The three-vehicle motorcade followed a route that took it away from the high-rise apartment complexes and glitzy clubs around the Oriental Pearl Tower, the tallest building of its kind in the world. The car and its escorts sped along the banks of the Yangtze River, then turned off the highway and headed toward the destitute neighborhoods that are the embarrassing underside of the largest and wealthiest city in the People’s Republic of China.

The procession plunged deep into the warren of slums, entering a hellish landscape of a no-man’s-land that was so burned out and devoid of human life even the most desperate slum dwellers avoided it. The vehicles turned onto a narrow, unlit street and went through a gate, pulling up next to an abandoned brick warehouse. Weathered plywood covered the widows, broken glass and boards from packing crates littered the oil-soaked dirt parking lot, but the razor wire topping the electrified chain-link fence that gleamed in the headlights was brand-new.

The guards poured out of the SUVs and formed a cordon between the Mercedes sedan and a loading platform. The man riding shotgun in the sedan’s front seat got out and opened the rear door. The lone passenger emerged and walked briskly toward the platform, accompanied by his bodyguard. As the men climbed the platform stairs, a door on well-greased rollers slid silently open.

They entered the warehouse and the door slid shut. The illumination from fluorescent overhead lights revealed that the passenger from the Mercedes was a small man dressed in a medium blue suit that had been hand-tailored in London, a neatly knotted silk tie, and Testoni shoes that sold for two thousand dollars a pair. He had a rigid, almost military posture about him.

Silver hair, neatly parted on the left, and black-plastic-framed glasses gave Wen Lo an avuncular air of bland respectability more befitting a desk clerk in a three-star hotel than the head of a giant real-estate and financial consortium that was the cover for extensive prostitution, gambling, and drug operations on a global scale.

Wen Lo’s face was asymmetrical, not from left to right but from top to bottom. The lower part of his face featured plump cheeks and a boyish smile while the upper part had a wide forehead, heavy furrowing brows, and soulless jade-green eyes that showed no more emotion than an abacus.

Waiting inside the warehouse door were three men in blue-green hospital gowns and a pair of heavily armed guards wearing generic tan security uniforms. The hard-faced guards carried Tasers, sidearms, and clubs that hung from their wide leather belts.

A balding, weasel-faced man dressed as if for the operating room stepped forward.

“An honor to have you visit us, sir,” he said, giving a quick bow of the head.

Wen Lo responded with a barely perceptible nod.

“Tell me how your work is coming, Dr. Wu,” he said.

“We are making progress,” Wu said with cheerful optimism.