After an hour of analyzing the ingenious setup, Zavala stepped back and brushed his palms together.
“She’s all set and ready to go, Kurt. You can project yourself with a push of that button.”
Austin peered up into one of the cones overhead.
“This isn’t going to reassemble my molecules so that I end up with the head of a fly, is it?” he asked.
“Nothing to worry about, Kurt. This is all high-tech illusion, smoke and mirrors.”
“Keep a flyswatter handy, just in case,” Austin said, settling into the padded, contoured chair.
Zavala stood off to the side ready to intervene if something went wrong. Austin glanced across the table at the two empty chairs, studied the control panel for a moment, and then punched in the code number Wen Lo had given Colonel Ming before the Triad triplet met his premature demise.
Lights blinked and machinery hummed as a complex set of optics scanned every square inch of Austin’s body and transmitted the information via electronic pulses to a computer that digested the information and sent it to another computer to be reassembled in a 3-D projector. The scan was all smoke and mirrors, as Zavala had said, but Austin tensed his shoulders, expecting to feel an electrical tingle that never came.
Instead, the air under a cone across from Austin shimmered as if heated. A cloud of whirling motes began to form with no distinct outline at first, then materialized into the rough image of a human head and shoulders, transparent at first, becoming translucent, then solid, as the facial features filled in. Austin knew from his encounter with the Dragon Lady that the hologram was mutable and could be changed at a whim. But the face across the table was stranger than anything he could have imagined.
The eyes below the gracefully arched brows were the same jade-green as Chang’s hate-filled orbs. The fleshy lips were feminine, but the soft-featured face was at odds with stubble on the chin and the professional wrestler’s body with shoulders straining the seams of the black collarless shirt. The third Triad triplet seemed to be neither man nor woman but a freakish combination of both, a hermaphrodite.
The hologram remained as still as a marble statue. The small, delicate hands remained on the table. The features were frozen, eyes staring straight ahead. Then the lips moved, and a mellow voice, neither male nor female, came through the surrounding speakers.
“We meet again, Mr. Austin,” the hologram said.
“Should I call you Dragon Lady or Lai Choi San?” Austin asked.
“I am known as One to my followers. I was the first of my siblings to come into this world, by a few minutes. We Chinese are superstitious when it comes to numbers and believe a low number denotes good fortune.”
“From the way your luck has been going lately,” Austin said, “you’d better look for a new number. Your holographic image is all out of whack too. Nothing is moving except for your mouth.”
“That’s because I can’t move my limbs. I have limited movement of my eyes and full movement of my lips only.”
“What happened?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that, Mr. Austin.”
Austin paused, recalling Kane’s revelations about the paralyzing effects of the medusa toxin.
“We wondered what happened to the vaccine,” he said. “The ship’s helicopter was gone, so we concluded that the cooler with the vaccine and cultures was no longer on Chang’s freighter.”
“The serum was transported directly to me. Upon the assurance of my brother Chang, I orally vaccinated myself. I knew that the virus would spread to my city in a matter of hours and I wanted to be the first to be made immune. I became paralyzed as I sat here trying to contact my brothers.” The thin lips spread in a grotesque parody of a smile. “It seems that the chemical was flawed.”
“The cylinder Chang sent you contained a transitional vaccine that was going to be discarded. It could kill the virus, but it still paralyzed the host.”
“Then the research was a failure?”
“Not at all, One. The real vaccine is rapidly being produced throughout China and around the world in quantities that will stop the epidemic you started.”
The lips snapped back to a thin line.
“The fact that you are on Chang’s ship tells me that my brother is no longer in the picture. He would never allow you to live if he were alive.”
“I’m afraid Chang became a victim of his own violent impulses.”
“Too bad,” the hologram said without sadness. “Chang was brilliant in many ways but too often impetuous.”
Austin’s jaw hardened.
“The murder of scores of innocent people,” he said, “is not what most people would describe as impetuous.”