A pause, longer than Nina would have expected to allow for transmission delay, then her doppelgänger spoke again. ‘No, we had a change of plan. We discovered something amazing – in China.’

‘China? What did you find?’

Again there was a slightly over-long pause before the reply. ‘I can’t tell you over an unsecure line. But it’s amazing. Daddy and I want you to fly here and join us. We’re going to get a friend of ours, Lam Chi, to meet you—’

Wu paused playback. ‘We convinced your grandmother to let Macy go with Lam.’

Nina was still staring at the frozen image. ‘That’s not me. It’s not me! I never said any of that.’

‘But it was you, Mom,’ said Macy with rising concern. ‘I talked to you, I could see you! I even spoke to Dad, too!’

‘It wasn’t us, love!’ Eddie told her, before turning back to Wu. ‘What the bloody hell is this?’

‘CGI,’ Wu replied. ‘Computer graphics, the latest deepfake technology. Professor Wilde is famous enough for there to be large amounts of reference material that an artificial intelligence program used to replace another person’s face with hers. Her voice was also simulated on the supercomputer at this base, all in real time.’

‘I’m not famous, though. You couldn’t have done that for me.’

‘We only needed to fake your voice, and we had enough recordings of you to do so.’

‘What recordings?’ Eddie demanded, only to notice Cheng looking ashamed. ‘You were taping me on your bloody laptop, weren’t you!’

‘I didn’t know it would be used for this,’ the young man replied quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

Nina turned away from the screen. ‘Okay, so . . . you’ve got us,’ she said, defeated. ‘Now what?’

Colonel Wu pointed at the shape inside the sarcophagus. ‘Now? You wake it up.’

Chapter 24

24

Nina heard her own breath hiss inside the tight-fitting rubber face mask, sounds from outside muffled by a thick neoprene hood. Her captors knew the sarcophagus contained a lethal gas, and since they needed her alive – for now – they had taken steps to ensure she stayed that way.

They had not given her a fully sealed hazmat suit, though. She needed to touch the resurrection key with her bare hand. As Eddie had angrily pointed out, if the poison was absorbed through the skin, she was screwed – along with the entire Chinese plan. But the protest had been to no avail.

The key itself was heavy in her hand. She regarded the inset stone and crystal, then looked back through the glass wall. Eddie and Macy stood beyond the barrier, watching with deep worry. They were under guard, a loose semicircle of armed men around them. Also observing were the two other family pairings in the lab: father and daughter, mother and son. The Wus looked on with stony dispassion, while the Huis at least appeared concerned.