Code Name Komiko (6 page)

She had to try very hard not to look like she was staring at the newcomer; she focused on the exquisite red lanterns as he walked past her. But she was certain. He was in a tailored suit and expensive shoes now, rather than a puffy blue tracksuit, but there was no mistaking the jowls, the bald spot, the potbelly.

He was the man from the police boat, the one she’d snapped the photos of on her phone, who she had assumed was one of the cops.

He was now helping Rand Harrison into a very expensive overcoat.

Her parents would be tied up saying their farewells for another hour. Lian found her mother at the bar, explaining the fragrances of the various
baijiu
liquors to a small group of Europeans who seemed genuinely interested in the topic.

“I’m going to catch a cab,” Lian said, after begging the guests’ pardon for the interruption. “I want to get home and check over my summer coursework one last time.” That wasn’t the real reason for her hasty departure, of course, but she promised herself she’d glance at the assignments once more before bed, just so she wouldn’t have told her mother an out-and-out lie.

Hung Lili gave her a curt nod, said “Be safe,” and returned to her conversation.

Lian tried to move stealthily back through the restaurant, but she caught her father’s eye and momentarily stumbled in her heels. He said nothing but held her in his stern gaze for a long moment before breaking away to laugh at one of the Australians’ off-color jokes. Lian took the opportunity to exit, but she didn’t quite feel like she’d made it out unscathed.

Twenty-six floors below, the doorman was able to flag her a taxi so quickly that she doubled her standard tip. Three car lengths ahead of her, the potbellied man was just stepping behind the wheel of a pristine, new-model black Mercedes with Rand Harrison in its backseat.

“Where to?” her cab driver grunted.

“I don’t know yet,” she answered. “Go where that Mercedes goes, but not too close, okay?”

“Oooh,” the driver said in a bored tone. “Intrigue.”

Maybe his sarcasm was warranted. She did feel a little ridiculous ordering the tail, like she was in some bad American cop show. But she couldn’t help but be curious about the fat man. Back at the beach, she’d figured him for a plainclothes detective, or a senior officer who’d been called out to the crime scene without the time to grab his uniform. So then why was he moonlighting as Harrison’s chauffeur, fetching his coat and driving him to whatever “business” he was attending to?

Something stank about the whole situation.

“So,” the cabbie said. “Are you his wife or his mistress?”

“Excuse me?”

“This part of town,” he explained. “Wearing a dress that nice, chasing a car that fancy . . . come on. You’re not the first pretty young thing to ask me to follow a two-timer.”

“I’m
sixteen
,” she said flatly.

“Intrigue, intrigue!” he replied, looking a million miles from even slightly interested.

It wasn’t hard to believe that the cabbie was an old hand at tailing, though. He kept a respectful distance without ever letting a full city block come between the cars, and he seemed to know how the lights were timed so that he could hit them properly.

Harrison, for his part, didn’t appear to be in any particular hurry. The Mercedes indicated a lane change, lazily drifted over, and headed up Gloucester Road for the Cross-Harbor Tunnel.

“Wave good-bye to the yacht club,” the cabbie told her, just before the tunnel swallowed them up. “When we pop out the other side, I guarantee you’re overdressed for wherever we end up.”

Lian thought of correcting him—she was not some helpless rich airhead—but she didn’t think he’d believe her. Let him think this was some petty, sordid affair—there was less chance of him remembering her that way, which was a good thing. Instead, she sat back in her seat, the tunnel lights moving over her in a steady rhythm, and tried to figure out some kind of plan.

The Mercedes emerged into the Hong Kong night and indicated for the Chatham exit. Lian peered through the cab’s windshield, watching the sleek black car ease onto Gascoigne Road and then signal a right turn onto Nathan.

Every block they drove north seemed to grow louder, uglier, and more sinister. Lian had only ever been through the Kowloon district during daylight hours, and even then, she’d have shied away from most of these places. To either side of them were bars and clubs, beckoning with garish neon, bleeding music that boomed and thudded. Advertisements for fast food and hard liquor and plastic junk seemed bolted to every available surface above her head. The sidewalks were crowded, as they always seemed to be, with the sort of people who’d learned to keep their heads down, their faces hidden from passing cars.

“Your boyfriend’s stopping,” the cabbie said, nodding to the narrow alleyway into which the Mercedes had turned. The Mercedes’ headlights shut off, and the black car was all but lost in the dark between buildings.

“Keep going,” Lian instructed. “Pull over at the end of the block.”

The cab slowed to let a bus by, then made for the curb. As she passed the Mercedes, Lian saw the potbellied man opening Harrison’s door for him. The dome light threw odd shadows onto the man’s jowly face.

“You sure this is where you want to be?” the cabbie asked, as she counted out the bills for the fare.

Lian certainly didn’t want to be there, but she’d followed her hunch this far; she had to at least snag some photos of Harrison and the mystery man. She palmed her phone, brought up the camera app, and took a deep, calming breath. Out the back window of the cab, she saw the two men emerge from the alley and head up the sidewalk.

Now or never.

She stepped out of the cab and directly into a puddle of what she hoped was just dirty water. She swore lightly under her breath as the wetness seeped into her shoe.
Off to a great
start
. She closed the car door and patted the fender to send the cab on its way.

Harrison and his companion had a substantial lead on her, but she narrowed the gap quickly; the portly man wasn’t a speedy walker. The two men paused at a crosswalk, and Lian ducked into a doorway littered with used lottery tickets. She held out her phone and snapped a couple of shots, but they were useless: backs of heads, dark and blurry.

Another photo, taken as the men passed under the bright white neon of a beer sign, was a little better. She knew how ridiculous she must look, tottering down the Kowloon sidewalks in her cheongsam, holding her phone out at odd angles in front of her, heels going click-squish-click on the pavement.

“Fish ball?” a street vendor barked, startling her.

“I just ate,” she said, breezing past him, hoping that she sounded cooler than she felt.

Up ahead, Harrison and his driver suddenly broke left and disappeared from view. Lian ran as fast as she dared to catch up. The men had slipped into a narrow alleyway between two towering, ramshackle apartment buildings. She craned her neck and squinted into the darkness.

Their destination was at the far end of the alley: what looked to be a tiny café, tucked away and calling as little attention to itself as possible. From this distance, she couldn’t even read the signage.

Lian could feel her heartbeat’s pressure in the back of her eyes. This was stupid and dangerous. There was no one in the alley but her and the men. This was the sort of dark corridor that a defenseless young woman might walk into but never come out of.

She thought of Mingmei, who’d had a very expensive clutch purse grabbed from her the last time she’d been in the Kowloon part of Hong Kong. Lian could almost hear her friend telling her to cut her losses and go home.

But she had come this far, and her curiosity was piqued. She brushed away her reservations and took a cautious step into the alley.

The potbellied man reached the café door and suddenly turned to check behind him. Lian dropped quickly behind some trash cans, her heart thudding. Her legs, constrained by the dress, were instantly wobbly, and she strained to keep her knees from hitting the grimy pavement.

From the alleyway’s far end, she heard the fat man rap on the door—three fast knocks, a pause, then two more. She gingerly held the corner of her phone out around the trash bin, and watched on the camera screen as the men were let inside the building. From here, they were two small shadows. She had to get closer, had to get a clear enough photo to make this peril worthwhile.

The door closed behind the men, and Lian made herself count slowly to ten before she stood and moved down the alleyway, staying as close to the wall as she could. The sign over the door, she could now see, read THE FAMILY HAND CAFÉ. And below that, the characters for
mahjong
. A gaming house, then.

She thought of knocking on the door in the same pattern the fat man had used. But no; she’d be too out of her element. Instead, she moved to the window to the right of the door. A cardboard placard filled most of the window’s area, but around its edges she could peer into the café.

She spotted Harrison right away, just past the gaming tables. He was at a side door, on either side of which stood massive, burly guards. As the potbellied man stood silently by, Harrison spoke with the guards. Lian was no lip-reader, but as she watched she grew increasingly certain that Harrison was speaking fast and fluent Chinese.

Hadn’t he stumbled over basic words at the dinner? Hadn’t he prevailed on the whole room to switch to English? And yet here he was, and Lian was pretty sure he wasn’t looking for a bathroom or ordering dim sum.

She thumbed the shutter on her camera app and managed to get a handful of decent shots as Harrison and his companion were allowed through the side door. Both men were in the frame, their faces clear even if their intentions were anything but. She powered off the phone, satisfied that her investigation hadn’t been a waste after all.

She hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps back toward the street when four shadows appeared in the mouth of the alleyway. Again, she felt her pulse jump.

“Lei ho,” one of the men called as they approached. “Are you lost?”

“Can we help you?” another asked.

Lian wasn’t sure whether she was just imagining the sinister undertones, but she didn’t think it was wise to stick around and find out. She walked toward them, the only way out of the alley, with a purposeful stride and her head held high, her gaze level.

For just a moment, she thought they might close on her, and she prepared to scream for help. But at the last second, they moved aside to let her through.

As soon as she could see the street, she broke into a run. She made it to the sidewalk and fled from the alley mouth as fast as she could, waving at every cab until she spotted one with its “For Hire” flag up. As it pulled to the curb, she finally let herself breathe. She brought up the photos on her phone and flicked through them.

She wasn’t quite certain what she was looking at, but she felt damn sure that Harrison and his buddy hadn’t come to this part of town for anything as simple as a game of mahjong.

11:48 PM HKT —
Komiko has logged on

Lian scanned back through the chat to see whether there was anything she’d missed since logging out earlier. Torch had laid out the group’s guidelines for Blossom in terse, humorless sentences, with Crowbar trying to lighten the mood with cheery—if misspelled—levity. Blossom meekly agreed with Torch over and over, enough that Lian began to feel vaguely perturbed. She had to step back from her desk a moment and consider before she realized the reason: She, like Torch, was starting to think of Blossom as a girl, on the basis of the delicate user name. And in her head, she was hearing all the muttering from the dinner table. “I thought they were meant to be deferential.”

The evening’s trip into Kowloon had left her with a mix of emotions. She was thrilled to have captured a few decent photos and to take a tentative step toward linking Harrison with the poor dead girl. She was grateful to have made it back to the apartment in one piece and to have beaten her parents home, even though she’d been gone much longer than she’d hoped.

But more than anything, she was angry at herself for feeling so vulnerable, so unprotected . . . so much like a delicate, deferential blossom, nearly trampled into the dirty sidewalk of Nathan Road.

She’d taken off the high heels before she’d entered the apartment, treading lightly in case her parents were home. Now she shimmied out of the cheongsam, pausing to frown at the blotchy stain up its side before returning it to the garment bag; she’d have to deal with the dry cleaning later.

Once she’d changed into her pajamas, she felt less like a shrinking violet. “Comfortable and casual” beat out “dressed to impress” any day, in her book. With a smile, she even put on a spiked punk-rock bracelet that Mingmei had given her as a joke. She gave the mirror a sneer and pantomimed a quick jab; if those guys had tried anything in the alley, she could have taken out all four of them. No problem.

She carried the laptop over to her bed and sat down cross-legged, scrolling through the last of the earlier chat. Torch had logged off not long after she had—for no stated reason, as usual—and Crowbar had given a few upbeat reassurances to Blossom before they’d both signed off.

While she waited for the rest of 06/04 to log in, Lian poked through her e-mails—some spam, a useful coupon from an online electronics retailer, and a message from Mingmei saying she’d be by at 8:00 the next morning so they could head to school together on their scooters.

11:56 PM HKT —
Crowbar has logged on

Komiko:
What’s the word, hummingbird?

Crowbar:
Gettin sleepy, probably going 2 make this a short 1

Komiko:
No arguments here.

11:57 PM HKT —
Blossom has logged on

Crowbar:
Hello again

Blossom:
Hi guys! Or gals? Crap. Dont tell me, I dont want to know.

Lian laughed out loud at this.

Torch signed in with the customary precision, right at midnight, and brushed aside the small talk.