Jade Dragon (19 page)

Excerpt from
Painted Faces, Swords and Gods: The Mythology of Chinese
Opera
by Georgina Golightly

The executive operations suite was decorated in the style of a stately
English library, heavy with polished teak and mahogany, rich with deep
oxblood leather chairs and brass lamps. Ornate desks lined the walls
between subtle privacy dividers. Only the screens seemed out of place,
and even those had been disguised in wood mounts similar to portrait
frames. The keyboards were hidden in the leather blotters on the surface
of the desks, illuminating from below when Frankie took his seat. The
other men in the room were subvocalising into hidden microphones, but
Frankie disabled the voice circuit and got to work typing.

Under his cuff he had a piece of tissue on which he had scribbled a
dozen strings of numbers. Code keys copied from the data spike that Alan
had left concealed for him, these were permissions that allowed entry
into parts of the Yuk Lung mainframe that would normally be far outside
of his sphere of influence. Frankie had not dared to bring the precious
needle with him, or even to upload the smallest part of its contents to
another computer. He was afraid to contaminate himself with the
material, at least until he had a clearer idea of what his brother had
been doing with it. It seemed quaintly low-tech of him to actually jot
the codes down on a scrap of paper instead of entering them on his PDA.

The files. What he had glimpsed in there made him shiver. Alan appeared
to have been making two distinct collections of information. The largest
of the two was broad in scope, a collation of details on YLHI’s
corporate battle plans, notes on what investments they would be buying
and selling in the next year. It held highly secret reports on the
performance of the conglomerate’s subdivisions, the sort of data that a
rival like Eidolon or NeoGen could easily use against them. The second,
smaller file was more eclectic. It consisted mostly of laboratory
reports fromYuk Lung’s genetics labs on the mainland, some peculiar
transcripts from ancient tablets, metallurgical scans of meteor
fragments, even audio samples that sometimes seemed like music, other
times like voices. Frankie had almost given up with paging through it
until he saw his own name amid an indecipherable block of medical-speak.
Alan’s name was there too, along with a couple of other people from
their graduating class. The others, he had heard, were dead now.
Something about an accident in the wilds, a company team-building
exercise that went badly wrong.

What were you doing, brother? Frankie asked the question over and over.
The planning files, that was the kind of stuff that a man would assemble
if he were thinking about jumping ship. With that information in his
hands, Alan could have struck a deal with any of the Big Six Multinats,
got them to exfiltrate him from YLHI and set him up somewhere with a new
identity and a billionaire lifestyle. But why would he? Yuk Lung had
been very good to Alan Lam, so why would he ever turn on them? Frankie
was sure that the answer to that question was in the second set of
files, if only he could comprehend it.

He entered the codes, licking dry lips. On the screen, pools of
information filled, presenting themselves for his examination. If the
data on the spike had been the first trickle, then this was the flood.
Frankie cast a look around, fearful that he would be seen for what he
was doing; but none of the other men paid any attention to him, all of
them engaged in their own private infospheres.

Frankie pushed on, beginning a search protocol using himself as the
subject. Layers of files fanned open, some of them the ones on the data
spike; but there were others. He started to read.

Ko’s face met asphalt and he rolled into it, grit scraping the skin of
his cheeks. He tried to right himself, but with his hands strapped
together behind his back it was nearly impossible. A random boot met his
thigh with a shocking impact and he let out a grunt of pain. Strong
hands took hold of his arms and dragged him off the ground. As much as
he tried, his attention was fixed on the three inches of stainless steel
protruding from his breastbone. Each breath he took was a lungful of
razors.

All at once his hands were free as they flapped uselessly at his sides.
Ko wobbled unsteadily, taking in what he could through eyes gummed with
dried blood. Blue Snake’s associates had not been careful with the youth
as they stuffed him into the back of the town car.

He smelt saline, diesel oil, the faint stinks of old rot and rust. He
could make out boxy shapes all around in bright primary colours, the
building blocks of some giant toddler. Distantly, the rumble of
robo-trucks reached his ears.

A familiar voice crossed him. “Ah, Ko. What did you do this time?”

“Rikio? That you?” he asked thickly. Blood was working its way back into
Ko’s hands and he wriggled them, fighting off pins and needles. By
painful inches, his vision began to unfog.

Rikio shook his head, the same Ushanti SMG still glued to his side. “I
warned you about this. I told you, you don’t get with someone, you’re
against everyone. Out in the cold.”

Ko shivered involuntarily. “Didn’t spect you to understand. About
honour, see? Man drugged my sister!”

“You’re an idiot. What, did you reckon you could just tippy-toe up to a
zaibatsu warlord and pop him like some yokel right off the ferry? That’s
your problem. You don’t
think.
”

“Got close,” he said lamely.

“Yeah. You go right on believing that.” The Red Pole looked away to
where the woman in the suit and the blue opera mask was holding an
intense conversation with Big Hung. The old man had a rock solid
expression of displeasure. One of Hung’s men approached and pointed at
Ko.

“Boss is sick of looking at this maggot,” snapped the guy. “Put him in a
can for the time being.” Rikio began to march Ko away, but the other man
halted him. “Just a sec.” He reached down to Ko’s chest and jerked the
knife out. “She wants her blade back.”

Ko fell in a heap, pain flashing through him and blood spreading under
his fingers.

“What we gonna do with him?” he heard Rikio say.

The reply was disinterested. “Probably just some waste disposal, nothing
serious.”

At first it seemed like bloodwork, more medical stuff, the kind of
paperwork that any corporation would keep on an employee. But there was
just so much of it. Frankie found the reports from his quarterly health
checks at the LA office, all of them stretching back to his very first
posting there—but there were layers of other files, dates that didn’t
tally up to visits to the clinic or the dentist. He saw reports that
spoke of “bio-surveillance” and found fluoroscopes of hair samples,
soiled chopsticks, stool samples and Band-Aids. In the most recent he
came across a polymorphic scan of a used toothbrush that had gone in the
trash a couple of weeks back. Some anonymous lab somewhere had
dismantled it and done intensive DNA sweeps of the cell material he’d
left behind. There were workups on women that he’d dated, spectrum
analysis of their physiology and intensive scrutiny of their sexual
histories.

Unnerved, he read on. Frankie expected the file to end with his very
first medical at the corporate academy, but it was the tip of the
iceberg. The data went back and back and back, through his teens and his
childhood, every broken bone and skinned knee, every schoolboy illness
and sick day; and still it did not stop. There were bloodline charts,
great multileveled things spread like inverted trees, root systems of
birth, death and marriage unfolding down through the generations. He
stopped, trying to steady the shaking in his hands. Yuk Lung had not
only tracked every living moment of Frankie’s life, but that of Alan and
the whole of the Lam family ancestry. He flicked down the scroll bar,
hopping decades in an instant, rolling back hundreds of years. Still the
pages unfurled, through the dynasties of ancient China and into the haze
of pre-history. He halted the file with a gesture and swallowed hard,
the acid taste of bile burning in his throat.

His own company, his own corporate faction had been shadowing him to a
level far beyond the bounds of normality, like some omnipresent stalker
peering back into the past. He felt naked and sickened.

After a moment Frankie’s eyes focussed on a pop-up window at the side of
the screen. It was more of the same, layer upon layer of G-T-A-C coding,
but the form of it was different. A blinking tag linked this separate
page with Frankie’s, some vague connection that he couldn’t read from
the reams of medical jargon. He recognised the name at the top, though.
There was no way he couldn’t have.

“Project: Juno.”

He wiped the screen and entered those words, using the highest code from
Alan’s secret records.

“Access Restricted.”

For a second he could smell her there in the room with him, the warm
flowery scent of her perfect skin, the feel of it under his fingertips.
Frankie savoured the moment of sensory recall before it faded. If
someone was keeping such a close eye on him, it wasn’t hard to imagine
that the same would be true for Juno… but why? What possible purpose
could there be for such a thing? He and Alan, they were just two
unremarkable salary-men, two Hong Kong brothers who’d pulled themselves
up off the streets to make a better life. Nothing about either of them
warranted such scrutiny…

Or did it? What if Alan had found something he shouldn’t have? The
spectre of his brutal, pointless death cast a chill over everything,
magnifying the guilt Frankie felt at their estrangement. If there was a
chance that the triads had silenced his brother for a reason, not
because of some blind error, then he had to know for certain. He owed
Alan nothing less; even after all the distance between them, he was
still his blood. Someone wanted him silenced, Frankie thought, and they
had him murdered.

The only question was: how far did it go? Whose finger had been on the
trigger?

The trilling of his phone made him start, and he grabbed it clumsily
from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. The motion drew some arched
looks from the other execs; it clearly marked him as a new boy.

His vu-phone was the latest model, a replacement for the one he’d lost,
with top-of-the-line encryption and executive level pass codes. On the
readout was a name he hadn’t expected to come across again. “Incoming
Call: Burt Tiplady.”

“Yes?”

“Frankie?” It was rare to hear that tone in Burt’s voice, his usual
braggadocio replaced by nervous indecision. Digital whispers across the
satellite link to Los Angeles fluttered under the words of his former
superior. “Or do I have to call you Mr Lam, now you got yourself
promoted?”

“No… Burt, what do you want?”

“Been trying to get you for the best part of a day. Seems all your
baggage ain’t caught up with you yet.”

Frankie sighed. “Burt, this is a bad time. I’m right in the middle of
something.”

“Uh, well,” Tiplady’s voice wavered, and Frankie knew what was going
through his mind. He wasn’t sure how to react. Lam had been his
subordinate for a long time and he was finding it hard to take on the
notion that their roles were now reversed. “It’s just that, there was a
comm that came in on your old office email here. One time signal,
couldn’t forward it.” An embarrassed cough. “The thing is, I kinda
accidentally opened it.”

“Accidentally,” Frankie repeated.

“Yeah. Uh. Sorry.”

He frowned. The last thing he wanted was this dolt wasting his time with
trivia. There were bigger things at stake than some lost piece of junk
mail.

“It must have got held up in that big server outage last week, delayed
in the system I reckon. It… It’s from your brother.”

Frankie felt his blood turn to ice water. “Read it to me.”

“It’s not much, just a couple of words. It says, uh, ‘Don’t ever come
home.’ Did you piss him off, or something?”

The room suddenly seemed tight and confined. Too late, Alan, said a
voice in his head, I’m already here. “Burt, listen to me. Erase it and
close down the line, okay?”

“Sure, sure,” said the other man. “Say, listen, I was wondering if maybe
you could put in a good word for me with head office, now you’re there?
Y’know, if you might—”

Frankie folded the phone shut and sat there for long moments in the
darkness, surrounded only by the murmuring of the other users. After a
while, he toggled the datascreen’s security protocols menu and asked it
to locate Blue Snake for him.

She was at the docks, it replied, conducting an unspecified errand for
the CEO. Frankie studied the area on a digital map, and with careful
deliberation, he began once again to dial his old phone number.

Rikio shoved him into the dark interior of the cargo container and Ko
stumbled on the metal floor, his sneakers slipping on damp patches. The
cold and rainy weather made the inside of the container feel like an
icebox. The youth bounced off a wall and coughed. Every physical
exertion made the injury in his chest hurt like fire. The front of his
grey shirt was stained purple with blood.

“I’m bleeding…” he said.

At the doors, Rikio threw him a pitying look. “That’s the least of your
problems right now.”

Ko shivered, at last a real sense of the depths of shit he was in coming
to him. “Are you gonna kill me?” The words came out in a scared little
boy voice. Rikio’s lip curled but he didn’t reply. “Dude, we used to
play on the street together. You know me. We were friends.”

“We were never friends, Ko,” the gunman said sadly. “We were just kids.
Doesn’t mean I owe you anything. ”

Ko started back toward the doors. “Riki—”

The Ushanti’s nickel-plated muzzle came up. “You stay right there. You
just be quiet and you stay right there.” Rikio stepped out of the
container and closed the hatches, throwing the bolt shut.