Code Name Komiko (24 page)

Crowbar:
You will hand this memory stick over to us, or Eva and Zan will die tonight.

Mingmei took a step back. “This . . . this isn’t some weird online role playing game, is it? Are they serious about killing people?”

Crowbar:
You will not copy the data. Any copies you have already made, you will destroy.

Crowbar:
If you choose to disobey, there will be consequences.

12:52 AM HKT —
Crowbar has uploaded four JPGs

Lian gasped. On the laptop screen were photographs. Her family’s apartment building. The door number of their home. Her father’s office in the city. Qiao’s dorm at the University of Neuchâtel.

“Lian?” Mingmei said, her voice a little shaky.

Crowbar:
You will call the following number within the next five minutes and arrange to deliver the memory stick. Alone.

A phone number popped up on the screen.

12:53 AM HKT —
Crowbar has logged off

Komiko:
. . .

Komiko:
That was him. It had to be.

Blossom:
Who? The fat man?

Komiko:
Mr. Yeung is his name. Torch sounded scared of what Yeung could do.

Blossom:
With good reason, it seems.

Blossom:
Are you going to take the memory stick to him?

Lian pondered the question for a moment, until an antsy Mingmei prompted her to reply.

Komiko:
I don’t see any other choice. We have every reason to think Crowbar and Zan are in real danger. Protecting the brand is apparently worth killing for.

Komiko:
I couldn’t live with myself if their blood were on my hands.

Blossom:
Or if they washed up on Big Wave beach.

“Wait a second,” Mingmei said. “The girl from the beach? She’s wrapped up in this, too?”

“It’s a really, really long story.”

Komiko:
I’m going to call Yeung and make the trade. You said you didn’t want to be outed, and I respect that.

Komiko:
But if I, or Crowbar, don’t get out of this . . . you’re the only hope we have. You’re the 06/04 insurance policy now.

Komiko:
So promise me you’ll find out everything you can about the girl. Her file says she was named Kong Nüying, from Lau Fau Shan. See this thing through to the end.

Blossom:
Count on it.

Komiko:
And if Torch logs on here again . . . don’t trust a word he says.

Blossom:
I absolutely wont.

12:56 AM HKT —
Komiko has logged off

Lian dialed the number; the voice that answered was the same one that had directed the guards earlier. Yeung.

“There is a disused school building, the Golden Hill Academy, off Tai Po Road, north of the city,” he said, with no pleasantries. “Do you know it?”

“I can find it,” Lian answered, bringing up a browser window on Mingmei’s laptop and searching for the school.

“Come alone, and bring the memory stick. Alert no one, especially not the police.”

Sure, Lian thought. On the slim chance that I find one who isn’t in Harrison’s pocket already.

“If anyone but you arrives . . . or if you try anything stupid once you get here . . . I will be certain you’re looking into your friends’ eyes as I pull the trigger.”

“I’ll do what you want. There’s no reason to hurt them,” Lian said, trying to keep her voice calm.

“Oh, I’m not sure about that. Your boyfriend Zan is practically begging for it.”

There was a rustling sound, and then Lian heard Zan’s voice, fast and panicky.

“Lian,” he said. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I messed things up so bad. I should have stayed with Matt. I just wanted a milkshake, and then these guys grabbed me, oh, man. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, as much to him as to herself. “Everything’s going to be okay. You don’t have to apologize.”

“Just . . . please . . . get here fast. These guys aren’t screwing around, they’ve got this power drill, and I don’t know what they’re planning with it, but I—”

The rustling again, and Mr. Yeung’s voice returned.

“Yes,” he said evenly. “Get here fast. Because who knows what we’re planning?”

There was a high-pitched whirring sound in the background. Something like the noise of a power drill.

And then the line went dead.

“I can’t believe you’re not letting me go with you.”

Lian fastened the straps on her panda-painted helmet and then shook her head. “He said I had to come alone. If they see another headlight on the road with me, Eva and Zan could be dead before we ever got there.”

Mingmei looked more worried than Lian had ever seen her. “You’re going to the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, absolutely alone, and the only thing you know for sure is that the guy you’re dealing with has a gun and a drill. How are you not totally freaking out right now?”

Lian considered the question. “I don’t know.” She could have added, that she’d pushed well through the part where she was feeling anything at all, other than wanting this to be finished. What little sentiment she had in reserve, she’d poured into a hastily written but sincere document on Mingmei’s computer. She’d made Mingmei leave the room while she wrote it, and then had saved it with the password “littlepanda” to lock it away, unless and until it was needed.

“Tell my parents,” Lian said, “that the key is their pet name for me. All one word.”

“I won’t need to tell them about it at all,” Mingmei said. “Because you’re going to be fine, and you’re going to save your friends, and everything’s going to turn out okay. Right?”

Lian looked at the ground and said nothing.

“Dammit, Lian,” Mingmei said, throwing her arms around Lian with such force that the girls and the scooter nearly toppled over. “You tell me I’m right!”

“You’re always right,” Lian said, hugging her best friend. “You told me so yourself.”

She fired up the Twist N’ Go and patted her pocket, making sure for the hundredth time that the rabbit’s foot was still there.

“When you’re done,” Mingmei said over the purring motor, “I don’t care what time it is, you text me. Or call. No, just come back by here. I just want to see you on the other side of this.”

Lian nodded.

“And if I don’t hear from you by sunrise,” Mingmei said, “I’ll come looking for you. I’ll get Matt, and we’ll find you, no matter what.”

Lian swallowed. “Don’t bring Matt. Don’t tell him anything at all.”

“What? Why not?”

“You can’t trust him, Mingmei. He’s not who he seems to be.”

Mingmei looked a little stunned, but she didn’t argue. She just watched silently as Lian motored out of the driveway and disappeared into the Hong Kong night.

Central was still bustling at two in the morning, the sidewalks packed with late-night drinkers and the streets filled with taxis, produce trucks, cyclists, and pedestrians crossing as they pleased. Lian discarded every traffic regulation she knew and just concentrated on moving forward: weaving between cars, taking corners without pause, even heading against traffic for a block on a one-way street after a bus had blocked her road.

She chose the Western Harbor Crossing so she could skirt the western edge of the city, up the Kowloon Highway and through the port at Lai Chi Kok. The map had suggested that it would take her half an hour to reach her destination, but Lian was shaving seconds off anywhere she could. She leaned into the curves of Ching Cheung Road and barely slowed for the hairpin turn onto Tai Po.

Under any other circumstances, this might have been a pleasant night drive among tree-dotted hills, the wind in her face crisp but not cold, the leaves still green and vibrant in the last few weeks before they began to turn red and brown and gold. Lian had never been out this way before, and she very nearly missed the turnoff onto Caldecott.

The buildings here seemed new enough, and nice enough. Past an apartment block, there was even a construction site, with two cranes resting for the night outside a boxy, skeletal frame. She hadn’t seen another vehicle for a while, though, and there were only a couple of lights on in the apartment. After the throngs in Central and the glow from Kowloon, this felt like a strangely sparse and unpopulated corner of the world.

Her final turn was onto an unlit and poorly paved road. Here, she eased off on the throttle to navigate the gaping potholes. The weather-beaten sign for the Golden Hills Academy had already broken free from one of its posts and was making a solid attempt at abandoning the other. The school building lay at the end of the road like a toppled gray tombstone.

Outside of the glow of her headlight and the purr of the motor, there was nothing but darkness and silence. A scream would go unheard; a plea for help would go unanswered. If Yeung planned to do away with her and her friends, he’d chosen the perfect setting.

Still, Lian thought as she killed the motor and removed her helmet. There’s still Blossom. If all else fails, there’s still one seed of 06/04 left, and from that seed a forest could grow in time.

Blossom had been cautious all along, staying in the shadows, finding strength in anonymity. Lian let herself wonder, just for a moment, whether things would have gone differently if she and the others had kept to that credo. If they’d never met in person, would she be here now, climbing the front steps into a pitch-black abandoned school?

It didn’t matter. Because they’d met, she now knew Matt was a traitor. That 06/04 had been rotten at its core. Better to root him out than to continue living the lie.

“Hello?” she called into the blackness as the door shut behind her. There was no response. She took a couple of cautious, groping steps forward but heard nothing more than the crunch of her own sneakers on a debris-strewn concrete floor.

She was just reaching for her phone to illuminate her path, when suddenly she heard a sinister metallic click, and a blinding light shone directly into her eyes. She slammed them shut and shielded her face with her hand, but not before she caught a glimpse of a gun barrel held up next to the light. However she blinked, the afterimage danced before her, a blood-red cylinder seared onto her retinas.

“Whatever you were reaching for,” Mr. Yeung’s voice said, “take your hand away.”

“My phone,” Lian told him, continuing to blink as she adjusted to the flashlight in the dark. “Just my phone.”

“There is no one you need to call. Everyone left in your world is in this room already.”

His voice was a cold, bloodless thing that slithered out of him like a reptile. Lian felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Perhaps she should have been terrified, but that emotion, too, had been used up completely over the course of the night.

“Now,” Yeung said. “Slowly take out the memory stick and place it on the ground at your feet.”

“First show me Eva and Zan,” Lian demanded. She couldn’t help the little waver in her voice. “I need to know they’re all right before I give you anything.”

Without a word, Yeung swung his flashlight so the beam fell on Eva, seated at a school desk in the corner of the room and bound to its chair with plastic riot cuffs. Her mouth had been stuffed with a wad of cloth, and duct tape had been wound around her head to gag her. Eva’s black-rimmed eyes were wide and panicked, and she was struggling, clearly trying to say something that Lian couldn’t begin to make out.

“The memory stick,” Yeung repeated. “Now.”

“What about Zan?” Lian asked. “I want to see him, too.”

Yeung strode purposefully over the corner and held his handgun to Eva’s knee, just above her boot. “You are finished making demands of me. Give me the memory stick, immediately, or know that you’re about to cause this young lady a great deal of pain.”

Eva wriggled and shook her head. Lian tried not to think about what a gun that size might do at point-blank range. When the light swung back to her, she held up one hand in a gesture of surrender, and moved the other one very slowly to her pocket.

“A rabbit’s foot?” Yeung said, like a machine trying to approximate amusement.

Lian twisted it to expose the USB connector and then bent down to set the stick on the ground.

Before she’d stood all the way back up, two men had appeared from the shadows behind her, grabbing her and pinning her arms behind her back. She shouted and kicked at them, but they took no notice. The men smelled like aftershave and gasoline, their muscular arms covered by track jackets emblazoned with that hateful H logo.

They dragged her across the room and forced her into an empty desk near Eva. Lian felt the plastic cuffs dig into her wrists and then into her ankles. She thrashed in the small chair but to no avail; one of the men pushed the desk hard into the wall, and Lian grimaced at the impact. She was face to face now with the captive Eva, but still couldn’t understand what she was trying to say.

“Let us go,” Lian said, wrenching her neck to look at Yeung. “I did everything you asked. I came alone. I brought the only copy of the data. So set us free.”

The overhead fluorescent lights switched on suddenly, and the inky blackness before them coalesced into the smiling form of Rand Harrison.

“Lian, Lian, Lian,” he chided. “My associate already told you, you’re done making demands. And here I thought you were such an intelligent girl. I’m disappointed that we have to repeat ourselves.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think about my intelligence,” Lian spat back. “I was smart enough to beat you.”

“Beat me?” he said with a laugh. “One of us has the dead girl’s file, the multibillion-dollar corporation, and the wherewithal to keep the former from causing even a moment’s concern to the latter. And the other of us?” He put one expensive loafer up on her desk and leaned down to meet her blazing eyes with his black ones. “The other of us has nothing. No data, no escape, no hope. No reason to go on living at all. So how, exactly, do you imagine that you’ve beaten me?”

Lian set her jaw defiantly. “It doesn’t matter if I don’t walk out of here tonight. I’m part of something bigger than myself, and our whole focus right now is taking you down, Harrison. You and your backstabbing son.” She inclined her head toward Eva. “When we don’t report back, another activist named Blossom will pick up where we left off. And Blossom is cautious, completely anonymous. You won’t have any idea who they are, or how to stop them. But I promise, they will destroy you.”