Tom Aston - The Machine

‘Anonymous sources in the Swiss Finance Ministry. Are you shitting me? How did you figure all that out?’ asked Carslake as the words spread across the page and Stone finally hit submit. ‘I didn’t. I made it up,’ said Stone. ‘Yes, but it’s bullshit right?’ ‘Your idea, Doug. Remember? You can post all kinds of shit on the Internet, right?’ ‘Sure. But it is still bullshit.’ ‘And so was your idea of a UFO hidden under the hills of Sichuan,’ said Stone. ‘This Swiss connection makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with. Oyang's a Chinese official with accounts in Switzerland, so let's call it an educated guess. Anyhow, so long as it gets a reaction, who cares?’

Ekstrom insisted on first class for this kind of flight. The client was paying of course, but the reason was that he needed a little privacy when he was planning his work and thinking things through. And, of course, it was way beneath a man of his standing to sit cheek by jowl with all those snotty kids, backpackers and college lecturers behind the curtain.

Ekstrom had been requested to personally perform a “hit” in mainland China. The assassination itself was not at all difficult. The target would not present any problem and for that matter even the location looked tailor-made. On the other hand, performing a hit in Mainland China would always present certain risks.

Thankfully, the order had come from the Chinese Public Security Bureau — which is why his corporate bosses at SCC had been so excited. It was a way-in to the Chinese market, and his bosses were seeing dollar signs. Ekstrom had agreed, but had asked some stiff questions before he left for the airport. If he was going personally to do a job where he risked the firing squad because some minor Chinese official screwed up, he demanded to know more about who was behind it. Whoever was hiring him, Gong An Public Security Bureau or not, he had better be able to protect him if the shit hit the fan.

Q Y Zhang was the client’s name. A full colonel in the Gong An Beijing Public Security Bureau. He was a big cheese all right — impeccable credentials — and it appeared he operated with impunity throughout China.

But as Ekstrom sat flying high over the Pacific, the natural question was — why? What need had the Gong An for a foreign assassin to do a job they themselves could have accomplished with impunity in China? An even bigger question — why Ekstrom in person?

As he sat in first class, twelve kilometers above the Pacific, Ekstrom was beginning to work it out. It gave a perverse thrill. The Chinese were all over the Semyonov-SearchIgnition affair. They must have been watching Alban and they knew it was Ekstrom who had killed him. Now they wanted the same man to carry out the hit in China. Everyone who was anyone in a US corporation knew that it was the SearchIgnition board who ordered Alban killed. Who else would it be? The Chinese knew it too. And by using the same assassin in China, they wanted suspicion for the next killing to fall on SearchIgnition also.

This Zhang was a clever guy.

Du Fu’s Road to Sichuan may have been hard, but getting back to Shanghai was not. The following day, Oyang emailed Stone asking to meet urgently. Stone played it cool, didn’t say where he was. Meanwhile, the messages from Oyang became more and more desperate. Stone had certainly hit a nerve with that blog posting. He’d as good as accused Oyang of taking ShinComm’s money and salting it away in Switzerland. Evidently it was too close to the bone, too near the truth. Oyang had panicked, and his messages were increasingly urgent. Stone would leave it a few hours longer before replying. Let’s make the bastard sweat.

By the following morning Oyang had offered to send a ShinComm private jet to wherever Stone was in China. Late in the day, Stone decided to put him out of his misery, and the following morning boarded the plane at Chengdu with Ying Ning and Carslake.

Oyang’s personal assistant from ShinComm was sent to meet them in Shanghai. She wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. Oyang, she informed them, was at a place called Balong. A car would take them there from Shanghai.

Balong, it turned out, was not some new, guarded hideaway of Oyang’s. There would be no guns or strip searches this time. Oyang was at was a country club called Balong, which was, bizarrely, the venue, of the Shanghai International Polo Tournament for the next few days. Evidently a must for the likes of Oyang and the Shanghai super-rich. But not exactly the natural habitat of Stone and Carslake. Still less Ying Ning.

‘And then there were eight,’ said Stone as he shook hands. His trip had begun in Kowloon — Cantonese for “Nine Dragons”. Now they had arrived at Balong, which means eight dragons in Mandarin.

‘Eight?’ said Rupert Rowley-Phipps, the Englishman who ran the Balong Resort. ‘No idea what you’re talking about, old man.’ Rupert had spent five years living in China, but had not a word of the language to show for it. Rowley-Phipps was little sniffy about Stone, Carslake and Ying Ning. Not the “quality” of guest he was looking for at the Country Club.

The feeling was mutual. When Rupert shook Ying Ning’s hand she looked down as if she’d just had dogshit pressed into her palm.

Rupert may not have gone native, but you couldn’t fault the man’s ambition. He’d arrived from England with no money, armed only with the vague knowledge that China was the “land of opportunity”. Where others wanted to get toys manufactured or buy a couple of container-loads of bikes, Rupert’s dream was to introduce the game of polo to a fifth of the world’s population.

With the help of some old friends in the Hong Kong banks, he’d leased twenty square kilometres of land from the Chinese Navy and built a golf course, a yachting marina, a country club of Babylonian luxury, and of course, the polo fields.

There were two hotels. The Seasons — merely five-star and luxurious, and then the Shui Hu, which ached with sensuous, deep wealth, and where every spacious suite came with its own servants. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a small island, a few hundred metres off shore, on which was a single villa. The pinnacle of exclusivity, even here.

‘The business plan,’ said Rupert as he showed Stone and the others round, ‘is based on the extraordinary number of new millionaires in China. We’re not catering to a middle class,’ he said. ‘We’re catering to the rich. The super-rich, in fact. And I have to give them what they want.’ Rupert waved his arm at the seeming acres of marble and the uber-expensive boutiques in the atrium of the club. Bulgari. Louis Vuitton. Hermes. And many more, selling Italian jewelry and French handbags at eye-watering prices.

Carslake strolled up, gawping at the watches. Ying Ning stood there in stony-faced contempt, itching with disgust. As if it soiled her somehow to even stand on the marble floor.

‘Five thousand bucks? For a watch?’ Carslake exclaimed.

‘One of the cheaper ones. The sports model,’ said Rupert without irony, but he eyed Carslake with concern. He turned to look at Stone. ‘Can’t you tell him to lose that jacket? And the bandana. Please?’

Ying Ning spoke finally. ‘If he was Chinese, you’d throw him out,’ she said.

Rupert grinned. ‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘I’d have all three of you thrown out if you weren’t friends of Robert Oyang. It’s a wild guess, but I’d say you’re a few million short of financial qualification for this place,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m also under no illusions about what you think. It’s vulgar, it’s over the top. The paintings on the wall are crass — look at that one over there — a pastiche of an eighteenth century Fragonard. Disgusting.’