“You never did keep your promise,” Mei Lin said suddenly. Caldwell almost choked on his food.

It was definitely one way to break the ice and she was beginning to get uncomfortable with the intensity of Caldwell’s stare. As much as Caldwell didn’t want to admin it, Mei Lin had turned out to be even more attractive than when she was a teenager. Her features were a lot stronger, more intense. Her body was lithe like a ballet dancer with well-toned muscles. Her face was a lot more assured. Tonight, she was wearing a strapless top which told anyone who cared to look that she spent a lot of time in the gym and the dojo. She had wide elegant shoulders and a compact midriff tapering off to a slim waist. Her eyes hadn’t changed much. They were slightly darker in the subdued light of the Vietnamese restaurant located a stone’s throw from Shek O Beach.

Caldwell knew that deep inside he hoped that his memories of her were not manufactured by HYDRA. He found it difficult to keep his eyes away from her face, willing her to become transparent so that he could see through her. Whatever he had felt for her in those memories of all those years ago was still flowing below the surface like precipitation in a water table.

“It’s a long story. One I only found out myself less than forty-eight hours ago.”

“So you keep saying. I’m listening,” Mei Lin said simply. There was a look of intense emotional pain on her face, the kind that had been painstakingly buried only to have it reluctantly dug up again. Her thin pink lips were pursed. Her eyes had turned into pools of squid ink, opaque and totally unreadable. Was she acting, bolstering the perceived authenticity of his recently acquired memories of her?

“The truth is I don’t know what happened to me after the day I met you. You see I had my memory erased by HYDRA six years ago.” Caldwell paused for dramatic effect and to study her reaction.

“You don’t expect me to believe that do you? HYDRA doesn’t do those kinds of things. At any rate, there is no data of this in your file.” Was she keeping up the pretences, toeing the official line?

“And that means it didn’t happen, right? You will be surprised. I think you will believe me by the time I am finished,” Caldwell said with thinly-veiled sarcasm.

“OK, go on.” There was a specter of incredulity in her eyes but it didn’t look like it had any staying power. Caldwell felt that the ice had been somewhat broken and he would be able to make some progress in making her believe him. Yet, he was anything but complacent. He could not trust her.

“As far as I was aware I knew nothing about Fouler or HYDRA until yesterday morning when I went to the Docklands to meet a hacker friend I knew only as Glyph. Until then, Glyph had been an online associate only. We had never met in the flesh. If it wasn’t for Glyph, and the work that he passed on to me, I would still be sleeping rough under Waterloo Bridge.”

“You were sleeping rough?”

“Yeah, a homeless commune below Waterloo Bridge. The authorities turned a blind eye. We lived off the streets. Terrible times but made some lifelong friends.”

“How did you end up there?” There was something Caldwell recognized as empathy in her eyes.

“Truth is, I woke up one day and there I was. The area below Waterloo Bridge has a reputation as a place to abandon unwanted infants and I guess folks who have had their memories erased. Basically, unwanted members of the human race who the system can not bring itself to murder in cold blood.”

“No wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“No wonder I’ve been so miserable most of these years.”

“How do you mean?”

“Found it impossible to be happy. Felt like a huge part of me was missing. I don’t know why, but I had a feeling you were suffering. Before he passed away, I told my grandfather about meeting you soon after that day. He asked me to tell him as much as I knew about you. I told him everything I knew, which was a lot since I’d been in love with you for years before we met that day outside the school. I even got a friend to get me a printout of your school records. My grandfather is a trained fortune teller and feng shui master. He said you would find much suffering in London but will only find peace and happiness when you return home to New China. When you never contacted me I guessed you were still in London.”

Wasn’t she laying it on a bit thick, all this stuff about being unhappy? She looked perfectly OK to him.

“I wish now I had contacted you. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle by just quitting the agency and coming back here.”

“I wanted to find you but by the time I got your family’s phone number from the school records, you were gone and your parent’s house on Caine Road was already up for sale, according to the property agent who picked up the phone.”

“Ah right. The house. Fouler didn’t say a word about that? What do you know about Fouler?”

“HYDRA. Global Head of Operations. In his youth he was one of the most infamous phreakers to ever walk the face of the earth. His forte, apparently, was to bring down entire telecommunications networks, until the authorities caught up with him and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Did some time in a re-education facility and joined HYDRA soon afterwards in S&D. Quite a resume. In fact, HYDRA is now probably his own personal operation. He keeps the name for the international recognition factor and the fact that it opens certain high-level doors. I suspect that the umbrella agency cut HYDRA loose a long time ago and now it is funded with Fouler’s own money.”

“Interesting. A lot of things are beginning to make sense. Anyway, where was I? Right, I was meeting with Glyph in a pub when these two Japanese Yakuza thugs started taking shots at us. Glyph got hit. I managed to break out the window on to the street. The Japanese were just about to kill me or kidnap me, who knows, when this black electric limo pulls up and I am bundled in. Inside is Fouler. He tells me this story about how I used to be some hot shot in S&D but somehow grew a conscience and threatened to out the agency, to publish its darkest secrets in cyberspace. He said the agency had no choice but to wipe my memory clean and dump me on the street. I ended up under Waterloo Bridge about six years ago with little or no memory of my past.”

“I see.”

“In the limo Fouler tells me what I had suspected earlier, that the Japanese were after this custom console, which was sent to me by one Kenzo Yamamoto, a dealer in information. Some say he was into data blackmail.”

“Why did this Yamamoto send this console to you?”

“At The HUB, essentially a hacker bulletin board I was a member of, he was one of our biggest clients.”

“And how did you go from sleeping rough under Waterloo Bridge to The HUB?” Mei Lin was still not buying the story completely.

“There were a few low-level hackers in Waterloo who used to retrieve old computer parts from corporate garbage dumps and re-build working machines. They did this to make a living, resold the computers at flea markets and the like. Occasionally someone found some valuable data residing in sectors on those discarded hard drives. Anyway, one of those guys gave me this netbase address while we were going through the junk, said I could find hacking jobs there if I could teach myself how to do it. At the time, I was trying to put together a computer I could actually use. I had no idea why I had this insatiable need to build one but in the end I did and it turned out I had a propensity for the things. I had no idea at the time. Now, I know why. So eventually got to messaging this guy on the netbase and we kind of started an online friendship. Around that time I started hacking the Union systems in a bid to find out about my past but I always came up blank. A few months later, I got accepted into The HUB and discovering this new world persuaded me to try and break out of the vicious cycle of Waterloo Bridge after close to four years there and make some kind of a life for myself. I set up an official netbase as C/C Online Investigations. My forte was to find missing people but I also did other jobs that went into grayer territories. After almost a year of borrowing power and connectivity from public infrastructure belonging to both Union Electric and Union Telecom, I made enough money to leave Waterloo Bridge. I started going wherever the work was in the Union, Antwerp, Maastricht, Vladivostok. Then Glyph picked up a client who had enough work to go around and soon we were doing quite well for ourselves even though Glyph as the owner of The HUB took the lion’s share. That client was Kenzo Yamamoto. As it happened Kenzo needed some jobs that Glyph couldn’t deliver on and he referred him to me. After a lot of rigmarole establishing that I was trustworthy, I started doing the odd job for him with some success. Until about nine weeks ago, his projects kept me in enough Euro credit to be regularly holed up in capsule hotels around the Union.”

“So, what happened nine weeks ago?”

“I got an anonymous job through the HUB to steal the private banking client list of the Sumitomo Bank in Tokyo, complete with account numbers, passwords, credit history and so on. This is low level work, stuff I can usually do with my eyes closed. Yet, the run was a complete failure. I had intrusion detection bots following me all the way back to the Union. I managed to avoid detection, but inexplicably news of the failed run was propagated all over the Union hacker bulletin boards. The general gist was that I had compromised the security of the HUB and the livelihoods of the hackers. I became persona non grata. Work dried up,”

“And Kenzo was behind the whole thing?”

“God, you are sharp. I didn’t realize at the time but I found out from the console, from the avatar Kenzo recorded before he died, that he had been behind it all.”

“And the console? How did it come into your possession?”

“Yesterday it shows up in the post with Kenzo’s calling card. He says I’ll need it for an upcoming mission. You can imagine, this sounded like the big deal. It was an opportunity to stop living in foam-padded plastic lockers that counted your life down by the minute. And I am running out of credit waiting for Kenzo to surface again when Glyph messages me. We meet and he tells me Kenzo is dead. And the Yakuza show up trying to retrieve the console and probably dispatch me to my maker. Then Fouler shows up saying he has the key to my past. He is a clever man. He unlocks enough with these triggers he has in his pocket to make me remember that day when he unofficially hired me, the same day I met you and every cliché of Hong Kong you can ever think of. If I help them on this mission to discover the function of the console I can have my past back, a job at HYDRA.”

“He made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“Basically. And on the plane I get a bunch of old memories re-activated. Just what I need for this mission.”

“That’s like mnemonic blackmail.”

“Concise way of putting it. Yeah!”

“So you still can’t remember why you never messaged me?”

“That part of my memory is locked up. Although I suspect it was an earlier procedure at HYDRA that wiped certain memories. I think Fouler may have erased some of my previous memories of Hong Kong when I joined HYDRA. If we don’t find this Chinese network it will probably be locked up forever.”

“I think you can do it. You always had talent, even at school.”

“So how did you end up at HYDRA? Coincidence?” Caldwell asked her. It was his turn to deliver the Spanish Inquisition.

“I guess. Left Hong Kong International School and read AI Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It was the done thing then, to study in China. After all, Hong Kong was but a shadow of its former self and young people looked northwards for their careers, culture fix, inspiration and everything else. Don’t know why I chose computers. Subliminally, I am sure it had something to do with you. It was a way of making up for the fact that I had probably lost contact with you forever. Anyway, I found out I was pretty OK at it once I got over my initial prejudice that computers were boring. And AI kind of puts a human spin on computing so that was interesting. One day, towards the end of my final year, I was sitting in a coffee shop near the Sanlitun diplomatic area in Beijing’s Chaoyang District reading some boring book on neural networks when a large man with straw-colored blonde hair strikes up a conversation.”

“De Witte.”

“Yes. He said neural networks were very interesting. Asked me what I was doing. I told him I was about to graduate with a degree in Artificial Intelligence and didn’t know what I was going to do with it. He asked if I would like the opportunity to work on some of the world’s leading systems. He asked a lot of questions about my family background and was pleased when I told him there was only me and my granddad, relatively recent mainland migrants to Hong Kong. Parents were dead, three grandparents dead and me an only child. A lot of tests followed in Hong Kong but basically within six months of the coffee shop encounter granddad and I were Union citizens and I was working for HYDRA. First there was intense physical training in Tokyo and then at The Seminary. Then it was back to Hong Kong. Started off pushing a lot of paper, then became an analyst writing reports on emerging technology trends in New China, mostly military-related.”

“That is interesting,” Caldwell said.

“Not nearly as amazing as your story. I am sorry you had to suffer so much. You must really hate Fouler. And here I was being angry with you. I had no right. I was asking too much of you from a single encounter.”

“A single special encounter,” Caldwell added, not knowing where he was going with this.

“Yes. But that was many years ago.”

“True.”

“And things change.”

“The one thing we can all be certain of is change.”

“So true.”

“So are you married? Boyfriend?” Caldwell ventured, emboldened by the direction of their conversation.

“If that counts, you were my first and only.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“That’s OK. It was my choice entirely and I am still young. I figured career first. Many young girls in Asia do adopt this approach, preferring to deal with affairs of the heart after they have sorted out their careers. So what about you?”

“I have a friend in Greater London called Kat who I am very close to but not like a girlfriend. We are more like brother and sister. She kind of saved my life once. I guess these days, relationships are almost impossible. People are too complex, the repercussions too many.”

“True. Well, it’s getting late should we get the bill? We start bright and early tomorrow.”

Caldwell had no credit so he let Mei Lin settle the bill and they walked back in silence along Shek O Road to the sound of waves crashing on the beach below.