Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

It was a good find and Bosch was excited.

“The thing is, Harry, to be in that window that chopper has to be flying pretty low.”

“So it either just took off or it was landing.”

“I think it was ascending. It appears to rise slightly as it crosses the reflection. Nothing you can really see with the eye but I measured it. Considering the reflection shows right to left what is occurring left to right, it would have taken off from a location on the opposite side of the street from the building this video was taken in.”

Bosch nodded.

“Now when I look for an audio track…”

She switched to the other screen where there was an audiograph showing different isolated streams of audio she had taken from the video.

“…and take out as much of the competing sound as I can, I get this.”

She played a track with almost a flatline graph and all Bosch could hear was distant traffic noise that was chopped into waves.

“That’s rotor wash,” she said. “You don’t hear the helicopter itself but it’s disrupting the ambient noise. It’s like a stealth chopper or something.”

Bosch nodded. He had moved a step closer. He now knew his daughter was held in a building near one of the few rooftop helicopter pads in Kowloon.

“That help?” Starkey asked.

“You better believe it.”

“Good. I also have this.”

She played another track and it contained a low hissing sound that reminded Bosch of rushing water. It began, grew louder and then dissipated.

“What is it? Water?”

Starkey shook her head.

“This is with maximum amplification,” she said. “I had to work at this. It’s air. Escaping air. I would 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.

Bosch 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 carried only a small backpack containing things he thought might help him find and rescue his daughter. When the jet’s door opened he moved quickly and soon took over the lead of all passengers heading toward customs and immigration. Fear stabbed at him as he approached the first screening point-a thermoscan designed to identify fever carriers. Bosch was sweating. Had the guilt burning in his conscious manifested itself as a fever? Would he be stopped before he had even begun the most important mission of all?

He glanced back at the computer screen as he passed by. He saw the images of travelers turned to blue ghosts on the screen. No telltale blooms of red. No fever. At least not yet.

At the customs checkpoint an inspector flipped through his passport and saw the entry and exit stamps from the many trips he had made in the past six years. He then checked something on a computer screen Bosch couldn’t see.

“You have business in Hong Kong, Mr. Bosch?” the inspector asked.

He had somehow butchered the single syllable of Bosch’s last name, making it sound like Botch .

“No,” Bosch said. “My daughter lives here and I come to visit her pretty often.”

He eyed the backpack slung over Bosch’s shoulder.

“You checked your bags?”

“No, I just have this. It’s a quick trip.”

The inspector nodded and looked back at his computer. Bosch knew what was going to happen. Invariably when he arrived in Hong Kong the immigration inspector saw his law enforcement classification on the computer and put him into the search queue.