Callie was still asleep when Jake let himself into the hotel room. The tape was still in the player.
Jake examined the pistol, a Chinese-made automatic, loaded. He put it in his luggage.
The wallet he had taken from the tail contained Hong Kong dollars and a variety of cards, all displaying Chinese characters.
He was toweling off after his shower when Callie awoke.
“Hey, beautiful woman, did you sleep okay?”
She sat up in bed, looked around at the bright room and the daylight streaming through the gauzy drapes.
“I don’t know who killed that man, Jake.”
“Couldn’t tell from the tape?”
“Impossible to say. But China Bob was into everything. Everything! He smuggled people, money, dope… he was even bringing in computers and guns.”
“Computers?”
“I couldn’t make much sense of it.”
“Was Cole on the tape?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know his voice.”
“You’ll meet him again tonight.”
“I don’t know that I want to.”
“Hey, kiddo. We’re the first team, okay? What say we have breakfast and see some sights?”
CHAPTER FIVE
The governor of Hong Kong, Sun Siu Ki, sat at his desk in City Hall puffing a cigarette as he listened to an interpreter translate Rip’s story of the fatal riot in front of the Bank of the Orient from the China Post. A copy of the offending paper lay on the corner of the desk in front of him, out of his way. Spread out where he could read them were the front pages of three Chinese-language newspapers.
Sun couldn’t believe his eyes or ears: Every editor in Hong Kong had apparently decided today was the day to tell the most outrageous lies about the government.
The copy of the leading Chinese-language paper had been hand-delivered to the governor’s office by one of the newspaper’s censors, who was horrified when he saw the paper rolling off the press. The lead headline and story on the Bank of the Orient failure was certainly not the one he had approved, and he wrote a note to the governor stating that fact.
The headline and story reported that Beijing had ordered the Bank of the Orient to close its doors since it had refused to lend money at super-low rates to customers designated by Beijing. The unspoken inference was that bribes in Beijing were the price of access to easy credit.
The censor had the presses stopped, but not before a truckload of the libelous papers had already left to be installed in vending machines in the northern area of Kowloon.
The other two papers carried slightly different versions of the same story. According to them the bank failure was the direct result of lending to unnamed politically connected entities who were unable to repay the loans, which had been made at ridiculously low rates. The morning editions of these papers had been distributed. The governor’s aide bought these copies from vendors at the Star Ferry terminal on his way to work.
Everyone in Hong Kong was reading these lies.
The aide was in the next room, talking to the censors involved. Apparently both of them swore the stories were not the ones they approved for publication.
If the newspapers weren’t enough, already this morning the governor had received a call from army headquarters: Several thousand people were sitting in the plaza outside the closed Bank of the Orient. They were peaceful enough, but they were there, a visible, tangible, unspoken challenge to the Communist government. As he listened to the interpreter, Sun Siu Ki was thinking about those people.
Behind his desk was a large window. Through that window, when he bothered to look, the governor could see a breathtaking assortment of huge glass-and-steel skyscrapers — one of which was the Bank of the Orient — designed by some of the world’s premier architects. These buildings were the heart of one of the most vibrant, energetic cities on earth, a city as different from the old, decaying Chinese cities of the interior as one could possibly imagine. This difference had never impressed Sun Siu Ki.
A career bureaucrat, he was governor of Hong Kong because of his family’s political connections in Beijing. He knew little about capitalism, banking, or the way Western manufacturing, shipping, and airline companies operated, and nothing at all about stock markets or the international monetary system. The wealth and dynamic energy of Hong Kong struck him as foreign… and dangerous.
A wise person once observed that Hong Kong was China the way it would be without the Communists. Nothing resembling that thought had ever crossed Sun Siu Ki’s mind or caused him a moment’s angst.
Baldly, he was in over his head. He didn’t see it that way, however.
Sun believed that he knew what he needed to know, which was how to surf the political riptides of the Communist upper echelons in Canton Province and Beijing.
The problem du jour was the defiance of the government’s authority by the people in the streets… and the newspapers. As bad as the uncensored stories were in the Chinese press, the headline in the China Post was the most outrageous: 15 MASSACRED AT BANK OF ORIENT.
Sun Siu Ki had replaced a governor who didn’t attack pernicious foreign ideas with sufficient vigor. If people saw that the Communists were too soft to defend themselves, they were doomed: They would be swept away, eradicated as thoroughly as the Manchus. Being human, the party cadres were doing their damnedest to prevent just such a disaster.
Many of the readers of the China Post were not Chinese. The newspaper’s reactionary stories inflamed the foreign devils, and they wrote outrageous, incendiary letters to the editor, which that fool published. All this caused faraway officials of the foreign banks to fear the loss of their money. Foreigners thought only of money. The culpability of the China Post was plain as day to Sun Siu Ki.
He gestured the interpreter into silence and seized a sheet of fine, cream-colored paper with the crest of Hong Kong on the top. There were still many boxes of paper bearing this logo in the attic of Government House. Thrifty Sun saw no incongruity in using paper bearing the likeness of the British lion. He wrote out an order for the offending newspaper to cease publication and signed it with a flourish. After further thought, he wrote out an order for the arrest of the editor. A few weeks in jail would teach him to mind his tongue.
While he was at it, he wrote out arrest orders for all of the editors involved. The time had come, Sun told himself, to whip these people back into line and show them who was in charge.
With the newspaper editors dealt with, Sun began to ponder the best way to handle the protesters in front of the bank.
The CIA contingent was summoned to the consul general’s office just minutes after they arrived at work.
“What’s going on?” Tommy Carmellini asked Kerry Kent, because she was more fun to talk to than the three men. Prettier, too.
“Didn’t you see the crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient when you came in this morning? The ferry from Kowloon was packed; the only topic of conversation was the demonstration they were on their way to join.”
The consul general’s office was large and sparsely furnished, apparently reflecting the taste of the current occupant. Virgil Cole was several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and short blond hair that was suspiciously thin on top. Ice-cold blue eyes swept the people who trooped in and stood in front of his desk.
Carmellini had spent a few moments with the consul general when he checked in last week. Cole had said little, merely welcomed him to Hong Kong, shook hands, muttered a pleasantry or two, and sent him off. He had also attended a meeting that Cole had chaired.