Hong Kong (14 page)

"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 attache 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—lovers, 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 best 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.

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 Take 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 emer-

gency 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.