Hong Kong (13 page)

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 crowd 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 than 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.

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 attache 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 hurtled 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
^a
go 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 hopelessness 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."