Tom Aston - The Machine

Ekstrom vaulted back out over top of the cubicle and smoothed himself down. Checked his watch. One minute forty-five seconds in all. Ekstrom relieved himself in the urinal, washed his hands, then walked back to join his date.

It was over forty minutes later when Alban was discovered, dead from an apparent heart attack. An ambulance came and went. The staff at L’Eventail were as discreet as one would hope at such an upscale venue, and there was little to disturb the other diners. Jessica was less bothered than she might have been. She’d left early with Ekstrom, well before the body was found. She had something else on her mind.

The sodium tripentol would be discovered at the routine autopsy. But by that time, Ekstrom would be long gone. Of course, it was risky to get involved personally in a hit so close to home. There was even the possibility that Ekstrom himself would be recognized, and the finger of suspicion would point at him. However, as the paymaster for Alban’s death had again had been SearchIgnition Corporation, Ekstrom was sure that more than enough money and influence could be called on upon to hush the thing up.

As he drove away from Jessica’s apartment later that night, a question flitted through Ekstrom’s mind. SearchIgnition was paying good money to silence individuals who might squeal about whatever Semyonov had been doing. But who was it who had dealt with Semyonov himself? And what had Semyonov been doing to deserve this kind of attention?

The Road to Sichuan is Hard . That was the title of a poem Ying Ning’s father had taught her as a child, and she had told Stone all about it on the flight from Shanghai. Not quite the thing a girl should be learning in the years just after the Cultural Revolution, apparently. Far too civilized and classical. ut with Ying Ning, there could be no better spur to study the classics than to tell her it was forbidden. For Ying Ning, even her knowledge of Tang Dynasty poetry was an act of rebellion. As a daughter in a rural village, she was expected to finish school at fifteen and “go out”. Go out was shorthand for becoming a migrant worker. Travelling to the city and taking to some shitty job so she could send cash home to her parents.

So learning Tang poetry was rebellious — different, intellectual. Didn’t rank alongside killing her boss with a screwdriver maybe, but… To a factory girl like Ying Ning, born dirt-poor, it was probably one step above throwing away a university career like Stone had.

Du Fu was Ying Ning’s favourite — a dissident poet, an anti-war free thinker in the harsh militarism of the Tang Empire. He was a proto-feminist, a lover of women who rhapsodized their beauty and dress, but lamented too their frustrated intellects.

Ying Ning’s views were strongly held — violent even. She used them as a suit of armour, as a way to deflect any questions about herself. And now she’d started to open up, her views could be entertaining:

“Fuck Oyang… Oyang is a liar and a thief… the Machine belongs to Chinese people and Oyang is trying to steal it…” OK. Got the picture about Oyang. Then it was Carlisle (“Barbie Doll Bitch”) or even Professor Zhang (“Part of hypocrite clique”). So talking Tang poetry on the plane with her was a kind of progress. If the way to relate to the spiky haired, hard-faced, spitting refusenik was through her intellectual side, that worked for Stone. And though he was hardly a fan of poems, he could see they fitted well with the Fox Girl part of Ying Ning’s image too.

Stone saw that in her closed, defensive way Ying Ning was a talented self-publicist — although the polar opposite of someone like Carlisle. There was nothing real about Ying Ning’s image, anymore than there was about Carlisle’s. The just went about things differently.

What about Stone’s image? Stone despised himself for even having an image. The student papers had once called him “a true believer”, “a man without hypocrisy”. All that because he lived in a student room, had no car, no bank account, no possessions, all that crap. The image was mostly true — Stone just hated the idea of it. Being a soldier — now that was real. You follow orders, you fight, you kill. Or get killed. Anyone can respect that. Except, it would seem, for Stone himself.

Stone respected Ying Ning’s brutal, in your face honesty. And considering she used the word “hypocrite” more than Jesus, she hadn’t said it to him yet, which was praise indeed. It would have hurt coming from her. The most she said was that his title of “Peace Professor” was “decadent Western bullshit”, and Stone wasn’t going to argue with that.

As the plane began to descend, Ying Ning explained that Sichuan was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, now a province of one hundred fifteen million people, sandwiched between the Kunlun Mountains in the East and the Tibetan Plateau in the West. Cut off in ancient times, because the road over high mountain passes and treacherous river gorges was so difficult. Hence the famous line from the poem — The Road to Sichuan is Hard .

Despite its remoteness, Sichuan is no backwater. Its hot, wet climate makes it outstandingly fertile. Travellers who braved the mountains were astonished to find the rich and leafy metropolis of Chengdu at the end of their journey — the “Brocade City” of Du Fu’s poem.

Modern Chengdu is no longer the green Brocade City of even twenty years ago. Its avenues are choked with traffic and the relentless tread of the concrete and the skyscrapers keeps the greenery to a minimum. Nevertheless, Chengdu still has the feel of a city of twenty million placed absent-mindedly into a subtropical forest. Trees grow everywhere, on the smallest patch of earth, and its markets still carry under their awnings the tang of its green humidity and the aroma of the Mapo tofu, the chili-laden local dish.

The flight from Shanghai had taken them seventeen hundred kilometres west into the deep hinterland of China. By Stone’s reckoning, the Machine was located another five hundred kilometres West at least, in the deserted foothills of the Himalayas, close to Tibet, in the very centre of the Chinese landmass.

Stone’s plan to get near the site of the Machine had annoyed Ying Ning initially. The idea was to get them very close to the mine workings called Death Hole in the high plateau of Western Sichuan, and let them stay there unnoticed. He made Ying Ning contact the monks of a Tibetan Buddhist temple saying they were tourists, requesting lodgings for a few days. It put them outside of the system of hotels, passports and ID cards, and the Tibetan monks would be the last people to talk to the Gong An .

Stone would be a Western Tourist with Ying Ning his girlfriend. Ying Ning had bristled at this. Was it because she had to be girlfriend? More likely on account of her typically Chinese prejudice against Tibetans. She wasn’t above a bit of casual racism, despite her progressive image.

‘Act nice. You’re supposed to be my girlfriend,’ Stone teased as they walked through the arrivals hall at Chengdu airport.

‘Bull. Shit ,’ she replied in careful English. He knew it would annoy her. Sex was fine in Ying Ning’s worldview. Boyfriends certainly were not. There were a few women back in England who would accuse Stone of having the same issue with girlfriends. He didn’t. At least he thought he didn’t.

The terminal was cavernous in the usual Chinese fashion, and not busy. Built for the hordes who would be using it in future years. As they walked on, Ying Ning pointed to one of the large TV screens showing Global News Network. ‘Your friend,’ she said and stopped to look. Virginia Carlisle was up there, talking in English, with Chinese subtitles streaming across the bottom of the screen. It seemed Virginia had a young guy with an electric fan who followed her, so she could always get that breeze-blown effect with the hair. Looked good though.