EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum by Shane Stadler Page A

desk. He could hardly believe it had taken so little time to acquire. His stomach twisted with the idea that maybe they hadn’t gotten everything.
    He turned the heavy box so he could access the seams, cut the packing tape with a utility knife, and tore open the flaps. Each item he extracted had been carefully wrapped in plastic, and he arranged them on the table in three piles: bound documents, file folders, and two data storage drives. It was the latter that captured his interest.
    Dates and numbers were written in red marker on a piece of paper taped to the top of each drive. The latter indicated the number of the treatment room in which the video had been recorded. He extracted the one with the earliest date from its case, and connected a cable between it and his laptop. A few seconds later he started the first video.
    Cho squealed in delight when the first image appeared. It was the first time he’d seen a subject inside an operational Exoskeleton. Before he’d acquired Syncorp, the company had provided him with still images for demonstration purposes. They never had access to actual treatment footage. That information was highly classified and only available to authorized government personnel.
    The video showed an overhead view of a man inside a horizontally oriented Exoskeleton positioned a few feet above the floor. The time rolled at the top right of the screen: the recording had started at 6:33 a.m. After about a minute a door opened and a middle-aged man and a young blonde woman, both dressed in white coats, rolled in carts filled with tools and gadgets. When they reached the Exoskeleton, a bundle of tubes and cables lowered from the ceiling. They connected them to receptacles on the carts, and the man grabbed a device that looked like an electric toothbrush and pressed a button on its handle. The device responded with a high-pitched whine that he immediately recognized. They were dentists .
    The ensuing torture was nothing like he had ever seen. The dentists carried out procedures without anesthetics, and he found himself envying them. Cho had carried out some fairly gruesome things himself during his rising years in Chinese intelligence, but nothing under such extreme and controlled conditions. What he was witnessing was how it was supposed to be done.
    For over two hours, the drilling and screaming was interrupted only to allow the subject to regain consciousness after passing out. Cho yawned, and then stood and stretched his legs as the video continued. What was he supposed to be looking for? The video had been deemed important for some reason. Did he miss it?
    He walked away from the desk to a counter where an electric teapot steamed away. He selected a bag of green tea from a jar, put it in a cup, and filled it with hot water. When he returned to the computer, the blonde woman was on the floor and the dentist was standing over her, trying to help her to her feet. What the hell happened? Did she pass out?
    He reset the video to the point when he’d gone for tea. The man backed away from the subject and let his assistant take over.
    The woman selected an instrument and approached the subject, but before she even touched him, her head spontaneously jerked to the side and she fell to the floor, landing hard. It looked unnatural, as if she’d been struck on the side of the head.
    Cho replayed the scene a dozen times. This was what he was supposed to see.
    He went the computer keyboard and navigated to the file folder with the video files. The file names indicated they were all footage of the same subject: Number 523 .
     

 
    5
    Saturday, 9 May (3:41 p.m. EST – Washington)
     
    Daniel closed the file he’d been reading for the past two hours and slapped it down on the coffee table. He sat on the couch, put his hands on his head, and massaged his temples with his fingers. What was he expected to do? Thackett had made it clear: nobody knew what was happening. In the meantime, he and Sylvia would work on the