Tom Aston - The Machine

‘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.

At four in the afternoon on 29 thMarch, 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

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 along 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.