Caldwell awoke at the crack of dawn. For a while he thought he was still in his capsule hotel in Angel. He almost expected to see an LCD ting down his credit but all he could see was the blink of LEDs on the various items of eleics scattered around the suite. No nightmares this time and he felt he had enjoyed his best sleep, a deeply satisfying interval of dreamless black, in a long while. He showered and ged into black slacks and a white linen shirt with no collar. The shirt was a size too small. He pressed an arrow on the lapel and the fabric stretched to a more fortable fit.
The elegant forty-something woman who Caldwell found out had mahe daily goings on at The Mansion for close to twenty years had seen to it that new clothes had been brought up to his suite. By whom, Caldwell had no idea but there was a small staiscellaneous fashion bags with names like G.O.D., Izzue, Joyd Shanghai Tang stacked in one er of the suite. He hadn』t bothered to open all of them.
The suite was prised of a large bedroom with a king-sized waterbed and en-suite bathroom, a small study with a black Great Wall putronics sole and monitor and a living area with two sofas and an Amoi plasma s on the wall. It was one of those plasmas that tilted to follow your line of vision, an old innovation that Caldwell personally found stupid.
He went down to breakfast. Mei Lin was already there in the dining room. Her face was inscrutable but as usual she looked stunning. Her hair ulled ba a ponytail and her eyes enhanced with the fai of black mascaras. Caldwell suspected she had made some extra effort for his be but that could have been his ego talking. He thought she could have dohout the mascara but try telling that to a girl, probably your first love and the love of your life, who had spent most of her adult life thinking you were a shit. She was wearing a red loose-fitting shirt, black slacks aallic gray pumps. Breakfast was hot pe and strong black coffee.
After breakfast she showed him the grounds of the house. There were altogether five self-tained private suites, several on living spaces, a gym and a library. These guys seemed to love their gyms, a fact probably related to some personal hang up of Fouler』s. Caldwell figured that if you spent most of your waking life in front of a sole you』d need easy access to a gym were you could reverse muscle wastage. There were also several offices to one side of the house.
He was surprised to learn that the solemn woman was De Witte』s wife and that she was in fact a Japanese who had spent most of her w life in Hong Kong, with somewhat infrequent visits to her native Japan. They had met whete joined HYDRA Hong Kong. He』d been dismissed from the British Army for failing to turn up to the barracks after a drunken night oown. The woman』s name was Kumiko. They had a son Dante who he had met briefly at breakfast. Dante was w as an intern in the Systems Department having just finished high school a few months earlier. He was a good-looking Eurasian kid, with a shock of brown curly hair and a mischievous look in his oriental eyes. Caldwell identified with him immediately.
Getting into the Operations Room was like getting into Fort Knox. Several fingerprint, body and iris ss and multiple codes later they found themselves in a steel-reinforced room with more soles and displays than he had ever seen, except perhaps in his memory of the puter room at HYDRA HQ in London. The Operations Room was empty