Lethal Circuit Read Online Free PDF

they turned out to be a lie. And it was for this reason that upon hearing Kate say the words, Michael made it his business to get as far away from her as possible. Even if everything changed, he wanted to keep the illusion alive. Besides, she’d already seen the video. He didn’t owe her anything more than that.
    But getting out of the tiny room without alerting Kate turned out to be more of a task than he’d imagined. She seemed to sleep with one eye open and his first visit to the washroom amounted to her practically showing him the way. Only after a mumbled explanation regarding the flaming curry and three subsequent trips to the can was Michael able to shake the interest of his ever vigilant roommate. On his fourth trip to the washroom, less than half an hour before dawn, Michael retrieved his backpack from the storage locker in the hallway and continued out of Happy Tom’s and into the twilight.
    Michael suspected that he had little time before Kate realized he wasn’t coming back, but his bigger concern was that the police were still looking for him. After all, the debacle at Chungking had taken place less than four hours earlier. They might be winding down their search, but he doubted they’d have completed it. For this reason Michael was pleased to note that the Westrail Station he needed to reach was less than a twenty minute walk away. The mass transit map he’d picked up at Chek Lap Kok clearly indicated he could take the MTR, Hong Kong’s highly efficient subway, to the station, but he knew he’d already be taking a risk riding light rail out of the city. There was no reason to compound the problem by walking into a subway station where the police could well be checking identification.
    As it was, the brisk walk in the pre-dawn light gave Michael the perspective he had been craving. Neon signs faded gently against a gradually lightening sky and before he knew it, Michael had located the Westrail station. He purposely chose not the main concourse which was located in a shopping mall, but a smaller elevated outdoor platform about a five minute walk past. There, after a wait that couldn’t have lasted more than a minute on the already busy platform, the white train whooshed to a stop and he stepped aboard, taking his stainless steel seat.
    Soon, the dense urban jungle of Kowloon proper was behind him, replaced by the lush landscape of Hong Kong’s New Territories. The New Territories were so named because they were the last piece of colonial Hong Kong to be leased to the British. They were also the last stop before China proper and the answers that country held hidden. Michael mulled on the thought as the tin-roofed shanties on green hills flew past. He wanted to believe that his father was alive. He wanted to believe it so badly that it hurt. It was, after all, this secret hope that had driven him to fly across an ocean. But he had also buried his father. He had thrown the last handful of dirt as the empty casket was creakily lowered into the rain soaked ground. To have to reevaluate those fundamental assumptions, to have to truly consider that his father might still be living was a difficult proposal. Not because Michael didn’t want his dad to be alive. But because he didn’t want to go through the pain of losing him all over again.
    Michael also realized, however, that what he wanted was largely irrelevant. He knew that if there was even a chance that his father was out there, he needed his help. And it went without saying that Michael would go to the ends of the Earth to help him, which is why upon hearing his father recite the sixteen digit number, Michael knew exactly what he needed to do.
    Number one was to immediately commit the number to memory. It was something he’d been able to do ever since he’d learned to count. He didn’t know if he had an eidetic memory or not, he’d never been tested, but running the number over in his mind he had recognized what it was. It wasn’t a lottery