Despite its remoteness, Sichuan is no backwater. Its hot, wet climate makes it outstandingly fertile. Travellers who braved the mountains were astonished to find the rich and leafy metropolis of Chengdu at the end of their journey — the “Brocade City” of Du Fu’s poem.
Modern Chengdu is no longer the green Brocade City of even twenty years ago. Its avenues are choked with traffic and the relentless tread of the concrete and the skyscrapers keeps the greenery to a minimum. Nevertheless, Chengdu still has the feel of a city of twenty million placed absent-mindedly into a subtropical forest. Trees grow everywhere, on the smallest patch of earth, and its markets still carry under their awnings the tang of its green humidity and the aroma of the Mapo tofu, the chili-laden local dish.
The flight from Shanghai had taken them seventeen hundred kilometres west into the deep hinterland of China. By Stone’s reckoning, the Machine was located another five hundred kilometres West at least, in the deserted foothills of the Himalayas, close to Tibet, in the very centre of the Chinese landmass.
Stone’s plan to get near the site of the Machine had annoyed Ying Ning initially. The idea was to get them very close to the mine workings called Death Hole in the high plateau of Western Sichuan, and let them stay there unnoticed. He made Ying Ning contact the monks of a Tibetan Buddhist temple saying they were tourists, requesting lodgings for a few days. It put them outside of the system of hotels, passports and ID cards, and the Tibetan monks would be the last people to talk to the Gong An.
Stone would be a Western Tourist with Ying Ning his girlfriend. Ying Ning had bristled at this. Was it because she had to be girlfriend? More likely on account of her typically Chinese prejudice against Tibetans. She wasn’t above a bit of casual racism, despite her progressive image.
‘Act nice. You’re supposed to be my girlfriend,’ Stone teased as they walked through the arrivals hall at Chengdu airport.
‘Bull. Shit,’ she replied in careful English. He knew it would annoy her. Sex was fine in Ying Ning’s worldview. Boyfriends certainly were not. There were a few women back in England who would accuse Stone of having the same issue with girlfriends. He didn’t. At least he thought he didn’t.
The terminal was cavernous in the usual Chinese fashion, and not busy. Built for the hordes who would be using it in future years. As they walked on, Ying Ning pointed to one of the large TV screens showing Global News Network. ‘Your friend,’ she said and stopped to look. Virginia Carlisle was up there, talking in English, with Chinese subtitles streaming across the bottom of the screen. It seemed Virginia had a young guy with an electric fan who followed her, so she could always get that breeze-blown effect with the hair. Looked good though.
‘Billionaire founder of SearchIgnition, Steven Semyonov was tragically killed in an auto accident a week ago. Conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere in the US remain convinced of foul play on the part of the Chinese authorities. A recent online poll for MSNBC revealed that eighty-nine per cent of respondents thought Semyonov had been lured into giving up his fortune to China and then crudely assassinated after he arrived in the People’s Republic.
Despite public doubts over his death, any evidence that this was anything other than a tragic accident remain elusive. Hundreds of the world’s media have descended on the intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, bringing with them retired investigators from the LAPD and forensics experts posing as cameramen. Not a shred of evidence has been found to suggest that the super-intelligent billionaire was the victim of anything other than driving on the wrong side of the road. Psychologists have also put in their two cents, pointing out that deaths from head-on collisions are usually the result of suicide bids. But again, there is no hard evidence to back up this theory.
The investigative frenzy has been turbocharged by the revelation about the death of Antonio Alban, a fellow member on the board of SearchIgnition Corporation with Semyonov until little over a week ago. Rumors are emerging from senior staffers at SearchIgnition, who refuse to be named, of continual fights and disagreements over the direction the corporation was taking. Semyonov, the rumors say, was supported by Alban in pushing for a different vision for the corporation, based on completely new technology. He was opposed by other board members who simply wanted to leverage the stranglehold SearchIgnition already enjoys in the market for Internet search systems.
Boardroom battles are not unusual in Fortune 500 firms, but it appears Antonio Alban, VP of Vision and Semyonov’s only ally on the ten man board of SearchIgnition Corp, may have been murdered. Alban was discovered with coronary heart failure in the restroom at Mountain View’s exclusive French restaurant, L’Eventail. The death showed every sign of natural causes, but the autopsy findings at three separate labs now reveal traces of sodium tripentol in the tissues of the Alban’s heart muscle. The chemical agent, used in coronary surgery and in lethal injections to stop the heart, can only have gotten there by foul means.
Stone felt like laughing. Bloggers had picked up like lightning on the speculation Stone had begun about the Machine, but Virginia Carlisle was still lagging behind, dumbly following the narrative she’d probably agreed on at a news meeting a week ago. Meanwhile the bloggers and Internet sleuths were going after the real story. At least one blogger known to Stone had repeated the location in Western Sichuan Stone had posted online for the Machine. Was Carlisle even in China anymore?
With Alban known to have been murdered, the speculation over Semyonov’s death will only increase. The attention of the Internet’s community of amateur sleuths has now turned to the real reason for Semyonov’s defection to China. Did Semyonov simply want to build another business empire in China based on search technology? Or, as Chinese officials have been briefing in private, have Chinese scientists made a discovery of such importance that Semyonov simply had to become involved? At any rate, with the Mountain View PD expected to open a homicide investigation on Antonio Alban, the attention has shifted from the examination of tire marks at an intersection in China, back across the Pacific to California, only a few miles away from where Steven Semyonov held his final press conference just days ago.
Something to be thankful for, at least. Virginia Carlisle and her cohorts would indeed be heading back East across the Pacific and the spotlight should be off for a few days.
‘Why she doesn’t tell us about Semyonov?’ said Ying Ning. Perceptive. Right on the money as usual. The whole thing was more confused than ever after that news report. It made no mention of the Machine, Semyonov’s weapons trading, or even the death of Junko Terashima, who had been one of GNN’s own staffers.
Carlisle and the mainstream media couldn’t grasp that the whole enigma revolved around Semyonov himself. They should be looking at the kind of person he was, his motivations. GNN must at least have some kind of obituary file on the man, but they had barely even shown that. There had been no information about Semyonov the man at all. Instead the mainstream media, TV and newspapers, were obsessing with the idea of foul play by the Chinese, even though by Carlisle’s own admission, they’d analysed tire marks and angles for days and come up with nothing. Carlisle had admitted to Stone herself that she’d seen the body. Why no interviews with people who knew Semyonov, building up a picture of where the great brain was heading?