Mr Wong Goes West (20 page)

Joyce was looking at the menu again as she stuffed five potato wedges into her mouth at once. ‘Wow, they got chocolate brownies with ice cream for dessert. Ben and Jerry’s—wicked. And warm apple crumble with vanilla sauce. And double-thick New York cheesecake topped with fresh cream. How am I going to choose? Can I order all of them, and we’ll share? Wanna share with me?’

Jackson closed his eyes, her words causing him physical pain. He knew he would have to leave before she piled all the desserts in front of them. He scooped the final piece of lettuce into his mouth and then threw his knife and fork down. ‘I got to go to the executive offices, make some calls. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your meal. I’ll meet you two back here in half an hour. Then I’ll brief you on what we know about what happened on Wednesday. We’ll make some plans about how exactly we are going to take this thing forward.’

Sighing at the end of another unsatisfying meal, he sadly left the table without looking back.

‘I reckon someone dressed up as Paul sneaked on board,’ McQuinnie said to Wong through her mouthful of burger, ‘shot the guy and sneaked off. After all, those security heat-detector things only send out their signals every few minutes or something. I think Paul was upstairs the whole time.’

Before she could order dessert she spotted Drexler collecting a cup of coffee from the counter. Joyce dropped the remains of her burger back onto the plate and rubbed her greasy hands
on her napkin. Then she raced up to the Australian. ‘Hi. Oscar Jackson told me you had a video trained on the crime scene. And pictures. Can you show me?’

‘Like a bit of gore, do we?’

‘No,’ said Joyce, affronted. ‘I’m an investigator. I just want to see if there are any clues. There’s much more to this than meets the eye.’

‘That’s true about most of us,’ he said, and smiled at her—a somewhat leering grin that made her feel uncomfortable. ‘In fact, there’s a lot of things on this plane that are not visible to the naked eye. Come.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ll take you to my secret chamber. Mwah-huh-huh-ha-ha.’ He wrung his hands together, suddenly a cartoon villain.

‘Um…’

‘The bunker, we call it. It’s the in-flight security centre, really. If you want to see the pictures of the crime scene, you’ll have to go there.’

‘Okay,’ said Joyce, a little warily.

‘I’ll show you some other cool stuff on the way. This plane has several delightful extra rooms for relaxation and all sorts of activities, karaoke, massage, a director’s club-type cinema, even a swimwear boutique—as you know.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He smiled again. ‘I saw you prowling around the backstairs earlier, checking out the shopping. I keep a camera there, to see who’s checking out the swimwear. On this plane, there’s no place to hide from Spyin’ Ryan.’

‘That could be awkward. What about the shower block?’

‘What sort of person do you think I am? There
are
private spots on this plane—one or two of which are well worth visiting. Follow me.’

Halfway down a corridor, Drexler stopped suddenly. ‘See this wall?’

Joyce nodded.

‘Now watch. You will notice that my hands never leave my sleeves.’

He took out a small electronic device and pointed it at the wall. There was a click in response. Drexler pressed with both hands, and the wall opened, folding up like an aircraft toilet door. Inside was a small room containing two chairs, each of which seemed to have too many seatbelts, and in the wrong positions. The room was cramped, with a low ceiling. It looked like a tiny prison.

‘What’s that?’

‘It ain’t first class,’ said Drexler.

‘Is this for people who are naughty?’

‘Exactly right,’ the security chief explained. ‘Welcome to the jailhouse. Normally, if you get someone rowdy and out of control on a flight, we strap them into their chairs and leave them where they are. But this is no fun for people sitting around them. On Skyparc, though, we have our very own little prison built in. We call this room Alcatraz.’

‘Do you have a judge and jury as well, to see if they are guilty?’

‘Nah. Planes are cities in themselves, with their own laws—really, I’m not joking. We have a lot of laws that don’t apply to the ground. It’s because of the safety angle. We are allowed to restrain people, even sedate them. All that would be illegal down on the ground.’

‘How do you sedate them?’

‘Actually, we won’t usually need to. Ninety per cent of the problems on planes are caused by alcohol. It might drive them wild for a while, sitting in here, but then they will collapse and
fall asleep. If not, we have a gentle dose of sleeping gas built into the chamber—in case we need it.’ He pointed to a small canister, attached high up on the wall, well out of reach of anyone strapped to a chair.

‘Turn this on and the room will fill with gas. They will sleep off the rest of the flight, whether they want to or not. Now come and see my aforementioned secret chamber,’ Drexler said as he twirled an imaginary moustache like a B-movie baddie.

Twenty metres down the corridor, they went through a small door into a sunken room filled with monitors. Drexler flicked a switch and a screen showed a bird’s eye view of a larger room containing desks and a chalked outline of a man.

‘There: the scene of the crime.’

‘Jackson said you might be able to print some photos out for me. Can you?’

‘Sure: anything for you,’ he said as he sent the images to print.

‘How come you didn’t film the murder?’

‘When the plane is empty, we just have the cameras showing the doors and the staircases on.’

‘Can you zoom in on the victim’s desk a bit?’

‘Yeah. He was a pretty messy bugger.’

‘He didn’t know that he was going to attract all this attention. Hey. Weird.’

‘What?’

‘Look: that CD box.’

‘A lot of people listen to CDs while they’re working.’

‘Yeah, but you know what that is, don’t you? That red cover—it’s unmistakable.’

‘Don’t care much for modern music, to tell the truth.’

‘That’s
Biscuit Dunked in Death
by The Rogerers.’

‘Any good?’

‘Good? It’s brilliant. It’s the album of the year. Maybe the decade. You
have
to get it. You can hear mine if you like—I have it on my iPod. But…’

‘What?’

‘It’s kinda weird that he’s got it.’

‘You think oil company executives don’t have good taste in music?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just that—well, the lead singer is Stongo, you know? Stongo is a mad keen global warming activist? He’s always in those concerts for climate change, and he even dedicated the album to “good guy scientists trying to stop us poisoning the planet”. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect an oil company man to like.’

‘Maybe he was studying the enemy’s tactics.’

‘Yeah. I guess that would make sense.’

Drexler moved his chair closer, so that he was sitting uncomfortably near to her. She could feel his warm, slightly alcoholic breath on her shoulder. He placed his hand casually on her thigh. ‘I keep some drinks in here. I have my own special brew. You like Red Bull?’

‘Sure. But—’

‘You’ll love my special brew. It’s like Red Bull to the max. Gives you a real zing.’

‘I gotta go,’ she said. ‘See my boss. Do some work.’

‘Don’t rush off,’ said Drexler, grabbing her arm. His hand was damp. ‘We got all the time in the world.’

‘Deadlines, deadlines,’ said Joyce, pulling away from him. She snatched the photos from his printer and rushed out the door.

Arriving back at their table in Food Street, Joyce was pleased to see both Wong and Jackson waiting for her. The geomancer had his fingers laced together.

‘How come you two both say you know that Paul not guilty? He look very guilty to me. No other suspect.’

‘He kind of told me,’ Joyce offered.

‘I thought he is not saying anything.’

‘He said it to me in a sort of code.’

Jackson stood up. ‘Okay, guys. Come with me. We’ll discuss this in my private office.’

He led them to what seemed to be the staff toilet. Joyce was surprised when he stopped there and pressed on the door.

‘We’ll wait here?’ she asked.

‘No. I want you to follow me.’

Wong explained: ‘There’s a secret room behind the toilet.’

‘You know?’ Jackson asked, his eyebrows rising.

The feng shui master nodded. ‘Of course. I spent six hours studying plane blueprints. Easy to spot secret rooms. I know every part of this plane.’

‘I thought this room was not shown on the plans?’

‘It is not shown on the plans. But the rooms around it are shown on the plans. Easy to spot missing section.’

Jackson entered the toilet, used a keycard to open a hidden door in the inner wall, and went into a private chamber. Wong and Joyce followed. They all sat down around a table in the room that was windowless but brightly lit.

Jackson tapped his fingers on the table. ‘Story time. Some years ago, the US military’s psychological warfare department started a new assignment, called RD 13c (i)77. These departments have existed on and off for many years. But in what came to be called Project 77, some very interesting work was done on the concept of subliminal messaging.’

Wong looked blank.

‘That’s when you show some conventional media to someone—movies, music, television, whatever. But hidden within the media are messages that work on the target at a subconscious level. It may be images or aural statements run at high speed, or it may be material shown at frequencies not normally detectable by our senses working at their normal levels. The curious thing about this project was that it was not aimed at the enemy. It was aimed at our own people. The idea was to combat what was seen as the spreading liberalism in the country, the leftism, the hedonism, the multiculturalism and so on.’

‘Sounds a bit right wing,’ said Joyce.

‘Very right wing,’ agreed Jackson. ‘This was the military, remember? They decided that it would be good if the American people were a tad more xenophobic than they were. Obviously, they couched it in positive language. They told their financiers that these programs were vital for ensuring homeland security, but in fact the main thinking behind it was to defend military budgets. If people felt worried about their homeland, military budgets would continue to rise forever more. Project 77 was a clever and innovative plan. It just had one flaw.’

‘Which was?’ Joyce asked.

‘It didn’t work.’

‘Ah. That must have sucked for them.’

‘It was really a problem of knowing what messages to send. If they sent pictures of death and violence, people got depressed and the fight went out of them. If they sent pictures of children and the American way of life, people felt sentimental and soft. Soldiers who were subjected to the stuff wanted to drop their guns and run home to spend time with their mums. There was no easy way to send a specific message
that military expansion had to be encouraged as the only way to preserve the American way of life. They worked for months on getting suitable material. But, even then there were problems: individuals decoded the same images differently. Some people were softened by images of babies, while others were repulsed. Some people were cowed by messages of violence, while others were excited by them. The whole project was too unpredictable and produced such mixed reactions that it was eventually scrapped.

‘But one of the scientists working on it noticed one constant—pictures of families or similar loving relationships produced a uniform effect of peacefulness and positivity. Similarly, images, sounds or messages indicating green, rural landscapes produced calm, positive effects. This scientist fell in with some psychologists working on psychosomatic effects of emotion and the project quietly restarted—but this time it was in private hands, not the military’s. In other words, the project only worked really well when it was used to promote a simpler message, and one opposite of what the military wanted: a message that families, peace, love, and a clean, natural environment full of happy humans were good things.

‘To cut a long story short, some powerful and well-connected individuals who shared an interest in promoting peace took an interest in this work. Various private meetings were held, and a concept was born: Operation Nice was the nickname we used for it—sort of self-mocking, but that’s the kind of people who are involved. We could laugh at ourselves. The idea was to turn this subliminal campaign into a small, hard-to-detect virus and stick it in the places where it would do most good.’

‘On television?’

‘On television. At the movies. On mobile video—yes, all of these were discussed as dissemination routes. But there was
a problem. However much good it might do, it was borderline illegal. It was possibly dangerous. And it was unpredictable. Everyone agreed it would be wrong to blast it out to the world in general. It seemed wiser to target only the people who needed to be targeted. To see if it could be a weapon that could calm the hawks who had taken over the world. So a very narrow target was chosen: business people in industries associated with global warming, the destruction of the environment, military spending, and so on. A program was designed—this is the brilliant bit—to spread the message as a virus and which then ran in the background on PowerPoint presentations. So while business executives all over the world were talking about profits and GDP growth and annual dividends, they were gently being subconsciously reminded of a different set of values. These were the people who needed to be reminded of the human and environmental cost of the profits they made.’