Code Name Komiko (11 page)

She returned to the living room with the clothes in a neatly folded stack and held them out—along with a handful of small bills totaling around three hundred dollars—to Zan.

“There’s a youth hostel in Mount Davis,” she told him. “Fifteen minutes from here. Any cab driver will know exactly where you’re asking for. You can get a hot shower, sleep on a real bed, have some clean clothes to change into.”

“I don’t get it,” he said, not yet reaching for the fresh clothes. “You live here, you have all this . . . you’re so high up in the sky that when you gaze out that window, Hong Kong actually looks
beautiful
. And you could just stay up here and pretend that it really is. So why in the world would someone like you care what happens to a bunch of downtrodden factory workers? Why are you waging this one-woman crusade?”

“It’s not just ‘one woman’,” she said, a little quickly.

“What do you mean?” Zan asked. “There’s more? Some kind of . . . group?”

“That’s not important,” Lian said, wondering if she had made a mistake going down this road.

Zan snorted derisively. “This world is an unjust place. What good do you guys think you can do?”

“Help those who need help,” she said, crossing to the door. “Listen, Zan, I don’t want to rush you out or anything, but . . . I have to rush you out. Get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll talk more tomorrow.”

He picked up the clothes and pocketed the money, smiling gratefully. She walked him down to the elevator and hit the button.

“How do I find you?” he asked. “I take it you don’t want me to show up here again?”

“There’s an Appolo ice cream stand two blocks southeast of Island South High. I’ll meet you there, 6 P.M. tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll get in touch with my group, tell them about you and Jiao. They may have already turned up something incriminating on Harrison.”

“If you and your friends are going to be seeking justice on my sister’s behalf, maybe I should meet them,” he offered. “Thank them for what they’re doing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said as the elevator doors opened. “That’s just not possible.” She thought of their motto:
Strength in anonymity
. And right now, they needed to be stronger than ever.

Zan paused and gave her a long look before stepping onto the elevator. “Thanks, Lian. For everything. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The doors closed behind him, and Lian returned to the apartment from where Hong Kong looked beautiful. She made herself finish her day’s school assignments—a blessedly light load—and change into her pajamas, and then keyed the ten-digit passcode into her laptop.

11:08 PM HKT —
Komiko has logged on

Blossom:
. . . And Komiko makes four.

Komiko:
Good evening, everyone. I went on a field trip today and made a new friend.

Crowbar:
Were U checkin N2harrison?

Komiko:
Affirmative. I took a stroll around the Harrison Corp complex, and halfway through it turned into a guided tour.

Komiko:
I met a kid named Zan. His sister was an employee of HC who went missing three days ago. And you’ll never guess where she turned up.

Blossom:
Out on a limb here, Im gonna say Big Wave Bay.

Komiko:
Got it in one, Blossom.

Crowbar:
Oh no thats horrible! Poor guy

Komiko:
Couple that with the conditions I saw inside the factory, and I think the pieces are starting to fall together to build a case against Harrison.

Torch:
I said it before and I’ll say it again: we should stay away from that man. He gets a whiff of us, and we’re dead.

Oh Torch
, Lian thought.
Always such a ray of sunshine.

Komiko:
Well, for now, we’re alive. And Zan’s sister isn’t. So I told him we’d do what we could to help.

Torch:
Hold on. “We?” Are you saying that YOU TOLD HIM ABOUT 06/04?

Lovely
. When Torch hits Caps Lock, rational conversation goes right out the window.

Crowbar:
Whoa take it EZ Torch

Komiko:
I didn’t mention us by name, obviously. Just that I was part of something bigger than myself, a group trying to make things right.

Komiko:
Or is that NOT the whole reason we exist, Torch?

She knew she was baiting him. But his little outbursts were getting tiresome, and she was fed up with him shaming the others anytime they stepped outside the lines of what he considered “proper” protocol.

Torch:
You met this guy THIS AFTERNOON. You don’t know the first thing about him, not really. And you couldn’t WAIT to broadcast our existence to a complete stranger.

Torch:
Really smart, K. Really good thinking.

Crowbar:
Hold on, this Zan sounds like exactly the sort of person we R meant 2 defend

Blossom:
Clearly hes got a beef w/ Harrison. That puts him on our side by default, right?

Komiko:
That was my way of thinking.

Crowbar:
If he can give us info abt his sister we could trace her records @ harrison corp

Crowbar:
Prove a connection btwn the girl & the factory, thats a major scandal right there

Komiko:
Right. Mynah Bird wouldn’t have been digging into Harrison if there were no story there. He started the work, we owe it to him to see it through.

Blossom:
What strikes me as weird is that there still hasnt been anything in the papers about the —

Blossom:
Does she have a name, K? Can we start to humanize her instead of just “the dead girl?”

It was little things like this—the sensitivity, the kindness, the wanting to give a face and voice to the oppressed—that continued to make Lian think that Blossom was female.

Komiko:
Her name is Jiao.

Crowbar:
There hasnt been an official police report, hasnt been a postmortem done either

Komiko:
Almost as if all trace of Jiao was being deliberately swept under the rug.

Blossom:
. . .

Blossom:
Komiko, do you think you could convince this Zan to pose as a worker? Get a job inside HC, see what he could find?

Torch:
Terrible, stupid, HORRIBLE idea.

Lian hated to admit it, but she was in Torch’s corner on this one.

Komiko:
Let’s put that one on the back burner. It’s very high-risk. Once he got in, Zan might never get out again.

Torch:
First sensible thing you’ve said since you logged in.

Komiko:
ENOUGH. We get it, you’re pissed off. The sky is blue and water is wet.

Lian smiled at her own joke. That certainly felt good.

Blossom:
You mentioned the factory conditions. Did you get any evidence? Photos or video? That would go a long way.

Lian felt a little sick to her stomach at reading this question.

Komiko:
Well . . . yes and no.

Komiko:
I shot a ton of video on my phone . . . but my phone’s not around anymore.

Torch:
WHAT.

Komiko:
Look, I had to escape, we were being chased, I dropped it somewhere along the way.

Crowbar:
Uh oh

Torch:
Sky = blue.

Torch:
Water = wet.

Torch:
Komiko = LIABILITY.

11:35 PM HKT —
Torch has logged off

Lian hung her head and closed her eyes, but the word was seared into her vision in all caps, harsh and accusatory.

And, maybe, completely correct.

11:36 PM HKT —
Komiko has logged off

She shut the laptop and flopped onto her bed, willing sleep to come but knowing that it wouldn’t. If she could just switch off her brain for a few hours, instead of rehashing the whole day—from the humiliations at school to the dangers of the factory trip, from the new wrinkle that Zan introduced to the awful notion that she’d endangered 06/04—she might be able to wake up with a fresh perspective on it all.

Instead, over the next couple of hours, she tossed and turned and fretted her way toward a mild headache. When holding a pillow over her head didn’t solve it, she got out of bed in a huff and shook an ibuprofen tablet into her hand. She’d long ago decided that such pills were best washed down with a iced coffee—the caffeine helping to rush the medicine through her bloodstream—and so made her way quietly down the hall to the kitchen.

She’d heard her parents come in sometime around one and had assumed they were asleep. But there was a light on in her father’s study, so Lian went to investigate.

“Dad,” she said quietly from his doorway. “What are you still doing up?”

He was at his desk, one hand on his forehead, his hair mussed. Towers of paperwork were spread before him, and Lian immediately understood that it was these, and not a night of social drinking, that had turned his eyes so bleary.

“I could ask you the same thing, little panda,” he said, not unkindly. “But I think our answers would be the same. The work doesn’t end just because the day does.”

“You can say that again,” she said. She walked into the study and took a seat on the other side of the desk. “How did your meeting go tonight?”

He sighed. “Much like how I imagine the meeting tomorrow night will go. There are so many conflicting interests in the deals I’m working with right now. It’s hard to know where to begin. And our good friend Mr. Harrison is giving me the biggest headache of all, at the moment.”

You and me both
, Lian thought. Instead, she slid the coffee and the ibuprofen across the blotter to him. “Maybe you need these more than I do, then,” she proffered.

“It’s 2 A.M. already,” he lamented. “I really shouldn’t drink this now. It’ll keep me up for hours.” But even as he said it, he popped the top of the can and took a long swig. Lian smiled.

“The biggest sticking point is this proposed expansion of Harrison Corp’s empire,” he continued, swallowing the pill. “To say that it flaunts a number of monopoly rules would be putting it lightly. And it hasn’t passed due diligence on several health and safety regulations.” He sighed and flipped a few pages. “But you wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m getting from above to push the deal through.”

Lian believed it, all right. At the mention of “health and safety,” she had to bite her tongue not to shout out “Ha!”

“If you’re having doubts, Dad,” she said, “you can’t just cave. There’s no reason you should sign off on a deal that you don’t think is fair.”

He fixed her with a very serious look. “It’s business. ‘Fair’ doesn’t enter into it.”

She grimaced a little to hear him so world weary.

“Everyone’s playing with loaded dice,” he told her. “The ones who come out on top are the ones who realize that. This isn’t about what’s fair. This is about me delivering on the deal, or risking my job. Risking everything I’ve worked for.”

His head fell back onto his hand, and Lian knew not to push any further. Instead, she stood up and walked around to his side of the desk.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “I know you’ll do what’s right.”

“Sleep well, little panda.”

“And you, Dad.”

Lian moved slowly through the corridors of Island South, the previous night’s insomnia making the halls and everyone in them look like photocopies of themselves—faded and distant, indistinct and immaterial. Not surprisingly, the fact that she was headed for Mr. Chu’s economics classroom wasn’t spurring her to walk any faster.

She’d done the reading, of course; she wasn’t about to be shown up again, by smarmy Matt Harrison or anyone else. But the question was whether she’d be able to recall any of what she’d taken in, or get her mouth to process her incoherent thoughts into actual words.

Currently, those thoughts were shifting from Matt to his father, who was, apparently, something of an expert in a certain shadowy segment of economic theory. Clearly, Harrison Corp played exclusively with loaded dice. How could anyone—from her harried father, to her splintering activist group, to a poor factory worker like Jiao—hope to stand up to a rule-flaunting behemoth like Harrison?

She slunk into the room, skirting its edges to get to her desk. Her eyes weren’t focused on anything but her Converse hi-tops, so she slid her backpack onto the floor and nearly sat down before she realized that Matt was occupying her chair, leaning across the aisle to talk to Mingmei. The two had their heads close together, obviously enjoying themselves; Mingmei was doing that thing where she kept smoothing some imaginary stray lock of hair back behind her ear.

Lian didn’t have time for this crap right now.

“I think you’re in the wrong seat, pal,” she said.

“Wow,” he said, turning around and flashing his poster-boy grin. “You, uh, you look really tired, Lian.”

“What a sweet thing to say,” she muttered, as he rose from her chair. “No wonder you’re such a hit with the ladies.”

“Okay, let’s start over,” he offered. “Good morning, Lian. Did you have a restful and restorative night’s sleep?”

“Of course not,” she said, slumping into her seat. “I’m a proper student at a Hong Kong high school. I was up all night studying for the quiz.”

“Oh, hell, the quiz!” Mingmei said, her eyes going wide. “I totally forgot!”

“Mingmei is a somewhat less proper student,” Lian told him as he took his seat.

“Don’t sweat it, Ming,” Matt said. “I never knew we had a quiz in the first place, so you were already one up on me.”

“You’ll probably still do great,” Mingmei told him cheerily.

Lian rolled her eyes. There were still a couple of minutes left before the bell called class to order, so she pulled her textbook out of her bag and pretended to focus intently on Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel acceptance speech. The words blurred together on the page, and no amount of yawning seemed to straighten them.

“So, this Friday night,” Mingmei said, tugging at her sleeve. “Matt’s dad is throwing a party on his yacht. I’m considering it an opportunity to window-shop for all the features I’ll want when I buy a yacht of my own someday. You want to come with us?”