“Why are you here?” Scarlett asked. She still couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice.
“I came for you,” Matt said. He wanted to tell her more but he didn’t dare. There was always a chance that they were being listened to.
“You shouldn’t have. I’ve mucked everything up. I’d have got away if I hadn’t…” Scarlett stopped herself. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about her last meeting with her father.
Matt sat next to her so that they were shoulder to shoulder with their legs stretched out on the floor. From the way he moved, she could see that he had been hurt. He looked pale and exhausted. “Why don’t you tell me everything that happened to you?” he suggested. “You could start by telling me where we are. Do you know?”
She nodded. “The chairman came to see me…”
“Who is the chairman?”
“Just some creep in a suit.”
“I think I may have met him.”
“He wanted to gloat over me,” Scarlett continued. “He told me that you were on your way but I hoped he was lying. This is an old prison. We’re right in the middle of Hong Kong. It was left over from Victorian times.”
“So when do they serve breakfast?”
“They don’t. It’s bread and cold soup and they bring it once a day.”
Matt lowered his voice. “Hopefully, we won’t be here that long,” he said. It was as much as he dared tell her, but even so Scarlett felt a glimmer of hope. “You know I went to your home in Dulwich,” he said, changing the subject.
“Was that you in the car? There was an accident…”
“It was no accident.”
“I knew it had to be you,” Scarlett said. “They planned it all very carefully, didn’t they? Using me to get you here. Are any of the others with you?”
Matt nodded briefly and Scarlett understood. They both had to be careful what they said. She gazed at him as if seeing him for the first and the last time. “I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe I’m really talking to you. Do you know, I’ve even dreamed about you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Matt said. “We all dream about each other. It’s how it works.”
“There’s so much I don’t understand.”
“Join the club.”
“It looks like I already have.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know where my story even begins, but I suppose I’d better start with St Meredith’s…”
She told him – briefly and without fuss – and as she spoke, Matt knew that he was going to like her. She had been through so much, and in a way her experiences reminded him of his own at Lesser Malling, the way she had been reeled into something so completely beyond her understanding. And yet she had coped with it. She had been brought here. She had been locked in this room for three days. But she hadn’t cracked. She was ready to fight back.
She finished talking and it seemed to Matt that just for a moment the building trembled as something, a shockwave, travelled through the walls. Scarlett looked up, alarmed. Part of her knew what was happening and had even been expecting it.
“What…?” Matt began.
“It was nothing.” She said it so hastily that he could see she didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t even want to imagine what might be happening outside. “Tell me about yourself,” she went on, quickly. “Tell me how you got here. Did you go to the temple? They’ve got people there waiting for you. They thought you’d come through one of the doors.”
“I didn’t…”
He told her his own story, or part of it, starting in Peru. It would have taken too long to tell her the whole thing and he was still afraid of being overheard. From Nazca to London to Macau. It had been a long journey and it was only now that they both saw how closely they had been following each other’s paths.
Matt finished by explaining how he had found his way to Wisdom Court. This was the difficult part. He had seen Scarlett’s father die and he had been at least in part responsible. How was he going to break the news?
But she was already ahead of him. “That jersey you’re wearing,” she said. She had suddenly realized. “It’s his.”
“Yes,” Matt admitted.
“Where is he now?” Matt didn’t answer and she continued. “They’ve killed him, haven’t they?”
Matt nodded. He didn’t want to remember what he had seen in the last moments before he had been taken out of Wisdom Court.
Scarlett’s face didn’t change but suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “It was all his fault,” she said. “He thought he could make a deal with these people – the Old Ones – but they would never have got me if it hadn’t been for him.” She paused. “I don’t know, Matt. I suppose that’s the way they work. They get ordinary people to do evil things for them. They used him. He really thought he was helping me. And now he’s betrayed you too.”
The building shivered a second time. It wasn’t as strong as it had been before but they both felt it.
“You know that Hong Kong is dying,” Scarlett said. “The chairman told me. They’re doing it deliberately. They want to turn it into what they call a necropolis. A city of the dead.”
“I saw some of it last night,” Matt said. “It was horrible.”
“Don’t tell me. I lived in it. I can’t believe I didn’t see what was going on.” She sighed. “What will happen to us, Matt? Are we going to be killed?”
“They don’t want to kill us,” Matt said. “It’s complicated. But killing us doesn’t really help.”
“Then what?”
“They think they’ve beaten us, but they haven’t. The others are still out there. And you and me…”
“What about us?”
“They put us together because they want to crow over us. But that’s their mistake. Because…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
There was an explosion. It was loud and immediate – and it came from somewhere inside the building.
“What…?” Scarlett began.
Then the light went out.
Lohan had used the storm as cover, closing in on the prison through streets that had quickly emptied as the weather had become more intense. He had only been given one night to prepare the attack, but he had still managed to assemble a small army. He had a hundred men with him, all of them well-armed. The Triads had been smuggling weapons across Asia for many years, supplying anyone from terrorists to mercenaries. Lohan had simply taken what he needed. He had plenty of choice.
Meanwhile, Jet and Sing would be arriving at the Tai Shan Temple. They both had the rank of 426, Red Pole as it was known, making them fighting unit lieutenants. They had another fifty men with them and both operations were to begin at the same moment. There was one door out of Hong Kong. The way there had to be cleared.
Lohan knew where Matt had been taken because he had followed him. This was what Matt had been unable to tell Scarlett. He had played a trick on the chairman. Just for once, he was the one pulling the strings.
Matt had contacted Lohan the night before, the call forwarded through the Kung Hing Tao firework company. The Triad leader already knew what had happened. Richard and Jamie were with him. The two of them had made it out of the water and over to Kowloon. They were standing next to him, worrying desperately about Matt, when the phone rang.
“We have to find Scarlett,” Matt had said. “And there’s only one way to do it. We have to let the Old Ones capture me.”
“How will you do that?”
“Paul Adams – Scarlett’s father – will call them and tell them I’m at Wisdom Court. They won’t suspect anything. They know that he wants Scarlett back and they’ll think he’s still trying to help them.”
“And then?”
“You have your men outside. You follow me wherever they take me.”
“How do you know they’ll take you to Scarlett?”
“I don’t… not for sure. But my guess is they’ll probably hold us together. I know the way these people think. They’ll want to parade us, to boast about how they’ve beaten us. Having the two of us together will make it more
