I woke disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was Iying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was Iying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they'd slept.
And I could smell blood.
I opened my eyes. A woman I'd never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left tricep with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.
Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response-catatonia in the face of danger-took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I'd been expecting something like this for weeks.
I spoke softly, in English. "What you're in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried."
My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I'd woken prematurely, she didn't show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I'd acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.
Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, "Look on the table next to the bed."
I twisted my head around. She'd set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood-mine, presumably-circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.
I cleared my throat and swallowed. "Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won't fool it."
"You're bluffing ." But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she'd used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering-and nothing at all about the software.
"I'm telling you the truth." I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn't easy given our awkward geometry. "It's new, it's Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms . . . then you inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective." Blood trickled down across my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't buried the thing deeper, after all.
"So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?"
"That would be telling."
"Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble." She rotated the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for cover.
I said, "Trouble gives me hypertension."
She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate-then peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around the problem-a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable computerized interface-arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved hand on my shoulder.
"You can relax now. We won't have long to wait."
I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand-and succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didn't say a word, but she must have realized at once how careless she'd been; she climbed off the bed and headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.
Then she started retching.
I called out cheerfulIy, "Let me know when you're ready for the antidote." l
I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen, her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.
"Tell me where it is!"
"Uncuff me, and I'll get it for you."
"No! No deals!"
"Fine. Then you'd better start looking, yourself."
She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. "Screw the cargo. I'll do it!" She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly trying ~ to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand. ~ I
