Code Name Komiko

by Naomi Paul

  Lian stayed focused on that bright pink as she made her way down to the rocks at the water’s edge, stumbling and skidding a little on the patchy terrain. She dimly heard Mingmei’s voice behind her, calling out for Lian not to get too close.

  But there was no way Lian could keep away.

  The body was floating facedown, the arm trapped at an awkward angle. Midway between wrist and elbow, a silvery charm bracelet hung, the skin swollen on either side of it. Hardly daring to breathe, Lian drew up close, braced her foot in a crevice, and peered over the rocks for a better look.

  The dead girl was about Lian’s size and, she guessed, roughly her age. She wore a smart white blouse, a charcoal-gray pencil skirt, two socks, one shoe—which meant that she most likely was not planning on going to the beach when she set out on what she did not know would be the last day of her life.

  Lian straightened, shielded her eyes, and shouted up to Mingmei. “Go! Get our phones, call the police, tell the lifeguards!”

  Mingmei half shrugged and held out her arms, shaking her head. She was communicating that she couldn’t hear what Lian had said.

  Lian flashed nine fingers, three times, and then held her hand to her ear like a phone.

  Mingmei stood stock still for a moment longer, and then finally seemed to understand. She took off like a shot for the beach. Lian was alone with a floating girl and a growing list of questions.

  An hour later, the flashing blue lights from the police vans were turning everyone’s skin the same color as the corpse’s. The police had cordoned off the immediate area with an efficient, brusque manner, but a junior officer had been kind enough to offer Lian a blanket as she sat shivering on the rocky slope. Behind her, the sunbathers on Big Wave were being ushered off the beach, directed around the closed section of the Dragon’s Back, and kept at a respectable distance from the crime scene.

  “I promise, I’m fine, Mum,” Lian said into her phone in the most reassuring tone she could muster. “Mingmei, too. We were both a little freaked out, but everything’s okay.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” her mother said. “To be the one to stumble across. . . . I can’t even imagine.” Her voice was shaky, on the edge of tears.

  “I’ll be home soon, okay? The police have already taken my statement. I’m just waiting for them to finish with Mingmei.”

  There was a pause in which Lian felt certain her mother was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. Her mom was a world-class worrier. “Just . . . be careful,” she said at last, as if Lian were in any danger with all the cops around. “We’ll see you soon. I love you, little panda.”

  Lian blushed. She generally wished that her parents would stop using the nickname, even when they only did so in private. This time, though, she was grateful for the warmth that the embarrassment brought to her cheeks. She said good-bye and hung up, wiping her phone’s screen with the corner of the blanket. Her hair was still wet, and she pushed it back from her eyes as she cast her gaze back down to the sea.

  A police boat had anchored a little way out from the shore. Two divers had gingerly freed the dead girl’s arm from the crag and loaded her onto a floating gurney. Even from up here, Lian could still see that bold pink polish; it was a fun color, a young color, totally absurd as decoration for a now-lifeless hand.

  On a nearly empty beach, under gathering clouds, Lian’s mind had nothing to do but wonder about the girl. Who was she? What sort of person had she been; what sort of daughter, student, friend? What choices had she made in her short life that had led her here?

  Had she taken her own life . . . or had it been taken from her?

  An ashen hand fell on Lian’s shoulder, and she tensed. But it was only Mingmei, finished with her statement and more than ready to leave the beach. The carefully regimented sunbathing had all been in vain, Lian thought as she stood; her friend was twice as pale as when they’d arrived at Big Wave.

  Lian folded the blanket into a tidy square as the junior officer approached them. He was a baby-faced young man, maybe only a year or two out of training school, Lian guessed. “Oh, you’re welcome to keep it,” he said as Lian offered the blanket back to him.

  She smiled slightly. “I’m declining on my mother’s behalf. I don’t think she’d be thrilled to have a souvenir from today in the house.”

  The officer nodded and accepted the blanket. “Of course, of course. Not a pleasant thing to be reminded of.”

  “Have you seen many cases like this?” Lian asked him, trying to keep her tone casual but keen to garner any insight she could into the case. The shock of discovering the corpse was wearing off—now her mind was going to work in the way that she had long ago trained it to.

  The young officer sighed. “More than I care for. There are a couple thousand suicides a year in Hong Kong. The currents bring ones like this right back into our laps.”

  “So, you think this was a suicide?” Lian asked, wincing at the eagerness in her voice.

  The officer gave her a curt smile, as if he’d already said too much. “We’ll have to see what the coroner says,” he told her. “You’ve both been very helpful, thank you. Can we offer you a lift home?”

  Again, that courteous efficiency; it sounded like a kind offer, Lian thought, but it was really a way to hurry the girls off the beach now that their usefulness had expired.

  “Thank you, but no,” she said, reaching out to take Mingmei’s clammy hand. “We don’t want to be any trouble. We’ll just take the bus back.”

  The junior officer nodded again and stepped aside so they could continue up the rocky slope to the trail. Lian didn’t relish the hike back over to Shek O to wait for the bus, but a ride home in the back of the police van would have been more frustrating. She didn’t trust herself not to pester the officers with questions, and she knew they wouldn’t be forthcoming with any real answers. Besides, Mingmei looked like she could use a walk in the fresh air to get a little color back in her cheeks.

  “You okay?” Lian asked.

  Mingmei blinked a couple of times, and then said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right. It’s just . . . I’ve never been that close to a . . . a dead body. It freaked me out.” She stopped in her tracks and looked at Lian. “Didn’t it freak you out, too?”

  “Of course it did,” Lian said, giving her friend’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “You, uh, you handled it a lot better than I did. Staying down there, with that poor girl. I don’t think I could have done that.”

  Lian cast one last look down at the rocks where she’d kept her lonesome vigil. The girl was on dry land now, the crime scene officers already swarming with their evidence bags in hand. A rising hum drew her eyes out past the body and to the bay, where a speedboat pulled in with a flourish. It didn’t have police markings, but those were definitely Hong Kong Police Force uniforms on the men on board.

  All but one of them, at any rate. Squinting, Lian could see a paunchy man in a blue tracksuit on the speedboat’s deck, barking orders at the cops. With his aviator sunglasses, jowls, and potbelly, he didn’t cut an immediately imposing figure, but the men all snapped to attention at his commands and set about their business.

  Maybe a plainclothes detective, Lian guessed. A man with a plan, an expert at these kinds of scenes.

  Lian realized that she and Mingmei had paused for too long on the hillside. A couple of the officers looked up at them, and Lian quickly dropped to one knee.

  “What are you doing?” Mingmei asked her.

  “Pretending to tie my shoes,” Lian said, sliding her cell phone out from the towel in which it was bundled.

  “But you’re wearing flip-flops,” Mingmei protested.

  “Hence the ‘pretending.’”

  Lian propped her phone against her ankle and brushed its screen with her fingertip, scrolling to the camera icon.

  “Come on, Lian. We’re going to miss our bus.”

  “Just give me two seconds,” Lian insisted, zooming in as close a
s she could to the man in the tracksuit. She clicked the shutter three times in rapid succession, then twice more as the man turned and she could capture his profile.

  “You’re being a weirdo again,” Mingmei said, nudging her gently with her sandal.

  “Maybe,” Lian said, thumbing off the phone and slipping it back into the towel. She couldn’t have articulated it, but something about the man had struck her as vaguely suspicious.

  As they headed toward the roped-off section of the Dragon’s Back, Mingmei hugged herself and shivered. Lian suddenly wished for her friend’s sake that she’d kept the police blanket after all.

  But the photos would have to serve as her sole keepsake of their strange, sad afternoon at the beach.

  THREE

  5:53 PM HKT — Komiko has logged on

  Komiko: Sorry I’m late, guys. I promise I have a good reason.

  Crowbar: Dont worry, youre not late, its not 6 yet!

  Torch: We agreed to 15 min, just us three, before the newbie signed in. So yes, Komiko *IS* late.

  Torch: But lay your reason on us.

  Komiko: Got delayed by a dead girl.

  Torch: ?

  Torch: That might just be a good reason, after all.

  Crowbar: 4 real what do U mean?

  Lian sat back in her desk chair and took a deep breath. Every time she dove into one of these chats with the rest of 06/04, she had to brace herself against Crowbar’s lack of punctuation and insistence on homophonic shorthand. But having to puzzle out whether “2” meant “to” or “too” or actually just “two” was a petty annoyance, she knew, and a small price to pay for Crowbar’s contributions to the cause.

  Komiko: Body was found a little west of Big Wave. Young girl, about 16–18.

  She’d very nearly typed “about my age,” but that would have violated the first and most important rule of the group: no identifying details. “Lian” didn’t exist in this chat room, and “Komiko” didn’t exist outside it. She didn’t know the age, race, profession, or even the gender of her two comrades, nor they hers. It was safer that way; they couldn’t be coerced to spill information they’d never had to begin with.

  Strength in anonymity.

  Which is not to say that Lian hadn’t formed her own mental images of her chat partners, based on the questions they asked, the causes they championed, and even the apostrophes they neglected to use.

  Crowbar: U got 2 see the body? What stage? Macerated?

  For example, Lian wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Crowbar—whoever he or she was—had something to do with the medical profession, or at the very least had several well-worn texts from the field. This wasn’t the first time that Crowbar had tossed out a term that Lian had to look up in a separate browser window.

  Komiko: Some swelling, yes. Her skin was kind of gray/blue. She was face down, I couldn’t tell how much damage there was.

  Crowbar: 99% of corpses face down in h2o . . . more bacteria in the torso means more gas so it floats & limbs hang

  Torch: Appetizing image.

  Crowbar: U snap any pix?

  Lian ejected the memory stick—a 16-gig drive encased in a lucky rabbit’s foot—from her laptop, clicked the USB cable into her phone’s port, and quickly uploaded the photos of the man in the tracksuit. She was playing a hunch, and maybe it was nothing. But if anyone could identify the man or hunt down the facts on him, she felt sure it would be her compatriots in 06/04.

  The name, of course, was a nod to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the unforgettable military actions on June 4. Students and intellectuals in cities throughout Main-land China had begun demonstrating in favor of liberalization. What started as a small-scale tribute to the late, deposed General Secretary Hu Yaobang soon became a sweeping, nationwide demand for political and economic reform. The conservative government declared martial law, and on that dark day in June, the People’s Liberation Army mowed down thousands of civilians in the areas around the square.

  Lian hadn’t even been alive then, and learning the facts of the massacre had been an uphill battle. Her textbooks had contained no mention of this event, and the Chinese Communist Party blocked Web searches. For most of her life, the protests had been a mythical thing. They existed only in guarded whispers in the school hallways, or in overheard conversations when her parents thought she was asleep. Lian had become fascinated by these hidden injustices and by the smoke and mirrors that had been used to cover up the facts.

  But a quote from Stewart Brand, lettered in tidy zhōngwén script and pinned to her corkboard, reminded Lian every day: “Information wants to be free.” She had pieced together the whole story and had been stunned enough to seek out the like-minded souls of 06/04. Together, they would effect change in this nation—and in this world.

  One tracksuited fat man at a time, if need be.

  Komiko: No photos of the girl; didn’t have my phone then. But this guy showed up and started bossing the cops around. He set off any alarms for you guys?

  5:57 PM HKT — Komiko has uploaded five JPGs

  Crowbar: I got nothing

  Torch: Nice work with the full-on and side shots. That should make it easier for me to find something on him.

  Komiko: Thanks. Eager to see what you turn up.

  Whatever info there was on the man, Lian felt sure that Torch would root it out. Much of what she’d learned about Tiananmen, and about other abuses of government power, had come from following the 06/04 blog back when she lived on the mainland. Torch pushed reams of stolen data onto the short-lived mirror sites, and Lian had devoured as much as she could before each URL went dead. She didn’t know anything about Torch as a person—though, from the proper grammar and the bullish attitude, she’d long suspected an educated male and had taken to thinking in terms of “him”—but as a hacker, he was without peer.

  Lian dithered, though, on whether she thought Crowbar might be an older female health professional or a young schoolboy with anatomy textbooks tucked under his mattress; the depth of knowledge sometimes felt out of step with the juvenile typos and emoticons.

  Crowbar: U guys think Blossom is goin 2 show?

  Torch: Doubting she will, at this point. Maybe we work best as a trio anyway.

  Komiko: Wait, why do you think it’s a “she” we’re talking about?

  Torch: . . .

  Torch: Seriously? With a handle like “Blossom,” I think it’s pretty obvious.

  Komiko: What happened to never taking anything for granted? Besides, he/she/it, makes no difference. Blossom has earned a place in 06/04 and deserves a warm welcome.

  Crowbar: Agreed x 1000

  Lian smiled. At least two of them were on the same page. This wasn’t the first time that Torch had suggested keeping their membership capped at three, but the group hadn’t felt quite whole since Mynah Bird’s arrest two months back. That had taken them all by surprise: Mynah had turned out to be a forty-year-old environmental activist, caught in the act of heavy-duty corporate theft. They had known from his sometimes-manic posts that he was a risk-taker who recklessly skirted the law, and he’d gone one step too far with a digital signature in his bank-hacking code. Now he was in jail—or worse—and, after weeks of discussion, the group was ready to fill his chair.

  She was just thankful that Mynah had been the paranoid type who deleted all his 06/04 files every time he logged off. The authorities hadn’t connected him to the group, which meant that their work could continue even in his absence.

  Lian heard the click of her bedroom doorknob turning. She quickly keyed the letters “BRB”—“be right back”—and hit the function key to kick her laptop into screensaver mode. By the time her mother entered the room, there was nothing more damning on display than digitized woodcuts of pandas among bamboo.

  “You always knock so quietly!” Lian said with a smile.

  Her mother turned back to the door and gave a knock on the inside. “Sorry, little panda. I wasn’t thinking. We’re leaving for the restaurant in
half an hour. You need to get changed.”

  “Fine, fine,” Lian said, standing up and moving between her mother and the computer. “I just have to wrap up a couple of things online, okay?”

  “You spend too much time online, Lian. There’s a whole world that doesn’t fit inside your computer. It’s not normal for a pretty girl like you to hibernate playing video games all day.”

  “Well,” Lian said, ushering her mother back into the hall. “You’ll be horrified to know that you and Mingmei are on the same page about something. Why don’t the two of you get together over bubble tea and figure out what’s best for me? Let me know what you decide.”

  “Half an hour, Lian.”

  “Not a second later,” Lian said, closing the door. She sat back down at her desk and returned to the chat just as a new message popped up.

  6:00 PM HKT—Blossom has requested access to this conversation

  Crowbar: [Allow]

  Torch: [Allow]

  Komiko: [Allow]

  And just like that, 06/04 had a new member.

  Crowbar: Welcome & glad U R on the team! So much 2 B done

  Blossom: Thank you. An honor and a little overwhelming. Not sure Im ready for the big leagues.