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.
They were looking for him.
He heard the sound of a car approaching and the very speed of it, the angry roar of the engine at this time of the night, told Matt that its journey was urgent and that he should get out of its way. Sure enough, just as he threw himself into a doorway, a police car shot past, immediately followed by a second, both of them heading the way he had just come. He knew that he had to get out of sight before any more arrived. He crossed another wide avenue and began climbing uphill.
And then he heard something coming through the darkness. It was the last thing he would have expected in a modern city and at first he thought he must be mistaken. The clatter of metal against concrete. Horse’s hooves…
A man appeared, riding a horse through a set of red traffic lights. The hooves were striking the surface of the road with that strange, unmistakable rhythm, and the echo was being trapped, thrown back and forth between shop windows. The horse paused under a street lamp and in the yellow glare, Matt saw that it was even more horrible than he had imagined. It was skeleton-thin and in an act of dreadful cruelty someone had driven a knife into its head, the blade pointing outwards, so that it looked like a grotesque version of a unicorn.
Matt saw it and remembered Jamie telling him about the fire riders who had taken part in the battle ten thousand years before. Was this one of them? As the man and the beast went past, he ducked behind a parked car, watching them in the wing mirror until they had disappeared from sight.
He was about to stand up, then froze as something huge fluttered through the darkness, high above the skyscrapers. Matt didn’t see what it was but guessed that it was some sort of giant bird, maybe even the condor that had been part of the Nazca Lines. It was there, a sweeping shadow, and then it had gone. He knew now that the whole city was possessed: the roads, the water, the very air. It could only be a matter of time before he was seen and captured. Every moment he was on the street he was in terrible danger.