“Beijing?” Dave paced up and down the room talking to himself and trying to get his head around what was going on. “Beijing, China? No, maybe Beijing Hotel or Beijing… London. Is there a Beijing in London? There’s a Chinatown.” He walked over to the bell on the wall and pressed it. After another ten minutes of pacing no one had appeared so he pressed it again. A further fifteen minutes passed before he heard the lock turning in the door and in entered an incredibly beautiful Asian woman dressed in a white blouse and tight blue jeans. “What do you want?” Despite her looks her accent was pure American and her tone petulant. “I want to know where the hell I am and why I’m locked in here,” he shouted. “You’ll find out soon enough Stuart, in the meantime just chill.” With that she turned to leave but before she got through the door he stopped her in her tracks. “Stuart? You think I’m Stuart? Is that what this is all about? Well you got it wrong sweetheart, I’m Dave Milton, Stuart’s brother.” She froze for a moment before slowly turning back to him. “You had better be shitting me.”
Her demeanour changed from apathy to grave concern and to anger. She removed a pistol from the back of her jeans and raised it to Dave’s head. He retreated from her but she followed with the pistol touching his forehead until his legs met with the edge of the mattress and he fell backwards onto the bed. She climbed on top of him straggling him with the gun still pointed at his forehead.
“Tell me you are fucking shitting me or I will kill you right here.”
Dave tried to turn his head away from the gun pointing at it. He was wincing as he replied. “I don’t know what you want but you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m David Milton. Stuart’s my brother.” She jumped off the bed cursing to herself while pacing up and down with the pistol waving in the air as she gesticulated.
“Fuck, fuck. How could I be so fucking stupid? Shit, you look just like him. Oh shit, now we’re both fucking dead.” She continued to pace, tapping the silencer against her head trying to induce an idea. She paced for a few more minutes before turning the pistol back on him. “Ok, there’s one way out of this for both of us. As far as they are concerned you are Stuart Milton so that’s what we’ll let them believe. If you don’t go along with this they will kill you anyway and me also.”
Dave agreed to what she was asking of him as he didn’t see he had much choice. “What is this all about anyway?” he asked her as his heart rate slowed. “Nothing for you to worry about. They just need you to calibrate their machine.” She replied fixing her hair in the mirror. “Well there is something to worry about actually because I’m not an engineer.” Dave snapped. He thought he may have gone too far with the sarcasm but she didn’t even turn away from the mirror.
Lin Lee gazed at her reflection. She looked herself in the eye and smiled at the thought of putting a bullet smack in the middle of the annoying man’s forehead. The thought would keep her going until she had chance to do it for real. She removed a speck of mascara from the corner of her eye before turning to address him calmly. “You don’t need to do anything to the machine other than get in it. I’ll come to get you when they are ready. As long as you go along with what they ask of you, everything will be fine.” She poked him in the middle of the forehead as she said the word fine. She left the room with a provocative swagger never looking back.
Dave felt like he had just been hit by a bus. He tried to piece together the sparse information he had but could not make anything of it. Why did they want Stuart and what was the machine she talked about? It was obviously important if they were willing to drag him, rather Stuart, to the other side of the world to get into it. Was this something to do with the way Stuart had been acting lately? Was he involved in something he was not telling him? He lay back on the bed, his head swimming with a thousand questions, all drowning unanswered.