Hong Kong

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When the van brought Eaton Steinbaugh home after his radiation treatment, his wife, Babs, was waiting by the curb. He felt like hell. Babs helped him inside. He wanted to go to the study and lie down on the couch, and today she let him. Usually she insisted he go to the bedroom and get in bed, but not today.

“You got an E-mail,” she told him.

“Did you print it out?” he whispered.

“Don’t I always?”

She handed him the sheet of paper. The message was from Hong Kong, somebody in Hong Kong — he had never before seen that E-mail address. The body of the message was a series of letters, arranged as if they were a word. He counted the letters. Twelve of them.

The letters appeared to be a code. And they were, but the code wasn’t in the message. The twelve letters was the message.

He handed the sheet of paper back to Babs.

“Want to tell me what that means?” she said sharply.

“Within four hours.”

“Cole?”

“Yes.”

“Really, Steinbaugh, I don’t know about you. Sick as you are and you’re messing in other people’s business. All the way around the world, in China, no less.”

“Umpf.”

“They could prosecute you.”

“For what?”

“How would I know? Something, that’s for sure.”

“They already did that,” her husband replied. “Years and years ago.” When he was twenty he spent two years in a federal penitentiary for hacking into top-secret Pentagon computer files. Of course he was thrown out of the university and ended up never going back. That was over ten years ago.

“Prison didn’t teach you a damned thing, obviously,” she snapped, and walked out with her head down.

A husband dying of cancer was a heavy load, and he appreciated that. Not much left for Babs to smile about.

Virgil Cole!

It was really happening.

Cole promised him it would. “Have faith,” he said. “The time will come.”

“I might be dead by then,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Cole. He hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer then. Maybe it was a premonition.

“Hey, man, the Lord might call us all home before then. Just do your best to make it work when the hour comes.”

“They might change the codes. They might change the system.”

“If they do, they do. That’s life. I don’t want you to guarantee anything. Just do the best you can and we’ll all live with it, however it turns out.”

Babs was sure as hell wrong, he reflected wryly, about what he learned in prison. While doing his time he taught a computer course for the inmates. Every day he had hours alone on the machine, hours in which he was supposed to be preparing lesson plans. He spent most of those hours hacking into networks and databases all over the globe. What he didn’t do was tamper with the data that were there, so no one came looking for him. Locked up with nothing to occupy his mind, the hacking kept him sane.

That was then. Today just getting into a network was tougher, and a lot of the security programs had alarms that would reveal the presence of an unauthorized intruder. System designers finally were waking up to the threat.

But Eaton Steinbaugh had also learned a few things through the years. One was that getting in was a lot easier if you had access to the software and constructed a back door that you could use anytime you wanted.

He became a back door specialist. As soon as he was released from prison he was heavily recruited by software companies. Through the years he took jobs that interested him, and the demand for his skills forced the companies to pay excellent wages. For his own amusement, when he designed or worked on networks, he put in a trapdoor for his own use.

He was working for Virgil Cole’s company when Cole called him in one day. Cole found one of the back doors, which was the first time anyone ever managed that trick.

That Cole! He was one smart cookie, shrewd and tougher than cold-rolled steel. Steinbaugh had never met a man like him.

Cole didn’t fire him. Just told him to do a better job on the back doors or take them out.

He was working for Microsoft when Cole telephoned him eighteen months ago, wanted him to accept a job with Cole’s company, which Cole was no longer with, go to China to do some Y2K remediation.

Steinbaugh had always refused Y2K remediations, which he regarded as mind-numbing grunt work, but he did it because Cole asked.

On his way to Beijing he went through Hong Kong and dropped in to see Virgil Cole at the consulate. Cole took him to the best restaurant in town, which was French of course, where they ate a five-star gourmet dinner on white linen in a private alcove and sipped on a two-thousand-dollar bottle of wine.

“You didn’t have to do this for me, you know,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Virgil Cole.

“I needed an evening out, and you’re a good excuse.”

They were sipping cognac and sucking on Cuban cigars after dinner when Steinbaugh remarked, “When you stop and reflect, life’s contrasts are pretty amazing, aren’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I grew up in blue-collar Oakland, Dad worked on road-paving crews, we never had a whole lot. Then I wound up in prison, which was a bummer. Since then I’ve been all over the world, married, had a kid, and here I am in Hong Kong having a five-star dinner with a billionaire, just like I was somebody. You know?”

Cole laughed. Later Steinbaugh realized that Cole had hoped for this reaction, indeed, had played for it.

“I spent a lifetime working to get here, too,” he said. “The low point in my life was a night in Vietnam. I was a bombardier-navigator on A-6 Intruder aircraft. One night near the end of the war the gomers shot us down.”

“I didn’t know that,” Steinbaugh said.

Cole continued: “I remember lying in the jungle with a broken back waiting for the North Vietnamese to find and kill me. I was absolutely certain I had come to the end of the road. And I was wrong.” He lifted his glass in a silent toast to Steinbaugh, and drank. Steinbaugh did likewise.

When he had his glass back on the table, Cole said, “If the Chinese people can get rid of the Communists, who knows, perhaps in the fullness of time they too will have some of the same opportunities that have enriched our lives.”

“Yeah,” Steinbaugh agreed, for the comment seemed innocuous enough.

“I want your help to make it happen.”

Steinbaugh wasn’t sure how to answer that.

“I want you to install some of your back doors,” Cole said, looking him straight in the eyes.

“Where?”

“On some systems in Beijing. You’re going to be working on some systems in the Forbidden City, the Chinese Kremlin. I want you to install back doors so that when the time comes, you can get into those systems and control them, screw them up, or disable them.”

“When will the time come?”

“When the revolution starts.”

“Jesus Christ!” Steinbaugh’s eyes got big in surprise. He had sort of suspected that Cole had something on his mind when he asked him to come to see him in Hong Kong on his way to Beijing, but in his wildest imaginings he hadn’t envisioned anything like this. “A revolution! Me screwing with government computers to help a revolution — wouldn’t that be an act of war or something?”

“I’m no lawyer,” Cole said, “but I suspect you’re right.”

The consul general’s cigar had gone out, so he fussed over it, scraped off the ash, and got the thing smoldering again. When he saw that Eaton Steinbaugh was still listening, he went into specifics, some of which were very technical.

Steinbaugh was even more amazed, then he wasn’t. Cole didn’t do anything by guess or by God. He had thought about this, about what he wanted.

“Cyberwarfare,” Steinbaugh said.

“That’s right. We must divert the government’s attention, confuse them all to hell, make it as difficult as possible for them to figure out what the threat is. That’s the first goal. Second, we want to make it difficult for the Communists to respond militarily to the real threat when they figure out what it is. Third, we must deprive them of control over the people, the economy, the course of events. If we can deprive them of the power to make things happen, we will win.”

“We?”

“You and me.”

“Oh, come on.”

“The revolutionaries.”

“You’re one of them?”

“Yep.”

“Goddamn,” Steinbaugh said.

Of course he agreed to do it.

Eaton Steinbaugh had pretty well finished the Beijing assignment when he got sick and had to go home to California. He was just thirty-five years old, and the doctors said he had terminal cancer. He mailed Cole a note, told him he’d better hustle the future right along, make it happen soon. Cole knew what he meant.

Now, today, this message arrived.

Within four hours.

One more message to go.

Steinbaugh got up from the couch and turned on the computer. He had set up the E-mail system so it would notify him immediately of any incoming mail.

Babs heard the computer noises and came to the door.

“You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a damned fool, Eaton. As if you don’t have troubles enough, a dying man about to face the Lord and answer for all you’ve done, bad and good. I don’t know how many felonies you’re going to commit now.”

“Neither do I. This is sort of fun, huh?”

She shook her head and went back to the kitchen.

Well, Babs was Babs. She was a good woman, although she knew absolutely nothing about computers, which were his passion. Truthfully, she didn’t know much about men, either, or at least Eaton Steinbaugh — didn’t know why he did what he did, made the choices he made. She thought him a fool for hacking as a young man and for his back doors, which he had made the mistake of mentioning a few years ago when they were talking about how fascinating his work was. Practical and unimaginative as always, she thought him a complete flaming idiot for helping Cole. He knew that, and somehow it didn’t matter. She had never had any romance in her soul. Still, he loved her and she loved him, each in their own way, and that was good enough for this life.

When Jake Grafton got back to the consulate with Rip Buckingham, Tiger Cole’s office was in an uproar. Even though it was almost midnight the lights were on, the secretary and two hovering aides looked white as ghosts, and Cole was on the phone. Since it was midnight here, it was noon in Washington.

Cole was standing beside the desk holding the telephone to his ear, looking out the window.

Although Jake didn’t realize it, Cole was looking straight at the windows of the office of Third Planet Communications. There was a man at the window looking this way, but with the lights behind him, Cole didn’t recognize him. Cole hoped the man was Hu Chiang on a break — Third Planet was going to be a busy place a bit later tonight.

On the telephone an undersecretary of state was demanding to know what the hell Cole had been up to in Hong Kong. The fax of Grafton’s letter to the National Security Adviser had apparently found its way to his desk, and the undersecretary was shouting.

“A gross breach of trust, Cole. Outrageous! I have called the Justice Department. The lawyers there are recommending that the FBI investigate you for a possible treason prosecution. Do you hear me? Treason!”

“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Podgorski. I suppose this incident will be an embarrassment to the administration.”

“An embarrassment? You suppose? It’ll be a nightmare, Cole. How could you? You know the president is on a tightrope over China, and now this!”

“Darn. What was I thinking? A public discussion of the administration’s willingness to deal with tyrants won’t win you any friends, I fear.”

“Public discussion? Is that a threat?”

“You don’t think I’m going to plead guilty to some trumped-up political charge or refuse to talk to the press, do you?” Cole asked dryly. “Prosecutions are political acts. I promise you that you will be reading my repeated requests that the administration stand up for the human rights of China’s enslaved citizens in The New York Times. This whole issue is going to get a full, complete, open airing. Perhaps my friends in Congress will decide to hold hearings.”

“Asshole! You asshole! I’m sending the FBI to arrest you. They’ll be on the next plane.”

“I’ll pack my toothbrush,” Cole told Podgorski and hung up the telephone.

“Sounds like it hit the fan in Washington,” Jake Grafton said.

“They are agitated. My resignation was sudden, unexpected. After mature reflection, I suspect they will claim executive privilege covers my resignation and the reasons for it. They may even refuse to acknowledge I was an appointee of the administration.”

Cole grinned. He did it so rarely that the effect was startling, as if a powerful light had been turned on. And as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone.

“Why are you dripping on my carpet?” Cole asked. His gaze went to Buckingham. “Both of you?”

“Little fracas at Sonny Wong’s restaurant in Aberdeen,” Jake said.

Rip added, “Grafton started a fire. We had to swim for it.”

“Did you kill him?” Tiger Cole asked, referring to Sonny.

“No.” Jake sighed. “I was sorely tempted. I almost wish I had. Wanted to put the fear in the bastard. Maybe he’ll send her back. Even if he doesn’t, maybe he’ll keep his hands off her.”

The secretary looked at the admiral like he was insane. Both the aides were trying to keep control of their faces, with little success.

Rip Buckingham was beside himself. He shooed the secretary and aides from the room. When they were gone, he whispered hoarsely at Cole, “This man’s crazy. He shot a man dead in Wong’s office. Pulled a gun from his pocket and shot him right in the bloody ticker. Didn’t say a bloody word, just… bang.”

Cole shook his head. “That sure sounds like Jake Grafton.”

Jake pulled the pistol from his pocket, opened the cylinder, and picked out the empties. “Need some more shells. Some gun oil too, if you have any. Salt water isn’t good for these things.”

Buckingham sank into a chair and put his head in his hands.

“I called my attorneys in California,” Cole said. “They need a day to sell some stock, raise some cash. They will be ready to wire-transfer the money to that Swiss account the day after tomorrow.”

“The day after tomorrow,” Grafton echoed. “When Wong calls, why don’t you tell him that he has to take them to a neutral place? I’ll meet him there. When I see them safe and sound, I’ll call you and you can wire the money. That way killing us won’t solve his problem.”

“It’ll be a start.”

“To be safe,” Jake explained, “he has to kill Wu and you and everyone in the revolutionary movement who might oppose him or seek revenge. If all of you are in one place, after he gets the money he can just blow up the building and solve his problem.”

“Okay. But how are you going to get Wu and Callie out of harm’s way after he gets his money?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think about it.”

“I don’t think it can be done,” Tiger Cole said softly.

“Sonny can’t afford to be known as the man who killed Wu,” Rip said. “Sure, a lot of people know that he kidnapped Wu. But if he kills him…”

Cole opened a desk drawer, extracted a small box, and walked to the chair where Buckingham sat. “This is your brother-in-law’s finger,” he told Rip. “Sonny Wong had it delivered this afternoon.”

Buckingham looked in the box and turned pale.

“We need Wu alive. China needs him.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Rip said crossly. “I’m a big boy.”

“How about doing another story for your dad? The last one was very good — got ‘em in an uproar in Europe and Washington.”

“Okay,” Rip said, brushing the hair back out of his eyes. He handed the box back to Cole.

“You can use a computer in the office across the street. More on the coming revolution, about the goings-on in Hong Kong. E-mail it to Richard for tomorrow’s papers. We want to make damn sure the world knows who the guys are in the white hats.”

Rip took a deep breath, his eyes still on the box.

“What do I say about Wu?”

“Don’t mention him by name. ‘Unnamed patriots’ is the phrase. Nothing about Sonny Wong.”

After Rip left, Cole used the intercom to ask the secretary to get Jake some clean clothes from his apartment. Then he asked the admiral, “Want a drink? I got some bourbon.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you tell Wong?”

“Not to harm Callie.”

“I’m sorry, Jake. Sorry you and Callie got mixed up in this.”

“Yeah.”

Jake was buttoning one of Cole’s shirts when there was a knock on the door. Tommy Carmellini stuck his head in.

“I thought I’d find you here, Admiral. You left a note on my desk asking for a report?”

“I did. Come in.”

Carmellini dropped into an overstuffed chair and watched Jake put on his wet shoes over dry socks. “You want it here, where Mr. Cole can hear?”

“Yep. What have you found out?”

The CIA officer removed a small notebook from an inside jacket pocket and flipped it open. “The clerk selling the passports to Sonny Wong is a woman named Elizabeth Yeager.” He spelled the last name. “She delivers the passports to her bedroom buddy, Carson Eisenberg, a CIA guy who is on Wong’s payroll. She’s been making false computer entries and writing up files to cover the thefts, so all the numbers will match when the department is audited.”

“How did you find out this information?”

“I opened the safes down there, checked the logbooks, then went into the secured cabinets.”

“Jesus!” Cole said. “And I thought this place was reasonably secure.”

“Not even close,” Carmellini shot back.

“Do you have Eisenberg’s contact?” Jake asked.

“Name, phone number, and address. And I got his banking information, where he’s been depositing the cash he got from Wong.”

“What else?”

“Kerry Kent has been talking to some people in her apartment in Chinese. Don’t know what it means without a translator, and don’t know which translator around here I can trust. I sent the tape off to Washington.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The consul general uses English in his office, fortunately. He had a conversation earlier today with Kerry Kent about a plane that was supposed to arrive at seven this evening at Lantau Island. She was worried that with the airport closed, the plane couldn’t land. Cole didn’t think that would be a problem.”

Carmellini looked at Cole. “Was it a problem, sir?”

“You’re still taping conversations in this office?”

“Yes, sir. After you and the admiral had your little talk, I wired you up again.”

“Goddamn you, Carmellini! I told you—”

“Can’t fire me,” Carmellini said smugly and grinned. “I work for him.” He jerked his thumb at Grafton.

“Don’t be a prick.”

“It’s genetic. Folks often remark upon that fact. You’d think I worked for the IRS or—”

“Can it,” Jake Grafton snapped. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Cole’s been lying to you.”

Grafton’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at Cole, then concentrated on Carmellini. “Explain.”

Carmellini extracted a sheaf of folded paper from another pocket. “The National Security Agency has been doing some intercepts on certain E-mail addresses, and they passed along some dillies that Cole had been sending and receiving.”

Cole sat down behind his desk. He didn’t look too upset.

“Seems that Mr. Cole has been E-mailing people in the states about something called York units. They are supposed to be on that plane.”

“York?”

“York units. Don’t know what those are, but it is obvious to me from reading this correspondence that Mr. Cole is not a traitor, that certain people in the United States government are cooperating with him and providing him with technical and logistical support. Six York units, tech manuals, computers, WB cell phones, the list goes on and on.”

“I know what York units are,” Jake muttered and glanced again at Cole. As usual the consul general’s face revealed nothing of its owner’s thoughts.

“Anything else?” Jake said to Carmellini.

“That about covers the waterfront, I think.”

Jake looked at Cole. “What do you want to do about Eisenberg and the Yeager woman?”

“Can’t prosecute them with illegally obtained evidence.”

“They don’t know how we got the evidence,” Carmellini pointed out.

“Have the personnel officer call them in and fire them,” Cole said to Carmellini. “Then give them a choice: They can go home and be prosecuted for theft and espionage, or they can stay in Hong Kong. If they want to stay, run them out of the consulate. Tell them if they ever show up in the states again they will be prosecuted.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jake frowned at Carmellini. “We’re going to need some weapons that have a little more oomphf than this thirty-eight. Send the head marine up here and let me talk to him.”

Carmellini nodded and headed for the door.

“Take the bugs with you,” Jake added.

There were three of them, tiny things, cleverly hidden. Carmellini pocketed them, then left the room and closed the door behind him.

“Want to tell me about it?” Jake said.

“The administration wants the Communist era in China to end, and they are willing to help the rebels make it happen. But they don’t want anyone to know they helped.”

“You’re the fall guy?”

“I suppose. They had to have someone to blame and I volunteered. I thought you had figured that out. Life in California was getting to be a burden that I couldn’t carry, and…” Cole shrugged.

Jake just nodded. He finished off his whiskey in one gulp and set the glass on the table by the couch.

“I guess the left hand and the right hand are still strangers in Washington,” Cole added.

“Yeah,” Jake Grafton replied. “They never tell all of it.”

“Do you know these people who kidnapped us?” Callie Grafton asked Wu Tai Kwong between chattering teeth. He had used a piece of sheet to wash her wounds after she was brought back to the stateroom around midnight. He thought she had had a mild concussion, but she was shivering uncontrollably from her hours in the meat locker.

“I know them,” he replied. He had ripped a sheet into strips and wrapped them around the cuts in his arm. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“They wanted to know what was on the tape. The CIA had a bug hidden in China Bob Chan’s library and taped the conversations there the night he died. I listened to the tape.”

“Sonny Wong is worried about what you heard.”

“You think?”

“He might be on the tape.”

“So who is Sonny Wong?”

“A gangster. Maybe the last big one in Hong Kong. There are many little gangsters, people who want to be big, but Sonny is big. Makes lots of money.”

Callie wrapped herself tighter in the blankets. She couldn’t stop shivering. Her face hurt like hell and she was bruised and ached all over, but the deep cold she felt was worse.

“Is this about money?” she asked. “Is that why we were kidnapped?”

“I think so.” Wu sat down on his bunk. His hand and arm were hurting. He rested his elbow on his knee with the hand elevated. “Cole has so much. The temptation was too much for Sonny.”

Callie waited for Wu to say more. She saw a broad-shouldered, medium-sized Chinese man of about thirty years, not handsome, not ugly, the kind of man who could melt into any crowd bigger than three. Or could he?

There was something…

“Sonny Wong is the security chief,” Wu said. “Every revolution needs someone to enforce secrecy or the whole thing will collapse of its own weight. That is his job.”

Callie began to see it. “So if someone talked to the police…”

“Sonny heard of it. He had people in every cell who reported to him. He plugged the leaks.”

“He killed people who talked?”

Wu lowered his head. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “Sometimes people saw the error of their ways and agreed to talk no more.”

“He’s a thug.”

“An enforcer. It takes more than dreamers with stars in their eyes to make a revolution.”

“He’s the dirty end of the stick.”

The metaphor threw Wu. Callie didn’t feel like explaining.

“You trusted him that much?” Callie pressed.

“No one else wanted the job. No one wanted blood on his hands.”

“How did you know this loyal murderer wouldn’t betray you?”

“I didn’t know. Anyone could have betrayed me, any hour of any day.”

“Who is your thug in Beijing, Shanghai, et cetera?” Callie asked.

“Sonny has friends throughout most of China. Really, there was no one else who could do the job.”

Callie was unwilling to leave the subject. “So you must have known that someday Wong might turn on you, take over the entire organization, put himself at the head? There is plenty of precedent, I believe. Saddam Hussein and Joe Stalin leap immediately to mind.”

“That was a possibility,” Wu Tai Kwong reluctantly admitted.

“So what did you plan to prevent that move from succeeding?”

“I planned to kill him before he killed me.”

“Looks like you may have miscalculated,” Callie snapped.

Thoroughly disgusted, she carried the blankets into the tiny bathroom and shut the door. The door had no lock.