Code Name Komiko (10 page)

Lian shook her head vigorously. They’d been trespassing on private property; they were wearing stolen clothes. She hadn’t had a spare moment to work out what she’d seen at the Harrison complex, and she had no idea what Zan’s story was. For all she knew, appealing to the police for help right now was tantamount to walking in with her wrists bared, demanding to be cuffed and processed. Her mind was already processing worst-case scenarios, the look on her parents’ faces, the cops taking her hard drive . . .

She checked her mirror again, cut off a flatbed truck, and powered toward the Lei Yue Mun exit. The black sedan disappeared from view, although the constant roar of its powerful engine reminded Lian that it was always close.

To their left were the industrial centers; with their grid layout and long, straight city blocks, they were no good for hiding. To the right were any number of winding little streets, dead ends and cul-de-sacs and one-way loops. Lian hooked a sharp diagonal path between two panel vans and raced into the semicircle around Kwun Tong Station.

“Move!” she shouted at a group of pedestrians dallying in the crosswalk at Hip Wo Street. She took the first left then the next right, onto streets she’d never heard of, lined with buildings she’d never want to enter. At last, when the black sedan’s headlights were no longer in her mirror, she steered into an alleyway barely big enough to accommodate the scooter. She parked behind a trash bin filled with several days’ worth of fish parts, and killed the Twist N’ Go’s lights and motor.

Zan and Lian crouched in the gathering darkness, not speaking but breathing hard. He kept watch at the near end of the alley, while she spied the far end. Cars drove by—some black, some sedans—but none stopped, and no one entered the alley on foot.

They stayed hidden until the sun sank completely below the horizon, and then Zan went to scan both alley mouths while Lian stripped off her pungent coveralls and threw them in the garbage.

“I think we lost them,” he said when he returned to her.

“Good,” she said. “We lost ourselves a little, too, but I think I can get us out of here.”

“Do you suppose,” he said, trashing his own black Harrison uniform, “that we could get something to eat, maybe?”

“Sure,” she said, starting the bike up again. “It’s time we talked, anyway.”

Lian led them back to the main road, keeping watch for the sedan, and then into Kowloon City via the Kai Tak Tunnel, a long two-lane straightaway that would make it easy to tell whether they were being followed. From there, they crisscrossed the streets of Hung Hom until they made it to The Cat’s Ear, a hole-in-the-wall noodle house off Bailey Street where she and Mingmei had been a couple of times.

Zan kept fidgeting and twisting around to keep watch behind them. She sighed in relief when they made it to the restaurant without his raising the alarm. “I have a confession,” he said sheepishly after they’d ordered their meals. “I . . . I don’t have any money with me.”

“It’s on me,” Lian told him. “You look like you could use a good meal.”

He also looked like he could use a scrub down with a fire hose and some industrial-strength cleanser, but she was too polite to say so out loud.

Zan shoveled his char kway teow into his mouth like it might be snatched away from him at any moment. As he ate, the color seemed to return to his cheeks, and he became more talkative. Lian had spent hours in his company and barely heard him speak two dozen words, but with a mouthful of prawn he was suddenly rather chatty.

“I live in Yah Tian,” he told her, “About thirty miles north of here. My little sister, Jiao, came into the city a few weeks ago, looking for work.” He took a gulp of tea and pawed at his mouth with a napkin. “Sometimes I think Jiao was born into the wrong family. She’s smart as a whip, and all she has ever wanted was to go to university, but . . . my family’s rainy-day fund got used up.” He shook his head sadly, his lips thinning and his eyes narrowing. “Too many ‘rainy days’ where we live. So she decided that she was going to put herself through school.”

Lian nodded. She understood that drive toward higher education and felt a pang of guilt that her family’s finances would make it so easy for her, when there were people just as deserving who couldn’t pursue their ambitions because of where they were born.

“Jiao called and said she’d gotten a job at the Harrison factory,” Zan continued. “She told our mother that the money was decent and that we shouldn’t worry . . . but of course that’s what she’d say. Jiao’s too proud to want pity. But she confided to me that she was staying at the cheapest place she could find, the Chungking Mansions, so she could put aside as much of her tiny paychecks as possible.”

Lian frowned at this. The Chungking Mansions were a dismal, squalid firetrap where four thousand residents crammed themselves into tiny, and often not very clean, rooms. Crime and drug use was rife, and racial tensions among the residents often boiled over into violence. That it had inexpensive guest housing for backpackers and transients was by far the nicest thing that could be said of the place.

Zan captured a last bit of sausage in his chopsticks and tossed it into his mouth. “Like I said, she’s smart, and she’s always been able to take care of herself. But I’m her brother, you know? I worry. So we made a deal: she’d call me every two days, and let me know she was okay. That was enough to put my mind at ease. And then, three days ago . . .”

“She didn’t call,” Lian guessed.

Zan nodded gravely. “I called her number, but it just rang. So I hitched into town and went looking for her. The apartments where she was staying . . . scary place. If I’d known how bad it really was there, I’d have dragged her back home in a heartbeat.”

He pulled a threadbare wallet out of his back pocket and opened it. Lian couldn’t help noticing it was empty of money. Zan removed a well-worn photograph, bent at its corners, that he gazed at for a long, wistful moment.

“I showed her picture around the Mansions, but nobody knew anything. Half of them slammed the door in my face. I got called a lot of . . . ugly names.” He paused, his eyes watering. “I don’t understand how people could care so little. How they could see this face and not want to help find her.”

He turned the picture around. Lian felt like she’d been punched in the gut.

“What?” Zan asked her.

“Oh,” she managed to whisper. “Oh, no.”

She was staring into the pretty, smiling face of the dead girl from the beach.

“Tell me,” he said. His eyes were no longer teary; they’d turned intense and probing. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Lian, you have to tell me.”

“Zan, I’m . . . I’m so sorry.”

“For what? Why?”

“Your sister—Jiao—is . . . she washed up on Big Wave Bay Beach yesterday.”

His voice trembled. “What do you mean, ‘washed up?’”

“Zan . . . she’s dead.”

“Don’t say that!” he shouted, slamming his palm onto the table. The few other diners fell silent. A busboy stuck his head out of the kitchen.

“Zan, please . . .”

“I’ve looked in every newspaper. There was nothing about a dead body on the beach in any of them. And, anyway, how would you even know about it?”

“I was there,” she said. “I found her.”

“You’re sure?” he said, breathing hard. He held the photo up again, right in front of Lian’s face. His hand was shaking, his knuckles turning white. “You swear it was her? You swear it was this girl, my Jiao?”

The face was seared in Lian’s memory. There could be no doubt. She held Zan’s eyes as she said, “I swear.”

The anguish on Zan’s face made Lian’s eyes sting. “I’m going to the police,” he told her. “Right now, right this minute.”

“Zan, wait,” she said, reaching for his arm as he stood. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t care what you think!” he yelled, pushing her hand away. He knocked over his chair and ran out of The Cat’s Ear, with all eyes on him.

Lian threw a handful of bills on the table—more than enough to cover the meal and the commotion—and chased after him. She found him walking in a chaotic circle on the sidewalk, distraught, clearly unsure which direction to go in this strange neighborhood.

“Zan,” she said, catching him by his elbow.

“Don’t touch me!” he shouted, rounding on her.

“Listen to me!” she pleaded, speaking quickly before he could refuse. “Just listen for a minute, okay? I don’t think it’s safe to talk to the cops. If I’m right, Rand Harrison has a man operating as a go-between with the police. Anything you say on the record, it’s going to get back to Harrison, and that’s going to get both of us in trouble.”

“But we have to—”

“We have to be careful,” she interrupted. “If you do something rash, they’ll throw up a brick wall between us and the facts. Then Jiao’s death will have been for nothing.”

He stared at her, his chest heaving with each breath.

“I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying to find out what Harrison’s role is in all this. To expose his wrongdoings, whatever they are.” How had she phrased it at the dinner, to the man himself? “To turn a spotlight on all of his dark corners. But we have to build a case. We can’t make a move until we have proof.”

People were looking at them, curious about the argument in the street. Lian hoped Zan was done with the shouting, that maybe he could talk through this rationally.

“What is this, ‘build a case?’ ‘Expose his wrongdoings?’ Who the hell are you, Lian?” He looked at her hard, his eyes demanding an answer. “What were you doing, sneaking around that factory?”

She wasn’t going to say a word about 06/04—not out on the street, where some onlooker might hear. Not to Zan at all, not yet. Instead, she chose a vague answer that she hoped would be enough: “I’m someone you can trust, Zan. We want the same thing.”

“How can I know that?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, reaching into her pocket for her phone. The video footage she’d shot of the factory conditions, the foremen shoving and kicking the workers—that should be all the evidence Zan needed that she was there to take Harrison Corp down.

Except that her phone wasn’t in her pocket.

She quickly checked all her other pockets; no joy.

“What?” Zan asked, when she growled in frustration.

“My phone. It must have fallen out when we were being chased!” She made one more pocket inspection, though she knew it was futile. “Dammit!”

A cold feeling spread over her skin. What if it had dropped out in the factory? When they were putting on the black uniforms. If someone with any know-how had gotten hold of her phone, she was finished. At least there was nothing linking her to 06/04.

The phone was gone, and with it, the only copy of the factory footage. The whole excursion had just been rendered a complete waste of time. She leaned against a nearby lamppost and fought the urge to cry.

The spotlight on Harrison had just grown a whole lot dimmer.

As the Twist N’ Go’s purring motor echoed against the walls of the Cross Harbor Tunnel, Lian tried to talk herself down. There was a chance, however slim, that the phone had fallen out when she’d taken off the coveralls. All she had to do was go back to Kwun Tong tomorrow while it was light, try to retrace the turns she’d taken down unknown streets in the heat of panic, stumble across the alleyway where she’d shed the uniform, and pray that the garbage collectors hadn’t beaten her to the punch.

Deep down, though, she knew she was kidding herself: the phone had probably been ground to powder under the unrelenting tires of Hong Kong traffic by now. But making a plan to look for it tomorrow was the only thing that was going to let her get any sleep tonight.

She’d offered to drop Zan off wherever he was staying, but after some hemming and hawing he’d admitted that he’d been sleeping on the streets since his arrival. This was more than Lian could bear; she’d practically demanded that he get back on the scooter, and together they were headed back to the Island, to Lian’s family’s apartment.

“We should make this fast,” she told Zan, once she’d pulled into her assigned parking spot and killed the engine. Her father’s car was gone; he and her mother were out for the evening, having dinner and drinks with the Australians to finalize some paperwork before the investors flew back Down Under the next day. Lian didn’t know how late they’d be out, but if the previous night was any indication, the Australians weren’t exactly teetotalers.

Still, better safe than sorry. She certainly didn’t want to have to explain where she’d been or what she’d been doing when she’d met her new friend Zan.

They entered the building through the rear doors, closest to the bank of elevators. In part it was a practical decision on Lian’s part, to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. But as much, or more, she did it out of guilt. Seeing Zan gape in awe of the spaciousness and clean white concrete of the parking garage was enough to tell her that he might well lose his mind in a trek through the lobby. The fountains, the landscaping, the rock gardens, the cathedral ceiling . . . all of it felt so unnecessary to her in the moment, embarrassingly opulent.

“This is . . .” he trailed off as they entered the apartment. “This is
astonishing
. It’s so big, and so clean, and . . .”

She winced at every compliment.

“I feel like I’m in a museum or something,” he said breathlessly. “Like I shouldn’t touch anything.” He peered into a curio cabinet filled with dozens of her mother’s jade figurines. “How can anyone live in a place like this?”

“My . . . my father does okay for himself.”

“No kidding.”

Lian didn’t want to talk about it anymore; she could feel herself blushing. “Stay here a minute,” she told him, crossing the living room—so shamefully huge, all of a sudden—and letting herself into her brother’s room.

Qiao—or “Karl,” as he was now insisting everyone called him—was studying abroad in Switzerland for the year. He was meant to be splitting his time between business studies at Neuchâtel and the music conservatory in Geneva, but if his Facebook posts were any indication, he was more interested in splitting his time between a ski bunny named Elisa and a cocktail waitress named Naomi. The shirts, jacket, and pants Karl was about to unknowingly donate to Zan, Lian decided, would count as his penalty for two-timing the young ladies.