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1. Shanghai Ramble

Was that a terrified woman's scream, knifing through these balmy Shanghai pleasure gardens in broad sunshine?

On a balcony overlooking acres of billionaire Wan Hong's green, sculpted parkland estate sat a slender brunette with straight hair and feminine-looking transparent blue eyeglass frames over studious and intelligent features. She listened for any more screaming, but heard only birds chirping, carp jumping in pools, and an occasional squirrel darting around a tree trunk. She lowered her head and returned to her work—must have been a bird call or something.

Mélusine was European—one of the new, educated global artisan class who traveled the world on assignment as needed to do temporary intellectual work in the hierarchy of the world's top industries and oligarchs. There were no permanent jobs or benefits anymore. You either had something to sell or you didn't. You were paid to get it done, and dismissed upon completion as if you had never existed, only to ramble on to some other city or continent for the next little piece of lucky income. If you were good at your work, and had word-of-mouth references, you got regular work. If you complained or made trouble, you never worked again. Skilled or artisan workers with advanced degrees now were treated just as household help (nannies, butlers, maids) had been during Victorian and Edwardian times. It made perfect sense if you were of the zillionaire class, the bishops and cardinals of the church of laissez-faire capitalism.

Corporations strove at all costs to accomplish their one and only contractual obligation: to maximize the wealth of their investors or shareholders by any means possible. Providing for workers was nothing but silly overhead that must be eliminated. Benefits were a distraction that turned off the modern investor class—especially in former Third World cultures still steeped in feudal values.

Lean, mean, and efficient were the cardinal virtues. Anything to fatten up workers—like health care, job place safety, minimum wages, or god forbid, unions—was evil socialism and must be eradicated by any means possible. If it was legal, great. If it wasn't legal, you sent an army of lawyers and spent a fortune bribing the oily politicians in your pocket. Miraculously, you could thus quickly make anything legal to know, love, and serve that ultimate divine grace: profits.

Mélu fortunately had long ago learned to dance between the rain drops. She had solid references, while hiding the subversive democratic aspirations of her young life at twenty-eight.

As a light wind blew her papers, Mélu compared statistics on a computer pad about stresses on aircraft frames, and made notes in pencil on old-fashioned lined paper.

Mélu was a contract worker from Luxembourg, performing a month's worth of very specific, skilled engineering documentation for Wan Industries. She was privately also a spy for the Progressive Alliance for Peace (PAX). Hers was a subversive resistance movement growing around the world against the unimaginably powerful feudal network of corporations. The goal was to restore real democracy, not just in name but with actual meaning, so that even the wealthiest thousand families who now owned or controlled most of the world's wealth could be made part of the law, rather than above it. If the people elected a certain candidate, he or she actually took office rather than being replaced—on trumped up, unconstitutional excuses—by agents of the moneyed class who owned the media, courts, politicians, and financial structure of nations and continents.

As Mélu well knew, if Wan Industries realized her affiliation with PAX, they would have hired some obedient, quiet little corporate mouse or blathering false news addict.

The murder of Pierre Sander recently in London—during the hijacking of vital military data he was carrying to neutral NATO and U.S. hierarchies—now gave her special impetus. She was not here to damage Wan Industries in any way, but to gather intelligence. She would deliver solid engineering work to this employer, as contracted. She'd return home, unlike some of Wan's less fortunate employees—for example, the young BAN contractors who were virtual prisoners in vast pleasure mansions like this one in Shanghai, where Wan entertained his business contacts (or feudal vassals, one might say). The latest fad among impoverished youth, especially in the United States, was to sell yourself into indentured servitude, most often on a five year contract. During that time, you lived as a virtual slave—yes, boys and girls were frequently used as sex toys for foreign guests at discreet pool parties. When (and if) you satisfactorily finished your term, you retired for life on a lucrative pension.

She'd been listening for two hours to a party going on in a nearby condo unit that was attached to her own temporary guest apartment by a long, elevated walkway over trees and flower gardens. She had been trying to tune out throbbing rock music, men's and women's laughter, an occasional alcoholic shout, and crashing bottles breaking in trash cans.

A scream was something different and distracting. Mélu's eyes fluttered, and she looked up from her work.

Around her, the early summer air was hypnotic and balmy. City smog lay among distant hills and skyscrapers, but Wan Hong's estate was clean—as if he piped in mountain air. And for a man like Wan, almost anything was possible.

Almost.