Necropolis

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.
    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. First he had to 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 phone 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 Salisbury Road. But that was on the other side of the harbor, 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 pants 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 harbor. 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 toward 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 sidewalks, 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 sidewalk. 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 one on top of the other. 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 armor-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