Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

  “What the hell did you do?”

  Bosch dropped the pillow to the floor and raised the window. The car smelled like burnt gunpowder but it was quiet again. He unwrapped the blanket and checked the weapon. It had fired easily and without a jam. He was down to fourteen bullets and was good to go.

  “I had to make sure it worked,” he said. “You don’t carry a gun unless you’re sure.”

  “Are you crazy? You could get us arrested before we get a chance to do anything!”

  “If you keep your voice down and Sun Yee stays in his lane, I think we’ll be fine.”

  Bosch leaned forward and tucked the weapon into his waistband at the small of his back. Its slide was warm against his skin. Up ahead he saw light at the end of the tunnel. They would be in Kowloon soon.

  It was time.

  27

  The tunnel delivered them to Tsim Sha Tsui, the central waterside section of Kowloon, and within a few minutes Sun turned the Mercedes onto Nathan Road. It was a wide, four-lane boulevard lined with high-rise buildings as far as Bosch could see. It was a crowded mix of commercial and residential uses. The first two floors of every building were dedicated to retail and restaurant space, while the floors rising above were residential or office space. The clutter of video screens and signs in Chinese and English was an intense riot of color and motion. The buildings ranged from dowdy midcentury construction to the slick glass-and-steel structures of recent prosperity.

  It was impossible for Bosch to see the top of the corridor from the car. He lowered his window and leaned out in an effort to find the Canon sign, the first marker from the photo generated from his daughter’s abduction video. He couldn’t find it and pulled back into the car. He raised the window.

  “Sun Yee, stop the car.”

  Sun looked at him in the rearview.

  “Stop here?”

  “Yes, here. I can’t see. I have to get out.”

  Sun looked at Eleanor for approval and she nodded.

  “We’ll get out. You find a place to park.”

  Sun pulled to the curb and Bosch jumped out. He’d taken the photo print from his backpack and had it ready. Sun then pulled away, leaving Eleanor and Bosch on the sidewalk. It was now midmorning and the streets and sidewalks were crowded with people. Smoke was in the air and the smell of fire. The hungry ghosts were close. The streetscape was replete with neon, mirrored glass and giant plasma screens broadcasting silent images of jerking motion and staccato edits.

  Bosch referred to the photo and then looked up and traced the skyline.

  “Where’s the Canon sign?” he asked.

  “Harry, you’re mixed up,” Eleanor said.

  She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him completely around.

  “Remember, everything is backwards.”

  She pointed almost directly up, her finger drawing a line up the side of the building they were in front of. Bosch looked up. The Canon sign was directly overhead and at an angle that made it unreadable. He was looking at the bottom edge of the sign’s letters. It was rotating slowly.

  “Okay, got it,” he said. “We start from there.”

  He looked back down and referred to the photo.

  “I think we have to go at least another block further in from the harbor.”

  “Let’s wait for Sun Yee.”

  “Call him and tell him where we’re going.”

  Bosch started off. Eleanor had no choice but to follow.

  “All right, all right.”

  She pulled her phone and started to make the call. As he walked, Bosch kept his eyes high on the buildings, looking for air-conditioning units. A block here was several buildings long. Looking up as he walked, he had a few near misses with other pedestrians. There seemed to be no collective uniformity of walking to your right. People moved every which way and Bosch had to pay attention to avoid collisions. At one point the people moving in front of him suddenly stepped left and right and Bosch almost stumbled over an old woman lying on the pavement, her hands clasped in beseeching prayer above a coin basket. Bosch was able to avoid her and reached into his pocket at the same time.

  Eleanor quickly put her hand on his arm.

  “No. They say any money you give them is taken by the triads at the end of the day.”

  Bosch didn’t question it. He stayed focused on what was ahead of him. They walked another two blocks and then Bosch saw and heard another piece of the puzzle drop into place. Across the street was an entrance to the Mass Transit Railway. A glass enclosure leading to the escalators down to the underground subway.

  “Wait,” Bosch said, stopping. “We’re close.”

  “What is it?” Eleanor asked.

  “The MTR. You could hear it on the video.”

  As if on cue the growing whoosh of escaping air rose as a train came into the underground station. It sounded like a wave. Bosch looked down at the photo in his hand and then up at the buildings surrounding him.

  “Let’s cross.”

  “Can we just wait a minute for Sun Yee? I can’t tell him where to meet us if we keep moving.”

  “Once we’re across.”

  They hurried across the street on a flashing pedestrian signal. Bosch noticed several ragtag women begging for coins near the MTR entrance. More people were coming up out of the station than were going down. Kowloon was getting more and more crowded. The air was thick with humidity and Bosch could feel his shirt sticking to his back.

  Bosch turned around and looked up. They were in an area of older construction. It was almost like having walked through first class to economy on a plane. The buildings on this block and heading further in were shorter—in the twenty-story range—and in poorer condition than those in the blocks closer to the harbor. Harry noticed many open windows and many individual air-conditioning boxes hanging from windows. He could feel the reservoir of adrenaline inside open up.

  “Okay, this is it. She’s in one of these buildings.”

  He started moving down the block to get away from the crowding and loud conversations surrounding the MTR entrance. He kept his eyes on the upper levels of the buildings surrounding him. He was in a concrete canyon and somewhere up there in one of the crevices was his missing daughter.

  “Harry, stop! I just told Sun Yee to meet us at the MTR entrance.”

  “You wait for him. I’ll be just down here.”

  “No, I’m coming with you.”

  Halfway down the block, Bosch stopped and referred to the photo again. But there was no final clue that helped him. He knew he was close but he had reached a point where he needed help or it would be a guessing game. He was surrounded by thousands of rooms and windows. It was beginning to dawn on him that the final part of his search was impossible. He had traveled more than seven thousand miles to find his daughter and he was about as helpless as the ragtag women begging coins from the pavement.

  “Let me see the photo,” Eleanor said.

  Bosch handed it to her.

  “There’s nothing else,” he said. “All these buildings look the same.”

  “Let me just look.”

  She took her time and Bosch watched her regress two decades to the time she was an FBI agent. Her eyes narrowed and she analyzed the photo as an agent, not as the mother of a missing girl.

  “Okay,” she said. “There’s got to be something here.”

  “I thought it would be the air conditioners but they’re on every building around here.”

  Eleanor nodded but kept her eyes on the photo. Just then Sun came up, his face flushed from the exertion of trying to track a moving target. Eleanor said nothing to him but slightly moved her arm to share the photo with him. They had reached a point in their relationship where words weren’t necessary.

  Bosch turned and looked down the corridor of Nathan Road. Whether it was a conscious move or not, he didn’t want to see what he no longer had. From behind he heard Eleanor say, “Wait a minute. There’s a pattern here.”

  Bosch turned back
.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can do this, Harry. There’s a pattern that will lead us right to that room.”

  Bosch felt a ghost run down his spine. He moved in close to Eleanor so he could see the photo.

  “Show it to me,” he said, urgency fueling each word.

  Eleanor pointed to the photo and ran her fingernail along a line of air conditioners reflected in the window.

  “Not every window has an air-conditioning unit in the building we are looking for. Some, like this room, have open windows. So there is a pattern. We only have part of it here because we don’t know where this room is in relation to the building.”

  “It’s probably in the center. The audio analysis picked up muffled voices cut off by the elevator. The elevator is probably centrally located.”

  “That’s good. That helps. Okay, so let’s say windows are dashes and AC boxes are dots. In this reflection we see a pattern for the floor she is on. You start with the room she is in—a dash—and then you go dot, dot, dash, dot, dash.”

  She tapped her nail on each part of the pattern on the photo.

  “So that’s our pattern,” she added. “Looking up at the building, we’d be looking for it going left to right.”

  “Dash, dot, dot, dash, dot, dash,” Bosch repeated. “Windows are dashes.”

  “Right,” Eleanor said. “Should we split up the buildings? We know because of the subway that we’re close.”

  She turned and looked up at the wall of buildings that ran the entire length of the street. Bosch’s first thought was to not trust any of the buildings to anybody else. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had scanned each building for the pattern himself. But he held back. Eleanor had found the pattern and made this break. He would ride her wave.

  “Let’s start,” he said. “Which one should I take?”

  Pointing, she said, “You take that one, I’ll take this one and, Sun Yee, you check that one. If you get done, you leapfrog to the next building. We go till we find it. Start at the top. We know from the photo, the room is up high.”

  She was right, Bosch realized. It would make the search faster than he’d anticipated. He stepped away and went to work on the building he was assigned. He started on the top floor and worked his way down, his eyes scanning back and forth floor by floor. Eleanor and Sun separated and did the same.

  Thirty minutes later Bosch was halfway through scanning his third building when Eleanor called out.

  “I’ve got it!”

  Bosch headed back to her. She had her hand raised and was counting up the floors of the building directly across the street. Sun soon joined them.

  “Fourteenth floor. The pattern starts just a little to the right of center. You were right about that, Harry.”

  Bosch counted the floors, his eyes rising with his hopes. He got to the fourteenth level and identified the pattern. There were twelve windows across in all and the pattern fit the last six windows to the right.

  “That’s it.”

  “Wait a minute. This is only one incidence of the pattern. There could be others. We have to keep—”

  “I’m not waiting. You keep looking. If you find another match for the pattern, call me.”

  “No, we’re not splitting up.”

  He zeroed in on the window that would have been the one that caught the reflection in the video. It was closed now.

  He lowered his eyes to the building’s entrance. The first two levels of the building were retail and commercial use. A band of signage, including two large digital screens, wrapped the entire building. Above this the building’s name was affixed to the facade in gold letters and symbols:

  CHUNGKING MANSIONS

  The main entrance was as wide as a double-car garage door. Through the opening Bosch saw a short set of stairs leading to what looked like a crowded shopping bazaar.

  “This is Chungking Mansions,” Eleanor said, recognition in her voice.

  “You know it?” Bosch asked.

  “I’ve never been here but everybody knows about Chungking Mansions.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the melting pot. It’s the cheapest place in the city to stay and it’s the first stop for every third- and fourth-world immigrant who comes here. Every couple of months you read about somebody being arrested or shot or stabbed and this is their address. It’s like a postmodern Casablanca—all in one building.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Bosch started across the street in the middle of the block, wading into slow-moving traffic, forcing taxis to stop and hoot their horns.

  “Harry, what are you doing?” Eleanor yelled after him.

  Bosch didn’t answer. He made it across and went up the stairs into Chungking Mansions. It was like stepping onto another planet.

  28

  The first thing that hit Bosch as he stepped up into the first level of the Chungking Mansions was the smell. Intense odors of spices and fried food invaded his nostrils as his eyes became accustomed to the dimly lit third-world farmers’ market that spread before him in narrow aisles and warrens. The place was just opening for the day but was already crowded with shopkeepers and customers. Six-foot-wide shop stalls offered everything from watches and cell phones to newspapers of every language and foods of any taste. There was an edgy, gritty feel to the place that left Bosch casually checking his wake every few steps. He wanted to know who was behind him.

  He moved to the center, where he came to an elevator alcove. There was a line fifteen people deep waiting for two elevators, and Bosch noticed that one elevator was open, dark inside and obviously out of commission. There were two security guards at the front of the line, checking to make sure everybody going up had a room key or was with somebody who had a key. Above the door of the one functioning elevator was a video screen that showed its interior. It was crowded to maximum capacity, sardines in a can.

  Bosch was staring at the screen and wondering how he was going to get up to the fourteenth floor when Eleanor and Sun caught up to him. Eleanor roughly grabbed him by the arm.

  “Harry, enough with the one-man army! Don’t run off like that again.”

  Bosch looked at her. It wasn’t anger he saw in her eyes. It was fear. She wanted to be sure she wasn’t without him when she faced whatever there was to face on the fourteenth floor.

  “I just want to keep moving,” Bosch said.

  “Then move with us, not away from us. Are we going up?”

  “We need a key to go up.”

  “Then we have to rent a room.”

  “Where do we do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eleanor looked at Sun.

  “We have to go up.”

  That was all she said but the message was transmitted. He nodded and led them away from the alcove and farther into the labyrinth of shop stalls. Soon they came to a row of counters with signs in multiple languages.

  “You rent the room here,” Sun said. “There is more than one hotel here.”

  “You mean in the building?” Bosch asked. “More than one?”

  “Yes, many. You pick from here.”

  He gestured to the signs on the counters. And Bosch realized that what Sun was saying was that there were multiple hotels within the building, all of them competing for the business of the cut-rate traveler. Some, by virtue of the language on their signs, targeted travelers from specific countries.

  “Ask which one has the fourteenth floor,” he said.

  “There won’t be a fourteenth floor.”

  Bosch realized he was right.

  “Fifteenth, then. Which one has the fifteenth floor?”

  Sun went down the line, asking about the fifteenth floor, until he stopped at the third counter and waved Eleanor and Bosch over.

  “Here.”

  Bosch took in the man behind the counter. He looked like he had been there for forty years. His bell-shaped body seemed form-fitted to the stool he sat on. He was smoking a cigarette attached to a f
our-inch holder made of carved bone. He didn’t like getting smoke in his eyes.

  “Do you speak English?” Bosch asked.

  “Yes, I have English,” the man said tiredly.

  “Good. We want a room on the four—the fifteenth floor.”

  “All of you? One room?”

  “Yes, one room.”

  “No, you can’t one room. Only two persons.”

  Bosch realized that he meant the maximum occupancy of each room was two people.

  “Then give me two rooms on fifteen.”

  “You do.”

  The deskman slid a clipboard across the counter. There was a pen attached with a string and under the clip a thin stack of registration forms. Bosch quickly scribbled his name and address and slid the board back across the counter.

  “ID, passport,” the deskman said.

  Bosch pulled his passport and the man checked it. He wrote the number down on a piece of scratch paper and handed it back.

  “How much?” Bosch asked.

  “How long you stay?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  The deskman moved his eyes over all three of them as he considered what Bosch’s answer meant.

  “Come on,” Bosch said impatiently. “How much?”

  He reached into his pocket for his cash.

  “Two hundred American.”

  “I don’t have American. I have Hong Kong dollars.”

  “Two room, one thousand five hundred.”

  Sun stepped forward and put his hand down over Bosch’s money.

  “No, too much.”

  He started speaking quickly and authoritatively to the deskman, refusing to let him take advantage of Bosch. But Harry didn’t care. He cared about momentum, not the money. He peeled fifteen hundred off his roll and threw it on the desk.

  “Keys,” he demanded.

  The deskman disengaged from Sun and swiveled around to the double row of cubbyholes behind him. As he selected two keys from the slots, Bosch looked at Sun and shrugged.

  But when the deskman turned back and Bosch put out his hand, he withheld the keys.