Code Name Komiko (7 page)

Torch:
So you’ve got something new for us, Komiko?

Komiko:
I do. I went for a casual stroll tonight and got a few photos.

12:01 AM HKT —
Komiko has uploaded three JPGs

Komiko:
I’m not going to quit my day job to get into portrait photography or anything, but does that look to you like our friend from the beach today?

Blossom:
At first glance, it certainly does. Changing out of the tracksuit was a good move.

Crowbar:
I agree . . . whos the other man?

Lian started to reply, but Torch beat her to the punch.

Torch:
Rand Harrison.

Komiko:
Correct. Clothing mogul, owns nine factories. Moved his operations here from the States. And apparently he likes a good game of mahjong.

She wasn’t going to go into any detail about the dinner, but she was pleased to have gleaned a few facts from the man’s son that she could share with the group.

Komiko:
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, obviously.

Torch:
Obviously. That’s not what 06/04 does.

Komiko:
But seeing these two together, I have to entertain the thought that Harrison has something to do with the dead girl at Big Wave.

Komiko:
Does he set off alarms for any of you?

Blossom:
I dont know him, outside of seeing his logo on clothes and billboards and such. Seems like half of what anyones wearing right now is Harrison.

Crowbar:
Hes shown up on the 06/04 radar B4

Lian grimaced. How hard was it to just type “before,” honestly? But she paid close attention to what Crowbar said next.

Crowbar:
Major investor in a Chinese silk factory, they were monopolizing a cluster of villages on the mainland

Crowbar:
Right B4 the authorities cracked down harrison sold his stake & walked away clean. . . . Timeline always seemed suspect 2 me

Komiko:
No kidding. I’ll do some looking into that.

Crowbar:
2 bad Mynahs in jail, harrison was 1 of his pet projects

Lian sighed and massaged her temples. Hearing this was almost too frustrating, and she was suddenly feeling quite tired after one of the longest days of her life.

Komiko:
That sucks. That means that A) Harrison’s worth investigating, and B) we don’t have a lick of Mynah’s evidence to look at.

Blossom:
. . . Can I ask, whos Mynah?

Lian braced for another upbraiding from Torch to the new kid, but when nothing happened for a good twenty seconds, she took it upon herself to respond.

Komiko:
He was one of us. He got a little ambitious with one of his “pet projects” and they traced it back to him.

Komiko:
The problem is, he kept all of his crucial data where no one could get to it: In his head.

Blossom:
Thats impressive.

It really was. The group had agreed to never write down the ten-digit access codes that allowed them to log into the chats; Lian and the others carried that information nowhere but in their brains. But Mynah had been on another level entirely. He deleted all his chat logs immediately and didn’t keep hard copies of anything. Still, when called upon, he could recite tiny details from months or even years back.

Mynah’s paranoia had been 06/04’s saving grace—in the wake of his arrest, there hadn’t been a shred of evidence linking him to the group. But now he was behind bars, and there was no way for them to get in touch with him. Whatever he knew about Harrison, it was locked away along with him.

Komiko:
But what that tells us is, there’s dirt to be found on Harrison, so we’d better roll up our sleeves.

Torch:
Piece of advice?

Torch:
Don’t look too hard into Rand Harrison. The man is dangerous.

12:22 AM HKT —
Torch has logged off

Social graces were clearly not a priority for Torch.

His warning did nothing to dissuade Lian. If anything, she felt spurred to turn up every bit of info she could on Rand Harrison. Even if he wasn’t connected to the dead girl, it was a sure bet that he had his hands in some dirty deals of some kind.

The others said their farewells, and they all signed off. Lian was just walking the computer back over to her desk when she heard her parents at the front door.

Quickly, she brought up the summer coursework file. She stared at the screen, counted to ten, then reached over and flicked off her overhead room light.
There
, she thought.
Now I didn’t lie to mom. I’m still a good girl.

Lian tucked herself into bed, still buzzing from the night’s events but determined to catch a few hours’ sleep so she wouldn’t wind up drooling on her desk on the first day of classes.

Still a good girl.

Lian was distracted. Not in the pleasant, daydreaming way that a couple of the other students seemed distracted, as they gazed out the windows of Island South High School to the impeccably crafted gardens of Hong Kong Park. And not in the flirty way that Dingbang (who had, admittedly, gotten cuter over the summer) and some new girl in pigtails were distracted by one another in the back row of seats.

No, Lian was distracted by Rand Harrison. She’d eventually fallen asleep sometime around two in the morning, her mind churning with theories and ideas about Rand’s impropriety, and had awoken almost itching to research him. But now she was stuck listening to an introduction-to-economics lesson, and the minute hand on the wall clock seemed in no hurry to turn her loose. She had a free period before lunch, and she intended to spend every bit of it in the school’s computer lab, combing the Internet for information.

She looked down at her notebook and realized that, as she had been turning things over in her mind, she had absently doodled the stylized H logo of his clothing brand in the margins, again and again. She rested her elbow on her desk, her head in her hand, and slumped in her chair. The potbellied man was the common element, the link between Harrison and the dead girl in the water . . .

But who was the potbellied man? Would her 06/04 compatriots be able to turn up anything? For all she knew, they were also stuck in boring lectures, or day jobs, right now.

She flinched as Mingmei leaned across the aisle to nudge her.

“What’s up with you?” Mingmei mouthed, furrowing her brow.

Lian closed the cover of her notebook and shrugged, but it was too late. The teacher, Mr. Chu, paused in mid-sentence and cleared his throat theatrically.

“Ladies,” he said, and half the class turned to stare at Lian and Mingmei. Chu was Chinese, but he spoke English with traces of an American accent. Lian had assumed that he studied in the United States. “I am an old man, and my convictions are strongly held. And I find it absolutely
impossible
to believe that there is anything in this world or the next that could interest you more than the contrasting economic theories of Keynes and Hayek.”

A few of the other students laughed. “Sorry, Mr. Chu,” Lian said sheepishly. “It won’t happen again.”

He smiled back. “I hope not, Ms. Hung. Because you know the old quote, yes? If you don’t learn this history, I’m destined to repeat it.”

Another few laughs. The daydreamers and the flirters had even returned to the fold, no doubt grateful that Chu hadn’t made an example of them instead.

“Now, where was I? Ah, yes.
The Road to Serfdom
. . . which was not, as one of you guessed in your summer work, a lost Bing Crosby/Bob Hope film.”

Chu had a good sense of humor and peppered the dry statistics and social science models with little pop culture references and groan-worthy puns. Lian was buoyed by the thought that this might be a fairly entertaining course, after all. Any other day—once all this Harrison business was sorted out—she’d be an active participant, and bring home solid marks.

But today wasn’t “any other day.”

As if to drive that point home, Chu found his lecture interrupted again—this time, by a knock at the door. He opened it and greeted Island South’s principal, Mr. Sòng, who stood at the threshold and exchanged a few polite words with the teacher. Then Sòng stepped into the classroom and smiled at the students.

“Class, I beg your pardon for this interruption. I had hoped to be here at the top of the hour, but the paperwork took a bit longer to process than I’d anticipated.”

Lian had spent two years under Principal Sòng’s roof; she thought of him as benevolent but terminally boring, the sort of man who used fifty words when five would have sufficed. As he rambled on about intake procedures and teacher-to-student ratios, never once in danger of coming to his point, she felt her attention drifting again.

“So,” he said at last, taking a big breath for his finale, “I hope you will all join me in welcoming our new student to your class.”

The principal announced the newcomer’s name, but Lian didn’t need him to. She looked up from her desk and straight at the marquee smile of Matt Harrison.

“Lei ho, everybody,” he said, bowing his head briefly to the class. When he looked up and saw Lian, his grin somehow got wider.

Sòng had a few more paragraphs to say to Chu, so the students were free to kick up a quiet murmur—in Cantonese, mostly—about the new American import. Mingmei leaned over again and whispered, “Wow. They grow ’em big, blond, and handsome over in the States, huh?”

Lian just shook her head, dazed. Matt strode down the aisle, and Lian realized his destination moments before he slid into the empty desk to her right.

“I just got here, and I’ve already got a study buddy!” he said genially. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.”

Matt somehow managed to seem arrogant and sincere at the same time, just like he had when he’d said good-bye in the Fàn Xī foyer the night before. From the muttering around her in Chinese, Lian knew that several of her female classmates were already charmed by that smile and his glinting green eyes.

She shook it off and whispered, “I thought you said you were homeschooled.”

He shrugged. “I was, up until my dad decided he wanted me to have a more ‘normal’ life, whatever that means. I guess he thinks I should have a few friends who aren’t ten thousand miles away.”

“Seventy-five hundred,” she corrected him. “And you must have known last night that you were coming to Island South. Why didn’t you say anything when I mentioned it?”

“Life’s not full of surprises these days,” he said, smiling. “I thought you might have liked one.”

Chu finally managed to politely steer Sòng out of his classroom, and the lesson resumed. Lian wasn’t finding it any easier to concentrate, though; she kept stealing glances over at Matt, who had opened his textbook to the proper page but was looking straight into his lap, where he appeared to be texting under the desk at a rapid rate.

Lian stared at him, debating whether to tut loudly, or give his shin a good kick. Five minutes through the door, and already he was blowing off the class. He may have had good looks, but he certainly had poor manners.

“Which leads us,” Mr. Chu was saying, “to Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
. Now . . . Mr. Harrison?”

“Hmm?” said Matt, not bothering to look up.

“Principal Sòng tells me that you did all the required summer reading for this course. So perhaps you can tell us a bit about the
General Theory
’s influence on modern economic thought?”

Lian felt a mix of dread and satisfaction. Chu did not accept slacking, and maybe being taken to task in his first five minutes would convince Matt to get his act together.

“Sure,” Matt said, thumbing off his phone. “The
General Theory
is widely recognized as the foundation of present-day macroeconomics, and the primary inspiration for economic policymakers the world over from the late 1930s until the middle of the ’70s.”

“Excellent,” Chu said, while Lian wondered what on earth had just happened.

“Although, if I can throw my own opinion into the mix,” Matt continued, “it’s a shame that Keynes’s failing health kept him from being a more active participant in the debates surrounding his book. I think the classicists made it their business to water down his ideas because, frankly, he scared the crap out of them.”

Chu nodded, clearly pleased. “Colorfully phrased and worth discussing. You’re off to an impressive start here, Mr. Harrison.”

“Please, call me Matt. ‘Mr. Harrison’ is my dad’s name.” He’d slipped the phone into his pocket and now made an arms-open gesture to the room. “That goes for everyone. Please.”

Mingmei leaned forward so she could see around Lian and waved. “Hi, Matt.”

Lian sank in her seat once again, willing the bell to chime so she could escape from this madness.

As class let out, several of the students clustered around Matt to welcome him. Mingmei was at the front of the group. Lian slipped out the door without a word to anyone. She’d catch up with Mingmei at lunch, and, if she was lucky, she would avoid running into Matt and his theories on Keynesian economics for the rest of the day.

The computer lab was about half full. It seemed to be mostly kids on their free period, mostly doing things unrelated to schoolwork. As the semester got well and truly under way, Lian knew, the lab would fill up quickly, and she’d have to sign up for a terminal ahead of time or risk missing out.

Today, though, she had her pick of computers, so she headed to one in the corner and quietly angled the monitor so that it wasn’t visible to the rest of the room. Not that she expected them to look up from Facebook or Twitter or celebrity gossip sites, but better safe than sorry.

Lian didn’t dare log on to the 06/04 group from here, of course. If any of them had turned up a connection between Harrison and the dead girl, she’d have to wait until she was at home, encrypted and firewalled, before she learned about it. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a connection waiting to be uncovered.

So she dug.

Her first search was for news reports on the tragedy at Big Wave. If the police had released the victim’s name to the press, Lian would be having a significantly easier time compiling information on her. But no combination of search terms led to a story about the girl on the beach. Lian widened the parameters until the results were useless, and then resorted to frustrated browsing on the major news sites.