Code Name Komiko (12 page)

Wow
, Lian thought.
She’s been in Matt’s orbit for less than twenty-four hours, and it’s “us” already?

“I, uh . . . I think I’m busy,” Lian said. “I’ve got to log a ton of violin hours. Plus,
Anna Karenina
isn’t going to read itself.”

“The audiobook does,” Matt offered helpfully. “You can knock the whole thing out in about thirty hours, unabridged. You could even do it at the same time you’re playing violin.”

“Have fun on your yacht,” Lian said, resisting the urge to ask him how he imagined she’d hear the audiobook over the sound of the violin. “I’ve got a date with Leo Tolstoy.”

“You could probably score a date with a dude who hasn’t been dead for a hundred years, if you eased up on the studying a little,” Matt said. “Think about it, okay?”

She waved him off as the bell chimed, and Mr. Chu passed the quizzes down the rows. Lian stared at the paper until the words coalesced into sentences, and eventually she realized that she actually had a decent grasp on the material. The first few questions were straight from the text, a couple of true/false and a handful of multiple choice, one or two of which included some sort of humorous option E’s appended by Chu.

She hesitated over a question on free banking, trying to ferret out the tenets of the system from its name. She shifted in her seat, running down the list in her mind, and felt certain that there were eyes on her. Turning her head just enough to see Matt, she found him looking in her direction. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

Lian curled her arm over her paper and hunched down until she was sure his view of it was completely blocked. How much had he seen already? How many of her answers had he swiped? How dare he just sit there, letting her do all the hard work while he reaped the benefits?

Like father, like son,
she thought.

Her mind then wandered to Jiao and Zan. She wondered whether he would show up that evening, like he was supposed to. Would he be patient enough to let 06/04 help him, or would he strike out on his own and disappear into the long shadows cast by Harrison Corp?

Chu called for the quizzes, and Lian was jolted out of her musings only to realize that she hadn’t written anything at all for the last three questions. Her heart raced for a moment—she’d always been a straight-A student, and this was two flubs in as many days.

Calm down,
she told herself.
It’s only a small quiz, a tiny percentage of the course grade. There’ll be extra credit down the line. You’ll get those points back.

And besides,
she thought with grim satisfaction,
if you didn’t answer those questions, Matt didn’t have any answers to steal.
“Tough quiz,” she whispered to him as the papers made their way to the front of the classroom.

“I guess,” he shrugged. “What’d you get for the first blank? The one that just said ‘Name’?”

It took her a second to realize he was making a joke. She didn’t feel like laughing.

The lecture dragged, and in the last ten minutes of the period—while Chu checked over the quizzes and the class read about Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem—Lian was in danger of falling asleep with her face in her book. The chiming bell roused her, and she packed up her bag and joined the queue waiting to pick up their papers at the door.

“Eighty,” Mingmei said, folding her quiz. “Not too bad, after all.”

Lian stared at the 72% inked in red at the top of her own page. Chu hadn’t said anything as he’d handed it back to her, but had she sensed a look of disappointment in his eyes? She supposed she wouldn’t have blamed him.

“Hey, pretty good for the new kid,” Matt said when he got his paper. He turned it around and Lian almost choked on air when she saw the red 100 in the upper right corner.

“Top grade!” it said, in Chu’s neat script.

Mingmei gave Matt a playful, one-armed hug. “See? Told you you’d do great!” she said. “Hey, what did you get, Lian?”

“Embarrassed,” Lian answered, and took off as fast as her tired feet would go.

“So, I need a hat.”

The last bell had rung, and Lian was at her locker, selecting the books she’d need for the evening’s homework. She double-checked that she wasn’t missing anything, and then closed the locker. “You don’t need a hat, Mingmei,” she said. “You must have fifty hats in your closet, and yet you only ever wear the same three.”

Mingmei ignored her. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get out of here and go hit up that new boutique over off Des Voeux Road. I need to find just the right seafaring look for Friday.”

“No, that’s okay,” Lian said as they headed down the hallway toward the exit. “I’ve got some stuff I have to take care of this afternoon.”

“But you love to watch me shop for hats. You’ve done it like fifty billion and three times.”

“That does sound like an accurate count. But I can’t today, okay? Have fun without me.”

Mingmei frowned. “What’s up with you all of a sudden, Lian?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re just being . . . kind of grumpy. And weird. You were all moody after economics, and then I didn’t see you at all during lunch. And what was that phone call all about?”

Lian stopped short. “What call? When?”

“I don’t know. Last night, around eleven o’clock? You call, you say nothing, you hang up. So I called you back, and you didn’t answer.” Mingmei shrugged. “What was it? A butt-dial?”

“No,” Lian told her. “I didn’t make any calls at eleven last night. Neither did my butt.”

“How do you know? A girl can’t be sure of what her butt’s doing twenty-four hours a day.”

“I lost my phone yesterday, sometime before dark. Maybe some upstanding citizen found it and was trying to figure out who it belonged to. I mean, it makes sense they’d call you, Mingmei. You’re far and away my most frequently dialed number.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day.”

“But then,” Lian wondered out loud, “why wouldn’t they have said anything to you?”

“Maybe they changed their mind about turning it in.”

“Yeah,” Lian said, as they pushed open the double doors to the outside. “Maybe they weren’t so upstanding, after all.”

She waved good-bye to Mingmei and feigned interest in her Tolstoy novel for a couple of minutes, until she was sure her friend was well out of sight. Then she strapped on her panda helmet and cruised to the Appolo stand. Zan wasn’t there yet. Lian ordered a red bean popsicle and took a seat on a nearby ledge, her eyes searching the crowd for Zan’s face.

When he arrived, she hardly recognized him. Scrubbed, clean shaven, and sporting a recently brushed smile, Zan was much more presentable than he had been the day they had met.

“A decent night’s sleep looks good on you,” she told him.

“I figured, if you were taking me out for ice cream, the least I could do is make myself pretty.” He did a little half turn to show off his new wardrobe: an inexpensive gray pocket T-shirt and black jeans, and a good effort to shine up yesterday’s shoes.

“You’ll note,” he said, “no Harrison Outfitters logos anywhere.”

“Yeah, I’d hope not.” She read the hungry look in his eyes and spotted him the cash for a Black Jack Cone, which he accepted gratefully.

“So,” he said a moment later, his mouth full, “did you talk to your friends? Can they help me?”

“Honestly? They’re not sure, Zan.”

He swallowed. “What’s not to be sure about?”

“It’s just a matter of proving that Jiao worked for Harrison.”

“What?” he said, his brow furrowing. “You don’t trust me?”

She was stung by the iciness of the accusation. “You have to understand, it’s not about trust. It’s about making an ironclad case. If we move forward with hearsay, we’re setting ourselves up to fail.” Her eyes pleaded with him for calm. “It’s not personal. It’s not about you.”

“I can’t imagine anything more personal,” he said, crumpling his wrapper. “This is my little sister we’re talking about.”

“Of course, but—”

“But you want proof. Okay, fine.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, chewing his bottom lip. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “Okay. This is what we’ll do. I’ll go undercover—get a job at the Harrison complex. I already know my way around it, and this way I’ll have access to the records buildings. I’ll find her file, her payroll info. There’s your proof. A nice little paper trail for your do-gooders club.”

Lian shook her head. “One of the ‘club’ already suggested a plan like that. But I don’t know if it’s such a good idea. I mean, your surname will slot right next to your sister’s in a database. . . . They’re bound to notice something like that.”

“Right, right,” he said, considering. “Well, then, I’ll use a fake name. Honestly, I doubt they’re going to look too closely. The way they churn through their workforce, all I’ll have to do is show up desperate for a job and willing to take whatever they offer me.” He seemed bolstered by having solved the problem. “This is a perfect plan. I’ll apply first thing tomorrow.”

He stood and took his trash to a nearby bin. Lian remained seated, watching him. There was almost a swagger to his walk now; he seemed somehow emboldened by the idea of the subterfuge.

Still, she was unsure. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said when he returned. “It’s very brave of you, but it also feels reckless to go back there, considering how we left. Maybe tomorrow’s too soon. Maybe we need to gather more information first.”

“Screw that. I’ve lost too much time already.”

“Listen, Zan, I really just need to talk to my group before any of us does anything.”

He waved her off. “Talk all you want. Talk until you’re blue in the face.” He paused, and took on a mean look. “Just like my sister was when you found her.”

Lian felt her blood go cold. “Zan . . . ”

“Talking is useless. I’m planning to actually do something, unlike your little group.”

“Just . . . just wait, okay? I’ll be in contact—”

“You think things can be fixed by talking?” he said, glaring at her. “All right, then. Let me talk to this group of yours. Let me make them understand why it has to be this plan, and it has to be now.”

She hung her head, shrinking from his angry eyes. “I told you. I can’t do that.”

“Right,” he said with disgust. “I forgot. You can’t do anything. You can just talk. Well, if you want to talk to me now, the word you’re searching for is ‘good-bye.’”

Lian didn’t even look up to see which way he’d gone. She sat for a moment more, until the popsicle dripped onto her hand, and then rose to throw it away.

The weight of the books in her bag—especially once
Anna Karenina
rejoined them—was a reminder of how much she had to do that evening; add the requisite violin practice, and she was already looking at another late night. But her head was a jumble in the wake of Zan’s abrupt departure, and she knew she was no good for schoolwork at the moment.

Instead, she took the scenic route home, steering the Twist N’ Go down to Harlech Road and then cruising up Hatton, enjoying the path carved through the natural beauty of Lung Fu Shan Park. The warm air rushing over her face, and the long stretches during which she didn’t have to dodge other vehicles, eventually brought on a sort of serenity.

Rather than piloting for Conduit Road and home, she smiled as she wondered whether it was too late to take Mingmei up on that hat excursion. No phone, of course, so she might as well just swing by.

Here, back on the edges of Central, there was once again traffic to contend with. Lian pulled her scooter to the curb to make way for an ambulance, its lights flashing and siren screaming as it raced past her. When it was gone, she fired up again and rounded the corner onto Mingmei’s block.

There were more flashing lights.

Two police cars were parked right outside of Mingmei’s family home, flanking an empty spot that the ambulance had clearly just left.

Lian’s heart was in her throat. She popped her scooter over the curb and let it fall onto the grass in front of Mingmei’s building. She hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before a police officer moved into her path, holding up a warning hand.

“This is my best friend’s house!” Lian told the officer. “Is she okay? Who was in the ambulance?”

The officer stood, mute as a wall and just as impassible.

Through the open door of the home, Lian could see Mingmei, wrapped in a blanket, looking shell shocked as someone else in the house brought her a cup of tea, before putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. Lian squinted, sure that her mind was playing tricks on her in the blue wash of the police lights. But it was not.

That was Matt Harrison, all right.

Just as she was working up a good head of angry steam, Matt looked up, noticed her, and waved her in to join them; when she took a step forward and the policeman moved to block, Matt shouted out, “It’s okay, officer, she’s our friend.”

The cop shrugged and stepped aside, and Lian rushed into the house. “What happened?” she asked.

“Burglars,” Matt answered.

“They busted in and roughed up Meihui,” Mingmei said. Lian gasped; she’d known and loved Mingmei’s elderly housekeeper ever since she moved to the island. The thought of anyone assaulting the woman was abhorrent.

“They think she’ll be all right,” Matt told Lian. “But they wanted to take her to the hospital to check for internal bleeding, stuff like that. She seemed to be taking it all in stride. Tough lady.”

“She is,” Lian agreed.

“My poor Meihui,” Mingmei said, her voice quivering. Matt readjusted the blanket on her shoulders.

“You said it was burglars,” Lian prompted. “Did they take anything?”

“Just two computers,” Mingmei said, dabbing at her eyes with a corner of the blanket. “Not the jewelry, not the Blu-ray, nothing else. I guess Meihui startled them before they could really start getting their haul together.”

Lian felt her brow crease. Mingmei’s house was a treasure trove of art, antique baubles, and high-tech entertainment devices. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of loot between the front door and the study, where the computers had been. So why had the thieves gone straight for the computers?