‘Your friend looks familiar’ said Ekstrom, making conversation.
‘Antonio Alban,’ she replied. ‘He’s been on TV a lot lately.’
Ekstrom raised an interested eyebrow.
‘SearchIgnition,’ she explained. ‘He’s VP of Vision at SearchIgnition.’
Ekstrom did the smile again. Glanced up from his menu cheekily. Women loved it when he did that. At least Jessica did.
Her blouse was open a button lower than usual, her eyes smouldering. And this was before the entree. A man with Ekstrom’s looks and physique shouldn’t need to work on his “game”, but the “S and A” (Seduction and Attraction) program at Special Circumstances' academy was the real deal. Ekstrom had refused to use the “S and A” program before now — as if learning seduction techniques somehow demeaned his masculinity. But this was business, and for Jessica he had deployed the full three-day program of dates, calls and text messages. It worked like a dream — before they even met. Ekstrom wondered what she would be like in bed. Grateful, was his guess.
He was interrupted by a movement on the other end of their table of ten, near the window. Alban. He had got up. Ekstrom glanced at his watch. He gave it forty-five seconds then stood up himself.
‘Excuse me,’ said Ekstrom, and made for the restroom. On the staircase he checked round one last time for cameras, though he knew there were none. Just ambient music, which sounded vaguely French. Pretentious crap. In the bathroom, Antonio Alban was just doing up his zipper. He was five-ten, and a moderately fit 168 pounds, according to the Special Circumstances file. Ekstrom loitered as Alban turned to the washbasin, then stepped up and took the VP of Vision’s neck from behind. Ekstrom stared intently into Alban’s terrified eyes in the mirror. His long, powerful fingers pressed into the carotid arteries, steadily increasing in pressure. Alban grabbed at his throat, his face contorted. Ekstrom smiled at him in the mirror. The smile he’d just used on Jessica. ‘Mr Alban. Your employers said I should persuade you to be quiet about Mr Semyonov. I can be very persuasive.’
Ekstrom pushed Alban’s face into the wall. The strength drained from the man. This Alban had nothing, no fight at all. Ekstrom had killed women and children with more spirit. His forearm pressed on the back of Alban’s neck, squeezing him against the wall. The body collapsed. Ekstrom was supporting the whole of Alban’s weight on his left elbow, pinned against the back of the man’s neck. With his right hand Ekstrom felt in his own coat pocket and produced the hypodermic. He pulled Alban’s shirt up and felt for the profile of the ribs. He pushed the hair-like needle in between the third and fourth rib, five centimetres to the left of the spine.
Sodium tripentol, used in some states for lethal injections. Death comes quickly when the heart stops. Ekstrom carried Alban into one of the cubicles and sat him on the can, locking the door behind him. He pulled down Alban’s pants and leaned him forward. That was the most difficult part of the whole operation — to balance a deadman on the toilet.
Ekstrom vaulted back out over top of the cubicle and smoothed himself down. Checked his watch. One minute forty-five seconds in all. Ekstrom relieved himself in the urinal, washed his hands, then walked back to join his date.
It was over forty minutes later when Alban was discovered, dead from an apparent heart attack. An ambulance came and went. The staff at L’Eventail were as discreet as one would hope at such an upscale venue, and there was little to disturb the other diners. Jessica was less bothered than she might have been. She’d left early with Ekstrom, well before the body was found. She had something else on her mind.
The sodium tripentol would be discovered at the routine autopsy. But by that time, Ekstrom would be long gone. Of course, it was risky to get involved personally in a hit so close to home. There was even the possibility that Ekstrom himself would be recognized, and the finger of suspicion would point at him. However, as the paymaster for Alban’s death had again had been SearchIgnition Corporation, Ekstrom was sure that more than enough money and influence could be called on upon to hush the thing up.
As he drove away from Jessica’s apartment later that night, a question flitted through Ekstrom’s mind. SearchIgnition was paying good money to silence individuals who might squeal about whatever Semyonov had been doing. But who was it who had dealt with Semyonov himself? And what had Semyonov been doing to deserve this kind of attention?
Chapter 38 — 1:15pm 6 April — Shuangliu International Airport, Chengdu, China
The Road to Sichuan is Hard. That was the title of a poem Ying Ning’s father had taught her as a child, and she had told Stone all about it on the flight from Shanghai. Not quite the thing a girl should be learning in the years just after the Cultural Revolution, apparently. Far too civilized and classical. ut with Ying Ning, there could be no better spur to study the classics than to tell her it was forbidden. For Ying Ning, even her knowledge of Tang Dynasty poetry was an act of rebellion. As a daughter in a rural village, she was expected to finish school at fifteen and “go out”. Go out was shorthand for becoming a migrant worker. Travelling to the city and taking to some shitty job so she could send cash home to her parents.
So learning Tang poetry was rebellious — different, intellectual. Didn’t rank alongside killing her boss with a screwdriver maybe, but… To a factory girl like Ying Ning, born dirt-poor, it was probably one step above throwing away a university career like Stone had.
Du Fu was Ying Ning’s favourite — a dissident poet, an anti-war free thinker in the harsh militarism of the Tang Empire. He was a proto-feminist, a lover of women who rhapsodized their beauty and dress, but lamented too their frustrated intellects.
Ying Ning’s views were strongly held — violent even. She used them as a suit of armour, as a way to deflect any questions about herself. And now she’d started to open up, her views could be entertaining:
“Fuck Oyang… Oyang is a liar and a thief… the Machine belongs to Chinese people and Oyang is trying to steal it…” OK. Got the picture about Oyang. Then it was Carlisle (“Barbie Doll Bitch”) or even Professor Zhang (“Part of hypocrite clique”). So talking Tang poetry on the plane with her was a kind of progress. If the way to relate to the spiky haired, hard-faced, spitting refusenik was through her intellectual side, that worked for Stone. And though he was hardly a fan of poems, he could see they fitted well with the Fox Girl part of Ying Ning’s image too.
Stone saw that in her closed, defensive way Ying Ning was a talented self-publicist — although the polar opposite of someone like Carlisle. There was nothing real about Ying Ning’s image, anymore than there was about Carlisle’s. The just went about things differently.
What about Stone’s image? Stone despised himself for even having an image. The student papers had once called him “a true believer”, “a man without hypocrisy”. All that because he lived in a student room, had no car, no bank account, no possessions, all that crap. The image was mostly true — Stone just hated the idea of it. Being a soldier — now that was real. You follow orders, you fight, you kill. Or get killed. Anyone can respect that. Except, it would seem, for Stone himself.
Stone respected Ying Ning’s brutal, in your face honesty. And considering she used the word “hypocrite” more than Jesus, she hadn’t said it to him yet, which was praise indeed. It would have hurt coming from her. The most she said was that his title of “Peace Professor” was “decadent Western bullshit”, and Stone wasn’t going to argue with that.
As the plane began to descend, Ying Ning explained that Sichuan was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, now a province of one hundred fifteen million people, sandwiched between the Kunlun Mountains in the East and the Tibetan Plateau in the West. Cut off in ancient times, because the road over high mountain passes and treacherous river gorges was so difficult. Hence the famous line from the poem — The Road to Sichuan is Hard.