Hong Kong (3 page)

"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.

It

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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 pistol 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.

One of the cashiers called the police. The police took a look at the crowd and called the governor, Sun Siu Ki. Sun didn't go look; he merely called General Tang Tso Ming, the new commander of the division of the People's Liberation Army that was stationed in Hong Kong.

A half hour later several hundred armed soldiers arrived. They spread themselves two deep across the street on each end of the crowd. They also surrounded a park across the

street from the bank where many people were waiting. There really weren't enough soldiers to physically prevent the crowd from moving, so the soldiers did nothing but stand in position, waiting for orders. Then four tanks clanked up, ripping up asphalt, and stopped with their big guns pointed at the crowd.

General Tang arrived with the tanks. He looked over the crowd and the soldiers, had his officers adjust the placement of the troops, then went to the door of the bank and pounded on it with his fist. When it didn't open, he pulled his pistol and rapped on the door sharply with the butt.

Now the door opened.

General Tang and two of his colonels marched into the Bank of the Orient and demanded to see the president.

As they walked along the sidewalk toward the Star Ferry, Tommy Carmellini said, "Admiral, I'm really flying blind. The people at Langley sent me over here with orders to help you out, but they didn't tell me what this is all about."

"They sent me over here," Jake Grafton told the CIA officer, "because I knew Tiger Cole in Vietnam. Apparently I'm one of the few people in government who know him personally. Washington wants to know what in hell is going on in Hong Kong."

"What do they think is going on?"

They each bought first-class tickets on the ferry and went up on the top deck. As the ferry pulled out, Jake Grafton said, "China is coming to a crisis. The whole country is tinder ready to burn. One spark might set it off. The Communists want to stay in power by delivering economic prosperity, which can come only if the economic system changes. They are trapped in this giant oxymoron; they want economic change without social and political change. On the other hand, the United States wants a big piece of the China pie. So the American establishment has traded technology and capital for access to Chinese markets and low-cost labor. In other words, they have invested in the political status quo, which is the dictatorial Communist system."

Tommy Carmellini nodded his understanding.

Jake continued. "The Communist system distorts and corrupts everything. The only way a Chinese importer can get goods into the country is to obtain a government import license. These licenses are restricted to prevent private entrepreneurs from competing against state-owned enterprises. Enter China Bob Chan and a thousand like him. If you are an enterprising Chinese businessman, for a fee Chan will obtain for you an import license from a government official— in effect, he splits the bribe. This system ensures that the bureaucracy is corrupted from top to bottom. Every single person in government is on the take, party members, officials of every caliber and stripe, army generals, everybody. This system generates enormous profits that go into their pockets, and the industrialized West gets to sell high tech to China."

"Only the public loses," Carmellini murmured.

"Precisely. Anyway, to get specific, the Chinese government used China Bob Chan to make political contributions in America and grease the wheels to get American export licenses for restricted technology, some of it military. As a general rule, government licenses always create opportunities for graft of one sort or another, in China and America. In this case the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, wanted the American military technology. Unfortunately, China Bob pocketed about half the money the PLA paid him to do all this American greasing. The guy who dealt with China Bob on behalf of the army was General Tang, now the PLA commander here."

"Uh-huh."

"The story is that Tang was sent here to find and apprehend a political criminal, Wu Tai Kwong. Remember the man who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989?"

"I thought he was dead."

"He may be. But dead or alive, he's public enemy number one; he gave the Commies the finger. These people are paranoid."

"That's an occupational hazard with absolute dictators," Tommy Carmellini said lightly.

"Anyway, that is what the army says it's doing here. In reality, Tang and the army are here to prevent a political uprising in Hong Kong. The CIA thinks China Bob Chan washed the money to finance the revolution."

"He was working both sides of the street?"

"The CIA thinks so. The politicians in Congress wanted someone to come over here and root around and give an independent assessment of how deep the consul general is in all this. The White House picked me, for lack of someone better."

"Virgil Cole?"

"That's right."

"Why you?"

"Well, basically, I got the impression that I'm supposed to worm my way into Cole's confidence and get him to say things to me that he wouldn't say to anyone else. That was the thinking in Washington, anyway. It stinks, but that's the sordid truth."

"Maybe it's all bullshit," Carmellini suggested. "Rumors go round and round. I'm an expert on rumors."

Grafton had his arms on the railing of the boat. "Cole is apparently having a relationship of some type with Amy Chan. Her father was a British soldier and her mother was a Chinese girl who came to Hong Kong when the Nationalist cause collapsed and Mao took over on the mainland. The mother got in just before the door slammed shut, took up prostitution to feed herself. She was supposedly really good-looking, became a high-class hooker, ended up falling for this Brit soldier and having Amy by him. Of course the soldier was a shit and went tooling off to Britain when his tour was up—seems he had a wife there, too.

"Anyway, Amy's mother saved her money and sent her daughter to America for an education. She had a degree from UCLA and was working at the American consulate processing visa applications when Cole arrived. They hit it off right from the start."