The Machine

Oyang emailed Stone asking to meet urgently. Stone played it cool, didn’t say where he was. Meanwhile, the messages from Oyang became more and more desperate. Stone had certainly hit a nerve with that blog posting. He’d as good as accused Oyang of taking ShinComm’s money and salting it away in Switzerland. Evidently it was too close to the bone, too near the truth. Oyang had panicked, and his messages were increasingly urgent. Stone would leave it a few hours longer before replying. Let’s make the bastard sweat.

By the following morning Oyang had offered to send a ShinComm private jet to wherever Stone was in China. Late in the day, Stone decided to put him out of his misery, and the following morning boarded the plane at Chengdu with Ying Ning and Carslake.

Oyang’s personal assistant from ShinComm was sent to meet them in Shanghai. She wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. Oyang, she informed them, was at a place called Balong. A car would take them there from Shanghai.

Balong, it turned out, was not some new, guarded hideaway of Oyang’s. There would be no guns or strip searches this time. Oyang was at was a country club called Balong, which was, bizarrely, the venue, of the Shanghai International Polo Tournament for the next few days. Evidently a must for the likes of Oyang and the Shanghai super-rich. But not exactly the natural habitat of Stone and Carslake. Still less Ying Ning.

‘And then there were eight,’ said Stone as he shook hands. His trip had begun in Kowloon — Cantonese for “Nine Dragons”. Now they had arrived at Balong, which means eight dragons in Mandarin.

‘Eight?’ said Rupert Rowley-Phipps, the Englishman who ran the Balong Resort. ‘No idea what you’re talking about, old man.’ Rupert had spent five years living in China, but had not a word of the language to show for it. Rowley-Phipps was little sniffy about Stone, Carslake and Ying Ning. Not the “quality” of guest he was looking for at the Country Club.

The feeling was mutual. When Rupert shook Ying Ning’s hand she looked down as if she’d just had dogshit pressed into her palm.

Rupert may not have gone native, but you couldn’t fault the man’s ambition. He’d arrived from England with no money, armed only with the vague knowledge that China was the “land of opportunity”. Where others wanted to get toys manufactured or buy a couple of container-loads of bikes, Rupert’s dream was to introduce the game of polo to a fifth of the world’s population.

With the help of some old friends in the Hong Kong banks, he’d leased twenty square kilometres of land from the Chinese Navy and built a golf course, a yachting marina, a country club of Babylonian luxury, and of course, the polo fields.

There were two hotels. The Seasons — merely five-star and luxurious, and then the Shui Hu, which ached with sensuous, deep wealth, and where every spacious suite came with its own servants. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a small island, a few hundred metres off shore, on which was a single villa. The pinnacle of exclusivity, even here.

‘The business plan,’ said Rupert as he showed Stone and the others round, ‘is based on the extraordinary number of new millionaires in China. We’re not catering to a middle class,’ he said. ‘We’re catering to the rich. The super-rich, in fact. And I have to give them what they want.’ Rupert waved his arm at the seeming acres of marble and the uber-expensive boutiques in the atrium of the club. Bulgari. Louis Vuitton. Hermes. And many more, selling Italian jewelry and French handbags at eye-watering prices.

Carslake strolled up, gawping at the watches. Ying Ning stood there in stony-faced contempt, itching with disgust. As if it soiled her somehow to even stand on the marble floor.

‘Five thousand bucks? For a watch?’ Carslake exclaimed.

‘One of the cheaper ones. The sports model,’ said Rupert without irony, but he eyed Carslake with concern. He turned to look at Stone. ‘Can’t you tell him to lose that jacket? And the bandana. Please?’

Ying Ning spoke finally. ‘If he was Chinese, you’d throw him out,’ she said.

Rupert grinned. ‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘I’d have all three of you thrown out if you weren’t friends of Robert Oyang. It’s a wild guess, but I’d say you’re a few million short of financial qualification for this place,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m also under no illusions about what you think. It’s vulgar, it’s over the top. The paintings on the wall are crass — look at that one over there — a pastiche of an eighteenth century Fragonard. Disgusting.’

Stone hadn’t noticed this artistic faux pas. And beneath this unprepossessing Fragonard or whatever it was, there was a cluster of polo players in white jeans and coloured shirts, playing video games. They’d pulled their Eighteenth century reproduction chairs up under a logo’d black canopy, incongruously playing motor racing games on wide screens.

‘The more money your guests have, the more tasteless it has to be?’ asked Stone.

‘Something like that,’ said Rupert, turning to go. ‘Anyhow, gentleman and lady. I must leave you. You’ll be sharing a room in The Seasons, with the TV crews.’

‘How come he spend so much time with us?’ asked Ying Ning.

‘Checking us out,’ said Stone.

Rupert called to them over his shoulder, ‘Mr Oyang has a large suite at the Shui Hu. Quite unusual. You should take a look if you get the chance!’

Stone would be doing just that. In the next half-hour if possible. The less time he spent at the Country Club the better — for whole host of reasons.

Rupert had said that Oyang’s suite in the Shui Hu Hotel was “unusual”. He wasn’t kidding. The room felt about as big as a tennis court, and the decor was half Jane Austen movie and half Santa’s grotto. It had an effeminate languor about it, that lazy feeling unique to very expensive places. Perfect for Oyang, in fact.

Stone was shown in by a fellow dressed up like a butler, who was very obviously carrying a handgun beneath his jacket. Oyang looked at Stone for a good minute when he walked in, but he didn’t show any surprise. In fact he didn’t show any emotion at all. Just sat there on the furry white sofa. It might have been real fur, too.

‘We went there, to the Machine,’ said Stone.

Oyang seemed distracted, compared to last time. Something on his mind. ‘You did? It was fascinating I suppose,’ he said.

Fascinating? Stone’s mind filled with the image of the monks, and the truck, and the driver getting his head stoved in. ‘Fascinating’s not quite the word. We didn’t discover what the Machine is. But there’s definitely something out there, a thousand metres below the surface. Is that what you flew me here to talk about?’

‘Yes. No. You know it isn’t,’ said Oyang.

Of course it wasn’t. He had a guilty conscience, Oyang, and was suddenly feeling very threatened by what Stone had posted on the NotFutile.com site. But Oyang didn’t look worried. He looked distracted if anything. Like he’d taken one too many valium.

‘Semyonov said it was somewhere out there,’ said Oyang. ‘It is quite fascinating.’ Oyang looked anything but fascinated. ‘I suppose I knew there was something,’ he said. ‘Semyonov went out there to Sichuan twice in the last year, to the Machine. He always came back with something exciting.’

‘What do you mean, “exciting”?’ asked Stone. Oyang had just repeated that the Machine was out there in Sichuan, and he didn’t look like he was lying.

Oyang was playing with an ivory chess set, turning the pieces around in his fingers. ‘Do you think they will kill me?’ he asked.

‘Who would want to kill you?’ asked Stone. ‘The people who killed Semyonov?’

‘Yes. The Gong An,’ said Oyang. His hands were shaking slightly. ‘It was the Gong An who sent that Switzerland story to your web site. No one in Switzerland would leak information in such a way.’ He’d still barely looked up at Stone. ‘And besides, it’s completely false. None of Steven’s money was sent to Switzerland.’

‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Stone. He’d actually found himself comforting Oyang. As though he should put his arm around the man or something.

Oyang turned the chess piece in his long, feminine fingers. ‘The Gong An knows about the Machine,’ he said. ‘Of course they do. I knew as soon as they killed Steven. Steven said the Machine was so powerful, it would change the world. But the Machine destroyed him, and now it will destroy me.’

Oh dear. It was even worse than it looked. Stone allowed a suitable pause.