The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (14 page)

It sounded a good plan.  Except for the person who had to do it.  Ostrovich had zoomed in, turned off the sound, frozen the frames.  He done all he could to avoid looking at the perverted spectacle.  He zoomed in on the bedside table.  There could be a card or a matchbook he could focus in on.  Something that could give him a clue about the killer maybe.  He zoomed in on the bedside table.  Still quite clear – high res.  Ostrovich zoomed in further.  Now this was strange.  His brow creased in bewilderment and he zoomed in further still. 
What the hell?
 

Ostrovich finally saw what this Stone fellow had meant.

‘
Any ideas Chris?
’ Virginia Carlisle said again into the headset.  ‘
Stone said there was something weird about the file format or something.’
  Ostrovich was barely listening, and he certainly wasn’t looking at the girl’s eyes any more.

‘OK, Ms Carlisle,’ said Ostrovich at length.  ‘Er…  How do I say this?’  He didn’t want to sound stupid in front of a star reporter.  ‘I’ve a video clip here, which plays on some kind of Internet browser-based video player.  Works on any computer in fact.  The file he sent you looks way too small for a clip of around two minutes.  It’s a little over a meg.  Yet I can zoom in, and in, and in...  It seems like I can zoom in as far as I want, and the image is still razor sharp.  Never gets grainy or blocky.  I’ve filled the whole of the fifty-inch monitor here with a close-up image of the ashtray on the table, and it’s still crystal.’

 He felt a little stupid.  ‘I know a few things about online video and television, Ms Carlisle, and aah… you just can’t do that.  I feel like I’m standing in front of a crime scene with a full-size TV camera, looking at whatever I want, in realtime.  Yet all I have is a tiny file sent by email.  This isn’t just a better system than we’re using.  It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.  I’m gonna have to study the file programming format and call you back, Ms Carlisle.’

-oO0Oo-

Ostrovich rang back after two hours.

‘It took me about an hour, but I managed to break into the programming code,’ said Ostrovich.  ‘It’s just that...’ and his voice paused.

‘
That what?  What is it?
’ asked Carlisle.

 ‘I’ve no idea,’ said the technician, embarrassed. ‘Virginia, this could be a computer program from Mars.  It’s full of advanced mathematics – fractals, I think - but like nothing I’ve ever seen.  It’s not a big program – in fact it’s incredibly compact.  I just... don’t understand it.  I feel like a five-year-old trying to decipher Ancient Greek.  It’s like no programming language, no software I’ve ever seen.  Someone has decided to tear up every programming method, every software architecture that has been used for the last fifty years.’

‘
OK, Chris.  Thanks
,’ said Virginia Carlisle, with a note of exasperation.   ‘
Can’t you even tell where it came from?  If the technology is so unusual, that  at least should give us a clue.
’

‘That’s the point,’ said Ostrovich.  ‘It’s not unusual.  At least not in China.  It’s called SmoothVision.  “Grainless, HD video on the Internet with no delays” according to their web site.  Turns out there are over twenty million copies of this program in use, mainly in South China.  The technology tells us nothing whatever about the murder, Virginia.  Except that some programmer in China is way, way ahead of us.  This could revolutionize the whole of television, and it’s made by a firm I never heard of...’

‘
Don’t tell me,
’ said Carlisle, ‘
A Chinese company called New Machine Technology.
’

 Chapter 25 - 8:02am
1 April -
Hung Hom, Hong Kong

The door to the apartment was open, and Stone pushed his way in.  Light flooded the room, showing off a selection of brutal modern art prints on the wall.  There was the smell of strong coffee.  A Chinese woman was sprawled across the solitary armchair with one leg hanging over the arm.  Skinny black jeans and a black singlet, pulled tight over her breasts.  No Asian subservience from this woman, that was for sure.

She wore a laconic smile, but said nothing, looking at Stone while chewing on crackers from a box, one after the other. Her eyes ran over his tall body like a thirsty woman looking at a long, cold drink.  A smile played around her lips and she made sure her eyes stayed on Stone until he could be in absolutely no doubt that he’d been checked out. 

‘A simple handshake would have sufficed,’ Stone said without looking, and walked over to pour a coffee for himself.  ‘Do I pass inspection?’ 

He glanced at her again.  Yep.  That arrogant smile was unmistakable.

-oO0Oo-

It’s not so difficult to find people if they want to be found.  The signal came from Ying Ning not long after Stone’s posting on the NotFutile.com blog; Stone noticed a new blog entry on the web site.

http://yingning.blogs.notfutile.com

Capitalist plutocrat Steven Semyonov got what he was asking for, and much quicker than he thought.  He was doing deals with the rightist clique that has taken over in Beijing, but they saw him coming.  Took his money like the bourgeois bankers they are, then killed him as soon as he crossed the border

China21 continues to fight the capitalist billionaire clique which has seized control of China.  The struggle goes on until the Revolution is restored.
文化革命万岁! 

No one else would take notice of this post.  China21’s bland language of “struggle”, “bourgeois” and “revolution” meant nothing.  And how retarded would any Chinese have to be in the 21
^st
Century to sign off with “
Long Live the Cultural Revolution
”?

No.  It wasn’t supposed to mean anything.  Ying Ning had posted on Stone's site to make contact.  After that it was simple to get in touch through the anonymized email server.

Ying Ning.  The woman dressed as a tart when Junko was murdered in the Snake Market.  That arrogant laconic smile was her trade mark.  But she looked better without the lipstick and red wig for sure.  So this was Ying Ning, with the spiky hair and the slim, angular body.  The source of Junko’s information on ShinComm Corporation and New Machine Technologies.

Stone stood while he poured himself a coffee.  Did she think he was going to blush or something?  Her eyes stayed on him, drinking him in, and who knows what she was thinking.

 ‘Did you learn about Semyonov by sipping wine with his capitalist cronies?’ she asked.  ‘Did he explain about his weapons factories?  No?  Or did you learn more from your visit with Professor Zhang?’

‘I found out more than you think,’ he said.  ‘But Junko’s file tells me you’re the expert.  So you can tell me, since you bought me here.’ 

‘OK.  I tell you one thing.  They will execute you, Stone,’ she said, coolly.  ‘Zhang gave you one day to leave Hong Kong, but you are still here.  If
Gong An
finds you in China, you will be a spy and you will be shot.  Again.  But this time it will be the last.’

She’d spotted the bullet wound scar just above his elbow, then.  ‘What about you?’ said Stone.  ‘They shoot subversives like you, don’t they?  Or is it a prison camp in Qinghai?’

 ‘Could be.’ She shrugged.  ‘But I know what I’m doing.  I have the contacts, and I am Chinese.  For yellow-haired
yang guizi
like you
,’
she used a racist term for a foreigner, ‘A man of a metre eighty-eight – not so easy to hide in China.’

‘Cool,’ said Stone.  His calm, grey eyes searched into her.  ‘Sounds like you’re the person I need to get me into China.  Help me blend in.’

Ying Ning was still lounging back, one leg over the arm of the chair.  She chose that point to take out a carton of cigarettes and tap it on the arm of the chair, then carefully take a cigarette and begin to smoke.  It was like Ying Ning was marking her territory.  ‘I’m the right girl for a lot of things,’ she replied.  Stone could see she was thinking.  Making a decision in her mind.  ‘You ready for a holiday in Jiangsu province, Mr
Shi-tou
?’

Shi-tou?  
What did that mean?  Stone already knew his Chinese wasn’t up to much. 
Shi-tou?  
It meant a stone, or a piece of stone.  Something like that.

 She helped him out, smiling with disdain. ‘It means Rock-head,’ she said, and breathed out a cloud of cigarette smoke.  ‘I heard you learned some Chinese,
Rockhead
.  But you didn’t study hard, I guess. 
Shi-tou
sounds funny in English also, no?’

Stone laughed back into her black eyes.  He liked her already.  He ran his gaze for a second over her hips.  The ones he remembered from the leather miniskirt in the Snake Market.  ‘Come on then, Cat-Woman,’ he said.  ‘I may just let you come along.  We’re going to China to meet a man called Robert Oyang.  But first you need to tell me all you know about Semyonov and ShinComm Corporation.’

He turned to get more coffee.  Ying Ning lounged in the chair and checked him out from behind, then stubbed out her cigarette in deliberate fashion and walked up behind him.  Pulled at his shirt to turn him around to face her.

‘You haven’t explained why you came here, Rockhead,’ she said.  ‘You have not been honest before we go any further.’

‘I told you.  I want to find out about what Semyonov was doing at ShinComm.’

‘You lie,’ she said.  ‘You are looking for the Machine.  Everybody is looking for the Machine.’ 

She was right of course.

Chapter 26 - 9:40am
1 April -
Hung Hom, Hong Kong

As soon as Ying Ning contacted Stone through NotFutile.com, the question had come into Stone’s mind.  Why was Ying Ning happy to have Stone alongside her in her campaigns against “China’s billionaire clique”?  Why should she even trust him?

So Stone had done some background work on Ying Ning before he went to find her in that apartment.  Even he would have to say what he found out was fascinating.  

Ying Ning was an enigma.  It wasn’t Ying Ning’s clever arrogance, her sarcasm, her plume of spiky black hair, her sexy angular body or that trademark crooked smile that made her mysterious.  It wasn’t just her background story of bad-luck, suffering and violence.  Or where on earth she found the information she used to expose and ridicule all those newly-rich businessmen and factory owners she was at war with.  All that was understandable.  It was just her.  Her closedness.  Stone sensed Ying Ning had hidden depths, but no one was going to see them.

After a couple of web searches, Stone had realised that Ying Ning was quite a famous individual  - in fact she was a cult figure in China.  China lacks a “free” press in the Western sense, but has a thriving scene of micro-bloggers.  Literally millions of them, and millions more who read the blogs.  Ying Ning and her banned protest organization, China21, were very well known, in an electronic-word-of-mouth way that can’t be replicated in the West.  For the simple reason that they were banned. 

Ying Ning was not a real name of course.  As soon as she posted it on the NotFutile.com site, that was obvious.  But this wasn’t just any made-up name.  Ying Ning was a girl in a Chinese fairy tale. The Fox Girl.   The fictional Ying Ning was a shape-changer girl who alternates between being a fox and a beautiful girl.   Apparently, Fox Girls are not uncommon in Chinese and Japanese fairytales, and Ying Ning was one of the best known.   She was not only beautiful.  She used her powers, magical and sexual, to entrance and deceive.  This Fox Girl name of Ying Ning, it turned out, was instantly memorable in China.  Almost as if Stone had called himself “Robin Hood”.  No one would forget it.  The modern Ying Ning was known across China on blogs and forums, and she was already a myth in her own right.

The Chinese authorities took a less charitable view of the name Ying Ning, however.  The official Chinese news site
Xinhua
stated that Ying Ning was “one of the criminal class”.  In China “criminal” does not mean what it does in the West.  China is a harsh country, where social control is tight, and resort to the firing squad commonplace.  The Chinese “criminal class” aren’t the same as the lesser enemies of the state such as “dissidents” or “intellectuals”.  Certainly not Robin Hood types.  They’re desperate thugs with a life expectancy measured in weeks. 

So Stone was impressed by Ying Ning, coming and going, travelling around China like a will-o-the-wisp.  Ying Ning had long since discarded her real name and ran with a bunch of false identities.  That was her real achievement and she wouldn’t tell anyone how she’d done it.  No one knew her real name.  In a country of over a billion, the ID card number is the bedrock of control.  In China you can’t fart without an ID card number, but she had cheated that.  She’d turned up all over China in the last two years, making her blogs and videos about billionaires and plutocrats, confronting corrupt officials online, and holding up China’s new class of super-rich to ridicule.  Her campaign about the suicide rates amongst the workers at ShinComm had even made it through to the
New York Times
.

It wasn’t just satire, either.  There was a hard edge to what Ying Ning did.   A number of people had been arrested on the back of her anti-corruption campaigns.  One had been shot.

Yet it was the Fox Girl name that created the Ying Ning aura more than anything.  She was her own woman, a force of one – similar to Stone in the way she operated – and she liked to keep people guessing.

Why she might want to have Stone on her side was anyone’s guess.  Ying Ning must think he was “useful”.  She would have researched Stone since she met him in the Snake Market.  Even before that.  She must think he would be useful to her, just like Junko Terashima had been useful to her.  She might want to use him and the NotFutile.com site for publicity.  After all she had no chance whatsoever of putting up web pages in China that weren’t liable to be taken down just hours after they’d gone live.  Then there was the weapons aspect.  Through NotFutile.com, Stone himself showed a macabre level of understanding of weapons systems.   It took an oddly perverted mindset to understand the people who had dreamed these weapons up, and Stone had that.  Perhaps that’s why she needed him.