Necropolis (21 page)

— but there was a dead quality to his flesh. His eyes were a very pale blue, so pale that they had almost no color at all.

This was the chairman of the Nightrise Corporation. It had to be. He was wearing an expensive suit, white shirt, and red tie. Very successful people have a way of walking, pushing forward as if they expect the world to get out of the way, and that was how he was walking now. He had a deep, throaty voice —

he could have been a heavy smoker — and spoke with a faint American accent. There was a silver band on the middle finger of his left hand. Not the wedding finger. Scarlett somehow doubted that he would be married. Who in their right mind would choose to live with such a man?

"It's all right," Scarlett said.

The chairman seemed disappointed by her reaction.

"There is no greater city on the planet," he muttered. He pointed out of the window. "That's Kowloon.

Some people say that the best reason to go there is to admire the views back again, but there are many museums and temples to enjoy too. You can take the Star Ferry over the water. The crossing is quite an experience, although it is one I have never enjoyed."

"Do you get seasick?"

"No." He shook his head. "When I was twelve years old, a fortune-teller predicted that I would be killed in an incident involving a boat. I'm sure you will think me foolish, but I am very superstitious. It is something I have in common with the Chinese. They believe in luck as a force, almost like a spirit. This building, for example, had to be built in a certain way, with the main door slanting at an angle and mirrors placed at crucial points, according to the principals of feng shui. Otherwise, it would be considered unlucky. And you see over there?" He pointed to a factory complex on the other side of the water, in Kowloon. "How many chimneys does it have?"

Scarlett counted. "Five."

"It has four real chimneys. The extra one is fake. It is there because 'four' is the Chinese word for death

— but on the other hand, they believe that five brings good luck. Do you see? They take these things very seriously, and so do I. As a result, I have never been close to the water and I have certainly never stepped on a boat."

He gestured at a low, leather sofa opposite his desk. "Please. Come and sit down."

Scarlett did as she was told. He came over and joined her.

"It's a great pleasure to meet you, Scarlett," he said. 'Your father told me a lot about you."

"Where is my father?"

"I'm afraid I owe you an apology. I'm sure you were disappointed that he wasn't here to meet you. The fact is that we had a sudden crisis in Nanjing."

"Is that in China?"

'Yes. There was a legal problem that needed our immediate attention. Obviously, we didn't want to send him. But your father is very good at his job, and there was no one else."

"When will he be back?"

"It shouldn't be more than a week."

"A week?" Scarlett was shocked. "Can I talk to him?" she asked.

The chairman sighed. "That may not be very easy. There are some parts of China that have very bad communications. The landlines are down because of recent flooding, and there are whole areas where there's no reception for mobile phones. I'm sure he will try to call you. But it may take some time."

"So what am I supposed to do?" Scarlett asked. She didn't even try to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

"I want you to enjoy yourself," the chairman said. "Mrs. Cheng will be staying with you until your father returns, and Karl will drive you wherever you want to go. There are plenty of things to do in Hong Kong. Shopping, of course. Mrs. Cheng has the necessary funds. There's a Disneyland out on Lantau.

We have all sorts of fascinating markets for you to explore. And you must go up to The Peak. Also, I have something for you."

He went over to the desk and opened a drawer. When he came back, he was holding a white cardboard box. "It's a small gift," he explained. "By way of an apology."

He handed the box over and she opened it. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool, lay a pendant made out of some green stone, shaped like a disc and threaded with a leather cord. Looking more closely, Scarlett saw that there was a small animal carved into the center — a locust or a lizard or a cross between the two, lying on its side with its legs drawn up, as if in the womb. It was very intricate. If the work hadn't been so finely done, it might have been ugly.

"It's jade," he explained. "And it's quite old. Yuan Dynasty. That's thirteenth century. Can I put it on you?"

He reached forward and lifted it out of the box. Compared to the delicacy of the piece, his fingers looked thick and clumsy. Scarlett allowed him to lower it over her head, even though she didn't like having his hands so close to her throat.

"It looks beautiful on you, Scarlett," he said. "I hope you'll look after it. It's very valuable, so you don't want to leave it lying around." He got to his feet. "But now I'm afraid I will have to abandon you. I have a board meeting. I'd much rather not go. But even though I'm the chairman, they still won't accept my cry for mercy. So I'll have to say good-bye, Scarlett. It was a pleasure to meet you."

My cry for mercy…

Why had he said that? Cry for Mercy was the name of the monastery where Scarlett had been kept prisoner, on the other side of the door. Of course, he couldn't possibly have known that, but nonetheless, he had chosen the words quite deliberately. Was he taunting her? The chairman was already moving back to the desk, but even as he had turned, Scarlett thought she had detected something in his eyes, behind his silver-framed glasses. Was she imagining it? He had just given her an expensive gift. And yet, for all his seeming kindness and concern, she could have sworn she had seen something else. A brief flash of cruelty.

Scarlett spent the rest of the afternoon shopping — or window-shopping, anyway. She didn't actually buy anything, which was unlike her. Back in England, Aidan had often teased her that she'd lash out money on a diving suit if it had the right designer label. But she wasn't in the mood. She wondered if she'd caught a cold. It was still very damp, with a thin drizzle that hung suspended in the air without ever hitting the ground. She was also more aware of the silver-gray mist that stretched across the entire city, even following her into the arcades. The skyscrapers disappeared into it, the top floors fading out like a badly developed photograph. There was no sense of distance in Hong Kong. The mist enclosed everything so that roads went nowhere and people and cars seemed to appear as if out of nothing.

She asked Audrey Cheng about it.

"It's pollution," she replied, in a matter-of-fact voice. "It's not ours. It blows in from mainland China.

There's nothing we can do." She looked at her watch. "It's time for supper, Scarlett. Would you like to go home?"

Scarlett nodded.

And then a man appeared, a little way ahead of them. Scarlett noticed him because he had stopped, forcing the crowd to separate and pass by him on both sides. They were on Queen Street, one of the busiest stretches in Hong Kong, surrounded by glimmering shop windows filled with furs, gold watches, fancy cameras, and diamond rings. The man was young, Chinese, dressed in a suit with a white shirt and a striped tie. He was holding an envelope.

"Scarlett —" he began.

He disappeared. The moment he spoke her name, the crowd closed in on him. It was one of the most extraordinary things Scarlett had ever seen. One moment, the people had been moving along the sidewalk — hundreds of them, complete strangers. But it was as if someone, somewhere, had thrown a switch and suddenly they were acting as one. Scarlett tried to look past the seething mass, but it was impossible. She thought she heard a scream. Then the crowd parted. The man was gone.

Only the envelope remained. It was crumpled, lying on the sidewalk. Scarlett moved forward to pick it up, but someone got there ahead of her… a pedestrian walking past. It was just a man going home. She didn't even get a chance to look at his face. He snatched up the envelope and took it with him, continuing on his way.

"What was that?" Scarlett demanded.

"What?" Audrey Cheng looked at her with empty eyes.

"That man…"

"What man?"

"He called out my name. Then everyone closed in on him." She still couldn't take in what she had just seen. "He had a letter. He wanted to give it to me."

"I didn't see him," Mrs. Cheng said.

"But I did. He was right there."

''You still have jet lag." Audrey Cheng signaled, and Karl drew up in the car. "It's easy to imagine things when you're tired."

Scarlett was glad to get back to Wisdom Court even though she wished her father had been there to greet her. She was going to sleep in his room. Audrey Cheng had taken the guest bedroom. Karl, it seemed, would spend the night elsewhere. She had been completely shaken by what she had seen. How could a whole crowd behave like that? She remembered the way they had suddenly turned. They could have been controlled by some inner voice that she alone had been unable to hear.

She ate dinner, said good night to Mrs. Cheng, and went to her room. She hadn't finished unpacking, and it was as she took out the last of her clothes that she made a discovery. Someone had placed a guidebook for Hong Kong at the bottom of her suitcase. She assumed it must have been Mrs. Murdoch, and if so, it was a kind gesture — although it was odd that she hadn't mentioned it. She flicked through it. The World Traveler's Guide to Hong Kong and Macao.

Fully illustrated with thirty color plates and comprehensive maps. It was new.

But that wasn't the only thing she found that night.

Scarlett had brought a little jewelry with her — a couple of necklaces and a bracelet Aidan had given her on her last birthday. She decided to keep them safe by putting them into one of the drawers in the dressing table. As she pulled, the drawer stuck. That was probably why nobody had noticed that it wasn't completely empty. She pulled harder and it came free.

There was a small, red document at the very back. It took Scarlett a few seconds to recognize what it was, but then she took it out and opened it.

It was her father's passport.

Paul Edward Adams. There was his photograph. Blank face, glasses, neat hair. It was full of stamps from all over the world and it hadn't yet expired.

The chairman had lied to her.

If her father had left his passport in the apartment, he couldn't possibly have traveled to China. And now that she thought about it, there had been something strange about the note he had left her. Why had he typed it? It hadn't even been signed. It could have been written by anyone.

It was eleven o'clock in Hong Kong. Four in the afternoon in England. Scarlett got into bed, but she couldn't sleep. She lay there for a long time, thinking of the passport, the passport official with the crocodile eyes, the chairman joking about the cry for mercy, the man who had tried to give her a letter.

She had only been in Hong Kong for one day. Already she was wishing she hadn't come.

SEVENTEEN

Contact

Over the next few days, Scarlett tried to forget what had happened and put all her energies into being a tourist. There had to be another explanation for her father's passport. He might have a second copy. Or maybe his company had been able to arrange other travel documents for his visit to China. It was, after all, just the other side of the border. She made a conscious decision not to think about it. He would be back soon — and until then she would treat this as an extended holiday. Surely it had to be better than being at school.

So she took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and back again and had tea at the old-fashioned Peninsula Hotel

— tiny sandwiches and palm trees and a string quartet in black tie playing classical music. She went to Disneyland, which was small and didn't have enough fast rides but was otherwise all right if you didn't mind hearing Mickey Mouse talking in Cantonese. She went up to The Peak, a mountain standing behind the city that offered panoramic views as if from a low-flying plane. There had been a time when you could see all the way to China from there, but pollution had put an end to that.

She visited temples and markets and went shopping and did everything she could to persuade herself that she was having a good time. But it didn't work. She was miserable. She wanted to go home.

For a start, she was missing her friends at school, particularly Aidan. She had tried texting him, but the atmosphere seemed to be interfering with the signal and she got nothing back. She tried to call her mother in Australia, but Vanessa Adams was away on a trip. Her secretary said that she would call Scarlett back, but she never did.

And it was worse than that. Scarlett didn't like to admit it. It was so unlike her. But she was scared.

It was hard to put her finger on what exactly was wrong, but her sense of unease, the fear that something was going to jump out at her from around the next corner, grew and grew. It was like walking through a haunted house. You don't see anything. Nothing actually happens. But you're nervous anyway because you know the house is haunted. That was how it was for Scarlett. Only in her case it wasn't a house — it was a whole city.

First of all, there were the crowds, the people in the street. Scarlett knew that everyone was in a hurry —

to get to work, to get to meetings, to get home again. In that respect, all cities were the same. But the people in Hong Kong looked completely dead. Nobody showed any expression. They walked like robots, all of them moving at the same pace, avoiding each other's eyes. She realized now that what she had seen on Queen Street hadn't been an isolated incident. It was as if the city somehow controlled them.

How long would it be, Scarlett wondered, before it began to control her too?

The strange, gray mist was still everywhere. Worse than that, it seemed to be getting thicker, darker, changing color. Mrs. Cheng had said it was pollution, but it seemed to have a life of its own, lingering around the corners, hanging over everything. It drained the color from the streets and even transformed the skyscrapers. The higher floors looked dark and threatening, and it was easy to imagine that they were citadels from a thousand years ago. They didn't seem to belong to the modern world.