Director Zang tapped his fingers on the desk and stared at the phone, willing it to ring. They had built their Harmoniser according to the plans from the stolen laptop and were now ready for the first test. The country’s top physicists had been persuaded to oversee the build and to check out the algorithm needed to replicate the conditions. They had managed to get to this stage in less than one week. That was quite an achievement by anyone’s standards, anyone’s but the Chairman’s. He was not interested in the complexity of the equipment, or the difficulty of getting the parts they needed to build it, or even recruiting the expertise required to ensure it worked. He was only interested in saving his son’s life and time was just about the only thing he could not buy. The boy had leukaemia and was not expected to live beyond the next six months. The Chairman had learned of the technology through an agent in the Chinese government. The man had told him that if the machine worked it could completely cure his son of the dreadful disease killing him. This was the only option left available to him to save his only child.

The director turned his attention back to the phone and hoped that when it did ring it would be good news. Anything less was unacceptable.

Lin Lee was not easily shocked but when the body in the Harmoniser exploded in front of her it sickened her to the point of vomiting. Not so much the sight of blood and guts dripping down the inside of the glass but the implications of having to inform her bosses the test had failed. They already had a setback when it was discovered the coding sequence for the initiation of the Harmoniser was a tertiary sequence and not a single one as she had originally reported. Fortunately for her the Agency had access to mathematical minds that made reverse engineering an algorithm seem like balancing a chequebook so the setback had only been a minor one. She looked back at the booth and the remains of what just minutes ago had been a perfectly healthy snub-nosed monkey. This was not a minor setback; this was a catastrophe and one that could easily lead to her demise.