Diamond Rain: Adventure Science Fiction Mossad Thriller (The Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series Book 2) (18 page)

A guard, his face
shadowed by the brim of his spotless dress uniform cap, ushered Chou silently
into a large room often used for small high-level banquets.  Chou remarked the
vacant look in the guard's eyes that resulted from the Chairman's use of the
incomplete nanosuit Chou had given him. Red banners, interspersed by large
portraits of the members of the committee, decorated the walls of the room.  A
celebration had been the scheduled event, but Chou’s partial defeat at
Armageddon Valley dampened the Central Committee’s enthusiasm for the general’s
adventurism. 

Thomas’ lack of nerve
inadvertently played into Chou’s hand.  As he approached the elevated part of
the room with a large table at it, a man in military uniform appeared at his
side.  The officer motioned towards a small carpet on the lower level.  Chou
noticed that there was a space without a chair at the banquet table.  When he
stepped onto the rug, the members of the committee moved around the other side
of the table to be able to face him.  A flurry of uniformed men moved the
committee members’ chairs into place on the opposite side of the table.  Once
seated, they all looked down at Chou.  Unfazed, Chou began speaking before the
Chairman addressed him.  A pregnant silence filled the room.

“Mister Chairman,
Committee Members.  I am pleased to be here today to announce our dramatic
success in the Russian Republics and in Moscow.  Our ‘walkers’ today made those
traitorous Russian swine pay for their rebelliousness.  Our coffers will soon
reflect the electronic transfers of Russia’s financial resources.”

The Chairman cleared
his throat, but let Chou’s brazen lapse of etiquette pass.  He alone possessed
one of Chou’s nanosuits and had used it to secretly manipulate his colleagues
and solidify his power base over the last few months.  Chou knew that the Chairman
needed him so that any problems would be a matter of saving ‘face’, always so
important in China.

“You are right to focus
on the positive, General Chou.  Won’t you join us at the table?” the Chairman
asked.  He coughed.  He was annoyed to discover that his voice was being
controlled by Chou’s interference with the suit he was wearing.

The Committee Members
made space for the general.  Waiters dressed in spotless white uniforms
delivered a bottle of French Champagne to each man.  The waiters then opened
each bottle at the same time producing a simulated gun salute; Chou stood and
nodded his approval as he made a toast.

“New beginnings.”

“New beginnings,”
repeated all of the committee members.

The Chairman dropped
back into his chair.  He looked pale as Chou tightened the muscles around the
Chairman’s heart by influencing the Chairman’s nanosuit, a clone, though a
lesser version of his own. 
Thank you for all the hard work solidifying the
power base of the Office of the Chairman
Chou communicated to the Chairman
using mind speak. 
But now your usefulness has passed.
 The Chairman
frowned while Chou toasted everyone in the room. None of the men paid attention
to the Chairman even when he slumped onto the table.  Chou managed all of their
reactions.  Two guards appeared with a stretcher.  A doctor took the Chairman’s
pulse then pressed his finger deep into the man’s neck to feel for his carotid
artery.  He shook his head and lowered his eyes.  The three of them left.  Chou
stood.

“Gentlemen, first,
arrange to have the minutes of this extraordinary meeting of the Central
Committee reflect the nation’s period of mourning.  Second, let it be approved
that General Chou assumes the role of Chairman of the Central Committee until
such a time as a Party Congress can be called and a proper election process can
be followed.  Now, if all of you will excuse me, I have a war to wage.  Good
day.”

All of the Central
Committee members rose in unison.

“Long live General
Chou, the new Chairman of the Central Committee.”  Chou left the room and
returned to a limousine waiting to take him to the Party helipad.  Now that he
was Chairman, several limousines trailed behind his filled with security people
and other parasites attached to power.  When he boarded, Chou dismissed all of
them except one man, a guard he recognized from an earlier time in his career. 
The officer bowed his head to the right, not daring to look the Chairman in the
eyes.

“Hand me your pistol,
Colonel.”

The Colonel complied
and Chou shot the man in the head, dropped the pistol and turned to climb into
his helicopter.  Several officers mounted the helipad after the helicopter
silently disappeared.  They looked at their colleague and wondered what this
murder meant for all of them.  No one spoke as they descended to the elevator,
carrying the Colonel.

Chou had remembered an
earlier defeat at the hands of the now dead Chairman orchestrated by that
Colonel’s information collection about Chou’s money-laundering activities. 
Lau’s
suit helps me all the time.  I never would’ve recollected that man’s acts all
those years ago, but Lau’s suit probed his mind and found that useful bit of
info.  Wonders never cease.  Have to control my anger around Lau.  He really is
useful.  Damn him. 
The helicopter made its way back to Chou’s
headquarters.

Macaulay’s Seeds

Macaulay opened up a neglected channel of
communication with General Lau.  He chose the Syrian Colonel who bought arms
from China and built a network of clandestine money laundering fronts using
thousands of compromised computers.  The Colonel pinged Lau’s workstation.  The
ping took the form of a message that only Lau would remember.  The words,
Friends
meet at the Venetian Macao,
sliding across his screen in a picture of
Central China, signalled to Lau that his old friend had urgent news.

Lau initiated an
encrypted protocol with a short macro.  A message bounced around all of the
computers in Macaulay’s network and Macaulay’s computer automatically fed it
into his Quantum system.  The result was an untraceable one-time connection
working on the tradecraft of the most basic and effective coded messages, the
one-time pad, or cipher.  Macaulay’s response to Lau’s question, ‘Where?’
passed by a unique undetectable route back to Lau. ‘Not where but who?  Arrange
a story for Sue Ann Lee. She’ll convey my message inside an unbreakable
molecule visible only to you.  She should remain safe because she won’t be
aware of delivering the information - just a precaution because of Chou’s sly
ways.

Lau’s face shone with
happiness. 
When one door closes, another opens
. 
I’ll find a way to
protect her here and arrange an escape for both Sue Ann and my mother.  I’ll
tell her my feelings this time. 
In the back of his mind he knew Macaulay
would exact a price in the future, but the prize was too precious not take the
bait. 
Maybe Macaulay’ll be useful again.
  Lau’s virus scanner didn’t
have a chance against the worm containing a search and locate script designed
in a diamond molecule by Thomas that hid inside the pixels of the
jpeg
picture
of Macaulay’s message to Lau.  Even without Lau clicking on the message, Thomas’
sophisticated worm unleashed the beginning of a search and rescue mission.

Soon Thomas, without
Macaulay’s knowledge, would know Kefira’s exact location in Chou’s underground
headquarters.  An invisible, untraceable diamond light crashed through all of
Lau’s carbon-based protection system until it found communications between Chou
and Lau concerning Kefira.  From those discussions came important information
about her holding cell hidden deep on the fifth level.

In the meantime Thomas
proceeded to spy on Macaulay on two fronts.  First he lodged a furtive
surveillance worm inside the ex-Fenian’s communications with Lau, protecting
himself against possible treachery by the slippery terrorist.  Second, he
motivated his clone travelling with Sue Ann to open and have power over the
memory implant Chou had placed in the reporter when they met in Qatar.  Feeling
less and less that he was slipping into manipulative behavior, Thomas subtly
instructed Chou’s implant to make Sue Ann susceptible to Lau’s advances.
  I’m
only nurturing the seed of an existing feeling.  I’m not making her feel for
him.

Now that Thomas had an
electronic passageway to Kefira, he prepared himself for an interactive
holographic visit.  He couldn’t take the chance of exiting the virtual form
because he needed more detail about Chou’s electronic firewall.  Possessing the
only diamond-based nanosuit tied his hands at this point. 
I can’t afford to
lose the suit to a technological improvement on Chou’s part.  The worst that
can happen right now is that he’ll know she’s communicated with the outside
world.

Thomas’ molecule,
enhanced by Jean Pierre’s bent triple helix, easily stored enough information
to be capable of spawning a holograph of Thomas in Kefira’s cell.  The glimmer
travelled into Lau’s system using the backdoor left by the worm in the photo
that Lau unsuspectingly clicked on and returned using a keystroke macro,
unleashing Thomas’ search and rescue tool.  When the spy tool found Kefira,
Thomas could get to her location in virtual form.

****

Kefira lay on a simple straw mat placed over a
rubberized corner of her cell.  She had not seen the light of day since her
capture and the lights in the room never changed, so she slept on an imposed
routine, trying to keep her sanity by sleeping regularly.  Her problem was that
she never knew how long she slept.  Always when she awoke, food lay on the
floor near the silent hydraulic opening at floor level.  She trusted her
judgement less and less and caught herself arguing with herself more and more
often.

Thomas’ diamond
refraction caught her attention as it lay on the floor. Its brightness had
awoken her.  Kefira unconsciously scratched at the itchy spots on her knees and
elbows and the ones she could reach on her back. "Scratching, no scratching,"
she said aloud and bounced to her feet and then onto her hands to do push ups. 
Exercise was her savior.  The diamond light grew and she paused in her morning
routine.  She sat and watched the light growing in lines as a pair of shoes
appeared on the ground.  Her breathing increased and she scurried on all fours
to her bed and covered herself with her blanket.  She had no clothes and needed
to keep moving all day long to stay warm in the cool cell.  Usually she wore
her blanket except for strenuous exercise as she had discovered that it became
wet with sweat and less helpful in keeping her warm.

Thomas cursed to
himself.  Chou’s protection slowed down his appearance dramatically. 
Their
technology’s better than I imagined.  Have to talk to Jean Pierre about the
slowness of the holograph.

Kefira got a hold of
herself and used the breathing techniques she had learned in her ‘sleeper’
training to slow down her heart rate.  The holograph taking shape before her
remained foggy.  Then it spoke.  Despite herself, she dropped her blanket
exposing her nakedness.  Thomas’ virtual eyes drank her in.  His heart pinched
to see her looking so confused. 
She’s more beautiful than I remembered.  If
only I could take her in my arms.  One step at a time.  It’s not long from here
to a rescue.

“Kefira,” said the
blurry image in front of her.

“Thomas?”

Thomas wished he could
use mind speak because Chou certainly recorded everything in this room.  As a
precaution he chose to protect further communication by using an
electromagnetic pulse to neutralize any recording mechanisms in the room. 
Seeing Kefira like this had made him careless initially, and now Chou had his
name to use as leverage in his control game with Kefira. 
No time to worry
about that now.

“We’re coming for you,
soon.  Buck up, girl.”

Recognizing his voice,
Kefira drew her blanket back over her body, normalness reasserting itself. 
Can’t
be.  Can’t be,
she thought.

“Hold on.  Hold on just
a bit more.”

A strong current emanating
from Chou's security system obliterated Thomas holograph.  For the first time
since her capture a door appeared in a flat wall and two guards came in.  One
of them leered at Kefira but they did not speak.  The older one used a long
pole with a rubberized loop on it that he dropped over her head before she
could react.  The hoop tightened around her neck so that she could barely
breathe.  The second guard motioned for her to raise her hands.  Clasps
appearing out of the ordinarily flat metal wall snapped over her wrists
clamping her tightly to the cool surface.  A similar pair of clasps caught her
ankles.  When she couldn’t move, the first guard slackened her neck noose.  She
gasped for air and felt one of the men touching her breast.  The indignity of
his behavior saddened her and she closed her eyes, expecting the worst. 

There was a smack and a
gasp; the hand was removed from her breast and when she opened her eyes, the
guard who had noosed her neck was dragging his partner out of the cell by his
feet.  He returned with a swath of heavy cotton.  He did not speak, but she
sensed the apology for his partner’s behavior in his eyes.  He put the sarong
around her and gave her a pair of sandals also made from rough cotton, then he
placed the noose around her neck a second time, but this time he tightened it
much less.  When he was at the end of the pole’s distance, and he had the pole firmly
in his hands, the clasps on her hands and feet unfastened and slid quietly back
into the wall.

They walked along a
long hallway heading towards a purplish halo surrounding a shape that looked
like a door on the wall.

Chou opened the door to
his personal interrogation room.  No recording equipment was necessary here. 
Chou’s suit remembered and sifted every one of his interactions on a regular
basis learning how to make decisions based on Chou’s past behavior. 
Machine
learning techniques applied to a nanosuit.  What will Lau think of next? 
 Kefira
sat in a comfortable chair adjacently opposite Chou.  She looked a little to
her left to see the general.  He gestured with his hands to some light rice
cakes and weak white tea.

“I would offer you
something more substantial but your stomach wouldn’t take it now and it would
only cause you discomfort later.  I regret this treatment of you, especially
the behavior of your guard just now.  I assure you he will be disciplined.  In
fact, why not watch the process?”

A plasma screen lit up
to their right.  The guard who had touched her earlier sat with his hands
secured onto the table in front of him.

“Which hand did he
use?” asked Chou.

Kefira had trouble
speaking.  Her vocal chords were out of use for normal interaction.

“Not certain,” she
managed to say.

Chou nodded.

“He’s right handed. 
The right hand then.”

The man’s right hand
twisted in an impossible way as his bones broke under neurological
stimulation.  A spasm rolled up his arm breaking the bones as it traveled.  An
anguishing screech, a screech of a kind Kefira had never heard before in her
life, accompanied the crunching sound of the man’s shoulder turning into powder
inside his skin.

“Enough.  Enough.” 
Kefira turned away from the spectacle, disgusted.

Chou closed the plasma
screen.

“You lasted longer than
I expected.”

“What do you want from
me?”

“Simple really.  The
secret to your suit.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.”

“What suit?”

“I’ll humor you for
now, but remember I am not a very patient man.”

She’s able to hide
part of her brain from me.  I can sense there’s more there but I can’t access
it.  I have to speak to Lau and get him down here to feel it.
 

“Think about it today,
okay?” he continued.  “In the meantime, does normal food sound good to you? 
How about some news about the world?  Try these clothes on too,” said Chou as
he handed her a pile of brightly colored cotton clothes. “Go on.  Everyone
loves a little comfort.”

Kefira reached out and
her thumb and forefinger squeezed the texture of a heavy cotton ‘hoodie’. 
Knowing better, she still couldn't help but take the garment into her arms,
savoring the warmth when she zipped it up. 
Shouldn’t let him win like
this.  I know I shouldn’t.  But it’s a small thing and it feels so good just to
be warm.

Her guard returned her
to her cell.  A comfortable chair, a plasma screen and a remote control, a few
books, some pencils and paper sat on a table beside the chair.  The heavenly
odor of rice and fresh vegetable stir-fry with her favorite tamari sauce
assaulted her nose.  Tears filled her eyes as she sat at a low table, leaned
over to let the aroma of fresh-cooked food into her pores.  She tore a piece of
naan bread, puffy and fragrant, and she rubbed it under her nose.  There were
chopsticks to eat with but she elected to use her hands.  When she finished,
all of the utensils vanished. 
Fog, all made of fog.  He doesn’t win.  I do
by getting stronger,
thought Kefira as she let her tongue roll over her
lips again and again.

Kefira centered her
mind and started her Capoeira exercises.  The meditation and exercise carried
her into a
Zen
mental place.  With a shine on her skin she relaxed and
breathed deeply from her abdominal
chi. 
Then she noticed something new
in her mind, a bright spot.  She concentrated and sensed Thomas’ energy present
in this location.  Her heart started to patter, hope filling her being. 
A ‘stealth’
molecule.  He left me a way out
.
Thomas, I could kiss you.  Wait.  What
am I thinking?  It could just be Chou.  Chou might have the control over his
carbon molecules to make a molecule like that too. 
Personal feelings for
Thomas, fear of Chou and the effects of solitude interfered with her usual way
of analyzing reality. 
Calm down.  If this is from Thomas, I have to find a
way to identify his signature on it.  Concentrate on opening it up.  Remember
how you felt when the suit opened.  Bring that feeling back.

At that instant, the
molecule activated, permitting her to communicate with it. It asked her for a
short message in mind speak.  She signalled.  
Hurry.  I need protection. 
Torture to-... 
Out of her control, the communication stopped but she felt
it leaving her mind and thought she saw it pass over to the plasma screen in
the form of a miniscule bright light.  Then the molecule rotated in her mind,
showing her how to use its immense storage capacity to shield herself from Chou’s
tricks.  She understood that she would have limited protection, but that she
would indeed be able to block off any life threatening attacks.