Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts Page B

conditions. The boats began running at six-thirty in the morning and stopped at eleven-thirty at night. There were two classes of passengers—first class, which rode on the upper deck, and second, which rode on the main deck.
    Everyone who lived or worked or visited Hong Kong rode on these ferries. On days off I would ride the ferries a dozen times a day, looking at the people and listening to them talk, laugh, cry, giggle.... Chinese laborers and wealthy merchants and sons and daughters and wives and mistresses and teenage toughs, English civil servants and nannies, Australian adventurers, tourists from everywhere on earth, Europeans, Russians, American sailors, Malays, Filipino maids, Japanese businessmen, Hindus, Sikhs—everyone came to Hong Kong, to make money and a new life for themselves or just to see it, to learn the truth of it. All the roads of the earth lead to this place.
    "I loved the city. It was British, colonial, civilized, grand and trivial, yet it wasn't. It was Chinese, but not quite. It was timeless, yet everyone was in a hurry and the city was being transformed before my eyes.
    "From this city I could feel the power of China, the thousand million people, the ancient and the new, the way of the seeded earth. I came to think of China as a giant oak, deeply rooted and enduring through the centuries- while the lives of men changed like the seasons.
    "In this city I can still feel the pulse of the earth. I can stand in the crowded places and listen to the hundreds of voices, all babbling about the things that fill human lives. I can hear the generations talking of the things that never change, the dreams, ambitions, and concerns that make us human."
    Jake Grafton squeezed his wife's hand, and they walked on.
    Rip Buckingham's brother-in-law, Wu Tai Kwong, was a delivery driver for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company. Rip was happily married and living in Hong Kong when he learned that his wife's younger brother was involved in the anti-Communist movement in Beijing. The whole thing seemed innocent enough ... until that same brother-in-law stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and had his photo plastered on every front page in the world. That incident made him a criminal. And a dedicated revolutionary.
    Now, of course, he was a fugitive ... and living in Rip's basement. Although he was a notorious political criminal and the object of the greatest manhunt in Chinese history, the government had no idea what Wu looked like now, where he was from, who his family was, or what name or names he might be using. Perhaps this was to be expected in a nation where public records were spotty at best, a nation where a significant portion of the population was illiterate and without identity papers of any kind, a nation with more than a hundred million migrants who roamed at will, looking for work.
    Still, the Chinese authorities knew with an absolute certainty that sooner or later they would get their man. They had offered a large reward for Wu Tai Kwong. Human nature being what it is, they had merely to wait until someone betrayed him.
    Wu Tai Kwong, being who he was, was not hiding. True, he wasn't
    broadcasting his whereabouts and he was using a false name and false identity papers, but he had no intention of stopping his political activities. He hated the Communists and intended to destroy them or be destroyed by them, whichever way fate spun out the story.
    The tale could go either way, he realized. Someone who knew or suspected who he might be would tell someone, and so on, and the rumors would spread like ripples in a pond. Still, Wu had to talk to his friends, had to plan, to plot, to conspire against those he hated. He did so knowing that any day could be his very last, for he knew that once the Communists caught him they would execute him quickly, then broadcast the news of their triumph.
    This afternoon he stopped his delivery van at various corners on Nathan Road and picked up the solitary