Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  Perhaps the tape held the answer.

  Carmellini scanned the crowd one more time, trying to fix the guests in his mind. The cream of Hong Kong society was here tonight.

  “Tell me again,” he said to Kerry Kent, “who these folks are.”

  She scanned the crowd, nodded toward a man in his sixties in the center of a small crowd. “That’s Governor Sun Siu Ki, surrounded by his usual entourage—officials and bureaucrats and private industry suck-ups. The gentleman of distinction talking to him is Sir Robert MacDonald, the British consul general. The tall, blond Aussie semi-eavesdropping on those two is Rip Buckingham, managing editor of the China Post, the largest English-language daily in Hong Kong. Beside him is his wife, Sue Lin. Over in the far corner is the American consul general, Virgil Cole, talking to China Bob’s sister, Amy Chan. Let’s see, who else?”

  “The fellow in the uniform with the highball, standing by the band.”

  “General Tang, commanding the division of People’s Liberation Army troops stationed in Hong Kong. He’s been in Hong Kong only a few weeks. The papers ran articles about him when he arrived.”

  “The man talking to him?”

  “Albert Cheung. Educated at Oxford, the foremost attorney in Hong Kong. Smooth and silky and in the know, or so I’ve heard.”

  She continued, pointing out six industrialists, three shipping magnates, and two bank presidents. “These people are the scions of the merchant and shipping clans that grew filthy rich in Hong Kong,” she said, and named names. “If ever a group mourned the departure of the British, there they are,” she added. “Never saw so much of the upper crust chatting it up together.”

  Any person in the room could have gone upstairs and popped China Bob, Carmellini reflected. All of them had probably excused themselves and gone in search of the facilities once or twice during the evening. Or someone could have ridden the elevator from the basement or walked to the library from another area of the house. The field was wide open. Still, Tommy Carmellini took one more careful look at each of the people Kerry had pointed out, then said, “Perhaps we should leave now before the excitement begins.”

  “A marvelous suggestion. Let me say a few good-byes as we drift toward the door.”

  Five minutes later, as they stood waiting for the consulate’s pool car to be brought around, Carmellini asked Kerry, “So what’s on the agenda for the rest of the evening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said lightly and turned toward him. He accepted the invitation and kissed her. She put her arms around him and kissed back.

  “You are such a romantic,” she said when her lips were free.

  “And single, too.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I don’t recall mentioning my marital status before.”

  “You didn’t. Your reputation preceded you. Tommy Carmellini, unmarried burglar, thief, second-story man …”

  “And all-around good egg.”

  “James Bond without the dash and panache.”

  “Don’t knock the recipe until you’ve tried it.”

  “You’ll have to sell me.”

  “I’m willing to give it a go, as you Brits say.”

  “Tell me about the Internet pornography. Little details like that spice up action reports, make them interesting.”

  The consulate pool car pulled to a stop in front of them, and the valet got out. “I was saving that morsel for later,” Carmellini said as he tipped the man and accepted the keys. “After all, the night is young.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The morning sun shone full on the balcony of the fifth-floor hotel room when Jake Grafton opened the sliding glass door. The bustle and roar from the streets below assailed him, but he grinned and seated himself at the small, round glass table. As he sipped at a cup of coffee he sampled the smells, sights, and sounds of Hong Kong.

  His wife, Callie, stepped out on the balcony. She was dressed to the nines, wearing only a subtle hint of makeup, with her purse over her shoulder and her attaché case in her left hand.

  As she bent to kiss Jake he got a faint whiff of scent. “You smell delicious this morning, Mrs. Grafton.”

  She paused at the door. A furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “What are you going to do today?” she asked.

  “Loaf, read the morning paper, cash some traveler’s checks, and meet you for lunch.”

  “When are you going to start on your assignment?”

  “I’m working on it this very minute. I know it doesn’t look like it, but the wheels are turning.”

  Today was the third day of the conference, an intense seven-day immersion in Western culture for Chinese college students. Callie was one of the faculty.

  “I’m soaking up atmosphere,” Jake added. “This trip was billed as my vacation, as you will recall.”

  Perhaps it was the rare sight of her husband in pajamas at eight on a weekday morning that bothered her. She smiled, nodded, and said good-bye.

  As Jake worked on the coffee he surveyed the old police barracks immediately across the road from the hotel. The barracks was surrounded by a ten-foot-high brick wall, which hid it from people on the street. Three stories high, it was constructed of whitewashed brick or masonry in the shape of a T. The windows in the base of the T, which was parallel to Jake, revealed rooms with bunks, lockers, showers, laundry rooms, and a kitchen and dining hall, all set in from outside balconies that ran the length of each floor, much like an American motel. The top of the T was an administration building, apparently full of offices. Police cars filled the parking spaces around the building.

  The lawn, however, was a military encampment, covered with troops, tents, fires, and cooking pots. Here at least five hundred People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, troops were bivouacked, covering almost every square yard of greenery. Pencil-thin columns of smoke from the fires rose into the still morning air.

  In colonial days the Royal Hong Kong police force must have been a nice life for single British men who wanted to do something exotic with their lives, or at least live their mundane lives in an exotic locale and make a very nice living in the process. Like most colonial police forces, the Royal Hong Kong force was famously corrupt, had been since the first Brit donned a uniform and strolled the streets.

  Today Chinese policemen and soldiers scurried to and fro like so many ants. Jake wondered if there were any British policemen still wearing the Hong Kong uniform.

  Jake Grafton drained his coffee cup and turned his attention to the English-language newspaper, the China Post, which had been slid under the door of the room early this morning.

  The financial crisis in Japan was the lead article on the front page, which contained lengthy pronouncements from the Chinese government in Beijing. The article also contained a quote from the American consul general, Virgil Cole.

  Jake read the name with interest and shook his head. He had flown with Cole on his last cruise during the Vietnam War, and the two of them had survived a shootdown. And he hadn’t seen the man since. Oh, they corresponded routinely for years after Cole left the navy, but finally in one move or other the Graftons lost Cole’s address, and the Christmas cards stopped. That was ten or so years ago.

  Tiger Cole. After his broken back healed, he had gotten out of the navy and gone to grad school, then got into the high-tech business world in Silicon Valley. When he was named consul general to Hong Kong two years ago, Fortune magazine said he was worth more than a billion dollars. Of course, he was also a generous donor to political causes.

  Maybe he should call Tiger, ask him out to dinner. Then again … He decided to wait another day. If Tiger didn’t call, he would call him.

  On the second page of the paper was a column devoted to a murder that apparently happened last night. The body was discovered just before press time. Jake recognized the victim’s name—China Bob Chan—and read the article with a sinking feeling. As the key figure in a campaign finance scandal in Washington, China Bob had been getting a lot of press in the U
nited States of late, most of it the kind of coverage that an honest man could do without. Chan’s untimely demise due to lead poisoning was going to go over like a lead brick on Capitol Hill.

  On the first page of the second section of the newspaper Jake was pleasantly surprised to find a photo of Callie with two of the other Americans on the seminar faculty, along with a three-paragraph write-up. Amazingly, the reporter even spelled Callie’s name correctly. He carefully folded that page to keep.

  All in all, Jake thought, the newspaper looked exactly like what it was, a news sheet published under the watchful eye of a totalitarian government intolerant of criticism or dissent. Not a word about why the PLA troops were choking the streets, standing at every street corner, every shop entrance, every public facility, nothing but the bare facts about China Bob’s murder, not even an op-ed piece about the implications of his death vis-à-vis Chinese-U.S. relations.

  Jake’s attention was captured by several columns of foreign sports scores on the next-to-the-last page. Australian football received more column inches than the American professional teams did, Jake noted, grinning.

  He tossed the paper down and stretched. Ahhhhh …

  Someone was knocking on the door to the room.

  “Just a minute!”

  Jake checked his reflection in the mirror over the dresser—no need to scandalize the maid—then opened the door a crack.

  A man in a business suit stood there, a westerner … Tommy Carmellini.

  “Come in.” Jake held the door open. “I’m not going very fast this morning, I’m afraid.”

  “Have you seen the morning paper?”

  “China Bob?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw the story.”

  “It’s true. Chan’s as dead as a man can get.”

  “Let me take a shower, then we’ll go downstairs for some breakfast.”

  “Okay.” Tommy Carmellini sat down in the only chair and opened his attaché case.

  When Jake came out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, Carmellini was repacking his sweep gear in the attaché case. “No bugs,” he told Jake.

  “The phone?”

  “Impossible to say. I have no idea how much impedance and resistance on the line are normal.”

  “Okay.”

  “How did you know the story was true?”

  “Alas, I met China Bob last night a minute or two after he had joined the ranks of the recently departed. He was warm as toast and the hole in his head was brand-new. There was a spent 7.65-millimeter cartridge under a table a few feet away.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “I didn’t. That’s all I know for sure.”

  “Do you have the tape on you?”

  Carmellini sat and removed it from his sock. He passed it to Jake Grafton, who examined it cursorily and put it in a trouser pocket.

  After they had ordered breakfast in the hotel restaurant, the two men talked in general terms about the city in which they found themselves. Jake told Carmellini that he and Callie had met in Hong Kong, in 1972. “Haven’t been back since,” Jake said, “which was a mistake, I guess. It’s a great city, and we should have come every now and then to watch it evolve and grow.”

  Carmellini was only politely interested. “How come,” he asked the admiral, “they sent me over here to help you out? You’re not CIA.”

  “You sure about that?” Jake Grafton asked. Carmellini noticed that Grafton’s gray eyes smiled before he did. His face was tan and lean, although the nose was a trifle large. The admiral had a jagged, faded old scar on one temple.

  “Few things these days are exactly what they appear to be,” Carmellini agreed. “As I recall, when I met you last year you were wearing a navy uniform and running a carrier battle group. Of course, the agency is going all out on cover stories these days.”

  Jake chuckled. “I was pushing paper in the Pentagon when they were looking for someone to send over here to snoop around. Apparently my connection to Cole from way back when got someone thinking, so … Anyway, when they asked me about it, I said okay, if my wife could come along. So here I am.”

  Carmellini frowned. “How did I get dragged into this mess? I had a pair of season tickets to see the Orioles and a delightful young woman to fill the other seat.”

  “I asked for you by name,” Jake replied. “The new CIA director tried to dissuade me. Carmellini is a thief, he said, a crook, and last year when someone murdered Professor Olaf Svenson, Carmellini’s whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for. Seems that you were on vacation at the time, which is not a felony, but it made them do some digging; of course nothing turned up. No one could prove anything. Still, your record got another little smirch.”

  “He said that?”

  “He did. Apparently your personnel file is interesting reading.”

  “You know how football players talk about adversity?” Tommy Carmellini remarked. “I’ve had some of that, too. And smirches. Lots of smirches.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So if you know I’m smirched, how come you asked for me?”

  “My aide, Toad Tarkington, suggested you. For some reason you impressed him.”

  “I see.”

  Their breakfast came. After the waiter left, Jake said, “Tell me about last night. Everything you can remember.”

  Carmellini talked as he ate. “They have me working with this woman from SIS, a Brit named Kerry Kent. She’s a knockout and speaks Chinese like a native. I’ve known her exactly three days and an evening.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Carmellini explained about the party, about how Kent got two invitations and took him along as her date. Two hours into the evening, he explained, he saw his chance and sneaked upstairs.

  “I was pretty spooked when I found China Bob all sprawled out. I got the tape out of the recorder and installed a new one, so anyone checking the machine would think the original tape didn’t work. That was my thinking, which wasn’t very bright on my part. I did have the presence of mind to turn the recorder off, so maybe anyone finding it will buy that hypothesis. Then again …

  “By the time I got downstairs the thought occurred to me that I didn’t know beans from apple butter. Anybody in Hong Kong could have killed China Bob, for any conceivable reason. Including, of course, my companion for the evening, Kerry Kent. She spent fifteen minutes in the ladies’ just before I went upstairs, or so she said. Just to be on the safe side, when I got downstairs after retrieving the tape I told her it wasn’t in the recorder.”

  Jake Grafton looked up from his coffee. “And …”

  “And damn if she didn’t frisk me when we were outside waiting for the valet to bring the car around. Gave me a smooch and a hug and rubbed her hands over my pockets.”

  “You sure she was looking for the tape?”

  “She patted me down.”

  “Maybe she was trying to let you know she was romantically interested,” Jake suggested with a raised eyebrow.

  “I had hopes,” Carmellini confessed. “She’s a nice hunk of female, tuned up and ready to rumble. But she had me take her straight home. She didn’t even invite me up for a good-night beer.”

  “I thought secret agents were always getting tossed in the sack.”

  “I thought so, too,” Carmellini said warmly. “That’s why I signed on with the agency. Reality has been a disappointment.” Another lie, a little one. Carmellini joined the CIA to avoid prosecution for burglary and a handful of other felonies. However, he saw no reason to share the sordid details with his colleagues in the ordinary course of business, so to speak.

  “Did she find the tape on you?”

  “No. I had it in my sock.”

  “Did she have a pistol on her?”

  “She didn’t have a pistol in her sock, and believe me, there wasn’t room for one in her bra.”

  “Her purse?”

  “A little clutch thing—I gave it a squeeze. Wasn’t there. Of course, whoever shot China Bob probably ditched the pist
ol immediately.”

  “So who are your suspects for the killing?”

  “It could have been anybody in Hong Kong. Anybody at the party or anybody who came in off the street and went straight upstairs. Still, Kent or the consul general are high on my list. As I mentioned, she camped out in the ladies’ just before I went upstairs. I saw Cole coming down the stairs five minutes before I went up.”

  Virgil Cole, the perfect warrior. Jake was the one who had hung the nickname “Tiger” on him, back in the fall of 1972 when Cole became his bombardier-navigator after Morgan McPherson was killed. This morning Grafton took a deep breath, remembering those days, remembering Cole as he had known him then. Those days seemed so long ago, and yet …

  The Chinese employees of the Bank of the Orient had known the truth for days, and they had told their friends, who withdrew money from their accounts. As the news spread, the queues in the lobby had grown longer and longer.

  This fine June morning a crowd of at least two thousand gathered on the sidewalks and in the manicured square in front of the bank, waiting for it to open. The bank was housed in a massive, soaring tower of stone and glass set in the heart of the Victoria business district, between the slope of Victoria Peak and the ferry piers. Its name in English and Chinese was of course splashed prominently across the front of the building in huge characters. In still larger characters lit day and night mounted on the side of the building at the twenty-story level so they would be visible from all over the island, from Kowloon, indeed, on a clear day from mainland China itself, was the name of the bank in Japanese, for the Bank of the Orient was a Japanese bank and proud of it.

  After urgent consultations and many glances out the window at the crowd, which was growing by the minute, bank officials refused to open the doors. Instead, they called the Finance Ministry in Tokyo. While the president of the bank waited by the telephone for the assistant finance minister for overseas operations to return his urgent call, someone outside the bank threw a rock through a window.