As they rode the ferry back to Kowloon, Jake asked Callie, “Did you recognize his voice?”
“Yes. He talked to Chan about computers. Chan was trying to cheat him.”
“But you don’t know if he killed Chan?”
“The identity of the killer is impossible to determine by listening to the tape.”
“May I send it off to Washington?”
“Jake, do whatever you think is right.”
“Well…”
“You didn’t tell Tiger why you are here.”
“I thought I’d call him tomorrow. Before we got down to business I wanted a social evening.”
“I’m not going with you for that.”
“I should see him alone,” Jake agreed.
They had just gotten off the ferry on the Kowloon side and were walking toward their hotel when the lights went off. One second the city was there, then it wasn’t. The effect was eerie, and a bit frightening.
Callie gripped Jake’s arm tightly.
When the electricity went off all over the city of Hong Kong, it also failed at the new airport on Lantau Island. And in the air-traffic-control rooms at the base of the tower complex. Fortunately there were only a few airplanes under the control of the Hong Kong sector, and those were mostly freighters on night flights.
The air-traffic-control personnel worked quickly to get the emergency generators on so that the radars could be operated and the computers rebooted. The computers were protected by batteries that should have picked up the load but for some reason didn’t. The emergency generators were on-line in three minutes and the radars sweeping the skies in three and a half.
The computers, however, were another matter. When the controllers finally got one of the computers on-line, the hard drive refused to accept new data via modem. Manually inputted data was changed in random ways — flight numbers were transposed, altitude data were incorrect, way points were dropped or added, and the data kept changing. It was almost as if the computer had had a lobotomy.
The second computer had the same problem as the first, and so did the third. The controllers worked the incoming flights manually, but without the computers they were in a severely degraded mode.
Inside the new, modern, state-of-the-art terminal, conditions were worse than they were in the tower. The restoration of power via emergency generators brought the lights back on, but the escalators wouldn’t work, the automated baggage system was kaput, none of the flight display screens worked, the people-mover train refused to budge — its doors were frozen in place — and the jetways that allowed access to and from the planes could not be moved. Fortunately there were few passengers in the terminals and concourses, but those who were there were trapped until service personnel could get to them.
When power was finally restored from the main feeds, the computers still refused to work. The airline companies’ reservations computers, fax machines, and Internet terminals seemed to be working fine, but the airport had ceased to function.
The technicians in the Hong Kong harbormaster’s office were also having problems. The radars that kept track of the myriad of ships, barges, tugs, and boats of every kind and description in Victoria Harbor and the strait were working, but the computer that processed the information and presented it to the harbor controller was no longer able to identify or track targets. When the technicians tried the backup computer, they found it had a similar disease.
The people who had caused these problems sat and stood in front of the computer monitors at Third Planet Communications in a merry mood. Someone opened a bottle of Chinese wine, which they drank from paper cups.
The virus programs they had written and loaded on the affected computers seemed to be working perfectly. As Cole explained to Wu and Kent all those months ago, “Remember the chaos that was supposed to happen when Y2K rolled around, and didn’t? We must make it happen now. Revolutions are about control, which is essence of power: We must take control away from the Communists. When the Communists lose their power they lose their leadership mandate. It’s as simple as one, two, three.”
Tonight Cole told Wu, “The revolution has begun.”
He shook hands all around and headed for the door with a light step. Tomorrow would be a hell of a day and he needed some sleep.
Tommy Carmellini hailed a taxi in front of the consulate. The driver took him back to his hotel via the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, creeping along through the blacked-out city with a solid stream of cars and trucks.
The rear door of the hotel was locked. To discourage thieves, no doubt, Carmellini thought as he opened it with a pick. The job took less than a minute. With the electricity off, of course there was no alarm when the door opened. There wouldn’t have been an alarm even if the power had been on — the door wasn’t wired, a fact Carmellini had ascertained fifteen minutes after he checked into the place.
He went up the back stairs and carefully unlocked his room. An old-fashioned metal key, thank God, because the card scanners in use at the new hotels would not be working, leaving all the patrons locked out of their rooms.
No one was in the room waiting for him.
Carmellini changed into black trousers, a long-sleeved dark shirt, and tennis shoes. The equipment from the consulate went into a knapsack, as did a roll of duct tape, a small flashlight, a glass cutter, a few small hand tools, and an extensive assortment of lock picks: everything necessary for a quiet night of burglary.
Kerry Kent lived in an apartment house on a side street off Nathan Road, a mile or so north of the Star Ferry landing at Tsim Sha Tsui. The building was about ten stories high, filled the block, and was ten or fifteen years old, Tommy Carmellini thought.
The street was unnaturally quiet. A few people were up and about at two in the morning, but without electrical power to drive the gadgets, the night was very still. Carmellini could hear traffic on Nathan Road and, from somewhere, the rumble of a train.
He checked the scrap of paper where he had written the apartment number.
Kent’s pad should be on the seventh floor, he decided, and went into the building to examine the apartment layout. The elevators weren’t working so he climbed the dark staircase. Okay, the first floor was the one above the ground floor, so she would be on the eighth floor.
He walked along the hall until he found the apartment that corresponded to hers, which was twenty-seven.
Back outside on the sidewalk he examined the windows and balconies, counted upward. Okay, Kent’s was the balcony with the two orange flowerpots and the bicycle chained to the rail.
He stood on the sidewalk just a moment, adjusting his backpack, listening, looking …
When he was sure no one was observing him, Tommy Carmellini leaped from the sidewalk and grasped the bottom of the wrought-iron slats in the railing on the first-floor balcony. He could tell by the feel that the iron was rusty. Would it hold his weight?
Using upper-body strength alone, he drew himself up to the edge of the balcony floor and looked. And listened.
When he was convinced it was safe, he pulled himself up hand over hand until he could hook a heel over the rail, which squealed slightly in protest.
In seconds he was balanced on the rail, still listening …
He straightened, examined the underside of the floor of the balcony above him. He reached up for the rails, grasped them, and gradually gave them his weight, making sure the slats and railings were not too rusty or broken.
Up the side of the building he went, floor by floor, silently and quickly. Two minutes after he left the street, he was crouched on Kerry Kent’s balcony examining the door, which was ajar. For ventilation, probably, since the night was warm and pleasant. As he listened for sounds from inside the apartment, he examined the windows of the apartments across the street, looking for anyone who might have watched him climb the side of the building.