Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  To Jake’s relief, Wong’s was not the restaurant where he and Callie had eaten. It was the next one down, gaudy as a painted whore, sporting enough lights to decorate the White House Christmas tree.

  Jake and Rip lined up at the same little wharf and took a sampan across the choppy black water to the restaurant. The main dining area was almost empty.

  “With air traffic screwed up and all the electrical problems, the tourists are staying in their hotels,” Rip opined.

  The maître d’ let them have their pick of window seats, then left them.

  “I’m not hungry,” Jake said. “Let’s go see if Wong is around. Where are the offices?”

  “The second floor, or deck, I think.” Rip pointed to a small black door near the kitchen entrance.

  “Lead on.”

  The door was unlocked. Rip pushed it open. There was a man sitting inside. Rip spoke to him in Chinese, asked if Wong were around.

  The man looked Rip over, asked his name, then went upstairs.

  In about a minute a medium-sized Chinese man in his fifties came down the narrow stairs. He broke into a grin, which revealed crooked teeth. “Rip Buckingham, as I live and breathe,” the man said in English. “This is a surprise. Who is your friend?”

  “Jake Grafton.”

  “I’m Sonny Wong,” the Chinese man said but didn’t offer a hand. “Come upstairs. We’ll talk there.” He turned and led the way back up the narrow staircase. Rip and Jake followed. The man who had been sitting in the foyer also came along.

  Wong’s office was roomy enough, furnished with a practical desk and some overstuffed chairs, and decorated with the stuff curio stores sold to tourists, stuff that looked valuable but probably wasn’t—carved elephants, ivory pagodas, here and there a hand-carved chess set.

  Sonny Wong turned to face his guests. “So, Mr. Grafton, did you come to buy your wife back?”

  “I came to explain why you should release her unharmed.”

  “Oh, no harm come to her if Virgil Cole pay the money I asked. If not …”

  “Cole will pay,” Jake said, looking around, then focusing on Sonny. “You got a nice life here in Hong Kong. Rip tells me you’ve got a lot of stuff, a restaurant, houses, apartments, boats, money, women… . Virgil Cole is going to pay you. If you send my wife back alive and in the pink, you can continue to live your good life here in Hong Kong. We’ll chalk this little episode up as an adventure and go on down the road.”

  Sonny smiled. He looked at Rip. “Do you think Cole would pay more to get you and Mr. Grafton back alive?” He turned toward the telephone on his desk. “Why don’t we ask him?”

  Jake Grafton drew Cole’s .38 snub nose from his right trouser pocket, turned, and shot the guard at the door square in the heart. The shot was like a thunderclap in that small space.

  Wong turned, quick as a cat, but too late.

  Jake Grafton rammed the barrel of the snub nose against his lips.

  “If you even twitch, I’m going to blow your brains all over that desk.” He stared into Wong’s eyes, trying to see if the man would do something stupid. Then he felt his pockets.

  Rip Buckingham was standing frozen, staring at the dead man by the door, his jaw slack.

  Jake marched Wong backward around the desk, opened and closed drawers. Sure enough, in one he found a pistol, a small automatic. It felt heavy enough.

  “Rip.”

  Buckingham turned toward him. Jake tossed him the automatic with his left hand.

  “See if this is loaded.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Pull the slide back, see if there is a shell in the chamber.”

  Rip bent over slightly, his long hair falling across his face. He used both hands on the pistol. “It’s loaded,” he reported.

  “Find the safety, put it to the off position.”

  After several seconds, Rip said, “Okay.”

  “Fire a shot into that chair.”

  Rip extended the pistol to arm’s length, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The shot wasn’t as loud as the boom from the snub nose, but it was loud enough.

  “You’re armed,” Jake told him. “Go search all the rooms on this deck. Make sure Callie and Wu aren’t here. Shoot anyone who looks at you cross-eyed. No conversation, just shoot them. Go!”

  To his credit, Rip Buckingham went.

  Keeping the snubbie against Wong’s teeth, Jake began searching his desk. The papers were written in Chinese, which was no help to Jake. He tossed the stuff all over as he scanned it, looking for … well, anything. Anything at all.

  “You want to call the police?” Jake asked Wong.

  Wong didn’t reply.

  “We can tell them about the kidnapping, have them call the American consul general, who will verify that the wife of an American flag officer was kidnapped by you and you personally demanded a ransom. American trade being what it is with China, I think the authorities might take a damn dim view of your activities, Mr. Wong.”

  Jake didn’t call the police because Callie would probably be dead by the time the police got to her. He didn’t say that, of course, but that was the nub of it.

  He marched Wong back around the desk and made him sit in a chair while he searched the dead man. This man was also armed, another small automatic. Jake pocketed it.

  He sat across from Wong, kept the .38 in close to his body, and pointed right at Wong’s solar plexus.

  “I misjudged you, Mr. Grafton.”

  “If I knew where she was, Wong, I’d kill you here and now and go get her.”

  “I believe you.”

  Jake sat silently, staring at the Chinese. For his part, Sonny Wong kept his mouth shut and didn’t move.

  The minutes crawled by. The telephone rang. Jake didn’t answer it. After four rings the noise stopped.

  Jake heard no shots, no shouts, no loud noises. Which was a good thing for Sonny Wong, because he would have been the first to die. Jake thought the man knew that, for he sat silently and still.

  Eight minutes later, Rip returned. He had put the automatic in his pocket. “There were some living apartments,” he told Jake, “some men who looked at me curiously, but your wife and Wu aren’t here.”

  “Let’s go,” Jake said, rising from his chair. “Wong, you’ll lead the parade. The thing you’ll feel in your back is the barrel of this pistol. Honest to God, if there is any trouble from anyone, I’m going to empty this thing into your back. Now let’s go.”

  Down the stairs they went. They went out into the dining room, then into the kitchen. Five people were there, four men and a woman, preparing dishes for the patrons. Jake stood so they couldn’t see the pistol he had on Wong and had Rip get everyone out of the kitchen.

  When all five had left, Jake told Rip, “Go out into the main dining room. Announce that there is a small fire in the kitchen and everyone should leave in an orderly way. Customers and employees, everyone. Don’t let them panic. Just herd them off this barge.”

  “A fire?”

  “A small fire.”

  Rip looked around the kitchen, looked at Sonny standing there with a blank face, looked at Jake. “What about the people upstairs?” he asked.

  “Working for Sonny Wong, they take their chances. If they have time to get out, good for them. If they don’t, too bad. Now do as I say.”

  “What about Wong?”

  “He can leave with me or die here. His choice.”

  Rip Buckingham took a deep breath. “When you deliver a message, you really deliver, Grafton.”

  Jake walked Wong over to the stove, a large gas burner with blue flames from several of the jets. Nearby was a deep-fat fryer full of hot grease. Jake turned the flames under it up as far as they would go.

  He traced out the gas lines, which were routed along the junction of the deck and bulkhead. Through a door, into a storage room. There it was, a tank of bottled gas or propane, Jake couldn’t tell which.

  Jake led Wong to the door to the dining area. He pushe
d it open a crack, watched Rip getting the small crowd off the floating restaurant onto sampans. Some of the employees kept looking toward the kitchen, but Rip insisted that Sonny himself wanted everyone to leave.

  “Give me your shirt,” Jake said to Wong.

  The Chinese unbuttoned the short-sleeve shirt and handed it over. With the pistol right against Wong’s neck, Jake marched him to the deep fat fryer and dipped the shirt in. When it had absorbed a fair amount of grease, he tossed it onto the stove. The grease flared up.

  Taking a step sideways to get a good view, Jake thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and aimed at the gas line. He missed with the first shot, but his second was rewarded with a loud hissing of escaping gas.

  Jake eared back the hammer one more time, put the pistol against Wong’s lips.

  “There is no place on this planet you can hide, Mr. Wong. If any harm comes to my wife, I’m declaring war on you.”

  Then Jake ran. Out the kitchen door, across the dining room as fast as he could scramble toward the sampan dock at the main entrance. He heard Sonny Wong running behind him.

  The kitchen exploded with a dull boom.

  Rip Buckingham was standing alone on the dock. There were no boats.

  The fire came out the kitchen door; the dining room quickly filled with smoke.

  Jake said, “Shall we?” to Rip, took a last look at Wong, then dove into the black water. Rip was right behind him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When the van brought Eaton Steinbaugh home after his radiation treatment, his wife, Babs, was waiting by the curb. He felt like hell. Babs helped him inside. He wanted to go to the study and lie down on the couch, and today she let him. Usually she insisted he go to the bedroom and get in bed, but not today.

  “You got an E-mail,” she told him.

  “Did you print it out?” he whispered.

  “Don’t I always?”

  She handed him the sheet of paper. The message was from Hong Kong, somebody in Hong Kong—he had never before seen that E-mail address. The body of the message was a series of letters, arranged as if they were a word. He counted the letters. Twelve of them.

  The letters appeared to be a code. And they were, but the code wasn’t in the message. The twelve letters was the message.

  He handed the sheet of paper back to Babs.

  “Want to tell me what that means?” she said sharply.

  “Within four hours.”

  “Cole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really, Steinbaugh, I don’t know about you. Sick as you are and you’re messing in other people’s business. All the way around the world, in China, no less.”

  “Umpf.”

  “They could prosecute you.”

  “For what?”

  “How would I know? Something, that’s for sure.”

  “They already did that,” her husband replied. “Years and years ago.” When he was twenty he spent two years in a federal penitentiary for hacking into top-secret Pentagon computer files. Of course he was thrown out of the university and ended up never going back. That was over ten years ago.

  “Prison didn’t teach you a damned thing, obviously,” she snapped, and walked out with her head down.

  A husband dying of cancer was a heavy load, and he appreciated that. Not much left for Babs to smile about.

  Virgil Cole!

  It was really happening.

  Cole promised him it would. “Have faith,” he said. “The time will come.”

  “I might be dead by then,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Cole. He hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer then. Maybe it was a premonition.

  “Hey, man, the Lord might call us all home before then. Just do your best to make it work when the hour comes.”

  “They might change the codes. They might change the system.”

  “If they do, they do. That’s life. I don’t want you to guarantee anything. Just do the best you can and we’ll all live with it, however it turns out.”

  Babs was sure as hell wrong, he reflected wryly, about what he learned in prison. While doing his time he taught a computer course for the inmates. Every day he had hours alone on the machine, hours in which he was supposed to be preparing lesson plans. He spent most of those hours hacking into networks and databases all over the globe. What he didn’t do was tamper with the data that were there, so no one came looking for him. Locked up with nothing to occupy his mind, the hacking kept him sane.

  That was then. Today just getting into a network was tougher, and a lot of the security programs had alarms that would reveal the presence of an unauthorized intruder. System designers finally were waking up to the threat.

  But Eaton Steinbaugh had also learned a few things through the years. One was that getting in was a lot easier if you had access to the software and constructed a back door that you could use anytime you wanted.

  He became a back door specialist. As soon as he was released from prison he was heavily recruited by software companies. Through the years he took jobs that interested him, and the demand for his skills forced the companies to pay excellent wages. For his own amusement, when he designed or worked on networks, he put in a trapdoor for his own use.

  He was working for Virgil Cole’s company when Cole called him in one day. Cole found one of the back doors, which was the first time anyone ever managed that trick.

  That Cole! He was one smart cookie, shrewd and tougher than cold-rolled steel. Steinbaugh had never met a man like him.

  Cole didn’t fire him. Just told him to do a better job on the back doors or take them out.

  He was working for Microsoft when Cole telephoned him eighteen months ago, wanted him to accept a job with Cole’s company, which Cole was no longer with, go to China to do some Y2K remediation.

  Steinbaugh had always refused Y2K remediations, which he regarded as mind-numbing grunt work, but he did it because Cole asked.

  On his way to Beijing he went through Hong Kong and dropped in to see Virgil Cole at the consulate. Cole took him to the best restaurant in town, which was French of course, where they ate a five-star gourmet dinner on white linen in a private alcove and sipped on a two-thousand-dollar bottle of wine.

  “You didn’t have to do this for me, you know,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Virgil Cole.

  “I needed an evening out, and you’re a good excuse.”

  They were sipping cognac and sucking on Cuban cigars after dinner when Steinbaugh remarked, “When you stop and reflect, life’s contrasts are pretty amazing, aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I grew up in blue-collar Oakland, Dad worked on road-paving crews, we never had a whole lot. Then I wound up in prison, which was a bummer. Since then I’ve been all over the world, married, had a kid, and here I am in Hong Kong having a five-star dinner with a billionaire, just like I was somebody. You know?”

  Cole laughed. Later Steinbaugh realized that Cole had hoped for this reaction, indeed, had played for it.

  “I spent a lifetime working to get here, too,” he said. “The low point in my life was a night in Vietnam. I was a bombardier-navigator on A-6 Intruder aircraft. One night near the end of the war the gomers shot us down.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Steinbaugh said.

  Cole continued: “I remember lying in the jungle with a broken back waiting for the North Vietnamese to find and kill me. I was absolutely certain I had come to the end of the road. And I was wrong.” He lifted his glass in a silent toast to Steinbaugh, and drank. Steinbaugh did likewise.

  When he had his glass back on the table, Cole said, “If the Chinese people can get rid of the Communists, who knows, perhaps in the fullness of time they too will have some of the same opportunities that have enriched our lives.”

  “Yeah,” Steinbaugh agreed, for the comment seemed innocuous enough.

  “I want your help to make it happen.”

  Steinbaugh wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  “I want you to install some of yo
ur back doors,” Cole said, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “Where?”

  “On some systems in Beijing. You’re going to be working on some systems in the Forbidden City, the Chinese Kremlin. I want you to install back doors so that when the time comes, you can get into those systems and control them, screw them up, or disable them.”

  “When will the time come?”

  “When the revolution starts.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Steinbaugh’s eyes got big in surprise. He had sort of suspected that Cole had something on his mind when he asked him to come to see him in Hong Kong on his way to Beijing, but in his wildest imaginings he hadn’t envisioned anything like this. “A revolution! Me screwing with government computers to help a revolution—wouldn’t that be an act of war or something?”

  “I’m no lawyer,” Cole said, “but I suspect you’re right.”

  The consul general’s cigar had gone out, so he fussed over it, scraped off the ash, and got the thing smoldering again. When he saw that Eaton Steinbaugh was still listening, he went into specifics, some of which were very technical.

  Steinbaugh was even more amazed, then he wasn’t. Cole didn’t do anything by guess or by God. He had thought about this, about what he wanted.

  “Cyberwarfare,” Steinbaugh said.

  “That’s right. We must divert the government’s attention, confuse them all to hell, make it as difficult as possible for them to figure out what the threat is. That’s the first goal. Second, we want to make it difficult for the Communists to respond militarily to the real threat when they figure out what it is. Third, we must deprive them of control over the people, the economy, the course of events. If we can deprive them of the power to make things happen, we will win.”

  “We?”

  “You and me.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “The revolutionaries.”

  “You’re one of them?”

  “Yep.”

  “Goddamn,” Steinbaugh said.

  Of course he agreed to do it.

  Eaton Steinbaugh had pretty well finished the Beijing assignment when he got sick and had to go home to California. He was just thirty-five years old, and the doctors said he had terminal cancer. He mailed Cole a note, told him he’d better hustle the future right along, make it happen soon. Cole knew what he meant.