Letters from England — he gave those only a cursory glance. Lots of travel brochures, letters from girlfriends, two from men — lover£, 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 Jake Grafton to ask if Cole’s California company had worked on the computers that controlled the Hong Kong power grid.