The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (35 page)

‘Take it easy,’ said Stone.  ‘We’re all still alive.  If they wanted to kill us they had about fifteen opportunities.  We’re cool.’

The screaming redoubled.  Carslake gave Stone a snake-like glance through the corner of his eye.  ‘Still think we’re going back to Sichuan?  More like a fucking interrogation centre in Mongolia.’

OK. 
Take it easy
hadn’t been the right choice of words just then.  No wonder Carslake was freaking out  The noise went on, on a loop.  Semyonov, or someone, or something, was screaming like wild-eyed bullock in the abattoir.  Like someone who knows what’s coming but is powerless to stop it. 

-oO0Oo-

The screaming and panic outside Stone’s room had finally abated.  About seven hours it had been on Stone’s watch since the screaming started.  It felt like double.  It was seven in the morning and a second helicopter could be heard overhead.  Was Semyonov dead or had they sedated him?   The helicopter sound receded after about another ten minutes.

Virginia had talked about going to recover “it” - the Machine.  It seemed like a bad joke now. 

By this stage Carslake was tired with worrying – worrying whether Semyonov had been shot, worrying that the room could be bugged, or worrying that the room would stink if he used the toilet.  He was lying on his back, looking at the lightbulb and refusing to speak.  Stone thought through what was happening again.

 So what had happened to Semyonov and Virginia?  Something had gone horribly wrong.  It hadn’t sounded like they were captives or had been taken away, but Stone could be wrong.  The helicopter had arrived at three in the morning – the prime time for taking prisoners. The “shock of capture” – it was an elementary discipline in the questioning of captives.  Get them while they’re still disoriented.  Hungry and confused.   Was that what had happened?

It was hours later when Stone managed to get Carslake’s attention again.   Worn down by either boredom or exhaustion, Carslake began to speak this time.

‘Tell me, Carslake, about Semyonov,’ said Stone, looking at the American’s downcast face across the room.  ‘You’ve spent so long researching the guy.’

‘He got ill,’ said Carslake.  ‘Then he met some Chinese guy in prison, ten years ago.  Maybe that’s where all this stuff started.’

Carslake wearily started to speak, and Stone asked him question after question.  In the next hour, using what Carslake knew, and what Semyonov and Virginia had already told him, Stone pieced together the story of Steven Starkfield, aka Semyonov.

Chapter 60 -
9:15am 13 April
- Balong Polo and Country Club Resort, Zhejiang Province, China

Unusually for him, Ekström was happy to use the phone in the hotel room.  It was a better bet than his cell phone at any rate, which in China would be intercepted and recorded.  There was probably an office in Beijing where a red light flashed every time he used it.

Ekström sat on the bed and glanced at himself in the mirror as he unscrewed the telephone handset to check inside.  He had on the snug white jeans and a blue polo shirt tight around his wiry biceps.  He’d kept on the leather leg guards, which came up above the knee.  An overtly sexual look for a man.  He smiled to himself in the mirror as he took the back off the phone handset.  He’d earlier seduced the wife of a German reinsurance executive wearing that very outfit.  He could see why she’d gone for him.  Ekström often found himself attractive.  It wasn’t a gay thing - just objective fact.

The tiresome unscrewing of hotel phones was now the norm for Special Circumstances – since the Israeli secret service, Mossad, had perfected the “telephone hit”.  A Mossad agent would enter the room posing as a maid or maintenance staff.  A tiny charge would be inserted into the ear-speaker, set to explode four seconds after the phone was answered.  The explosion was tiny, but since it was held against the ear of the target, it was almost always fatal.

Ekström had even used the technique himself once, in Abu Dhabi.  It was ideal anywhere in the Arab world, since Mossad was always blamed for the hit.

With the phone reassembled, Ekström dialed the number.  No one spoke as the phone was picked up, but Ekström spoke in English.

‘Half the job was done,’ Ekström said.  ‘The Englishman is slippery.  He seems to know what’s coming.’

‘
You mean he outwitted you,
’ came the gravelly voice
. ‘You were too elaborate.’

‘Planning, preparation, subtlety.  I make no apologies for the elegance of my methods.’

There was a harsh edge to the reply.  ‘
Elegance is for the decadent, Swedish.  And I do not want your apologies.  I want a job completed.  A bullet to the back of the head is effective, I hear.’

‘No doubt,’ said Ekström, controlling his anger.  ‘A Chinese firing squad is also effective.  But I do not intend to verify the fact in person.’

‘
I will protect you.  You may count on it,’
said the Chinese voice in careful English.

Ekström’s silence showed he had no intention of counting on Zhang’s “protection”.   When he spoke his tone was businesslike.  ‘The target has flown.  Do you know where he is?  I need to be right behind him.’

‘
I can do better than that,’
said Zhang.  ‘
I can put you ahead of him.  You will leave in thirty minutes.’

Ekström hung up.  He’d planned the hits on Oyang and Stone such that even with the double hit, he would be beyond suspicion.  It had worked out fine with Oyang.  But Stone was still out there.  And Ekström was a professional.  He had to finish the job. 

There was too much self-assurance in Zhang’s voice for Ekström’s liking.  Zhang wanted to take control.  But Ekström hated relying on others.  He felt uncomfortable.  Bad things happened when he relied on others.  

On the other hand, the job must be completed.  The reputation of Johan Ekström and Special Circumstances depended on it.  He would take Zhang’s car when it arrived in thirty minutes.

Chapter 61 -
11:10am 13 April
- Balong Polo and Country Club Resort, Zhejiang Province, China

Carslake knew plenty about Steven Semyonov, going right back to the photos in his highschool yearbook, then his conviction and his time in prison.  He knew less about the man’s illnesses, which Stone had learned about from Virginia, and for that matter, pretty much seen for himself.

One of the difficult things in the story was grasping that the regular, skinny thirteen year-old in the high school yearbook, with hair and clear skin, was the same person as Semyonov.  At first glance, no one would believe they were the same person, and Stone could see why Semyonov, the person, had seemed to appear from nowhere.  It was a key to the person he was, and what had happened to him. 

When Carslake finished talking again, and lay back in that stifling bedroom to gaze once more at the ceiling lightbulb, Stone rehearsed the story of Semyonov through in his mind.

It seemed that until the age of thirteen, the boy called Steven Starkfield was a normal, happy teenager.   He also had a beautiful, clever sweetheart called Virginia Kocszelny.  The two were inseparable, both clever and so different from anyone else at the small community school, in Coldbury, New Hampshire.  However, at the age of fourteen, Steven became ill.  For whatever reason – hormone changes maybe, or some mystery virus – he became afflicted by the most acute eczema and asthma.  He later discovered they were caused by allergic reactions to normally harmless bacteria.  Sores covered his body and his face.  It must have felt like he was breathing through a straw.  The doctors treated with heavy doses of steroids for the asthma, which explains why the school photo at age fourteen shows a boy forty pounds heavier than the year before, and covered in acne and sores. 

At that time of life, any kid would be sensitive of his appearance.  Steven found his body bloated by steroids and his face covered with zits and acne right down to his chest.   Stone could guess how it panned out next.  Kids can be cruel to one who looks different.  But Steven never gave them chance.  He hid himself away.  Depression, isolation – a very common thing with teenagers who are long-term sick.  He even stopped seeing his best friend Virginia, which is why she felt so eternally guilty about it all.  Virginia was intelligent, blossoming, beautiful.  She would soon escape to a top university, call herself Virginia Carlisle, and never look back. 

Meanwhile, young Steven Starkfield turned in on himself.  The computer and the Internet became his world.  He applied himself for days on end to programming and hacking, and he was good at it.  Virginia said he was inspired by Marc Andreessen, a college kid who wrote the software for the first web browser.

Carslake pointed out that Andreessen didn’t invent the Web, but it seemed like it at the time.  His web browser was the first software you could use to access the Web easily.  It was world-changing, but in fact it had been put together in a few weeks by a college kid.

Young Starkfield suddenly knew what he wanted in life.  He wanted to write software that would change the world.  According to Carslake, Starkfield would have seen through Andreessen in a few weeks.  Because Andreessen’s genius was in the idea, not the programming.  Steven would have realized very soon that he could do better than Andreessen, which must be a weird feeling if you’re fourteen.

Whatever the exact sequence was, Andreessen was key to Steven, because it was Andreessen’s next venture that really lit the touch paper for Semyonov’s life work.  Andreessen’s next venture was
Infoseek
, the first major search engine on the Internet.  Semyonov’s career had been about search ever since, and the Machine was just an extension of that.

But back then, Steven Starkfield was into hacking and programming.  This was where Carslake’s knowledge had been so useful, because he’d looked up the court case against Starkfield, and found out a ton of stuff.  It was used in court evidence against the young Steven.  Semyonov couldn’t go to school, so he programmed, twelve, fourteen hours a day.  He must have hated everyone back then.  Thought everyone was an idiot, even Andreessen.  Even Virginia.

Steven Starkfield, sick and reclusive, was arrested for hacking Defense Department servers when he was eighteen.  And the computers seized by the FBI showed a remarkable level of programming.  He’d made his own operating system, like Bill Gates did at that age.  It was simpler than Gates’, but more powerful.  Also code-generators, programs to write programs.  And the programming code showed that he was obsessed with concision.   Making his programs as short, but as powerful as possible.

Prison was the key event in Semyonov’s life.  He would have hated the fact that the FBI took all his work and analysed it, and he resolved that no one would be able to figure out his programs again.  You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that prison would have been disastrous for his health too.  The weight, the eczema, the sores – it all went out of control.

He was lucky to get away with a year in jail, according to Carslake.  The US can be very hard on hackers, especially if they target the Defense Department.  And Starkfield was banned from the Internet for two years when he got out.    It was when he did his best work.  Away from the Internet, entirely on his own.

As for the Chinese: Carslake knew for certain Semyonov shared a cell for a while with a Chinese guy.  Maybe it gave him the idea.  Maybe he learned a few Chinese characters.  Who was to say?

However it happened, Virginia’s tech guy, a man called Ostrovich, had analyzed Semyonov’s video technology.  He said he could begin to work out the programming, but it looked like whoever wrote it redesigned the whole system to use a few hundred Chinese characters as short cuts.  The character for gold would be for the function “print”, for example.  But it went much further.  Semyonov used a single Chinese character as a short cut for a whole complex algorithm.  It was ultra-concise.  For Semyonov, who had it all memorized, it would be ultra-quick to write his programs.  Which is why he’d achieved so much, working entirely alone.

Best of all, his own system, full of Chinese characters, was private to Semyonov.  No one looking at it would have a clue how it was done.  Including the FBI, if they ever seized his computer again.  Semyonov was determined that if anyone ever saw his work again, it would be impossible to decipher.  Which was something the guys at SearchIgnition had found to their cost.

 The next part of the story was fairly well known.  Steven Semyonov founded SearchIgnition with a lawyer and an accountant whom he’d never met, and with whom he shared as little as he could.   Neither had an interest in technology.  His search programs, his algorithms, his indexes were all held in the “black box” of his own programs.  He started the SearchIgnition Corporation in a basement filled with a hundred-odd old machines, bought for scrap, loaded with his own software.  He hooked them together and made them act as a single computer.  Soon he had thousands of machines in a warehouse, again acting as a single computer.  He’d built the world’s dominant search engine for virtually nothing.  The rest was history.

Stone lay back too, like Carslake, looking at the ceiling in the bedroom, watching the moths flutter round and round the bulb.

‘I think I’ve figured it out,’ said Stone finally.

‘Figured what out?’ asked Carslake.

‘The Machine,’ said Stone.  ‘What it is, what makes it so powerful, and why so few people know about it.  I think I’ve figured it.  If I’m right, the whole world will want a piece of it and Oyang was right.  Twenty-five billion was a small price to pay.’

 Chapter 62 -
5:06pm 13 April
- Balong Polo Resort and Country Club, Zhejiang Province, China

Seventeen hours by Stone’s cracked digital watch in that one bedroom in the villa.  They had been given neither food nor water.  This was, of course, a good thing.  It meant that whoever was holding them had meant to bring them out sooner.  And still meant to bring them out.  Carslake added that the lack of food or water meant that neither of them had to use the toilet, and that was a good thing for him.