Code Name Komiko (26 page)

“You were right,” Eva rasped. “That did hurt like hell.”

Matt severed her last ankle bond, dropping the drill and helping her to her feet. Lian got on Eva’s other side to prop her. As quickly as they could, the threesome made for the door, staying close to the one brick wall that the fire had not yet consumed. Burning ceiling tiles and wisps of pink insulation rained down on them. Matt gave the girls a sudden shove and took the brunt of a falling wall clock on his back.

Their last few steps to the door were unavoidably blocked by flames. Without a word, Matt swept Eva up in a fireman’s carry, wrapped his free arm around Lian’s waist, and charged for freedom like a man with nothing left to lose.

He didn’t stop running until he reached the top of the steps outside, where he first deposited Lian and then knelt so she could help with Eva again. They supported one another down the stairs and ten yards or so onto the unkempt grass, turning only when the school building seemed to moan at their absence and then collapse in on itself, support beams at last giving way to the inferno.

Lian’s eyes were on the burning building even as her feet continued to move away from it, so she nearly tripped on a large, dark lump in the grass. With a gasp, she realized that it was the prone form of Mr. Yeung. The tall grass around his head was deeply stained by the blood seeping out of a large gash in the side of his head.

“So,” Matt said between lungfuls of clean night air, “now do you guys trust me?”

Eva smiled, sat on the ground, and fell into a coughing jag. Lian looked up at Matt, her eyes softening. “So you never were a mole,” she said. It wasn’t a question; she had no doubt of the answer now.

“As much as my stepdad hated Torch, he had no idea it was me until tonight. Zan went for a ‘milkshake’ and told him everything.”

“What you did in there,” Lian said breathlessly. “Coming to rescue us. That . . . that was really—”

Her sentence ended in a shriek as she felt meaty fingers close around her bare ankle.

“You aren’t . . . rescued yet,” Yeung said groggily.

Lian kicked at him until she was free. He was no longer moving quickly, but with his head wound she was amazed he was moving at all. His hands went to his pocket.

“Which were you looking for, Yeung?” Matt asked, holding up the memory stick in his left hand. “This?” From his right sweatshirt pocket, he then pulled out Yeung’s handgun. “Or this?”

“Pretty boy,” Yeung said, spitting blood. “You wouldn’t dare use it.”

Matt fired a shot that split the grass three inches from Yeung’s face.

“Lucky shot,” Matt said, in a tone that told Lian luck had nothing to do with it. “Must be the rabbit’s foot.”

He put the memory stick back into his pocket, then handed the gun to Lian, who accepted it gingerly. “Oh, I also nicked your car keys when I was rooting around in your pockets, Yeung,” he said, jingling the keys on their ring. “So I guess we’ll be on our way.”

Lian stared at the gun in her hand, then looked at Matt questioningly.

“Just stay here and cover him while I get his car. I’ll pull up so we can load Eva in.”

Lian nodded, and Matt took off at a run toward Yeung’s black Mercedes, parked at the head of the drive.

“Lian,” Eva whispered.

When she turned, Lian saw it: the glint of metal that leapt from Yeung’s ankle holster to his hand. He had gotten to his feet somehow, grinning the first grin Lian had ever seen on him, his teeth stained with his own blood. He looked directly into her eyes and swung his arm back to throw the knife.

She put a bullet through the center of his chest.

The grin faltered. The hand trembled, and the blade fell silently onto the grass. Lian dropped the gun, feeling a sudden swim of nausea. Yeung staggered backward, clutching at his heart, mouth moving but making no sound. He collapsed onto his back at the foot of the school stairs, and a flaming corner slid off the roof to bury him.

Lian was still staring at the gun on the ground, when Matt pulled up behind her.

“I . . . I killed him.”

“See, that’s why you’re such an effective activist,” Matt said through the rolled-down window.

“He had a knife,” she muttered.

Matt climbed out of the car, picked up the gun and flung it into the heart of the fire, then held the car’s passenger door for her as she climbed in. He ran back to get Eva from the lawn, lifted her as if she were weightless, and eased her into the backseat of the Mercedes. Then he jogged over to retrieve something from behind a stump.

Lian felt numb. She’d just shot a man. In the chest.

Matt handed something to her before climbing back behind the wheel. It was her messenger bag.

“That was good thinking,” he said with a smile as she opened it. “Knowing that Eva might want to cover up with a suit coat, and you might need a replacement pair of shoes.”

“Yeah,” Lian said, turning around in her seat to lay the jacket over Eva. “Everything went exactly the way I planned it.”

She removed her right sneaker and sock, slipped her feet into the black flats, and then lay back in the leather seat and closed her eyes.

“Hey,” Matt said as he pulled away from the ruined schoolhouse. “Buckle up, Lian. You don’t want anything bad to happen to you tonight.”

Lian fastened her seatbelt, marveling at how steady her hands were. As they turned back onto the main road, a cell phone in the car’s center console lit up and gave the double chirp that indicated a new text message. Lian picked up the phone; the caller was identified only as RH.

Is it done?

She showed it to Matt, who nodded. She tapped out a reply and sent it.

Of course.

“But it’s not, quite,” Matt said. “So what’s our next step?”

“We have the information,” Lian said. “Now we just have to get it to the people who can do something with it.”

“Don’t worry,” came Eva’s tired voice from the backseat. She tapped her belt buckle with a fingernail. “A little bird told me that everything’s going to work out fine.”

Lian had stayed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel only one night in her life, two years ago when her father had been wooed for his current job on the island. She had never experienced such luxury before or since. Winding herself up with sweet delights from the Cake Shop and then calming back down under the Vichy showers in the spa, she had spent nineteen enchanted hours through the looking glass in this five-star wonderland.

Now she stood at one side of the lobby, with Matt and Eva at her side. Harrison was prepping at the front, accompanied by an eight-man security detail, serious guys in serious suits, little curls of translucent wire leading from their ears into their shirt collars. Lian’s father and his bosses were there as well, talking amongst themselves. The higher-ups looked self-congratulatory, but Hung Zhi-Kai seemed empty; to Lian’s eyes he appeared exhausted and disheartened, a shadow of the father she loved.

“I think Taylor almost told me about you,” whispered Lian, “on Harrison’s yacht. He said you wore hand-me-downs. I didn’t get it.”

Matt blushed, and for once he didn’t look comfortable in his own skin. “My folks made ends meet, or at least got within shouting distance. But the, uh, when my dad got sick . . . that’s where all the money went. I’d pick up little odd jobs around the neighborhood, mowing lawns or washing cars for a couple of bucks. When Rand met my mom she was waitressing on the graveyard shift. It seemed unreal; he plucked us from small-town Colorado and suddenly we’re living in his huge house…”

Rand Harrison cleared his throat, calling the press conference to order. Lian glared at him across the vast room through sunglasses that hid her face but did nothing to dim her hatred.

A sea of journalists representing new media and old had gathered to report on the occasion. These same writers, or ones very like them, had covered Harrison before; in her research, Lian had read enough press on the man and his company to know that he’d feed them sound bites expertly chosen to reflect precisely the image he wanted for his company. Any hard questions would be subtly but artfully evaded; any softballs would be seized upon to the room’s amusement. And every one of these reporters would file almost the exact same story: the story that Harrison’s publicity people had written for them even before he’d opened his mouth.

That’s how things had gone up until today, at any rate.

“Good morning,” Harrison said to the crowd. “Zao shang hao. I’m so pleased that you could join me here today. I think, when all is said and done this morning, you’ll feel that you’ve witnessed something . . . just a little bit extraordinary.”

The convivial tone and warm smile did nothing to betray the fact that, six hours earlier, the man behind the podium had casually ordered the death of two teenage girls.

“We stand today,” he continued, “at the precipice of a bold and exciting new era of Chinese–American business cooperation. I had to sign an awful lot of dotted lines to get us to this point, too.” Harrison held up his hand, cramped into an exaggerated claw. “Does anybody know if there’s a good acupuncturist anywhere in town?”

This drew laughs from the press. Harrison shook the stiffness out of his hand and ran it through his hair, smiling. “But if writing my name a couple hundred times is the worst thing I have to do to usher in a period of unprecedented prosperity for Harrison Corp, well then, I guess it’ll all have been worthwhile. Now, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about exactly—”

There was a tiny squeal of feedback, and then Rand Harrison interrupted himself.

“Beat me?” his voice asked through the sound system. “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.”

Harrison gripped both sides of his podium, his eyes suddenly wide and furious. He was saying something, but Lian couldn’t hear it. Nobody could; the microphones had cut out completely. The lobby echoed with the sound of a voice from just a few hours before, sinister and taunting.

“And the other of us? 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?”

“
This is how
, you smug son of a bitch,” Lian said under her breath.

“You know,” Eva said, stepping up behind her and handing her grapefruit juice in a champagne glass. “This is a really nice way to spend a morning.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Lian said as they clinked their glasses together. Eva’s eyes were still a little pink, as was the square around her lips, but she smiled nonetheless. She was wearing a black overcoat and had her dreadlocks tucked up underneath a dark gray snood. At her waist, the eye of the chrome crow glittered.

Hours earlier, from the backseat of Yeung’s Mercedes, Eva had detached the belt buckle and explained that it hid a digital recorder. She never left home without it, and when she suspected that a situation might become noteworthy, she pressed the bird’s eye and started taping. Last night the crow had been served quite a meal.

Matt had nearly lost control of the car when Eva had told them about the recording. Lian had plugged the device’s cord into her phone, and the three of them had taken a lazy drive through Kowloon at four in the morning as they listened to Harrison and Zan gloat over their dirty doings.

There had been no sleep for them after that. At an all-night coffeehouse back on the island, Eva had downloaded an audio editing app to Lian’s phone and had set about isolating Rand Harrison’s greatest hits. Matt had hacked the hotel’s server to discover the make and model of the soundboard they’d be making available for the press conference. Lian texted Mingmei and reassured her that everything was fine, that the mystery letter to her parents could be deleted unread, and that Mingmei might wish to feign illness so she could stay home and watch the local news.

“The thing of it is,” Harrison’s oily voice said from the speakers, “I don’t like being looked into. My secrets are my own. The backroom deals, the greased palms, the little favors that are done off the books . . . those are what business is built on, sweetheart. They’re what keep the machine running smoothly. Everything else is just for show.”

The reporters were already buzzing, but Lian watched her father’s face darkening in his chair.

“I said, stop the damned recording!” Harrison bellowed from behind the podium, loud enough for the room to hear even without the microphones’ amplification. His security guards were all jabbering into their earpieces, but none of them seemed able to do anything to silence the speakers.

“And if Drax just happened to be making plans to expand into Harrison Corps’ markets—plans that, sadly, had to be scuttled when the company went under and its assets were sold for pennies on the dollar—well, what a nice little bonus for me.” Harrison laughed on the recording. Lian thought he might never laugh again in real life. “Why pay for a piece of candy when you can have the whole candy shop at the same price?”

“That’s a man who’s had too much candy,” Matt said as he joined the girls. “It was bound to catch up to him.”

“He certainly looks sick to his stomach,” Lian agreed.

“Oh, just wait,” Matt said. “It’s about to get better.”

The playback ended. Harrison just stood before the crowd of reporters, his brow glinting with sweat, his eyes bulging fiercely, his face as red as that of a New Year’s dragon.

A pretty young Web journalist near the front of the throng held up a manila envelope, addressed to her in Lian’s measured script.

“On the assumption that we’ve entered the question-and-answer phase of the conference, Mr. Harrison,” the woman said, “I’d like to ask about your thoughts on this. It’s a very interesting package that was waiting for me this morning. Files from a number of sources linking your corporation to police and governmental corruption. Chemical poisoning and cover-ups. The recent death of Dr. Lan Ming. Arson at her building, as well as at a disused schoolhouse south of Kam Shan Park.” She paused for breath.

“And the formerly unidentified girl found ten days ago at Big Wave Bay Beach, here shown to be one Kong Nüying . . . dead under mysterious circumstances while under your employ. Any comment on these connections, Mr. Harrison?”