The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (15 page)

Stone’s cool rational core knew he’d have to be wary of Ying Ning.  Stone always worked better alone, relying on himself, shunning the limelight.  But Stone couldn’t fail to be impressed by Ying Ning.  All she’d done and the way she’d done it.  She was like an opposite version of him.  Female and Chinese, where he was European and male.  And where Stone used Western laws on openness and free speech to evade his enemies, Ying Ning did her stuff in spite of the laws in China. 

Stone’s rational mind urged caution, but he wanted to learn more.

-oO0Oo-

Stone had been surprised that Ying Ning had arranged to meet in her own apartment – and of course she hadn’t.  Ying Ning had Stone walk separately to another tower block ten minutes away, no doubt having him followed as she did so.  It was broiling mid-morning in Kowloon, and it ought to be quiet.  Nonetheless there must be two hundred Chinese people on each hundred metre stretch of sidewalk.  More on the backstreets in the shade.  Street vendors, awnings, hawkers, desultory market stalls.  There was no chance of Stone spotting his follower here, and he gave up the effort.  Stone made it to the tower block as arranged and walked up an airless stairwell for eight stories. 

Ying Ning opened the door.  This must be her real place, entirely different from the place where they’d met.  The apartment was empty, save some bare sticks of furniture and two of Ying Ning’s comrades from China21.  There were introduced as Bao An, the tall biker in the shades, and Lin Xiaohong, shorter, with a shaven head.  There really was nothing in that place.  Kept that way no doubt so that Ying Ning could move on and there would be no evidence of what she was up to.

The room stank of stale smoke, and the two men had on the usual Hong Kong garb of trouser-legs turned up from the ankle, flip-flops and undershirts.  They sat around looking at the ceiling.  It smelt like a surfeit of Chinese-brand whiskey the night before had dulled their senses. 

Ying Ning had wasted no time setting up a laptop to do whatever it was she was going to do.  It looked like some kind of presentation.   

So this was it?  China21?  Four people to protest the exploitation the Chinese workers, the illegal sale weapons and “Semyonov’s capitalist dogs”.  Ying Ning stood in the middle, hand on hip.  She pulled another cigarette from her bag, and a lighter decorated with an image of Mao Zedong.  Then she got on with it, referring occasionally to the laptop and to a file marked “ShinComm” on the table.  Stone was barely listening to her at first.  He was checking out his situation.

Four people?
  And that was including Stone.  In truth, Ying Ning
was
China21.  The two guys were her lapdogs, in it for whatever reasons.   Idealistic or more likely  bewitched by Ying Ning.   

Ying Ning looked every inch an arrogant, opinionated, intellectual bitch, in her tight-fitted top and her black jeans.  Stone let his eyes flit over her once more.    A slight ripple of muscle in her legs.  She sensed him looking, but made no reaction at all. 

Ying Ning talked on, but Stone interrupted. ‘We need to talk about the weapons production at ShinComm,’ he said bluntly.  ‘ShinComm is a maker of Western products, yes?  Mostly designed in USA and Japan.  Smartphones, notebook computers, MP3, electronics, semi-conductor.  ShinComm has quarter of a million workers in a city called Dongguan in the South, and as many at a place called Factory City in Shanghai.  Work is hard, the pay not bad…now.’

That last remark was for Ying Ning.  It had been her campaign that had embarrassed ShinComm in the Western media and forced a forty percent pay increase.

She was immune to flattery however.  ‘You miss the point,’ said Ying Ning. ‘ShinComm is not typical Chinese factory.  Chinese factory works to plans.  Chinese factory does not have ideas.  ShinComm was founded only five years ago, and subsidiary New Machine Technology only one year ago.  Already New Machine makes its own products.  In one year, it made applications for thirty-five patents in the United States.  Also other technology come from ShinComm and New Machine, without even bother to patent.  Including many weapon technology.  This is real mystery about ShinComm.’

Stone picked up the file.  Ying Ning was talking up the weapons angle – and that was probably why she wanted Stone’s help.  But already it was plain to Stone that Ying Ning was right.  ShinComm was a lot more interesting than just the weapons angle.  It was no ordinary Chinese firm.  In fact it was no ordinary firm at all.  Ying Ning’s file detailed one amazing technology after another.  New Machine and ShinComm were a conveyor belt of new technology.  And Chinese firms just weren’t like that.

Another odd thing in the file was the randomness of it all.  Innovations in so many different areas.  Some stuff went to patent, some didn’t.  The SmoothVision video software, with its seemingly limitless resolution – there was no patent, no copyright for that.  It had practically been given away.  Yet Virginia Carlisle’s man had said it was based on fractal mathematics, with no similarities whatever to any other software.  A fundamental innovation.

‘Take this example,’ Ying Ning went on, and she produced a baggie containing what appeared to be about fifty grams of sugar.  She poured a little pile out onto the table.  She licked the tip of her finger, dipped it in the sugar, then tasted it.  ‘Go ahead.  Try,’ she said.

Stone tasted it.  Sure enough, the sweet, bland taste of refined sugar.   

Bao An appeared with a spoon.  Ying Ning crushed the little pile of sugar granules with the back of the spoon, turning them into a thin white powder, then licked her finger once more, looking at Stone in an oddly provocative way.  She gestured him to taste it again. 

‘Cocaine?’ said Stone.  Stone licked his finger and tasted once more.  ‘I got a bitter aftertaste on my teeth back there, after the sugar.  But no odour or taste.  Cocaine, yes?’ 

‘Not bad, Rockhead.’  Ying Ning was impressed  ‘Yes.  Cocaine – high quality too.  Another ShinComm idea.  But how do they do it?’

‘The real question is why,’ said Stone interrupting.  ‘Why do they do it?  This technology is used to smuggle cocaine to China,’ he said.  ‘It says here in the file they use a nanotech system to coat the drug with a layer of sugar
only one molecule thick
.’  The significance was just sinking in with Stone as he spoke.  This was an incredible process, and light years ahead of the big food companies.  Worth billions.  Food companies could coat healthy food in a nanotech layer of sugar, and they would have the perfect low calorie foods.  But here it was, and not even patented.  All that work to disguise cocaine for smugglers?  Made no sense.  This technology was being given away, just like the SmoothVision digital video. 

Stone flipped though the file on the table.  Full of this stuff.  His favourite was the car – like the one he had seen driven by Semyonov, gliding past with preternatural acceleration as Semyonov left the party.  Another piece of outrageous technology.  The news clipping made out that Semyonov had driven from Beijing to Shanghai in that electric sports car.  A thousand miles, without charging it once.  Stone had assumed it was bullshit when he first read it.  But maybe it wasn’t.  It could revolutionize the car industry, yet Semyonov was just driving around in a prototype, and doing nothing with the technology. 

‘Do you see what this means?’ Stone said.  ‘All of this work has been traced to New Machine and ShinComm, the corporation which worked with Steven Semyonov in China.  But where is the innovation coming from?  Where are the labs?’

Ying Ning flicked on the computer.    She pointed to the screen, and zoomed in on a photo of a factory unit.  Perfect resolution, Stone noticed.  SmoothVision again.

‘This is ShinComm at Dongguan,’ explained Ying Ning.  ‘Less than three hundred kilometres from here.  Giant facility, two hundred fifty thousand workers, but…’  Ying Ning paused.  ‘But nothing is happening in Dongguan.  I have local people watching this place.  I have contacts in factory.  They make only phones, computers and semiconductors, All design in America.  Same thing at ShinComm Factory City in Shanghai.’  Ying Ning flicked through images of the two giant factory sites.  ‘No research workers, no labs.  The ideas are coming from a secret facility.  Semyonov and his capitalist whores at ShinComm are selling Chinese secrets for quick money.’

‘Sorry to spoil your story,’ said Stone.  ‘But why would Semyonov do it for the money?  He just committed twenty-five billion to the corporation.  And he’s also dead.’  Ying Ning looked at him.  ‘Bank of China confirmed they received every penny of Semyonov’s money.  They said so in public.  So the question is: why?  Why did Semyonov pay that money?’

‘And where does the technology come from?’ said Ying Ning.  ‘Including weapons?’

 Ying Ning paused, as if she were unsure whether to say something.  Then she took out her Mao Zedong lighter and lit another cigarette, again looking perplexed. 

‘You want to tell us something?’ asked Stone.

Another slide came up on the screen.  ‘This photo was sent to Junko Terashima,’ she said.  ‘From a contact high up in ShinComm, called Oyang.  But we don’t know where this place is.  Junko said she didn’t know.  But Oyang claimed that’s where the technology is coming from.’  It was a photo of a high electric fence, with seemingly nothing behind it.  Stone leaned forward to the screen and zoomed in once more.  No lab or factory, just a few small huts in the distance, with rolling, parched landscape behind, and a clear blue sky, like it was in a desert.  The fence was four metres high, electrified, with cameras.   It was meant to look menacing.

‘Junko received this photo in USA from Oyang.  That is why she comes to Hong Kong.’ said Ying Ning, playing with her Communist cigarette lighter.  ‘And Junko say this place is the reason why Semyonov came to China.’

‘This is the Machine?’ asked Stone.

Ying Ning nodded.  ‘Oyang sent her this photo,’ she said.  ‘He said it was the reason Semyonov came to China.’

‘And it was the reason Junko came to Hong Kong.  But now she’s dead, and so is Semyonov,’ said Stone.

Ying Ning nodded.

‘Sounds like we need to have a chat with your Mr Oyang,’ said Stone.

Ying Ning laughed and shook her head.  ‘Oyang?  And finish up like Junko?  Maybe you are stupid, Rockhead.  But I take you to Shanghai to show you something.  You will be surprised.’ 

 Chapter 27 -
7:05pm 31 March Special Circumstances Training Facility, Southern California

Ekström froze the video clip on his widescreen monitor at two minutes thirty-three seconds, and scribbled some notes on his iPad.  He hated deskwork as a rule – but this wasn’t so bad.  He zoomed with the SmoothVision slider, and looked at the range indicator on the weapon.  780 meters to the wall of the Afghan compound.  The infrasound weapon was run at 95 per cent power with focused beam for 85 seconds.

He resumed the video and slid forward to eleven minutes on the clip, to see the first results of the firing.  Two kids lying prone in a dusty lane, a woman in her twenties and a young girl in a doorway, an old man with a donkey collapsed on top of him.  Then a video of the inside one of the “dwellings”, as he was meant to call them.  Shitholes more like. The video showed a woman lying half-naked in a scuzzy bedroom with clay walls. 

And so on.  In the eight and a half minutes between the weapon discharge at a range of nearly half a mile, and his men reaching the site, the whole village had stayed incapacitated.  Four had been killed by the eighty-five second burst.  Three children under five, including one breast-feeding baby lying with his inert mother, and an elderly man.  These small children had suffered major hemorrhage in the ears and lungs.  They had died from inhalation of blood, with no one able to help them.

Ekström had ordered the bodies brought from the village and laid out together under the trees.  The first sign of recovery from the villagers was at twelve minutes, and the last at twenty-two.

Forty-four adult villagers and adolescents had been used for the second phase of the work.  They had been tied in pairs to trees, and exposed to the weapon at a range of 250 metres through a one metre thick compound wall.  Varying power discharges and exposure times were tested, with the figures written neatly on their foreheads in black marker pen.  Those who survived the test, by reason of having a lower dose of the sound weapon, Ekström personally dispatched them with a single shot of his .22 automatic to the forehead, after ensuring their heart function and blood pressure had been recorded, along with their time of exposure, in black permanent marker on their chests.

The mean exposure of the infrasound weapon required for human adult death was 113 seconds, with a standard deviation of 25 seconds

Details of non-human deaths were not recorded, which in hindsight had been an error.  The men responsible for letting the two Afghan boys escape were docked two days pay each.  The village was declared sterile of native Afghans at 13:34 in the afternoon and the airstrike to dispose of the collateral bodies called at 14:13.  Ekström ordered his men to move out 14:07, returning with three men on foot at 14:33 to verify that the bodies had been destroyed.

Though he enjoyed the detail and neatness of a job well done, Ekström would be lying if he said he enjoyed anything more than the incendiary weapon striking at the bodies through the line of trees.  He watched it a dozen times, zooming in and out.  In real time and in slow motion, Ekström watched the trees waving gracefully in the firestorm, and the skin peeling back from the faces of his victims.  Most gratifying.

   Sometimes he had to pinch himself.  Did he really get paid to do this?  It was his dream job.

Chapter 28 - 12:40pm
1 April -
Hung Hom, Hong Kong

Ying Ning sat astride Stone’s lap, her face centimetres from his. ‘Try not to become
excited
,’ she said with casual irony, massaging her butt into his groin. It was another of her "tests".  Stone was sitting in a chair with Ying Ning facing him, holding a hypodermic syringe.  He closed his eyes once more as the Chinese girl rubbed his brow with alcohol gel, and then jabbed the needle in.