「I take it you got what you wanted?」 Mei Lin asked again as the Range Rover sped down the Eastern Harbour Expressway towards Quarry Bay.
「Yes. I was just cheg the data traffiit server for large data trao New a. You won』t believe this. Over the past month or so, one single institution has been responsible for more in-bound data than all the other ers bined.」
「Whistitution?」 Mei Lin asked, glang sideways at him.
「Tsinghua Uy.」
「Tsinghua? In Beijing? My alma mater. New a』s leading academistitution. Iing.」
「Yep. A manages mirror servers for them too. I created a new user on one of their mirror servers. Tsinghua as the source of all this makes a whole lot of sense doesn』t it?」 Caldwell mused.
「You say that again. Good stuff Caldwell. As you probably figured, the stakes just went sky high,」 Mei Lin warned, with a serious look on her face that gave Caldwell sed thoughts about what he was about to suggest.
「Things are about to get rough?」
「I guess that depends on your plans.」
「I see.」
「」Look, I am going to have this car fixed. It will save me a lot of explanation whete es back. He be quite annoyingly pedantic.」
「I』m not surprised. He strikes me as the uptight old schoolboy type.」
「I guess.」
Mei Lin pulled the Range Rover off the Eastern Harbour Expressway on to a side ramp with a sign that said North Point. They drove up King』s Road past an old yellow building with a sign in English and ese that read: North Point Funeral Parlour & Cryogenics ter. Several stalls outside seemed to be doing a r trade in selling both holographid natural funeral wreaths of various shapes and sizes.
「Cryogenics is big here?」 Caldwell asked.
「A growing trend. The ese are very pragmatiow that there』s evidehat Cryogenics is going to work they are more receptive of the idea. A few decades ago the ese thought this was nonsense as did most people, actually.」
「I wonder if my parent』s ashes are still stored there.」
「Oh yeah, I remember that. That is very likely. They keep the ashes there for fifty years or something like that. It』s all gover subsidized anyway.」 Was that the pregnant pause of someone making up a story on the fly?
「I might take the ashes back with me to London.」
「Thinking of going back then?」 she asked. There was a hint of disappoi in her voice.
「I think that』s the deal with Fouler.」
「You always make another deal if you succeed,」 she pointed out.
「Of course. We』ll have to see.」
「You will,」 she said, as they pulled up to a garage round the back of King』s Road. Mei Lin typed in a code, disabled the Range Rover』s sole system and removed it from its slot by the handle before they disembarked.
A couple of young ese apprentices in shorts and flip-fops with peroxide silver hair came out to look at the car. One of them whistled loudly. He had some kind of personal music implant in his ears. Caldwell could see the flesh-colored volume trols stig out behind his ear lobes. As the youth leaned over the back of the car he revealed a giant tattoo of some kind of mystical serpent on his back. When he moved the tattoo flipped bad forth making it appear as though the snake was slithering up his back. The other boy had a similar tattoo of a dragon. When he moved, the dragohed fire up his neto his silver shock of spiky hair.
A heavily tattooed half-naked middle-aged man with the most amazing potbelly Caldwell had seen in a