Code Name Komiko (22 page)

Lian read the code twice, committed it to memory, and passed it back to him. “Thank you. And hey, Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor? Smile for me?”

He gave her a confused look for a second, then shrugged and complied.

“Good. Now, if this turns out to be a setup. . . . I swear I will personally smash every one of those perfect teeth out of your skull.”

She didn’t even turn around to watch his smile fade.

“That was pretty badass, back there,” Eva said as they moved through the shadows of the underground parking garage. “If we do get popped tonight, at least you bowed out with some famous last words.”

“I’m just hoping I didn’t use up all my bravado making Matt wet himself,” Lian replied. “I could use a little bit for what we’re about to do.”

“Relax,” Eva said. “We’re just two hip young girls, out on the town, who happen across a big shiny skyscraper, and then happen to punch in the right door code on our first guess, and then happen to stumble across evidence in a ninth-floor records room that will happen to bring a global corporation to its knees. It could happen to anyone . . . right?”

Lian smiled. “Not exactly what I’d call an airtight alibi.”

At a run, the two of them crossed a dimly lit expanse of white concrete and painted yellow parking stripes. Lian stopped with her back against one side of the support pillar closest to the building’s rear doors; Eva drew up next to her. They peered in opposite directions around the post, holding their breaths, scanning for movement and finding none. The lot was nearly deserted in the 10 P.M. hour. If luck was on their side, they could make it in and out and not encounter a single soul.

Lian reached around the corner of the pillar, grabbed Eva’s hand, and squeezed. “Here we go,” she said, as Eva squeezed back.

They dashed to the rightmost of the four glass entry doors. Lian stopped when she reached the keyed security pad. If she entered the code, she would leave fingerprints. She cursed herself for the oversight, until she saw Eva reaching into her pocket and pulling out woolen gloves the same shade of blue as her hair. As Lian whispered the code, Eva keyed it in.

The door slid open with a whisper.

No alarms sounded, no guards pounced from the darkness. As the girls stepped inside, the door slid purposefully back into place and anchored itself.

Lian finally let herself exhale. So far, so good.

She pointed down the hallway to their left. All clear. The blueprints showed a service lift back here, as well as two banks of elevators in the heart of the building, but they’d agreed that these were likely to be fitted with cameras. The better bet was the emergency stairs at the end of the hall.

Thankfully, the lights weren’t on motion sensors. Matt had reassured them, but Lian was braced to discover his mistakes—or
lies
—with every step she took. Eva gingerly pressed the bar to open the stairwell door, making only the tiniest of metallic clicks. She opened it just wide enough for the two of them to slip through, before gently letting it click back into place.

A single yellow bulb lit each floor’s number. Lian tugged the sleeve of her blouse down over her left hand so her bare skin wouldn’t touch the rail, and they made their way quickly and quietly up eight flights.

“Jiu,” Lian said, a little out of breath, when they reached the painted symbol.

Eva nodded. “Nine.”

“Yeah. But everything in Chinese means ten different things. It’s a lucky number because it sounds like the word for ‘everlasting.’ And it’s all bound up in dragon symbolism. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Harrison’s people did their homework and chose the ninth floor on purpose, as some kind of talisman.”

“Where would big business be without ridiculous old-world superstitions?” Eva said with a smirk. “Now, knock on wood, we’re about to find something that’ll keep this dragon from being everlasting.”

“Fingers crossed,” Lian said, smiling.

“You brought your lucky rabbit’s foot, right?”

“I never commit corporate crimes without it.”

Eva turned the handle, and they stepped onto the patterned gray carpet of the ninth floor. Lian hoped that they had got all their nervous laughter out in the stairwell. Now was the time for seriousness and silence.

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.

“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?”