The Machine Page 8

  And “self-publicist”. Stone loved that one. There could be no stronger insult from Zhang. He’d probably spent forty years fighting for his ideals, watching his country destroy itself through the Cultural Revolution, then rebuild, but Zhang was devoted through it all to the memory of Mao Zedong. Equality. The Communist system. The Iron Rice Bowl. Only to find that after Zhang's lifetime of loyalty, it was the regime itself which had abandoned Communist ideals.

  ‘I campaign against war, weapons trafficking and people who make fortunes from weapons,’ said Stone. ‘I am still a soldier. I am a soldier for peace; and you are a warrior of the mind, Professor Zhang. We have much in common.’ He knew it would be irritating.

  ‘Please, Mr Stone,’ spat Zhang contemptuously. ‘You are SAS. Your exploits may dazzle the young women who chase after you, but your soul is that of a killer. The SAS kills people. My file tells me you are a killer, Mr Ethan Eric Stone. And you think you can carry on your filthy trade in China.’

  Stone’s cool grey eyes looked back at the leathery face. ‘No, Professor,’ he said. ‘Your file tells you I gave up violence when I left the army. My methods are unorthodox, but I am no killer.’ At least he was gaining some kind of engagement with Zhang now. ‘Your intelligence tells you that I never got to Terashima’s room. I’d be amazed if you hadn’t ID-ed Johan Ekstrom as the killer. Also, your intelligence tells you that I went to Semyonov’s little “party” to confront him about his export of weapons from the People’s Republic of China.’

  ‘China does not need capitalist running dogs like Ekstrom to sell its goods,’ said Zhang. The words were full of contempt again, but Zhang had shown he knew about Ekstrom too. That was a guess on Stone’s part.

  ‘What about Semyonov?’ asked Stone, looking down.

  ‘He is a great friend of the Chinese people,’ observed Zhang again. His stock phrase on the subject.

  ‘He’s just handed over his whole fortune — twenty-five billion dollars — to a Chinese state enterprise. An enterprise with no sales or products supposedly. Or is nice Mr Semyonov helping China with some new weapons?’

  ‘You think you are clever, English, but you are mistaken. Semyonov laoshi is here to work on the Machine. Nothing else.’

  There. Zhang had sprung a surprise of his own, and was looking suitably pleased with himself. And it had worked. Stone was surprised. “The Machine”? Also Zhang referred to Semyonov back there as “laoshi”. Teacher. Why would he do that?

  ‘You think you know it all, Stone. But your understanding is that of an imbecile,’ Zhang continued. ‘Twenty-five billion dollars is a small price to pay to work on the Machine.’

  The Machine — Zhang had thrown that out there for a reason, had he? He was fishing to assess what Stone knew about it. The answer was nothing, but Stone had to keep him talking.

  ‘Semyonov is an exceptional man,’ said Stone. Zhang nodded sagely. ‘Is that why China has allowed him to collaborate on The Machine?’

  Abruptly the grey steel door opened at the back of the room. An officer strode over to Zhang, speaking to him in rapid Mandarin.

  Zhang’s eyebrows shot upward in consternation. Zhang jumped to his feet, anxiety on his face for the first time.

  ‘Shi duide ma? Ta si le?’ Stone got that bit at least. Is it true? He’s dead? Who was Zhang referring to? Or it could be “she’s dead”. Junko?

  Zhang was still standing, looking distracted, like he didn’t know what to do next. He looked round at Stone, almost as an afterthought, as if what he’d just heard had made him forget everything.

  ‘Tell me truthfully. Do you know how Miss Terashima died?’ Zhang asked.

  Stone said nothing. He’d seen the video clip of a girl’s death. Zhang’s question meant they hadn’t even been through Stone’s laptop yet.

  ‘An insect bite,’ Zhang said. ‘Most unusual to die so quickly, even here in the tropics. We tested the venom. Japanese hornet, if you please,’ said Zhang in his deliberate English. ‘Seven centimetres long and quite deadly.’

  Stone stared insolently back. ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘It is of no consequence whether you believe it, English,’ sneered Zhang. ‘I assure you the Japanese hornet’s eight different venoms in the bloodstream are unmistakable. Besides. My men found this in the hotel…’ Zhang took something from his pocket and tossed it on the table towards Stone.

  ‘We will talk later,’ said Zhang. ‘For now, I permit you to rest, English. In your cell. I thought it only right to reserve a special cell for you. Built a century ago by the British Imperialists. Very old and very small. I think hot and dirty. The insects also are quite disagreeable.’

  Zhang’s eyes creased with a hint of pleasure as he strolled from the room. Stone looked at the desk and examined the object Zhang had thrown to him. It was the carcass of a huge, multicoloured bug, about seven centimetres long — the Japanese hornet. Except it wasn’t a real insect at all. It was man-made — a beautiful manufacture of metal and plastic.

  Chapter 17 — 4:02pm 29 March — Special Circumstances Training Facility, Southern California

  At four in the afternoon on 29th March, Ekstrom received another order from SearchIgnition Corp for an assassination in Hong Kong. This time it looked more interesting, and the location suggested a very fitting method for the execution.

  Ekstrom authorized deployment of the South East Asian regional asset based in Hong Kong for the procedure. A text alert was sent, followed by an encrypted email with Ekstrom’s detailed instructions and photographs of the target.

  Subject: Ethan Eric Stone, United Kingdom National

  Location: Old Bailey Prison, Central, Hong Kong

  Chapter 18 — 7:54am 30 March — Old Bailey Prison, Hong Kong Island

  Stone was hooded again and taken down several flights of stairs.

  So. Stone would have to pay a price for irritating the Gong An investigator. Zhang wanted to punish him for his impudence. The cell they found for him hadn’t been used for decades and was filthy. It must have been an effort for the local police to find anything like that in their orderly detention centre.

  Stone sat on the cold brick floor and thought again of the video he’d seen the night before. Could the violently coloured insects he’d seen crawling over the terrified girl’s body really have been man-made? And if so, who the hell had made them purely for an assassination?

  There were other questions popping still, basic questions that wouldn’t go away. First — why? If Semyonov was doing all this — making weapons, testing weapons on live subjects, murdering journalists — then why? Semyonov had everything, literally everything. Yet he had sold it up and given away the money. So why? To go and work on the Machine, according to Zhang. Could that possibly be true?

  Stone was in a filthy prison cell in Hong Kong. Things weren’t exactly going according to plan. He’d come out here in a blaze of anger over the cold-blooded killing of Hooper. That was the truth if he was honest. He’d seen some of what Junko Terashima knew, and he had evidence that the weapons in Afghanistan came from Semyonov’s firm — New Machine Tech, or ShinComm or whatever. It had looked like a clear case. Tech genius is exposed for dabbling in exotic weapons, dozens of villagers dead. Plus Hooper. It looked even more obvious when Semyonov ran away from the US taking every cent with him.

  But things weren’t that simple. Terashima was dead, and her information with her. And now there was something called the Machine. By rights Stone should go on home, do some research and figure it out. But as of now, in a sweltering Hong Kong prison cell, that was not one of his options.

  After a few hours in solitary, things took a still more sinister turn. He heard a loud argument between the prison staff outside his cell. Another hour, and the door opened. Stone was cuffed once more and taken back up into one the main wing of the prison. No hood this time. He’d become a regular prisoner, and that was not a good thing.

  This was an institution built to intimidate, constructed by the British a
long the lines of the Victorian jails back home. It was underground, with brick walls, apparently metres thick, painted over in shit brown and a nauseous, creamy yellow, and smelling of carbolic soap. Even the hallway of this prison wing was claustrophobically narrow and low, with the heavy steel doors of the cells close together along the wall. No natural light, and the air felt dead and sweaty. Like an ancient, brick-built cave with striplights. It was brutally clean, though, and the brickwork made smooth from a century and a half of repeated painting. It had seen some misery, this place. An airless hole, redolent of an age of judicial whippings and regular hangings.

  The cell doors were of steel plate and bars, and as Stone was led along the hall, a hellish noise of banging grew up, the inmates hammering their tin plates and rice bowls against the bars, hollering in half a dozen tongues. Chinese, Indian, Malay and then the odd African and European.

  Stone realised something. They were staring and hollering at him. He was shoved in a cell. The warder unlocked his cuffs, then clanged steel door behind him, but the banging and shouting behind him scarcely abated.

  Stone looked around the small cell. Like the rest of the place, it was small, old — but clean, painted over and over in the same sickly yellow. No window of course. Stone’s was the upper of two bunk beds. For a second he thought he was alone in there, until he noticed a man in the shadows, scrunched into a ball on the lower bunk, his hands over his ears. A white man, hunched and folded, like a frightened monkey. Stone climbed up onto his bed and lay looking at the ceiling, forty centimetres or so from his face.

  It was an hour later, long after the noise had calmed down, when the terrified man below him spoke.

  ‘They’ll kill us, you know.’ It was a New Zealand accent. ‘They said they’re going to kill us and they will.’ His voice was weak and trembling. Then he said, ‘Is it true? Did you kill the whore in the Snake Market? They say she was tortured and murdered.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Stone. ‘This is place is OK. It’s old, but it’s well run. The guards here won’t let anything happen to you. Neither will I.’

  That didn’t cut any ice. ‘It’s not me. They’re going to kill you, because you killed the whore. They’ve told me already. But they’ll have to kill me too, I know they will. To stop me talking.’

  Stone looked down. The guy’s eyes were tight shut. Stone jumped down from his bunk and began to coax out of this shrivelled individual what he had heard.

  It turned out the man’s name was Williams. A businessman from New Zealand — a quiet husband and father by the look of it — who was tempted to the Ming Dai Hotel that day with a prostitute. Williams didn’t know much more, but he’d been seen in the Ming Dai, and then a girl had been murdered — tortured and murdered. By a white man. Williams had been arrested and ended up in this Victorian hole deep below the streets of Hong Kong.

  This kind of made sense as far as it went. But what was wrong with this picture? Why were Stone and Williams in the same cell? They were held in connection with the same crime — the killing at the Snake Market. Why put them in the same cell, where they could concoct stories and alibis? Also, before Stone had even arrived on the wing, word had gone out that he’d tortured and murdered the girl. Who would do that?

  This was Zhang’s way of expressing displeasure with Stone. Maybe even getting rid of him. Stone asked Williams if he’d seen anyone resembling Ekstrom at the Ming Dai, or whether he’d actually seen Junko Terashima. Williams was no help at all, had no information. He was going to pieces, dissolving into guilt.

  ‘I love my wife so much. I’ve never been tempted to cheat before,’ said Williams, squeaking in his New Zealand accent. ‘Now I’ve landed myself in this place, locked in a tiny cell with a murderer. It’s God’s judgement on me.’

  What a worm. Williams stayed crushed up in the corner of the bunk like some kind of contortionist, whining over and over about how he loved his wife, and if only he hadn’t strayed, and this was God’s way of punishing him, yadda yadda. He sounded more scared of his wife than anything that might happen to him in that hole in Hong Kong.

  Williams wanted literally to hide — to curl into a ball in the shadows on the lower bunk. But hiding isn’t easy in a prison, and if the other prisoners really wanted Williams, which Stone doubted, Stone didn’t rate the guy’s strategy too highly.

  But if they wanted Stone? He couldn’t see why, but something was going down in that place. If some prisoners did come looking for him, Stone would be ready when they found him. He was better of out of the way of Williams though. Stone would look weak merely by association with the man. In a place like this, looking strong is nine parts of being strong. Better to keep that pathetic creature Williams out of it. Stone would leave the cell when he got the chance — and see who came looking for him.

  Dinner was served in the cells. Stone ate his rice at the bars of the cell, eye-balling the shouters and plate-clangers from his cell. He wanted to see their eyes, to see who meant it. There were a couple of big Malaysian guys who were looking at him silently. They could mean trouble. On the other hand it could be anyone.

  A couple of hours after dinner, the cell doors were finally opened and prisoners escorted out in turn to make their ablutions. This could be it.

  A clear head is the best weapon. So many men, even big, strong, musclemen, feel stress going into a fight. They start the fight on a ninety-five percent stress level, which creates negative thoughts of what might happen. Unexpected stress points can cause a domino effect of negative thoughts. Inarticulate, looping, draining thoughts. Stress piles on stress, and each sight or sound can paralyse the mind. In fact it certainly will paralyse the mind. And if you’re not thinking, you’ve already lost.

  The answer is obvious, but not easy to achieve. Keep a calm clear head, and put the stress onto the other guy.

  The cell door clunked open. Stone turned to Williams and ordered him to stay in the cell. No explanation. As his cell door swung wide, Stone smiled at the warder and walked out. The prison guard avoided his eye. Did that mean anything? The Malaysians were giving Stone the stare, trying to look wolfish and hard, laughing to each other. But the laugh said they were nervous, distracting themselves. As the time approaches stressful thoughts would be coursing through them, distracting, making it all happen too fast. Ten, twenty, fifty stress impulses a second can cascade through the mind. Only the highly trained and the bone stupid can avoid it, and these Malaysians weren’t stupid. They’d likely been paid by one of Zhang's acolytes. Were they up to their task?

  The entrance to the shower room was a low hole in the nauseous cream and shit brown of the prison wall. The prisoners had to stoop to get in and there was a press at the door. The Malaysians jostled to stay behind him. They would know the routine, the times when the warders weren’t looking.

  Eight at a time went through to the showers and Stone found himself in the last bunch. He stayed back to wait for the Malaysians. Unfair not to give them an opportunity. As they went through, the inmates began to undress and to use the toilet, pissing like horses, glad not to have to use the latrines in the cells. Stone looked around. There were three Chinese warders with batons. The room was tiled white, floor to ceiling. Easy to clean away the blood — the perfect location. Stone began to undress, but stood tall, looking around, eyeing the Malaysians, keeping only the warders at his back.

  Stone bent to take off his trousers — a moment of danger when he couldn’t jump out of the way. Here it came — Stone snatched the pants back up as one guy leaped for him. Stone raised his hands, but the Malaysian backed off, looking at something behind Stone. Stone’s head flicked round — too late. His arms were grabbed from behind. Two of them on him, behind his back. He couldn’t see them. He tried to kick out backwards, to trip them, up-end them on the wet tiled floor, but his trousers were round his thighs. It was all he could do to stay upright and whoever it was back there was strong. They had his upper arms pulled right back. Nothing he could do about it.

  W
as it Zhang who had planned this stunt? Whatever. Someone had definitely told the guards to disappear. There were three of them a second ago. Unless…

  He tried to shove them sideways, to get them to fall. It would be a start. But his feet barely gripped the floor at all. The men behind held him up. They had a plan, these guys. He’d underestimated them, and it was about to get worse.

  Boom! The first blow to his kidneys. Then another. Heavy blows, expertly applied. A few more blows like that and he was dead. Stone let himself vomit after the third, half-digested rice spilling down his chest to the tiles. He’d have to play dead — pretend to be finished, out of it. Not much of a plan, but…

  Stone opened his eyes for a second. The prisoners were all gone. Whoever was left in that room was there to assist at an execution. Stone had been wrong about the Malaysians. They were nothing to do with it. Probably they’d wanted to warn him. Now they’d left him to his fate. Once again Stone had gone looking for one fight too many.

  He let himself hang limp, felt himself dragged backwards towards the showers. He had to form a picture of what was happening before he could try anything. There were definitely two of them on him. A third would arrive any second. The executioner. Neither of these two was going release him. Someone else was going arrive for the deed. Shit. Stone realised who it would be.

  Stone cursed himself for being taken in. Williams. That bastard had been crouched in the corner, cowering and snivelling to hide his appearance. Anyone who could contort himself like that must be seriously fit. Williams was no whining businessman. He was a trained hitman.

  Stone made no move. He let his hands trail limply over the faces and shoulders of the men behind him, made himself a dead-weight, to force them to hold him beneath the shoulders — they wanted him upright for some reason. He looked through half-open eyes at his killer, and considered kicking out. Williams was shorter than Stone — about 1.80m — and had the fit, spare look of an infantryman about him. Short neat hair — he could just about pass as a civilian. He was a professional, Stone would give that. He wasted no time in gloating or taunting his victim. Williams intended to be out of there in seconds. He’d be ushered upstairs and a fast car to the airport. With twenty thousand dollars earned undramatically for his few minutes work.