Read Online Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts - Free Book Online Page B

Bob was shot and killed in that library by a party unknown. I got there before the body cooled and took the tape from the recorder. That tape is probably the best evidence of the identity of the person who killed Chan. In fact, it may be the only evidence we'll ever get. It also might shed some light on who killed the CIA officer."
    "You told Jake that Tiger Cole, the consul general, might have killed Chan."
    "Mrs. Grafton, anyone in Hong Kong could have gone into that library and shot China Bob."
    Callie glanced at Jake, who said nothing.
    "The recorder was voice-activated," Carmellini explained, "so that valuable space on the tape wouldn't be wasted recording the street noises that penetrated an empty room. When the sound level dropped below the electronic threshold, the tape would play on for a few seconds, then stop. Places on the tape where the recorder stopped were marked as audible clicks."
    "We'll play it later," Jake Grafton said in a tone that settled the issue.
    "Sure." Carmellini rose to go. "Nice to meet you, Mrs. Grafton."
    Callie merely nodded.
    Buckingham Lin Su, or as she wrote it in the Western style, Sue Lin Buckingham, found her mother, Lin Pe, in her study consulting her fortune book. Lin Pe lived in her own three-room apartment in the Buckinghams' house. Just now she was smoking a cigarette which she had fixed in a short black plastic holder. The smoke rising from the cigarette made her squint behind the thick lenses of her glasses.
    Sue Lin broke the news. The Bank of the Orient had collapsed, failing to open its doors today. Depositors trying to withdraw their money had been fired upon by soldiers.
    Lin Pe took the news pretty well, Sue Lin thought, considering that her company kept all its accounts at the Japanese bank because it paid the highest interest rates in Hong Kong.
    Lin Pe listened, nodded, and when Sue Lin left, got the accountant's latest summary from her desk and studied it.
    The Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company, Ltd., was a profitable international concern because of one person—Lin Pe. Thirty years ago when she came to Hong Kong from a village north of Canton, she found a job in a factory that baked fortune cookies for export to America. Before she went to work there she had never even heard of a fortune cookie. The little fortunes printed on rice paper inside the cookies charmed her. She wrote some in Chinese and one day showed her creations to the owner, an alcoholic old Dutchman from Indonesia who also mixed the cookie batter and cleaned up the place at night, if he was sober enough. He translated a few, they went into the cookies, and Lin Pe had found a home.
    When the Dutchman died five years later of cirrhosis of the liver, she bought the company from his heirs. It thrived, because Lin Pe was a very astute businesswoman and because the fortunes she put into her cookies were the best in the business.
    About three dozen fortunes were in use at the cookie factory at any one time. Writing good fortunes was a difficult business. She was hard put to come up with three or four good new ones per month, which meant some of the old ones had to be used again. Lin Pe kept a book, her "book of fortunes," in which was recorded every fortune she had ever written and notations on what months it had been used. She changed the fortunes going into the cookies on a monthly basis.
    Just now she put down the accountant's summary and consulted the fortune list she had constructed for use next month.
    "Happiness will find you soon." She had used this fortune before and thought it one of her best. Other cookie people wrote "You will find happiness," but that was bland, without wit or snap. Lin Pe sent the happiness searching for you.
    "Your true love is closer than you think." Love, Americans seem enamored with it. Many of the letters she received from restaurant owners in America pleaded with her to use more love fortunes in her cookies. Lin Pe had never been in love herself, so to write these