9 Dragons

Like a window.”
    Starkey rolled the video back to the moment Maddie had kicked at her captor. In real time the video at that point had been a blur of sudden movement and light followed by a quick correction back to the girl.
    But now in stop-action of frame-by-frame playback, Bosch saw that the camera had momentarily swept left across a room to a window, and then back.
    “You’re good, Harry,” Starkey said. “We may have something here.”
    Bosch bent down to look over her shoulder and get closer. Starkey backed up the video and rolled it slowly forward again. Maddie’s effort to kick at the outreached arm of her captor made the frame of the video go left and then jog down to the floor. It then came up on the window and corrected to the right again.
    The room appeared to be a low-rent hotel room with a single bed and a table and lamp directly behind the chair Maddie was tied to. Bosch noted a dirty beige rug with a variety of stains on it. The wall over the bed was pockmarked with holes left by nails used to hold up wall hangings. The pictures or paintings had possibly been removed to make the location harder to identify.
    Starkey backed the video up to the window and froze it there. It was a vertical window with a single pane that opened out like a door. There appeared to be no screen. It had been cranked open in full outward extension and in the glass was a reflection of an urban cityscape.
    “Where do you think this is, Harry?”
    “Hong Kong.”
    “Hong Kong?”
    “She lives there with her mother.”
    “Well…”
    “Well, what?”
    “It’s just going to make it harder for us to determine location. How well do you know Hong Kong?”
    “I’ve been going twice a year for about six years. Just clean this up, if you can. Can you make that part bigger?”
    Using the mouse, Starkey outlined the window and then moved a copy of that part of the video over to the second screen. She increased its size and then went through some focusing maneuvers.
    “We don’t have the pixels, Harry, but if I run a program that sort of fills in what we don’t have, we can sort of sharpen it. Maybe you’ll recognize something in the reflection.”
    Bosch nodded, even though he was behind her.
    On the second screen, the reflection in the window became a sharper image with three different levels of depth. The first thing Bosch noted was that the location of the room was up high. The reflection showed a channel down a city street from at least ten stories up, he judged. He could see the sides of buildings lining the street and the edge of a large billboard or building sign with the English letters
N-O
. There was also a collage of street-level signs with Chinese characters. These were smaller and not as clear.
    Beyond this reflection Bosch could see tall buildings in the distance. He recognized one of them by the two white spires on the roof. The twin radio antennas were braced by a crossbar and the configuration always reminded Bosch of football goalposts.
    Outlining the buildings was the third level of reflection: a mountain ridgeline broken only by a structure that had a bowl shape -supported by two thick columns.
    “Is this helping, Harry?”
    “Yeah, yeah, definitely. This has to be Kowloon. The reflection goes across the harbor to Central and then the mountain peak behind it. This building with the goalposts is the Bank of China. Very famous part of the skyline. And that is Victoria Peak behind it. That structure you see up on the top through the goalposts is like a lookout spot next to the peak tower up there. So to reflect all of this I’m pretty sure you’d have to be across the harbor in Kowloon.”
    “I’ve never been there, so none of this means anything to me.”
    “Central Hong Kong is actually an island. But there are other islands surrounding it and across the harbor is Kowloon and an area called the New Territories.”
    “Sounds too complicated for me. But if any of this helps you, then-”
    “It helps a lot. Can you print this?”
    He pointed to the second screen with the isolated view of the window.
    “Sure thing. There’s one thing that’s sort of weird, though.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You see in the foreground this partial reflection of the sign”
    She used the cursor to put a box around the two letters
N
and
O
that were part of a larger sign and word in English.
    “Yeah, what about it?”
    “You have to remember, this is a reflection in the window. It’s like a mirror, so