上海梦想 精彩片段：
Chapter 57
Caldwell felt a strange mixture of fear and excitement as he and Mei Lin disembarked from the plane at 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 luck and the implications were still cascading 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 on the tip 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 conversation 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 direction, brushing his shoulder, her head turned the other way to avoid the PLA man registering 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 conversation on Mei Lin’s tiny earpieces they had just looked at each other and smiled. Caldwell couldn’t understand everything the men were saying, they had thick Beijing accents, but he could catch the drift of most of it. The server which contained the AI was being transported to the former site of the No. 455 Military Hospital. Mei Lin had checked the address on the in-flight entertainment system and written it down. No. 388 Huaihai Road West. The hospital had been deserted for almost a year, according 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 major-general arrived in Shanghai. Major-general Wang? This whole fiasco with the AI extended right up to the upper echelons of the People’s Liberation Army.
With the Chinese 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 common sense and obvious field skills. Yet, Caldwell still felt like he was a pawn in a dangerous game, his fate entirely at the whim of Fouler and his organization.
He thought about the low level hacking he had been used to in the Union. The small-time scores of The HUB seemed inconsequential in comparison 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 hacking of NEXT Tower had gone down well, giving them the lead that had taken them to 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 been yet another stroke 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 conversations of at least one of these guys and possibly others depending on the man’s proximity to the other PLA agents. With luck they might get some sound bites from the major-general himself and those were bound to be interesting.
Later, when Mei Lin had logged in to a netbase linked to the bugs she had planted at the Kornhill residence of Hideo Sato and Junichiro Miyagi, another bombshell had emerged from the recorded phone conversations. The Yakuza too were heading back to Tokyo and then to Shanghai and they were going to kill a Major-general Wang. Wait a minute. Could it be the same major-general? It made sense. The major-general had Kenzo Yamamoto killed. Apparently, he was killed by some kind of toxic compound, one used for assassinations predominantly in China. The Yakuza revenge their own. The key thing was to manage not to get caught up in the ensuing crossfire as collateral damage. So, they had not only the PLA to worry about in Shanghai but also the Yakuza. It seemed the Japanese were unstoppable, tracking him from London to Hong Kong and now to Shanghai. They would have to be extra careful. Caldwell’s thoughts were interrupted by Mei Lin tugging at his arm.
“Use this passport chip, it’s in another name.” She gave him the chip, took the real one from him and placed it in a small container.
“Would it by any chance be a Mr. Johnson?”
“That’s right.”
“But what about the digital tag that gets placed on passport chips every time you use them?” Caldwell asked.
“Don’t worry about that. I bribed the check-in girl, it’s all sorted. I told her I was going on a dirty weekend with a married laowai to Shanghai and didn’t want the trip to show up on his chip. And being a young Shanghai girl she understood totally and was sympathetic.”
“That would explain the mischievous look on her face when she gave me the ticket,” Caldwell laughed. Mei Lin winked at him.
“Wouldn’t the authorities have you on file as an agent and alert someone when you went through immigration?”
“They normally would but Fouler has something on the head of immigration for the whole of New China. Something bad. You’ll find no HYDRA names on the list. We know. We have access to the list. Besides, I am traveling as Ms. Zhu, an attaché at the Union Embassy in Beijing.”