Hong Kong

CHAPTER TWO

The morning sun shone full on the balcony of the fifth-floor hotel room when Jake Grafton opened the sliding glass door. The bustle and roar from the streets below assailed him, but he grinned and seated himself at the small, round glass table. As he sipped at a cup of coffee he sampled the smells, sights, and sounds of Hong Kong.

His wife, Callie, stepped out on the balcony. She was dressed to the nines, wearing only a subtle hint of makeup, with her purse over her shoulder and her attaché case in her left hand.

As she bent to kiss Jake he got a faint whiff of scent. “You smell delicious this morning, Mrs. Grafton.”

She paused at the door. A furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “What are you going to do today?” she asked.

“Loaf, read the morning paper, cash some traveler’s checks, and meet you for lunch.”

“When are you going to start on your assignment?”

“I’m working on it this very minute. I know it doesn’t look like it, but the wheels are turning.”

Today was the third day of the conference, an intense seven-day immersion in Western culture for Chinese college students. Callie was one of the faculty.

“I’m soaking up atmosphere,” Jake added. “This trip was billed as my vacation, as you will recall.”

Perhaps it was the rare sight of her husband in pajamas at eight on a weekday morning that bothered her. She smiled, nodded, and said good-bye.

As Jake worked on the coffee he surveyed the old police barracks immediately across the road from the hotel. The barracks was surrounded by a ten-foot-high brick wall, which hid it from people on the street. Three stories high, it was constructed of whitewashed brick or masonry in the shape of a T. The windows in the base of the T, which was parallel to Jake, revealed rooms with bunks, lockers, showers, laundry rooms, and a kitchen and dining hall, all set in from outside balconies that ran the length of each floor, much like an American motel. The top of the T was an administration building, apparently full of offices. Police cars filled the parking spaces around the building.

The lawn, however, was a military encampment, covered with troops, tents, fires, and cooking pots. Here at least five hundred People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, troops were bivouacked, covering almost every square yard of greenery. Pencil-thin columns of smoke from the fires rose into the still morning air.

In colonial days the Royal Hong Kong police force must have been a nice life for single British men who wanted to do something exotic with their lives, or at least live their mundane lives in an exotic locale and make a very nice living in the process. Like most colonial police forces, the Royal Hong Kong force was famously corrupt, had been since the first Brit donned a uniform and strolled the streets.

Today Chinese policemen and soldiers scurried to and fro like so many ants. Jake wondered if there were any British policemen still wearing the Hong Kong uniform.

Jake Grafton drained his coffee cup and turned his attention to the English-language newspaper, the China Post, which had been slid under the door of the room early this morning.

The financial crisis in Japan was the lead article on the front page, which contained lengthy pronouncements from the Chinese government in Beijing. The article also contained a quote from the American consul general, Virgil Cole.

Jake read the name with interest and shook his head. He had flown with Cole on his last cruise during the Vietnam War, and the two of them had survived a shootdown. And he hadn’t seen the man since. Oh, they corresponded routinely for years after Cole left the navy, but finally in one move or other the Graftons lost Cole’s address, and the Christmas cards stopped. That was ten or so years ago.

Tiger Cole. After his broken back healed, he had gotten out of the navy and gone to grad school, then got into the high-tech business world in Silicon Valley. When he was named consul general to Hong Kong two years ago, Fortune magazine said he was worth more than a billion dollars. Of course, he was also a generous donor to political causes.

Maybe he should call Tiger, ask him out to dinner. Then again… He decided to wait another day. If Tiger didn’t call, he would call him.

On the second page of the paper was a column devoted to a murder that apparently happened last night. The body was discovered just before press time. Jake recognized the victim’s name — China Bob Chan — and read the article with a sinking feeling. As the key figure in a campaign finance scandal in Washington, China Bob had been getting a lot of press in the United States of late, most of it the kind of coverage that an honest man could do without. Chan’s untimely demise due to lead poisoning was going to go over like a lead brick on Capitol Hill.

On the first page of the second section of the newspaper Jake was pleasantly surprised to find a photo of Callie with two of the other Americans on the seminar faculty, along with a three-paragraph write-up. Amazingly, the reporter even spelled Callie’s name correctly. He carefully folded that page to keep.

All in all, Jake thought, the newspaper looked exactly like what it was, a news sheet published under the watchful eye of a totalitarian government intolerant of criticism or dissent. Not a word about why the PLA troops were choking the streets, standing at every street corner, every shop entrance, every public facility, nothing but the bare facts about China Bob’s murder, not even an op-ed piece about the implications of his death vis-à-vis Chinese-U.S. relations.

Jake’s attention was captured by several columns of foreign sports scores on the next-to-the-last page. Australian football received more column inches than the American professional teams did, Jake noted, grinning.

He tossed the paper down and stretched. Ahhhhh…

Someone was knocking on the door to the room.

“Just a minute!”

Jake checked his reflection in the mirror over the dresser — no need to scandalize the maid — then opened the door a crack.

A man in a business suit stood there, a westerner… Tommy Carmellini.

“Come in.” Jake held the door open. “I’m not going very fast this morning, I’m afraid.”

“Have you seen the morning paper?”

“China Bob?”

“Yes.”

“I saw the story.”

“It’s true. Chan’s as dead as a man can get.”

“Let me take a shower, then we’ll go downstairs for some breakfast.”

“Okay.” Tommy Carmellini sat down in the only chair and opened his attaché case.

When Jake came out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, Carmellini was repacking his sweep gear in the attaché case. “No bugs,” he told Jake.

“The phone?”

“Impossible to say. I have no idea how much impedance and resistance on the line are normal.”

“Okay.”

“How did you know the story was true?”

“Alas, I met China Bob last night a minute or two after he had joined the ranks of the recently departed. He was warm as toast and the hole in his head was brand-new. There was a spent 7.65-millimeter cartridge under a table a few feet away.”

“Who shot him?”

“I didn’t. That’s all I know for sure.”

“Do you have the tape on you?”

Carmellini sat and removed it from his sock. He passed it to Jake Grafton, who examined it cursorily and put it in a trouser pocket.

After they had ordered breakfast in the hotel restaurant, the two men talked in general terms about the city in which they found themselves. Jake told Carmellini that he and Callie had met in Hong Kong, in 1972. “Haven’t been back since,” Jake said, “which was a mistake, I guess. It’s a great city, and we should have come every now and then to watch it evolve and grow.”

Carmellini was only politely interested. “How come,” he asked the admiral, “they sent me over here to help you out? You’re not CIA.”

“You sure about that?” Jake Grafton asked. Carmellini noticed that Grafton’s gray eyes smiled before he did. His face was tan and lean, although the nose was a trifle large. The admiral had a jagged, faded old scar on one temple.

“Few things these days are exactly what they appear to be,” Carmellini agreed. “As I recall, when I met you last year you were wearing a navy uniform and running a carrier battle group. Of course, the agency is going all out on cover stories these days.”

Jake chuckled. “I was pushing paper in the Pentagon when they were looking for someone to send over here to snoop around. Apparently my connection to Cole from way back when got someone thinking, so… Anyway, when they asked me about it, I said okay, if my wife could come along. So here I am.”

Carmellini frowned. “How did I get dragged into this mess? I had a pair of season tickets to see the Orioles and a delightful young woman to fill the other seat.”

“I asked for you by name,” Jake replied. “The new CIA director tried to dissuade me. Carmellini is a thief, he said, a crook, and last year when someone murdered Professor Olaf Svenson, Carmellini’s whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for. Seems that you were on vacation at the time, which is not a felony, but it made them do some digging; of course nothing turned up. No one could prove anything. Still, your record got another little smirch.”

“He said that?”

“He did. Apparently your personnel file is interesting reading.”

“You know how football players talk about adversity?” Tommy Carmellini remarked. “I’ve had some of that, too. And smirches. Lots of smirches.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So if you know I’m smirched, how come you asked for me?”

“My aide, Toad Tarkington, suggested you. For some reason you impressed him.”

“I see.”

Their breakfast came. After the waiter left, Jake said, “Tell me about last night. Everything you can remember.”

Carmellini talked as he ate. “They have me working with this woman from SIS, a Brit named Kerry Kent. She’s a knockout and speaks Chinese like a native. I’ve known her exactly three days and an evening.”

“Uh-huh.”

Carmellini explained about the party, about how Kent got two invitations and took him along as her date. Two hours into the evening, he explained, he saw his chance and sneaked upstairs.

“I was pretty spooked when I found China Bob all sprawled out. I got the tape out of the recorder and installed a new one, so anyone checking the machine would think the original tape didn’t work. That was my thinking, which wasn’t very bright on my part. I did have the presence of mind to turn the recorder off, so maybe anyone finding it will buy that hypothesis. Then again…

“By the time I got downstairs the thought occurred to me that I didn’t know beans from apple butter. Anybody in Hong Kong could have killed China Bob, for any conceivable reason. Including, of course, my companion for the evening, Kerry Kent. She spent fifteen minutes in the ladies’ just before I went upstairs, or so she said. Just to be on the safe side, when I got downstairs after retrieving the tape I told her it wasn’t in the recorder.”

Jake Grafton looked up from his coffee. “And…”

“And damn if she didn’t frisk me when we were outside waiting for the valet to bring the car around. Gave me a smooch and a hug and rubbed her hands over my pockets.”

“You sure she was looking for the tape?”

“She patted me down.”

“Maybe she was trying to let you know she was romantically interested,” Jake suggested with a raised eyebrow.

“I had hopes,” Carmellini confessed. “She’s a nice hunk of female, tuned up and ready to rumble. But she had me take her straight home. She didn’t even invite me up for a good-night beer.”

“I thought secret agents were always getting tossed in the sack.”

“I thought so, too,” Carmellini said warmly. “That’s why I signed on with the agency. Reality has been a disappointment.” Another lie, a little one. Carmellini joined the CIA to avoid prosecution for burglary and a handful of other felonies. However, he saw no reason to share the sordid details with his colleagues in the ordinary course of business, so to speak.

“Did she find the tape on you?”

“No. I had it in my sock.”

“Did she have a pistol on her?”

“She didn’t have a pistol in her sock, and believe me, there wasn’t room for one in her bra.”

“Her purse?”

“A little clutch thing — I gave it a squeeze. Wasn’t there. Of course, whoever shot China Bob probably ditched the pistol immediately.”

“So who are your suspects for the killing?”

“It could have been anybody in Hong Kong. Anybody at the party or anybody who came in off the street and went straight upstairs. Still, Kent or the consul general are high on my list. As I mentioned, she camped out in the ladies’ just before I went upstairs. I saw Cole coming down the stairs five minutes before I went up.”

Virgil Cole, the perfect warrior. Jake was the one who had hung the nickname “Tiger” on him, back in the fall of 1972 when Cole became his bombardier-navigator after Morgan McPherson was killed. This morning Grafton took a deep breath, remembering those days, remembering Cole as he had known him then. Those days seemed so long ago, and yet…

The Chinese employees of the Bank of the Orient had known the truth for days, and they had told their friends, who withdrew money from their accounts. As the news spread, the queues in the lobby had grown longer and longer.

This fine June morning a crowd of at least two thousand gathered on the sidewalks and in the manicured square in front of the bank, waiting for it to open. The bank was housed in a massive, soaring tower of stone and glass set in the heart of the Victoria business district, between the slope of Victoria Peak and the ferry piers. Its name in English and Chinese was of course splashed prominently across the front of the building in huge characters. In still larger characters lit day and night mounted on the side of the building at the twenty-story level so they would be visible from all over the island, from Kowloon, indeed, on a clear day from mainland China itself, was the name of the bank in Japanese, for the Bank of the Orient was a Japanese bank and proud of it.

After urgent consultations and many glances out the window at the crowd, which was growing by the minute, bank officials refused to open the doors. Instead, they called the Finance Ministry in Tokyo. While the president of the bank waited by the telephone for the assistant finance minister for overseas operations to return his urgent call, someone outside the bank threw a rock through a window.

One of the cashiers called the police. The police took a look at the crowd and called the governor, Sun Siu Ki. Sun didn’t go look; he merely called General Tang Tso Ming, the new commander of the division of the People’s Liberation Army that was stationed in Hong Kong.

A half hour later several hundred armed soldiers arrived. They spread themselves two deep across the street on each end of the crowd. They also surrounded a park across the street from the bank where many people were waiting. There really weren’t enough soldiers to physically prevent the crowd from moving, so the soldiers did nothing but stand in position, waiting for orders. Then four tanks clanked up, ripping up asphalt, and stopped with their big guns pointed at the crowd.

General Tang arrived with the tanks. He looked over the crowd and the soldiers, had his officers adjust the placement of the troops, then went to the door of the bank and pounded on it with his fist. When it didn’t open, he pulled his pistol and rapped on the door sharply with the butt.

Now the door opened.

General Tang and two of his colonels marched into the Bank of the Orient and demanded to see the president.

As they walked along the sidewalk toward the Star Ferry, Tommy Carmellini said, “Admiral, I’m really flying blind. The people at Langley sent me over here with orders to help you out, but they didn’t tell me what this is all about.”

“They sent me over here,” Jake Grafton told the CIA officer, “because I knew Tiger Cole in Vietnam. Apparently I’m one of the few people in government who know him personally. Washington wants to know what in hell is going on in Hong Kong.”

“What do they think is going on?”

They each bought first-class tickets on the ferry and went up on the top deck. As the ferry pulled out, Jake Grafton said, “China is coming to a crisis. The whole country is tinder ready to burn. One spark might set it off. The Communists want to stay in power by delivering economic prosperity, which can come only if the economic system changes. They are trapped in this giant oxymoron; they want economic change without social and political change. On the other hand, the United States wants a big piece of the China pie. So the American establishment has traded technology and capital for access to Chinese markets and low-cost labor. In other words, they have invested in the political status quo, which is the dictatorial Communist system.”

Tommy Carmellini nodded his understanding.

Jake continued. “The Communist system distorts and corrupts everything. The only way a Chinese importer can get goods into the country is to obtain a government import license. These licenses are restricted to prevent private entrepreneurs from competing against state-owned enterprises. Enter China Bob Chan and a thousand like him. If you are an enterprising Chinese businessman, for a fee Chan will obtain for you an import license from a government official — in effect, he splits the bribe. This system ensures that the bureaucracy is corrupted from top to bottom. Every single person in government is on the take, party members, officials of every caliber and stripe, army generals, everybody. This system generates enormous profits that go into their pockets, and the industrialized West gets to sell high tech to China.”

“Only the public loses,” Carmellini murmured.

“Precisely. Anyway, to get specific, the Chinese government used China Bob Chan to make political contributions in America and grease the wheels to get American export licenses for restricted technology, some of it military. As a general rule, government licenses always create opportunities for graft of one sort or another, in China and America. In this case the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, wanted the American military technology. Unfortunately, China Bob pocketed about half the money the PLA paid him to do all this American greasing. The guy who dealt with China Bob on behalf of the army was General Tang, now the PLA commander here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The story is that Tang was sent here to find and apprehend a political criminal, Wu Tai Kwong. Remember the man who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989?”

“I thought he was dead.”

“He may be. But dead or alive, he’s public enemy number one; he gave the Commies the finger. These people are paranoid.”

“That’s an occupational hazard with absolute dictators,” Tommy Carmellini said lightly.

“Anyway, that is what the army says it’s doing here. In reality, Tang and the army are here to prevent a political uprising in Hong Kong. The CIA thinks China Bob Chan washed the money to finance the revolution.”

“He was working both sides of the street?”

‘The CIA thinks so. The politicians in Congress wanted someone to come over here and root around and give an independent assessment of how deep the consul general is in all this. The White House picked me, for lack of someone better.”

“Virgil Cole?”

“That’s right.”

“Why you?”

“Well, basically, I got the impression that I’m supposed to worm my way into Cole’s confidence and get him to say things to me that he wouldn’t say to anyone else. That was the thinking in Washington, anyway. It stinks, but that’s the sordid truth.”

“Maybe it’s all bullshit,” Carmellini suggested. “Rumors go round and round. I’m an expert on rumors.”

Grafton had his arms on the railing of the boat. “Cole is apparently having a relationship of some type with Amy Chan. Her father was a British soldier and her mother was a Chinese girl who came to Hong Kong when the Nationalist cause collapsed and Mao took over on the mainland. The mother got in just before the door slammed shut, took up prostitution to feed herself. She was supposedly really good-looking, became a high-class hooker, ended up falling for this Brit soldier and having Amy by him. Of course the soldier was a shit and went tooling off to Britain when his tour was up — seems he had a wife there, too.

“Anyway, Amy’s mother saved her money and sent her daughter to America for an education. She had a degree from UCLA and was working at the American consulate processing visa applications when Cole arrived. They hit it off right from the start.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Her half brother was China Bob Chan. He used Cole as his poster boy to advertise his influence with the Americans. Amy had him over to the mansion every other night. China Bob paraded him in front of government toads, General Tang, everybody and anybody who came down here from Beijing. This has been going on about a year. Cole has been talking to congressional investigators, so he is aware of the intricacies of all this. Still, the Tiger Cole I remember from way back when wouldn’t give a good goddamn what anybody thought about his love life.”

“That’s my impression of him, too,” Carmellini mused. “I’ve seen his dossier and spent an hour or so with him, and I’d say you are pretty close to the mark.”

“We’re here to find out what Cole and China Bob have been up to,” Jake said. “I want to listen to that tape you brought over. Callie will help me with the Chinese.” He had the thing in his sock just now.

“I’ll have to get a player out of the communications room at the consulate,” Tommy Carmellini told Jake as they joined the throng waiting to get off the boat when it slid into its dock in the Central District. “It takes a special machine to play the thing.”

“Let’s get bugs in Cole’s office in the consulate. Search his desk, see what you can learn. As soon as you can, open the safes and start going through the files. I want to see anything that implicates Tiger Cole in a conspiracy to overthrow the Chinese government. If there is not a shred of physical evidence, I want to know that, too.”

“Jesus! Where’d you learn how to do investigations?”

“We don’t have time for subtleties. I want to know what in hell is going on in Hong Kong, and I want to know now. If representatives of the American government are members of a conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of China, that could be construed as an act of war.”

As they walked out of the Star Ferry terminal, Tommy Carmellini nodded at the admiral and set off for the consulate on Garden Road.

The president of the Bank of the Orient was Saburo Genda. When General Tang and his officers were escorted into his office, he was on the telephone with Governor Sun, trying to explain the situation.

“We do not have money on hand to pay all the depositors waiting outside,” Genda explained as patiently as he could.

He listened to a burst of Chinese, which he spoke reasonably well, then answered, “Of course the bank is solvent. Yes, we have reserves. Unfortunately, we just do not have sufficient cash in the vaults to pay all the people waiting outside … Yes, we will open in a few hours. You have my assurances, sir.”

He hung up the telephone and wiped his forehead.

Tang wanted to know why the bank wasn’t open.

Genda ran through it all again.

“Get some money,” General Tang said.

“We are trying, General, but since we don’t have printing presses in the basement, we must obtain currency from other banks. We are in the process of doing that now.”

Tang disliked being patronized, which he thought a slight on his dignity and his position, and he told Genda that in no uncertain terms.

He was just winding up when the telephone rang. Genda answered.

“Sir, the Finance Ministry in Tokyo is on the line.”

Genda switched to Japanese and began talking into the telephone, leaving the general to stew. Tang felt out of place in this huge, opulent office decorated with tropical hard-woods and designer furniture, four stories high in a grand temple dedicated to the gods of money.

Tang Ming was a peasant’s son, born during World War II, whose earliest memories were of his family fleeing before advancing Japanese troops.

He had spent his adult life in the army. From skin to backbone he was a soldier. A firm believer in the social goals of communism, he was, like a majority of his fellow countrymen, a cultural and racial xenophobe. Before his assignment to Hong Kong he had actually seen foreigners on only two occasions in his life, both official visits to Beijing. He had seen the foreigners at a distance, not talked with them.

Sitting in this huge office and watching an impeccably attired senior Japanese executive babble in a foreign tongue about matters he didn’t understand made General Tang Ming restless and irritable.

Someone with a cellular telephone called the editor of the China Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language newspaper, and informed him about the restless crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient. The editor, Rip Buckingham, had heard rumors for the past two days about the possible collapse of the bank, so as he listened to the caller describe the crowd and the troops, his gut told him, This is it.

Rip called the newsroom and ordered four reporters and two photographers dispatched to the scene immediately. Then he extracted an eyewitness account from the caller while he jotted notes.

When he finally let the caller go, Rip automatically glanced out the window of his corner office at the giant Coca-Cola sign on top of the Bank of the Orient building, an imposing seventy-story skyscraper in Hong Kong’s Central District. In a typical Hong Kong deal, the developer of the building played off competing consumer giants, one against the other, for the honor of having their logo prominently displayed on the masthead of the new bank building, the biggest one in the colony. Reportedly the local Coke bottler had paid a fee in excess of ten million dollars U.S. to the developer just for the privilege of putting a sign up there. That was in 1995, two years before the British turned over the colony to the Chinese Communists.

No one is building buildings like that in Hong Kong now, Rip thought bitterly.

Rip was an Australian who had enjoyed a wonderful, vagrant youth. He repaired slot machines in Las Vegas, worked as a motorman on San Francisco trolleys, sailed the Pacific and Indian oceans in the forecastles of rusty Liberian tramps, and bicycled across most of China, including the entire route of the ancient Silk Road, from Tyre on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean to Sian in central China. Finally, in his late twenties, Rip Buckingham came to rest in Hong Kong, where he got a haircut and traded his sandals for leather shoes. He even married a local girl.

Rip turned to the computer sitting on a stand beside his desk and began writing. He wanted to get the eyewitness account down while it was fresh and immediate. He was still working on it when his reporters began calling in on their cellular telephones. He folded the facts they had gleaned into the story he was writing and asked questions.

Unlike a reporter operating in a Western nation, Rip did not telephone the governor’s officer or the police or the PLA to elicit comments or give those officials a chance to dispute the accounts his reporters were getting. He had done that years ago when he first took over the managing editor’s position, and before long was told by some government functionary, “You can’t print that.” The police then came to the newspaper office to ensure that he didn’t.

So far he had managed to avoid the wrath of the Communist officials who ruled Hong Kong. It hadn’t been easy. He was, he often thought wryly, becoming a master at damning with faint praise. I’m the king of innuendo, he once grumped to his wife. Actually, as he well knew, he had escaped censorship only because his paper was published in English, a language that few government officials spoke with any fluency. All the Chinese-language newspapers had a squad of resident apparatchiks from the New China News Agency who had to approve everything.

As Rip worked on the story, a sense of impending doom came over him. There were several hundred banks in Hong Kong, most of them privately owned, yet China had no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Chinese banks outside of Hong Kong were owned by the state and theoretically could not fail. Of course, if those state-owned banks were examined using Western accounting standards, all were insolvent.

The problem was the desperate financial straits of the Chinese government, which saw the privately owned banks in Hong Kong as a source of low-interest loans for noncompetitive state-owned industries that would collapse without cash infusions, industries that employed tens of millions of mainland workers.

The Japanese who owned the Bank of the Orient had refused to make those loans to the Chinese government. Now the bank was failing, and thousands of people were going to be flat-ass broke after a lifetime of work and saving.

What was the Chinese government doing to prevent that outcome, if anything?

As luck would have it, after he left the Star Ferry terminal Jake Grafton wandered along with the crowd, lost in thought. When he at last began paying attention to his surroundings he found himself in the square outside the Bank of the Orient, shoulder-to-shoulder with several thousand other people. The doors of the bank were apparently locked. From time to time people came out of the crowd to try the doors, which refused to open.

Armed soldiers in uniform were visible here and there, but they were well back, away from the crowd, and seemed to be making no attempt to disperse it or prevent people from approaching the door of the bank to rattle it, pound on it, or press their foreheads against the glass and look in.

Here and there knots of people argued loudly among themselves, waved passbooks, and stared openly and defiantly at the soldiers.

For a moment, Jake thought of wandering on, finding another bank to cash his traveler’s checks. Surely they all weren’t closed today.

Yet something made him linger. He found a few empty inches on a flower bed retainer wall and parked his bottom.

Meanwhile, in the executive suite of the bank, President Saburo Genda was getting bad news from the assistant finance minister in Tokyo.

“We will not loan the bank additional funds. I’m sorry, but the prime minister and the finance minister are agreed.”

President Genda’s forte was commercial loans to large companies. He had spent much of his adult life dealing with wealthy businessmen with a firm grasp of economic reality. He fought now to keep his temper with this obtuse government clerk.

“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice tightly under control. “We are experiencing a run on the bank. There is a crowd of several thousand depositors outside demanding their money. Without additional cash, the bank cannot pay them. Without more money, the bank will collapse.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Genda,” said the bureaucrat. “It is you who do not understand. The government has decided to let the bank fail. It would simply cost too much to save it.”

“But—”

“The Bank of the Orient made far too many real estate loans in Hong Kong at astronomical evaluations. As you know, the market collapsed after the Communists took over. It may be twenty years before the market recovers. Indeed, it may never recover.”

“Mr. Assistant Minister, your ministry has known about the bad loans for years. Your colleagues were working with us. We have the assets to pay our depositors, but the assets are in accounts in Japan and you have frozen them. Those funds belong to this bank! Make them available for us to pledge and we will borrow the cash we need locally.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Genda. The government has decided to offset the bank’s assets against the amounts the bank owes the government.”

“You can’t do this,” Genda protested. “This isn’t the way things are done. You are violating the banking regulations!”

‘The decision has been made.”

“Have you discussed the failure of the bank with the governor of Hong Kong or the Chinese government in Beijing?”

“We have. Since the bank is not Chinese, they did not choose to guarantee its debts.”

Genda continued, almost pleading, trying to make the bureaucrat see reason. “This is a Japanese bank! Many of our senior people are former Finance Ministry officials. We have close ties with the government, extremely close ties.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Genda,” the civil servant said politely. “As I said, the decision has been made. We here in the Ministry expect you to take personal responsibility for the condition of your institution. Good-bye.”

The assistant minister hung up, leaving Saburo Genda standing with the telephone in his hand, too stunned to hang it up, too stunned to speak to his subordinates standing around the room waiting for a report. He felt as if his head had just been separated from his body. In two minutes of conversation, the civil servant at the Finance Ministry had ruined him: He could never work in a bank again; his whole life had just been reduced to rubble.

“Open the bank,” General Tang said in Chinese. “I order you to open the doors of the bank.”

“The bank is ruined,” Saburo Genda told the soldier, his lips barely able to form the words. “Tokyo refuses to guarantee our borrowings of cash to pay the depositors.”

Tang Ming tried to understand. Foreigners! “But this is a bank. You have much money in the vault. Give it to the people who want it, and when you run out, tell them they will have to come back another day.”

“Then the riot will occur in our lobby.”

“You must have money!” Tang gestured to the crowd. “What have you done with all of their money?”

Genda had had it with this fool. “We loaned it out,” he said through clenched teeth. “That is the function of banks, to accept deposits and make loans.”

Tang Ming stretched to his full height. He looked at Genda behind his great, polished desk, a whipped dog, and his two colonels and Genda’s secretary and the crowd beyond the window.

“Come,” he murmured at the colonels and strode out.

The tangible anger of the crowd made Jake Grafton uneasy. He sensed it was high time for him to be on his way, time to be out of this group of angry Asians who were working themselves up for a riot.

Still he lingered. Curiosity kept him rooted.

Although he spoke not a word of Chinese, he didn’t really need the language to read the emotions on people’s faces. A few people were openly crying, weeping silently as they rocked back and forth in sitting positions. Others were on cellular phones, presumably sharing their misfortune with family and friends.

The number of wireless telephones in use by the crowd surprised Jake — China was definitely third or fourth world. There was money in Hong Kong, a lot of which had been invested in state-of-the-art technology. Still, most of the people in this square existed on a small fraction of the money that the average American family earned.

As Jake sat there with two thousand American dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in his pocket that he could get cashed at any bank in town, the vast gulf between the comfortable, middle-class circumstances in which he had lived his life and the hand-to-mouth existence that so many hundreds of millions — billions — of people around the world accepted as their lot in life spread before him like the Grand Canyon.

He was no bleeding heart, but he cared about people. Always had. He found people interesting, could imagine himself in their circumstances; this was one of the qualities that made him a leader, a good naval officer, and a decent human being.

General Tang Ming climbed into a small van with public address system speakers mounted on the roof. Sitting in the passenger seat of the van holding a microphone, the general explained the facts as he understood them: The bank had loaned all the money it had and had no more to pay to the people in the crowd. It would not open its doors.

Since waiting for an event that would not happen was futile, Tang ordered the crowd to disperse. The language he used was Mandarin Chinese, the dialect of northern China, of Beijing, and of most of the soldiers under his command. Unfortunately, it was not the language of the people in the crowd, most of whom spoke Cantonese or English.

As General Tang harangued the crowd in the street outside the Bank of the Orient over a loud, tinny PA system in a language few understood, the crowd became more boisterous. Some people began shouting, others produced stones and bits of concrete from construction sites that they threw toward the bank windows. Several men nearest the main entrance to the bank pounded on the door with their fists, shouting, “Open up and pay us!”

Others in the crowd, sensing approaching disaster, tried to leave the area by passing through the cordon of soldiers. Almost by reflex, the greatly outnumbered soldiers tried to hold the crowd back. They struck out with billy clubs and rifle butts. Inevitably the conflict panicked onlookers, many of whom gave in to their urge to flee all at the same time. Those in the center of the crowd began pushing those on the fringes toward the soldiers.

A shot was fired. Then several shots.

General Tang was still holding forth on the PA system from the passenger seat of the van when the first fully automatic burst was triggered into the crowd by a frightened soldier.

People screamed. More shots were fired into the crowd, random insanity, then the soldiers were either trampled or ran before the fear-soaked mob trying to escape.

A sergeant in one of the tanks on the edge of the park tried to aid the escape of his fellow soldiers, who ran past the tank in front of a wall of running civilians who were also desperate to escape. The sergeant opened fire at the civilians with a machine gun mounted on top of the main turret. The bullets cut down several dozen people before the gun jammed.

In three minutes the sidewalk and street in front of the bank contained only dead, dying, and wounded people, many of them trampled. More than a hundred people lay on the pavement and grass and in the flowerbeds, some obviously dead, some bleeding and in shock.

General Tang climbed out of the public address van and stood staring uncomprehendingly at the human wreckage. He hadn’t recognized the muffled pops as shots since the public address system was so loud, and he was initially pleased when the people he could see from the van began to move. Alas, by then the situation was out of control. Surprised by the panic evident among the civilians he could see through the van’s windshield, Tang stopped speaking and heard, for the first time, the shooting, the shouting, and the screaming.

Staring now at the people lying in the otherwise empty street, he became aware that several officers were beside him, shouting questions.

The thought that ran through the general’s head was that the crowd should not have run. It was their fault, really. He certainly hadn’t given orders for the soldiers to shoot.

“Pick them up,” he said and gestured toward the dead and wounded. The officers beside him looked puzzled.

“Pick them up,” General Tang repeated. “Take them to the hospital. Clear the street.”

When the first shot was fired, a nervous Jake Grafton raked two old ladies from their perch on the retaining wall and shoved them onto the ground. Then he threw himself on top of them.

He didn’t move until the shooting was completely over and most of the people on their feet had fled. Only then did he stand and look about him at the bodies, at people bleeding, at people like himself who had taken what cover they could find.

He helped the two old women to their feet. Neither was hurt. They looked about them with wide, fearful eyes. Without a word they walked away, away from the bank and the soldiers and the gunshot victims.

Jake Grafton lingered a moment, watching the soldiers check the people lying on the concrete. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he walked through the troops and along the street away from the square.

The soldier who fired the first shot was from a fishing village on the northern Chinese coast. Eighteen years old, he had been in the army for nearly two years. He had been in Hong Kong for two weeks and two days — he was counting the days so he could accurately report to his family when he next sat down with a scribe to dictate a letter. His name was Ng Choy, and now he was crying.

Sitting on the hard, clean, bloody pavement of the bank square, he couldn’t stop the tears. The body of the man he had shot was lying beside him. In his panic Ng had triggered a burst of seven shots, all of which hit this middle-aged man in the chest. By some fluke, after the man was shot his heart continued beating for almost half a minute, pumping a prodigious quantity of blood out the bullet holes. The sticky mess was congealing now and turning dark.

Ng Choy didn’t understand any of it. He didn’t understand why he was here, what everyone had been shouting about, what the sergeant had wanted him to do, why this man had tried to wrestle him out of the way, and he didn’t understand why he had shot him.

So he sat there, crying uncontrollably, while his fellow soldiers walked around him, carrying away the wounded and the dead.

Finally two soldiers picked up the corpse beside Ng, leaving him on the cold pavement with his rifle and the pool of sticky blood.

Rip Buckingham cradled the telephone automatically between his cheek and shoulder. “How many dead?” he asked the reporter on the line.

“Fifteen, the soldiers say. One woman died as they loaded her into the ambulance. At least forty more were injured by bullets. I estimate a dozen or two were trampled — it will be impossible to get an accurate count of the injured.”

“Get to the bank officials. Find out why they wouldn’t open the doors of the bank.”

The story would be front-page news around the world, with a big, bold headline: 15 KILLED IN HONG KONG BY PLA TROOPS. The teaser under the main headline would read, Crowd at Japanese Bank Fired Upon.

Ten minutes later Rip was told, “I talked to a cashier. The officers of the bank are in a meeting and unavailable. The bank is insolvent. Tokyo refused to loan it any more money.”

“What?”

“Yes. The Japanese are letting the bank fail. The word is Tokyo already poured twenty billion yen into it. Apparently that’s the limit.”

This story is growing by leaps and bounds, Rip thought.

He called a man he knew on a Japanese newspaper and asked for help. In twenty minutes the Tokyo newsman called back with confirmation from the Finance Ministry. The government of Japan had decided not to save the Bank of the Orient, a Japanese-owned bank headquartered in Hong Kong. After consultations with Finance Ministry officials, the Chinese authorities had elected not to intervene.

Rip looked at his watch. There was still time. He grabbed a notebook and his sports coat and headed for the door.

The army was cleaning up the mess in front of the Bank of the Orient, loading bodies in ambulances and the backs of army trucks. Rip stood watching for several minutes. There were few onlookers; the soldiers standing around didn’t seem in the mood for gawkers. Yet because he wasn’t Chinese, it was several minutes before the nearest soldier gestured for him to move on.

Rip went to the office tower entrance of the bank building and showed his press pass to the security guard. It took some talking and several hundred Hong Kong dollars, but eventually he managed to get into the executive suite on the fourth floor.

He explained to the receptionist that he wanted to talk to the president of the bank. He gave her his card: “Rip Buckingham, Managing Editor, China Post,” with the China Post lettering in the company’s trademarked style.

The receptionist told him to take a seat.

He looked at the art on the walls and at the magazines on the table. He really didn’t expect to see any bank officer. He thought it would be helpful to see the street in front of the bank again, see it knowing it was an important place, so he could visualize the scene the reporters were describing to him. And he had the time before deadline. So he was surprised when the receptionist appeared in the doorway and said, “Mr. Genda has a few minutes. Come this way, please.”

Saburo Genda had a corner office. Through the window Rip caught a glimpse of the last army truck leaving. Except for a few police guards, the square was empty.

Genda was slumped in a large stuffed chair beside the desk with his back to the square. He didn’t look up as Rip entered, didn’t pay any attention to him until the Australian was seated across from him. He had Rip’s card in his hand. He glanced at it.

“So, Mr. Buckingham,” Genda said in accented English, “ask your questions.”

The Japanese executive looked, Rip thought, like he had slept in his clothes. He had the fashionably gray hair, the dark power suit and tie, the trim waistline… and he looked exhausted, worn out.

“What happened, Mr. Genda?”

“They killed the bank.”

“They? Who is they?” Rip asked as he wrote down the previous reply in shorthand.

“The Finance Ministry. They seized our assets in Japan. They refused to let us draw on those assets for the cash we need to operate on a daily basis. The news leaked out, there was a run on the bank… We are out of business, insolvent. The bank has,” Genda took a deep breath and exhaled, “collapsed.” He raised his arms and let them fall to the arms of the chair. He looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before.

“You are saying the Finance Ministry chose to put you out of business?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“They said it was the bad real estate loans.”

“But I thought they have known about those loans for years.”

“They have.”

“Then…”

“Someone in Japan made a decision, Mr. Buckingham. I don’t know who or why. The decision was to make the bank fail.”

“Make it fail? You mean allow it to fail.”

“No, sir. When the Finance Ministry seized our Japanese assets, the Ministry forced the bank to close its doors. There was no way it could stay open. They took a course of action that made the failure of the bank inevitable.”

Rip made a careful note of Genda’s exact words.

“Mr. Genda, I have heard that the Bank of the Orient refused the Chinese government’s demands for low-interest loans. If the bank had made those loans, would it have failed today?”

Genda tried mightily to keep a straight face. He started to answer the question, then thought better of it. He lowered his head. He seemed to be focused inward, no longer aware of Rip’s presence.

Rip tried one more question, then rose and left the office. He pulled the door shut behind him.