Caldwell awoke at the crack of dawn. For a while he thought he was still in his capsule hotel in Angel. He almost expected to see an LCD counting down his credit but all he could see was the blink of LEDs on the various items of electronics scattered around the suite. No nightmares this time and he felt he had enjoyed his best sleep, a deeply satisfying interval of dreamless black, in a long while. He showered and changed into black slacks and a white linen shirt with no collar. The shirt was a size too small. He pressed an arrow on the lapel and the fabric stretched to a more comfortable fit.

The elegant forty-something woman who Caldwell found out had managed the daily goings on at The Mansion for close to twenty years had seen to it that new clothes had been brought up to his suite. By whom, Caldwell had no idea but there was a small stack of miscellaneous fashion bags with names like G.O.D., Izzue, Joyce and Shanghai Tang stacked in one corner of the suite. He hadn’t bothered to open all of them.

The suite was comprised of a large bedroom with a king-sized waterbed and en-suite bathroom, a small study with a black Great Wall Computronics console and monitor and a living area with two sofas and an Amoi plasma screen on the wall. It was one of those plasmas that tilted to follow your line of vision, an old innovation that Caldwell personally found stupid.

He went down to breakfast. Mei Lin was already there in the dining room. Her face was inscrutable but as usual she looked stunning. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her eyes enhanced with the faintest of black mascaras. Caldwell suspected she had made some extra effort for his benefit but that could have been his ego talking. He thought she could have done without the mascara but try telling that to a girl, probably your first love and the love of your life, who had spent most of her adult life thinking you were a shit. She was wearing a red loose-fitting shirt, black slacks and metallic gray pumps. Breakfast was hot porridge and strong black coffee.

After breakfast she showed him the grounds of the house. There were altogether five self-contained private suites, several common living spaces, a gym and a library. These guys seemed to love their gyms, a fact probably related to some personal hang up of Fouler’s. Caldwell figured that if you spent most of your waking life in front of a console you’d need easy access to a gym were you could reverse muscle wastage. There were also several offices to one side of the house.

He was surprised to learn that the solemn woman was De Witte’s wife and that she was in fact a Japanese who had spent most of her working life in Hong Kong, with somewhat infrequent visits to her native Japan. They had met when De Witte joined HYDRA Hong Kong. He’d been dismissed from the British Army for failing to turn up to the barracks after a drunken night on the town. The woman’s name was Kumiko. They had a son Dante who he had met briefly at breakfast. Dante was working as an intern in the Systems Department having just finished high school a few months earlier. He was a good-looking Eurasian kid, with a shock of brown curly hair and a mischievous look in his oriental eyes. Caldwell identified with him immediately.

Getting into the Operations Room was like getting into Fort Knox. Several fingerprint, body and iris scans and multiple codes later they found themselves in a steel-reinforced room with more consoles and displays than he had ever seen, except perhaps in his memory of the computer room at HYDRA HQ in London. The Operations Room was empty except for Dante De Witte.

“Cad, man, I’ve set up a workspace for you and Mei Lin over there,” the boy said, pointing to one side of the room where an ergonomic multifunction desk had been set up.”

“Thanks Dante.”

“If you need anything, gloves, goggles, cyberspace hook-up just let me know. It’s all wireless anyway so as long as you are wireless-friendly you are ready to go.” The kid obviously loved his job. He was a geek like Caldwell. Mei Lin looked at them as though they were two kids at Toys-R-Us.

“Won’t be needing that. This thing has direct satellite links to cyberspace,” Caldwell said tapping Kenzo’s console under his arm.

“Sweet,” Dante said, whistling as he went out the door.

Mei Lin and Caldwell sat at the worktop in two padded leather chairs. She pulled a long thin recording device from her pocket and fiddled with it while Caldwell set up the console. He plugged in the goggle and gloves and donned them. Mei Lin spoke something into the device.

Caldwell cracked his knuckles, stretched and pressed the button on the front that was flush with the console’s sleek black body. A green light came on as though it appeared from nowhere. A burst of activity in the LEDs as the console painted the screen on his retina and another on the worktop. Caldwell tapped on the keyboard, feeling the tactile sensation of the keys through the gloves. He logged on to his netbase. There were two messages. One was from Glyph. Caldwell heart stopped. Glyph had returned from the grave. And then he remembered that it was probably because Kat was using one of Glyph’s messaging applications.

Hey Cad,

Hope you arrived safely in Hong Kong. Let me know.

Love,

Kat

Caldwell sent Kat a quick reply:

Kat,

Arrived safely. All’s going according to plan.

Best,

C.C.

He fired up the other message. Caldwell froze in his chair. Mei Lin leant in further to see the contents of the message.

Subject: I AM WATCHING YOU

Cad Caldwell,

I know who you are. I am watching, omnipresent. I know what you are up to. For your long-term health, I implore you to cease and desist. I cannot be held responsible for the consequences.

“Who the hell could that be from?” Caldwell asked aloud.

“What is it?”

“Some anonymous threat message. Let me check the electronic trail.”

Caldwell hacked into the messaging server of his netbase provider in Mumbai, India. He had done it so many times that it had become second nature. He drilled down into the messages, found his last message and scanned the message headers. The header of the anonymous message suggested that it had come from Russia.

“Sent from Russia, this is not making any sense,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Could be a relay. A mask. An anonymizer.” Mei Lin suggested.

“Most likely.”

It took Caldwell all of two minutes to breach the Russian server the message claimed to be coming from. He pulled up the message logs and within seconds found the entry for the message. It hadn’t originated in Russia at all. It was a relayed message sent from a domain in New China.

“The origin is in New China.”

“Let me see,” Mei Lin said. Caldwell passed the goggles over to her. He started to hack into the New China message server, sending in a low level password sniffing bot. Caldwell was attempting to crack the messaging server by brute force but nothing seemed to be happening. He flipped to his netbase and checked on his small army of bots. They are all there except for the password bot. It had disappeared from the database.

“But that’s impossible. The IDEs have traced my password bot and killed it in the database.”

“There is a ring of low level IDEs and ICEs surrounding the entire Chinese portion of cyberspace, some of the best in the world. They practically invented the concept of intrusion counterattack. Try another one.”

Caldwell sent in another bot. This one was slightly more sophisticated. Whereas the previous one made no attempt to hide its presence, it was a low level password bot that sniffed around open ports, the current bot was a Trojan that attempted to mimic an ordinary user. It scanned surrounding traffic on the periphery of the messaging server for genuine messaging requests and hijacked any usernames it found. IDEs were usually written to recognize that genuine users may have problems imputing the correct password. Caldwell flipped to his netbase. All his bots had disappeared.

“Shit. My bots are all gone. Destroyed,” Caldwell said, his mind incapable of articulating anything else at that particular moment.

“How did that happen?”

“Probably traced the second bot and realized it was in the netbase. It was just a matter of sending in a remote query and wiping the entire database.”

“Do you have a backup?”

“Yes, I do but those bots are not going to cut it. Can you imagine, this is just an ordinary messaging server in New China and the IDEs are this sophisticated? How the hell are we going to find a secret network where the IDEs must make this one look like child’s play?”

“That’s why you’re the man for the job. Actually, we don’t have time for this. We better get cracking on this mysterious network,” Mei Lin said.

“Oh we are. Something tells me the two are related. Why else would someone in New China send me threatening messages?”

“OK. So what now?”

“I have an idea. What’s the biggest Hong Kong company offering data interconnect links to China?” Caldwell asked, an idea rising in him like a phoenix from its ashes.

“The NewChina Electronic Xchange & Telecommunications Co. Ltd.”

“Long name,” Caldwell observed.

“They like ‘em long in New China. We call it NEXT for short. Why?”

“What are the chances of the cyberspace data being sucked into China having gone through NEXT’s systems?”

“High.”

“Where are their data centers?”

“NEXT Tower, Central. Why?”

“That’s where we are going next.”

“Pardon me?”

“I need to see the logs at NEXT. That may tell us where the data went. I can attempt to hack them from here but it’ll take too long to break their IDEs. Hong Kong is somewhat of an Achilles heel when it comes to protecting the New China networks from the outside world since they need interconnects with service providers here. I am sure they have some of their best IDEs protecting the NEXT systems but if I can use an authenticated network terminal that might be quicker.”

“You realize what you are suggesting, right? Security at NEXT Tower is incredibly tight. To my knowledge it has never been breeched. Getting caught is not an option.”

“I know. Do you have an AR unit?”

“Yeah.”

“And a vehicle equipped with a cyberspace console?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Then what are we waiting for?”

“Cad, I need to talk to Fouler or at least De Witte to authorize this. We are talking NEXT here. If you get caught, the fallout will be stratospheric.”

“We’ll be in and out in a matter of minutes. Calling Fouler will only complicate things.”

“You better be sure about this Caldwell.”

“Trust me,” Caldwell said, fixing her with his most intense look. He didn’t even trust himself.