behaving like men.”
Alex nodded. He pressed off from the ground, felt his arm giving out on him and hesitated. His hand shook violently, and he closed his eyes for just a second. The tremor passed, and he managed to lever himself to his feet with reasonable grace.
Luckily Liang had been turned away, putting the glasses into a bag. They returned to Liang’s car and headed into town.
As they passed out of the industrial district, Alex saw bright lights ahead. Liang saw them, too, and grinned. He sped up, pulled down a side street, turned up an alley and moments later they emerged onto a wide, well-lit street. Colored neon rippled over the doors. Men and women flooded the streets, moving from club to club in an ocean of color and sound. The contrast was incredible.
Liang pulled onto another side street and found a place to park. It was easy to see why he preferred the small vehicle.
“We got lucky.” Liang grinned. “Most nights we’d have had to go half a mile from the action for a parking space.”
Alex eyed the streets and shook his head. The brilliant colored lights irritated his eyes, and he fought to keep his sight clear. His legs ached, but he thought they’d support him. He didn’t want to have any drinks. The last thing he wanted was anything that might fuel the erosion of his motor control, but he couldn’t do anything to make Liang suspicious. Once he was inside—once he was on his own—he could worry less about the MS and more about the job, but up to that point he needed Liang. The big man had the explosives, the key to the doors of the MRIS plant and the files.
“Have you had a chance to go through the files?” he asked, turning quickly to exit the vehicle and pulling his hand in close to his chest. It was shaking again, and he was afraid if the spasm became more violent he wouldn’t be able to conceal it.
“I’ve been through them,” Liang said. “We’ll get to that in the morning. Have you ever been to Beijing, Mr. Vance?”
Alex shook his head. “I’ve been in China several times, but never the city.”
Liang nodded. “Good. I like it when I can show a man something he’s never seen before.” They locked the car and headed back to the main drag, stepping into the ocean of bodies. Liang had to shout to be heard over the laughing, babbling throng.
Alex was taller than most of those around him, but he spotted a few non-Asian faces in the crowd.
Music blared from several doorways. Young couples, teenagers and groups of older men and women who he assumed were businessmen, rolled in and out. Each time one of the doors opened wide, the music from that particular club rose, blotting out the others, and then faded back into the general roar of sound.
“What would Confucius have thought of this?”
Alex wondered out loud.
Liang stopped, as though considering the question seriously, and then he laughed. “It’s a whole new world,” he said. “The West leaks in through all the cracks, across the Internet, through television and popular music. Everything about your culture is popular with the youth of China, and even the rest of us are catching the fever a little. It’s too close for me to what came before.”
The big man’s face darkened. “I remember students being shot for their beliefs. I remember days when you didn’t dare write or say a thing that wasn’t programmed into you from birth. We’ve been fighting a very long war with ourselves, our ancestors and our culture. We always hope it will get better.” Liang considered his words for a moment, then added, “Confucius would probably say too much of anything is bad for everything.”
Alex nodded. They stepped up to the doors of a club outlined in bright blue neon. He focused on the sign, but they passed under it before he could fully translate. His spoken Chinese was fluent, but accented. He’d worked on it carefully. American accents were recognizable, and more likely to draw attention. His Chinese had been learned from a woman with a thick British accent. The combination of her influence on his pronunciation and his own slight accent gave his voice an odd European inflection. It had served him well in the past because its very ambiguity made it forget-table. In a company where Arab doctors worked side by side with Hindu researchers, it wouldn’t even register on the scale of oddity.
The interior of the club throbbed with sound.
There were three dance floors, all brightly lit with fluorescent borders and colored spotlights. Disco balls dangled from the ceiling and spun slowly.
Lights flickered off the walls, the floor, the faces, and behind it all was the music. There was never a break in the sound. The conglomeration of dance tracks and techno beats stretched from the l970s into some future world of sound Alex had never experienced.
“Loud, huh?” Liang cupped a hand over his mouth and directed his hoarse yell into Alex’s ear.
“What?” Alex grinned as he answered, and Liang laughed. He led Alex through a beaded curtain and into a hallway where the sound was muffled. A few yards farther they stepped through into a shadowy bar. Soft music played—
so soft that after the cacophony of the main dance area, it was a few moments before Alex even heard it.
They stepped up to a cherrywood bar and leaned on it. Alex was grateful for the support. He was also grateful for the dim lights. His legs shook, and the pain, which had been no more than a steady ache during the drive into the city, had evolved into something like bags of broken glass shifting under the muscles.
Liang spoke to the bartender and a moment later two tall brown bottles of beer appeared. Alex didn’t even glance at the label. He picked his up and took a long drink. The beer stung a little going down, and the faint tang of formaldehyde burned his tongue, but he ignored it. He’d drunk worse, and the cool liquid soothed him. He drained half of the oversize bottle in a single long gulp.
“Thirsty?” Liang asked. He was watching Alex with cool curiosity. His smile was genuine, but Alex knew when he was being sized up.
“It’s been a long day. The flight in was rough, and I didn’t sleep too well the night before. I guess I’m more tired than I thought.”
“We’ll have just one more,” Liang said. “I was going to show you some of the city, but maybe we better concentrate on this one and get through it.”
Alex nodded. He glanced around the room.
“From the street you’d never guess this room was here. I thought for a minute you were going to try and get me out on a dance floor.”
Liang laughed again and took a swig of his beer. “I’m not much of a dancer. I come here because the beer is cold, and with the sound out there, this is a good place to talk. Not many know it’s here, and those that do have business of their own. It works out well.”
Alex’s respect for the big man jumped another notch. It was easy to see why he’d gotten the nod from Room 59. It was almost always easy to see.
There was something about the men and women who were capable of doing what Alex did that shone through, if you knew how to look. Their eyes were a little brighter—they moved with a certain grace—and invariably they saw through everything you thought they shouldn’t. It was going to be harder to conceal anything from Liang than it was to get into MRIS. Maybe it would be impossible.
“You
“When don’t we?” Alex asked, lifting his beer and holding it out.
Liang tapped his bottle against Alex’s and grinned.
They downed the last of the beer and turned away from the bar, disappearing back into the dancing crowd and the wall of sound. Liang took the lead, and Alex, his hand shaking like a leaf in a heavy breeze, followed.
The lab was cleared in less than an hour, just in time for Rand’s people to start rolling in with their equipment. Steph and Billy tried their best to hang around at first, pestering Brin with questions and trying to peek at the equipment as it rolled in, but she chased them away with a promise that she would tell them whatever she was authorized to soon. The laptop arrived in a sealed case. Brin took this in herself, setting it up on a small desk in the rear of the lab.
She was anxious to know what was in the files, but she knew she couldn’t begin reading until the room was
