The gray Brix suitcase was next to Caldwell’s left leg, sandwiched between him and the same old couple he had opened the elevator doors for earlier. The old man had a glassy look, while the old lady appeared to be as sharp as they came. Her hair was jet black, suggesting some kind of dye job or medical procedure that held gray hairs in check. Caldwell could just about see the tiny touch screen on the suitcase. The green light that indicated that the case was locked onto its owner was blinking. There was a toggle button on the Brix’ touch screen that read: MANUAL. Caldwell prayed that his left hand was not visible from where the biker girl was standing. He pressed the button on the screen gently with minimal movement in his shoulder.
The elevator stopped at B2. The old couple walked slowly out into an underground parking lot. The old lady was pushing the luggage cart. She turned round and gave Caldwell a look that said she hoped he could get himself out of his current predicament. The old boy looked as though he had forgotten where they parked the car. Caldwell realized that B3 was the next and last basement floor. He had to move fast.
The light on the Brix was now red, the toggle button read AUTOMATIC. Caldwell thanked God for simple user interfaces and the fact that the Brix’s camera and its scanning device were facing the other way, towards the family. He pressed the AUTOMATIC button. The camera popped up quietly. It took a snapshot and the laser did the swipe thing of the little Chinese boy.
“Look dad,” the boy said in Cantonese, pointing at the suitcase. The biker girl whipped her head around, the muzzle of the gun still pressing painfully into Caldwell’s rib cage. The laser had disappeared and it looked like she couldn’t see the camera.
“What, son? Mat ye a?” the father asked in Cantonese.
“Oh nothing,” the boy replied. Caldwell thanked God for limited attention spans. As soon as the laser disappeared the boy had lost interest. The green light was on again. The Brix had a lock on the boy.
The lift stopped at B3. The doors opened. The girl grabbed Caldwell’s arm, signaling to him to let the Chinese family go out first. They stepped out of the lift one by one. The boy was last. As he stepped out, the Brix started following him. The biker girl’s eyes opened wide with surprise. She lunged out of the elevator, trying to grab the handle of the Brix. She had no way of knowing if the console was in his knapsack or in the suitcase. That was her biggest mistake.
Caldwell twisted his body and violently slammed the impostor’s arm against the side of the elevator doors. She screamed in agony as her elbow made contact with the metallic edge of the doors. Her gun slid to the floor. The elevator doors were closing again. Before she could turn around Caldwell’s leg was already in motion. It made contact with her leather-padded mid-riff and she went flying out into the parking lot. The family stood there transfixed, looking at the gun on the floor as Caldwell made a grab for it. The stunned girl was getting up. There was a sound of running footsteps coming from the left of the car park but he was safe. The lift doors closed.
Caldwell jabbed nervously at the B2 button and all the other buttons right up to the departure lounge. The impostor’s instincts would be to guess that he would head for the departure lounge and try to mingle with the crowds, find the HYDRA agents or head out to the taxi stands outside the arrivals area. Her instincts would be wrong. He was already trying to second-guess the moves of the other girl in leather, ostensibly the real Agent Hsu. He had noticed from the sign when they first got into the lift that the motorcycle parking lot was on B1. He was guessing that as soon as the real Agent Hsu saw the elevator doors close she’d head for her motorcycle on B1, ready to give chase. It was a long shot but it would have to do. The female impostor was probably Japanese, the motorcycle gear nothing but an elaborate disguise for the Japanese girl to impersonate the real Agent Hsu. The HYDRA agents had not seen through the ruse.
Caldwell guessed that the Yakuza probably had some kind of mini-van with darkened windows idling somewhere in the parking lot, waiting for the girl and the two Japanese. It was a Yakuza thing, the more intimidating the vehicle the better. Agent Hsu, the real one, was probably this very moment belting it down on her bike to the lower levels and if his hunch was correct she would just about be arriving on B2.
The elevator doors opened on B2. Caldwell stepped out of the elevator expecting to hear the revving sound of a motorcycle engine. All he could hear was a distant whine like the sound of those driver-less trains that transported passengers between terminals at international airports. Then the strangest-looking vehicle came screaming round the corner from the level above. It was as wide as three motorcycles placed side by side and the girl who was probably Agent Hsu was on it. Or was it the Japanese impostor? It was hard to tell. The vehicle was cutting through the air defying the laws of gravity. The girl spotted Caldwell and the vehicle came to an abrupt halt. Four exhaust-like square tubes unfurled vertically and blasted a whole lot of dust away from the concrete floor.
“Quick. Hop on,” the rider instructed.
Caldwell still was not sure which girl it was but he took a chance. There was enough space behind the girl for three people to sit one behind the other. Caldwell jumped aboard the vehicle, which he noticed was hovering at least three inches off the ground and she floored it before he’d even got on properly and did a sharp u-turn almost on the spot. Caldwell barely had time to regain his balance before the girl shot back up the winding tunnel. The vehicle cut across a whole lot of cars, most of them electric models, and a few vehicles with the word POLICE written on them. They were skimming the curved tunnels all the way to the exit. The bike thing flew out into the open air and the next thing Caldwell knew, they were outside heading for the airport highway with the sun beating down upon them like someone messed with the thermostat of a radiator and turned it on too high.
“Sun in winter?” Caldwell asked over Agent Hsu’s shoulder as they belted it down the highway leaving a trail of luxury electrics and hybrids in their wake. If anyone was following them, they would have a hard time catching up. The road looked like somebody had emptied all the car showrooms in New China on to it. None of the cars looked like they were more than a few years old and most were the latest models with body panels that changed color like chameleons and changed shape to achieve better aerodynamics. There were a few sports models, which they couldn’t match for speed, sleek bullet-shaped phallic symbols that cut through the light traffic leaving the others behind. The girl was doing a good job of keeping up.
“You better believe it. You have no idea how close you came to a horrible death,” she said, swooping down low so that if the Yakuza were giving the chase they wouldn’t be visible. She sounded different from the other girl. She had a British accent with a slight trace of Mandarin. Caldwell found her voice strangely comforting.
“Trust me I believe it. What’s the code word?”
“PERFECT VISION 2020,” the girl said without skipping a beat.
“How could those agents have been so lax?”
“Not their fault. We generally don’t have any problems with drop-offs. Usually the code is good enough at the airport. Just in case there are communication interception devices or cameras taking photographs. The Japanese get us every time with the disguise stuff. They’ve mastered it to a tee. Apparently they are even growing identical copies of enemy agents in labs these days. Of course this just happens at the highest levels of the biz. It is still too costly.”
“So that’s what I am, a drop-off? Growing copies of agents? So that girl could have been a copy of you?”
“Unlikely for such a low-profile kidnap job. That explains why she kept her helmet on. I was delayed by what I now know was a prank call purporting to be from HQ.”
“You know what they want, right?”
“I guess they wanted the console but now they know you are here they also want you dead.” She said this in a very matter-of-fact way. Her black hair was streaming out behind her and Caldwell was getting a fair bit of it in his face. The smell of floral shampoo brought back recently acquired memories. They were still outside Hong Kong Island proper and there was a lot of familiar-looking greenery.
“I lost my Brix,” Caldwell said.
“Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing in there that will help them or that you can’t get in Hong Kong.”
“But I got myself a gun.”
She turned around briskly, a swirl of black hair and gray eyes, but she was too quick for him to see her face properly through the visor.
“Where did you get that?” Agent Hsu asked.
“From the girl. Your impersonator.”
“Good to see you are taking care of yourself already.”
“From what I heard, you’re the one who’s going to be taking care of me.
Her lithe body tensed up and she said nothing as they blasted through a tunnel and emerged a few minutes smack-bang into a cityscape that blew his mind.
***
In a weird kind of way Hong Kong felt like home. The memories came flooding back but they couldn’t match the panoramic vista of glass, steel and concrete that expanded before his eyes as they slowed down into heavier traffic. A lot had changed over the years. That much was clear. The buildings still soared into the clouds and were densely packed along the harbor. Many of them were new, the glass and steel symbols of New China’s economic might. There was a grandeur to them that beat anything Hong Kong had previously been famous for. These building were symbols of global dominance. The tops of most of them were invisible, melting into the clouds like the stick in candy floss.
“What’s that huge building with the window cleaning robots climbing up the sides?” Caldwell asked Agent Hsu as they wove through what was rapidly becoming a traffic jam.
“That is the new Bank of New China building. Those are not window-cleaning bots. They are maintenance bots making nano-scale repairs to the exterior of the building.”
They stopped. An electric van was too close to cars in the other lane. Caldwell took the opportunity to look behind them. There was nothing untoward happening. He noticed that some of the cars were driverless Mercedes Benz S-Class models.
“Those don’t come out in the Union for at least another five years.”
“Well, this is Hong Kong. Things move along very fast here, except for traffic.”
“Yeah, I can see that. These things help though. What are they?”
“Hoverbykes. Invented by a company in New China. Currently being tested by enforcement agencies here and in Shanghai. The Hong Kong government has given special permission and released a new ordinance. This is the first time that hovering vehicles have been used on public roads anywhere in the world.”
“Cool. Hard to drive?” Caldwell was surprising himself. Getting out of the depressing Union had mellowed him out somewhat. He was actually having a conversation and not hating it.
“It’s easier than riding a motorcycle, that’s for sure. Basically, you have two pedals one on either side. Left pedal decelerates, right pedal accelerates. Hit both pedals simultaneously the vehicle comes to rest. It’s almost instantaneous. The thrusts just cancel each other out.”
“What about on the steering bar? Those look like a motorcycle’s accelerator.”
“These actually control the direction of the thrusters. Push both forward and the thrusters point backwards and hold in that position. Push back about halfway and you can basically hover with the electric engine still revving. Push all the way back and the thrusters point all the way forward allowing you to essentially ride backwards.”
“Can you go straight upwards?”
“You can. You just override the hover with this red button here. There are strict laws against it on public roads though. These things were not designed to be used in that way. Safety Ordinance.”
“I see. So where are we going?”
“The Mansion, HYDRA HQ in Shek O. That’s the south side of Hong Kong Island. It’s a lot quieter, away from all this.” Agent Hsu’s helmet nodded towards oncoming traffic.
“I remember Shek O. There’s a beach,” Caldwell said, vague memories of weekends in Shek O rising.
“Right. Glad to hear you haven’t forgotten everything,” she said. Caldwell thought he detected a note of sarcasm in her voice.”
“That’s a long story.”
“They always are.”
The streets were brimming with people. They were on the walkways, the pavements and the alleys, the streets jam-packed with retail signage in English and Chinese. They were visible through hundreds of corporate office windows that went vertically upwards as far as the eye could see. The difference between corporate drones in Hong Kong and those in the Union was that the ones here seemed much more in control of their lives and their destinies. There was a spring in the step of the people in the street. The streets were alive with a determined humanity actively going about the business of acquiring wealth at any cost.
“Energetic place isn’t it?”
They were on the move again and picking up speed as they got on a giant freeway. Caldwell had never seen so many corporate logos in his life. Almost every other building had one and hundreds of them were built into the barren hills of the Peak. At night the city must be spectacular, Caldwell thought. He vaguely recalled dazzling bright lights and an array of colors filling the night sky.
“Hong Kong has always been that way, even more so now. The people here are some of the most adaptable in the world. You should know. You were born here.”
They overtook a whole string of Mercedes vehicles and a bunch of those morphing bullet sports cars. Agent Hsu was chewing up huge chunks of the city at an alarming rate. Caldwell held on closely to her trim leather-bound body.
“Been reading my file have you? By the way, what is your first name? I am not going to call you Agent Hsu during this entire trip. It’s not the easiest surname to pronounce either,” he joked.
“At night the city comes alive like a Christmas tree,” she said ignoring his attempt to become familiar. Maybe he was being too forward. There was a whole load of Chinese etiquette that he needed to relearn quickly.
“Hey, didn’t mean to be so forward and was kidding about the name.”
“Well if you must know Mr. Caldwell, the name is Mei Lin. Hsu Mei Lin.” She raised her visor and turned around. For the first time Caldwell got a good look at her face. He almost fell off the hoverbyke with shock.