9 Dragons

say you are talking about an entrance to an underground subway station or maybe a vent through which displaced air is channeled up and out when a train comes into the station. Modern subways don’t make a lot of noise. But there is a lot of air displacement when a train comes through the tunnel.”
    “Got it.”
    “Your location is up high here. Maybe twelve, thirteen stories, judging by the reflection. So this audio is hard to pinpoint. Could be ground level to this building or a block away. Hard to tell.”
    “It still helps.”
    “And the last thing is this.”
    She played the first part of the video when the camera was holding on Bosch’s daughter and just showing her. She brought up the sound and filtered out competing audio tracks. Bosch heard a muffled line of dialogue.
    “What is that?” he asked.
    “I think it might be outside the room. I haven’t been able to clean it up any better. It’s muffled by structure and it doesn’t sound Chinese to me. But I don’t think that’s what is important.”
    “Then, what is”
    “Listen again to the end of it.”
    She played it again. Bosch stared at his daughter’s scared eyes while concentrating on the audio. It was a male voice that was too muffled to be understood or translated and then it abruptly ended in what sounded like midsentence.
    “Somebody cut him off?”
    “Or maybe an elevator door closed and that cut him off.”
    Bosch nodded. The elevator seemed like a more likely explanation because there had been no stress in the tone of the voice before the cutoff.
    Starkey pointed at the screen.
    “So when you find the building, you’ll find this room close to the elevator.”
    Bosch stared at his daughter’s eyes for one last and long moment.
    “Thank you, Barbara.”
    He stood behind her and gave her shoulders a squeeze.
    “You got it, Harry.”
    “I gotta go.”
    “You said you were heading to the airport. Are you going to Hong Kong?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Good luck, Harry. Go get your daughter.”
    “That’s the plan.”
    Bosch quickly returned to his car and raced back to the freeway. Rush-hour traffic had thinned out and he made good time as he headed through Hollywood to the Cahuenga Pass and home. He started focusing on Hong Kong. L.A. and everything here would soon be behind him. It would be all about Hong Kong now. He was going to find his daughter and bring her home. Or he was going to die trying.
    All his life Harry Bosch believed he had a mission. And to carry out that mission he needed to be bulletproof. He needed to build himself and his life so that he was invulnerable, so that nothing and no one could ever get to him. All of that changed on the day he was introduced to the daughter he didn’t know he had. In that moment he knew he was both saved and lost. He would be forever connected to the world in the way only a father knew. But he would also be lost because he knew the dark forces he faced would one day find her. It didn’t matter if an entire ocean was between them. He knew one day it would come to this, that the darkness would find her and that she would be used to get to him.
    That day was now.

PART TWO:The 39-Hour Day

23
    B osch got only fitful sleep on the flight over the Pacific. Fourteen hours in the air, pressed against a window in the coach cabin, he never managed to sleep more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time before thoughts of his daughter and his guilt over her predicament intruded and jarred him awake.
    By moving too fast to think during the day, he had kept himself ahead of the fear and guilt, the brutal recriminations. He was able to put it all aside because the pursuit was more important than the baggage he was carrying. But on Cathay Pacific flight 883 he could run no more. He knew he needed to sleep to be rested and ready for the day ahead in Hong Kong. But on the plane he was cornered and could no longer put his guilt and fear aside. The dread engulfed him. He spent most of the hours sitting in darkness, fists balled tightly and eyes staring blankly, as the jet hurtled through the black toward the place where Madeline was somewhere hidden. It made sleep fleeting if not altogether impossible.
    The headwinds over the Pacific were weaker than anticipated and the plane picked up time on the schedule, landing early at the airport on Lantau Island at 4:55 a.m. Bosch rudely pushed around passengers reaching for belongings in overhead bins and made his way to the front of the plane. He