Hong Kong

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rip Buckingham was on a squash court batting balls against the wall when Tiger Cole arrived at the athletic club. “I heard the governor shut down the paper,” Cole said after he closed the door to the court.

“Yep. I spent a couple of nights in the can.”

“You’ve been begging for it for years.”

“Already I feel cleaner, closer to God. I’m going to try to get arrested more often, work up to once or twice a month.”

They played hard for twenty minutes, then returned to the dressing room. They were the only men in the shower. As the water ran, Rip told Cole, “The rain is supposed to stop tonight. Wu says tomorrow is our day.”

“Okay.”

“Kerry is counting on your help with the computers.”

“I can’t guarantee anything. We need another week to verify our methodology.”

“We don’t have a week.”

“I didn’t think he’d wait.”

“Hard to believe the time has come.”

Cole just nodded. He thought, life’s transitions always come at the worst possible time.

“How about the governor? What is he saying to Beijing?” Rip knew that Cole had had the CIA bug City Hall.

“He doesn’t have a clue,” Cole said. “If the Chinese government knows what’s going down, they haven’t told him or Tang.”

“I’d like to bring Sue Lin and her mom to the consulate,” Rip muttered, barely loud enough for Cole to hear above the sound of running water.

“Rip, we’ve been all through that three or four times. Take them to the Australian consulate.”

“If it goes bad the PLA will overrun the Australians. The Americans are the only people they don’t have the balls to take on.”

“Take the women to the airport tonight and put them on a plane to Sydney.”

“The old woman won’t go, can’t go — doesn’t have a passport — and the daughter won’t go without the old woman.”

“For Christ’s sake! Have your father send a private jet; land them somewhere in the damned outback. There has to be at least one immigration official in Australia who can be bought.”

“There are probably dozens, but the women don’t want to leave.”

“Rip, it’s time to stop sweating the program. If we lose we’ll all be dead. The women know that.”

“Jesus, another philosopher!” Rip glowered at the older man.

Cole was right, of course. Still, Rip thought he would feel better if he had somehow managed to get Sue Lin and Lin Pe out of the line of fire. If that made him an unrepentant chauvinist, so be it.

“Had a talk with Sonny Wong a few nights ago,” he told Cole. “The bastard says someone in your consulate is selling him genuine American passports.”

“Think he was lying?”

“No.”

Tiger Cole finished washing and went into the dressing area. When Rip joined him, he said in a low voice, “That explains a lot.”

“A lot of what?”

“China Bob Chan knew far too much. He and Sonny did dozens of deals together through the years.”

“So who’s leaking?”

“Only two people have access to the passports. One of them has to be in on it, maybe both. One of them is a woman who sleeps with one of the CIA dudes.”

“Didn’t one of the consulate staffers just in from the states get killed a week or so ago?”

“A CIA officer. Shot to death on the street after he planted bugs in China Bob’s library.”

They finished dressing in silence and left separately.

The bakery for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company was housed in a warehouse near the Chinese University in the New Territories. After the Dutchman died, Lin Pe moved the bakery here for a reason: Even though wages for cooks and laborers were low, wages for students were even lower. By paying students more than the going wage, Lin Pe managed to staff her business with some of the brightest, most talented workers in Hong Kong.

The cookie packaging and storage facilities for bulk bakery supplies were located on the first floor. The actual baking of the cookies and printing of Lin Pe’s fortunes occurred on the second floor. In the company offices on the third floor where Lin Pe had kept the books by hand for many years, banks of computers manned by students studying computer and electrical engineering were operating around the clock. Behind the warehouse several delivery vans were parked, as well as a half dozen full-sized trucks that were used to transport overseas cookie shipments to the airport.

Wu Tai Kwong had taken the situation as he found it. The bakery employees were now one of the key cells of the revolutionary committee; threads ran from the bakery to dozens of cells in the university and in factories and offices all over town. From there, the threads ran all over China. Wu Tai Kwong well knew that a local uprising in Hong Kong was doomed; he was playing for much bigger stakes.

This afternoon he lingered on the loading dock with several of his key lieutenants smoking, watching the rain fall, and making last-minute plans.

The time for waiting was over. The spontaneous protests in front of the failed Bank of the Orient had deeply impressed Wu and his friends. The willingness of unarmed citizens to defy the PLA was, Wu thought, a direct measure of the depth of their antigovernment feelings. The Communists also understood that fact, which was the reason they reacted so violently to peaceful protests.

The conspiracy dynamic was also pressing mercilessly. As the organized circle of government enemies expanded, secrecy became nebulous. The enforcers who had ruthlessly punished security lapses when there were relatively few conspirators — and even executed government spies — became powerless as the group expanded exponentially. Whispers at the rank-and-file level became impossible to prevent. Absolute secrecy could be enforced only in a few key cells. Fortunately Virgil Cole, the American, had signed on a year ago and contributed vast sums of money, money that was used to bribe the regular and secret police and anyone else whose silence was deemed necessary.

The government in Beijing knew it had sworn blood enemies, of course, but Beijing was far away, with dozens of layers of corrupt officialdom between here and there. Still, even an absolutely corrupt government could bestir itself if the threat was perceived as grave enough.

Time, Wu told his friends, was running out. Now or never. Fight or submit. Fight or die.

Today his friends watched his facial features as he talked, listened intently to every word. Wu recruited them to his vision and held them enthralled with the power of his personality, nothing else. Energy radiated from him, life, power…

Some of the women who came within his personal orbit thought of him as a semireligious figure, a modern-day Buddha or Confucius. He wasn’t: Wu Tai Kwong was a fierce, driven man of extraordinary personal courage who had ordered executions of traitors and occasionally pulled the trigger himself. He believed in himself and his convictions with a righteous fervor that ordinary people would label irrational. What the people who knew him well saw was a man with the wisdom, courage, determination, and titanic ego necessary to lead a nation as large as China into a new day.

Wu removed a cell phone from his pocket. “Do we go?” he asked them one last time.

Positive nods all around.

Wu dialed the number.

One ring, two.

“Hello.” Cole’s voice. How well Wu knew it.

“Go,” he said and flipped the mouthpiece shut, severing the connection.

“The new day is almost here,” Wu said now to his friends and laughed heartily. He would have laughed on Judgment Day. His laughter seemed to calm the taut nerves of those around him, some of whom forced themselves to smile.

Wu Tai Kwong took a last drag on his cigarette, tossed the butt into a rain puddle, got into the delivery van he normally used, and drove out of the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company parking lot.

He joined the flow of traffic in the crowded street and crept along toward the first light. The windshield wipers fought a losing battle with the rain, which was coming down harder now than it had all day. Perhaps it was only his imagination.

Another van pulled out in front of him, inched its bumper out into the space between Wu and the vehicle ahead, and of course he had to let it in.

The driver got the van into the traffic stream ahead of Wu, and of course didn’t make it through the first light.

Sitting behind the van, thinking of rain and soldiers and millions of angry people, Wu failed to take alarm when the back door of the van ahead opened and two men hopped out. They slammed the door closed, then one stepped to the passenger door of Wu’s van and one to the driver’s door. They jerked the doors open.

The man on Wu’s side had a pistol in his hand, one that he seemed to produce from thin air. Wu looked left — the man climbing into the passenger seat also had a pistol, one pointed at Wu’s midsection.

“Put the van in park,” the man said standing beside him, “and move over. I’ll drive.”

Wu floored the accelerator. The van jumped forward, smashing into the back of the vehicle ahead. The man standing on the driver’s side fell to the street while the man on the passenger’s side who was half in and half out hung on to the door for dear life.

Wu slammed the vehicle into reverse and cranked the wheel over as he jammed the accelerator back down.

A bullet smashed the driver’s window. Wu felt the thump of the wheel rolling over the fallen man just before the van impacted the vehicle behind. Wu kept the accelerator mashed down, the rear wheels squalled…

The man on Wu’s left was inside the vehicle now, swinging at his head with a pistol. Wu drove his right hand into the man’s teeth, then slammed on the brake and tried to get the transmission in reverse.

The engine stalled.

In the silence that followed Wu could hear the gasping oaths of the man in the passenger seat. He was grinding on the starter when the man hit him a glancing blow in the head with the pistol.

Wu tried to elbow the man, punch him in the face, but he passed out when the man hit him in the head with the gun a second time.

Jake Grafton unlocked the door to his hotel room and couldn’t believe his eyes. The room was trashed. The bed had been stripped, the mattress stuffing strewn everywhere, the furniture broken, the television smashed… every item of clothing he and Callie had brought to Hong Kong lay somewhere in the middle of that mess. Even the carpet had been peeled back around the walls.

“Callie?”

He walked into the room, checked to make sure she wasn’t in the bathroom or closet or lying under the mess or behind the dresser.

“Callie?”

He knew what they had been searching for — the tape. They didn’t find it because it was in his pocket.

Where was Callie? She could be downstairs, or shopping, or getting her hair done…

“Callie!” He roared her name.

A woman peered through the open doorway from the hall. A Chinese woman, the maid. She asked something in Chinese.

“The lady who was here?” he replied. “Where did she go?”

The maid shook her head uncomprehendingly, stared in amazement at the sea of trash.

Jake Grafton brushed by her and hurried along the hallway. Unwilling to wait for an elevator, he charged down the stairs, trying to think.

He raced for the manager’s office and blew by the secretary. The manager was a Brit. “Someone trashed my room”—he gave the man the number—”and my wife is missing! Call the police!”

The man stood gaping at Jake, so Jake repeated it, then went charging out of the office.

He had to find a phone.

Fumbling with the telephone book, barking at the operator, he finally got through to the American consulate. “Tommy Carmellini, please.”

In less than a minute Carmellini was on the line.

“Grafton. This morning someone did a real messy search of my hotel room. My wife is missing.”

Several seconds of silence followed as Carmellini digested the news. “The tape,” he said. “Did they get it?”

“No. Who was it?”

“God knows.”

“I want to know.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t know what to tell you, Admiral. If they snatched your wife, you’ll probably be hearing from them.”

“Unless they have plans for making her talk.”

Carmellini didn’t respond.

“Is the consul general there this afternoon?” Grafton asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming over there. See you in about a half hour. Find me a weapon.”

Jake Grafton slammed the telephone down and marched through the lobby to the street. He passed two uniformed police on their way into the building and didn’t stop.

Tiger Cole was in his office. With Carmellini in tow, Jake stormed past the secretary and barged in. Cole was on the telephone. “… the trade agreements can be interpreted as—” One look at Grafton’s face stopped the words.

“May I call you back, Mr. Secretary? A crisis has arisen here that I must deal with.” He listened for a second or two, muttered something, then hung up.

“What in the world—?”

“Someone trashed my hotel room searching it and my wife is missing.” Jake came around the desk and seized Cole’s lapels. “If you know who has her or where she is, now is the moment to come clean.”

“Hey!” Cole tried to pull Grafton’s hands off.

The admiral held on fiercely and lowered his face toward Cole. “If anything happens to Callie I’ll kill you,” he snarled. “Anything! Do you understand me, Cole?”

The consul general became very still. “I understand, Jake.”

Grafton released Cole and straightened.

“Who has her?”

“I don’t know. Tell me about it.”

Jake sat on the desk. He described the room. “When I left her to come here for lunch, she was fine. Going to go downstairs for lunch, but she said she would be waiting for me when I got back from the consulate. She wasn’t, and the place had been violently trashed. Whoever did it was looking for this!” He pulled the tape from his pocket and showed it to Cole. “This is the tape from China Bob Chan’s library, removed from the recorder within minutes after his death.”

Cole’s brow knitted. “How’d you get it?”

“Mr. Carmellini gave it to me. He was sent over here to help with my investigation. The death of Harold Barnes seemed a good place to start.”

Jake turned to Carmellini. “Anything of interest on your searches or bugs?”

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“What’s he searching?” Tiger asked.

“Everything in this building,” Grafton barked. “Safes, filing cabinets, desks, hard drives, databases, trash cans, everything. I want to know what the fuck is going on in Hong Kong and I want to know now!”

Cole took a deep breath. “Did you bug this office, Carmellini?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Disable the bugs and leave us alone. Admiral Grafton asked a question and he deserves an unrecorded answer.”

Carmellini took less than a minute to remove the hidden wireless microphones. One was stuck to the eraser of a pencil, one of a dozen pens and pencils protruding from a coffee cup on Cole’s desk; another was pinned to the window curtain behind his chair.

When the door closed behind Carmellini, Cole said, “I don’t know who kidnapped your wife.”

“Did you know it was going to happen?”

“No. I’m amazed that it did.”

“Let’s take it by the numbers. What in hell are you mixed up in?”

“As you surmised at lunch, a group of revolutionaries is about to kick over the lantern. I’m one of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

Cole raised his hands questioningly.

“Did your group kill Harold Barnes, or have him killed?”

“To the best of my knowledge, no.”

“Don’t start that quibble shit with me, Cole! You are ten seconds away from a phone call to Washington. Did anyone in your group kill Harold Barnes? Tell me what you think.”

“No.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know. I thought at the time it might be someone in the CIA who was in bed with China Bob.”

“Where did China Bob fit in all this?”

Cole took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “I wish I knew the correct answer to that. I was using him as a conduit to get untraceable money into Hong Kong to fund the revolution. About a hundred million American dollars went through his hands.”

“Your money?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, Tiger! What in the hell are you doing, man?”

“Violently overthrowing the Communist government of China. I thought it was a great investment.”

“Did the thought ever cross your mind that perhaps the best thing you could do for your fellow Americans was let the Chinese solve their own problems?”

“I’m not going to justify my actions to you or anybody else,” Cole said coldly. “I’ve done what I believed was the right thing for my fellow man — all of them. You and the people in Washington can put that on my tombstone or stick it up your ass, I don’t care which.”

“Okay, okay.” Jake held up his hands. “What else was Chan into?”

“He smuggled some computers into the country for me.”

“Was he making campaign contributions to American politicians?”

“I believe so.”

“Who supplied the money?”

“The PLA.”

“What else was he up to?”

“Anything that would turn a dollar. Chan liked money and had a finger in every pie in town. That’s probably what got him killed.”

“Someone thought he knew too much about too many things?”

“I suspect that’s the gospel truth.”

“Did he know your money was going to fund a revolution?”

“I believe he thought I was in the drug business, but he may have guessed the truth at some point.”

Jake Grafton held both hands to his head. “I can’t believe this shit!”

Cole smacked the desk with the flat of his hand. “Don’t give me any sanctimonious crap! I won’t listen to it! Thirty years ago America’s liberals refused to fight for freedom in Asia — now they’re partners with the propaganda ministry of the Communist government as investors in China.com. Anything for a goddamn buck! Yeah, I’m funding a revolution. If the warm, well-fed, comfortable, educated establishment bastards in America lose some money or bleed a little, it’ll break my slimy heart.”

Jake Grafton took his time answering. “You can’t give freedom to people, Tiger. It’s something they have to earn for themselves. If they don’t want freedom enough to fight for it, they won’t value it.”

“The Chinese are going to fight, all right,” Cole shot back. “They’re going to do their share of bleeding.”

“Okay,” Jake Grafton said.

When Cole calmed down, he asked, “Did Callie listen to the tape that Carmellini brought her?”

“Yes.”

“All of it.”

“She said she did.”

“Who knew about the tape?”

“Carmellini, and whoever he told. He brought us a special player and earphones to listen to the thing. I presume he got them out of the closet here at the consulate.”

Tiger Cole took a deep breath. “Let’s make some assumptions, see where they take us. Let’s assume that whoever grabbed Callie is interested in the contents of that tape.”

Jake Grafton nodded.

“We know China Bob was taking money from the PLA to give to American politicians,” Cole continued. “And we know he wasn’t passing all of it along. The PLA has figured this out, too, but I fail to see why they would care what was on that tape. If a PLA officer killed China Bob, he wouldn’t care if the American government knew it. The Chinese government doesn’t care. Oh, Beijing might be embarrassed about the congressional revelations, but the government really doesn’t care. Do you understand me?”

“I guess.”

“For these people, Beijing is the center of the universe. What the Americans think or don’t think is as important as the shape of the craters on the back side of the moon.”

“Okay.”

“The only reason the PLA would want the tape is because there’s something on it that threatens them. If they knew about the revolutionaries, they wouldn’t need the tape. Do you agree?”

“I’m listening.”

“That leaves someone else Chan dealt with. Not me, because it’s too late for you or anyone else to stop the train. The danger to the revolution is past.”

“I accept that for now,” Grafton said. “If the shit hits the fan tomorrow. If it doesn’t…”

“The tape would be of value only to someone who doesn’t know the timetable, someone who thinks that he can sell the information that’s on it or use it for blackmail. He’s assuming that the world he knows is still going to be there, otherwise the tape has no value.”

Jake took the tape from his pocket and placed it on Cole’s desk. “Do you have anybody who could translate this for me?”

“Yes. Kerry Kent.”

“Is she in the building?”

“Yes.” He pushed the button on the intercom and said his secretary’s name. “Is Mr. Carmellini waiting out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please have him go to the CIA office and ask Ms. Kent to come see me.”

When he released the intercom button, Cole told Grafton, “She’s a British SIS agent on a foreign assignment. She works here.”

“Do you want the Brits to hear this?”

“I don’t think she’ll pass it along to London.”

“Think or know?”

“She’s Wu Tai Kwong’s girlfriend.”

“I’m not going to sit here for six hours while she listens to the tape. Gimme your best guess. Who snatched Callie?”

“The first possibility that pops into my head is a local gangster named Sonny Wong. I have reason to believe that people in this building are feeding him information, maybe even selling him passports.”

“Do you know who these people are?”

“Suspicion only.”

“What else is Wong into?”

“His primary occupation is smuggling: refugees, dope, diamonds, guns, whatever will earn a buck.”

“Where do I find this star of the social register?”

“You need to see a man named Rip Buckingham. He’s a friend of mine. I’ll give you his address. We won’t call because the telephones might be tapped, but I’ll write a note for you to take with you. Go over to his house.”

“Does he know about the plan for revolution?”

“Yes.”

“He’s one of the inner circle?”

“Yes.”

“What does he know?”

“As few of the specifics of my business as possible. Like all good conspirators, we compartmentalize all we can, just in case. Obviously he knows details that I don’t. He’s as familiar with the big picture as I am, of course.”

Jake Grafton could sit still no longer. He walked to the window and back, rubbing his hands. “I need a weapon, a pistol. Got one you could loan me?”

Cole hiked a foot up on his lower desk drawer, pulled up a trouser leg, and pulled down his sock. He was wearing an ankle holster. “It’s a five-shot Smith and Wesson thirty-eight with a two-inch barrel,” he said as he unstrapped the holster. “The police will get real pissy if they catch you toting it around. About all it’s good for is shooting yourself.”

“Would you have done that if they arrested you?” Jake murmured.

“Hell no. I’ve got diplomatic immunity,” Cole said.

“Is immunity bulletproof?”

“Nope. Which is why I carried the pistol.”

Cole was writing down Rip Buckingham’s address on a Post-it when the intercom buzzed. The secretary’s voice came through the box. “Sir, Mr. Carmellini is back with Ms. Kent. And there is a call from a Mr. Wong. He says he has something that might be of interest to you.”

Cole looked up and met the unblinking gray eyes of Jake Grafton.

“Send Carmellini and Kent in,” he told the box, “and I’ll take the call.” When Carmellini and Kent were seated beside Jake Grafton, Cole pushed the speaker button on the telephone.

“Cole.”

“Mr. Cole, my name is Sonny Wong. I don’t think we have ever formally met, but you may have heard someone mention my name.” Wong spoke decent English, but the accent was unmistakable.

“I have indeed heard your name.”

“I have come into the possession of several items you may wish to redeem, Mr. Cole. One is an American lady named Grafton.”