The Race for the Red Dragon Read online

  Everyone else was clustered inside the bright ferry for warmth, or human company, leaving Harley alone outside, for which he was grateful.

  The lights of Taipa Island, Macau, receded in the distance. Harley shoved the pearl he was holding into an inside jacket pocket. It lay there, warm against his heart.

  Call Hong Kong! his dad had bellowed. That could only mean one thing.

  Pulling out his special phone – the phone Ray had just given Harley for his thirteenth birthday, the phone that was supposed to be for life and death situations kind of like this one – Harley placed his right thumb to the centre of the screen.

  He held it there for exactly three seconds, counting one-cat-and-dog, two-cat-and-dog, three-cat- and-dog – the way Ray had taught him to.

  The phone lit up with a faint whirr and click, vibrating gently in Harley’s hand, and a blood-red symbol appeared where his thumb had been.

  Ray had never explained what the intriguing symbol meant, but Harley figured the S had to have something to do with Spark. What the returning arrow stood for, Harley had no idea.

  The red symbol dissolved into dozens of icons. They had names under them like Venice, Jakarta, Mogadishu and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

  Harley bent his head over the faintly shining screen and scrolled till he found the icon that said Hong Kong.

  Then he pressed it.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Wei?’ an elderly man’s voice said clearly.

  Harley had been expecting a video call, not a phone call in Chinese. Startled, he replied in the only language he knew, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I need your help.’

  His words were met with a long silence. Terrified that the old man might hang up, Harley gabbled, ‘I’m Ray Spark’s son, Harley. We got separated. In, in, a place called Taipa Island, Macau.’

  There was another uncomfortable beat of silence, then the old man said in very precise, clipped English with a strong Chinese accent, ‘Where are you now, boy?’

  ‘On a ferry. I think it’s bound for Hong Kong. At least, I hope it is.’

  ‘Where is your father?’ the old man queried sharply.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Harley struggled not to wail. ‘I don’t even know if he’s alive.’

  ‘An interesting conundrum,’ the old man muttered, almost to himself, ‘seeing as the once-in-a-lifetime favour was quite clearly expressed to be non-transferable and owed specifically to Ray Spark. But no large matter.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Harley whispered, looking around furtively to see if anyone was watching him from inside the ferry.

  ‘Your father is a man who raises many ethical conundrums, Harley Spark. Wherever he goes, priceless artefacts and old alliances invariably vanish. While it is well after the time I take my evening meal, and I endeavour not to eat more than two meals a day for health reasons, you will find me at the Lan Fong Yuen restaurant when you disembark the ferry at Sheung Wan. I will be seated at a table for two with a plate of roast duck, a large iced milk tea and a plate of French toast fried in butter before me.’

  Then the old man hung up and, baffled, Harley repeated the name of the restaurant to himself over and over until he could remember it without stumbling. His stomach growled at the thought of roast duck and buttery French toast. It had been a long time since his last meal, which had been eaten out of a banana leaf in an entirely different country while the sun was just rising.

  The fog, which had hung back while the ferry navigated its way through a bunch of outlying islands and narrow channels, came back in earnest as the ferry docked at the terminal in Sheung Wan and passengers spilled out of the vessel onto a concrete walkway.

  Harley, the very last person to disembark, watched in awe as a tsunami of fog seemed to flow from the water, up and over the bridge he was walking across, enveloping everyone and everything in a rush of white.

  As soon as the fog hit, the pearl hopped out of Harley’s pocket onto the ground. Aided by the orb – which now seemed to glow far less brightly and move far less quickly than it had before – Harley soon found himself outside the terminal and facing a squat, dirty beige building, about four storeys tall. It was sandwiched between two grey and red highrise office towers, forming a kind of U-shaped complex.

  As people stumbled out of the fog behind him, exclaiming and pointing about at the unnatural weather, Harley tugged at the sleeve of a young woman who’d stopped nearby.

  ‘Lan Fong Yuen?’ he enquired.

  She shook her head, put her earbuds in and moved away.

  ‘Lan Fong Yuen?’ Harley asked a man in a rumpled suit who seemed to have lost both his shirt and his shoes. Not appearing to have heard a word that Harley had said, the man raised his hands to his bloodshot eyes and staggered away in the direction of the car park with shaking shoulders.

  The pearl at Harley’s feet tapped once more, tiredly, at the toe of his right sneaker. Its lustre was very dim now and it only rolled a few more metres towards the front entrance of the low building between the two office towers before it seemed to collapse in on itself and disperse in a scatter of pearlescent fragments.

  At that moment, the fog that had engulfed the Hong Kong Macau Ferry Terminal collapsed, too, like a dropped theatre curtain, revealing a night sky that was very dark and punctuated by an array of electric lights that seemed extra dazzling. Blinking and startled, passengers all around the concrete concourse seemed to give themselves a shake and move forward more briskly. Harley, who’d never felt more alone in his whole life, entered the beige building in trepidation.

  It turned out to be a daggy shopping centre full of shops that Harley didn’t recognise, each dedicated entirely to things like underpants, headphones, suitcases, rice cookers in their colourful dozens or Korean beauty products. Some of the stores were beginning to close, but a few people were still heading up stairs and escalators. Harley followed them.

  On the third floor, in the distance, Harley spotted a ginormous white menu sign with red and green English words and Chinese characters as soon as he stepped off the escalator. The menu featured a photo of a plate of glistening roast duck, not to mention a plate of buttery French toast alongside a towering sundae-glass full of iced milky tea.

  However, by the time Harley worked out that he had indeed found the Lan Fong Yuen restaurant, it was closed. The waiters had just finished locking up the steel accordion gates surrounding the restaurant and streamed past him on their way home.

  Harley rushed over and hung off the gates in desperation, giving them a vigorous shake.

  ‘Please!’ he shouted through the bars. ‘You can’t be closed!’

  Inside the restaurant, a man in a stained chef’s apron shouted back at Harley in Chinese, then returned to the kitchen.

  Harley’s shoulders slumped, his fingers still threaded through the diamond-shaped lattice of the accordion gates. He’d called Hong Kong, just like his dad had told him to, and nothing had worked out. The ‘special’ phone wasn’t special in the least – exactly as his sceptical mum, Delia, had predicted. It let you call and text people, just like a regular phone did. And that was that.

  Harley’s disappointment was crushing. He turned and sat on the ground, his back to the restaurant and the vanished roast duck dinner. The helpful pearl was nowhere to be seen. He might as well have imagined it.

  Harley was stranded in a strange country with no passport, no money, no language, no friends and, worst of all, no dad. His throat felt tight with feelings he couldn’t put a name to, because if he did, they might come true.

  ‘Young man,’ a voice said, quiet but stern, from behind the steel gates.

  Harley looked up into the dark eyes of an old man with very hollow cheeks, wearing black-framed glasses and a tailored three-piece grey suit; his short black hair was combed very close to his scalp and oiled down neatly.

  ‘Please get up from the floor. Your dinner is getting cold.’

  Harley leapt to his feet. ‘Are you Hong Kong?’ he exclaimed with dawning delight as the old man gestu
red curtly at the chef who’d yelled at Harley only minutes before. Sheepishly, the man bobbed his head and unlocked the accordian gates before relocking them behind Harley and hurrying back into the kitchen.

  The old man gave Harley a measuring look from head to toe. Even though he wasn’t much taller than Harley, he exuded an air of steely command. ‘I am indeed Hong Kong,’ the dapper stranger said with a glimmer of a smile. ‘And you’re late. I am reliably informed that the ferry docked quite some time ago. I had to convince the kind gentleman in the kitchen to keep the wok burners burning, just for you,’ he added. ‘Now eat.’

  The old man gestured at a table tucked away in the corner, out of sight of the restaurant entrance. The table for two was laden with more roast duck, French toast and iced milk tea than two human beings could possibly ingest.

  Harley pulled up a vinyl-covered chair and started to tear into the duck, interspersing it with bites of eggy, buttery French toast and sips of the heavenly, sugar-loaded tea. Finally remembering his manners, he scrubbed at his greasy face with the back of one hand and said, ‘Did you want me to save you any foo—’

  The old man smiled and shook his head, the fluorescent light gleaming off his heavy 1950s-style spectacles. ‘I would like you to tell me everything,’ he said kindly, ‘about what has brought you to Hong Kong.’

  For some reason, Harley trusted the old man. Just like his mum, who was a senior emergency nurse at a big city hospital and dealt with people from all walks of life, Harley was good at reading people. He knew that the elderly gent could have given him up to the shadowy network of international crims that was after him and his dad already. But, instead, the old man had fed Harley more roast duck than his mum had ever let him eat in one sitting.

  Even if this man was a major (alleged) criminal, just like Harley’s dad, he gave off an honourable, unruffled kind of air.

  ‘You remind me of my great-grandpa,’ Harley blurted, taking one last noisy sip of his iced milk tea as he looked across the table at the old man, who still hadn’t introduced himself.

  The old man smiled. ‘If you’re finished,’ he said, rising to his feet and throwing down a stack of notes in lolly-bright colours, ‘let us talk at my shop. My driver, Ricotta, is waiting for us downstairs.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘Your driver’s name is Ricotta? Like the cheese?’ Harley gaped, following the old man down to the car park where a large, shiny black car was waiting for them.

  ‘Ricotta’s mother was very fond of Italian food,’ Mr Hong Kong smiled.

  Harley had never seen a car like this before. He noted with interest that the limousine had two back passenger doors that met in the middle and opened outwards, away from each other.

  A huge, white-gloved man in a peaked cap and black chauffeur’s uniform – who resembled a muscular cube more than a person – held the doors open for the elderly gentleman first, then Harley, before closing them. Harley faced ‘Mr Hong Kong’ – which was what he had taken to calling his mysterious benefactor in his head – across the tan, leather-lined interior of the limo. He was astonished to note an array of bottles and glassware lining one of the doors of the car. The limo even came with its own drinks!

  Just as Harley looked up from studying the minibar, the limo stopped outside a narrow singlestorey shop faced in dark granite and square rosewood panels carved in complex Chinese patterns and symbols.

  Like the restaurant, the entrance to the shop was shuttered by heavy steel security gates which the driver, Ricotta, now unlocked and pushed apart with his beefy hands.

  Mr Hong Kong flicked a switch near the front entrance, and a long line of old-fashioned green pendant lights came on down the length of the store, dimly illuminating the polished dark wood floors and walls of the narrow interior. Through the glass front door, Harley saw Ricotta lock up the accordion gates again from the outside and take his position directly in front of them. Harley heaved a silent sigh of relief, feeling safer than he had done for hours.

  To get to the old man’s office, they had to pass shoulder-high open sacks of dried grain, legumes, spices, rice, and other intriguing things like salted whole fish and cuttlefish, dried seaweed, wrinkled-up mushrooms, dried shrimp and small, flattened parcels of leathery tofu skin. A stainless-steel scoop poked out of the top of each sack. Seeing Harley staring around in fascination, the old man murmured, ‘We run a modest import and export business. Life’s necessities, you understand. But, occasionally, we also deal in those little things that can sweeten one’s existence and make its passage infinitely more … bearable.’

  Harley hardly took in what Mr Hong Kong was saying. He picked up a scoopful of brown, star-shaped spice pods and let them trickle back down into the sack they’d come out of, then poked another scoop deep into a sackful of what looked like preserved tangerine peel piled up in small, irregular curls, which gave off a lovely smell.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Harley caught sight of a fat, pale caterpillar – as long as one of his fingers – inch up and into a sack of salted dried fish standing nearby. He shuddered, hurrying to catch up with Mr Hong Kong as the old man entered his backroom office and settled in behind an ornately carved rosewood desk inlaid with small discs of iridescent mother-of-pearl. When Harley looked closer, he was startled to see that these discs formed the eyes of carved dragons that ran across the surface of the desk and around the legs.

  The walls of the windowless back office were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of cloth-covered books in a variety of languages. There was no way out of the slightly claustrophobic space other than the door they’d come in through. A single green pendant light hung over the old man’s desk, casting strange shadows across the looming bookshelves.

  ‘Sit.’ Mr Hong Kong indicated the chair across the desk.

  Harley sat gingerly, his movements stirring the tops of neat piles of invoices and bills of lading gathered on the glass-topped surface of the desk, all executed in spidery Chinese script or printed in harsh black characters.

  Then Harley began to recount the strange tale of the azure vase he’d found in Melbourne only days ago, with the bright blue, golden-eyed dragon painted on it that had seemed alive. ‘I couldn’t help taking it off the footpath near my house. It was like I was meant to find it! And once I touched it, I couldn’t let go of it. Mum had to break it to free me.’

  The old man leant forward on his elbows, his eyes narrowed. ‘The relic of the blue dragon! Said to awaken only to the hands of someone capable of freeing the creature imprisoned inside. Someone of good heart, so they say. So it was real.’

  Harley told the old man everything he knew about the girl who had somehow materialised out of the fragments of the vase; about the innocent mistake his dad had made in offering the vase not to Grandmaster Chiu Chiu Pang first, but to Garstang J. Runyon at Antediluvian House; and how there was a near-identical green dragon vase in a private collection in Singapore, but it had shattered, releasing a young male warrior who wanted to rekindle an ancient blood feud. Harley’s voice trailed off into an exhausted whisper as he added, ‘Me, Dad, Qing and Schumacher have been on the run ever since. We were supposed to go to the Wudang Mountains together…’

  ‘Where is this Qing now?’ Mr Hong Kong enquired pointedly, his gaze sweeping around the silent shop before settling again on Harley’s face. ‘Girls who are able to defy gravity and eat copious amounts of tuna preserved in oil,’ the old man made a face at the thought, ‘are rare indeed.’

  ‘I lost everyone in Macau,’ Harley said, deflated. ‘But I swear it all happened, although I’ve got no proof of anything I’m saying.’

  Mr Hong Kong frowned. ‘Apart from your striking resemblance to the one black-and-white surveillance photograph in my possession of a certain Ray Spark, taken seven years ago on a street in Brussels,’ the old man replied, ‘you, young man, might just have spun me an elaborate web of lies …’

  Then, from beneath the glass-topped surface of his desk, Mr Hong Kong whipped out a com
pact black pistol. He pointed it straight at Harley’s chest and barked questions at him in a range of different Chinese dialects, none of which Harley remotely understood.

  Harley had fully stopped breathing by the time the old man ended his interrogation with a question that Harley thought he’d heard before. ‘Nǐn shì shuí?’ the old man roared. ‘Who are you? How did you get here?’

  Harley shook his head, sticking his hands high up in the air. ‘Please!’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know what else to tell you! I swear I’m telling the truth!’

  Mr Hong Kong said sharply, ‘I have to warn you that there is no way out – I have an armed man stationed at the front and at the back of the shop. You will never get out of my presence alive.’

  Harley closed his eyes. The old man had seemed so nice. Who fed someone a plate of French toast before they whacked them?

  This time, he felt sure, it really was curtains.

  Chapter 5

  Harley’s eyes flew open again as the air across his face went cold. Hope flared in his chest as he realised who the gun, and the questions, had really been aimed at.

  ‘Move back! Or I will shoot our young friend here,’ Mr Hong Kong yelled, now sounding strangely frightened.

  Harley spun in his seat, spotting Qing at the far end of the shop near the front door. As her azure-rimmed dark eyes flicked up to meet the wide-eyed gaze of Mr Hong Kong, multiple sacks of dried goods simultaneously tumbled over, spilling their contents across the shop floor in a slithery roar that sounded like an avalanche. A tidal wave of sorghum grain, dried fish flakes and salted meat jerky spilled through the open door of the old man’s office. Startled, Harley moved his sneakers back.

  Between him and Qing, a knee-deep sea of dry goods had suddenly sprung into being.

  The old man – still clutching the handgun – leapt out of his seat, repeating, ‘Who are you?’