Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  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,” Ja
ke 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 c
rowd 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.