Chapter 125
Ever since they’d tangled with the Red Chamber, Bradshaw had been researching the Forty-Fours triads.
Poe hadn’t bothered asking her why. She’d only have said something knobby like, some of the world’s greatest discoveries had come from undirected research.
She was always saying that when Poe caught her wasting time.
Bradshaw didn’t stop with the dragon head, though.
She used every database she had access to and went deep into Li Jie Wang’s private life.
Into the life of his wife. His brothers and sisters.
His wife’s brothers and sisters. His friends and associates.
She found out everything she could about his children.
His grandchildren. She downloaded videos of them.
Some of the footage had been filmed by the police as part of their ongoing operation against triad activity.
Other footage came from social media, from wedding videos and Chinese New Year celebrations.
Not all the dragon head’s relatives were triads.
In fact, none of his grandchildren were in the family trade.
They seemed to have made a point of distancing themselves from their grandfather.
Their lack of culpability didn’t matter to Bradshaw – she targeted them ruthlessly.
She already had access to Red Chamber footage obtained by the NCA, the FBI, a whole host of other law enforcement agencies, and using her dangerous-as-hell program, she and Estelle went to work creating the most damaging deepfakes ever generated.
In Bradshaw’s parallel world – of which the evidence was now absolute – the Forty-Fours’ dragon head was the person who had ordered the deaths of the Red Chamber concubines.
His wife, Hsiu-Ch’in, was heavily involved in the recruitment of the girls, his children in their training.
It had been his wife’s idea to skin their feet and sell the tattoos back to their clients.
Bradshaw had even digitally concocted footage showing the dragon head’s favoured granddaughter, a gifted pianist called Fang, discussing over a latte in New York’s Central Park how she had spontaneously orgasmed when watching one of the concubines being murdered.
Every person close to Li Jie Wang was implicated in the trafficking, torture and murder of vulnerable women.
If it got out, the stain on the family’s honour would last ten generations.
It was all fiction.
But because the technology to prove that it was synthetic media wouldn’t exist for ten years, it was simultaneously true.
Schrodinger’s truth.
The world’s foremost deepfake experts would examine the footage and declare it genuine. That nothing had been manipulated.
That was what Bradshaw had done.
Instead of pointing the finger at the Red Chamber, she had blamed every atrocity on the only organisation they feared. And because in the eyes of the criminal underworld the Red Chamber were little more than vassals of the Forty-Fours, everyone who mattered would believe it.
Dongyang Dong, the man with the boss-eyed dragon tattoo, certainly believed it, and he knew it wasn’t true. He looked utterly defeated.
Poe said, ‘When the countdown on that iPad reaches zero, the footage – all the footage, as this is just a fraction of it – will be circulated to every major media outlet in the world. To every person implicated in the video montage you’ve just watched.
To their friends. Their colleagues. The boards of the clubs they’re members of.
The footage of the dragon head’s granddaughter talking about how she gets off on watching women being murdered will go to every philharmonic society of renown.
She won’t be able to get a job as an organ grinder.
Even the Chinese Communist Party will be sent copies. ’
Dongyang Dong wiped his wet eyes with the back of his hand. ‘What do you want?’ he said, his voice soft and flat.
Poe checked his watch. ‘You have fifty-three minutes to convince me that what’s on that iPad should stay on that iPad.’