Medusa

CHAPTER 15

SHANGHAI, CHINA

THE LICENSE PLATE ON THE SILVER MERCEDES S65 AMG sedan that emerged from the parking garage under Pyramid Trading Company’s fifty-story building displayed only the number 2, suggesting that the car’s owner enjoyed extreme wealth. Vanity plates were auctioned off for millions of dollars to affluent and superstitious bidders who believed that the low numbers would bring good luck.

To reinforce that good luck, the car’s skin was fashioned from rocketproof armor plate and its tinted-glass windows were bulletproof. The underside was fortified against street bombs. The six-hundred-horsepower V-12 engine under the hood could push the car’s speed up to two hundred miles an hour.

An armed guard wearing denim fatigues sat in the front seat next to the driver. For added security, the Mercedes was sandwiched between two four-hundred-ninety-three-horsepower Mercedes G55 AMG SUVs. Each SUV carried a driver and five guards armed with Chinese-made, lightweight Type 79 submachine guns that had firing capabilities of five hundred rounds per minute.

The three-vehicle motorcade followed a route that took it away from the high-rise apartment complexes and glitzy clubs around the Oriental Pearl Tower, the tallest building of its kind in the world. The car and its escorts sped along the banks of the Yangtze River, then turned off the highway and headed toward the destitute neighborhoods that are the embarrassing underside of the largest and wealthiest city in the People’s Republic of China.

The procession plunged deep into the warren of slums, entering a hellish landscape of a no-man’s-land that was so burned out and devoid of human life even the most desperate slum dwellers avoided it. The vehicles turned onto a narrow, unlit street and went through a gate, pulling up next to an abandoned brick warehouse. Weathered plywood covered the widows, broken glass and boards from packing crates littered the oil-soaked dirt parking lot, but the razor wire topping the electrified chain-link fence that gleamed in the headlights was brand-new.

The guards poured out of the SUVs and formed a cordon between the Mercedes sedan and a loading platform. The man riding shotgun in the sedan’s front seat got out and opened the rear door. The lone passenger emerged and walked briskly toward the platform, accompanied by his bodyguard. As the men climbed the platform stairs, a door on well-greased rollers slid silently open.

They entered the warehouse and the door slid shut. The illumination from fluorescent overhead lights revealed that the passenger from the Mercedes was a small man dressed in a medium blue suit that had been hand-tailored in London, a neatly knotted silk tie, and Testoni shoes that sold for two thousand dollars a pair. He had a rigid, almost military posture about him.

Silver hair, neatly parted on the left, and black-plastic-framed glasses gave Wen Lo an avuncular air of bland respectability more befitting a desk clerk in a three-star hotel than the head of a giant real-estate and financial consortium that was the cover for extensive prostitution, gambling, and drug operations on a global scale.

Wen Lo’s face was asymmetrical, not from left to right but from top to bottom. The lower part of his face featured plump cheeks and a boyish smile while the upper part had a wide forehead, heavy furrowing brows, and soulless jade-green eyes that showed no more emotion than an abacus.

Waiting inside the warehouse door were three men in blue-green hospital gowns and a pair of heavily armed guards wearing generic tan security uniforms. The hard-faced guards carried Tasers, sidearms, and clubs that hung from their wide leather belts.

A balding, weasel-faced man dressed as if for the operating room stepped forward.

“An honor to have you visit us, sir,” he said, giving a quick bow of the head.

Wen Lo responded with a barely perceptible nod.

“Tell me how your work is coming, Dr. Wu,” he said.

“We are making progress,” Wu said with cheerful optimism.

Although the lower part of Wen Lo’s face smiled, his eyes didn’t mirror the same pleasant expression.

“Please show me your progress, Dr. Wu.”

“I’d be glad to, sir.”

Wu led Wen Lo and his personal bodyguard through two sets of airtight chambers and along a short corridor that ended in a thick glass door. Responding to a gesture from Wu, a guard pressed an electrical switch that unlocked the door. Wu, Wen Lo, and the bodyguard stepped into a cellblock. Steel doors, solid except for small rectangular openings, enclosed a dozen cells.

As they walked between the cells, Dr. Wu said, “The men and women are segregated, four to a cell. We maintain full occupancy at all times.”

A few inmates pushed their faces close to the barred openings and called out to Wu and his guests to help them. Wen Lo, his face devoid of pity, turned to Wu.

“What is the source of these lab rats?” he asked.

Dr. Wu was rewarded handsomely enough for his work to afford a large apartment in a new high-rise overlooking the Yangtze and to keep his wife and his mistress clothed in the latest fashions, but he had convinced himself that his research was for the good of mankind. Although his work required that he suppress his humanity under a thin veneer of medical noninvolvement, the coldness of Wen Lo’s question stunned him. He was, after all, still a physician.

“As medical professionals, we prefer to call them subjects,” he said.

“Very well, Dr. Wu, I’m sure these subjects appreciate your professionalism. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“My apologies, sir,” Wu said. “This lab is surrounded by teeming slums, and it’s easy to lure the subjects in with promises of food and money. We choose only those in relatively good physical shape. People in the slums rarely report the missing, and the police never follow up.”

Wen Lo said, “Show me the next phase. I have seen prisons before.”

Wu escorted the two men out of the cellblock to a black-walled room. One wall was half glass, like the viewing area for a maternity ward. Visible through the glass were a number of full-sized beds, each occupied and enclosed in a transparent cylinder.

The occupants of the beds were quiet for the most part, but occasionally someone stirred restlessly under a tightly tucked sheet. Figures in white body-encasing protective suits moved like ghosts among the beds, checking electronic monitors and IV tubes.

“This is one of several sick rooms,” Wu said. “The subjects in each have been injected with the new pathogen and are proceeding through the stages of the virus. Although the virus is waterborne, it can be spread through contact as well. You can see by the way the technicians are dressed, and the separately vented enclosures for each subject, that we take every precaution to keep the disease contained to the rooms.”

“If the subjects were left on their own, they would die?” Wen Lo asked.

“That’s correct, sir, within twenty-four hours. The disease would take its course by then, and it is always fatal.”

Wen Lo asked to see the next phase.

They set off down another corridor, through more airtight doors, and entered a second observation area similar to the first. The room on the other side of the glass held eight gurneys enclosed by cylinders. On the gurneys were four men and four women. Their faces looked like they had been carved from mahogany. Their eyes were closed, and it was difficult to tell if they were alive or dead.

“This is phase three,” Wu said. “These subjects show the dark rash that is typical of the virus, but they are still alive.”

“You call these ripe vegetables in your little garden alive, Dr. Wu?”

“Admittedly, it would be preferable if they were up and about, but they are still breathing, and their vitals are sound. The experimental cure is helping.”

“Would you like to be infected and helped by your cure, Dr. Wu?”

Wu couldn’t miss the implied threat. Sweat trickled down his back between his shoulder blades.

“No, I would not, sir. The cure is imperfect at this time. The virus is amazing! Its ability to adapt quickly to any treatment we try has made our task difficult but not impossible.”

“In other words, you have failed.”

Wen Lo’s smile could not counteract the coldness in his eyes.

“Success is possible,” Wu said. “But it will take time. I don’t know how long.”

“Time is the thing we have in little supply, Wu.”

Dr. Wu couldn’t help but notice that Wen Lo had dropped his title. He was doomed. He started to croak something about one more chance, but Wen Lo wagged a finger at him.

Wu was about to faint, but Wen Lo clapped him on the back.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Wu,” he said. “We appreciate your hard work here. We are near to developing a highly promising cure at our offshore facility. You will go there to make sure the work is satisfactory.”

“I’m grateful for another chance,” Wu said. “When might I expect to start new tests?”

“There won’t be time,” Wen Lo said. “The testing will be done using computer simulation.” He turned back to stare at the forms on the gurneys. “Dispose of this material. The subjects in the cellblock too. We will find our way out.”

After Wen Lo and the bodyguard left, Dr. Wu glanced through the glass at the supine forms on the gurneys and sighed heavily. He had fifty subjects going through tests and most of them would die, so it was simply a question of disposing of the remains. But those in the cellblock would pose a particular problem, and it was going to be a messy job getting rid of this batch. He hurried back to the main lab to fill his staff in on the task that lay ahead.

AN HOUR LATER, Wen Lo got off the elevator on the top floor of the Pyramid Trading Company building, where he had his luxurious penthouse office suite. He was alone as he made his way across an enormous room decorated in French Empire style.

Floor-to-ceiling windows lined one long wall, but he paid no attention to Shanghai’s tapestry of lights. He stood in front of a tall wall cabinet and barked a password. A microphone hidden in the cabinet filtered the password through a voice-identification device, and the cabinet rolled aside to reveal a metal door.

Wen Lo pressed his hand against a panel that examined the whorls of his fingertips and the lines of his palm and the door opened with a click, admitting him into a room of about twenty feet square. The room was perfectly circular in shape, and the only furniture was a plastic-and-aluminum table and three chairs. Cones that looked like oversize swag lamps hung from the ceiling. The deceptive blandness of the room obscured its function as a sophisticated communications center, its walls and ceiling containing a complicated system of microphones, projectors, transmitters, and receivers.

Wen Lo settled into a cushioned chair, looked across the table at the other two chairs, and uttered a single word.

“Begin.”

The LED lighting in the ceiling dimmed except for a cone-shaped shaft of light that illuminated each chair. The air in one shaft seemed to shimmer as if superheated, becoming wavy, then darkening with tiny swirling motes, until a fuzzy silhouette formed, amorphous at first, then more solid, outlining first shoulders and then a head. Details filled in: eyes and nose, flesh and clothing. In short order, Wen Lo was looking at a three-dimensional laser projection of a man so real that he could almost touch it.

The man’s face was the mirror image of Wen Lo’s, which was not surprising, because they were two of a set of triplets. They both had the same high forehead, beetled brow, and unfathomable eyes, but the projected man’s scalp was clean-shaven. Where the menace in Wen Lo’s face was quietly understated, the projected face had an unvarnished, street-thug toughness around the mouth and chin that suggested barely restrained violence.

“Good evening, Brother Chang,” Wen Lo said.

“And good evening to you, Brother Wen Lo. Number One is about to join us.”

The air under the third light went through the same wavy sequence. The hologram that appeared in the chair was of a man dressed in a red silk robe and wearing a round, high-brimmed hat. The face was long and lean, with arched brows over a prominent forehead, cunning cat-green eyes, and a long, thin mustache that draped down below his chin.

Wen Lo clapped his hands upon recognizing the apparition.

“Bravo!” he said. “Dr. Fu Manchu, if I am not mistaken.”

The hologram responded with a knife-edged chuckle.

“Congratulations, Wen Lo,” Fu Manchu said. “You are looking at the master criminal who is preparing to unleash the Yellow Peril against the civilized nations of the world.”

The silken embodiment of evil was a clever illusion carved in light by the latest in computer and laser technology. Although the figure of the Chinese archvillain seemed solid, it had no more substance than the literary character created in the Sax Rohmer series. The system that brought the triplets together for their meetings could be manipulated, using data on figures real or imagined, to create any image desired. Past meetings had been presided over by such monumental figures as Mao or Genghis Khan.

Although Fu Manchu was an illusion created by electronic ectoplasm that defined the smallest detail, the voice behind the leering archfiend belonged to a flesh-and-blood person who ran a criminal empire that Rohmer’s villain could only have dreamed of.

In the tradition of the age-old crime cults know as Triads, the triplets who ran the far-flung organization were ranked by numbers rather than names, given them according to their order of birth. Wen Lo was Two, and he directed the Triad’s criminal enterprises behind a thin screen of respectability. Chang was Three, and he was in charge of the global network’s security, including the gangs that infested Chinatowns in every major city. The triplet behind the Fu Manchu mask served as CEO, overseeing criminal and legitimate operations, a responsibility that went with the name One.

“I enjoyed the hatchet man from the tong wars,” said Chang.

“I’m not surprised, given your efficient stewardship of our own hatchet men,” Fu Manchu said. “However, I understand that this efficiency did not extend to your expedition in Bermuda. Dr. Kane escaped from the bottom of the ocean.”

“Our machine cut the bathysphere’s cable. There was no way anyone could have saved it at that depth.”

“Apparently, someone did. His name is Kurt Austin. The television reports say he is an engineer with NUMA. Also, how do you explain your botched attack on the NUMA ship?”

Chang scowled.

“We met unexpected resistance,” he said.

“We cannot afford any more slipups. We would not be dealing with this situation if you had kept a closer eye on things at your testing lab, Wen Lo.”

The third triplet had been enjoying the discomfiture of his brother, but now it was his turn to squirm in his chair under the cold gaze of the archvillain.

“I accept full responsibility. The laboratory guard who brought the virus to his home province did not follow the proper decontamination safeguards. I have tightened them and prohibited travel by any of our security people.”

“Has the virus spread further?” Fu Manchu asked.

“It has broken past the quarantine. The government is trying to contain it.”

“Not good,” Fu Manchu said. “Our plan was to release the virus selectively when we had a vaccine to control it. We are trying to destabilize the government and profit from the spread of the disease. Wiping out the human race would be rather counterproductive, don’t you think?”

“It would solve our country’s problem with population control,” said Wen Lo in a weak attempt at humor.

“I’m sure it would. Unfortunately, we are part of the population. Is there any word of Dr. Kane?”

“We checked Bonefish Key,” Chang said. “He never returned. We still have our feelers out, but he seems to have disappeared.”

“His disappearance doesn’t concern me as much as the possibility that he now is aware that he is a target. And that he may have conveyed that concern to others. Fortunately, he is no longer vital to the completion of the project. But the work cannot be allowed to regerminate at Bonefish Key.”

“The only one who can reconstitute the project, other than Kane, is Dr. Song Lee, the representative that the People’s Republic sent to work with U.S. scientists,” Chang said. “She is about to be removed and disposed of.”

“See that it is accomplished quickly and cleanly,” Fu Manchu said. “And you, Brother Wen Lo, what is the status of the vaccine?”

“The vaccine will soon be a reality, and we can proceed with the next phase. I have ordered our land lab closed and its contents liquidated.”

“Very good. Is that all?”

“For now,” Wen Lo said.

Fu Manchu bowed his head, folded his hands. His evil face began to disintegrate, falling apart into whirling motes that grew from dark to light and then vanished. Moments later, the second hologram vanished

Wen Lo rose from his seat and left the now-empty room. There was much to do.

CHANG REMAINED in his chair, brooding. After his attack on the NUMA ship had been rebuffed, he had boarded a fast powerboat that took him to the mainland. From there, he booked a private jet that flew him to the United States. He entered the country carrying the credentials of a trade representative and joined the holographic meeting with his siblings from a Virginia warehouse the Triad used as a cover.

After a moment of thought, Chang turned to a computer and typed in Kurt Austin’s name. The computer took him to the NUMA website and provided him with a short blurb that identified Austin as a project engineer. Austin’s photo also was posted.

Chang stared at the coral-blue eyes, and the smile that seemed to mock him, until he could stand it no longer. He pressed the OFF button and Austin’s face vanished. Chang glared at the blank screen.

The next time I encounter Kurt Austin, he vowed, I will make him vanish forever.