Code Name Komiko (8 page)

There was not one word about what she’d seen the day before.

She sat back in her chair for a moment, surprised and saddened. Life was sometimes cheap in Hong Kong, she knew, but it seemed odd that not a single news agency had picked up on this suspicious death.
Everyone deserves an obituary
, she thought. Everyone deserves justice.

Typing “Harrison Corp” into the search field, on the other hand, got her just shy of 70 million hits. It was feast or famine for the amateur detective with Web access. She clicked through on a handful of news stories, filtering to show the most recent items. Harrison had an industrial estate over the water, a massive factory and warehouse complex situated on Wan Po Road, on the city’s east side.

She thought for a second, then opened a new tab and searched for maps of the currents around Hong Kong. There were about three miles between the Harrison port and Big Wave Bay Beach, and the gentle curves of the arrows in the waters of the Tathong Channel confirmed what she’d suspected. Anything, or anyone, departing from the Harrison complex stood a good chance of washing up right where Lian had been sunning herself.

This was one coincidence too many, when tallied alongside the ubiquitous potbellied man and Harrison’s questionable “business” trip to the Family Hand Café.

Back in the original tab, she took down the address of both the factory complex and the Harrison Corp corporate offices in the Central District, entering them under the title “Economics lecture notes” into her phone’s Notes application.

Many of those 70 million links, she discovered, led to photos of Harrison fashions modeled by pop stars, athletes, and the entire cast of some American show about attractive white people living in an enormous apartment and sleeping with each other. Two dozen different sites had what they claimed was an “exclusive” sneak peek at the Harrison Denim line: a photo set featuring a rugged black man in a cowboy hat, a buxom blonde whose jeans were so tight they looked spray painted on, and—for a bit of local flavor—the sultry lead actress in a high-rated Chinese cop drama on TVB.

Harrison’s name kept cropping up as one of the sponsors for an American baseball team out of Colorado called the Rockies. A
New York Times
article had a photo of Harrison in a posh luxury suite at Yankee Stadium, wearing a black baseball cap with his team’s CR logo and raising a celebratory tumbler. His other hand was on the shoulder of his son, Matt.

And Matt’s arm was around the stunning blonde girl in the seat next to him.

He’d gone out of his way last night to mention a girlfriend. This wasn’t new information. So why couldn’t Lian stop looking at the photo? The girl could’ve been a model herself. She had her head resting against Matt’s shoulder, laughing at something he had said.

When she heard Matt’s voice calling her name, she had a moment of disconnect before she realized it wasn’t coming from the picture. She turned to see him walking toward her, smiling wide.

“Mingmei told me I might find you in here,” he said. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to walk to lunch together. I don’t know my way around the halls here, and you were a big help in the menu department last night.”

Lian said nothing, stabbing desperately at the keyboard, trying to minimize the browser window before he reached her. Maddeningly, she succeeded only in zooming in on the photo. The flawless faces of Matt Harrison and his girlfriend filled her whole monitor.

Matt put a hand on Lian’s shoulder, just as he had when he’d said good-bye at the restaurant. But this time he drew back quickly.

“What . . . ?” he trailed off. Then she heard him chuckle.

“You know, if you spent a little more time studying Keynes and a little less time Googling me, you might have a shot at the dean’s list again.” He spun her chair so she had no choice but to see his grin. Somehow, she would have preferred him to be angry. She gritted her teeth and willed the ground to open beneath her feet and swallow her up. The ground did not comply.

“It’s . . . I wasn’t . . .” she stammered, her face burning in embarrassment. “You snuck up on me!”

He cocked his head. “That’s your defense? I called your name from across the room, and you’re claiming I ‘snuck up’ on you?”

She sank in the chair and rotated so she wasn’t looking at him anymore.

“Man,” he said. “Maybe I ought to forget about school and just become a ninja assassin. Clearly, I’ve got the ‘sneaking up’ skills for the job.”

He reached over her to grab the mouse. “Here’s how you close it,” he said. “Pretty basic stuff. Even a dumb American can do it.”

Lian searched her brain for a retort as he walked away, but nothing came to her.

Matt was gone.

Lian’s hand was sweaty, clutching the phone. She’d never made this call before, and she wasn’t sure she could pull it off.

“Wèi?” said the woman’s voice on the other end.

“Ms. Fang?” Lian said, and then generated a brief cough. “This is Lian. I’m so sorry to give you so little notice, but I don’t think I should come in for my violin lesson today.” Cough. “I’ve come down with something, and I wouldn’t want to pass it to you.”

As lies went, this was a little one, but she still didn’t feel great about it. She was probably imagining the sudden ache in the welt on her neck—Zheng’s hickey—but it felt like an accusatory jab, a punishment for her fib.

“I understand,” Ms. Fang said. “Thank you for your consideration. Add an extra half hour to each day’s practice until we meet again.”

“Of course.” Cough. “I’ll see you in a week.”

Lian hung up, feeling guilty. Ms. Fang was not a warm person, but she was an incredible teacher; Lian hadn’t always liked her but had always respected her. This lie was a violation of that respect. She resolved that she’d actually tack on those extra half hours of practice, so as not to compound the deception.

In the meantime, though, she’d effectively cleared her afternoon schedule, so she strapped on her panda-painted helmet and piloted her Twist N’ Go scooter over the Eastern Harbor Crossing, headed out to Wan Po Road.

She passed the sleek and sprawling Shaw Studios complex on her left, briefly wondering who might be filming on its soundstages today. After that, though, the buildings became far less impressive: shorter, squatter, more about function than style. Huge gray warehouses sat impassively behind fences topped with razor wire; ugly beige field houses sprouted satellite dishes like mushrooms. Traffic cones and barriers directed her away from unfinished side streets and muddy service roads. Just before Wan Po Road seemed to give up pavement altogether, she took a hard right into the tree-lined entrance to the Harrison Corp complex.

Seeing that logo made her think back to the day’s disaster in the computer lab. She knew her way around a PC keyboard; it was bad luck that she’d hit the wrong function key. Actually, bad didn’t cover it. Utterly mortifying. She’d managed to duck Matt when she saw him at the far end of a hallway after lunch; he probably thought she was stalking him online, nursing some crush, and she certainly didn’t want to make things worse by appearing to be tailing him in real life, too.

Okay
, she thought.
Focus. Enough of this girly high school drama. This is a mission now. Stay alert, stay undetected, gather the intel, and get out clean
.

She pulled off next to a particularly thick-trunked tree and propped her scooter up behind it, concealing it from the road. As a heavy-duty Hino truck rumbled past her, exiting the complex, she stayed behind the tree and concentrated on calming breaths.

Lian was nimble enough to scale the high fence behind the trees, but she hadn’t brought anything like shears or cutters to get through the double helix of razor wire on top. Even if she could jump from a nearby branch and clear the wires, it was a drop of probably twenty feet to the ground on the other side. She didn’t imagine she’d make that without breaking a couple of bones in the attempt.

So the only way in that she could see was the front gate. She moved toward it furtively, keeping between fence and trees, and was able to watch the intake process at the guard station when another Harrison truck pulled up. Two guards—one, she could clearly see, was armed with a Taser, so she had to assume the other one was as well. No small talk, just a brusque demand for paperwork, a thorough review of it, and finally a code punched into a ten-key. At least six digits, and at this distance, Lian couldn’t be sure of a single one of them.

The “walk up and smile” plan was out the window, then.

Lian began to despair. Had she driven all this way for nothing? Photos of far-off warehouses and guards playing Tetris weren’t likely to impress 06/04. Maybe she should have just gone to her violin lesson after all.

She’d started to thread her way back to her scooter when she spied movement at the far end of the drive. A truck was turning off of Wan Po, headed into the Harrison complex. As it drew closer, Lian could see that it was an old-model vehicle: ineffectual muffler, mud-spattered grille, and—most importantly—canvas sides.

In the moment, she made a decision. As the truck rolled past her, she broke from the trees, keeping as low to the ground as she could, and jogged up behind the left rear tire of the truck. From this angle, the guards couldn’t have spotted her dash; so long as the truck driver hadn’t checked his rearview in that split second, she was safe.

Lian reached up and grabbed one of the cords holding down the canvas, then leaped onto the thin shelf provided by the back bumper. The truck vibrated and shimmied, and she wound the cord around her right hand until the skin beneath it turned white.

With a hydraulic hiss, the truck began braking for the guard station. Lian flattened herself against the Harrison logo painted on the back of the truck. Over the juddering engine, it was hard to hear the guard request the bill of lading, and harder still to hear the driver’s response.

Lian waited, willing her breathing to remain steady. Her palms were slick with sweat, and the cord slipped an inch or so in her grip.

This was taking so much longer than the previous truck’s admission. There had to be something wrong.

She tried to prepare herself, to choose a course of action now rather than in the moment. What would happen if the guard decided to inspect the truck’s interior? She could run, but could she make it to her scooter before being caught? She could stay, maybe take him by surprise with a kick to the jaw . . . but how much time would that buy her? And if she missed, how much time would she lose?

Swallowing hard, she relaxed her grip on the cord, readying herself for the sprint.

Then the guard gave the clearance, the gate lifted, and the truck started forward again. Lian counted to three, then pivoted to her right, coming face to face with the left outer wall of the truck. The toes of her right foot were all that touched the bumper; her left foot dangled in air. The cord dug deep into her hand. But if one of the guards happened to look at the rear of the truck as it passed, she’d be out of sight.

Somehow, she had made it into the Harrison complex. Chalk it up to dumb luck.

The truck took a left, out of sight of the guard station, and Lian pushed off with her left hand, feeling the canvas give a bit before springing back. She pivoted until, once again, both of her feet were on the bumper and her back was pressed against the truck’s rear, giving her a view of the north campus of the complex as they drove in the opposite direction.

It was pretty drab: windowless corrugated iron warehouses, each adorned with a ten-foot-tall H logo; portable outbuildings where Lian supposed the paperwork was handled; a dozen or more trucks parked or idling. She could see a couple of men in short-sleeved white dress shirts, walking quickly from one of the portables, arguing over whatever was written on the clipboard that one of them was waving. They seemed too preoccupied to notice her, but she tensed just the same.

The truck turned right and began to slow; a shadow moved over her as they pulled into some kind of hangar. Lian quickly let the cord unwind from her hand and jumped from the bumper, stumbling for a moment on the concrete before she regained her footing. She slipped back outside, around the edge of the hangar door, and stayed as low as she could while rounding the building’s corner.

There were no other buildings facing the rear of the hangar; no one was watching her. She took the opportunity to sit for a moment, steady herself, and consider the daring, thrilling, potentially very stupid adventure she’d just undertaken.

If she were caught here, she would probably face trespassing charges. Or maybe the guards would taze her.

Maybe she’d be found washed up dead across the bay in Big Wave.

But even if that didn’t happen, she’d certainly be grounded until her dying day. For her parents—her mother, especially—trust was everything. This whole escapade, if it were found out, would be a massive and unforgivable abuse of that trust.

Lian tried not to think about “what if” and to focus instead on the task at hand. Getting back on her feet, she jogged the width of the hangar and peered around its corner. The nearest warehouse was about twenty-five yards away. No personnel around. At a flat-out run, she covered the gap in seconds.

The giant Harrison logos on every building were starting to intimidate her. She moved away from the front of the warehouse, down the vast length of its corrugated iron side, looking for a way in. Near the back corner, she spied at some distance a standing ashtray. It made sense that smokers would not want to walk halfway around the building; there must be a nearby door.

Lian walked toward the ashtray until she could see on its other side a black door with a metal handle and two locks. She was on high alert; at any moment, someone could walk out here to spark up a cigarette, and she’d be spotted. She could probably outrun a smoker, but . . .

Lian flinched as the caged fluorescent bulb over the door lit up and a bell inside the warehouse clanged wildly. Lian’s heart leaped into her throat. No one was here; she hadn’t even touched the door. How had they found her?