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 se
t 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 hardwoods 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 t
ightly 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.
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