Where was Callie? She could be downstairs, or shopping, or getting her hair done…
“Callie!” He roared her name.
A woman peered through the open doorway from the hall. A Chinese woman, the maid. She asked something in Chinese.
“The lady who was here?” he replied. “Where did she go?”
The maid shook her head uncomprehendingly, stared in amazement at the sea of trash.
Jake Grafton brushed by her and hurried along the hallway. Unwilling to wait for an elevator, he charged down the stairs, trying to think.
He raced for the manager’s office and blew by the secretary. The manager was a Brit. “Someone trashed my room”—he gave the man the number—”and my wife is missing! Call the police!”
The man stood gaping at Jake, so Jake repeated it, then went charging out of the office.
He had to find a phone.
Fumbling with the telephone book, barking at the operator, he finally got through to the American consulate. “Tommy Carmellini, please.”
In less than a minute Carmellini was on the line.
“Grafton. This morning someone did a real messy search of my hotel room. My wife is missing.”
Several seconds of silence followed as Carmellini digested the news. “The tape,” he said. “Did they get it?”
“No. Who was it?”
“God knows.”
“I want to know.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t know what to tell you, Admiral. If they snatched your wife, you’ll probably be hearing from them.”
“Unless they have plans for making her talk.”
Carmellini didn’t respond.
“Is the consul general there this afternoon?” Grafton asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m coming over there. See you in about a half hour. Find me a weapon.”
Jake Grafton slammed the telephone down and marched through the lobby to the street. He passed two uniformed police on their way into the building and didn’t stop.
Tiger Cole was in his office. With Carmellini in tow, Jake stormed past the secretary and barged in. Cole was on the telephone. “… the trade agreements can be interpreted as—” One look at Grafton’s face stopped the words.
“May I call you back, Mr. Secretary? A crisis has arisen here that I must deal with.” He listened for a second or two, muttered something, then hung up.
“What in the world—?”
“Someone trashed my hotel room searching it and my wife is missing.” Jake came around the desk and seized Cole’s lapels. “If you know who has her or where she is, now is the moment to come clean.”
“Hey!” Cole tried to pull Grafton’s hands off.
The admiral held on fiercely and lowered his face toward Cole. “If anything happens to Callie I’ll kill you,” he snarled. “Anything! Do you understand me, Cole?”
The consul general became very still. “I understand, Jake.”
Grafton released Cole and straightened.
“Who has her?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about it.”
Jake sat on the desk. He described the room. “When I left her to come here for lunch, she was fine. Going to go downstairs for lunch, but she said she would be waiting for me when I got back from the consulate. She wasn’t, and the place had been violently trashed. Whoever did it was looking for this!” He pulled the tape from his pocket and showed it to Cole. “This is the tape from China Bob Chan’s library, removed from the recorder within minutes after his death.”
Cole’s brow knitted. “How’d you get it?”
“Mr. Carmellini gave it to me. He was sent over here to help with my investigation. The death of Harold Barnes seemed a good place to start.”
Jake turned to Carmellini. “Anything of interest on your searches or bugs?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“What’s he searching?” Tiger asked.
“Everything in this building,” Grafton barked. “Safes, filing cabinets, desks, hard drives, databases, trash cans, everything. I want to know what the fuck is going on in Hong Kong and I want to know now!”
Cole took a deep breath. “Did you bug this office, Carmellini?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Disable the bugs and leave us alone. Admiral Grafton asked a question and he deserves an unrecorded answer.”
Carmellini took less than a minute to remove the hidden wireless microphones. One was stuck to the eraser of a pencil, one of a dozen pens and pencils protruding from a coffee cup on Cole’s desk; another was pinned to the window curtain behind his chair.
When the door closed behind Carmellini, Cole said, “I don’t know who kidnapped your wife.”
“Did you know it was going to happen?”
“No. I’m amazed that it did.”
“Let’s take it by the numbers. What in hell are you mixed up in?”
“As you surmised at lunch, a group of revolutionaries is about to kick over the lantern. I’m one of them.”
“Uh-huh.”
Cole raised his hands questioningly.
“Did your group kill Harold Barnes, or have him killed?”
“To the best of my knowledge, no.”
“Don’t start that quibble shit with me, Cole! You are ten seconds away from a phone call to Washington. Did anyone in your group kill Harold Barnes? Tell me what you think.”
“No.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know. I thought at the time it might be someone in the CIA who was in bed with China Bob.”
“Where did China Bob fit in all this?”
Cole took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “I wish I knew the correct answer to that. I was using him as a conduit to get untraceable money into Hong Kong to fund the revolution. About a hundred million American dollars went through his hands.”
“Your money?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, Tiger! What in the hell are you doing, man?”
“Violently overthrowing the Communist government of China. I thought it was a great investment.”
“Did the thought ever cross your mind that perhaps the best thing you could do for your fellow Americans was let the Chinese solve their own problems?”
“I’m not going to justify my actions to you or anybody else,” Cole said coldly. “I’ve done what I believed was the right thing for my fellow man — all of them. You and the people in Washington can put that on my tombstone or stick it up your ass, I don’t care which.”
“Okay, okay.” Jake held up his hands. “What else was Chan into?”
“He smuggled some computers into the country for me.”
“Was he making campaign contributions to American politicians?”
“I believe so.”
“Who supplied the money?”
“The PLA.”
“What else was he up to?”
“Anything that would turn a dollar. Chan liked money and had a finger in every pie in town. That’s probably what got him killed.”
“Someone thought he knew too much about too many things?”
“I suspect that’s the gospel truth.”
“Did he know your money was going to fund a revolution?”
“I believe he thought I was in the drug business, but he may have guessed the truth at some point.”
Jake Grafton held both hands to his head. “I can’t believe this shit!”
Cole smacked the desk with the flat of his hand. “Don’t give me any sanctimonious crap! I won’t listen to it! Thirty years ago America’s liberals refused to fight for freedom in Asia — now they’re partners with the propaganda ministry of the Communist government as investors in China.com. Anything for a goddamn buck! Yeah, I’m funding a revolution. If the warm, well-fed, comfortable, educated establishment bastards in America lose some money or bleed a little, it’ll break my slimy heart.”
Jake Grafton took his time answering. “You can’t give freedom to people, Tiger. It’s something they have to earn for themselves. If they don’t want freedom enough to fight for it, they won’t value it.”