Agent Matt

Chapter 10: Chironex fleckeri

The silver grey BMW E39 M5 cruised down the freeway, travelling south. Matt was sitting in the front passenger seat with so much soft leather around him that he could barely hear the 389 horsepower, 6-liter engine that was carrying him toward the Warren complex near Port Omaezaki, Omaezaki. At eighty miles per hour, the engine was only idling. But Matt could feel the power of the car. Thirteen million Yen worth of German engineering. One touch from the unsmiling chauffeur and the BMW would leap forward. This was a car that sneered at speed limits.

Matt had been collected that morning from a converted Shrine in Shomaki, North Tomoeda. This was where Jeremy Sobokai lived. When the driver had arrived, Matt had been waiting with his luggage, and there was even a woman he had never met before—an JIN 7 operative—kissing him, telling him to brush his teeth, waving goodbye. As far as the driver was concerned, Matt was Jeremy. That morning Matt had read through the file and knew that Sobokai went to a school called St. Anthony's, had two sisters and a pet Labrador. His father was an architect. His mother designed jewellery. A happy family—his family if anybody asked.
"How far is it to Port Omaezaki?" he asked.
So far the driver had barely spoken a word. He answered Matt without looking at him. "A few hours. You want some music?"
"Got any Shiria lobicka CDs?" That wasn't his choice. According to the file, Jeremy Sobokai liked John Lennon.
"No."
"Forget it. I'll get some sleep."

He needed the sleep. He was still exhausted from the training and wondered how he would explain all the half healed cuts and bruises if anyone saw under his shirt. Maybe he'd tell them he got bullied at school. He closed his eyes and allowed the leather to suck him into sleep.
It was the feeling of the car slowing down that awoke him. He opened his eyes and saw a fishing village, the blue sea beyond, a swathe of rolling green hills, and a cloudless sky. It was a picture off a jigsaw puzzle, or perhaps a holiday brochure advertising a forgotten Japan. Seagulls swooped and cried overhead. An old tugboat—tangled nets, smoke, and flaking paint—pulled into the quay. A few locals, fishermen and their wives, stood around, watching. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon and the village was caught in the silvery light that comes at the end of a perfect spring day.

"Port Omaezaki," the driver said. He must have noticed Matt opening his eyes.
"It's pretty."
"Not if you're a fish."
They drove around the edge of the village and back inland, down a lane that twisted between strangely bumpy fields. Matt saw the ruins of buildings, half-crumbling chimneys, and rusting metal wheels and knew that he was looking at an old tin mine. They'd mined tin in Cornwall for three thousand years until one day the tin had run out. Now all that was left was the holes.
About another mile down the lane a metal fence sprang up. It was brand-new, twenty feet high, topped with razor wire. Arc lamps on scaffolding towers stood at regular intervals and there were huge signs, red on white. You could have read them from the next county:

WARREN ENTERPRISES

Strictly Private

"Trespassers will be shot," Matt muttered to himself. He remembered what Mrs. Jensen had told him. "He's more or less formed his own private army. He's acting as if he's got something to hide." Well, that was certainly his own first impression. The whole complex was somehow shocking, alien to the sloping hills and fields.
The car reached the main gate, where there was a security cabin and an electronic barrier. A guard in a blue-and-gray uniform with SE printed on his jacket waved them through. The barrier lifted automatically. And then they were following a long, straight road over a stretch of land that had somehow been hammered flat with an airstrip on one side and a cluster of four high tech buildings on the other. The buildings were large, smoked glass and steel, each one joined to the next by a covered walkway. There were two aircraft next to the landing strip. A helicopter and a small cargo plane. Matt was impressed. The whole complex must have been a couple of miles square. It was quite an operation.
The Mercedes came to a roundabout with a fountain at the centre, swept around it, and continued up toward a fantastic sprawling house. It was Victorian, redbrick topped with copper domes and spires that had long ago turned green. There must have been at least a hundred windows on five floors facing the drive. It was a house that just didn't know when to stop.
The Mercedes pulled up in the front and the driver got out. "Follow me."
"What about my luggage?" Matt asked.

"It'll be brought."
Matt and the driver went through the front door and into a hall dominated by a huge canvas—Judgment Day, the end of the world painted four centuries ago as a swirling mass of doomed souls and demons. There were artworks everywhere. Water colours and oils, prints, drawings, sculptures in stone and bronze, all crowded together with nowhere for the eye to rest. Matt followed the driver along a carpet so thick that he almost bounced. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic and he was relieved when they passed through a door and into a vast, cathedral-like room that was practically bare.
"Mr. Warren will be here shortly," the driver said, and left.
Matt looked around him. This was a modern room with a curving steel desk near the centre, carefully positioned halogen lights, and a spiral staircase leading down from a perfect circle cut in the ceiling about fifteen feet high. One entire wall was covered with a single sheet of glass, and walking over to it, Matt realized that he was looking at a gigantic aquarium. The sheer size of the thing drew him toward it. It was hard to imagine how many thousands of gallons of water the glass held back, but he was surprised to see that the tank was empty. There were no fish, although it was big enough to hold a shark.
And then something moved in the turquoise shadows and Matt gasped with a mixture of horror and wonderment as the biggest jellyfish he had ever seen drifted into view. The main body of the creature was a shimmering, pulsating mass of white and mauve, shaped roughly like a box. Beneath it, a mass of tentacles covered with circular stingers twisted in the water, at least ten feet long. As the jellyfish moved, or drifted in the artificial current, its tentacles writhed against the glass so that it looked almost as if it was trying to break out. It was the single most awesome and repulsive thing Matt had ever seen.

"Chironex fleckeri." The voice came from behind him and Matt twisted around to see a man coming down the last of the stairs.
Darren Warren was short. He was so short that Matt's first impression was that he was looking at a reflection that had somehow been distorted. In his immaculate and expensive black suit with gold signet ring and brightly polished black shoes, he looked like a scaled-down model of a multimillionaire businessman. His skin was dark and his teeth flashed when he smiled. He had a round, bald head and very horrible eyes. The gray pupils were too small, surrounded on all sides by white. Matt was reminded of tadpoles before they hatch. When Warren stood next to him, the eyes were at the same level as his and held less warmth than the jellyfish.
"A box jelly fish, also known as a sea wasp," Warren continued. He had a heavy accent brought with him from the Cairo marketplace. "It's beautiful, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't keep one as a pet," Matt said.
"I came upon this one when I was diving in the South China Sea." Warren gestured at a glass display case and Matt noticed three harpoon guns and a collection of knives resting in velvet slots. "I love to kill fish," Warren went on. "But when I saw this specimen of Chironex fleckeri, I knew I had to capture it and keep it. You see, it reminds me of myself."
"It's ninety-nine percent water. It has no brain, no guts, and no anus." Matt had dredged up the facts from somewhere and spoken them before he knew what he was doing.
Warren glanced briefly at him, then turned back to the creature hovering over him in its tank. "It's an outsider," he said. "It drifts on its own, ignored by the other fish. It is silent and yet it demands respect. You see the nematocysts, Mr. Sobokai? The stinging cells? If you were to find yourself wrapped in there, it would be an unforgettable death."
"Call me Matt," Matt said.
He'd meant to say Jeremy, but somehow it had slipped out. It was the most stupid, the most amateurish mistake he could have made. But he had been thrown by the way Warren had appeared and by the slow, hypnotic dance of the jellyfish. The grey eyes squirmed. "I thought your name was Jeremy."
"My friends call me Matt."
"Why?"
"After Matt Luther. He's the manager of my favourite soccer team." It was the first thing Matt could think of. But he'd seen a soccer poster in Jeremy Sobokai's bedroom and knew that at least he'd chosen the right team. "Shabotai city," he added.
Warren smiled. "That's most amusing. Matt it shall be. And I hope we will be friends, Matt. You are a very lucky boy. You won the competition and you are going to be the first teenager to try out my Virtual Tech. But this is also lucky, I think, for me. I want to know what you think of it! I want you to tell me what you like … what you don't." The eyes dipped away and suddenly he was businesslike. "We have only three days until the launch," he said. "We'd better get a bliddy move on, as my father used to say. I'll have my man take you to our room and tomorrow morning, first thing, you must get to work. There's a math program you should try … also languages. All the software was developed here at Warren Enterprises. Of course we've talked to children. We've gone to teachers, to education experts. But you, my dear … Matt. You will be worth more to me than all of them put together."
As he had talked, Warren had become more and more animated, carried away by his own enthusiasm. He had become a completely different man. Matt had to admit that he'd taken an immediate dislike to Darren Warren. No wonder Ooishi and the people at JIN 7 had mistrusted him! But now he was forced to think again. He was standing opposite one of the richest men in Japan, a man who had decided out of the goodness of his heart to give a huge gift to English schools. Just because he as small and slimy, that didn't necessarily make him an enemy. Perhaps Ooishi was wrong after all.
"Ah! Here's my man now," Warren said. "And about bliddy time!"
The door had opened and a man had come in, dressed in the black suit and tails of an old-fashioned butler. He was as tall and thin as his master was short and round, with a thatch of close-cropped ginger hair on top of a face that was so pale it was almost paper white from a distance it had looked as if he was smiling, but as he drew closer, Matt gasped. The man had two horrendous scars, one on each side of his mouth, twisting up all the way to his ears. It was as if someone had at some time attempted to cut his face in half. The scars were a gruesome shade of mauve. There were smaller, fainter scars where at one time his cheeks had been stitched.
"This is Mr. Scar," Warren said. "He changed his name after his accident."
"Accident?" Matt found it hard not to stare at the terrible wound.
"Mr. Scar used to work in a circus. It was a novelty knife-throwing act. For the climax he used to catch a spinning knife between his teeth. But then one night his elderly mother came to see the show. She waved to him from the front row and he got his timing wrong. He's worked for me now for a dozen years and although his appearance may be displeasing, he is loyal and efficient. Don't try to talk to him, by the way. He has no tongue."

"Eeeurgh!" Mr. Scar said.

"Nice to meet you," Matt muttered.

"Take him to the blue room," Warren commanded. He turned to Matt. "You're fortunate that one of our nicest rooms has come up free—here, in the house. We had a security man staying there. But he left us quite suddenly."
"Oh? Why was that?" Matt asked, casually.

"I have no idea. One moment he was here, the next he was gone." Warren smiled again. "I hope you won't do the same, Matt."

"Thi … wurgh!" Mr. Scar gestured at the door, and leaving Darren Warren standing in front of his huge captive, Matt left the room.
He was led back along a passage, past more works of art, up a staircase, and then along a wide corridor with thick wood-panelled doors and chandeliers. Matt assumed that the main house was used for entertaining. Warren himself must live here. But the computers would be constructed in the modern buildings he had seen opposite the airstrip. Presumably he would be taken there tomorrow. His room was at the far end. It was a large room with a four-poster bed and a window looking out onto the fountain. Darkness had fallen and the water, cascading ten feet into the air over a semi-naked statue that looked remarkably like Darren Warren, was eerily illuminated by a dozen concealed lights. Next to the window was a table with an evening meal already laid out for him: ham, cheese, salad. His luggage was lying on the bed.
He went over to his case—a Nike sports bag—and examined it. When he had closed it up, he had inserted three hairs into the zip, trapping them in the metal teeth. They were no longer there. Matt opened the case and went through it. Everything was exactly as it had been when he had packed, but he was certain that the sports bag had been expertly and methodically searched.

He took out the Color Game Boy, inserted the Azure Dreams cartridge, and pressed the start button. At once the screen lit up with a green rectangle, the same shape as the room. He lifted the Game Boy up and swung it around him, following the line of the walls. A red flashing dot suddenly appeared on the screen. He walked forward, holding the Game Boy in front of him.
The dot flashed faster, more intensely. He had reached a picture, hanging next to the bathroom, a squiggle of colours that looked suspiciously like a Picasso. He put the Game Boy down, and being careful not to make a sound, lifted the canvas off the wall. The bug was taped behind it, a black disk about the size of a 500 yen. Matt looked at it for a minute wondering why it was there. Security? Or was Warren such a control freak that he had to know what his guests were doing, every minute of the day and night?
Matt lifted the picture and gently lowered it back into place. There was only one bug in the room. The bathroom was clean.
He ate his dinner, showered, and went to bed. As he passed the window, he noticed activity in the grounds near the fountains. There were lights coming out of the modern buildings. Three men, all dressed in white overalls, were driving toward the house in an open-top jeep. Two more men walked past. These were security guards, dressed in the same uniforms as the men at the gate. They were both carrying semiautomatic machine guns. Not just a private army but a well-armed one.
He got into bed. The last person who had slept here had been his uncle, Mahon Ishida. Had he seen something, looking out of the window? Had he heard something? What could have happened that meant he had to die? Sleep took a long time coming to the dead man's bed.