“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.”
“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 attaché 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.