Code Name Komiko

by Naomi Paul

  That was it.

  “Retreat,” she said, since no one else had hazarded a guess at Matt’s question. “The yacht is already a retreat, and this is your own further retreat inside of it.”

  Matt looked impressed. “Got it in one, Lian! That’s . . . wow.”

  Lian ignored Mingmei’s look—somewhere between confusion and annoyance—and said to Matt, “Presumably you’ll be waging a war of attrition against Carthage soon?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “Something like that. Man, remind me not to throw obscure references your way when money’s at stake. You’re too smart for me.”

  “Keep your cash,” she said. “You can just loan me a couple of these books sometime, instead.”

  He nodded. “It’s a deal.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mingmei said, picking up the television remote. “Enough of the smart people being smart. Does this thing get MTV?”

  They all laughed, and Matt brought up the channel, where two crudely drawn cartoon boys were insulting a rap video in what Lian thought was English, although it was hard to tell.

  “Ahh,” Mingmei said, sinking into the couch and taking a long pull on her straw. “That’s more like it.”

  Lian had to admit that the show was pretty funny, and the company in which she was watching it was pleasant. But this wasn’t why she’d come on board the yacht. If she deboarded tonight with nothing but a mild buzz and Taylor’s e-mail address, the night might not be a total failure . . . but it wouldn’t be much of a victory for 06/04, either.

  She set aside her drink untouched and asked Matt where the restroom was. He opened the suite door and pointed her down a hallway and to her left. “If you end up in the bay,” he told her with a smile, “you’ve gone too far.”

  Once she’d rounded the corner, Lian took stock of her surroundings. The speakers from below were still thudding, rattling her floor with their dull noise. There were a few partygoers down on the main deck, chatting or playing with the telescope. No one seemed to be up on the second deck anymore, and she didn’t see any interior lights on in any of the rooms down the hall.

  She made her way cautiously toward the fore of the boat, passing the bathroom and instead peering around the last corner of the hall. There was the study, the room she’d seen Harrison pacing earlier when he’d taken the call. If there was anything of value to her investigation on board the Seaward, it was likely to be in here.

  Lian didn’t dare turn on the room light, but she took her cell phone from her purse and scrolled to a flashlight app, dimming it so that it was just bright enough for her to see a few feet in front of her.

  The study was disappointingly bare. No computer to search, no file cabinet to rifle through, not even an old-style rotary card index of business contacts. It was just a desk with a blotter and a banker’s lamp, some pens, a framed photo of Harrison and, Lian presumed, his wife. Matt’s mother.

  She lingered just a moment on the photograph. The woman was beautiful, with Matt’s blond hair and stunning green eyes. But her smile seemed sad, somehow. Her eyes seemed distant.

  Lian shook the thoughts from her head. This wasn’t why she was here.

  She turned the glow of the phone onto the blotter, hoping to find an impression left in it by Harrison’s handwriting: a name, an address, a written confession to Jiao’s murder. But it was smooth and new, offering her no clues.

  Distantly, she thought she heard a noise, and she spun around quickly, banging her shin on the desk chair. It was all she could do not to cry out in pain; she bit her bottom lip and stood there, breathing hard for a moment, willing the hurt to subside.

  What she saw next sped up the healing process a great deal.

  Rand Harrison’s coat was draped over the back of the chair. The coat he’d been wearing earlier in the evening. The one from which he’d pulled his cell phone when it rang.

  Lian slipped her fingers past the lapel, daring to hope. When she felt the plastic rectangle behind the silky fabric, she could have done a victory dance, if her leg wasn’t still mildly throbbing.

  She took it out and found the screen locked and requesting a pin. A mad part of her thought about pocketing the phone and just getting off the boat then and there. But that was nuts. She wasn’t that desperate yet. Instead she thumbed four zeros—the manufacturer’s standard pin. The phone unlocked and the screen flared to maximum brightness. Lucky me, she thought.

  She punched up Harrison’s call log and read the most recent number. Yes; this would have been right around the time he’d left her on the deck. Whoever had gotten him so steamed, and so frightened, was on the other end of those digits. She quickly scrolled to her own phone’s contacts and punched in the number, filed under “RH scary phone call.”

  Another noise, closer this time. She’d risked enough; she slipped the phone back into the coat and was moving for the door when the overhead light came on. She slammed shut her eyes against the sudden brightness.

  “Hey!” a male voice said from the doorway. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  Lian blinked several times, waiting for her eyes to readjust. As they did, the speaker swam into focus, and her heart leapt into her throat.

  It was the potbellied man.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, slurring the words a little. “I was looking for a restroom, and, uh, I stumbled in here and ran into the chair and, um, this isn’t the restroom, is it?”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said again, adopting a ‘girlish’ demeanor that, she suspected, was a pretty dead-on impression of Mingmei. “Just between you and me, I think I’m a little drunker than I thought I was.”

  “Bathroom’s in the middle hall,” he said gruffly. “And the party is downstairs. Not up here.”

  “Got it. Okay,” she said, wobbling past him and back into the hall. He said nothing but gave her an odd look, as if he was trying to remember where he’d seen her before. She tottered quickly to the middle hallway, and then straightened up and dashed for the restroom, more sober than she’d ever been in her life.

  Once inside, she locked the door and stood by it, listening intently for the fat man’s footsteps. When she was confident he hadn’t followed her, she lowered the toilet lid, sat down on it, and stared at the number she’d cadged from Harrison’s phone.

  She had signal here. No reason not to give it a call. She typed in the vertical service code to block her number, and then dialed.

  “You’ve reached the Family Hand Café,” a formal female voice said. “To whom may I direct your call?”

  Lian recognized the name right away. It was the mahjong parlor where Harrison and the fat man had gone after the dinner.

  “Who is calling, please?” the voice said.

  Lian hung up and returned her phone to her purse, perplexed.

  So she had the where of the call but not the who. Who was operating out of the Family Hand? What had they said to get Harrison so angry?

  One thing she was sure of—if a man like Harrison was scared of them, they must be really bad news.

  EIGHTEEN

  Saturday

  “I’m surprised you’re up this early, after your big party last night.” Lian’s mother gave her a sympathetic look across the breakfast table. “Do you need some aspirin?”

  “I’m not hungover, Mother, just sleepy. I only had half of one drink last night,” Lian said truthfully, rubbing at her eyes and padding over to the pantry for some cereal. “You must think I’m some kind of wild party girl.”

  “No, little panda,” her mother said, turning the page of her newspaper. “I think you’re my good and responsible daughter. But I like to have that notion confirmed every now and again.”

  Lian poured the puffed rice cereal into a bowl, replaced the box, and was opening the refrigerator for the milk when her father bustled into the room. He snagged his keys from the wall hook, grabbed and nearly dropped his briefcase, and was gone before Lian had said a word.

  “What
’s Dad up to?” she asked her mother. “It’s pretty early on a Saturday for him to be in a suit and tie.”

  “He would say that ‘the work doesn’t end just because the workweek does.’ He was called in to some sort of urgent meeting with his bosses. Something that couldn’t wait, apparently.”

  Lian didn’t like the sound of that. She poured her milk and ate her cereal, careful not to seem like she was rushing through it. When her mother put down the newspaper and left the kitchen, though, Lian scoffed the last couple of bites, poured the milk down the sink, and quietly sprinted for her father’s office.

  The file cabinets and drawers were not locked; Hung Zhi-Kai trusted his family, and up until this point he’d had no reason not to do so. But if there was something in here, right under her nose, that could help with her investigation, Lian felt it would be irresponsible—possibly dangerous—of her not to take advantage of the situation.

  The files, thankfully, were meticulously arranged, with tabs and cross-references making them simple to search. Lian quickly located the Harrison Corp materials—which was easy because they sprawled to fill most of a drawer—and, within them, precisely what she’d been hoping to find.

  The report was thick, but luckily the local research company, MedVestigators, had summarized their findings on the cover sheet. The date on the findings was only about six weeks old. Keeping an ear out for her mother, Lian began turning the pages.

  Analysis of ten Harrison samples indicates that chemical dyes are well within acceptable limits for toxicity.

  “Damn,” she mumbled, as she went to the next page.

  Dye-fixing agents contain high to very high levels of mercury chlorides. Toxicity above acceptable levels.d

  She wasn’t sure what “mercury chlorides” were, or what they did, but she knew that mercury was a poison, and she doubted that adding chlorine to it would help much.

  Additional testing recommended on larger sample size.

  This was more encouraging. She looked through the file for a follow-up report, but none had been submitted yet. Still, the one in her hands was enough to start on; she’d research mercury chloride’s effects on the liver and kidneys, and see how it matched up with Jiao’s autopsy.

  Lian pulled up her phone’s document scanner app, switched on the desk lamp for good contrast, and took a photo of the report’s cover page. She nudged the edges of the preview and hit the “Scan” button, waiting as the program transformed the image into a PDF. Then she slid the report back into the Harrison file, exactly where she’d found it. She closed the drawer, made sure everything was in its right place. Then she switched off the lamp. Her mother was washing dishes; her father was still out. Lian headed down the hallway, her guilt over the snooping subsumed by her thrill at having uncovered a new piece of evidence.

  Once back in her bedroom, she plugged her phone into her laptop and brought up the file. The findings had been signed by one Dr. Lan; a quick Web search showed that Lan Ming was the owner of MedVestigators, as well as the head of its laboratories. Lian clicked the contact link next to Lan’s name, which brought up a blank e-mail in a separate window. Her keystrokes were quick, and her lies were little and white.

  Dear Dr. Lan,

  Greetings. I am a high school student preparing an independent study on clothing manufacturing processes, and your company came highly recommended by my proctor. I write in the hope that you can spare some time to discuss acceptable toxicity levels for dyes and fixing agents used by companies who produce the most popular clothes among my peers (e.g., Roxie, Harrison Outfitters, Alien, etc.), and the effects of such toxins on the human body. Any assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

  Thank you, Hung Xiao-Lian

  That should open up the right kind of dialogue, Lian thought, without tipping my hand as far as my true motives. She sent the e-mail, and then typed in the ten-digit code she’d memorized for 06/04.

  8:14 AM HKT — Komiko has logged on

  Komiko: Anyone awake at this ungodly hour?

  Blossom: Im here.

  8:14 AM HKT — Crowbar has logged on

  Crowbar: Got the ping, whats the news?

  8:15 AM HKT — Torch has logged on

  Torch: Yawn. It’s much too early on a weekend for activism.

  Komiko: Oh my goodness, Torch has a sense of humor!

  Torch: I’m pretty funny when you get to know me.

  Torch: Which you won’t, because anonymity and blah blah blah. I say again, yawn.

  Lian found herself laughing at Torch’s words for the first time ever. He was claiming not to be a morning person, but this was the most pleasant he’d been in ages.

  Komiko: Got a little something I thought you might like to see.

  8:16 AM HKT — Komiko has uploaded one PDF

  Komiko: Right there in black and white. “Toxicity above acceptable levels.”

  Torch: Very impressive find, K.

  Blossom: OMG. How in the world did you get hold of a document like this?

  Torch: Not important and not politic. We’ve all got our sources, and they need to stay protected.

  Blossom: Sure. Just amazed, thats all.

  Crowbar: I dont know much re: mercury chloride but I know where 2 look

  Komiko: Fantastic. I was going to do that, but I’m happy to leave it to an expert.

  Crowbar: Lets not oversell my abilities :)

  Lian heard the apartment door open and close. Her father must be back from his meeting. She couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but his voice was louder than normal, his tone clipped and agitated.

  Torch: If the known effects line up with the girl’s autopsy report, C, this might just be enough to implicate Harrison.

  Blossom: Not “the girl,” remember? Jiao.

  Torch: Right, sorry.

  First the jokes and now an apology? Lian feared that Torch might be losing his edge.

  Her mother’s voice had grown louder as well. This sort of “verbal sparring” wasn’t something Lian was used to from her parents. It gnawed at her for a long moment, and she decided to investigate, to at least hear enough of their words to know what had sparked the argument.

  Komiko: brb

  Still in her pajamas and socks, she tiptoed to the end of the hall and cautiously peered around the corner. Her folks were in the kitchen, but she could glimpse her father through the door. He looked twice as harried as he had when he’d left.

  “No, Lili, I’m telling you,” he said, sounding nearly manic. “If I don’t push the deal through, they told me in no uncertain terms that there would be consequences.”

  “You’ve faced consequences before, dear.”

  “Not some damned probationary week at work. Not losing the best leads to someone else. No. Consequences for me, you, and Lian. They’re talking about transferring us back to the mainland.”

  Lian gasped. Whatever was happening, it was serious. In career terms, a transfer back across the bay was a black eye her father would never recover from.

  “They wouldn’t do that,” her mother said, but she didn’t sound very sure.

  “They absolutely would. They showed me the papers. We’re four signatures away from losing all of this.”

  “But,” her mother protested, sounding as though she was searching for words. “But . . . that wouldn’t be fair to Lian!”

  “No. It wouldn’t. That was my first thought, too.”

  Lian’s heart swelled.

  “And that’s why I have to make sure this deal happens, regardless of my feelings,” her father said. His voice had lost some of its energy; now he sounded defeated and hollow. “The negotiations are at such a delicate point. I can’t afford to push them the wrong way.”

  He took off his coat, folded it over the back of a kitchen chair, and then sat down heavily, his fingers at his temples. His wife stepped behind him and began gently massaging his shoulders. The worry on her face was hard for Lian to look at.

  “Damn this deal,” her father m
uttered. “I wish I’d never in my life heard of Rand Harrison or his company.”

  Lian ducked back around the corner and let fly a string of foul, whispered curses. How dare Harrison cause her father such misery? Add that to a list of sins that might have no end.

  She stalked back to her bedroom, furious, and pounded out her return on the keyboard.

  Komiko: Sorry about that. Needed a little recharge of my righteous anger, apparently.

  Komiko: We have to take Harrison down now. This has got to be our top priority. Every day he’s still in business is a bad day for everyone else.

  Komiko: And I can only speak for myself, but I don’t care what the consequences are to me personally. I just want him stopped.

  Blossom: Strong sentiment, K.

  Komiko: I mean every word.

  If Harrison’s downfall meant that her father’s company pulled the power ploy of sending the family back to the mainland, she would of course be sad to say farewell to the school and the friends she had made there. She and Mingmei would stay close—she hoped—but not living in Central would be a huge change otherwise. As much as she often felt guilty about the life of privilege she led there, she had to admit that the readjustment would be brutal. She worried more for her parents, though; they had earned this lifestyle and might struggle to deal with taking a “backwards step.”