Zavala turned and looked at Austin as if his friend had lost his marbles.

“I’m the one who got his brain bashed around,” Zavala said. “She looks pretty real to me.”

“Me too, Joe, but the Dragon Lady was a character in a comic strip. Terry and the Pirates . . . Stereotypical femme fatale. My father used to read it to me when I was a kid. She was always causing trouble. Damn. What was her name?”

The woman’s lips parted in a smile.

“My name is Lai Choi San,” she said in a voice that would have been seductive it if hadn’t been drained of all emotion. “Bravo, Mr. Austin. Few people know I even have another name. I have been looking forward to this meeting.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Austin said. “Now that we’re good friends, maybe you’d like to tell us why you invited us here.”

He could hardly believe he was talking to a comic-strip character. Next, he’d be chatting with Roger Rabbit.

“For a start, I want you to tell me the whereabouts of Dr. Kane,” she said.

Austin shrugged.

“Kane is under government protective custody. I can’t tell you where they are holding him. Apparently, someone is trying to kill him.”

“Really?” she purred. “Who would want to do that to the brilliant doctor?”

“The same people who hijacked the lab that was developing a vaccine from the medusa toxin.”

The woman gave him a slow-burn stare, and her face actually seemed to glow with anger. Austin passed it off as a manipulation.

“What you don’t know,” she said, “is that Pyramid created the new virus. Our pharmaceutical company was experimenting with an influenza vaccine for the world market and inadvertently produced the more virulent and adaptable strain. They wanted to destroy it, but wiser heads prevailed.”

“Why didn’t wiser heads prevent the virus from breaking out?”

“That was an accident, something we would have avoided until we had developed the antidote, which would have gone to members of my organization first. You see, the virus fit in with our larger plan of destabilizing the government. The outbreak of SARS almost toppled China’s leaders. Just think how the public would react to their impotence in dealing with an even more lethal virus. They would see Pyramid step in and cure the masses. In return, we would acquire power and fortune. We would replace the Chinese government.”

“Do you know that the virus is going to hit your big cities in a couple of days?”

“It was only a matter of time, no matter what the government did. The more, the merrier.”

Austin stared at the apparition.

“You’re willing to wipe out scores of your countrymen to stir up trouble with your government?” he asked.