“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 man 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 attaché 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 hurdled 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 ago 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.