Necropolis (25 page)

And the head, lying on the path, wasn't human either. It was the head of an oversize lizard, with yellow-and-black diamond eyes, scales, a lolling forked tongue. Scarlett glanced back at the body. Mrs. Cheng had thrown out one of her arms as she fell. It was also covered in scales.

A shape-changer.

That was what they had said. And in the shock of the moment, all Scarlett could think was — Was this the creature she had been living with since she had come to Hong Kong? Audrey Cheng had cooked for her. She had been sleeping in the same apartment. And all the time…

She thought she was going to be sick. She couldn't get the hideous images out of her head. But then she heard the sound of an approaching engine, coming down the path toward her. Had they been discovered?

The woman and the two men weren't moving. They didn't look alarmed. Scarlett relaxed. Whoever was coming was part of the plan.

A motorbike appeared, speeding round the corner. It was a silver Honda, being ridden by a figure in black leather, gloves, and boots. Scarlett guessed that it was a man, but it was hard to be sure as his head was concealed by a helmet with a strip of mirrored plastic across his face. He stopped right in front of them, the wheels tilting underneath him, one leg stretching out to keep the bike upright.

The woman grabbed hold of Scarlett once again. "We need to get you out of here fast," she said. "We don't have time to explain."

"Where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere safe."

They produced a second helmet. Scarlett hesitated, but only for a few seconds. Audrey Cheng's dead body told her everything she needed to know. She had been living in a nightmare, and these people, whoever they were, were rescuing her from it. She grabbed the helmet and put it on, then climbed onto the bike, putting her arms around the driver. At once they were away. She felt the engine roar underneath her as they shot down the path. She tightened her grip, afraid that she would be blown over backward by the rush of wind.

They shot past a man walking a dog and then a family of local people who had been posing for a photograph but who scattered to get out of the way. They turned another corner. If they went much farther, they would surely arrive back at the tram station where Scarlett had begun. On one side there was a small park, on the other, a driveway leading up to a house, for there were a few private homes scattered along the upper reaches of The Peak. But that wasn't where they were heading. Scarlett saw a parked car with two more men waiting. They skidded to a halt.

She got off, quickly removing her helmet. The two men were young, in their twenties, both wearing jeans and sweatshirts. One was Chinese, but the other was a foreigner, maybe from Japan or Korea.

They both hurried over to her, their faces filled with a mixture of determination and fear.

'You have to come with us," the first one said. He had a thin face, and his nose and cheekbones were so sharp-edged that they could almost have been folded out of paper. "We must leave at once."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere safe." That was exactly what the woman had said. "Not far. Maybe twenty minutes."

"Wait—"

"No time." He spoke in fractured English, spitting out the words. 'You want to die, you stay here. You ask your questions. You want to live, get in the car. Now! They will be coming very soon."

"Who will be coming?"

"Shape-changers. Or worse."

The other man had gone over to the car. But he hadn't opened the door. He had opened the trunk.

"You don't expect me to get in there!" Scarlett said.

"It must be this way," the thin-faced man insisted. 'You can't be seen. But you'll be all right. We make airholes…"

"No…" It was too much to ask. Scarlett didn't care how many shape-changers there might be, making their way up The Peak. She wasn't going to be locked in the trunk of a car by two people she had never met before and driven off to God knows where. 'You can forget it —" she began.

The man had whipped something out of his pocket, and he grabbed her before she knew what he was doing. She felt a handkerchief being pressed against her face. She kicked out, trying to knock him off balance, but he was too strong. The fumes of some sort of chemical, sweet and pungent, crept into her nose and mouth. Almost at once, all the strength drained out of her. She felt her legs fold, and the world spun. And then she was falling, being guided into the trunk, which had become a huge black hole waiting to swallow her up.

The end came very quickly. Darkness. Terror. And then the welcome emptiness of sleep.

TWENTY

Lohan

She was in a cage, not lying down but standing. And there was something strange. The wall was moving. It seemed to be scrolling downward in front of her. Or was it she who was moving up?

As consciousness returned, Scarlett realized what was happening. She was in an elevator, one of the old-fashioned kind with a folding iron gate instead of a door. What she was looking at was the brickwork between floors in what had to be a very tall building. She was pinned between the Japanese man and the one she had decided to call Paper Face. They were supporting her. She could still taste the drug —

chloroform or whatever it was — that had knocked her out.

Scarlett groaned and the two men immediately tightened their grip. There was no chance she was going to start a fight in such a confined space, but she had already struggled at the car, and they weren't taking any chances.

'You are safe now," Paper Face said.

"Where am I?"

'You will see…very soon."

The elevator slowed down to a stop, and the Japanese man jerked the cage door open. They stepped out into a long, dimly lit corridor with walls that were either grimy or had been deliberately painted the color of grime. There were doors every few feet. The whole place looked like a cheap hotel.

There was a Chinese man guarding the corridor with a machine gun cradled across his chest. The sight of the weapon struck Scarlett as completely bizarre. It was like something out of a gangster film. But the man didn't look anything like her idea of a gangster. He was dressed in jeans and a loose-hanging shirt.

He was skinny, with a wispy beard, a tattoo on his neck, and a gold tooth prominent at the front of his mouth. A drug dealer, perhaps? Looking at him, it was hard to believe that he was on her side.

The two men took her to the fourth room along the corridor. Paper Face knocked and the door was unlocked from inside. They entered. Machine Gun stayed where he was, opposite the elevator.

Scarlett found herself in a large, almost empty apartment that looked as if someone had recently moved out… or in. There were a few pieces of furniture, some of them covered in dust sheets, and no decoration — no carpet, no lamp shades, no pictures on the walls. The windows had been blanked out with sheets of paper. Scarlett wondered why. They had to be fairly high up, so surely there was no chance of anyone looking in. An archway led into a small kitchen, and there was a corridor on the other side, presumably with a bedroom and bathroom at the end.

Another man had been waiting for her to arrive. He was Chinese, more smartly dressed than the others

— in a gray suit and gray T-shirt — and everything about him radiated confidence and control. Was he the one in charge? He examined Scarlett briefly. His eyes were very dark, almost black, and gave nothing away. There was a thin scar starting high up on his left cheek and then slanting diagonally across his lips so that the two halves of his face didn't quite meet, like a reflection in a broken mirror.

But, even so, he was handsome. Scarlett guessed that he was barely more than twenty years old.

"How are you?" he said. 'You must have been very frightened by your ordeal. I'm sorry that there was no other way."

"Who are you?" Scarlett demanded. "Where am I, and who are these people? What do you want with me? And what was that with Mrs. Cheng? They said she was a shape-changer. What does that mean?"

Once the questions had started, they wouldn't stop.

The man held up a hand. He had long, elegant fingers, like a piano player. "We have a great deal to say to each other," he said. "Would you like a drink?"

"No, thank you."

"But I would." He nodded and Paper Face hurried into the kitchen. The man was obviously used to being obeyed. He turned back to Scarlett. "Please, come and sit down."

Scarlett went over to the sofa. She was surprised how quickly the drug had worn off. She sat down. The man followed her and sat opposite. He moved slowly, taking his time. Everything about him was very deliberate.

"My name is Lohan," he said. "Does that answer your first question? I doubt if my colleagues will have very much to say to you, but I will tell you their names too. The man in the kitchen is called Draco. And this here"—he nodded in the direction of the Japanese man — "is Red. Not their real names, you understand. Just the names they use.

'Your next question — what do we want with you? Very simply, we want to get you out of Hong Kong as quickly as possible. Quite frankly, it would have been better for everyone if you had never arrived, but never mind. We couldn't stop you coming, although we tried. It's remarkable how many people you've already managed to get killed."

He certainly wasn't sparing her feelings. But Scarlett wasn't going to let him intimidate her. "I want to see my father," she said. "Do you know where he is?"

"I'm afraid not," Lohan replied. "I have never even met him. For what it's worth, I would imagine that he is dead. A very great many people have died in Hong Kong in the last weeks. He might have been one of them."

''You're telling me my father's dead! Don't you care? Can't you find out?"

Lohan shrugged. "I've told you. I've never met him. Why should it matter to me whether he is alive or dead?"

Draco came back in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a small porcelain bowl and ajar of some sort of spirit — vodka or sake. He set the whole thing down in front of Lohan, bowed, and then took his place on a seat beside the front door. Lohan poured himself a drink. He held it briefly between his index finger and his thumb, then threw it back and swallowed. He set the bowl back down.

'You want to know where you are," he continued. "This apartment is in Mong Kok, a couple of blocks north of the Tin Hau Temple, where you had your fortune told. The entire building belongs to us, and with a bit of luck, nobody will come up here. While you remain in this room, you are safe. Every minute you spend outside it, you are in more danger than you can possibly imagine."

'You mean shape-changers."

Lohan ignored her. For a moment he gazed past her, as if focusing on something outside the room. Then he began.

'You have to understand the nature of a city," he said. 'You live in London, so maybe what I'm about to say will be obvious to you. All cities are the same. They have an atmosphere. More than that. You might call it a flow. The traffic moves in a certain way. The trains pull in and out of the stations. People go to work, they have their lunch, they go shopping, they go home again. Postmen deliver the post. Policemen patrol the streets. Garbage collectors come out in the evening. The night bus arrives at the right time and picks up the people who are waiting at the stop and takes them where they expect to go. Everyone is obeying the flow, even if they don't realize it, because if they didn't, life would descend into chaos.

"Now, consider Hong Kong. It is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. There are more than seven million people living here. That works out at around 18,000 people per square mile. A few of them are rich. Most of them are very poor. And then there are the millions in between — the doctors and dentists, the shopkeepers, builders, plumbers, teachers —"

"I think I get the point," Scarlett interrupted.

"No, Scarlett — I don't think you do." Lohan hadn't raised his voice. His face was as impassive as ever.

But Scarlett realized that she shouldn't have spoken. He wasn't used to being interrupted. "This is the point," he went on. "How many of those people could die, do you think, before you noticed? How many of them could be shot or knifed while they lay in bed before the city seemed any different? Fifty of them? Or five hundred? Or how about five hundred thousand? Can you describe to me, accurately, the man who sold you the ticket when you boarded the tram this morning? Or the driver who took you to The Peak? Or the man who was sweeping the leaves away when you began your walk? Suppose they had all been taken away and replaced with people who looked a little like them but who were not the same? Would you notice? If they and their entire families had been murdered, would you care? We see only what we want to see because that is the way of the city. In a village, in the country, people notice things. But on the streets, we are willfully blind."

"Are you saying that's what's happened?" Scarlett asked. "Ever since I've been here, I've been seeing weird things. And there's nobody living at Wisdom Court. The whole place is empty. Are you saying they were all killed?"

"In the last three months, Hong Kong has been taken over," Lohan replied. "It happened very quickly, like a virus. It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. Anyone who has noticed what has been going on or who has tried to fight it has been removed. What has happened has been so huge, so terrible, that it is almost impossible to understand.

"Of course, some people have guessed, or half guessed, and they have managed to get out, taking their money and their families with them. Ask them why they have gone and they will lie to you. They will say they wanted a change or had new business opportunities. But in truth, they have gone because they are afraid. Other people are aware that Hong Kong has changed. They have stayed here because they have no choice, because they have nowhere else to go. They are frightened too. But they keep their heads down and they go about their daily business in the hope that, if they ask no questions, they will be left alone. If you are poor, Scarlett, if you run a tiny stall in the street, what does it matter who controls the city? All you care about is your next meal. The city can take care of itself."