Hong Kong

CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

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

The censor had the presses stopped, but not before a truckload of the libelous papers had already left to be installed in vending machines in the northern area of Kowloon.

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

Everyone in Hong Kong was reading these lies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sun believed that he knew what he needed to know, which was how to surf the political riptides of the Communist upper echelons in Canton Province and Beijing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t you see the crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient when you came in this morning? The ferry from Kowloon was packed; the only topic of conversation was the demonstration they were on their way to join.”

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

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

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

No one disputed that assessment.

“I want to know what’s going on in City Hall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A dangerous blabbermouth,” Carson Eisenberg agreed.

“Nevertheless, he’s given us our marching orders, so let’s dive in. Carmellini, your star is rising.”

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” said Tommy Carmellini, “this is how we’re going to do it …”

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

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

“Rip Buckingham, I have a warrant.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

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

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

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

“Hey, Marcus, it wasn’t your fault,” Rip said, trying to sound like he meant it. After all, he had been the one who always refused to fire Marcus when headlines irritated people he couldn’t afford to irritate. These little storms blew in several times a year. For a day or two there was lightning and thunder, then the sky would clear and Marcus would still be there, contrite, apologetic, slightly drunk … The damn guy just couldn’t handle life sober and Rip had never been able to condemn him for that.

“It was the story,” he told Marcus. “And the governor…”

“We must shut down the newspaper, Buckingham,” the sergeant said gently. “We have our orders. Everyone must leave the building. We will put a guard on the doors.”

“Who gave these orders?”

“Governor Sun Siu Ki.”

“May I see the paper, please?”

The order was in Chinese. Buckingham read it while the sergeant wiped his hatband and ran his hand through his hair. He ignored the curious staffers standing nearby and turned his back on Marcus, who was sobbing audibly. Rip folded the document and handed it back to the officer.

“Perhaps it will help if I tell all the staff in English what they must do.” He said it easily, without even a hint of temper, and the sergeant agreed again. As a very young man touring China, Buckingham had learned the fine art of self-control.

Some of the staffers wanted to argue with the officers, but Buckingham wouldn’t permit it. With sour looks, muttered oaths, and tears, the staffers — two-thirds of whom were Chinese — turned off the computers and office equipment and vacated the building. Buckingham remained the epitome of gracious affability, so he was given permission to have a private conversation with an assistant before the policemen took him away. Most of the staff milled helplessly on the sidewalk as the police car disappeared into traffic.

Jail held no terrors for Rip Buckingham. He had been incarcerated on several occasions in his footloose past when local policemen didn’t know quite what to make of a six-foot-three Australian bicycling through forbidden areas, that is, areas in China off the beaten track, in which tourists were not permitted. He usually talked his way out of their clutches, but now and then he spent a few nights in the local can.

Fortunately his gastrointestinal tract was as impervious to bacteria as PVC pipe. Had his GI tract been more normal, one suspects he would not have strayed so far from tap water. He would probably be in Sydney now, married to one of the local sheilas, with one and a half blond kids, holding down some make-work position in his father’s worldwide newspaper empire while the old man groomed him to follow in his footsteps, et cetera, et cetera.

As he rode through the streets of Hong Kong in the police car, wedged in the backseat between Sergeant Ng and his colleague, Rip Buckingham thought about the et ceteras. He also thought about his father, Richard Buckingham, and what he would say when he heard the news. Not the news his son had been arrested, but that the paper had been shut down.

Amazingly, for a man who owned fifty-two newspapers located in six countries, his father never really understood the romance of the printed word. Richard Buckingham saw newspapers as very profitable businesses with enviable cash flows. “Newspapers,” he liked to say, “are machines for turning ink and paper into money.”

Measured on Richard’s criteria, the China Post had once been one of his best. B.C. Before the Communists.

Strange, Rip thought. He was thinking about the paper as if it would never publish again. Well, perhaps its day was over. For that matter, perhaps Hong Kong’s day was over.

The Brits just turned over the keys and walked away. They went home to their unimpressive little island on the other side of the world and pretended Hong Kong never happened.

Maybe that was the wise thing to do.

Rip Buckingham shook his head, angry at himself. He was becoming demoralized. This was his city, his and Sue Lin’s. She was born in Hong Kong, grew up here; he had adopted it.

Sue Lin loved Hong Kong.

Well, he thought defensively, he did, too. The city belonged to everyone who loved her. God knows, there were millions of people who did.

Despite his best efforts at keeping his spirits up, he was glum when the police car rolled through the gate of the city prison.

Damn Communists!

Sue Lin Buckingham told her mother that Rip was in jail, on a warrant demanded by Governor Sun Siu Ki. Policemen had arrested him, closed the newspaper. And this morning another riot was developing in front of the Bank of the Orient.

“Rip was foolish,” Lin Pe told her daughter in Cantonese, the only language in which she was fluent. She spoke a little English, but only when she had to. She acquired most of her English from American movies which she watched on a VCR, running scenes over and over until she understood the dialogue.

The news about Rip annoyed her. He had no respect for authority! “He has been baiting the tiger with his news stories and editorials, and now the jaws have snapped shut. Only a fool spits in the eye of a tiger.”

“The paper was losing circulation, Mother, and advertising.” Sue Lin was tense, unhappy over the news of her husband’s jailing, and her mother’s simplistic reaction angered her. As if this lifelong capitalist didn’t understand the dynamics of the marketplace! “The Post used to make money because it was the newspaper for Hong Kong bankers and businesspeople to read. Rip knew that he had to address the concerns of the people he wanted as readers or he would lose them. And when he lost them, he would lose the advertisers who wanted to reach them. It’s that simple.”

“Apparently Sun Siu Ki isn’t concerned about Rip’s advertisers,” the mother snapped.

“Sun Siu Ki is an extraordinarily stupid bastard.” Rip Buckingham’s Chinese wife was no shrinking violet.

“That may be,” her mother agreed evenly. These young people! “But he represents the government in Beijing, in precisely the same way that the old governor represented the queen in her palace in London. The difference, which dear Rip chooses to ignore, is that the English queen never laid eyes on a copy of the China Post. She didn’t give a”—she snapped her fingers—”what Rip Buckingham said in his silly little newspaper in Hong Kong, on the other side of the planet. The people in Beijing don’t share Queen Elizabeth’s indifference. They apparently do read Rip’s scribblings. They’re a lot closer, their skin is a lot thinner, and Sun is their long right arm.”

Sue Lin sank into a chair. “Oh, Mother, what are we going to do? Rip is in jail. No one knows how long they intend to keep him. They may even send him to a prison on the mainland.”

Her mother’s expression softened. “The first thing to do,” she said, “is to call Albert Cheung, the lawyer. He knows everything. He will know what to do.”

Lin Pe made the call. After talking to three people who pretended they never heard her name before in their lives, she got through to Albert Cheung, an illegal refugee from mainland China who was so smart that he won a scholarship to study law at Oxford. When he returned to Hong Kong, with a trace of a British accent and a fondness for tweeds, he managed to elbow his way to the top of the legal heap and into the inner sanctums even though he had no family in the colony. He had had a finger in every big deal in Hong Kong for the past twenty years. He was filthy rich and slowing down, yet he was too smart to pretend that he didn’t remember Lin Pe.

“It has been years since I’ve heard from the chairman of the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company, Limited,” Albert Cheung said.

“You’ve been getting your dividends every quarter,” Lin Pe told him. Albert took stock instead of a fee when she floated the initial public offering for her company on the Hong Kong exchange.

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “I was wondering, have you ever thought of selling the company? Retiring to a life of leisure? Travel the world, see the Great Pyramids, the Acropolis—?”

“I’ve had some other things on my mind, Albert. Like getting my son-in-law out of jail.”

“Rip Buckingham? See, I keep up. But I didn’t know he was in jail. What has he done?”

“Sun Siu Ki closed the Post today and arrested him. Could you find out how long they intend to keep him?”

“So the tiger has him in his jaws?”

“Yes.”

Cheung sighed. After a few seconds he said, “Many things are possible if you are willing to pay a fine. Would you—?”

“Within reason, Albert. I will not be robbed by anyone.”

“I saw the headline in the morning Post: ‘15 Massacred at Bank of Orient.’ And the PLA did the shooting. That headline was not wise, Lin Pe.”

“I think Sun Siu Ki was just fed up.”

“Perhaps the bank closing had—”

“Rip Buckingham’s world is collapsing. He’s been fighting back the only way he can.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Lin Pe. Give me your telephone number.”

She did so, asked about his wife and children, then hung up.

“He’ll see what he can do,” Lin Pe told her daughter. “It will cost money.”

“The newspaper will pay.”

“The newspaper is finished,” said Lin Pe. “It will never publish again.”

“Richard Buckingham is a powerful man.”

“Sun Siu Ki and the people in Beijing probably never heard of Richard Buckingham, and if they have heard, they don’t care,” Lin Pe said, which was, of course, true. To see beyond the boundaries of China had always been difficult. Even the queen of England, she reflected, knew more about the outside world than the oligarchy in Beijing.

“The next thing to do,” Lin Pe said, “is to call your father-in-law. Someone from the newspaper has probably called him already, but you should do so now.”

As her daughter walked from the room, Lin Pe added, “Don’t forget, all calls out are monitored.” She went back to writing fortunes.

Well, there it was. A way to get some money and get out before Wu Tai Kwong set China on fire. Sell the fortune cookie company to Albert Cheung!

The traders at the Hong Kong stock exchange had expected a wild ride in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bank of the Orient, but the ride was worse than anyone imagined it might be.

At the opening bell the traders were faced with massive sell orders, while the buy orders were minuscule. Prices went into freefall. Ten minutes went by before exchange officials finally learned that the computer system was at fault. Most — but not all — of the sell orders had an extra zero added just before the decimal, increasing the size of the orders by a factor of ten. On the other hand, some — not all — buy orders had their final digit dropped somewhere in cyberspace, shrinking them to a tenth of their original size.

The result was chaos. Since not every order was affected, the orders had to be checked by hand, which drastically limited the number of orders that could be processed. Unable to cope, officials closed the market.

Exchange officials quickly determined that they had a software problem, but finding the cure took most of the day. While they were working on it, one of the exchange officials was called to the telephone. The governor’s aide was on the line demanding an explanation. For the first time, the exchange official mentioned the possibility of sabotage.

“Sabotage?” the governor’s aide asked incredulously. “How could anyone do that?”

“Probably a computer virus of some type,” he was told.

“Are you certain that is the case?”

“Of course not,” the exchange official snapped.

Sun Siu Ki was on the telephone to Beijing when the phones went dead. He tried another line, couldn’t even get a dial tone, so he motioned to an aide that there was a problem and handed the instrument to him.

Sun turned to General Tang, explained that Beijing wanted the bank demonstrators dispersed and, if possible, wanted to avoid a bloody incident that the press would publicize around the world, inflaming foreign public opinion. “Remove the press from the area,” Sun advised, “before you remove the hooligans. That way the foreign press will be unable to use provocations as propaganda. Still, first and foremost, these hooligans must not be permitted to flout the authority of the state. That is paramount.”

Tang understood his instructions and the priorities they contained. Both men firmly believed that the state could ill afford to give an inch to anyone challenging its authority or resolve. Perhaps they were right, because both men knew Chinese history and their countrymen.

In any event, they were determined men who believed that the party and the government could and should use every weapon in the arsenal, indeed, every resource of the state, to fight for the survival of the revolution. And if pushed, they were fully capable of doing just that.

The telephones had been off for ten minutes when Tang left the governor huddled with his aide, who tried to explain that the computers at the stock exchange had been sabotaged. As Tang rode out of the City Hall parking area in his chauffeur-driven car, two telephone repair vans passed him on their way in.

Three men wearing one-piece telephone company jumpers and billed caps climbed from the vans. Tommy Carmellini removed an armload of tools and equipment from the van he came in while Bubba Lee talked to the security guard in Chinese. Carson Eisenberg unloaded the equipment they needed from the other van. The men strapped on tool belts. When Lee motioned to them to follow, they picked up their equipment and trooped along in single file into City Hall.

Tommy Carmellini was worried. He was an obviously non-Chinese worker who didn’t speak a word of the language. The other two spoke Chinese, of course, and they had assured Tommy that there would be no problem, but still…

When he walked into City Hall, Carmellini took the bull by the horns. The very first Chinese he saw, he brayed, as Australian as he could, “G’day, mate. Where’s your switch-box?”

Carson Eisenberg repeated the question in Chinese, the official pointed and said a few words, and they were in!

The CIA officers went to work on the telephones. Since the system was an ancient government one, this involved picking up each handset and using a noisemaker that allowed a colleague in a manhole just up the street to identify the line and tap it. After each line was identified, there was much shouting in Chinese into the instruments for the benefit of the watching civil servants.

As the crew worked their way from office to office, Carmellini inspected the building and its security system. He did this as one of the uniformed guards stood beside him quietly observing his every move. Carmellini smiled at the guard, nodded, then ignored him.

The building looked modern enough. The hallways and rooms were spacious, with hardwood floors, but, like government offices the world over, looked crowded and cramped.

Carmellini was in the foyer of the governor’s office examining the door locks and alarms when one of the staff began staring at him. Carmellini glanced at the man… and recognized him: It was the guy who had stared at Kerry Kent at China Bob Chan’s party the other night!

The man’s brows knitted; he knew he had seen Carmellini before but couldn’t quite remember when or where. His puzzlement was obvious.

Carmellini headed for the hallway with his escort right behind.

The staffer followed.

Uh-oh!

He had seen a men’s room a moment ago and he headed for it now, his entourage in tow. Inside he went into a stall and shut the door.

He listened as the staffer and the security escort chattered away, their remarks totally unintelligible.

Carmellini unzipped his overalls, shrugged them off his shoulders, and sat.

He sat listening for almost fifteen minutes, then flushed noisily and rearranged his clothing.

When he opened the stall door, the room was empty.

Carmellini was listening at the door of the men’s room when he heard footsteps. He got away from the door just in time. It swung open, and the man, wearing a PLA officer’s uniform, looked startled. Tommy nodded pleasantly and walked out.

The hallway was empty. He went down a flight of stairs, walked toward the service entrance, passed the table with the two security guards, and went out into the parking area. The other three men were still inside. Carmellini got behind the wheel of one of the vans and sat staring at the side of City Hall, waiting.

Everybody in Hong Kong seemed to be on their way to the Central District this morning. Public transportation facilities were packed, with long lines of people waiting to board subway trains, buses, taxis, and the Star Ferry at Tsim Sha Tsui. PLA soldiers at the Central District subway station, the MTR, tried to prevent people leaving the trains at that stop, but there were too many people and the soldiers were overwhelmed. Taxis and buses were directed not to discharge passengers when they stopped at the usual stops, so they stopped in the middle of city blocks and opened their doors. By ten in the morning at least ten thousand people were in the square in front of the Bank of the Orient and on the surrounding sidewalks.

That was the situation when General Tang arrived direct from the governor’s office in City Hall. He became angry with his officers, whom he felt should have made greater efforts to prevent the crowd from gathering.

“Since we failed to prevent the crowd from gathering, now we must make it disperse,” he instructed the staff, only to be told that the officers doubted they had enough soldiers present to make much of a show. Ordering the crowd to leave without sufficient soldiers to enforce the order would make the PLA appear ridiculous, an object of scorn.

“In accordance with your instructions, sir, we have used our men to prevent news media from congregating here.”

“Why not prevent everyone from congregating?”

“We tried, sir, but we simply did not have enough men.”

Tang lost his temper. “Why did you wait for me to tell you to get more men? This demonstration is a direct affront to the government. It is a crime against the state and will not be tolerated! Order the police to send all available men here. They should have been here already, preventing this crowd from gathering in an unlawful assembly.”

“Sir, we have discussed this matter with the police, who say they have no spare men to send. All are engaged in law enforcement and traffic control duties elsewhere.”

“Get more soldiers, as many as you need. Have them brought here by truck as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tang found a vantage point in a third-floor office of a nearby building. The civilians who worked for a shipping company were ejected and the soldiers moved in. From here Tang could see that the crowd below consisted of men, women, and children, all well behaved. People sat visiting with each other and, as the noon hour approached, ate snacks brought from home. Water and food vendors worked the crowd.

“Why have you allowed these vendors to congregate here?” Tang demanded of his staff. “Run them off.”

The soldiers tried. The vendors promptly gave away everything on their carts and obeyed the soldiers, who laughed along with the crowd. Watching from above, Tang was coldly furious.

“Two hours, sir. We will have another two hundred men here within two hours.”

“By truck?”

“Yes, sir. The trucks must go through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, which is crowded at this hour.”

Tang could contain his fury no longer. He stormed at the staff, berated them at the top of his lungs. When he had vented his ire, he retired to a private office and slammed the door.

Jake and Callie Grafton spent the morning cooped up with a flock of middle-aged British and American tourists riding a small tour bus around the coast of Hong Kong Island. They visited the mandatory jewelry factory — they looked but didn’t buy — and rode a sampan to a fish restaurant in the harbor at Aberdeen.

A barefoot old woman in a loose cotton shirt and trousers, brown as a nut, with a lined, seamed face, sculled the tourists over. The restaurant was one of a half dozen in the harbor, all built on barges. Permanently anchored, covered with Victorian gingerbread painted in bright, gaudy primary colors, the restaurants somehow still managed to bear a faint resemblance to a pagoda.

These much-photographed temples of capitalism made Jake smile. Callie’s mood, however, was somber; she hadn’t smiled all morning.

After they had given the waiter their order — the waiter seemed to know an extraordinary amount of English, although Callie chatted with him in Chinese — Jake and Callie Grafton were left in semiprivacy with glasses of wine. They were seated in a booth by a window that looked across acres of fishing boats and the residential sampans of the boat people. Beyond the harbor were rooftops and high-rises, all the way up the mountain.

“You don’t seem too happy about your glimpse into China Bob’s affairs,” Jake said tentatively.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got no right to be such a stick in the mud.”

“Not your fault. The guy was a probably a shit.”

“Sssh! People might be listening.”

“I hope not.”

“Let’s just say he was a foul, evil man who made his living on the misfortunes of others.”

“That would be fair.”

“The tape was really hard to figure out,” Callie explained, “and I don’t think I’ve got it yet. I would say that at least half of the tape is made up of his side of telephone conversations. When he was silent too long, the tape stopped and one hears that infuriating beep, and the first few words of his next sentence are missing.

“Of course, he also had conversations with people in his office, and sometimes during those conversations he would take telephone calls.

“The tape is full of beeps, missing words, mumbled words, incomprehensible garble, and Chinese spoken too fast for me. Sometimes Chan and a visitor would both speak at the same time… sometimes they both shouted at the same time. Everyone around here smokes, have you noticed that?”

“Yes.”

“They talk with cigarettes dangling from their mouth” She sighed. “The tape needs to be gone over by experts. All I got were snatches of conversation, words and phrases, sometimes a bit of give and take, usually just bits and pieces.”

“And you don’t know who killed Chan?”

“No. There is a beep — which means the tape was stopped — then a bit of a phrase, incomprehensible, and the shot. Nothing after that. The tape stops.”

“Before that, what was on the tape?”

“Someone talking about an import permit for computers.”

“Okay.”

“And before that, an argument about money. It seems someone gave Chan money to give to people — I think in America — and he pocketed at least half of it, according to the man who shouted at him.”

“You said Chan was into human smuggling?”

“That was the subject of several conversations, I think. Hard to be sure. I got the impression that it would be better for everyone if the cargo didn’t survive the voyage.”

“You aren’t crying for China Bob?”

“I wouldn’t mind throwing a shovelful of dirt in his face.”

“Hmm.” Jake took a sip of wine.

“Where’s the tape now?” Callie asked. “Did you leave it in the room?”

“It’s in my pocket.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Along with a pistol I took off a guy who was following me this morning when I went jogging.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope. A little automatic. Loaded.” Jake removed the man’s wallet from another pocket and passed it to Callie. “See if you can figure out who this guy is.”

She ignored the money, Hong Kong dollars equivalent to about forty dollars American, and examined each of the cards. “I don’t know many Chinese characters,” she said tentatively, “but none of this stuff looks like an official ID card. I would think that in Hong Kong everything is in English and Chinese.”

She returned the documents to the wallet and passed it back. Jake took out the money and put it in his shirt pocket, so he could leave it on the table after lunch as a tip.

As they were eating lunch he realized that two people were watching him and Callie from the kitchen door and whispering together. One was a man who didn’t look like he was kitchen help.

After a few minutes the man took a seat at an empty table by the door and devoted himself to studious contemplation of the menu.

“When we get back to the hotel,” Jake said to his wife, “I want to see if I can get you a flight back to the states.”

“I don’t want to go back alone.”

“And I don’t want you in the middle of a civil war. I’m going to have a heart-to-heart talk with Cole, and then I think I’ll go back, too. Sending me over here to root around was a bad idea from the get-go.”

“You’re worried about the man who followed you this morning, aren’t you?”

“I’m getting worried about everything. We’re in way over our heads.”

As they rode the sampan back to the tour bus, he slipped the wallet into the water. When no one was looking, he did the same with the pistol.

Callie reached for Jake’s hand. “Come on, Romeo, hold my hand. We’re smack in the middle of an exotic city and I could use a little romance.”

Lin Pe rode the tram down Victoria Peak. It was but a short walk from Rip and Sue Lin’s house to the tramway, and the motorman always stopped on the way down when he saw her standing there. She stepped aboard and wedged herself in among a earful of plump, rosy-pink Germans. With barely a lurch the car continued its descent of the steep grade.

At the bottom she set off on foot, walking quickly, her small purse clutched tightly in her left hand.

Huge buildings rose on all sides, towering palaces of glass and steel. Around them traffic swirled on multilane streets that could be crossed only at over- or underpasses. Hiking the concrete canyons was strenuous, but Lin Pe could remember dawn-to-dark days in the rice paddies from her youth. Nothing could be as strenuous as those lean times, with too much work and not enough to eat.

The human sea thickened as she approached the bank square. Acres of people crowded the sidewalks and spilled into the streets. Most seemed content to stand right where they were since the bank square wasn’t all that big. Still, Lin Pe pressed forward, worming her way through.

There were some soldiers about, but they were standing back, well out of the way. Lin Pe walked right by them and edged her way carefully into the middle of the square, where she finally found a tiny area of unoccupied concrete and sat.

The bank loomed before her like a dark, black cliff, blocking out the sun. When she looked straight up she could see a patch of blue sky.

She folded her hands in her lap and spoke to the woman beside her. They chatted politely for a moment — both had money in the closed bank — then fell silent, each lost in her own thoughts.

When Lin Pe had been very young there had been a man. He had worked hard and given her six children. One died in infancy; the three eldest she left behind with his parents after he died. The two youngest, Sue Lin and Wu, she carried away, one in each arm, when she decided she must go. Without her man, burdened with the children and his parents, both of whom were vigorous enough then but growing older, she would never be able to make it. She had too many children ever to attract another man. So she left.

She sat in the square thinking about the children she left behind, as she did for a few minutes every day. Finally her mind turned to fortunes. Thinking up fortunes had been the most important thing in her life for many years now, and she returned to it whenever the world pressed in.

“Go always toward the light” had been one of her favorites. The words seemed to mean more than they said, which was why the fortune appealed to her. She thought about it now, about what inner meaning might be hiding in the words.

By midafternoon Tang’s officers believed they had enough soldiers to force the crowd to leave, so they sent a staff officer to man the loudspeaker mounted on a van.

Like a thick, viscous liquid, the thousands of people began slowly flowing outward from the bank square. The crowd was orderly and well behaved and obeyed the soldiers with alacrity.

Thirty minutes after the order was given, only a few hundred civilians were still in sight from Tang’s third-story window.

He turned to his officers. “Wait for more soldiers, you said, so we waited. And when told to go, the people went like sheep. For hours they sat here illegally, in open and notorious defiance of the government. They have made fools of us again.”

One of the senior colonels tried to argue that the reason the crowd dispersed in an orderly fashion was because there were so many troops in sight, but Tang was having none of it. The government had been defied; he could feel it.

“Another crowd may return tomorrow,” Tang said, “so I want enough troops stationed on the streets to deny access to this square. And put four tanks in the square. We will advertise our strength.”

One of the people who did not leave the square was Lin Pe. She was sitting against a curb with a flower bed behind her, and she was very small. The soldiers ignored her.

When she was almost the last civilian left in the square, Lin Pe slowly levered herself erect and turned her back on the bank.

Eighteen-year-old Ng Choy watched her leave. He didn’t know her, of course. She was just a small, old woman, one of thousands he had seen in and around the square that day.

Ng Choy turned his attention back to the stain on the concrete where the man he had shot yesterday had fallen.

His rifle was heavy in his hands.

There were three of them, and they would probably have killed Tommy Carmellini if he hadn’t been scanning the faces in the crowd. He was walking from the consulate toward the Star Ferry, trying to go with the ebb and flow of packed humanity. He was renting a room by the week in a cheap hotel in Kowloon until he found an apartment, and he was on his way there after work. Hordes of people jammed the sidewalks and spilled into the streets this afternoon, even more man usual for Hong Kong, a notoriously crowded city.

The eyes tipped him off. The man was fifteen feet or so away, standing by a power pole, when he saw Carmellini. His eyes locked on the American, who happened to glance straight at him. The man was several inches shorter than Carmellini and powerfully built. He left the spot where he had been standing on an interception course.

Instinctively, Carmellini turned and started the other way. And saw another set of brown eyes staring into his as a man closed in from the direction of a street vendor’s cart.

Carmellini didn’t hesitate. He leaped for this second man, so quickly that he took his assailant by surprise. Carmellini knocked the man down as he went over and through him and kept on going.

As he turned a corner he looked back, and that was when he realized there were three of them pushing and shoving people out of the way as they chased him.

Oooh boy!

Tommy Carmellini stepped off the jammed sidewalk and began running along the gutter, between the sidewalk and the traffic coming toward him. Behind him the three thugs did the same.

Of course he was unarmed.

Carmellini was carrying a thin attaché case that contained a Hong Kong guidebook, a Chinese-English phrasebook for tourists, and a Tom Clancy paperback. After he got through the first intersection he glanced behind him. His pursuers were successfully dodging traffic, still coming, so he tossed the case into the street and settled down to some serious running.

He loosened his tie and the top button of his shirt.

After three blocks the street became limited access and separated from the sidewalk. Carmellini stayed in the street.

The three thugs following had lost some ground.

As he went under an underpass a speeding truck grazed Carmellini and bounced him off the concrete abutment. He kept his feet but he lost a step or two. When he topped the underpass his pursuers were closer.

Oh, man! That damned tape. He didn’t have it and he didn’t know what was on it! Of course the guys behind him wouldn’t believe that! No doubt they were out to get the tape and permanently shut his mouth.

A few more blocks and he was into the Wanchai District, today as tame and touristy as North Beach in San Francisco, but in its day home to some of the raunchiest whorehouses east of Port Said.

But how did they know about the tape?

As he ran he worked on that problem in a corner of his mind.

The crowd here was only a bit thinner than the throng in the Central District, but the night was young.

Running down the street in his suit and tie pursued by three thugs, looking futilely for a cop, Tommy Carmellini was a victim looking for a crime site. Twice he ran by knots of armed soldiers standing on street corners, and the soldiers made no move to stop him or the three men following.

Insane! Like something from a pee-your-pants anxiety nightmare.

He considered possible courses of action and rejected them one by one. Dashing through a nightclub, darting into a building, jumping on a moving truck…

When he saw the entrance to the MTR, the subway, he didn’t hesitate. He charged down the stairs and hurdled the turnstile.

He went around two sharp turns… and there was his opportunity. About nine feet or so over his head was a scaffolding on the side of a wall, for repairing light fixtures or something.

Without even pausing, Carmellini launched himself. He caught the bottom pole — the scaffolding was of bamboo poles — and swung himself upward. He hooked a leg and was up, flat on the walkway, when the three men chasing him rounded the corner and shot underneath.

This wasn’t the time or place for a breather.

Quick as a cat, Tommy Carmellini swung down and charged back up the stairs, fighting the stream of people coming down. Out on the street he slowed to a walk and joined the crowd flowing along Hennessey Road.

Kerry Kent. As he walked he remembered how she hugged him at the party as they waited for the car, subtly ran her hands over him. Could she be the rotten apple?

And if she wasn’t, who was?