The west entrance of Kowloon Park is located at the teeming end of Nathan Road, a seemingly never-ending strip of hotels, mid-range fashion stores, restaurants, cafes, bars, jewelry stores and electronics shops selling Japanese and Chinese imports at grossly inflated prices. Despite the long tradition of bargaining in many of the neon-bathed retail establishments lining the pavements, it was a rare punter indeed who came away with a real bargain. However, prices were cheaper than anywhere in the Western world so every gadget or item bought on Nathan Road was still considered a bargain by a mostly tourist clientele.
The atmosphere at this end of Nathan Road is distinctly touristy, traced with hints of illegal immigration, visitors from less affluent countries in Asia and Africa who have out-stayed their three-month visas. There’s a strong Muslim element on Nathan Road, especially at prayer time when a sizeable chunk of Hong Kong’s Muslim residents and tourists head towards the white marble dome of Kowloon Mosque with its four minarets defiantly proclaiming the faith in a land where Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and a dwindling Christianity are the key mediums through which Hong Kong citizens fulfill their need for religion.
There’s a certain anything-goes quality to Tsimshatsui, the area straddling this end of Nathan Road, which stands in stark contrast to prim and proper Hong Kong Island just across Victoria Harbor. If Hong Kong was the older son of a wealthy merchant who excelled at school and was hand picked to run his father’s empire, then Kowloon as viewed from Tsimshatsui was the younger brother that never graduated from high school, can’t hold down a job but sure knows how to have a good time.
In the 1830s, Kowloon Park used to be a British military base overlooking the vessels anchored in Victoria Harbor. The overzealous land reclamation policies of successive Hong Kong governors and governments had since resulted in the harbor shrinking over the years like a receding hairline. Yet, no matter how much more land was reclaimed or how many new skyscrapers emerged from the sidewalks, Kowloon’s thirst for commerce and the fast buck remained unquenchable.
Li Jin’s slow train from Beijing arrived at the East Rail Station, known as the Kowloon-Canton Railway Station in pre-unification times, at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. It had been a mere ten-hour trip from Beijing, yet the journey had felt like it had taken forever. It had taken him a scary half an hour to emerge from the customs checkpoint. Nobody had checked his bags. The immigration officers, sated from lunch, did not seem to have the energy. Li Jin bought himself a ticket to Xian for eight o’clock that same night and headed towards nearby Tsimshatsui.
The tedium of the journey had had some benefits though. It had afforded Li Jin some much-needed time to fine-tune his hastily constructed plans. Why use a radio when he could have instruct the Russian to pick up a disposable mobile phone at one of the many Sunday phone shops dotted around Hong Kong. You could order the phone online, choose a number and prepay for a specific number of minutes in complete anonymity.
There was a dirty console in the train compartment. Part of the monitor had been discolored with some unknown liquid, probably the result of motion sickness, but it was definitely useable. Li Jin waited until the other passengers in his four-person compartment, a young man with a buzz cut and his over-painted girlfriend and a middle-aged academic type, were asleep and logged on to Sunday’s Hong Kong site. He placed an order for a phone with ten hours of pre-paid talk time in Krachev’s name. The pick-up location was one of Sunday’s walk-in shops on Nathan Road. Then he sent an e-mail to Krachev notifying him where to pick up the phone and then entered the number in his contact list. Next he set up an instruction with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to immediately transfer any payments over the next forty eight hours to an obscure account with a bank in Xian, Shaanxi Province.
Li Jin shouldered his way through the teeming Nathan Road crowds towards the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank’s Nathan Road branch. He looked up at the elaborate neon signage jutting out on to the street in various shapes and sizes and wondered whether he would ever see them lit up again. He had checked his account before the train pulled into the Hunghom station and had been pleased to see that Krachev had got his message. A simple hack revealed that Krachev had logged into cyberspace from a server that belonged to the Peninsula Hotel just down the road. Li Jin smiled wryly to himself as he walked into a gray steel and glass building just a stone’s throw from Kowloon Park.
Li Jin kept his eyes trained on any one who looked Caucasian and middle-aged. The last thing he wanted was for the Russian to be tailing him. There were a few suspects but he figured they were mostly American and British businessmen or tourists. He was familiar with Russians from the Russian quarter in Beijing and certain shopping malls and outdoor markets that catered almost exclusively to Russian traders who frequently travelled via Siberia and Mongolia to buy goods in New China and resell them at a mark up all over Russia. He could tell them apart quite easily. He walked up to one of the machines that doled out queue numbers, took a number and sat down on one of the many gray metal seats facing the service counters. Two hundred and eighty eight. It was a lucky number to the Cantonese, which suggested easy riches. The gods were on his side today.
Li Jin went through the revised plan. He would walk around Kowloon Park for a bit, figuring out the best spot to make the transaction. He would then call Krachev at precisely 5.38PM and instruct him on the place for the meeting. Given that Krachev was staying at the Peninsula Hotel, Li Jin figured that the Russian would use the entrance beside Kowloon Mosque. What time would the Muslims be having their evening prayers? Even as he pondered the answer to this question, Li Jin was formulating a plan in his head. The computer that managed the queues called his number and instructed him to head to counter number eight. Another lucky number.
Ten minutes later, Li Jin had deposited the quantum neuroprocessor in a bearer safety deposit box. The contents of the box automatically belonged to anyone who had possession of the deposit slip. That would avoid any complications despite the associated risk. As he walked back down Nathan Road, he thought about the implications of what he was doing for the first time. What happened if Krachev sold the chip to Russian mobsters who then resold it to terrorists or criminal syndicates? If the final owners knew what they were doing, and the process of selling the chip on would surely ensure that they did, they could potentially bring about a major disruption in the balance of power. But then, what good was the chip without the benefit of a powerful AI to take advantage of it? An AI like Black Jade. You could fabricate as many of these processors as you wanted but without the right software all you had was a smart processor, one that increased its performance over time. Even when Moore’s Law was still in effect and computing power doubled every eighteen months, the lack of truly intelligent software had meant that much of the increase in raw processing power had been wasted on meaningless applications.
A sign outside a mall called the Miramar Shopping Centre announced that there was a food court in the basement. Li Jin entered the mall and felt his body break out in goose pimples, or chicken skin, as the phenomenon was known among Chinese. The air-conditioning was up too high. Hong Kong people loved their air-conditioned shopping malls and covered walkways. They offered refuge from sweltering heat and oppressive humidity. The artificially cooled interior reminded Li Jin of the lab at Tsinghua that he would probably never see again.
As he rode the escalators to the basement Li Jin felt that strange feeling people had when they were being watched. He looked up and scanned the crowds on the escalator moving in the opposite direction. A small Chinese man was staring intently at him as the escalator went by. Li Jin’s heart skipped a beat. The man was a mainlander and the look on his face had unmistakably been one of recognition. The man’s mask-like face showed nothing but Li Jin had seen his eyes. They had been studying him with the intensity of a predator about to pounce on its prey. Li Jin turned the other way and when he was sure the man was out of sight started walking briskly down the other side of the escalator. As soon as he hit the bottom, Li Jin broke into a run.