Oleg Krachev was getting into his rhythm now. He began to thrust even more eagerly as he felt the explosion start to well up inside of him. The girl underneath him was trying her hardest to match the sheer frequency and variety of the Russian’s movements but he was proving too much for her. Her small naked body was covered in a thin film of perspiration mixed with the Russian’s saliva and semen. In her two years as a prostitute, she had never met a man who could keep going as long as he had. He had picked her up from the Great Boss hostess nightclub in the Tsimshatsui district and paid her bar fine for the night. This had amounted to some ten thousand dollars paid in cash plus another five thousand which he had slipped into her hands. What the hell, he was going to be a rich man soon.

They were in a small villa in the bustling but seedy Kowloon commercial district of Mongkok, which rented rooms out by the hour. Every one and a half minutes or so, the deafening sound of aircraft thundered above them as skilled pilots brought them in to land at nearby Kai Tak airport, Hong Kong’s revived second international airport, which served all of Asia. Krachev rolled the girl around and half plastering her against the wall of the room, he proceeded to bring the session to conclusion. The Chinese girl winced in pain and bit on her lower lip, drawing blood. Then it was all over as the Russian’s spasms slowed and she felt the dead weight of his body on her. Smallish hands pushed at the Russian’s hairy chest urging him to get off her.

Krachev rolled over and reached for a packet of Dunhill cigarettes lying on a cheap IKEA bedside table next to the bed. The girl curled up into a ball with her hands between her legs.

“That was very good yeah?” Krachev asked her, smiling and lighting a cigarette.

“Yes,” she responded nonchalantly. That was the most hard-earned five thousand dollars she had made in her entire life.

“Tomorrow night you and me again OK?” he asked her. The girl shook her head in disagreement.

“No OK, tomorrow I visit my mother,” she explained, somewhat unnecessarily.

“That’s fucking great,” Krachev said, mimicking a New York accent. Then he swore at her in Russian. The girl said nothing. Krachev rolled out of bed and began to put on his clothes. The girl stared at him through bleary eyes. Her sweat-soaked hair was plastered against her forehead and she was breathing heavily. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. He threw a five hundred dollar note on the bed and walked out of the room. The girl held the money against her almost-flat chest and began to cry.

Oleg Krachev was on a high. He had just landed in Hong Kong that day and being familiar with the round-the-clock availability of underage girls in Mongkok, from his KGB days, had made that his first order of business. The second order of business would have to wait until tomorrow. Then he would have in his possession what was probably the world’s most powerful quantum chip and after that who knew? Retirement? Oleg Krachev felt his time in the sun was tantalizingly close.

Ever since the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or KGB, was dismantled in 1991, Oleg Krachev had found himself all at sea, a young rising star drowning in the depths of ever-changing state bureaucracies. First, the reorganization of the KBG by President Gorbachev had seen Krachev, like many others, reassigned from Division VII, the unit responsible for communications, cryptology and connections, to the newly created Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSK. For years Krachev had languished in the myriad corridors of the former KGB’s impressive but oppressive Lubyanka headquarters at the whim of the new leadership. The power structure had changed and one of the many heads that had rolled had been the boss of Krachev’s division. Yet another reorganization of the FSK into the Federal Security Service had seen another round of purges a few years later and Krachev had found himself on the open market, his PHD in Computer Science incapable of shielding him from the axe wielding.

Krachev had then tried his hand at the free market, fencing stolen KGB software technologies to the shady elements of Russia’s emerging private enterprise. For a while he had thrived. Amidst the bureaucratic chaos of the reorganizations, some of his colleagues had appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of technology but the pool of disgruntled ex-Division VII agents was large and Krachev had found his share of the spoils diminishing at a rapid rate. Soon mobile numbers were changed and phone calls went unanswered as his former associates disappeared into the dark mushrooming world of the oligarchs.

As an ex-KGB agent with a PHD though, Krachev had a certain cachet in the new free market. And he had no choice but to exploit it. After months of “interviews”, Krachev landed a job handling technology and communications for an up and coming figure in the Russian Mafia. That was his official job but during the course of his employment, Krachev had often had to do double duty as a bodyguard and in the process seen more bloodshed than in all his years at the KGB combined. It was all part of the job and he had grown to become immune to the cries of a man hacked to death or gunned down in front of his family in the name of private enterprise.

That had been life in Russia then. His boss had moved into a new line of business, fencing stolen American technologies to terrorists, and Krachev’s job had slowly evolved into verifying the authenticity of the merchandise. Over the next few years he had risen in stature in the organization as his boss’ new business had flourished in tandem with an explosion in global terror. He traveled abroad, drank Stolichnaya Vodka with all shades of colorful characters from Iraq to Somalia. He bought himself a nice car, a new set of suits. American imports no less, and made numerous trips to New China, via the cold expanse of Siberia, on shopping trips with his numerous mistresses.

Then it had all started to turn sour when his boss had decided, for reasons unknown to Krachev, to gun down a Politburo member with connections right in the center of Moscow. His boss had gone into hiding, escaping to the United States as his shady empire collapsed around him. Considering his options then, Krachev had decided to go legit. He had some money, a wardrobe of flashy suits and a string of women who put up with his violent sexual tendencies. Academia beckoned and with his ex-KGB credentials, his PHD and his peculiar experience of international trade, Krachev had joined the Moscow Institute of Supercomputing as a lowly clerk in the purchasing department.

He was happy to lie low for a while and Krachev was genuinely interested in advancing the cutting edge of technology but he quickly realized that his meager salary at the institute would never catch up with the kind of lifestyle that he had become accustomed to. That’s when he had started fencing off the products of the institute’s research. Despite the fact that he was ripping off the institute, his age and his aura of authority commanded the respect of his peers and his familiarity with the mechanics of bureaucracy quickly saw him rise through the ranks to his current position, head of purchasing for the Department for Artificial Intelligence. It was a position that had given him unprecedented access to the movers and shakers in the world of information technology contraband.

Krachev looked at his gold diamond-encrusted Rolex watch. It was 3.00 AM. As he walked through Yaumatei in search of a taxi, his mind was pre-occupied with the meeting that was scheduled to take place later tonight. He had had his doubts when his search agents had returned with an interesting post on one of the numerous underground bulletin boards he kept his electronic eyes on for business opportunities. Usually, Krachev would dismiss such pranks. Russian hackers played them all the time. Typically only one percent of these supposedly cutting-edge technologies appearing on the market resulted in a real prospect.

Yet just a few days ago, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, he had been in the audience when that Professor Yao from Tsinghua University had been talking about creating an AI that had consistently passed the Turing Test. The key, the professor had expounded, was a quantum neural network powered by a 3D array one billion qubit processor that the self-learning AI had designed itself. He had been one of the many skeptics but when the professor had collapsed on stage, his ex-KGB instincts had been heightened. The Chinese professor’s limp body had been carried off stage and that Bruckheimer girl had made some silly excuse about the professor being exhausted, Krachev had known exactly what had happened. It was a killing, plain and simple, which meant that the professor had not been talking out of his rear end. His mind hovered on the residual image of Wendy Bruckheimer’s legs and the thought of what it would be like to have her screaming for mercy. He felt himself go hard for the third time that night, this time medically unassisted. He would need no Viagra tonight.

On his return to Moscow, Oleg Krachev had got to thinking. If what the professor was saying was true then the technology was probably still at Tsinghua. He had been mulling it over in his small office at the institute, circling a small tumbler of vodka in his calloused hands, when his computer had beeped telling him that his bots had dug up something interesting. He had then logged into the bulletin board and fired off a quick barrage of messages to the poster using his official e-mail address which he knew would elicit enthusiasm from whoever was behind the post. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Chinese professor dead in New York and a few days later someone from New China, a Tsinghua University student no less, purporting to have conceivably the world’s most advanced neuroprocessor for sale.

Krachev shuddered in his black leather jacket as a chilly early morning breeze bit into his bones. He couldn’t understand this damned Hong Kong weather. It was nothing like the bitter cold which dictated life in Mother Russia, but then again, in Russia you didn’t have the blistering daytime heat, even in the dead of winter, to contend with as another extreme. Several electric taxis drove past but their ‘For Hire’ signs were all down.

A gang of five youths sitting outside a 7-Eleven shop nursing bottles of Heineken glared at him and cursed the mother-fucking gweilo prick for daring to walk around in their territory at this time of night. Krachev dismissed them as directionless youth hiding from boredom and irrelevance behind a veil of beer and soft drugs. It was the only way they could cope. He himself had been like them once. Krachev stuck his index and middle finger up at them and carried on unperturbed. He knew that even at his age he could take them all, no problem. He was in no real danger.

The deal was happening tomorrow at Kowloon Park. Interesting choice of location, he thought. It was a quick walk from the hotel where he was staying. Before leaving Moscow, he had set up an elaborate system of financial transactions, with the help of one his ex-KGB colleagues at Sodbusinessbank, that would allow the credit to be sent to the seller’s account and then within minutes withdrawn as an erroneous transaction. All Krachev would have to pay would be the transaction service fees. That was if the seller was na?ve, some university student who had no experience in these kinds of transactions. If the seller tried to be too clever, Krachev decided he would simply slit his throat and hide the body in one of Kowloon Park’s many bushes. He had taken a walk around the park earlier, mentally making a note of ideal spots for such a slaying.

This person, whoever they were, probably wouldn’t want to do the deal out in the open, but he could be wrong. The seller had insisted on using a radio and had instructed him were he would find it, under a specific bench in the park at a specific time. It would have been easier to use an anonymous disposable cell phone but the seller was taking what he perceived to be precautions, forgetting that even radio communications could be easily compromised. Krachev had circled the park, his mind running through all the possibilities. The seller had insisted that if Krachev went to the park in advance the deal was off. Krachev smiled to himself. Idle threats.

A taxi pulled over next to him. The driver had seen what appeared to be a drunken gweilo and had guessed that he was going to need a ride home, probably somewhere in Hong Kong Island’s exclusive Mid-Levels. That would mean a tunnel charge, after midnight surcharge and maybe the blasted man would mistakenly give him a thousand dollar note.

“Peninsula Hotel,” Krachev said in heavily accented English.

The driver cursed to himself. It was just down the bloody road. Krachev restrained himself. There was probably killing to be done tomorrow. He had made up his mind that death was the only sure way.