Hong Kong (10 page)

He veered left onto Kowloon Park Drive, just loping along.

Ahead was a ramp up to an overpass that went across the street and into the lobby of a major hotel. Looking neither right nor left, Jake took the ramp, made the turn at the top, and slowed just enough to go through the glass doors, which reflected the early morning glare.

His tail came thudding up the ramp, made the turn, charged for the door with his head down, inhaling deeply as he tried to get enough air to ease the pain in his chest. On the street below the car that had been keeping pace with the runner accelerated away.

Jake Grafton caught the tail by the throat as he came through the door and slammed him into a marble pillar, where the man collapsed, too stunned to move.

Glancing around to be sure no one was paying too much attention, Jake picked the man up by his pants and shirt and shoved him back out the door onto the ramp. There he slammed the man's head into the ramp railing, and the man passed out.

After he eased the heavy man to the concrete, Jake patted him down. He had a small automatic in a holster in his sock, so Jake relieved him of that and pushed it down inside his own athletic sock. A wallet... he didn't need that anymore, either. A few keys, matches, an open pack of Marlboros .. .

Grafton spent no more than ten seconds searching the man, then he straightened and went on into the hotel, leaving one middle-aged Western woman staring open-mouthed at him. No one else seemed interested.

Callie was still asleep when Jake let himself into the hotel room. The tape was still in the player.

Jake examined the pistol, a Chinese-made automatic, loaded. He put it in his luggage.

The wallet he had taken from the tail contained Hong Kong dollars and a variety of cards, all displaying Chinese characters.

He was toweling off after his shower when Callie awoke.

"Hey, beautiful woman, did you sleep okay?"

She sat up in bed, looked around at the bright room and the daylight streaming through the gauzy drapes.

"I don't know who killed that man, Jake."

"Couldn't tell from the tape?"

"Impossible to say. But China Bob was into everything. Everything! He smuggled people, money, dope ... he was even bringing in computers and guns."

"Computers?"

"I couldn't make much sense of it."

"Was Cole on the tape?"

"I don't know. I don't know his voice."

"You'll meet him again tonight."

"I don't know that I want to."

"Hey, kiddo. We're the first team, okay? What say we have breakfast and see some sights?"

CHAPTER FIVE

The governor of Hong Kong, Sun Siu Ki, sat at his desk in City Hall puffing a cigarette as he listened to an interpreter translate Rip's story of the fatal riot in front of the Bank of the Orient from the
China Post.
A copy of the offending paper lay on the corner of the desk in front of him, out of his way. Spread out where he could read them were the front pages of three Chinese-language newspapers.

Sun couldn't believe his eyes or ears: Every editor in Hong Kong had apparently decided today was the day to tell the most outrageous lies about the government.

The copy of the leading Chinese-language paper had been hand-delivered to the governor's office by one of the newspaper's censors, who was horrified when he saw the paper rolling off the press. The lead headline and story on the Bank of the Orient failure was certainly not the one he had approved, and he wrote a note to the governor stating that fact.

The headline and story reported that Beijing had ordered the Bank of the Orient to close its doors since it had refused to lend money at superlow rates to customers designated by Beijing. The unspoken inference was that bribes in Beijing were the price of access to easy credit.

The
censor
had
the
presses
stopped,
but
not
before
a
truckload
of

the libelous papers had already left to be installed in vending machines in the northern area of Kowloon.

The other two papers carried slightly different versions of the same story. According to them the bank failure was the direct result of lending to unnamed politically connected entities who were unable to repay the loans, which had been made at ridiculously low rates. The morning editions of these papers had been distributed. The governor's aide bought these copies from vendors at the Star Ferry terminal on his way to work.

Everyone in Hong Kong was reading these lies.

The aide was in the next room, talking to the censors involved. Apparently both of them swore the stories were not the ones they approved for publication.

If the newspapers weren't enough, already this morning the governor had received a call from army headquarters: Several thousand people were sitting in the plaza outside the closed Bank of the Orient. They were peaceful enough, but they were there, a visible, tangible, unspoken challenge to the Communist government. As he listened to the interpreter, Sun Siu Ki was thinking about those people.

Behind his desk was a large window. Through that window, when he bothered to look, the governor could see a breathtaking assortment of huge glass-and-steel skyscrapers—one of which was the Bank of the Orient—designed by some of the world's premier architects. These buildings were the heart of one of the most vibrant, energetic cities on earth, a city as different from the old, decaying Chinese cities of the interior as one could possibly imagine. This difference had never impressed Sun Siu Ki.

A career bureaucrat, he was governor of Hong Kong because of his family's political connections in Beijing. He knew little about capitalism, banking, or the way Western manufacturing, shipping, and airline companies operated, and nothing at all about stock markets or the international monetary system. The wealth and dynamic energy of Hong Kong struck him as foreign ... and dangerous.

A wise person once observed that Hong Kong was China the way it would be without the Communists. Nothing resembling that thought had ever crossed Sun Siu Ki's mind or caused him a moment's angst.

Baldly, he was in over his head. He didn't see it that way, however.

Sun believed that he knew what he needed to know, which was how

to surf the political riptides of the Communist upper echelons in Canton Province and Beijing.

The problem du jour was the defiance of the government's authority by the people in the streets .. . and the newspapers. As bad as the uncen-sored stories were in the Chinese press, the headline in the
China Post
was the most outrageous: 15 MASSACRED AT BANK OF ORIENT.

Sun Siu Ki had replaced a governor who didn't attack pernicious foreign ideas with sufficient vigor. If people saw that the Communists were too soft to defend themselves, they were doomed: They would be swept away, eradicated as thoroughly as the Manchus. Being human, the party cadres were doing their damnedest to prevent just such a disaster.

Many of the readers of the
China Post
were not Chinese. The newspaper's reactionary stories inflamed the foreign devils, and they wrote outrageous, incendiary letters to the editor, which that fool published. All this caused faraway officials of the foreign banks to fear the loss of their money. Foreigners thought only of money. The culpability of the
China Post
was plain as day to Sun Siu Ki.

He gestured the interpreter into silence and seized a sheet of fine, cream-colored paper with the crest of Hong Kong on the top. There were still many boxes of paper bearing this logo in the attic of Government House. Thrifty Sun saw no incongruity in using paper bearing the likeness of the British lion. He wrote out an order for the offending newspaper to cease publication and signed it with a flourish. After further thought, he wrote out an order for the arrest of the editor. A few weeks in jail would teach him to mind his tongue.

While he was at it, he wrote out arrest orders for all of the editors involved. The time had come, Sun told himself, to whip these people back into line and show them who was in charge.

With the newspaper editors dealt with, Sun began to ponder the best way to handle the protesters in front of the bank.

The CIA contingent was summoned to the consul general's office just minutes after they arrived at work.

"What's going on?" Tommy Carmellini asked Kerry Kent, because she was more fun to talk to than the three men. Prettier, too.

"Didn't you see the crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient when

you came in this morning? The ferry from Kowloon was packed; the only topic of conversation was the demonstration they were on their way to join."

The consul general's office was large and sparsely furnished, apparently reflecting the taste of the current occupant. Virgil Cole was several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and short blond hair that was suspiciously thin on top. Ice-cold blue eyes swept the people who trooped in and stood in front of his desk.

Carmellini had spent a few moments with the consul general when he checked in last week. Cole had said little, merely welcomed him to Hong Kong, shook hands, muttered a pleasantry or two, and sent him off. He had also attended a meeting that Cole had chaired.

Cole stood behind the desk now, looked into each face. "There's a crowd gathering in front of the Bank of the Orient this morning," he said without preliminaries. "Tang and the army will probably run them off before long."

No one disputed that assessment.

"I want to know what's going on in City Hall."

"We have some excellent sources there, sir," Bubba Lee began, but Cole waved him into silence.

"They are marvelously corrupt—I know that. The problem is our whisperers are too low on the totem pole. I want to know what Beijing is telling Governor Sun and General Tang and what those two are telling Beijing, and I want to know it now, in real time."

Lee took a deep breath and said, "The only way we can get that information, sir, is to tap the telephones."

"While you are at it, bug Sun's office. Do it today." Cole nodded curtly at Lee, then seated himself in the chair behind his desk and picked up the top document in his in-basket.

Apparently the spooks had been dismissed. Lee turned without a word and led his colleagues from the room.

Out in the hallway with the doorway closed, Lee faced them. "You heard him. He's the most garrulous man I ever met."

"A dangerous blabbermouth," Carson Eisenberg agreed.

"Nevertheless, he's given us our marching orders, so let's dive in. Carmellini, your star is rising."

As they walked toward the CIA office, Carmellini said, "Can anyone get us a couple of telephone company trucks and some uniforms?"

"Tommy, you are in a city where money doesn't just talk, it sings like Pavarotti. You can get anything in Hong Kong; the only question is the price."

"We need a floor plan of City Hall. Blueprints would be better."

"Blueprints, yes," said George Wang. "We bought them from a butler when the British were still in residence." He waggled his eyebrows at Kerry Kent, who stayed deadpan.

"Okay," said Tommy Carmellini, "this is how we're going to do

it____

Rip Buckingham was in his office on the second floor of the newspaper, closeted with the newspaper's headline writer, when he heard a commotion on the stairs. By the time he got to the door the policemen were up the stairs and shouting fiercely at two reporters who were trying to keep them from coming in. One of the policemen, a sergeant, tired of a zealous reporter's interference and threatened to chop him in the side of the neck.

"Ng Yuan Lee, what are you doing?" Rip shouted in Cantonese, which froze the sergeant. He snarled at the reporter, who drew back.

"Rip Buckingham, I have a warrant."

"You're kidding, right?"

"No," the sergeant said, extracting a piece of paper from his pocket. "They have issued a warrant for your arrest, signed by the chief judge. The governor demanded it."

Rip Buckingham threw up his hands in resignation. He didn't, however, argue with the sergeant and his colleague, who were merely doing their jobs.

"I'm sorry, Rip," Marcus Hallaby, the headline writer, told him from the office door. "God, I'm sorry! I just didn't think the headline was that big a deal, and ..." Marcus was crying. He was also half soused, precisely the same condition he had been in yesterday afternoon when he wrote the massacre headline, precisely the same condition he had been in for the last ten years. He covered his face with his hands and sagged against the wall.

"Hey, Marcus, it wasn't your fault," Rip said, trying to sound like he meant it. After all, he had been the one who always refused to fire Marcus when headlines irritated people he couldn't afford to irritate.

These little storms blew in several times a year. For a day or two there was lightning and thunder, then the sky would clear and Marcus would still be there, contrite, apologetic, slightly drunk.... The damn guy just couldn't handle life sober and Rip had never been able to condemn him for that.