‘For Pete’s sake, Stone! Make it look realistic!’
For Pete’s sake? Virginia Carlisle, GNN. She planted her lips on him, then dug her fingernails into his butt. She’d followed behind, looking for Semyonov like him. Now she’d seen the guns and she was pretending they were drunken lovers, sneaking out on the loading bay.
‘I didn’t know you cared.’
‘I care enough to stop from getting shot, Stone!’ she breathed, and dug her fingernails into him again. ‘C’mon, kiss me! Before I get my ass blown off.’
She was an attractive woman. He couldn’t help noticing.
‘Will this be on GNN “Wake up World”?’ asked Stone, looking sideways at the tall soldiers in green. They were barking orders in Mandarin, but had lowered their weapons. There was really no danger.
Still — no sense in turning down some free entertainment from Ms Carlisle. Or was it acting lessons?
Stone gave in and ran his fingers up from her thighs to her butt to her back, then pulled her backwards into the shadows in a fair approximation of a drunken clinch.
‘For God’s sake! Get your hands on me, Stone! You might get off on this guns and danger thing, but I’d rather live to tell the tale.’
What was her game?
In any case — a good thing she was here. Stone needed to have a talk with her about Junko Terashima.
— oO0Oo-
Virginia Carlisle took Junko’s death exactly as Stone expected. Shock and grief — but controlled grief. There was even a tear which may or may not have been real. It wasn’t that Carlisle was as hardened to the nastiness of the world as he was. Mercifully not. It was just that she was one of those “well-balanced” people who have a mechanism for shutting out the misfortune of others. Bad luck, unhappiness, depression — well-balanced people like Carlisle avoid it, like it’s a contagion. Which is not a bad way to be.
Carlisle reminded him of the stuck-up babes from his university days. Bright, attractive, always knew the right things to do and say. They started their careers while still at high school. They were building a career — a life. People from Stone’s background go to school, university if they’re bright, they get a “job”. Then they work, for a long time.
People like Virginia Carlisle had realized years before Stone that the minute you got a “regular job”, you were hosed. Finished. People like Stone got a “regular job”. People like Carlisle got a “life”. At eighteen, Stone had a vague sense that he wanted a “life”and not a “job”, but unlike Virginia Carlisle, he had no idea what to do about it. He did a year of maths at university, then decided it was boring. He did a year of Chinese because it looked cool. Turned out it wasn’t cool after all, so he dropped out. Then it was the army. All the while Virginia Carlisle and the boys and girls like her shook their beautifully coiffured heads and got on with their “lives”. Just about the time Stone had been sent on his first Afghan tour.
In any case, Virginia had more than a “life”, she had an uber-life. She was a socially ambitious Ivy League woman. She gravitated straight to the in-crowd wherever she was. In fact, she practically defined the in-crowd. Stone had been one of the out-crowd all his life, and often an out-crowd of one. He was always a force of one. It suited him that way.
Stone ought to be against someone like Carlisle on principle. But he wasn’t against her. They were just different. All people have ways of living their lives. Stone might look down on some of the things Virginia had done. He despised her falseness, her play-acting, that she was always the “face that fits”. He hated that she took the credit for everyone else’s work, that she would do that to Junko and she’d do it to him. He should hate her.
But he didn’t hate her. Why was that?
At the backpackers’ hostel, Stone sat up looking at his laptop, and pulled out the two slips of paper Semyonov had given him. Semyonov had stonewalled him better than he could have thought possible. He’d got nothing but clever wordplay from the man. He left with only the two slips of paper Semyonov had written on simultaneously. Semyonov had said it was poetry.
The SearchIgnition search engine confirmed that it was indeed poetry. From a Roman poet called Horace, who lived two thousand years ago.
exegi monumentum aere perennius
odi profanum vulgum
This was getting ridiculous. He’d got nothing from Semyonov, and now he was reduced to looking for significance in Latin poetry. The search engine duly gave translations, and Stone wrote them down.
I have created a monument more lasting than bronze
I hate the ignorant masses
Perhaps the second one was Semyonov’s weary, cynical answer. “I hate the ignorant masses”. Could be. But Stone was clutching at straws.
Just then, an alert popped up on the laptop. An incoming email via the NotFutile.com web site. Stone had a bad feeling. Ekstrom.
Last time, Ekstrom had sent a video of a slaughterhouse. This time he’d gone one better. He’d emailed video footage of the murder of Junko Terashima.
Stone was dealing with an evil psychopath, but he was past the anger stage. He climbed onto to his bunk, numbed by hatred, and forced himself to sleep.
Chapter 15 — 3:42am 30 March — Kowloon, Hong Kong
Stone woke up habitually at the least sound. A habit from the days of undercover surveillance under the foliage in Kosovo or Afghanistan. He instinctively lay perfectly still so as not to betray his position. Listening for tiny rustlings or distant voices. Only when he identified where the sound was coming from could he nod off back to sleep.
Even so he woke with a start in his bunk, to the sound of the barking of attack dogs and a hoarse Scottish voice shouting over and over, ‘Stay where you are! Don’t move. DO NOT. FUCKING. MOVE!’
Stone was in the backpackers hostel. Eighteenth floor of the Chungking Mansions. A Kowloon tower block. On the top bunk of three in a dorm of eighteen people.
‘I said, do not fucking move!’ bellowed the Scottish voice again. A British officer of the Hong Kong Police, a hangover from the old days. Three Chinese policemen behind him.
Assorted backpackers and students from Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Mexico were scrambling for backpacks and money belts. Girls covered themselves with the bed sheets, squinting into the strip lights. Two lads dropped little bags of white powder behind the bunks. They were thinking ‘drugs raid’.
Stone knew it wasn’t. Amid the rustling and scrambling in bags, Stone sat up and dangled his legs over the side of the bunk and looked at the officer. Then he slowly strayed an eye over the three Chinese policemen in blue shirts and cargo pants. Probably fit enough, with decent martial arts. All four had pistols, but still clipped into their belts. An escape looked on for the moment.
Then a scream. A couple of tall Chinese men in those olive drab uniforms and shiny black boots had appeared in the brightly lit dorm. More screams as the others saw the sub-machineguns pointed their way. Dogs barking, girls screaming. Boys shouting ‘Don’t shoot!’ and holding their hands in the air.
‘SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!’ bellowed the Scottish guy. His was a limited but effective vocabulary. A tense silence. The Scot began eyeballing all the men in turn and pointing with a stick.
Enough of this. Stone jumped softly down from the bunk. The Scottish guy stepped back. Too slow. Stone could have leaned his weight into the cop. Caught him a percussion blow on the temple before he’d even raised his hands. The other three cops were distracted, their eyes flitting about the room at those hands in rucksacks and arms shooting in the air. Stone could have had them too. Maybe. Would have been fun to try at any rate.