Jade Dragon by James Swallow Read Free Book Online Page B

soldiers, some holding weapons, guarded discreet
lamps in the corners of the room, looking on across the centuries with
blank stone faces. Frankie hesitated by the low table in the middle of
the library and something made his eyes fall to the oak platform. A box
made of brushed aluminium sat there, shiny and out of place.
    From behind him there came the thud of a heavy door and an intake of
breath that was deep and sonorous.
    “Francis,” said Mr Tze. “Welcome home. I am so sorry we were required to
meet under these terrible circumstances.”
     
    The radiator complained as Ko turned the temperature up a notch or two,
the elderly pipes rumbling and knocking. He padded through the apartment
in his socks, the quiet routine of breakfast so as not to disturb his
sister ingrained in him. He microwaved a couple of meatpockets and made
strong tea. The atmosphere inside the apartment was patchy; where the
kitchen and the closet-sized bathroom lay against the outer wall, it was
chilly and damp from the rain; the two bedrooms and the living room—the
patch of space Nikita laughingly called “the lounge”—were warmer, closer
to the central courtyard in the middle of the block where caged heat
from the lower floors wafted upwards. The apartment felt gloomy and
confined, as if the resonance from their argument on the way home had
followed them in and leached into the walls. The sullen ambience in the
room was infectious.
    Through the walls he could hear the woolly sounds of the Yip family next
door, the strident noise of the mother ordering the kids out to school
and the usual arguments in return. One of Ko’s other neighbours had told
him the Yip boys both had ADHD, but Ko was less inclined to be so
generous. The kids were just noisy, unruly and argumentative, and the
Yips and the Chens had come to loggerheads over it on many occasions.
Nikita didn’t help, with frequent bouts of playing her musichip
collection at ear-stunning volume. Plenty of times Ko had come home to
hear the strains of some Petya Tcherkassoff ballad reaching down the
stairwell from the eleventh floor. He hated that whiney sovpop. Ko’s
musical tastes ran to rapcore and PacRim turbine bands like Nine Milly
Meeta, 100 Yen or the Kanno Krew.
    He glanced over his shoulder as Nikita’s door opened and she clattered
into the bathroom. Ko tried to think of more pleasant things as she went
through her regular purge ritual in there. Watery morning sunshine
filtered in through the peeling UV sheets on the window, casting a faint
cage of shadows across the floor where the safety bars crisscrossed
outside. Ko wandered over, nibbling at his food, letting the hot tea
warm his chilled fingers. In the dull glass he saw a frowning
reflection, and peered past it, scanning the street below. The wan
daylight revealed skinny tower blocks looking like something from the
building set of a patient but unimaginative child, tall rods of
polymerised stone growing out of the face of the Kowloon hillside, their
footprints barely enough to cover the acreage of a conventional two-tier
home like the ones in the walled enclaves. Through the gaps between the
other towers, Ko could spy parts of the city beneath its constant cowl
of yellow-grey smog. Soon that view would be gone forever. Another new
housing project was already sprouting on the hill, a series of con-apts
that would rise to twice the height of Ko’s block. Right now, they were
just greenish humps in the middle distance, fuzzy shapes like desert
cacti from the vat-grown bamboo scaffolds that concealed them. In a few
months they would be finished, and a hundred thousand new citizens would
feed into Hong Kong from across the border. The city had slowly been
advancing out from the bay for centuries, gradually consuming every bit
of spare land from the outlying New Territories. There would come a time
when the Hong Kong Free Economic Enterprise Quadrant would collide with
the ferrocrete wall that marked the edge of True China. Ko