EPTProgram a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Shanghai burns solid white. Then it starts to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in Lujiazui, outlines of fifty-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Pudong International. And a dark, dark gash running along the Suzhou River, like North Korea in the old Keyhole-Eleven spysat photos. The underbelly of the city.
The first three boat taxi drivers had refused to go to the address on the card. So Jack lied and gave the fourth false directions, which he corrected mid-route. The taxi driver forced him off about a quarter-mile away. His father had given it to him, long ago.
“Here’s a contact I had in Suzhou. I’ll make the introductions. Should I tell him about the case?” Jack thought for a moment and nodded. A card slid across the table, bearing a name written in a script Jack didn’t understand. “Abdul al-Ahmad. There’s a middle part to his name, but I don’t remember what it was. I’m assuming it was small-caliber?”
He passed kebab stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Fairy Bamboo, the holographic lightning of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited corporate lifer by, spotting the Sohu-Vivendi logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand.
Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it wasn’t, served him right. S-V employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced neurochips that blocked unwanted subliminal advertising and monitored thoughts and behavior. Gear like that would get you rolled in Suzhou, rolled straight into a black clinic.
The lifer had been Chinese, but the riverside crowd was a foreign crowd. West Coast heavies preying on Russian hustlers in men, animals, and digitals, all of whom preyed on the outsiders, groups of sailors, up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed.
The Shanghai underworld was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, watched by a bored researcher who kept one thumb perpetually on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d be floating in the Yangtze.
Abdul al-Rahman was one hundred and forty years old, his metabolism meticulously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones, paid by his salary as a pimp. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Shanghai. Then he’d fly to Hong Kong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sexless and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Jack had never seen him wear the same suit twice, even though his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of next year’s leading fashion designs. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.
His offices were located in a warehouse along the Suzhou River, part of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of Scandinavian furniture, as though al-Ahmad had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Ash waited. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of durian.
“You seem to be clean, my friend,” said Abdul’s disembodied voice.
“Do come in.” Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. ABDUL RAHMAN BIN OMAR AL-AHMAD IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in Abdul’s makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
Al-Ahmad’s seamless pink face regarded Jack from a pool of light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawered cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of thing, Jack supposed, that had once been used to store written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes, scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some autoloading crossbow, a machine Abdul never seemed to get around to reassembling.
“I do hope your old man is still doing well,” Abdul said, offering Jack a narrow slice frozen in waxed paper. “Try one. From the Surinao work camps, the very best.” Jack refused the durian, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the crease of a white linen suit leg. “He said you had a few questions about a case.”
Jack still hadn’t told him that his father was now an invalid in a nursing home.
“Abdul, I need a four-eleven on a meatboy, Max Reed-Luo.”
“Ah. Well then. And what for?”
“He’s been knocking up a wife.”
“I see. Who gave you this case, if I may?”
“People.”
“People,” Al-Ahmad said, around some durian. “What sort of people? Friends?”
Jack nodded.
“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”
“I don’t discriminate in my clientele. How should I keep track of him?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Name doesn’t ring a bell, either, not amongst the meatboys I know.” Then he sighed. “If I did know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they are, you understand.”
“Things?”
“It would take a tidy sum to compensate for the loss in weekly revenue.”
“Yeah. I’m on a photography mission this time. How can I find him?”
Al-Ahmad shrugged. “Two A.M. His girl disembarks at the old Bayer docks. For what I have no idea.” They might have been discussing the price of durian. “If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and I’ll let you in on a new batch out of Mogadishu.”
“Out of the orphanages, the Genentech complex?”
“Loose lips, old son!” Al-Ahmad grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
“Thanks, Abdul. Be seeing you. I’ll tell dad you said hi.”
Abdul’s fingers came up the brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.
