a few seconds of hesitation, Wen Lo jotted down a number and handed back the pad and pen.
“Thank you,” Ming said, inspecting the number to make sure it was legible. He tucked the pad and pen back in his pocket. “Now we can deal with your future. How does London sound, for a start? We can move you around, to Paris and New York, as need be. And, when it’s safe, we can bring you home again.”
Wen Lo’s mood brightened.
“London is fine. I have a town house in Soho.”
“Too public. The government will find you a less obvious place to live. Do you still play tennis?”
“Every day. It’s my passion.”
“Splendid. You will have endless time to work on your backhand.”
Ming lit a cigarette, took a drag, and tapped on the window separating the backseat from the driver. The car pulled over to the curb, and the colonel said to Wen Lo, “See you in Paris.”
The husky man got out of the front, opened the door, and escorted Ming to a second Roewe sedan that had pulled up behind the first one. As Ming got into the second car, he said to the man, “Make sure it’s neat.”
As the colonel’s car pulled away from the curb, he tapped out a number on his cell phone. After a few rings, a man’s voice answered.
“Mr. Austin?” Ming said.
“That’s right,” Austin replied.
“I have the information you are looking for.”
WHILE THE COLONEL WAS talking on the phone in his car, the husky man walked back to the first car and got in next to the driver. He tapped on the glass behind him and slid the partition open. Wen Lo looked right at him. This gave the man a perfect target when he shot Wen Lo directly in the right eye with a .22 caliber pistol.
The shooter slid the glass partition closed and grunted an order to the driver. They drove Wen Lo’s warm body to a mortuary that was waiting to embalm it. A glass eye replaced the one the bullet had vaporized. The embalmed corpse was turned over to the Bureau of Police. A tag attached to the big toe there certified that he had died while being incarcerated in a Chinese prison.
The police noted the death on records that were promptly destroyed. The body was shipped to a warehouse where the receiver complained about the quality of the merchandise. The corpse was dissected, immersed in acetone to eliminate all traces of moisture, and then given a bath of polymers. The muscles and bones were touched up with paint, and the body bent into a standing position, the arm cocked and ready to smash a tennis ball.
When the transformed corpse arrived in London to join other bodies in an exhibition that would take it to Paris and New York, a tennis racket was placed in the boney hand.
In time, Wen Lo’s skinned body would adorn T-shirts, key chains, refrigerator magnets, even the cover of the catalog sold at the traveling exhibition.
And, as Colonel Ming had promised, Wen Lo had endless time to work on his backhand.
CHAPTER 48
WHEN JOE ZAVALA WASN’T DATING HALF THE FEMALE POPULATION of Washington or tinkering with his Corvette’s engine, he loved figuring out how things worked. To Zavala, the hologram projection room adjacent to Chang’s garishly appointed ship’s salon was nothing but an elaborate engine whose purpose was to send and receive lifelike images.
Zavala prowled through the intricate arrangement of microphones, lenses, lasers, projectors, and computers that surrounded the circular table and three chairs under the hanging cones. Austin was standing by, connected by cell phone to Hiram Yeager back at NUMA headquarters. Yeager was an expert on holograms, having developed a lovely young holographic woman named Max as the personification of the NUMA computer system, which he presided over. Austin relayed questions to Yeager and sent him photos of electronic or optic devices that Zavala was unable to describe.
After an hour of analyzing the ingenious setup, Zavala stepped back and brushed his palms together.
“She’s all set and ready to go, Kurt. You can project yourself with a push of that button.”
Austin peered up into one of the cones overhead.
“This isn’t going to reassemble my molecules so that I end up with the head of a fly, is it?” he asked.
“Nothing to worry about, Kurt. This is all high-tech illusion, smoke and mirrors.”
“Keep a flyswatter handy, just in case,” Austin said, settling into the padded, contoured chair.
Zavala stood off to the side ready to intervene if something went wrong. Austin glanced across the table at the two empty chairs, studied the control panel for a moment, and then punched in the code number Wen Lo had given Colonel Ming before the Triad triplet met his premature demise.
Lights blinked and machinery hummed as a complex set of optics scanned every square inch of Austin’s body and transmitted the information via electronic pulses to a computer that digested the information and sent it to another computer to be reassembled in a 3-D projector. The scan was all smoke and mirrors, as Zavala had said, but Austin tensed his shoulders, expecting to feel an electrical tingle that never came.
Instead, the air under a cone across from Austin shimmered as if heated. A cloud of whirling motes began to form with no distinct outline at first, then materialized into the rough image of a human head and shoulders, transparent at first, becoming translucent, then solid, as the facial features filled in. Austin knew from his encounter with the Dragon Lady that the hologram was mutable and could be changed at a whim. But the face across the table was stranger than anything he could have imagined.
The eyes below the gracefully arched brows were the same jade-green as Chang’s hate-filled orbs. The fleshy lips were feminine, but the soft-featured face was at odds with stubble on the chin and the professional wrestler’s body with shoulders straining the seams of the black collarless shirt. The third Triad triplet seemed to be neither man nor woman but a freakish combination of both, a hermaphrodite.
The hologram remained as still as a marble statue. The small, delicate hands remained on the table. The features were frozen, eyes staring straight ahead. Then the lips moved, and a mellow voice, neither male nor female, came through the surrounding speakers.
“We meet again, Mr. Austin,” the hologram said.
“Should I call you Dragon Lady or Lai Choi San?” Austin asked.
“I am known as
“From the way your luck has been going lately,” Austin said, “you’d better look for a new number. Your holographic image is all out of whack too. Nothing is moving except for your mouth.”
“That’s because I can’t move my limbs. I have limited movement of my eyes and full movement of my lips only.”
“What happened?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that, Mr. Austin.”
Austin paused, recalling Kane’s revelations about the paralyzing effects of the medusa toxin.
“We wondered what happened to the vaccine,” he said. “The ship’s helicopter was gone, so we concluded that the cooler with the vaccine and cultures was no longer on Chang’s freighter.”
“The serum was transported directly to me. Upon the assurance of my brother Chang, I orally vaccinated myself. I knew that the virus would spread to my city in a matter of hours and I wanted to be the first to be made immune. I became paralyzed as I sat here trying to contact my brothers.” The thin lips spread in a grotesque parody of a smile. “It seems that the chemical was flawed.”
“The cylinder Chang sent you contained a transitional vaccine that was going to be discarded. It could kill the virus, but it still paralyzed the host.”
“Then the research was a failure?”
“Not at all, One. The real vaccine is rapidly being produced throughout China and around the world in quantities that will stop the epidemic you started.”
