Jade Dragon by James Swallow Read Free Book Online Page A

into
deep REM and finally Frankie relaxed. He thought, just once, that he had
seen the Monkey King in the room with him; but that blurred like
rainwater on glass and faded.
    A service bot woke him by singing a traditional folk aria. It was a
silver ball balanced on two convex wheels that emerged from its flanks.
A rotating head presented a pair of cute eyes and a sine wave mouth. It
giggled like a child as it did its chores, making him coffee and tuning
the shower. The device offered him a trio of vitamin and nanobooster
tablets as he got dressed, gravely informing him of the dangers of
dehydration on the international traveller. Frankie didn’t argue; his
face felt like old paper. When he was done, the metal ball rolled away
along the corridor and used arrows projected from laser slits to direct
him to the hotel’s rooftop heliport. Alice was waiting for him in an
idling spidercopter, with Monkey King in the cockpit.
    “Where’s Ping?” The question popped out of his mouth as he strapped
himself into a seat.
    “Occupied,” Alice replied, as the rotodyne drifted off toward the towers
of Central.
    Frankie watched the world go by, the glass and steel skyscrapers passing
beneath him, the near-distant glitter of Kowloon across the bottle green
waters of the bay. There was no need to provide a spidercopter to take
him to Yuk Lung’s headquarters—a car would have got him there almost as
quickly—but the gesture was obviously important. Everything about
Francis Lam’s return to Hong Kong was being choreographed with infinite
care and precision. For his part, Frankie could not be sure if it were
to make him feel special or just inferior.
    Monkey King flew them around the dagger-like shape of the China Bank
building, giving the sheath of protected airspace around the fluted
NeoGen pyramid nearby a wide berth. The rotorplane turned and made an
orbit of the YLHI tower. The company headquarters resembled a column of
creamy green jade rising like a pillar of heaven; bright ribs of lunar
steel studded the sheer walls, and at the level of the ninetieth floor
the ultramodern lines of the tower suddenly stopped. Capping the
building was a reproduction of a Qin Dynasty castle, deposited there
like something from an ancient legend. Only the discreet clusters of
satcomm dishes and ku-band antennae seemed out of place. As the flyer
approached, a helipad unfolded from a hidden balcony to accept them, a
bee settling into an open flower.
    Alice read a message from her watch and beckoned Frankie. “Mr Tze will
receive you in the library.”
    They were met by one of Monkey King’s counterparts. This one had a mask
of green with red and white detail, a little trim of gold here and
there. Frankie searched his mind and came up with a name: Deer Child, a
mountain guardian from an opera that he couldn’t recall the title of.
Deer Child was shorter and stockier than Monkey King, but they were cut
from the same cloth. The masked man had the same smooth gait and
effortless sense of menace about him.
    Frankie followed Alice into the castle and Hong Kong vanished behind
him. Inside, the building was warm and close, full of the natural noise
of feet on stone floors and creaking wooden doors. Tapestries and art
hung on the walls, and there were suits of armour at each intersection
of corridor. Frankie wondered if they were more than they seemed; if an
alarm sounded, would they suddenly leave their plinths and stand to the
defence of the castle’s master?
    He glimpsed other rooms as people passed them along the way, doors
opening and closing with flashes of glass and steel, banks of
holographic monitors and server farms. Behind others came the snapping
of wooden practice swords and the patterns of voices from sparring
fighters. They emerged in the library and Frankie wandered to the centre
of the room to get the measure of the place. Books lined every inch of
vertical space, rising far out of reach to the ceiling. Trios of
full-size terracotta