Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  Yes, he was informed, the generator was indeed running.

  “Let’s do it,” Cole said carelessly, trying not to let his tension show.

  One of the female engineers began typing. In seconds a complex diagram appeared on the screen. Everyone watching knew what it was: the Hong Kong power grid. The engineer used a mouse to enlarge one section of the diagram, then did the same again.

  Finally she sat looking at a variety of switches.

  The other engineer pointed with a finger.

  The mouse moved.

  “Now we see if the people of China will be slaves or free men,” Wu said.

  Months of preparation had gone into this moment. If the revolutionaries could control China’s electrical power grids, they had the key to the country. Hong Kong was the test case.

  The engineer at the computer used one finger to click the mouse.

  The lights in the room went off, then came back on as the emergency generator picked up the load in the office suite. The computers, protected from power surges and outages by batteries, didn’t flicker.

  Cole and the other witnesses rushed from the room, charged across the dark office to the windows that faced the street.

  The lights of Hong Kong were off!

  Tears ran down Cole’s face. He was crying and laughing at the same time. He was trying to wipe his face when he realized Wu was pounding him on the back and Kerry Kent was kissing his cheeks.

  When Cole got his eyes swabbed out, he looked across the street at the consulate. The emergency generator there had come on automatically, so the lights were back on.

  Tiger Cole wondered how long it would be before it occurred to Jake Grafton to ask if Cole’s California company had worked on the computers that controlled the Hong Kong power grid.

  As they rode the ferry back to Kowloon, Jake asked Callie, “Did you recognize his voice?”

  “Yes. He talked to Chan about computers. Chan was trying to cheat him.”

  “But you don’t know if he killed Chan?”

  “The identity of the killer is impossible to determine by listening to the tape.”

  “May I send it off to Washington?”

  “Jake, do whatever you think is right.”

  “Well …”

  “You didn’t tell Tiger why you are here.”

  “I thought I’d call him tomorrow. Before we got down to business I wanted a social evening.”

  “I’m not going with you for that.”

  “I should see him alone,” Jake agreed.

  They had just gotten off the ferry on the Kowloon side and were walking toward their hotel when the lights went off. One second the city was there, then it wasn’t. The effect was eerie, and a bit frightening.

  Callie gripped Jake’s arm tightly.

  When the electricity went off all over the city of Hong Kong, it also failed at the new airport on Lantau Island. And in the air-traffic-control rooms at the base of the tower complex. Fortunately there were only a few airplanes under the control of the Hong Kong sector, and those were mostly freighters on night flights.

  The air-traffic-control personnel worked quickly to get the emergency generators on so that the radars could be operated and the computers rebooted. The computers were protected by batteries that should have picked up the load but for some reason didn’t. The emergency generators were on-line in three minutes and the radars sweeping the skies in three and a half.

  The computers, however, were another matter. When the controllers finally got one of the computers on-line, the hard drive refused to accept new data via modem. Manually inputted data was changed in random ways—flight numbers were transposed, altitude data were incorrect, way points were dropped or added, and the data kept changing. It was almost as if the computer had had a lobotomy.

  The second computer had the same problem as the first, and so did the third. The controllers worked the incoming flights manually, but without the computers they were in a severely degraded mode.

  Inside the new, modern, state-of-the-art terminal, conditions were worse than they were in the tower. The restoration of power via emergency generators brought the lights back on, but the escalators wouldn’t work, the automated baggage system was kaput, none of the flight display screens worked, the people-mover train refused to budge—its doors were frozen in place—and the jetways that allowed access to and from the planes could not be moved. Fortunately there were few passengers in the terminals and concourses, but those who were there were trapped until service personnel could get to them.

  When power was finally restored from the main feeds, the computers still refused to work. The airline companies’ reservations computers, fax machines, and Internet terminals seemed to be working fine, but the airport had ceased to function.

  The technicians in the Hong Kong harbormaster’s office were also having problems. The radars that kept track of the myriad of ships, barges, tugs, and boats of every kind and description in Victoria Harbor and the strait were working, but the computer that processed the information and presented it to the harbor controller was no longer able to identify or track targets. When the technicians tried the backup computer, they found it had a similar disease.

  The people who had caused these problems sat and stood in front of the computer monitors at Third Planet Communications in a merry mood. Someone opened a bottle of Chinese wine, which they drank from paper cups.

  The virus programs they had written and loaded on the affected computers seemed to be working perfectly. As Cole explained to Wu and Kent all those months ago, “Remember the chaos that was supposed to happen when Y2K rolled around, and didn’t? We must make it happen now. Revolutions are about control, which is essence of power: We must take control away from the Communists. When the Communists lose their power they lose their leadership mandate. It’s as simple as one, two, three.”

  Tonight Cole told Wu, “The revolution has begun.”

  He shook hands all around and headed for the door with a light step. Tomorrow would be a hell of a day and he needed some sleep.

  Tommy Carmellini hailed a taxi in front of the consulate. The driver took him back to his hotel via the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, creeping along through the blacked-out city with a solid stream of cars and trucks.

  The rear door of the hotel was locked. To discourage thieves, no doubt, Carmellini thought as he opened it with a pick. The job took less than a minute. With the electricity off, of course there was no alarm when the door opened. There wouldn’t have been an alarm even if the power had been on—the door wasn’t wired, a fact Carmellini had ascertained fifteen minutes after he checked into the place.

  He went up the back stairs and carefully unlocked his room. An old-fashioned metal key, thank God, because the card scanners in use at the new hotels would not be working, leaving all the patrons locked out of their rooms.

  No one was in the room waiting for him.

  Carmellini changed into black trousers, a long-sleeved dark shirt, and tennis shoes. The equipment from the consulate went into a knapsack, as did a roll of duct tape, a small flashlight, a glass cutter, a few small hand tools, and an extensive assortment of lock picks: everything necessary for a quiet night of burglary.

  Kerry Kent lived in an apartment house on a side street off Nathan Road, a mile or so north of the Star Ferry landing at Tsim Sha Tsui. The building was about ten stories high, filled the block, and was ten or fifteen years old, Tommy Carmellini thought.

  The street was unnaturally quiet. A few people were up and about at two in the morning, but without electrical power to drive the gadgets, the night was very still. Carmellini could hear traffic on Nathan Road and, from somewhere, the rumble of a train.

  He checked the scrap of paper where he had written the apartment number.

  Kent’s pad should be on the seventh floor, he decided, and went into the building to examine the apartment layout. The elevators weren’t working so he climbed the dark staircase. Okay, the first floor was the one above the groun
d floor, so she would be on the eighth floor.

  He walked along the hall until he found the apartment that corresponded to hers, which was twenty-seven.

  Back outside on the sidewalk he examined the windows and balconies, counted upward. Okay, Kent’s was the balcony with the two orange flowerpots and the bicycle chained to the rail.

  He stood on the sidewalk just a moment, adjusting his backpack, listening, looking … .

  When he was sure no one was observing him, Tommy Carmellini leaped from the sidewalk and grasped the bottom of the wrought-iron slats in the railing on the first-floor balcony. He could tell by the feel that the iron was rusty. Would it hold his weight?

  Using upper-body strength alone, he drew himself up to the edge of the balcony floor and looked. And listened.

  When he was convinced it was safe, he pulled himself up hand over hand until he could hook a heel over the rail, which squealed slightly in protest.

  In seconds he was balanced on the rail, still listening … .

  He straightened, examined the underside of the floor of the balcony above him. He reached up for the rails, grasped them, and gradually gave them his weight, making sure the slats and railings were not too rusty or broken.

  Up the side of the building he went, floor by floor, silently and quickly. Two minutes after he left the street, he was crouched on Kerry Kent’s balcony examining the door, which was ajar. For ventilation, probably, since the night was warm and pleasant. As he listened for sounds from inside the apartment, he examined the windows of the apartments across the street, looking for anyone who might have watched him climb the side of the building.

  Only when he felt certain that he was unobserved did he remove two tiny remote microphones, bugs, from his backpack, and a roll of duct tape. Using a knife, he trimmed two pieces of tape about two inches long from the roll and stuck them on the front of his shirt, where they were accessible. Then he returned the knife and tape roll to the backpack.

  Due to the low probability that Kent routinely swept for bugs, these would transmit to a recorder as long as their batteries lasted, a time frame that depended on how many hours a day noise was generated in the apartment. They should last a couple of weeks if she didn’t watch too much television or leave the radio on continuously. Months if electric power wasn’t restored to the building.

  The recorder had to be nearby, outside if possible, where Carmellini could get at it without too much effort. He planned to find a place to install it after he got the microphones in place.

  Just to be on the safe side, he removed the backpack, which contained the burglary tools he wouldn’t need since she left the sliding glass door ajar, and placed it on the floor out of his way.

  Now he got to his feet, crouched to present as small a silhouette as possible to any casual observer, and inched the door open with his latex-clad fingertips. Applying steady pressure, he got the door moving and kept it moving, as slowly as possible.

  When he had it open enough, about fourteen inches, Carmellini stood, turned sideways, and stepped in.

  Moonlight was the only illumination. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom Carmellini could see that the apartment consisted of just one room and a bath. The kitchen area, a sink and stove, was located in the inside corner of the room to the right of the door. The area to the left of the door was the bathroom. The rest of the apartment, which was about the size of a standard American motel room, contained a Western-style bed, a few chairs, and a dresser. A television sat atop the dresser. Posters of famous paintings adorned the walls.

  And in the bed, asleep apparently, were Kerry Kent … and a man. From this angle Carmellini could see only his hair—the man appeared to be Chinese. Kent’s bare leg stuck out from under the sheet and light blanket that covered them.

  Carmellini stood in the darkness listening. Heavy, deep, rhythmical breathing.

  From where he was standing he examined the apartment, looking for a place for the bugs.

  The head of the bed certainly looked inviting. It was some kind of wooden latticework; he could reach in and stick a bug on the back of the top of the headboard. It should be out of sight there and safe enough, unless someone moved the bed and examined the headboard.

  The other one … perhaps under the bedside nightstand that held the telephone.

  The decisions made, Tommy Carmellini stepped forward with bugs and tape ready.

  Like a silent shadow he moved to the edge of the bed and bent down. He reached up under the nightstand and was affixing the first bug when Kerry Kent’s deep breathing stopped.

  She was facing away from him, thank God, but she might turn over.

  He froze.

  Yes, she was turning toward him. He waited until she had completed her move and was breathing regularly again, then he felt to make sure the tiny transmitter’s antenna was hanging down freely. It was. Now he slowly stood, staying perfectly balanced, moving at the speed of a glacier, making no noise at all.

  To get the other bug behind the headboard meant that he had to reach across her, above her face, and put it in place without jiggling the headboard in any way, for the movement of the headboard would be transferred to the bed.

  He didn’t let his limbs come to a stop but stayed fluidly in motion, each move thought out and planned so that he stayed balanced on both feet.

  He got the tape, with the bug in the center of it, in the proper position and pressed firmly so that it would stick to the wood. The antenna seemed to be hanging in place behind one of the lattices.

  He had pulled his arm back and was ready to turn when her breathing changed abruptly and she awoke. One second she was asleep, the next she was awake. Just like that.

  Carmellini stood frozen. He was about eighteen inches from her head. If she decided to get up to go to the bathroom, this was going to get very interesting.

  Can a person feel the presence of another human being, one absolutely silent and motionless?

  There are those who swear they can. Tommy Carmellini believed that some people could, and he stood now willing his heart to beat slowly lest she hear it.

  For the first time he was also aware of the faint voices and traffic rumble that could be heard through the open balcony door, which had of course been almost closed before he arrived. Would she notice the noise? Or the coolness of the night air?

  She turned in bed again, rubbed against the sleeping man.

  Oh, great! She’ll wake him!

  She mumbled something in Chinese … and the man stirred.

  He turned, put his arm around her.

  Seconds passed, his breathing deepened.

  Tommy Carmellini realized he was sweating. Perspiration was trickling down his nose, down his cheeks. He dared not move … .

  If I don’t relax, she’s going to smell me!

  The seconds dragged. She adjusted her position in the bed … and finally, little by little, her breathing slowed and grew deeper.

  Carmellini began moving toward the open door. He didn’t walk, he flowed, gently, steadily, smoothly

  On the balcony he debated if he should close the door. If it made a noise now … no! The risk was too great.

  After scanning the other balconies and the apartment buildings across the street to ensure he didn’t have an audience, Carmellini went over the rail. He leaned back, checked the balcony below as best he could, then lowered himself onto the railing. Balancing carefully, he released his grip on the wrought-iron slats above and coiled himself to go down another floor.

  In half a minute he was standing on the street. He was wiping his hands on his trousers when the electrical power was restored to the neighborhood, bringing the lights on. Televisions and radios that had been on when the power failed blared into life.

  What is it his mother used to say? “You’re going to get caught, Tommy, one of these days. Sneaking around like you do ain’t Christian. People’ll get mean when they catch you sneaking, one of these days.”

  One of these days, he thought. But not
today.

  He began looking for a place where he could hide the recorder.

  As Tommy Carmellini walked south on Nathan Road toward his hotel, a van whipped to the curb and a man jumped out with a bundle of paper in his arms. He put the stack on top of a newspaper dispenser, cut the plastic tie that bound it together, then got back in the van, which rocketed off down the street.

  Carmellini paused by the stack and took a sheet off the top. A flyer of some type. In Chinese, of course.

  He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  Wonder what that is all about?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Governor Sun Siu Ki didn’t have newspapers to worry about this morning; he had shut down the politically incorrect rags and jailed the editors. No, the rag du jour was a flyer that had been distributed by the tens of thousands throughout the Special Administrative Region, the old colony, of Hong Kong.

  The flyer, titled The Truth, was a single sheet of paper printed on both sides with Chinese characters. It contained a highly critical account of the Bank of the Orient debacle and shooting, blaming the entire incident on the Chinese government’s attempted looting of the bank and on the over-aggressiveness of the People’s Liberation Army. The sheet called for mass demonstrations to demand that the authorities cease requiring bribes from banks, release the jailed newspaper editors, and allow the publication of uncensored news. The sheet was signed by a group calling itself the Scarlet Team.

  “This is outrageous, inflammatory, antirevolutionary criminal propaganda,” the governor told his assistant, who agreed completely with that assessment. “Have the police find the people who did this and arrest them.” Sun hammered on the deck with his fist as he added, “I will not tolerate these criminal provocations! Find these people!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the aide.

  The governor wadded up the offending flyer and threw it into the wastebasket beside his desk.

  He took a deep breath, then tackled the next item on the morning’s agenda. “Has electrical power been restored throughout the city?”