Code Name Komiko

by Naomi Paul

  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 s
choolwork. 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.

  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.

  EIGHT

  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.