The Machine

he said.

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘It’s good.’

She felt his fingers lightly on her sides. His thumbs on her back. ‘Mmm hmm,’ she said again, arching her back as he kissed her. She had a very stylish body, he thought, as he glanced at her as and her back in the mirror. You don’t get one of these in the make-up department. Her arms reached gracefully upward, like a cat stretching as Stone took the olive blouse by the hem. Over her head in one slow movement, sweeping the hair up with it for a moment, and then letting it fall again onto the bare skin of her back, like a curtain of blond silk.

— o0°0o-

Lying on Virginia Carlisle’s bed in the afternoon, Stone weirdly thought of Ying Ning and the poem again, on the plane. The Ballad of the Lovely Women. Du Fu, her Eighth Century intellectual rebel. The feminist, the anti-war guy. Du Fu loved those upper class women in spite of himself. “Peerless women, with the names of Northern lands”. Did she know something? On second thoughts, Ying Ning had probably never heard of a place called Carlisle.

Ying Ning was more his type in a way. Edgy, moody, difficult. Darkly attractive. Yet here he was with Virginia Carlisle. Funny that.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said to Virginia. ‘A nap in the afternoon gives you added sparkle in front of the camera. Energy.’

‘Honey. I already got the sparkle,’ she said. ‘And it seems you have plenty of energy too, Stone. We must be good for each other.’ She winked.

Lovely manners, this Vassar girl. In many ways, the perfect hostess.

Thirty seconds after Stone left, Virginia Carlisle was on her cell phone. ‘Jim. There’s a guy just left my room. Tall. Kinda handsome, slim. Blondish hair — could use a cut. Have him followed by some of the Chinese guys when he leaves the hotel.’

Chapter 40 — 3:55pm 6 April Chengdu, China

Ying Ning had been followed before of course — often in fact. She sometimes wondered why she hadn’t been picked off by an over-enthusiastic young Communist cadre with a gun, given her notoriety. Still, China had laws. The Gong An would catch her and put her on trial one day. It wouldn't last long, but yes, she would get her day in court.

Today it was different. Usually they worked in teams of three — two men and one woman, all in their late twenties, all average-looking. Average height, average build, all fit from their training in the Gong An’s schools of martial arts. Today it was just one guy. He was much taller than average and easy to spot. She led him through the crowds into the Du Fu Park, where Sichuan’s humidity and greenery still held the upper hand over Chengdu’s concrete. The park was like a jungle, peppered with old-style Chinese pavilions, picturesque bridges and ponds of koi carp, their well-fed muzzles plopping lazily in and out of the water. There are worse places to be followed.

At first she’d thought it might be Stone tracking her through the streets, given his height, but now she could turn and peer at a distance through the trees, she could see it was not. It was a white Western man, but if anything taller still than Stone. He loped through the forest like the yeti, with long brown hair in a ponytail and a scruffy red bandana around his head.

Ying Ning walked off down one of the forest paths and stopped once more, checking behind her. He was coming the same way for sure. What did he want? Ying Ning was used to the attentions of the Gong An. It was sufficient with the Gong An just to get away. In China there were plenty of crowds to blend into, plenty of scooters and bikes to “borrow” if she needed to. This was different, because she needed to know what this guy behind her was up to. She needed to ID him as Stone had asked her. She retraced her steps while he was out of view for a few seconds, then cut off into the trees, her staccato tip-toe steps making barely a rustle in the undergrowth. She crouched on her haunches, still on tiptoe, then rose to pass silently out onto the tiled path only twenty metres behind the man.

Now she could see him. Five centimeters taller than Stone, she guessed, and bigger in the shoulders, just as Stone had said he would be. He was wearing heavy boots, which scraped on the path as he ambled along untidily. He also had on a heavy leather jacket, like he was some kind of biker. It must be killing him in this humidity. She followed him with silent, velvet steps for another fifty metres, before the big lunk realised he’d lost her. He stood there, his long arms dangling in simian fashion, and looked around him, peering obviously through the trees for Ying Ning’s spiky hair and fox-like face.

Inevitably he turned, and when he did, Ying Ning was standing behind him in her skinny black jeans and black T-shirt, a hand placed questioningly on an angular hip. She was looking directly into his Aviator sunglasses.

Chapter 41 — 5:35pm 6 April Chengdu, China

Carslake, he was called. Stone had told him to meet up with Ying Ning, and finally he’d found her. She’d brought him back to her place. Stone had never met Carslake in person, but he’d met men like him. He’d suggested Carslake grab a flight to China to be on the spot when he discovered the location of the Machine. He knew the American wouldn’t pass up chance to find a real UFO. Carslake might look like a nutjob — a madcap UFO blogger — but Stone knew people like Carslake can be useful.

Big, clumsy, slightly dirty looking: everything about Carslake said lazy. He took long loping strides, and somehow still dragged his boots on the ground. He spoke with a slow drawl, as if he couldn’t be bothered to speak any faster. The unkempt stubble on his face was because he couldn’t be bothered shaving rather than any fashion statement. And that black leather jacket — well, Stone liked the jacket. It was a cool jacket. Heavy, old, very good quality. But in the sauna of Chengdu? And Carslake wore it all the time. As in all the time. Probably wore it bed.

‘Being in China is kinda like camping,’ said Carslake, conspiratorially to Stone. ‘You never get properly clean. You take a shower, but as soon as you put your clothes on, you feel dirty again.’

Coming from him, it made Stone smile. Ying Ning merely took another drag on her cigarette and shook her head. ‘Yang guizi make excuse to be dirty,’ she said, paying Carslake’s casual racism back in kind.

Carslake helped himself to another of her cigarettes and lit up using her red star Chairman Mao cigarette lighter. ‘I don’t know how you smoke this Chinese shit,’ he said, examining the characters on the carton. ‘You ain’t got any American smokes? What the hell brand is it anyway?’

Ying Ning had brought Carslake back into a house she was using on the outskirts of the sprawling city. It was one of a few hundred small houses built by a main highway, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. No streets had been laid, however. They walked from the roaring four-track highway through clouds of dust, or through mud if the rain had just fallen. It being Sichuan, trees and weeds were rapidly gaining a hold in the brown, rutted mud of the “streets”.

How did Ying find these places? The house was small, with two tiny bedrooms. It was newly built, unpainted and unfurnished. But clean. Stone had returned there from Virginia Carlisle’s place to find their old friends Bao An and Lin Xiaohong infesting the place. Then Ying Ning arrived with the tall American. Stone had been feeding tidbits of information to his blog, and finally, Carslake had been interested enough to get off his sofa in LA and fly to Chengdu. Which was good, because Stone had asked him to bring something very useful with him.

This guy was more than a courier though. Despite appearances, Carslake’s type can be very useful. Because although people like Carslake might look lazy, it was often because they were obsessional and independent-minded. They focused on one thing, and the rest of life could go hang. That was Carslake. Stone had seen his blog — UFOWatch. Crazy, perhaps delusional, but Carslake had obviously done very little for the past