Hong Kong (7 page)

other."

[ got thrown out," she told Jake when she unlocked the hotel room door and found him on the balcony reading.

"I thought you would, sooner or later," he said and i grinned broadly. "Still glad we came?"

insult to the state. You attempt to destroy that which you do not understand. We have the weapons to smash those who plot evil." He turned toward Callie. "Ignore the provocations of the criminal elements," he ordered peremptorily, closing the discussion. Then he sat heavily and used a cloth to wipe his face.

Callie was trembling. Although she could speak the language, she felt the strangeness of the culture acutely. She was also worried that she might somehow say something to jeopardize the conference or the people who had invited her.

"Mr. Hu merely asked my opinion," Callie said, trying to hold her voice steady. "I will answer the question."

The official's face reddened and his jowls quivered. "Go," he roared at her, half rising from his seat and pointing toward the door. "You insult China with your disrespectful attitude."

Callie gathered her purse and headed for the door. As she walked she addressed her questioner, Hu Chiang, who was still standing in the audience. "The answer to your question, Mr. Hu, is no. Political freedom and economic freedom are sides of the same coin; they cannot exist independently of each other."

"I got thrown out," she told Jake when she unlocked the hotel room door and found him on the balcony reading.

"I thought you would, sooner or later," he said and grinned broadly. "Still glad we came?"

She slumped on the side of the bed and held her head in her hands.

Jake put his arms around her. "Hey, I called the consulate. Tiger Cole wants us to come to dinner tomorrow night."

"I told you so," Callie Grafton said through her tears, then tried to smile.

Removing the tape player that would play the miniature tape he had taken from China Bob's library from the tech shop in the basement of the consulate presented Tommy Carmellini with several problems, the most intractable of which was that the device could not be in two places at once. Kerry Kent had access to the office. Carmellini thought that if she chose to look for the player while it was missing, she would

realize that Carmellini had lied to her, that he didn't trust her. She might even conclude that she was a possible suspect in China Bob's murder.

The problem was that the tape player was a unique device that played a nonstandard small tape that held up to eight hours of recording, so Carmellini couldn't hope to buy one over the counter at a gadget

shop.

Tommy Carmellini thought about all of this as he stood in the small shop staring at the one serviceable tape player. Or was there only one? The room was chock-full of electronic components and gizmos, perhaps he just didn't know what was there. He began searching under the workbench, then worked his way to the large steel filing cabinets that stood against the back wall.

Aha! On the top of the cabinet behind an obsolete commercial Sanyo reel-to-reel tape player was another small player that looked as if it could handle the tape from China Bob's. He got it down, blew the dust off it, sat it beside the first one. Yes. The same model, controls, etc. He plugged the thing in and found a tape in one of the drawers that looked like it would fit. When he had the tape properly installed on the reels, he pushed the Play button.

Nothing. The thing was broken.

Without a qualm, he put the working machine in his attache case and left the broken one in its place. There were several headsets lying around, so he selected one and tossed it into the case, too.

He found Kerry writing a report in the office the CIA officers used. The senior man was there, Bubba Lee, schmoozing with two of the other permanent men, George Wang and Carson Eisenberg. All three were Chinese-Americans; Lee and Wang had two Chinese parents, Eisenberg had a Chinese mother. All could speak perfect Cantonese and pass for natives, which they often did. This morning they wanted to shoot the breeze about Harold Barnes, who had been in Hong Kong for only a couple of months before he was killed.

"I went to the police department this morning," Eisenberg told Tommy, "to see if they have developed any leads on Barnes. They were all atwitter over China Bob's murder last night. You and Kerry got out of there just in time. They kept everyone else until dawn, including Mr. Cole."

'Did they ever find the murder weapon?"

"Little automatic, nickel-plated?"

"Could have been."

"Found it in the secretary's office just outside the library, in the trash can.

"That makes sense," Kerry Kent said. "If I had just shot someone, I would want to get rid of the weapon as soon as possible."

Tommy Carmellini stared at her in amazement. She was either ditsy or had more brass than any broad he had ever run across.

Lee and the others spent a very pleasant half hour going over the Chan layout with Tommy, speculating about motives, generally rehashing everything, and reaching no conclusions.

Then, finally, the men returned to their offices, closed their doors, unlocked their private safes, and got on with the business of covert and overt espionage, leaving Carmellini to the gentle company of the British transplant, Kerry Kent.

"I wonder who has the tape," she said. "Barnes was always such a careful workman. One must assume the device worked and someone swiped the tape."

Carmellini shrugged.

"One has to assume," she continued, "that the tape is the key to the mystery."

"If you think I have it, you're barking at the wrong dog," he said.

She came over to the desk where he was sitting, squatted so her face was level with his. No more than twelve inches separated them. "You can trust me, you know."

"So you think I have it."

"I don't think you trust me."

"Whatever would give you that impression? I've known you three whole days ... no, four now. Four delightful days of humdrum work and one evening of romance lite. You kissed me what? Twice? I trust you as much as you trust me."

"I never mix business and pleasure."

"So there's no hope for us? Wait until my mother hears the news; she had such high hopes. Now get up off the floor and go sit in a chair. A woman kneeling before me will give people the wrong impression and create a tragic precedent."

Kerry did as he asked.

"What I'd like to know," he said, "is how many people paraded

through that library before and after me, looked over China Bob's corpse, then went back to the party and didn't say a word to anyone."

"This morning a request came in from the chairman of the congressional committee," she informed him. "Congress invited China Bob to Washington to testify."

"All expenses paid, no doubt."

"The poor man is probably better off dead," Kerry said firmly. "His position between the Chinese and the Americans was going to get scorching hot."

"Whoever shot him did him a real favor," Carmellini agreed. He picked up his attache case and walked out of the office.

"I had just graduated from college when I first came to Hong Kong," Callie Grafton told her husband as they walked the streets of Kowloon, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. "I felt like I had finally come to the center of the earth's civilization, the place where all the currents and tides came together.

"I remember my first ride on the Star Ferry as if it were yesterday. The white-and-green boat was
Morning Star,
very propitious, you must agree, for a girl making her way in the world for the very first time. All of the thirty-nine-ton double-ended diesel boats are named for stars, and between them made four hundred and twenty crossings a day between Kowloon and Central. Each crossing took about ten minutes, regardless of the weather or sea conditions. The boats began running at six-thirty in the morning and stopped at eleven-thirty at night. There were two classes of passengers—first class, which rode on the upper deck, and second, which rode on the main deck.

Everyone who lived or worked or visited Hong Kong rode on these ferries. On days off I would ride the ferries a dozen times a day, looking at the people and listening to them talk, laugh, cry, giggle.... Chinese laborers and wealthy merchants and sons and daughters and wives and mistresses and teenage toughs, English civil servants and nannies, Australian adventurers, tourists from everywhere on earth, Europeans, Russians, American sailors, Malays, Filipino maids, Japanese businessmen, Hindus, Sikhs—everyone came to Hong Kong, to make money and a new life for themselves or just to see it, to learn the truth of it. All the roads of the earth lead to this place.

"I loved the city. It was British, colonial, civilized, grand and trivial, yet it wasn't. It was Chinese, but not quite. It was timeless, yet everyone was in a hurry and the city was being transformed before my eyes.

"From this city I could feel the power of China, the thousand million people, the ancient and the new, the way of the seeded earth. I came to think of China as a giant oak, deeply rooted and enduring through the centuries- while the lives of men changed like the seasons.

"In this city I can still feel the pulse of the earth. I can stand in the crowded places and listen to the hundreds of voices, all babbling about the things that fill human lives. I can hear the generations talking of the things that never change, the dreams, ambitions, and concerns that make us human."

Jake Grafton squeezed his wife's hand, and they walked on.

Rip Buckingham's brother-in-law, Wu Tai Kwong, was a delivery driver for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company. Rip was happily married and living in Hong Kong when he learned that his wife's younger brother was involved in the anti-Communist movement in Beijing. The whole thing seemed innocent enough ... until that same brother-in-law stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and had his photo plastered on every front page in the world. That incident made him a criminal. And a dedicated revolutionary.

Now, of course, he was a fugitive ... and living in Rip's basement. Although he was a notorious political criminal and the object of the greatest manhunt in Chinese history, the government had no idea what Wu looked like now, where he was from, who his family was, or what name or names he might be using. Perhaps this was to be expected in a nation where public records were spotty at best, a nation where a significant portion of the population was illiterate and without identity papers of any kind, a nation with more than a hundred million migrants who roamed at will, looking for work.

Still, the Chinese authorities knew with an absolute certainty that sooner or later they would get their man. They had offered a large reward for Wu Tai Kwong. Human nature being what it is, they had merely to wait until someone betrayed him.

Wu Tai Kwong, being who he was, was not hiding. True, he wasn't

broadcasting his whereabouts and he was using a false name and false identity papers, but he had no intention of stopping his political activities. He hated the Communists and intended to destroy them or be destroyed by them, whichever way fate spun out the story.

The tale could go either way, he realized. Someone who knew or suspected who he might be would tell someone, and so on, and the rumors would spread like ripples in a pond. Still, Wu had to talk to his friends, had to plan, to plot, to conspire against those he hated. He did so knowing that any day could be his very last, for he knew that once the Communists caught him they would execute him quickly, then broadcast the news of their triumph.

This afternoon he stopped his delivery van at various corners on Nathan Road and picked up the solitary people standing there waiting. He picked up four men and a woman in this manner, then found a quiet place to park near the old Kai Tak airport. These people knew him, knew his real name, knew the risks he took, and he trusted them with his life. Since they literally held his life in their hands, they also trusted him.

Today this "gang of six" discussed the current situation, the public anger at the failure of the Bank of the Orient, the predictable resentment against the PLA for shooting into an unsuspecting crowd.

"Is this the spark? Is now the hour?"

They debated the question hotly.

To overthrow the Communists, Wu Tai Kwong had argued for years, two things must come to pass. The great mass of people must be aroused against the government, and the army must refuse to fight the people.

"There are things still to be done," Hu Chiang argued. "We are almost ready, but not quite."

"The police know far too much," the woman replied. Alas, keeping the existence of a large subversive organization a total secret was impossible. People whispered, some tried to sell information to the authorities, others wanted to betray their colleagues and the movement for reasons that ran the gamut of human emotions. "There are too many leaks, too many people talking. We must wait no longer. Every day we wait the danger grows, yet we grow only marginally stronger." We are bribing the police," one man pointed out when his turn to

talk came. "Every day the number of people who want money grows. It is inevitable that someone will take a bribe and turn us in ... if they haven't called Beijing already. We must act now!"