Free Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts Page A

of those hopelessly poor, squalid villages in the middle of the vast Eastern European plain. Rumor had it that he left the mother country in a large hurry with a suitcase full of money taken at gunpoint from a Russian mobster. How much truth was in the rumor was impossible to say, but it was a nice rumor.
    Yuri's expressionless face, with its cold, blank eyes and pallid features, certainly didn't inspire trust. Inspecting it at close range, Rip idly wondered why Sonny chose to be in the same room with Yuri Daniel.
    "Hey, Sonny."
    "Hey, mate. What do you hear on the Bank of the Orient thing?"
    "At least fifteen dead."
    "The lid is gonna blow off this place. People aren't going to take this lying down. Even I had money in that goddamn thing."
    "Tea? Beer?"
    "Beer would be great."
    Sue Lin was still there, and now she nodded at Rip and went for the refrigerator.
    "First time I've been up here," Sonny said, surveying the view from a chair beside Rip. "Hell of a view you got here, yessir. Hell of a view. You're right up here with the upper crust, looking down on the world."
    Yuri sat on Sonny's other side, turned slightly away from the two of them. He hadn't yet said a word.
    Sue Lin brought the beer, then left them. She paused at the door of the greenhouse and looked back, catching Rip's eye. She raked her windblown hair from her eyes, then went in, closing the door behind her.
    ". .. owned a building just below here some years back," Sonny was saying. He pointed. "That one right there, with the little garden on the roof. The value of that building went up to four times what I paid for it. I was collecting fabulous rents every month, then it all just... just melted away, like ice cream in the noonday sun."
    "Yeah."
    "One day, the whole thing ..." He sighed.
    Rip sipped a beer. Sue Lin had brought one for each of them. Yuri was looking at the ships in the harbor to the west.
    "I always liked this view," Sonny said. "Always."
    "Yeah."
    "These are the last days of Hong Kong, Rip. It's coming to an end."
    Rip didn't say anything to that. What was there to say?
    "Got your message that you wanted me to drop by. So what can Wong and Associates do for the scion of the Buckingham clan?"
    "China Bob Chan."
    "Too bad, huh?"
    "Got any ideas on who might have done it?"
    "It wasn't me, Rip."
    "Hey, Sonny. If I thought there was the slightest possibility, I would have respected your privacy. What I'm after is any background or insight you might be able to provide, not for attribution, of course. What was China Bob into?"
    "You've been following the American thing...?" Sonny began. "The PLA was giving him money to contribute to American political campaigns. Don't ask me why. The generals think the American po-
    liticos are as crooked as Chinese politicians. And they may be right— there was a guy in the American embassy in Beijing who was handing out visas to the United States to anyone who said he would go over there and contribute to the president's reelection campaign."
    "Uh-huh."
    "Chan was into the usual stuff here. And he was big into smuggling people, which I won't touch. It's too dirty for me, Rip, but not for China Bob."
    "Where to?"
    "Anywhere. Malaysia, Australia, America, anywhere people wanted to go, China Bob would do the deal. Course he didn't always deliver— it's a smelly business."
    "Did he do passports?"
    "S.A.R. passports, but no one wanted those," Wong said. Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997 when the British turned over the colony. "I heard that for the right price—and the right price was very high—China Bob could produce genuine passports. That's not generally known around, I believe."
    "Was he doing that a lot, do you think?"
    "No country I know about is granting visas to people holding S.A.R. passports, so there isn't a lot of demand for those. The refugee problem has these other countries scared silly. The old British colonial passports are a dreg on the market—you can't get into