Caldwell felt a strange mixture of fear aement as he and Mei Lin disembarked from the pla Shanghai』s Hongqiao airport. It was raining slightly outside and as they walked through the makeshift tunnel on the way to the arrivals area he could hear the sound of the raindrops thudding on the roof above. The information they had gleaned from the four PLA officers on the plane had been a stroke of pure lud the implications were still casg through his mind.
He』d watched in awe as Mei Lin had removed a miniscule eavesdropping kit from her luggage and placed the tiny audio transmitter oip of her index finger. It looked like a small round piece of gray felt. She had then walked up the aisle towards one of the air hostesses, engaged her in idle versation and then made her way back to her seat. Her movement had been a blur when she』d attached the transmitter to the shoulder of one of the PLA officer』s jackets. The PLA had turned around abruptly and Mei Lin had thrust her hips in the officer』s dire, brushing his shoulder, her head turhe other way to avoid the PLA maering her face. The man had spent some time admiring Mei Lin』s rear and Caldwell had ducked out of sight just in time.
Later, listening to the versation on Mei Lin』s tiny earpieces they had just looked at each other and smiled. Caldwell couldn』t uand everything the men were saying, they had thick Beijing ats, but he could catch the drift of most of it. The server which taihe AI was being transported to the former site of the No. 455 Military Hospital. Mei Lin had checked the address on the in-flight eai system and written it down. No. 388 Huaihai Road West. The hospital had beeed for almost a year, acc to the search results. There were plans for some kind of restoration as a medical facility for the PLA. The men were supposed to wait in the old mansion on the hospital grounds until the majeneral arrived in Shanghai. Majeneral Wang? This whole fiasco with the AI extended right up to the upper echelons of the People』s Liberation Army.
With the ese army involved at this level, things were going to get dangerous. Yet, Caldwell felt that he was so close to giving Fouler what he wanted and reclaiming his past, that he had no option but to press forward. And he had Mei Lin with him. He suspected he wouldn』t be able to make it without her practical on sense and obvious field skills. Yet, Caldwell still felt like he awn in a dangerous game, his fate entirely at the whim of Fouler and his anization.
He thought about the low level hag he had beeo in the Union. The small-time scores of The HUB seemed insequential in parison to what he was currently involved in. Some of the skill sets were identical but the scope and element of danger were orders of magnitude larger. The hag of ower had gone down well, giving them the lead that had takeo Tsinghua. His instincts had been right in going for student data to nail down the whereabouts of the lab where this AI was fabricated. It had bee aroke of luck that they had arrived on the campus just when the PLA were removing the AI for transportation to Shanghai. And if the wizened old taxi driver had lost the PLA on the roads of Beijing, everything might have just screeched to a dead end. Or if the PLA had not in fact been heading to the airport what would he have done? Now, here they were in Shanghai with the ability to listen into versations of at least one of these guys and possibly others depending on the man』s proximity to the other