“So who’s leaking?”
“Only two people have access to the passports. One of them has to be in on it, maybe both. One of them is a woman who sleeps with one of the CIA dudes.”
“Didn’t one of the consulate staffers just in from the states get killed a week or so ago?”
“A CIA officer. Shot to death on the street after he planted bugs in China Bob’s library.”
They finished dressing in silence and left separately.
The bakery for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company was housed in a warehouse near the Chinese University in the New Territories. After the Dutchman died, Lin Pe moved the bakery here for a reason: Even though wages for cooks and laborers were low, wages for students were even lower. By paying students more than the going wage, Lin Pe managed to staff her business with some of the brightest, most talented workers in Hong Kong.
The cookie packaging and storage facilities for bulk bakery supplies were located on the first floor. The actual baking of the cookies and printing of Lin Pe’s fortunes occurred on the second floor. In the company offices on the third floor where Lin Pe had kept the books by hand for many years, banks of computers manned by students studying computer and electrical engineering were operating around the clock. Behind the warehouse several delivery vans were parked, as well as a half dozen full-sized trucks that were used to transport overseas cookie shipments to the airport.
Wu Tai Kwong had taken the situation as he found it. The bakery employees were now one of the key cells of the revolutionary committee; threads ran from the bakery to dozens of cells in the university and in factories and offices all over town. From there, the threads ran all over China. Wu Tai Kwong well knew that a local uprising in Hong Kong was doomed; he was playing for much bigger stakes.
This afternoon he lingered on the loading dock with several of his key lieutenants smoking, watching the rain fall, and making last-minute plans.
The time for waiting was over. The spontaneous protests in front of the failed Bank of the Orient had deeply impressed Wu and his friends. The willingness of unarmed citizens to defy the PLA was, Wu thought, a direct measure of the depth of their antigovernment feelings. The Communists also understood that fact, which was the reason they reacted so violently to peaceful protests.
The conspiracy dynamic was also pressing mercilessly. As the organized circle of government enemies expanded, secrecy became nebulous. The enforcers who had ruthlessly punished security lapses when there were relatively few conspirators — and even executed government spies — became powerless as the group expanded exponentially. Whispers at the rank-and-file level became impossible to prevent. Absolute secrecy could be enforced only in a few key cells. Fortunately Virgil Cole, the American, had signed on a year ago and contributed vast sums of money, money that was used to bribe the regular and secret police and anyone else whose silence was deemed necessary.
The government in Beijing knew it had sworn blood enemies, of course, but Beijing was far away, with dozens of layers of corrupt officialdom between here and there. Still, even an absolutely corrupt government could bestir itself if the threat was perceived as grave enough.
Time, Wu told his friends, was running out. Now or never. Fight or submit. Fight or die.
Today his friends watched his facial features as he talked, listened intently to every word. Wu recruited them to his vision and held them enthralled with the power of his personality, nothing else. Energy radiated from him, life, power…
Some of the women who came within his personal orbit thought of him as a semireligious figure, a modern-day Buddha or Confucius. He wasn’t: Wu Tai Kwong was a fierce, driven man of extraordinary personal courage who had ordered executions of traitors and occasionally pulled the trigger himself. He believed in himself and his convictions with a righteous fervor that ordinary people would label irrational. What the people who knew him well saw was a man with the wisdom, courage, determination, and titanic ego necessary to lead a nation as large as China into a new day.
Wu removed a cell phone from his pocket. “Do we go?” he asked them one last time.
Positive nods all around.
Wu dialed the number.
One ring, two.
“Hello.” Cole’s voice. How well Wu knew it.
“Go,” he said and flipped the mouthpiece shut, severing the connection.
“The new day is almost here,” Wu said now to his friends and laughed heartily. He would have laughed on Judgment Day. His laughter seemed to calm the taut nerves of those around him, some of whom forced themselves to smile.
Wu Tai Kwong took a last drag on his cigarette, tossed the butt into a rain puddle, got into the delivery van he normally used, and drove out of the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company parking lot.
He joined the flow of traffic in the crowded street and crept along toward the first light. The windshield wipers fought a losing battle with the rain, which was coming down harder now than it had all day. Perhaps it was only his imagination.
Another van pulled out in front of him, inched its bumper out into the space between Wu and the vehicle ahead, and of course he had to let it in.
The driver got the van into the traffic stream ahead of Wu, and of course didn’t make it through the first light.
Sitting behind the van, thinking of rain and soldiers and millions of angry people, Wu failed to take alarm when the back door of the van ahead opened and two men hopped out. They slammed the door closed, then one stepped to the passenger door of Wu’s van and one to the driver’s door. They jerked the doors open.
The man on Wu’s side had a pistol in his hand, one that he seemed to produce from thin air. Wu looked left — the man climbing into the passenger seat also had a pistol, one pointed at Wu’s midsection.
“Put the van in park,” the man said standing beside him, “and move over. I’ll drive.”
Wu floored the accelerator. The van jumped forward, smashing into the back of the vehicle ahead. The man standing on the driver’s side fell to the street while the man on the passenger’s side who was half in and half out hung on to the door for dear life.
Wu slammed the vehicle into reverse and cranked the wheel over as he jammed the accelerator back down.
A bullet smashed the driver’s window. Wu felt the thump of the wheel rolling over the fallen man just before the van impacted the vehicle behind. Wu kept the accelerator mashed down, the rear wheels squalled…
The man on Wu’s left was inside the vehicle now, swinging at his head with a pistol. Wu drove his right hand into the man’s teeth, then slammed on the brake and tried to get the transmission in reverse.
The engine stalled.
In the silence that followed Wu could hear the gasping oaths of the man in the passenger seat. He was grinding on the starter when the man hit him a glancing blow in the head with the pistol.
Wu tried to elbow the man, punch him in the face, but he passed out when the man hit him in the head with the gun a second time.
Jake Grafton unlocked the door to his hotel room and couldn’t believe his eyes. The room was trashed. The bed had been stripped, the mattress stuffing strewn everywhere, the furniture broken, the television smashed… every item of clothing he and Callie had brought to Hong Kong lay somewhere in the middle of that mess. Even the carpet had been peeled back around the walls.
“Callie?”
He walked into the room, checked to make sure she wasn’t in the bathroom or closet or lying under the mess or behind the dresser.
“Callie?”
He knew what they had been searching for — the tape. They didn’t find it because it was in his pocket.