Semyonov’s high-tech wheelchair was on its side, and the smooth, white bulk of the alien intelligence was lying over the control desk.  Stone checked his pulse, his breathing.  No sign of that asthmatic wheezing anymore.  But for Semyonov, Stone and Ying Ning would have died in that shaft.  Semyonov had just given his life to save them.  It was the final, human act of an alien intelligence. 

Stone looked round to see Ying Ning, the hundred-twenty pound Chinese woman, hauling an insensible Ekström across the dust to the small, round hole in the ground.  She tied the Swede’s hands behind his back with his belt, then shoved him head first down the shaft.  Unceremoniously, like a sack of coal down a chute.

Chapter 75 -
11:34am 15 April -
Shanglan Monastery, Garzê Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

Stone sat with Virginia Carlisle in the incense-heavy room where he’d taken tea with Giyenchen a few days before. 

It turned out Ekström had been inserted into Semyonov’s medical team by Zhang, and offered to help Semyonov by going down the shaft.  Ekström had gone down there unseen, while Stone and Virginia were still wondering what to do with Carslake. 

‘I recognised Ekström when he came back up, as soon as he stepped back out of the cage at the surface,’ said Virginia. 

‘When he’d left us down there for dead?’

‘I guess,’ said Virginia.  ‘Semyonov asked him where you were, and Ekström said you’d been trapped in a rock fall underground.  Steven believed it, but I thought he’d killed you.  That’s when I ran.’

‘You ran?’ 

‘When it comes to “fight or flight”, I’m a flight girl every time,’ said Virginia.  ‘You should try it. Good for your health.’  She was a smart woman.  She’d known when to run from an impossible situation and regroup.  A skill Stone had yet to master.

‘But what about Semyonov?’ asked Stone.  ‘After all you’ve done for him.  You just abandoned him.’

‘Come on, Stone.  Steven had lost it, even I could see that.  He wanted to believe Ekström’s story,’ said Virginia.  ‘He didn’t even try to get away from him.  Steven wanted to believe anyone who said they could get the Machine out of there.  Semyonov knew it was Ekström coming up that shaft, even though he’d told me it was you.  He didn’t care about you.  He didn’t even care about me.  He would happily have seen me killed.  Steven knew he was dying and all he cared about was his Machine.  He stayed there at the top of the shaft.  At the controls – ready to help anyone who could bring it out.  You, me, Ekström, Ying Ning – it didn’t matter who,’ said Virginia. 

‘It might have worked out for him too,’ said Stone.  ‘Only Semyonov weakened.  He took pity on us and pulled us up out of the shaft.  He struggled from his wheelchair and got to the controls when Ekström wasn’t looking, and pulled us out.  Cost him his life.  He could have let Ekström kill us, then go back down and get the Machine’

‘I guess.’

‘Semyonov must have already had second thoughts, though, Virginia,’ said Stone.  ‘Probably when he realised you’d walked out on him.  Semyonov started bringing us up, remember.’

‘Probably Ekström had a gun to his head,’ said Virginia. 

‘No wonder he sounded weird,’ said Stone.  ‘He would have been thinking how he could get out of there.’  

It was all academic now.  Stone looked out of the window again at the deep blue mountain sky, then looked back at Carlisle.  ‘Where were you, Virginia?  How did you know to come up here to the monastery?’

‘I didn’t.  I had no idea where I was, but one of the monks was there,’ said Virginia.  ‘Up by the fence.  A guy called Panchen.  He led me back through the forest to the monastery.  What was I going to do?  There was nothing else around, nothing at all.  The head guy, the head monk…’

‘Giyenchen.’

‘Yes.  He told me that a Chinese woman had persuaded Panchen to bring her to the crater and get her inside.’ 

So Panchen did know how to get inside the fence.  And Ying Ning had persuaded him to take her back there.

‘You knew the Chinese girl didn’t you?’ asked Virginia.  ‘The killer?  She killed Carslake, didn’t she?’

‘Ying Ning?  Yes.  You could say I knew her, but you don’t get to “know” Ying Ning.  I knew when Ying Ning disappeared at the Polo Club that something was wrong, that she wasn’t all she seemed.  I’d no idea she’d kill Carslake though.  At any rate, she’s disappeared again, and that tells its own story.’

‘The old monk’s looking pretty smug at any rate.’  Virginia said, and cast her eyes through the window as Giyenchen floated serenely by.  She was right there.  The head monk was looking like a burnished, brown Buddha, with a look of Yoda about him.  The head monk had seen everything coming, and now was in a position to explain everything.

After a while, Giyenchen materialised quietly at the back of the little chamber, and lit a few more incense sticks in silence.  For once something more than a benign half-smile played on his lips.

‘It seems your friend Ying Ning was with the
Gong An
, Mr Stone,’ said Giyenchen.  ‘The one who called herself the Fox Girl, the dissident, was an agent of the Chinese.’  

Virginia looked shocked, but Stone had guessed it already, when he’d seen what she did to Carslake.  What Stone hadn’t done yet was to think through the implications.

‘It seems Ying Ning was using everyone,’ said Stone finally.  ‘Including you, and me and Carslake, who led her to the find the Machine in these mountains.  And the Japanese woman, whom she used to plant stories in the Western press.  Junko had been passing Ying Ning’s stories to the world -  through Carslake, through Terashima's Japanese blog, even through GNN. ’

‘What was Ying Ning doing though?  What was her plan?’ asked Virginia.

‘She was trying to secure the Machine for China,’ said Stone.  ‘That is all.’

-0000-

The clear air of the mountains, the Yunnan pine and the pink Sichuan pepper flowers in the background.  The cameras were there, and the make-up team.  For once Virginia Carlisle was really on location.  Not just acting in front of a green screen, with a guy in front of her wielding a reflector-board covered in silver foil.

‘
Stories and myths and conspiracy theories seemed to follow Steven Semyonov wherever he went,’
said Virginia to the camera.  She loved that camera.  And the camera loved her.  ‘
And since his death in an auto accident just over a week ago, the rumor-mill producing Semyonov stories has been working even more feverishly.  Sometimes, however, the truth is less exciting than all the stories.  Semyonov knew he was dying, and was coming to spend his last days in seclusion in this Buddhist monastery in Western Sichuan – a place he had visited a number of times in the last year and where his funeral takes place today.  So this was the reason billionaire SearchIgnition founder came to China.  He came here to die, but in the end he was cheated even of his last wish.  In Hong Kong, cars drive on the left.  In China, straight after the border crossing at Lo Wu, they drive on the right.  Steven Semyonov insisted on driving himself that night, and a simple mistake on the ramp of the freeway has cost him his last few days or weeks on earth…’