The Black Dragon (8 page)

Danny groans. “But if it was the Black Dragon, why can't you just go after them?”

“But we don't know it, do we?” Lo answers. “And no one knows where they are.”

Disappointed with his attempt at the hypnosis, Danny idly watches the detective's fingers stump across the keys as Zamora spells out his name, profession—Circus Daredevil—Laura's details, their hotel name, what they did this last twenty-four hours.

It's interesting, he realizes; if you keep the image of the QWERTY keyboard in your head you can tally letters one by one to the keystrokes.

Z, A, M, O, R, A

G, O, L, D, E, N, B, A, T . . .

Intrigued, he sits up a bit and focuses as Lo punches the keyboard two-fingered. Something's not quite right, Danny realizes after a while. Not right at all. The keystrokes aren't matching their answers. Not all the time at any rate.

The phone rings.

“
Wai
?” Lo barks into the phone, grabbing a pen. He scribbles on a Post-it pad.

“
Neih dim chingfu a
?” He's pressing very hard, Danny thinks, the knuckles of Lo's hand white as he grips the pen. Stressed.

The detective underlines what he has written, then rips the note off the pad.

“Gotta go,” he says, grabbing his jacket. “Busy night. You go back to your hotel. We'll do everything we can.”

An idea leaps into Danny's mind. He stands and makes as if to shake Lo's hand.

“Thank you for your help—”

But as Lo reaches for his grip, Danny moves his hand quickly sideways. The unexpected movement confuses Lo's attention, and Danny's left hand sweeps across the Post-it pad, whipping the second sheet.

“Sorry.” He shakes Lo's hand now firmly, palming the note like a playing card, transferring it to his back pocket in one smooth movement right under the detective's nose. Feels good to be doing something. And he has done it for good reason.

He's convinced that Lo has been less than straight with them.

The detective leads them out into the corridor. “I'll have a couple of officers take you back to the Pearl. Keep to the hotel. Don't trust anyone you don't know. If the Black Dragon are involved then we will all need to be careful.”

He adjusts the gun in his shoulder holster. “Understand?”

Danny glances at the door that slammed on White Suit. There are raised voices coming from inside now, but indistinct. There's a muffled thud, like a heavy weight falling to the floor. Another—and then a stifled cry of pain.

Lo glances at the door, seems to hesitate a fraction, and then turns on his heels, striding briskly away down the echoing corridor.

Danny nods at the door, drops his voice. “The white suit man's in there.”

“
Caray!
Why didn't Lo say?”

“I think he's being interrogated.”

“Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye,” Zamora says.

“You have no idea who he is? White Suit?”

“Not a clue.”

A police car takes them back to the Pearl on rain-slicked streets. So many lights overhead that they fuse into a white smoke in the humid air. Danny gazes up at them. The feeling that has been growing these last few days—that began with the explosion and that washed over him in the rain outside the Bat—is loud in his head.
Something's coming. Something I've been trying to avoid, but can't avoid any longer
. And ever since the trip began it has felt like Mum and Dad are closer again somehow. Their personalities, their actions conjuring themselves back to life around him.

He turns to Zamora beside him on the backseat of the patrol car. The dwarf's profile is giving nothing away except grim determination—the kind that used to play on his face when they were facing a difficult crowd or pitching the big top in a high wind. In the glow of the neon signs overhead he looks older than Danny remembers. Tired.

“At Mum and Dad's funeral you said I could always trust you.”

Zamora shifts on his seat.

“Well, of course you can, Mister Danny. Let's keep focused on the immediate problem . . .”

But the memory of the funeral is stirred now. Danny remembers how well Zamora supported him then. Danny had found himself alone, standing in the steadily falling snow, the entire company of the Mysterium gathered under the skeletal trees in the Berlin Kreuzberg Friedhof. Darko Blanco was saying how hard it had been for the gravediggers. Pneumatic drills were needed.

Danny had desperately tried not to think about what Mum and Dad looked like in those long silent caskets. The worst of it was this: when you were used to seeing them escape from confined spaces—despite being bound and shackled—you couldn't help but assume that any moment now the coffins' lids would spring open, and there they would be, smiling and taking their bows after another daring stunt. But the lids stayed resolutely shut. Danny had thought about Houdini's escapes from the “living burials.” It was one trick his father never wanted to emulate. (He had started working on it, but couldn't cope when the soil hit his face, choking him. Each time he sat up and shook his head violently—and then got out of the open grave.)

In the cemetery Zamora had come up and stood next to Danny, letting his quiet presence do the work. After a long while watching the snow fall the dwarf had said, “You can always rely on me, Danny. Always.”

Danny believed it then. He needs to believe it now.

10

HOW TO REVEAL HIDDEN MESSAGES

Thirty minutes later they're sitting by the window in their hotel room. Across the South China Sea the last of the lightning is guttering away to nothing.

Danny looks at Zamora. “So you were going to tell me about the dots.”

The dwarf looks thoughtfully at his hat as he twirls it in his stubby fingers.

“Please.”

“I don't know much. Honest. Your aunt always keeps things close to her chest, you know. Remember, it was three weeks before anyone even knew she was in
prison
!”

“You were Dad's closest friend,” Danny presses. “He trusted you. I
need
to know.”

“Well. There's always been a rumor. A rumor about a criminal organization—a global organization—that pulls all the strings behind the big gangs and crime families. That's what Laura told me. She got interested in it some time ago. But she was sure it was just a myth. Like Bigfoot, or UFOs. She thinks some gangs use it to scare people . . . you know, what do they call it—a bogeyman.”

“Go on.”

“Laura wrote about it a year or so ago. And then she got a number of anonymous notes and emails via her editor. That same symbol on each one. She thinks it's just some crank trying to put the wind up her and make out that it really exists.”

“That what exists?”

“It's called the Forty-Nine. Because there are meant to be forty-nine members from affiliated gangs around the world. A kind of supercrime syndicate. Always forty-nine. When one dies—or disappears—another takes his or her place. Sounds fantastical really, but now with the dots turning up all over the place, well . . .”

“And what has it got to do with the Black Dragon?”

“Laura didn't say. She just wanted to bring you along to . . . show you Hong Kong. What with school being shut and all.”

“And that's all you know?”

Zamora turns to look out the window, but Danny catches his reflection in the glass. Caution. His hands are tensing slightly, as if holding on to something.

“That's all I know about the stupid dots.” Something definitely unsaid. Danny goes to challenge him, and then decides to let it pass. He will trust Zamora. People always said that Zamora had the word
honest
running through him like a stick of rock candy says
Brighton
. If he's not being a hundred percent truthful he must have his reasons. So forget about it for now. Find the right way forward.

It was Dad's contention that any problem—almost any problem—could be solved if you just broke it into small enough parts. He would sit Danny down, with a mug of tea for each of them, at the big table in the trailer, then write a problem in capital letters at the top, like
HOW TO DO THE BURNING ROPE ESCAPE
.

“But it could equally well be how to mend a tap or how to make a cup of tea,” Dad said. “The principle is the same. I call it my atomic strategy. The main thing is that your problem contains masses of other little ones hidden inside it. Maybe ten, maybe a hundred. You have to take it to pieces, so it becomes something like: ‘How to escape from a burning rope, while you're held fast in a straitjacket and you only have sixty seconds to get free.' Then you can see how to break it down further, stage by stage . . .”

He started to draw radiating lines, write down new subheadings, expanding the problem across the sheet.

“And so, old son, the burning rope part has at least nine elements including thickness of rope, the kind of fuel you put on it, and so on . . . and then those can subdivide.”

And pretty soon his tea would be cold and the paper would be covered in writing and lines.

“But that looks impossible,” Danny said.

“No, it's not. It just looks bad. But now all the problems are little ones. Solvable. It's just a matter of working through it one by one. You write them in the order you need to solve them and then you just go at it one at a time, Danny. Lock by lock, so to speak!” And then he crumpled up the paper into a tight ball, tucked it down into his left fist, blew on it—and it was gone, vanished into the bright light from the window. “But we don't want anyone getting their hands on trade secrets, do we now?!”

Danny grabs his notebook. He takes a pen and writes down
HOW TO RESCUE AUNT LAURA
.

He looks at the problem and adds a new line.
How to find Aunt Laura. How to release her
.

Zamora looks over his shoulder. “We'll need clues.”

“We've already got some,” Danny says. “The man in the Bat had a Star Ferry ticket marked today. Yesterday, I mean. The ticket had our room number on the back. He must have been stalking us. And he had a shoe repair receipt for somewhere called the Wuchung Mansions.”

“How do you know?”

“From the man with the ponytail. I checked his pockets.”

“Maybe you should have left that to the police?” Danny shakes his head. He writes down a new line:
Work out who to trust
.

“What do you mean?” asks Zamora.

“When we were answering Lo's questions, he wasn't typing what we said. Not all the time. I could see where his fingers were going. He typed our names all right. But when you said ‘Golden Bat' he typed something that had at least three p's or o's in it. Top right on the keyboard. Like ‘Happy House' for example. Something like that.”

“
Madre mia
—you sure?”

“Sure. Same again when we told him what Laura was doing in Hong Kong. He didn't type ‘journalist.' I think it was ‘shopping!'”

“That's the last thing your aunt would do.”

Danny draws two lines from the last question and puts
Detective Lo
and
Detective Tan
in little boxes.

“Better add Charlie Chow to that list. I don't trust him at all,” Zamora says, tapping the sheet. “Not at all. Made himself scarce. That girl too.”

Danny's hand hesitates for a beat. And then reluctantly he adds Sing Sing to the list.

“We might have one more clue here,” he says, taking the blank Post-it note from his back pocket. He holds the paper up to the light, turns it side on.

“I don't see what that's going to tell you,” Zamora says. “I saw you swipe it, of course. Nicely done.”

Danny takes a pencil from his bag and the craft knife he uses to sharpen it. He snaps the pencil in two, and quickly pares away the wood from one side, exposing the graphite core. He spreads the note out, rubbing the cored pencil across it.

“Clever lad!” Zamora says, leaning over.