Chapter 10: The Test (Part 1)

Sipping tomato juice, Gu Wen began his account at a leisurely pace. “Dewitt. I'll call you Dewitt, since you're always changing names anyway, aren't you?” He sighed deeply. “The clumsiest way to conceal your identity is to invent one out of thin air. With forged identification, all you have is a name. There's nothing behind it. It won't stand up to scrutiny.

“Using an identity like Mike Byron's works much better. He's a flesh-and-blood person. As you found out, he has a family, a life and studies of his own. You can even use those records to make guesses about his personality.”

“Hmph… You call my cover clumsy? Then tell me, Consultant, have you found out my real identity?” Dewitt recovered a little and assumed his usual air of arrogance.

Gu Wen replied, “You mean Sam Heidman?”

Dewitt didn't answer. His twitching face said it all.

Gu Wen smiled. “Who do you think I am? The Chicago police? You think grinding off your fingerprints, keeping silent and using a name that doesn't exist would leave me helpless? Heh… Then let's discuss this so-called real identity of yours. Sam Heidman. Dropped out of school at fifteen and began a career as a professional thief on the streets of Detroit. From simple gambling scams to art theft, bond forgery and so on, your nerve and your appetite have certainly grown over the years. On the whole, your methods are quite clever too. But you have one weakness. You spend extravagantly. You've pulled jobs worth hundreds of thousands, even over a million, yet you have practically no savings. Once the money starts running out, you have no choice but to commit another crime.”

“Enough! So you found out who I am. What of it? What exactly are you after? And why did you kill Mr. Lucchese?” Dewitt demanded.

“Heh… Don't rush me. I'm getting to that…” Gu Wen said. “I have two objectives. The first is testing.

“As business has expanded over the past few years and my clients have multiplied, I've had some trouble keeping up on my own, so I began looking for a highly intelligent criminal to serve as my assistant. I tested a few people before you, but none was satisfactory. Of course, you've been a great disappointment too.

“I'll start at the beginning. I singled you out four months ago and dug up everything there was to know about you. When it was about time for you to look for another target, I put my plan into motion. The first step was to give you an opportunity. It had to be tempting enough to make you dare to pull a major job despite the risks. So one day, when you turned on your computer and hacked into the Imperial database to browse around, I made a few adjustments behind the scenes. I opened a route for you, guided you to the information on pure alloy and helped you steal the data.”

“You did that…” Dewitt said in shock. His pride, both as a con man and as a hacker, had suffered a severe blow.

Gu Wen gave a cold snort. “Hmph… ‘Science is the way forward in the twenty-second century,’ isn't it?”

Dewitt said, “How do you know I said that?”

Gu Wen said, “I heard it, of course.”

“You planted a bug in Lucchese's office?!”

“No, I planted a bug on you.”

“Impossible!” Dewitt said emphatically.

Gu Wen said, “Oh? Are you so sure because you think a bug can only be planted outside the body?”

This time, Dewitt looked as though he'd swallowed a fly.

Gu Wen smiled. “Remember the hot dogs you ate every day when you first came to this city?”

Dewitt was too furious to speak.

Gu Wen simply carried on. “I paid the hot-dog vendor to add a special ingredient every time you came by. Of course, he didn't know what it was either. He thought it was just a few drops of ordinary sauce, some prank of mine. But the sauce actually contained nanorobots.

“This is the Empire's most advanced military technology today. High-precision miniature machines that can disassemble and reassemble themselves. Stomach acid can't corrode them, and teeth can't crush them. A single drop of sauce might contain a dozen or more nanorobots. If you assembled thousands of these things, each invisible to the naked eye, the finished object would be bigger than a segment of your finger. Naturally, you wouldn't swallow a hard foreign object like that. But if you swallowed it in dozens of separate portions, you'd never know. So those ultraminiature machines attached themselves to your stomach wall and waited until there were enough of them to assemble. Then the listening device was complete.”

Dewitt involuntarily touched his stomach. “You lunatic…”

Gu Wen said, “Only moderately. Let's carry on… Even before the bug was in place, keeping track of your movements wasn't difficult. Your computer searches, your flight bookings—none of it escaped me. So while you were still at home in Miami studying pure-alloy technology, with a rough idea of coming to Chicago to work with the Mafia, I'd already arrived here ahead of you. I selected a student of Chinese descent at a nearby university and altered Mike Byron's photograph in the University of Illinois student database, leaving all the other information untouched. That gave me an identity that looked real.

“Next, I made some trouble for the Lucchese family. Then, through a supposedly ‘chance’ encounter, I did a fairly pleasant bit of business with Sonny Lucchese, establishing contact with a local Mafia family. He came to me of his own accord a few more times after that. I played my part and did a few things for him.

“Not long afterward, at the end of January, you arrived in Chicago. I'd just taken on a rather troublesome consulting job that took a great deal of work to plan. Unfortunately, the client later botched the plan, costing a professional assassin organization I'd recommended quite a few people in Venice. They later sent me a rather strongly worded email threatening me.

“Anyway, I was quite busy then and couldn't be everywhere at once, so I thought I'd use that time to install a bug that would stay with you twenty-four hours a day. It took more than twenty days, but it worked. By then, I'd also extricated myself from the business over there and taken on another job, a local one here in Chicago.

“By mid-February, just as I'd predicted, you approached the Lucchese family rather than Genovese. I hadn't expected to have direct, face-to-face contact with you, though. At first, I thought I could simply watch from the sidelines, with a little contact with the Mafia. But fate had other ideas. That idiot Sonny wanted to use me, a student, as a shield, so I got to observe your performance at close quarters.”

Gu Wen paused and took another sip of tomato juice. “When you opened your mouth and brazenly passed yourself off as the Consultant, I was a little surprised, and a little pleased too. It wasn't vanity at being imitated. I just thought it was a very bold move with some practical value. I even wondered whether you might be able to discover my identity on your own, so I immediately let an inconsistency in my Mike Byron identity show. Unfortunately, you missed it completely.”

Dewitt could no longer remember their conversation online that day. He merely said, “We only exchanged a few words that day. If there'd been a flaw, I'd have noticed.”

Gu Wen said, “Really? A flaw like ‘There was even a group at my former university who started a fan club for him.’”

It took Dewitt two seconds to register what he'd heard. “‘Former’!”

Gu Wen said, “English is your native language, yet you barely reacted when I said ‘my former university.’ A student currently in his third year used that expression, and you didn't look into it. So I gave up dropping hints.”