‘It is of no consequence whether you believe it, English,’ sneered Zhang. ‘I assure you the Japanese hornet’s eight different venoms in the bloodstream are unmistakable. Besides. My men found this in the hotel…’ Zhang took something from his pocket and tossed it on the table towards Stone.
‘We will talk later,’ said Zhang. ‘For now, I permit you to rest, English. In your cell. I thought it only right to reserve a special cell for you. Built a century ago by the British Imperialists. Very old and very small. I think hot and dirty. The insects also are quite disagreeable.’
Zhang’s eyes creased with a hint of pleasure as he strolled from the room. Stone looked at the desk and examined the object Zhang had thrown to him. It was the carcass of a huge, multicoloured bug, about seven centimetres long — the Japanese hornet. Except it wasn’t a real insect at all. It was man-made — a beautiful manufacture of metal and plastic.
Chapter 17 — 4:02pm 29 March — Special Circumstances Training Facility, Southern California
At four in the afternoon on 29th March, Ekstrom received another order from SearchIgnition Corp for an assassination in Hong Kong. This time it looked more interesting, and the location suggested a very fitting method for the execution.
Ekstrom authorized deployment of the South East Asian regional asset based in Hong Kong for the procedure. A text alert was sent, followed by an encrypted email with Ekstrom’s detailed instructions and photographs of the target.
Chapter 18 — 7:54am 30 March — Old Bailey Prison, Hong Kong Island
Stone was hooded again and taken down several flights of stairs.
So. Stone would have to pay a price for irritating the
Stone sat on the cold brick floor and thought again of the video he’d seen the night before. Could the violently coloured insects he’d seen crawling over the terrified girl’s body really have been man-made? And if so, who the hell had made them purely for an assassination?
There were other questions popping still, basic questions that wouldn’t go away. First — why? If Semyonov was doing all this — making weapons, testing weapons on live subjects, murdering journalists — then why? Semyonov had everything, literally everything. Yet he had sold it up and given away the money. So why? To go and work on the Machine, according to Zhang. Could that possibly be true?
Stone was in a filthy prison cell in Hong Kong. Things weren’t exactly going according to plan. He’d come out here in a blaze of anger over the cold-blooded killing of Hooper. That was the truth if he was honest. He’d seen some of what Junko Terashima knew, and he had evidence that the weapons in Afghanistan came from Semyonov’s firm — New Machine Tech, or ShinComm or whatever. It had looked like a clear case.
But things weren’t that simple. Terashima was dead, and her information with her. And now there was something called the Machine. By rights Stone should go on home, do some research and figure it out. But as of now, in a sweltering Hong Kong prison cell, that was not one of his options.
After a few hours in solitary, things took a still more sinister turn. He heard a loud argument between the prison staff outside his cell. Another hour, and the door opened. Stone was cuffed once more and taken back up into one the main wing of the prison. No hood this time. He’d become a regular prisoner, and that was not a good thing.
This was an institution built to intimidate, constructed by the British along the lines of the Victorian jails back home. It was underground, with brick walls, apparently metres thick, painted over in shit brown and a nauseous, creamy yellow, and smelling of carbolic soap. Even the hallway of this prison wing was claustrophobically narrow and low, with the heavy steel doors of the cells close together along the wall. No natural light, and the air felt dead and sweaty. Like an ancient, brick-built cave with striplights. It was brutally clean, though, and the brickwork made smooth from a century and a half of repeated painting. It had seen some misery, this place. An airless hole, redolent of an age of judicial whippings and regular hangings.
The cell doors were of steel plate and bars, and as Stone was led along the hall, a hellish noise of banging grew up, the inmates hammering their tin plates and rice bowls against the bars, hollering in half a dozen tongues. Chinese, Indian, Malay and then the odd African and European.
Stone realised something. They were staring and hollering at
Stone looked around the small cell. Like the rest of the place, it was small, old — but clean, painted over and over in the same sickly yellow. No window of course. Stone’s was the upper of two bunk beds. For a second he thought he was alone in there, until he noticed a man in the shadows, scrunched into a ball on the lower bunk, his hands over his ears. A white man, hunched and folded, like a frightened monkey. Stone climbed up onto his bed and lay looking at the ceiling, forty centimetres or so from his face.
It was an hour later, long after the noise had calmed down, when the terrified man below him spoke.
‘They’ll kill us, you know.’ It was a New Zealand accent. ‘They said they’re going to kill us and they will.’ His voice was weak and trembling. Then he said, ‘Is it true? Did you kill the whore in the Snake Market? They say she was tortured and murdered.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Stone. ‘This is place is OK. It’s old, but it’s well run. The guards here won’t let anything happen to you. Neither will I.’
That didn’t cut any ice. ‘It’s not me. They’re going to kill you, because you killed the whore. They’ve told me already. But they’ll have to kill me too, I know they will. To stop me talking.’
Stone looked down. The guy’s eyes were tight shut. Stone jumped down from his bunk and began to coax out of this shrivelled individual what he had heard.
It turned out the man’s name was Williams. A businessman from New Zealand — a quiet husband and father by the look of it — who was tempted to the Ming Dai Hotel that day with a prostitute. Williams didn’t know much more, but he’d been seen in the Ming Dai, and then a girl had been murdered — tortured and murdered. By a white man. Williams had been arrested and ended up in this Victorian hole deep below the streets of Hong Kong.
This kind of made sense as far as it went. But what was wrong with this picture? Why were Stone and Williams in the same cell? They were held in connection with the same crime — the killing at the Snake Market. Why put them in the same cell, where they could concoct stories and alibis? Also, before Stone had even arrived on the wing, word had gone out that he’d tortured and murdered the girl. Who would do that?
This was Zhang’s way of expressing displeasure with Stone. Maybe even getting rid of him. Stone asked Williams if he’d seen anyone resembling Ekstrom at the Ming Dai, or whether he’d actually seen Junko Terashima. Williams was no help at all, had no information. He was going to pieces, dissolving into guilt.
‘I love my wife so much. I’ve never been tempted to cheat before,’ said Williams, squeaking in his New Zealand accent. ‘Now I’ve landed myself in this place, locked in a tiny cell with a murderer. It’s God’s judgement on me.’
What a worm. Williams stayed crushed up in the corner of the bunk like some kind of contortionist, whining over and over about how he loved his wife, and if only he hadn’t strayed, and this was God’s way of punishing him, yadda yadda. He sounded more scared of his wife than anything that might happen to him in that hole in Hong Kong.
Williams wanted literally to hide — to curl into a ball in the shadows on the lower bunk. But hiding isn’t easy
