Medusa

“Time is the thing we have in little supply, Wu.”

Dr. Wu couldn’t help but notice that Wen Lo had dropped his title. He was doomed. He started to croak something about one more chance, but Wen Lo wagged a finger at him.

Wu was about to faint, but Wen Lo clapped him on the back.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Wu,” he said. “We appreciate your hard work here. We are near to developing a highly promising cure at our offshore facility. You will go there to make sure the work is satisfactory.”

“I’m grateful for another chance,” Wu said. “When might I expect to start new tests?”

“There won’t be time,” Wen Lo said. “The testing will be done using computer simulation.” He turned back to stare at the forms on the gurneys. “Dispose of this material. The subjects in the cellblock too. We will find our way out.”

After Wen Lo and the bodyguard left, Dr. Wu glanced through the glass at the supine forms on the gurneys and sighed heavily. He had fifty subjects going through tests and most of them would die, so it was simply a question of disposing of the remains. But those in the cellblock would pose a particular problem, and it was going to be a messy job getting rid of this batch. He hurried back to the main lab to fill his staff in on the task that lay ahead.

AN HOUR LATER, Wen Lo got off the elevator on the top floor of the Pyramid Trading Company building, where he had his luxurious penthouse office suite. He was alone as he made his way across an enormous room decorated in French Empire style.

Floor-to-ceiling windows lined one long wall, but he paid no attention to Shanghai’s tapestry of lights. He stood in front of a tall wall cabinet and barked a password. A microphone hidden in the cabinet filtered the password through a voice-identification device, and the cabinet rolled aside to reveal a metal door.

Wen Lo pressed his hand against a panel that examined the whorls of his fingertips and the lines of his palm and the door opened with a click, admitting him into a room of about twenty feet square. The room was perfectly circular in shape, and the only furniture was a plastic-and-aluminum table and three chairs. Cones that looked like oversize swag lamps hung from the ceiling. The deceptive blandness of the room obscured its function as a sophisticated communications center, its walls and ceiling containing a complicated system of microphones, projectors, transmitters, and receivers.

Wen Lo settled into a cushioned chair, looked across the table at the other two chairs, and uttered a single word.

“Begin.”

The LED lighting in the ceiling dimmed except for a cone-shaped shaft of light that illuminated each chair. The air in one shaft seemed to shimmer as if superheated, becoming wavy, then darkening with tiny swirling motes, until a fuzzy silhouette formed, amorphous at first, then more solid, outlining first shoulders and then a head. Details filled in: eyes and nose, flesh and clothing. In short order, Wen Lo was looking at a three-dimensional laser projection of a man so real that he could almost touch it.

The man’s face was the mirror image of Wen Lo’s, which was not surprising, because they were two of a set of triplets. They both had the same high forehead, beetled brow, and unfathomable eyes, but the projected man’s scalp was clean-shaven. Where the menace in Wen Lo’s face was quietly understated, the projected face had an unvarnished, street-thug toughness around the mouth and chin that suggested barely restrained violence.

“Good evening, Brother Chang,” Wen Lo said.

“And good evening to you, Brother Wen Lo. Number One is about to join us.”

The air under the third light went through the same wavy sequence. The hologram that appeared in the chair was of a man dressed in a red silk robe and wearing a round, high-brimmed hat. The face was long and lean, with arched brows over a prominent forehead, cunning cat-green eyes, and a long, thin mustache that draped down below his chin.

Wen Lo clapped his hands upon recognizing the apparition.

“Bravo!” he said. “Dr. Fu Manchu, if I am not mistaken.”

The hologram responded with a knife-edged chuckle.

“Congratulations, Wen Lo,” Fu Manchu said. “You are looking at the master criminal who is preparing to unleash the Yellow Peril against the civilized nations of the world.”

The silken embodiment of evil was a clever illusion carved in light by the latest in computer and laser technology. Although the figure of the Chinese archvillain seemed solid, it had no more substance than the literary character created in the Sax Rohmer series. The system that brought the triplets together for their meetings could be manipulated, using data on figures real or imagined, to create any image desired. Past meetings had been presided over by such monumental figures as Mao or Genghis Khan.

Although Fu Manchu was an illusion created by electronic ectoplasm that defined the smallest detail, the voice behind the leering archfiend belonged to a flesh-and-blood person who ran a criminal empire that Rohmer’s villain could only have dreamed of.

In the tradition of the age-old crime cults know as Triads, the triplets who ran the far-flung organization were ranked by numbers rather than names, given them according to their order of birth. Wen Lo was Two, and he directed the Triad’s criminal enterprises behind a thin screen of respectability. Chang was Three, and he was in charge of the global network’s security, including the gangs that infested Chinatowns in every major city. The triplet behind the Fu Manchu mask served as CEO, overseeing criminal and legitimate operations, a responsibility that went with the name One.

“I enjoyed the hatchet man from the tong wars,” said Chang.

“I’m not surprised, given your efficient stewardship of our own hatchet men,” Fu Manchu said. “However, I understand that this efficiency did not extend to your expedition in Bermuda. Dr. Kane escaped from the bottom of the ocean.”

“Our machine cut the bathysphere’s cable. There was no way anyone could have saved it at that depth.”

“Apparently, someone did. His name is Kurt Austin. The television reports say he is an engineer with NUMA. Also, how do you explain your botched attack on the NUMA ship?”

Chang scowled.

“We met unexpected resistance,” he said.

“We cannot afford any more slipups. We would not be dealing with this situation if you had kept a closer eye on things at your testing lab, Wen Lo.”

The third triplet had been enjoying the discomfiture of his brother, but now it was his turn to squirm in his chair under the cold gaze of the archvillain.

“I accept full responsibility. The laboratory guard who brought the virus to his home province did not follow the proper decontamination safeguards. I have tightened them and prohibited travel by any of our security people.”

“Has the virus spread further?” Fu Manchu asked.

“It has broken past the quarantine. The government is trying to contain it.”

“Not good,” Fu Manchu said. “Our plan was to release the virus selectively when we had a vaccine to control it. We are trying to destabilize the government and profit from the spread of the disease. Wiping out the human race would be rather counterproductive, don’t you think?”

“It would solve our country’s problem with population control,” said Wen Lo in a weak attempt at humor.

“I’m sure it would. Unfortunately, we are part of the population. Is there any word of Dr. Kane?”

“We checked Bonefish Key,” Chang said. “He never returned. We still have our feelers out, but he seems to have disappeared.”

“His disappearance doesn’t concern me as much as the possibility that he now is aware that he is a target. And that he may have conveyed that concern to others. Fortunately, he is no longer vital to the completion of the project. But the work cannot be allowed to regerminate at Bonefish Key.”

“The only one who can reconstitute the project, other than Kane, is Dr. Song Lee, the representative that the People’s Republic sent to work with U.S. scientists,” Chang said. “She is about to be removed and disposed of.”

“See that it is accomplished quickly and cleanly,” Fu Manchu said. “And you, Brother Wen Lo, what is the status of the vaccine?”