Free Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts

fortunes she had to imagine what it might be like. This was becoming more and more difficult as the years passed.
    'Beware ... use great care in the days ahead." When she saw this fortune in her book, she inhaled sharply.
    It was her fortune.
    One cookie in three thousand contained that fortune. Yesterday she plucked a cookie off the conveyor belt as it was about to go into the packing machine, and that was the fortune inside.
    She closed the book, unable to continue. She shivered involuntarily, then sat staring out the window.
    Rip Buckingham disliked the Communists, and her son Wu hated them. Neither knew them like Lin Pe did, for she had lived through the Great Cultural Revolution. Occasionally she still awoke in the middle of the night with the stench of burning houses and flesh in her nostrils, listening for the shouts, the sobs, the screams. She had fled to Hong Kong to escape that madness; now the storm seemed to be gathering again out there in the darkness. She could feel its presence.
    The money. Its loss was a disaster, of course, but perhaps the Japanese could be shamed into paying it back. The neat little men with their perfect haircuts and creased trousers must know the importance of keeping faith with their customers, even if the law didn't require it.
    The cookie company could run a few days without writing checks. Lin Pe began considering whom she might borrow money from to meet the payroll. Rip and Sue Lin had plenty of money and would have loaned her all she wanted without giving it a thought, but Lin Pe was too proud even to consider that course of action. Amazingly, the possibility never crossed her mind. From her desk drawer she removed a private list of her fellow businesspeople and studied that.
    Rip Buckingham's idea of the perfect way to spend an evening was to loaf in a lawn chair on his roof reading newspapers from all over the world as he sipped beer and listened to music. Occasionally he would pause to watch a ship slip through the harbor on its way to or from the open sea.
    Hong Kong didn't have enough dock facilities, so many of the freighters had their cargo on- and off-loaded onto lighters, which were towed back and forth between their anchorages and the ships by tugboats. Flotillas of ferryboats were in constant motion crossing and re-crossing the strait, fuel boats cruised for customers, tour and party boats dashed about, here and there someone sculled a sampan through the heaving ridges of waves and wakes.
    Rip was not enjoying the view tonight.
    He finished with a Beijing newspaper and threw it onto the pile with the Hong Kong dailies. He grabbed a Sydney paper and started flipping though it.
    The problem was that he liked being a newspaperman. He liked going to the office, saying hello to everyone, reading the wire service stories, tapping away on his computer as the cursor danced along, then seeing it all in print. He liked holding the paper in his hand, liked the heft of it, liked the way that it felt cool to the touch. He liked the smell of newsprint and ink, liked the idea of trying to catch the world every day on a pound of paper. A newspaper was worth doing, and Rip Buckingham didn't want to do anything else.
    And he wanted to keep doing it here. In Hong Kong.
    He was still stewing, and trying to get into last Sunday's Washington Post, when his wife came through the greenhouse leading two men. Rip recognized them immediately—Sonny Wong and Yuri Daniel.
    Wong Ma Chow, "Sonny," was a gangster, the leader of the last of the tongs. He made a huge fortune in Hong Kong real estate, then lost it in the collapse that followed the British departure. Since then he had returned to the service business. Whatever service you wanted, Sonny could provide ... for a price.
    Rip had seen Yuri Daniel, Sonny's associate, around town for four or five years. Rip had never before had any dealings with him, nor had he wanted to. Yuri was a Russian or Ukrainian or something like that, reportedly from one