Chang sat back and allowed his servant to place a napkin in his lap. Chang then reached over for the glass of orange juice.
“Here it is,” Hail said, realizing that he sounded a little too happy.
But Chang picked up his coffee mug instead and took a tiny sip. The coffee must have been hot, because Chang quickly pulled the cup away from his mouth and made a face.
The sliding glass door opened again and one of Chang’s girlfriends came out to join him at the table. She was wearing a bikini under a colorful sheer cover up.
She said some words that sounded like good morning in Korean.
Chang didn’t respond or even look at her. Instead he picked up a butter knife, sliced off a thick slab of butter and began to work it into his toast.
“What an asshole,” Shana Tran said.
“That he is,” Hail agreed. “And if he drinks his OJ like a good boy, he will soon be a dead asshole.”
His girlfriend took a moment to look over the table. Drinks had been poured for Chang, but as of yet, nothing had been poured for her. She looked directly at the single glass of orange juice that had been poured and began to reach for it.
“Oh shit,” Mercier said. “I think she’s going to drink the orange juice.”
The woman’s hand closed around the glass.
A split second later, like lightning, Chang flipped over his butter knife and rapped the woman on the back of her knuckles with the knife’s thick handle.
She flinched, let go of the glass and cried out and in pain. She held the back of her hand and teared up and Chang yelled something at her that could only have been, “Get your own orange juice.”
The little Asian woman’s body visually shrank as she meekly leaned back in her chair and lowered her head.
Chang’s servant had heard the commotion and came outside.
Chang pointed at the orange juice and then pointed at the woman and told the servant to get her a glass.
The woman raised her head and did her best to smile appreciatively.
“Really teaching her a lesson. Huh?” Shana Tran commented. “What a jerk.”
A moment later, Hail’s team watched Chang reach over and pick up the glass of orange juice. He held it up in front of his girlfriend. Making sure she was watching him, he greedily drank half of the glass.
“You haven’t seen jerking yet,” Hail remarked.
Hail looked down and pressed his finger to his screen and started a digital timer on his right monitor.
The servant returned with more orange juice and topped off Chang’s glass and filled an additional glass for the woman.
The crew looked on; each of them readying themselves for the spectacle to follow.
“Are we still recording?” Hail asked Fox.
“Yes, Sir,” Fox responded.
The image from Styx showed what would appear to be a common breakfast being consumed by a common Korean couple in a picturesque surrounding.
But what was really happening was four-thousand miles away from the Hail Nucleus, a prostitute was about to witness the horrific death of a maniacal terrorist in a picturesque surrounding.
At that exact moment the metabolic compound was breaking down in Chang’s body.
Hail looked at the timer on his monitor.
“One minute,” he announced.
During the planning of Chang’s death, his lab staff explained to Hail that cyanide poisoning created a form of histotoxic hypoxia. The cells of the surrounding organism were unable to use oxygen. Once the brain no longer received oxygen, then it was lights out. This particular form of cyanide was more concentrated than the pill form due to the fact that the pico-drone could only carry a tiny amount. Therefore, time was the tradeoff. It would take longer to do its damage, but Hail’s chemists assured his team that it would work just fine.
“Two minutes,” Hail announced.
Chang reached across the table and picked up his coffee cup again. Apparently the man was confident the dark liquid was now cool enough to drink.
As the cup touched his lips, Chang made another strange face; similar to the one he had made when he had burned his lips the first time. Chang pulled the cup back from his mouth an inch or two and grimaced. The coffee cup began to tremble in his hand slightly. Chang cleared his throat with a single cough. Brown hot liquid slid over the edge of the coffee cup and on to the table. Without warning, Chang stood up from the table with his coffee cup still in his right hand. His eyes were now wide and he looked panicked and began to shake. A few seconds later, the coffee cup fell from his hand and landed on the glass table with a crash. Hot coffee splashed up from the table and landed on his girlfriend who began to scream. Both of Chang’s hands flew up to his neck and he clutched at it as if he were trying to choke himself. As he stood there, immobile, trying to choke himself, his entire body began to shake and convulse. Chang’s face had turned beet read. One hand flew away from his neck and began to reach across the table toward the woman, as if beckoning her for help. The screaming she had let out when the hot coffee had splashed on her was nothing compared to the scream she belted out now. Chang looked like he was trying to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was some guttural choking sounds as if he had swallowed his tongue. Chang had now become a zombie. He let go of his throat and both of his hands rose out in front of him. His eyes widened and his eyeballs looked like they were ready to pop out of his red face. His girlfriend scuttled her chair backwards across the bricks and continued to scream. Two servants opened the sliding glass doors and came running out. One of them approached Chang and tried to assess the situation. The servant quickly determined there was very little he could do for his boss who couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk and was making weird zombie choking sounds. The servants had good intentions, but they were not fast enough to catch their boss when he fell. In one great convulsing act, Chang straightened up as if a rigid pole had been driven up his spine. He then grabbed at his chest with both hands and fell forward onto the glass table. Chang’s face smashed into the bowls and the plates and the glassware. The force of the North Korean’s body landing on the table shattered the glass top inward and he continued to fall forward. His feet came off the ground and his body cartwheeled over the thick table rail that had supported the glass. With all his weight on the rail, the opposite side of the table lifted off the ground and the frame went shooting up onto its side.
The microphone on Styx had been optimized to pick up speech at a distance. The sound of Chang falling through the table was so loud inside the Nucleus that one would have thought that a car that had crashed into a glass factory.
“Holy shit!” Knox yelled, verbalizing what everyone else was thinking.
Chang’s body finally relaxed and came to a rest face up, his white suit covered in crystal shards of colorful china, brown coffee stains and orange blotches from the deadly juice. His face was still bright red, which was a telltale sign of cyanide poisoning.
On the screen, Hail watched Chang’s ex-girlfriend jump up out of her chair and run back inside the house. Chang’s servants began picking their way through the rubble, negotiating broken glass and what was left of the misshapen frame of the table.
Mercier used his right hand to trace a cross over his heart.
Tanner Grant said, “Damn, if the cyanide didn’t kill him, then the glass table sure the hell did.”
Under her breath, Shana Tran said, “Goodbye to bad garbage.”
Gage Renner stared on in disbelief as if he was waiting for someone to rerun the footage so he could be sure that the man was dead.