Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  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?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jake and Callie Grafton had dinner in Tiger Cole’s private apartment at the consulate. Jake wondered if he would have recognized the consul general if he had seen him on the street. Cole was several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and thinning, sun-bleached hair. No doubt the hair was graying … His eyes were as blue as ever and still seemed to look right through you, or perhaps it was only Jake’s imagination, a trick of memory from years ago.

  Small talk wasn’t Cole’s forte. He listened politely to Callie, who tried to fill the silence with the story of the conference fiasco, impressions of Hong Kong, and a running commentary on Jake’s career through the years. She told him about Amy and about Jake’s current assignment at the Pentagon, and wondered about Cole’s life. His answers were short, almost cryptic, but he looked so interested in what she was saying that she kept talking. Finally, over the main course, she fell silent.

  “You two are very lucky,” Cole said, “to have found each other. You seem very happy together.”

  “We are,” Jake Grafton said and grinned at his wife.

  “I was married three times,” Cole continued, speaking softly. “Had a girl by my first wife and a boy by my second. The boy died two years ago of a drug overdose. His heart just gave out. He’d been in and out of rehab facilities for years, could never kick the craving.” Cole stirred his dinner around on the plate with his fork, then gave up and put the fork down. He sipped at the wine, which was from California.

  “I wasn’t a good father. I never understood the kid or the demons he fought. I thought he was stupid and I guess he figured that out.”

  “Jesus, Tiger!” Jake Grafton said, “That’s a hell of a thing to say!”

  Cole looked at Callie. “Now that is the Jake Grafton I remember. Was never afraid to say what was on his mind.”

  Grafton finished the last of his fish and put his silverware on his plate.

  “I wondered about you,” Cole continued. “Wondered if you were still the way I remembered, or if you had turned into a paper-pushing bureaucrat as you went up the ladder.”

  “I see you’re still the silver-tongued smoothie who charmed your way through the fleet way way back when,” Jake shot back.

  “Yep, still an asshole.” Cole flashed a rare grin. “My presence in the diplomatic game is a stirring testament to the power of political contributions. I knew you were wondering—that’s the explanation in a nutshell.”

  “You owe Callie an apology for sitting there like a bump on a log letting her carry the conversation.”

  Cole bowed his head toward Callie. “He’s right, as usual. I apologize.”

  She nodded.

  “When I saw the newspaper article a couple years ago announcing your appointment, I had a chuckle,” Jake said. “You’re so perfectly suited for the diplomatic corps, why’d you take this appointment?”

  “After the kid died I needed to get the hell out. I was wasting my life with people with too much money and not enough humanity. I didn’t like them and I didn’t like the man I had become. When this opportunity came I grabbed for it like a drowning man going after a rope.”

  “You certainly had some interesting experiences in Silicon Valley,” Jake commented. “You helped design key networking software, you started a company that got one of the biggest contracts to make the Chinese telephone and air traffic control systems Y2K compliant Certainly sounds as if you had your plate full.”

  “You did some checking on me before you came to Hong Kong.”

  Jake Grafton chuckled. “I did. I made some inquiries when I got the chance to come to the conference here with Callie.”

  “The company did the bulk of the Y2K China stuff after I left.”

  “You were over here then, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right. I had to put my shares in a blind trust.”

  “So just how advanced are the Chinese computer systems?”

  Cole made a face. “They’ve bought some state-of-the-art stuff. Hong Kong is as wired as any American city. On the mainland it’s a different story; only the most obvious public applications have been computerized. The reason their growth rate is so high is that they are leapfrogging tech levels. For example, the first telephone system some cities are getting is wireless.”

  Cole fell silent. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about computers or high tech, so Callie changed the subject. “Tell us about Hong Kong,” she said.

  A glimmer of a smile appeared on Cole’s face, then quickly vanished. This was a subject that interested him. “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting left farther behind. That happens throughout the industrial world, but in China there is no social mobility mechanism. If you are born a poor peasant you can never hope to be anything else. In an era of rapid change, that hopelessn
ess becomes social dynamite. The reality is that the forces of social, economic, and political change are out of everyone’s control, and the dynasty of Mao Tse Tung is numbered. Every day the tensions are ratcheted tighter, every day the pressure builds.”

  “These demonstrations in the Central District that the government is dispersing with troops—what is that all about?”

  “A Japanese bank failed and the depositors lost their money. The Chinese government doesn’t want to attempt to overhaul the banking system, which is state-owned and insolvent. The government has used the banks to fund bad loans to state-owned heavy industry. They can’t fix the system, so they ignore the problem.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  Cole shrugged. “The state-owned industries and the banks are insolvent. To wipe out all the debts is to admit that socialism is a failure and fifty years of policy has been one massive error. To make that admission is to forfeit their mandate to rule.”

  “So there’s no way out?”

  “The crunch is inevitable.”

  “Since Callie got thrown off the platform at her conference and these demonstrations keep getting bigger and bigger, we thought we might go home early,” Jake said, stretching the truth only a little. “I called the airlines this afternoon with no luck. There are no seats at any price. Everyone and their brother is trying to get out of Hong Kong.”

  “A lot of people are worried. They certainly ought to be.”

  “Someone said the troops are after a political criminal.”

  “The troops are hunting a man named Wu Tai Kwong, public enemy number one, which is a measure of how paranoid the government has become. The man who stood up to them in Tienanmen Square in 1989 has become a symbol of resistance and must be ruthlessly crushed.”

  “One brave man,” Jake commented.

  “Ah, yes. Courage. Courage, daring, the wisdom to wait for the moment, and the wit to know it when it arrives. That’s Wu Tai Kwong.”

  “You speak as if you know him,” Callie observed.

  “In some ways, I think I do,” Tiger Cole replied thoughtfully.

  “So you think communism will collapse in China?”

  “Communism is an anachronism, like monarchy. It’s died just about everywhere else. It’ll die here one of these days. The only question is when.”

  “What does Washington say about all of this?” Jake wondered.

  Tiger Cole chuckled, a dry, humorless noise. “Wall Street doesn’t like revolutions, and the market is the god Americans worship these days.” He talked for several minutes of the politics driving Washington diplomacy.

  Later, as they stood at the window staring up the unblinking commercial signs on the tops of the neighboring skyscrapers, Cole said, “The industrial West is operating on the same fallacy that brought the British to Hong Kong a century and a half ago. They think China is a vast market, and if they can just get access, they will get rich selling Western industrial products to people so poor they can barely feed themselves. ‘It will work now,’ the dreamers say, ‘because the Chinese are going to become the world’s premier low-cost labor market, earning real money manufacturing goods to be sold in the industrial West.’” Cole threw up his hands.

  Callie asked, “Do China’s Wu Tai Kwongs have a chance?”

  “I think so,” Tiger Cole said. “The little people have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The king has everything to lose and nothing to gain. There is only one way that contest can end.”

  “It’s going to cost a lot of blood,” murmured Jake Grafton.

  “Lots of blood,” Tiger agreed. “That too is inevitable. In China anything worth having must be purchased with blood.”

  Tommy Carmellini didn’t go to his hotel in the evening; he went back to the consulate. He found the equipment he wanted on the shelves in the basement storage room, signed it out, then went upstairs to steal an attaché case. He found a leather one he liked in the CIA spaces under one of the desks. It was a bit feminine for his tastes, yet Kerry Kent would never miss it. Her desk was locked, of course, but the simple locks the furniture manufacturers put on the drawers could be opened with a paper clip. Carmellini settled down to read everything Kent had in her desk.

  Letters from England—he gave those only a cursory glance. Lots of travel brochures, letters from girlfriends, two from men—lover£, apparently—a checkbook. He went through the checks, used her pocket calculator to verify that she was indeed living within her income, examined the backs and margins of the check register to see if by chance she had jotted down a personal identification number. Indeed, one four-digit number on the back of the register was probably just that. Tucked under the checks was a bank debit card.

  Well, it was tempting. She had caused him a bad moment this evening. Either she sent the thugs or someone she reported to made the call, he felt certain.

  Her desk took an hour. He checked his watch, then began on the desks of his CIA colleagues. All the classified documents were supposed to be locked in the fireproof filing cabinets or the safe. Tonight didn’t seem like the evening to open those, but perhaps tomorrow night or the night after.

  He was working on the boss’s desk when he heard someone coming. He closed the drawers, went to his own desk, and selected a report from the in-basket. He had it open in front of him when one of the marines from the security detail stuck his head in.

  “How’s it going, sir?” the lance corporal asked.

  “Just fine. Everything quiet?”

  “As usual.”

  ‘Terrific.”

  “Gonna be much longer?”

  “Couple hours, I think.”

  Twenty minutes per desk was sufficient for each of the three men. Other than personal items of little significance, Carmellini found nothing that aroused his curiosity.

  Since he was doing desks tonight, he decided he might as well do Cole’s. The consul general’s office was locked, of course, but Carmellini had the door open in about eighty seconds.

  A reasonable search of the bookcases, desk, and credenza would take a couple of hours. He checked his watch. The night was young.

  Tommy Carmellini picked the locks on Cole’s desk, opened the drawers, and began reading.

  Tiger Cole had just said good-bye to the Graftons when his telephone rang. “Tiger?”

  He recognized the voice. Sue Lin Buckingham. She didn’t waste time on preliminaries. “I know Rip would want you to know, so I called. He’s in jail. The authorities shut down the Post today and arrested him.”

  “Have you called a lawyer?”

  “Lin Pe called Albert Cheung. I think Albert will get him out of jail tomorrow.”

  ‘Tell Rip to come see me.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Cole hung up the phone and poured himself another glass of California Chardonnay.

  He snorted, thinking about Jake Grafton and the innocent grin that had danced across his face when he admitted he had “made some inquiries.” Yeah. Right. Grafton had probably read his dossier cover to cover.

  So he already knew that Cole’s company did all the Y2K testing and fixing on some of China’s largest networks … .

  Hoo boy. Talk about irony! He had thought the U.S. government would take months to figure out what happened in Hong Kong. It turned out some dim bulb in Washington who didn’t have one original thought per decade decided to send Jake Grafton to look around.

  Cole took another sip of white wine and contemplated the glass. He had spent most of his professional life around very bright people, some of them technical geniuses. Jake Grafton was a history major, bright enough but no genius, the kind of guy many techno-nerds held in not-so-secret contempt.

  Grafton’s strengths were common sense and a willingness to do what he thought was right regardless of the consequences. Cole remembered him from Vietnam with startling clarity: No matter what the danger or how frightened he was, Jake Grafton never lost his ability to think clearly and perform flawlessly, which was why he was the bes
t combat pilot Cole ever met.

  Yes, Cole thought, recalling the young man he had flown with all those years ago, Jake Grafton was a ferocious, formidable warrior of extraordinary capability, a precious friend and a deadly enemy.

  Perhaps it was Cole’s good fortune that fate had brought Grafton here. His talents might be desperately needed in the days ahead.

  Cole checked his watch, then walked out of the apartment, locking the door behind him.

  The sign on the door said, “Third Planet Communications.” Cole used his key.

  The office suite was on the third floor of a building directly across the street from the consulate. As luck would have it, Cole could look out his office window directly into the Third Planet suite.

  With several hundred of the brightest minds in Hong Kong on its payroll, Third Planet was an acknowledged leader in cutting-edge wireless communications technology. In the eighteen months it had been in business it had become one of the leading wireless network designers and installers in Southeast Asia. Although Cole had put up the capital to start Third Planet, he didn’t own any of the stock. In fact, the stock was tied up in so many shell corporations that the ownership would be almost impossible to establish. Cole was, however, listed on the company disclosure documents as an unpaid consultant, just in case any civil servant got too curious about his occasional presence on the premises.

  Tonight Tiger Cole walked through the dark offices to a door that led to a windowless interior room. A man sitting in front of the door greeted him in Chinese and opened the door for him.

  The lights were full on inside the heavily air-conditioned room, which was stuffed with computers, monitors, servers, routers—all the magic boxes of the high-tech age.

  Five people were gathered around one of the terminals, Kerry Kent, Wu Tai Kwong, Hu Chiang, and two of Third Planet’s brightest engineers, both women. Cole joined them.

  “We’re ready,” Wu said and slapped Cole on the back.

  Another warrior, Cole thought, shaking his head, a Chinese Jake Grafton.

  “Is the generator in the basement on?” Cole asked. Through the years he had noticed that these kinds of petty technical details often escaped the geniuses who made the magic.