Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch suddenly felt a vibration in his pocket and realized that he had not muted his phone. Luckily the man showing the apartment was continuing what was probably the sales pitch about how great the place was. His voice covered any notice of the low-level vibration. Bosch quickly worked his hand into his pocket and pulled the phone to see if the call was from his daughter’s phone. He would have to answer such a call, no matter the circumstance.

  He reached the phone up into the box spring so he could see it. The call was from Barbara Starkey, the video tech, and Bosch hit the call-decline button. That was a callback he could make later.

  Opening the phone to check the call had activated the screen. The dim light illuminated the inside of the box spring and Bosch saw a gun jammed behind one of the wooden slats of the frame.

  Bosch’s heart kicked its beat up a notch as he stared at the gun. But he decided not to touch it until the apartment was empty again. He closed the phone and waited. Soon he heard the visitors on the staircase going down. It sounded like they took another quick look around the lower level and then left.

  Bosch heard the dead bolt being locked from the outside. He then pushed his way out from under the bed.

  After waiting a few moments to make sure the rental party was gone for good, he turned the overhead light back on. He moved back to the bed and pushed the mattress off the box spring, leaning it against the rear wall of the loft. He then raised the box spring and leaned it against the mattress. He looked in at the gun, still held in place by the wood framework.

  He still could not see it clearly so he pulled his phone again, opened it and used it as a flashlight by holding it in close to the weapon.

  “Damn,” he said out loud.

  He was looking for a Glock, the gun with a rectangular firing pin. The gun hidden under Chang’s bed was a Smith & Wesson.

  There was nothing here of use to him. Bosch realized that once again he was at ground zero. As if to accentuate this point, a tiny beeping sound came from his watch. He reached to his wrist and turned it off. He had set the alarm earlier so as not to risk missing his flight. It was time for him to head to the airport.

  After putting the bed back in place, Bosch turned the light off in the loft and quietly slipped out of the apartment. His plan was to go home first to pick up his passport and lock up his gun. He would not be allowed to carry the weapon into a foreign country without that country’s approval—a process that would take days if not weeks. He didn’t plan to pack any clothes because he didn’t see himself having time to change clothes in Hong Kong. He was on a mission that would begin the moment he stepped off the plane.

  He got on the 10 west from Monterey Park and planned on taking the 101 up through Hollywood to his home. He started mulling over a plan for directing police to the gun hidden in Chang’s former apartment but as of now there was no probable cause to hit the place. Still, the gun needed to be found and examined. It was of no use to Bosch in the John Li investigation but that didn’t mean Chang had used it for good deeds and philanthropy. It had been used for triad business and it could very likely lead to something.

  As he was taking the 101 north along the edges of the civic center, Bosch remembered the call from Barbara Starkey. He checked for a message on his phone and heard Starkey tell him to call her as soon as possible. It sounded like maybe she had made a break. Bosch hit the callback button.

  “Barbara, it’s Harry.”

  “Harry, yes, I was hoping to get to you before I go home.”

  “You should’ve gone home about three hours ago.”

  “Yeah, well, I told you I would look at this thing.”

  “Thank you, Barbara. It means a lot. What did you find?”

  “A couple things. First of all, I have a printout here that is a little sharper if you want it.”

  Bosch was disappointed. It sounded like there wasn’t much more than what he already had and she just wanted to let him know there was a clearer picture of the view out the window of the room where his daughter was held. Sometimes, he had noticed, when somebody did a favor for you, they really wanted you to know it. But he decided he would just make do with what he had. A jog in off the freeway to pick up the picture would take too much time. He had a plane to catch.

  “Anything else?” he asked. “I have to get to the airport.”

  “Yes, I have a couple other visual and audio identifiers that might help you,” Starkey said.

  Bosch paid full attention now.

  “What are they?”

  “Well, one I think might be a train or a subway. Another is a snippet of conversation that is not Chinese. And the last one I think is a silent helicopter.”

  “What do you mean silent?”

  “I mean literally silent. I have a flash reflection in the window of a helicopter going by, but I don’t have any real audio track to go with it.”

  Bosch didn’t respond at first. He knew what she was talking about. The Whisper Jet helicopters that the rich and powerful used to move over and around Hong Kong. He had seen them. Commuting by helicopter wasn’t uncommon but he also knew only a few buildings in each district were allowed to operate landing pads on their roofs. One reason his ex-wife chose the building where she lived in Happy Valley was that it had a helicopter pad on the roof. She could get to the casino in Macau in twenty minutes door-to-door instead of the two hours it would take to leave the building, get to the ferry docks, take a boat across the harbor and then cab or walk from the dock to the casino.

  “Barbara, I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said.

  He exited on Los Angeles Street and headed over to Parker Center. Because of the late hour, Bosch had his pick of spaces in the garage behind the old police headquarters. He parked and then quickly crossed the street and entered through the back door. The elevator up seemed to take forever, and when he walked into the mostly abandoned SID lab, it had actually been seven minutes since he had closed the phone.

  “You’re late,” Starkey said.

  “Sorry, thanks for waiting.”

  “I’m just giving you a hard time. I know you’re on the run, so let’s just look at this thing.”

  She pointed to one of her screens where there was a frozen image of the window from the phone video. It was what Bosch had printed out. Starkey put her hands on the dials.

  “Okay,” she said. “Keep your eyes up here at the top of the glass reflection. We didn’t see—or hear—this before.”

  She turned one dial slowly, reversing the tape. In the murky glass reflection Bosch saw what he had not seen before. Just as the aim of the camera started its swing back toward his daughter, a helicopter moved across the top of the reflection like a ghost. It was a small black craft with some sort of unreadable insignia on its side.

  “Now here it is in real time.”

  She backed the video up until the camera was focused on Bosch’s daughter and she was kicking at it. Starkey hit a button and it went by in real time. The camera swung toward the window for a split second and then back. Bosch’s eyes registered the window but never the reflection of the city, let alone a passing helicopter.

  It was a good find and Bosch was excited.

  “The thing is, Harry, to be in that window that chopper has to be flying pretty low.”

  “So it either just took off or it was landing.”

  “I think it was ascending. It appears to rise slightly as it crosses the reflection. Nothing you can really see with the eye but I measured it. Considering the reflection shows right to left what is occurring left to right, it would have taken off from a location on the opposite side of the street from the building this video was taken in.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Now when I look for an audio track…”

  She switched to the other screen where there was an audiograph showing different isolated streams of audio she had taken from the video.

  “…and take out as much of the competing sound as I can, I get this.”

  She played a trac
k with almost a flatline graph and all Bosch could hear was distant traffic noise that was chopped into waves.

  “That’s rotor wash,” she said. “You don’t hear the helicopter itself but it’s disrupting the ambient noise. It’s like a stealth chopper or something.”

  Bosch nodded. He had moved a step closer. He now knew his daughter was held in a building near one of the few rooftop helicopter pads in Kowloon.

  “That help?” Starkey asked.

  “You better believe it.”

  “Good. I also have this.”

  She played another track and it contained a low hissing sound that reminded Bosch of rushing water. It began, grew louder and then dissipated.

  “What is it? Water?”

  Starkey shook her head.

  “This is with maximum amplification,” she said. “I had to work at this. It’s air. Escaping air. I would say you are talking about an entrance to an underground subway station or maybe a vent through which displaced air is channeled up and out when a train comes into the station. Modern subways don’t make a lot of noise. But there is a lot of air displacement when a train comes through the tunnel.”

  “Got it.”

  “Your location is up high here. Maybe twelve, thirteen stories, judging by the reflection. So this audio is hard to pinpoint. Could be ground level to this building or a block away. Hard to tell.”

  “It still helps.”

  “And the last thing is this.”

  She played the first part of the video when the camera was holding on Bosch’s daughter and just showing her. She brought up the sound and filtered out competing audio tracks. Bosch heard a muffled line of dialogue.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “I think it might be outside the room. I haven’t been able to clean it up any better. It’s muffled by structure and it doesn’t sound Chinese to me. But I don’t think that’s what is important.”

  “Then, what is?”

  “Listen again to the end of it.”

  She played it again. Bosch stared at his daughter’s scared eyes while concentrating on the audio. It was a male voice that was too muffled to be understood or translated and then it abruptly ended in what sounded like midsentence.

  “Somebody cut him off?”

  “Or maybe an elevator door closed and that cut him off.”

  Bosch nodded. The elevator seemed like a more likely explanation because there had been no stress in the tone of the voice before the cutoff.

  Starkey pointed at the screen.

  “So when you find the building, you’ll find this room close to the elevator.”

  Bosch stared at his daughter’s eyes for one last and long moment.

  “Thank you, Barbara.”

  He stood behind her and gave her shoulders a squeeze.

  “You got it, Harry.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “You said you were heading to the airport. Are you going to Hong Kong?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good luck, Harry. Go get your daughter.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Bosch quickly returned to his car and raced back to the freeway. Rush-hour traffic had thinned out and he made good time as he headed through Hollywood to the Cahuenga Pass and home. He started focusing on Hong Kong. L.A. and everything here would soon be behind him. It would be all about Hong Kong now. He was going to find his daughter and bring her home. Or he was going to die trying.

  All his life Harry Bosch believed he had a mission. And to carry out that mission he needed to be bulletproof. He needed to build himself and his life so that he was invulnerable, so that nothing and no one could ever get to him. All of that changed on the day he was introduced to the daughter he didn’t know he had. In that moment he knew he was both saved and lost. He would be forever connected to the world in the way only a father knew. But he would also be lost because he knew the dark forces he faced would one day find her. It didn’t matter if an entire ocean was between them. He knew one day it would come to this, that the darkness would find her and that she would be used to get to him.

  That day was now.

  PART TWO: The 39-Hour Day

  23

  Bosch got only fitful sleep on the flight over the Pacific. Fourteen hours in the air, pressed against a window in the coach cabin, he never managed to sleep more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time before thoughts of his daughter and his guilt over her predicament intruded and jarred him awake.

  By moving too fast to think during the day, he had kept himself ahead of the fear and guilt, the brutal recriminations. He was able to put it all aside because the pursuit was more important than the baggage he was carrying. But on Cathay Pacific flight 883 he could run no more. He knew he needed to sleep to be rested and ready for the day ahead in Hong Kong. But on the plane he was cornered and could no longer put his guilt and fear aside. The dread engulfed him. He spent most of the hours sitting in darkness, fists balled tightly and eyes staring blankly, as the jet hurtled through the black toward the place where Madeline was somewhere hidden. It made sleep fleeting if not altogether impossible.

  The headwinds over the Pacific were weaker than anticipated and the plane picked up time on the schedule, landing early at the airport on Lantau Island at 4:55 A.M. Bosch rudely pushed around passengers reaching for belongings in overhead bins and made his way to the front of the plane. He carried only a small backpack containing things he thought might help him find and rescue his daughter. When the jet’s door opened he moved quickly and soon took over the lead of all passengers heading toward customs and immigration. Fear stabbed at him as he approached the first screening point—a thermoscan designed to identify fever carriers. Bosch was sweating. Had the guilt burning in his conscious manifested itself as a fever? Would he be stopped before he had even begun the most important mission of all?

  He glanced back at the computer screen as he passed by. He saw the images of travelers turned to blue ghosts on the screen. No telltale blooms of red. No fever. At least not yet.

  At the customs checkpoint an inspector flipped through his passport and saw the entry and exit stamps from the many trips he had made in the past six years. He then checked something on a computer screen Bosch couldn’t see.

  “You have business in Hong Kong, Mr. Bosch?” the inspector asked.

  He had somehow butchered the single syllable of Bosch’s last name, making it sound like Botch.

  “No,” Bosch said. “My daughter lives here and I come to visit her pretty often.”

  He eyed the backpack slung over Bosch’s shoulder.

  “You checked your bags?”

  “No, I just have this. It’s a quick trip.”

  The inspector nodded and looked back at his computer. Bosch knew what was going to happen. Invariably when he arrived in Hong Kong the immigration inspector saw his law enforcement classification on the computer and put him into the search queue.

  “Have you brought your weapon with you?” the inspector asked.

  “No,” Bosch said tiredly. “I know that’s not allowed.”

  The inspector typed something on his computer and then directed Bosch, as expected, into a chute for a search of his bag. It would waste another fifteen minutes but Harry stayed cool. He had gained a half hour on the schedule with his early arrival.

  The second inspector carefully went through the backpack and made curious looks at the binoculars and other items, including the envelope stuffed with cash. But none of it was illegal to enter the country with. When he was finished he asked Bosch to step through a metal detector and then he was cleared. Harry headed into the baggage terminal and spotted a money exchange window that was open despite the early hour. He stepped up, pulled the cash envelope out of his backpack again and told the woman behind the glass he wanted to change five thousand U.S. dollars into Hong Kong dollars. It was Bosch’s earthquake money, cash he kept hidden in the gun locker in his bedroom. He had learned a valuable lesson back in ’94 when an earthquake roc
ked L.A. and severely damaged his house. Cash is king. Don’t leave home without it. Now the money he kept hidden for just such a crisis would hopefully help him overcome another. The exchange rate was a little less than eight to one, and his five thousand American became thirty-eight thousand Hong Kong dollars.

  After getting his money he headed to the exit doors on the other side of the baggage terminal. The first surprise of the day came when he saw Eleanor Wish waiting for him in the main hall of the airport. She was standing next to a man in a suit who had the feet-splayed posture of a bodyguard. Eleanor made a small gesture with her hand in case Harry hadn’t noticed her. He saw the mixture of pain and hope on her face and had to drop his eyes to the floor as he approached.

  “Eleanor. I didn’t—”

  She grabbed him in a quick and awkward embrace that abruptly ended his sentence. He understood that she was telling him that blame and recriminations were for later. There were more important things now. She then stepped away and gestured to the man in the suit.

  “This is Sun Yee.”

  Bosch nodded but then put out his hand, a gesture he hoped would help him figure out what to call Sun Yee.

  “Harry,” he said.

  The other man nodded back and gripped his hand tightly but said nothing. No help there. He would have to take Eleanor’s cue with the name. Bosch guessed Sun Yee was in his late forties. Eleanor’s age. He was short but powerfully built. His chest and arms pressed the contours of the silk suit jacket to the limit. He wore sunglasses although it was still before dawn.

  Bosch turned to his ex-wife.

  “He’s driving us?”

  “He’s helping us,” she corrected. “He works in security at the casino.”

  Bosch nodded. That was one mystery solved.

  “Does he speak English?”

  “Yes, I do,” the man answered for himself.

  Bosch studied him for a moment and then looked at Eleanor and saw in her face a familiar resolve. It was a look he had seen many times when they had been together. She wasn’t going to allow an argument on this. This man was part of the package or Bosch was on his own.