‘Take this example,’ Ying Ning went on, and she produced a baggie containing what appeared to be about fifty grams of sugar. She poured a little pile out onto the table. She licked the tip of her finger, dipped it in the sugar, then tasted it. ‘Go ahead. Try,’ she said.
Stone tasted it. Sure enough, the sweet, bland taste of refined sugar.
Bao An appeared with a spoon. Ying Ning crushed the little pile of sugar granules with the back of the spoon, turning them into a thin white powder, then licked her finger once more, looking at Stone in an oddly provocative way. She gestured him to taste it again.
‘Cocaine?’ said Stone. Stone licked his finger and tasted once more. ‘I got a bitter aftertaste on my teeth back there, after the sugar. But no odour or taste. Cocaine, yes?’
‘Not bad, Rockhead.’ Ying Ning was impressed ‘Yes. Cocaine — high quality too. Another ShinComm idea. But how do they do it?’
‘The real question is why,’ said Stone interrupting. ‘Why do they do it? This technology is used to smuggle cocaine to China,’ he said. ‘It says here in the file they use a nanotech system to coat the drug with a layer of sugar only one molecule thick.’ The significance was just sinking in with Stone as he spoke. This was an incredible process, and light years ahead of the big food companies. Worth billions. Food companies could coat healthy food in a nanotech layer of sugar, and they would have the perfect low calorie foods. But here it was, and not even patented. All that work to disguise cocaine for smugglers? Made no sense. This technology was being given away, just like the SmoothVision digital video.
Stone flipped though the file on the table. Full of this stuff. His favourite was the car — like the one he had seen driven by Semyonov, gliding past with preternatural acceleration as Semyonov left the party. Another piece of outrageous technology. The news clipping made out that Semyonov had driven from Beijing to Shanghai in that electric sports car. A thousand miles, without charging it once. Stone had assumed it was bullshit when he first read it. But maybe it wasn’t. It could revolutionize the car industry, yet Semyonov was just driving around in a prototype, and doing nothing with the technology.
‘Do you see what this means?’ Stone said. ‘All of this work has been traced to New Machine and ShinComm, the corporation which worked with Steven Semyonov in China. But where is the innovation coming from? Where are the labs?’
Ying Ning flicked on the computer. She pointed to the screen, and zoomed in on a photo of a factory unit. Perfect resolution, Stone noticed. SmoothVision again.
‘This is ShinComm at Dongguan,’ explained Ying Ning. ‘Less than three hundred kilometres from here. Giant facility, two hundred fifty thousand workers, but…’ Ying Ning paused. ‘But nothing is happening in Dongguan. I have local people watching this place. I have contacts in factory. They make only phones, computers and semiconductors, All design in America. Same thing at ShinComm Factory City in Shanghai.’ Ying Ning flicked through images of the two giant factory sites. ‘No research workers, no labs. The ideas are coming from a secret facility. Semyonov and his capitalist whores at ShinComm are selling Chinese secrets for quick money.’
‘Sorry to spoil your story,’ said Stone. ‘But why would Semyonov do it for the money? He just committed twenty-five billion to the corporation. And he’s also dead.’ Ying Ning looked at him. ‘Bank of China confirmed they received every penny of Semyonov’s money. They said so in public. So the question is: why? Why did Semyonov pay that money?’
‘And where does the technology come from?’ said Ying Ning. ‘Including weapons?’
Ying Ning paused, as if she were unsure whether to say something. Then she took out her Mao Zedong lighter and lit another cigarette, again looking perplexed.
‘You want to tell us something?’ asked Stone.
Another slide came up on the screen. ‘This photo was sent to Junko Terashima,’ she said. ‘From a contact high up in ShinComm, called Oyang. But we don’t know where this place is. Junko said she didn’t know. But Oyang claimed that’s where the technology is coming from.’ It was a photo of a high electric fence, with seemingly nothing behind it. Stone leaned forward to the screen and zoomed in once more. No lab or factory, just a few small huts in the distance, with rolling, parched landscape behind, and a clear blue sky, like it was in a desert. The fence was four metres high, electrified, with cameras. It was meant to look menacing.
‘Junko received this photo in USA from Oyang. That is why she comes to Hong Kong.’ said Ying Ning, playing with her Communist cigarette lighter. ‘And Junko say this place is the reason why Semyonov came to China.’
‘This is the Machine?’ asked Stone.
Ying Ning nodded. ‘Oyang sent her this photo,’ she said. ‘He said it was the reason Semyonov came to China.’
‘And it was the reason Junko came to Hong Kong. But now she’s dead, and so is Semyonov,’ said Stone.
Ying Ning nodded.
‘Sounds like we need to have a chat with your Mr Oyang,’ said Stone.
Ying Ning laughed and shook her head. ‘Oyang? And finish up like Junko? Maybe you are stupid, Rockhead. But I take you to Shanghai to show you something. You will be surprised.’
Chapter 27 — 7:05pm 31 March Special Circumstances Training Facility, Southern California
Ekstrom froze the video clip on his widescreen monitor at two minutes thirty-three seconds, and scribbled some notes on his iPad. He hated deskwork as a rule — but this wasn’t so bad. He zoomed with the SmoothVision slider, and looked at the range indicator on the weapon. 780 meters to the wall of the Afghan compound. The infrasound weapon was run at 95 per cent power with focused beam for 85 seconds.
He resumed the video and slid forward to eleven minutes on the clip, to see the first results of the firing. Two kids lying prone in a dusty lane, a woman in her twenties and a young girl in a doorway, an old man with a donkey collapsed on top of him. Then a video of the inside one of the “dwellings”, as he was meant to call them. Shitholes more like. The video showed a woman lying half-naked in a scuzzy bedroom with clay walls.
And so on. In the eight and a half minutes between the weapon discharge at a range of nearly half a mile, and his men reaching the site, the whole village had stayed incapacitated. Four had been killed by the eighty-five second burst. Three children under five, including one breast-feeding baby lying with his inert mother, and an elderly man. These small children had suffered major hemorrhage in the ears and lungs. They had died from inhalation of blood, with no one able to help them.
Ekstrom had ordered the bodies brought from the village and laid out together under the trees. The first sign of recovery from the villagers was at twelve minutes, and the last at twenty-two.
Forty-four adult villagers and adolescents had been used for the second phase of the work. They had been tied in pairs to trees, and exposed to the weapon at a range of 250 metres through a one metre thick compound wall. Varying power discharges and exposure times were tested, with the figures written neatly on their foreheads in black marker pen. Those who survived the test, by reason of having a lower dose of the sound weapon, Ekstrom personally dispatched them with a single shot of his.22 automatic to the forehead, after ensuring their heart function and blood pressure had been recorded, along with their time of exposure, in black permanent marker on their chests.
The mean exposure of the infrasound weapon required for human adult death was 113 seconds, with a standard deviation of 25 seconds