Matt jumped.
Even as his feet left the deck, the fireworks went off. There were thousands of pounds worth in the hold. A tonne of gunpowder. But there was nothing beautiful about the explosion. It was just a blinding, burning wheel of fire that seemed to take Richard and hurl him into the air. That was the last thing Matt saw before he hit the water. For a moment everything was panic. The sea was black and freezing. He was still wearing his clothes and trainers. He was being sucked down. He had to fight with all his strength just to get back to the surface.
He emerged, gasping for air, into a brilliant, blazing nightmare. It was as if the whole night was on fire. Moon Moth was alight. The fire was burning so intensely that the metal plates would surely melt away. With no one to steer it, the boat had turned a full circle and was ploughing into the police launches, which had been too slow to get out of the way. It was right in the middle of them and Matt could just make out figures in helmets and full riot gear staring at the destruction, knowing that they were too close, that they were part of it. One of their boats was already on fire. The tall man was still howling – but this time in agony. Every part of him was on fire. His suit and the skin beneath it were peeling away. At the very end, his head split open and something began to snake out of it – a second head, but not a human one. Then there was a great rush of white flame as more of the fireworks exploded and he was blown out of sight.
Individual fireworks were going off, one after another and Matt saw cascades of red, blue, white, green and yellow as blazing missiles were shot into the air, reflecting in the water below. About fifty rockets screamed out at once, some of them twisting into the sky, others slamming into the police boats. One of them spluttered across the water and plunged down in front of him, missing his head by inches. He saw a policeman on fire, jumping into the water to save himself. Another was less lucky. He seemed to be holding a spinning Catherine wheel, unable to let go of it even though it was burning into his chest. Fireworks were cracking and buzzing and whining all around him. He didn’t make it into the sea. He died where he stood.
Matt was treading water, forcing himself to breathe. He was so cold that his lungs had shut down. He knew that he couldn’t stay out here much longer. Two of the police boats were undamaged. Very soon they would be looking for him. But where was Richard? Where was Jamie? The surface of the water was like a black mirror, reflecting the light, but he couldn’t see them anywhere. He wanted to shout out for them but he didn’t dare. The policemen would have heard him.
There was only one thing he could do. The edge of the water was about a hundred metres away. He had to get to dry land and hope to find them there. He took one last look and then turned round and began to swim, slowed down by his clothes. The glow from the flames spread out over his shoulders, helping to light the way, and there were more bangs and fizzes as the last fireworks went off. He heard someone shouting an order in Chinese but doubted that they’d seen him. He was wearing dark clothes. His hair was dark. The currents were carrying him away.
He reached land without even realizing it. Suddenly there was a slimy concrete slope under his knees. He crawled onto it and pulled himself out. He was on a building site. That was what it looked like. It was hard to tell as he squatted in the darkness, shivering, filthy water dripping out of his hair.
“Richard? Jamie?”
He didn’t dare call too loudly. The whole city – anyone who was awake – must have seen the firework display. The Old Ones knew he was there. They would already be searching.
“Richard? Jamie?”
There was no reply.
He waited ten minutes before he made a decision and set off, moving while he still could. If he stayed still much longer, he would freeze.
It was three o’clock in the morning. He had entered the enemy city. He had no idea where he was going. He was dripping wet. He was unarmed.
And he was alone.
NECROPOLIS
Leaving the water behind him, Matt made for the wall of light that defined the edge of Hong Kong. He came to a main road, empty at this time of the night, with a block of luxury hotels and shopping centres on the far side. The smog was worse than ever. The entire city reeked of it, like a chemical swamp. He had only been there for a few minutes but he already had a nagging headache and his eyes were smarting.
Where were Richard and Jamie? He had to find them. He was lost without them. Jamie had been the first off the boat and although Matt hadn’t seen Richard jump, he must surely have followed moments later. Like him, the two of them must have swum ashore – unless the police had managed to find them first. The thought of his friends in captivity sickened him.
He tried to shake off the sense of hopelessness. He had to work out what to do. Get in touch with the Triads. There were a thousand of them, waiting to help him, but the way things had turned out, it wasn’t going to be so easy after all. Han Shan-tung had given them a mobile with a direct dial. Richard had been carrying it. But it would have been made useless the moment it hit the water. And then there was Shan-tung’s son, Lohan. He would already know that something had gone wrong. Presumably his men would be searching for them all over the city.
But Matt had no way of contacting them. He remembered the address of the place where they were supposed to be going, a warehouse on the Salisbury Road. But that was on the other side of the harbour, in Kowloon. Matt had no map and no money. He was soaking wet. It was the middle of the night. How was he supposed to get there?
He was already finding it hard to walk. Every time his foot came down, his shoes squelched and he felt the water rise over his foot. His shirt and trousers were clinging to him, digging in under his arms and between his legs. As he crossed the road and passed between the first of the buildings, he wondered if it wasn’t a little warmer here than it had been in the harbour. But it was only a matter of degrees. He was soaked and shivering and if he didn’t want to catch pneumonia he was going to have to find a change of clothes.
He stopped. A man had appeared, coming towards him from round the corner of a building. At first Matt assumed he was drunk, on his way home from a late-night party. The man was wearing a crumpled suit with a tie hanging loosely from his neck, dragged round one side, and he was staggering. Matt thought about hiding but the man obviously had no interest in him. And he wasn’t drunk. He was ill. As he drew nearer, Matt saw that his suit was stained with huge sweat patches, and his face was a sickly white. He almost fell, propped himself against a lamppost, then threw up. Matt turned away, but not before he saw that whatever was coming out of his mouth was mixed with blood. The man was dying. He surely wouldn’t last the night.
Slowly, the city began to reveal itself. Matt wasn’t completely on his own after all. There were street cleaners out, sweeping the pavements, their faces covered by white cloth masks. He saw security men sitting on their own in the neon glare behind the windows, only half awake as they counted the long minutes until dawn. He passed the entrance of a subway station, closed for the night, but there was a woman sitting on the steps, a vagrant, her whole body completely wrapped in old plastic bags. She saw him and laughed, her eyes staring, as if she knew something he didn’t. Then she began to cough, a dreadful racking sound. Matt hurried on.
An ambulance raced past, its siren off but its lights flashing, throwing livid blue shadows across the shop windows. It pulled in ahead of him and he saw that a small crowd had gathered round a man lying unconscious on the pavement. The ambulance doors were thrown open and two men climbed out, also wearing white masks. Nobody spoke. The man on the ground wasn’t moving. The ambulance men scooped him up like a sack of meat and threw him into the back. He was either dead or dying and they didn’t care. There were other bodies in the back, lots of them, piled up on top of one another. The ambulance men slammed the doors then got back in. A moment later, they drove away.
The city was huge, silent, threatening. It seemed to be entirely in the grip of the night, as if the morning would never come. Bald-headed mannequins in furs and diamonds stared out of the shop windows as Matt hurried past. Hundreds of gold and silver watches lay ticking quietly behind armour-plated glass. In the day, in the sunshine, Hong Kong might be a shopper’s paradise. But at three o’clock in the morning with the pollution rolling in and the inhabitants sick and dying in the streets, it was something close to hell.
