by Naomi Paul
At the far end of the hall, a swaybacked cleaning lady slowly moved her vacuum back and forth in the dull glow of the maintenance lights. She didn’t hear the stair door open and close, and in a few moments she had rounded the corner without noticing the intruders.
Lian brought up the blueprints on her phone and confirmed their destination. Harrison’s corner office took up nearly a quarter of the finance department that lined almost the entire east face of the building. If any hard evidence of Jiao’s brief employment with Harrison Corp was to be found, it would be there.
The girls moved quickly and stealthily along the corridors. Their eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom, and they peeked around each corner before turning, keeping a lookout for lingering workers or lights coming from under office doors. The sound of the vacuum cleaner faded until it disappeared.
The glass-walled finance department was dark, as still as a tomb and twice as foreboding. Taking a steadying breath, Lian entered the door code with her middle knuckle—8, 9, Q, 5—and stood frozen in the world’s longest half second before the door unlocked.
Eva immediately crossed the room toward the tiny white glow that hovered over a desk. “How nice,” she whispered. “Somebody left out the welcome mat.”
One of the accounts officers—his nameplate read CHEN MENGYAO—had neglected to shut his computer down before leaving for the day. Eva nudged the mouse, and with a crackle of static, the monitor came to life. Lian allowed herself a smile: this saved them valuable time waiting for the system to boot up or trying to hack a personal password. Lian suspected that Mengyao’s next performance review would be harsh.
If he got to have one.
The corner office—Harrison’s seat of power—was an impressive thing to behold, with a clear view straight to the ferry piers in the harbor. Lian peered through the glass into the office, careful not to touch it or leave any prints. Inside, she could see that the walls were lined with smartly framed photographs of Harrison with other men in suits, shaking hands or raising a glass in a toast. Occasionally, a well-dressed woman would decorate the scene. Lian didn’t know who most of them were, but she recognized the TVB actress from the denim ad campaign, as well as at least one former American president.
The massive, dark wood desk was Spartan in its decoration: just a new-model Macintosh, a silver inkpot with a molded quill pen, and a two-foot-tall bronze statue of a baseball player—a Colorado Rockies batter, she guessed—preparing to swing for the fences. No photo of the family whose image was supposedly so important to the corporation.
Lian wondered what Matt thought about that.
The door to this inner office had both a keypad—presumably programmed with the same sequence as the other doors, although Matt had neglected to specify—and a traditional deadbolt. There would be no way in, other than to break the glass. This was the very definition of an emergency, Lian thought. A plan of last resort.
She turned away from Harrison’s office and began reading the drawer labels on the banks of horizontal filing cabinets that bordered two walls of the department. There were four additional islands of these massive drawers in the middle of the room, not to mention at least two standing files visible in each walled office and two below-desk rolling cabinets in each cubicle. It was an ocean of paperwork, and Lian was without a compass.
The flashlight app on her phone illuminated label after label: quarterly stock reports; filings with the Securities Regulatory Commission and the United States SEC; operational logistics studies; bills of lading; shipping and receiving contracts. Lian opened some of these drawers and inspected files at random. Whether there was anything incriminating to be found among them, she’d never know; they all appeared legitimate enough, at first blush. Certainly, though, none of them had anything to do with Jiao.
Lian let a drawer click back into place, and was just about to hook her sleeve-covered fingers under the latch of the next one, when Eva waved her over with a loud whisper of “Got something!”
In seconds, Lian was peering over her shoulder at the widescreen monitor. Eva had wormed her way into the server and sniffed out the payroll database. “Ta da,” she said humbly. “The Crowbar strikes again.”
Lian’s heart leapt. This was it: the name of every employee who had ever worked for Harrison since the transfer of operations to Hong Kong. They’d found the mother lode.
Even in gloves, Eva’s fingers were fast and confident as they flew across the keyboard. “Now we just type in the name ‘Jiao,’ hit Find, and . . .”
No Results Matched Your Criteria
Search Again? Y/N
“Impossible,” Lian said, crestfallen.
“Maybe they delete the dead employees?” Eva ventured as she backed out to the main screen.
Lian scanned the names. “No . . . here’s one. Yè Tingfeng in manufacturing. Listed as deceased a couple of days ago.” A sudden chill ran through her; hadn’t Zan’s friend with all the kidney stones been named Tingfeng?
Eva leaned forward on the desk, cracking her knuckles. “No need for despondence. I can trick any database into telling me what I want to hear.”
Eva set up a laddered search, filtering out males, eliminating anyone over the age of twenty years old, defining a window for the start date of the employment. One by one, these qualifiers narrowed down the list to just eleven names. Eva clicked on the name at the top to open the employee file.
A photograph of a dull-faced teenage girl stared back at them. Her employment info ran down along one side. This was a seamstress at the complex. Too young for that kind of work, paid next to nothing, probably in desperate need of being rescued.
But she wasn’t the girl Lian had found floating in the water.
Eva continued down the list, opening the files, frowning, and moving on. Lian felt worse with each passing moment.
And then, three files from the end—lucky number nine—she saw a familiar face.
“That’s her!” she said, louder than she’d intended. “That’s Jiao!”
“Not according to this,” Eva said, squinting at the dossier. “Says her name is Kong Nüying, from Lau Fau Shan in the New Territories.”
“That’s . . . weird,” Lian allowed. “But it’s definitely the girl from the beach. In fact, that’s the same exact photo that Zan has in his wallet. He showed me, the day we met.”
“Fair enough,” Eva said. “Let’s get this on a memory stick and get out of here.”
Lian pulled her rabbit’s foot out of her pocket, twisted it at its center to extend the USB connector, and handed it to Eva.
“You actually had a rabbit’s foot,” Eva said, sounding as impressed as she was amused. She took it from Lian, and plugged it into the computer. Then dragged the girl’s record to it.
Lian stretched her sleeves over each palm and leaned back on an adjacent desk, still trying to reconcile the disconnect between what the computer said and what she knew (or thought she knew).
“Huh,” Eva said, scratching her head. “This file’s not with the main database doc. It’s in a subfolder.”
“Really?” Lian said, standing back up to look at the screen again. Eva had brought up the file’s properties, and they both looked at the word in all caps at the end of the metadata, after the final slash.
DELETED
Lian felt the chill pass through her again. Eva ejected the rabbit’s foot, logged out of the database, and then disconnected from the server, putting Chen Mengyao’s desktop back just the way she’d found it. She started to get up from his chair, then got a sudden, wicked grin on her face.
From the top of his Start menu, she pulled up the calculator. It appeared in the lower right corner of the screen. Her gloved finger tapped out four digits and a decimal on the keyboard, and Lian instantly realized what she was doing. As calling cards went, it was subtle but satisfying. When Mengyao got to work the next morning, he might wonder for the briefest of moments what he’d been doing on his computer that had added up to ‘0.406.’
Eva pocketed the memory stick, and the girls quietly let themselves out of the finance department and back into the hallway. They heard the sound of the vacuum, blocking the way they’d originally come and flattened themselves against a wall.
Lian brought up the blueprints on her phone. The only other path from here took them deeper into the building; they’d need to cross it to the southwest corner to access the other stairwell. It was a lot of ground to cover, but they couldn’t just stand there waiting for the custodian to spot them. Lian drew their route on her phone. Eva watched and nodded, and the two of them took off down the corridor.
Everything was going perfectly, until they rounded the corner to the main elevator banks just in time for the doors of the nearest one to open with a cheerful ping.
Lian gasped as she was struck by an almost physical blast of déjà vu. In an instant, her mouth went dry and her palms broke into a cold sweat as she flashed back to the Fàn Xī foyer.
Dressed in a suit, the potbellied man stepped off the elevator and directly into their path.
Only this time, instead of Harrison’s overcoat, he’d brought half a dozen armed security guards.
TWENTY-SIX
“Hey!” the fat man shouted, starting toward them with surprising speed.
Eva grabbed Lian’s wrist and ran back the way they’d come. The vacuuming janitor was now the least of their worries.
“Matt sold us out after all,” Lian growled. “That lousy, treacherous—”
“Not important!” Eva said. “Just run!”
Behind them, they heard the fat man directing the guards. “Split up! Cover both stairwells, and the service elevator! You stay here in case they’re stupid enough to double back. And radio down to have them suspend the door code!”
“Oh, God,” Eva said. “What are we gonna do?”
“We’re going to be faster than radio waves,” Lian said, diving for the keypad at the nearest door and punching in the code, still using her middle knuckle. The door opened and the girls bustled inside, pushing it closed behind them. It settled back into its frame just as the pad outside buzzed and its display began glowing red.
She moved to the closest freestanding desk and started trying to shove it toward the door. Eva joined her, and soon they managed to get their makeshift barricade in place.
“Okay, okay,” Lian said, fighting panic. “There has to be a way out.” She wasn’t sure she believed it, but saying out loud seemed to make it sound more plausible. She flicked through the blueprints until she found the office they were in.
Eva looked over her shoulder. “It’s a dead end,” she said.
“The air ducts,” Lian said, pointing to the cooling system on the drawing. “We should be small enough to fit inside them.”
“And then what?” Eva asked desperately, grabbing the phone. “We’d have to crawl more than halfway around the building before we could drop into a hallway by the stairs. It would take us hours! Even if they don’t hear us clanking around over their heads, they’ll have the whole place on lockdown well before we can get out.”
“It might be the only plan we have,” Lian said, taking her phone back from Eva. There was no “911” text from Matt. Of course there wasn’t. Why would he have warned them about a trap he’d orchestrated himself?
She paced the office, teeth gritted, adrenaline the only thing keeping her headache at bay. The whole world was crashing down, and she was powerless to stop it. With an angry, growled sigh, she beat her fist on the glass of the window, nine floors above the darkened streets of the Central District. Some equally dark part of her hoped that the glass would shatter and offer her some sort of escape—however permanent—from this nightmare situation.
That’s when she saw it.
To either side of her, on the other side of the glass, thick cables ran vertically up to a roof rig. And right below her, just ten feet down, was a window washer’s suspended scaffold, paused at the end of the workday on the eighth story.
“Eva!” she hissed. “We have a way out!”
Eva ran toward her, but drew up short a few steps shy of the glass. “Are you kidding me?”
“There’s a window washer’s gantry, one floor down. Look, this big pane opens.”
“Forget it, Lian. This is not a Jackie Chan movie.”
“It will be fine,” Lian said, muscling open the latch. “We just have to—”
The end of her sentence was stolen from her mouth by the whipping wind that buffeted the building.
Eva’s black-rimmed eyes were wide with fear, and she shook her head emphatically, every dreadlock like a shocking blue exclamation point. Lian took one tentative step over the sill, and then held out her hand, beckoning Eva to come with her.
“I can’t!” Eva shouted. “I can’t do it!”
“You can do anything!” Lian encouraged her. “You’re the girl who cleaned up Junk Bay!”
“Junk Bay is at sea level! I’m afraid of heights!”
“You should be more scared of a Chinese prison,” Lian said.
There was a loud clang from over by the office door. Eva turned to look over her shoulder. Lian looked past her and saw the propped-up desk shudder, as someone on the outside tried to get to the inside.
“They’re here,” Eva exclaimed, her eyes welling. “They’re coming in. You have to go!”
“Not without you!”
The desk jumped again.
Eva stepped as close as she dared to the open window, and reached for Lian’s outstretched hand. But rather than grabbing it, she dropped the USB rabbit’s foot into Lian’s palm.
“I can’t go with you,” Eva said tearfully. “But you can still get this to the authorities.”
The desk toppled, followed by the sound of shattering glass.
“If we’re both caught, it’s all been for nothing,” Eva said, pressing Lian’s fingers around the furry memory stick. “So go!”
Lian saw the potbellied man charge into the office. Eva screamed. Lian gripped the rabbit’s foot tightly, swung her other leg over the sill, and then let herself drop onto the platform below. She landed on her feet, but felt the window washer’s scaffold judder. She spilled onto her side, snatching out her free hand to clutch at an edge. For one terrifying moment, the building and sky seemed to slide over her like a waterfall, but then she hauled herself into the right position.
She propped herself up on one elbow as she caught her breath, and willed her heartbeat to slow down. Then she grabbed for the control box. The “down” arrow was big and yellow. When she pressed it and the platform actually started to descend the face of the building, Lian thought she might cry with relief.
Overhead, the potbellied man’s furious face appeared as he leaned out the window to see where she’d gone. He bellowed something into his cell phone, but Lian couldn’t make out a word. She lay on the mesh floor of the scaffold, breathing hard, watching as the sidewalk seemed to swell and rise to meet her.
Her exhilaration was shredded by the guilt she felt at leaving Eva behind. They’d gotten the file they’d been after . . . but at what price?
She was two stories high when a security guard shouted up from below her. She peered through the mesh, saw the handgun aimed for the scaffold, and was instantly on her feet. She backpedaled up to the railing farthest from the guard, nearly tripping over a metal bucket of soapy water that sloshed onto her sneakers.
Without thinking, she grabbed the bucket by its edges and dumped its contents over the side, directly onto the guard. He sputtered for a moment, turning away and wiping his face. Lian leapt over the rail, covering the last few feet before the platform reached the ground. When the guard had got his bearings back, she swung the metal bucket with both hands, striking him on the head and sending him to the pavement.
For an insane second, Lian thought of picking up the gun he had dropped. But instead, she kicked it away from his unconscious form as hard as she could, and then took off at a run, rabbit’s foot still clenched in her hand, her s
hoes leaving wet prints on the sidewalk behind her.
When she reached the plaza for the rendezvous, Matt was sitting on a bench next to her messenger bag, flipping through his Standard.
“Lian!” he said, looking up. “Wait, where’s Crowbar?”
“Where’s Zan?” she countered, trying not to look like she didn’t trust him. She didn’t want him to know—yet—that she had figured out his treachery.
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “He went to get a milkshake, like, twenty minutes ago. He hasn’t come back yet.”
“Do you have any idea how made-up that sounds?”
Lian felt her lips curl. “It’s what he told me!” Matt protested.
“Liar!” she said, shoving him hard in the chest. Matt stumbled back, taken off guard. “You handed him over to your dad’s goons the second Eva and I were out of sight, didn’t you? Right before you sent them in after us.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“You sprung your trap, and Eva got caught in it! And I damn near had to chew my own foot off to escape!” She still had the rabbit’s foot clenched tight in her hand. She felt a thrill of victory—if Matt hadn’t planned for her to get back out of the building, then he certainly hadn’t accounted for the notion that she might have gotten what she’d gone in for. It was followed by a shudder of dread when she pondered what he would do if he did become aware of it. What lengths he might go to in order to take it from her?
“Lian, you have to believe me,” he said. “I didn’t turn Zan in, and I didn’t send anybody after you. I didn’t sell you out.”
“Then how did the potbellied man know right where to find us?” she demanded.
“The potbellied . . . wait, Mr. Yeung is in there? He has Crowbar? Oh, no.”
“Eva!” Lian screamed. “Her name is Eva! That’s a real person you just handed over, not some name on a message board.”
