Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  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 h
ad 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.