The HYDRA aircraft touched down at Hong Kong Iional Airport just after noon. Caldwell stared out one of the windows as the plane skidded to a halt. He』d never seen so many aircraft in one place before. There were hundreds of them with many landing and taking off simultaneously. There were plahat landed and stopped abruptly, plahat took off from a stationary position. They just shuddered and shot up vertically into the sky. There were hybrid plahat took off like a helicopter, then they』d sprout wings, the rotors would fold down, and they』d shoot off like a jet fighter. Amazingly, most of the airline logos were familiar to him. In his previous life he had probably been a frequent flier.
「Thank you for flying HYDRA Air,」 the two Eurasian stewardesses said in stereo over the inter. Caldwell wondered where they had sequestered themselves for much of the flight and sidered the remote possibility that they had actually flown the plane, if in fact it had been piloted by humans.
Caldwell couldn』t put his finger on it but something in him had ged dramatically. He』d e out of the operating room a bit groggy and badly in need of some shut-eye, the dull throb of a migraine lingering in there somewhere, but otherwise feeling that he was still the same person, except for the stant barrage of images flashing in his head. He』d taken a nap and found himself the protagonist in a string of vivid nightmares. He』d awoken to ay lounge and headed to the shower. He felt much better after his shower, shave and a ge of clothing. The suit the two Siu Jes had brought on board for him fitted well and when Caldwell had looked at himself in the mirror he had seen a face that he didn』t pletely reize.
While still in the operation room, for that』s what it was even though the procedure was non-invasive, he had solved three programming algorithms that had been b him for a while. These were algorithms that would have made his bots much smarter and less proo reboots or system failures. He was happy with that aspect of things. He would need his brain cells firing on all ders to extricate himself unscathed from his current predit. He felt the urge to hold a gun in his hand and fire it. He had no idea why he had those thoughts, he just felt them. It was as though that act would fill some deep hole in his psyche. What surprised him most was that he could think in what he figured was tonese. He had heard the language before in the numerous atowns scattered across the Union. And now in his somewhat refurbished mind, the sounds of the ese language were coalesg intnizable pattern of sorts.
The Siu Jes emerged to open the aircraft doors.
「Nei dei sik gong gman ma?」 Caldwell asked the twins in tonese, surprising even myself. Did they speak tonese?
「Gan hai la!」 they exclaimed, like he was asking an idiotic question. That was good enough for him. He could speak at least some tonese. Caldwell wondered what else was going on in the uncharted depths his mind. Ms. Levin had explaio him that she had implawo tiny chips non-invasively. One was a miniscule GPS chip that plotted his whereabouts on a digital map accessible somewhere in London. It probably had Fouler』s fingerprints all over it. The other was a Hong Kong ID chip.
While he was knocked out she had taken the liberty of running the ID chip he carried in his pocket against the Unioification database. She had told him he had a list of minor offences as long as her arm and that the authorities