The Last Six Million Seconds Read Free Page A

from his forehead. “Yeah, I bribed them.” He looked out to sea, hesitated, spoke into the distance. “But the people who gave them orders to intercept the bag, they’re the ones who’ll be running Hong Kong in two months’ time. See?” He looked at the young Englishman, so typical of the raw recruits who had been coming out of England for as long as he could remember. “Everything has already changed. The rules are different now; they just haven’t got around to telling us yet.”
    Chan waved a hand in the direction of Hong Kong Island, which had begun to appear full ahead. “Enjoy the view, why not? You don’t have to live here after June. This is a vacation for you.”
    Aston gulped at the implications of what Chan was saying, then obediently stared out through the bridge window. For the moment the wind had died again, a calm before the storm. In the twilight of an early tropical evening lights were being switched on from Aberdeen to North Point, burning electricity and money with an exuberance like nowhere else in the world.
    It was an awesome skyline, not dissimilar to Manhattan’s except that it was surmounted by a mountain and the scores of office towers presided over a huge harbor where some of the largest ships in the world lay at anchor. Neither the city nor the harbor ever slept. And it all happened on a rock not ten miles long that hung west to east off the south coast of the largest remaining Communist country in the world. Thirty miles north there lived 1.4 billion people whose collective attention was focused on Hong Kong just two months before its reversion to rule by the People’s Republicof China. It was like living in a spiritual wind tunnel: You could feel the pressure of uncontainable envy, loathing and longing pressing in from over the border. Somebody said Hong Kong was a borrowed place living on borrowed time. That time was now being measured in hours: about fifteen hundred at the moment, but reducing quickly. The Communists were coming; they were almost here.
    He left Chan to his private chat with the captain, stood at the bows again, where he had spent most of that afternoon. Hong Kong was the first hot country he’d visited. Standing in the warm, damp breeze created by the boat and gazing at the constellation of lights on the island were like a dream he’d never dared to believe could come true. He didn’t care that he’d be made redundant in June. He would have had almost three years. Three years! He couldn’t believe his luck.
    Swinging around into the harbor itself, they slowed to the regulation four knots. Aston watched a tiny woman in a wide-brim straw hat fishing from a sampan, her silhouette balancing against the bucking of the tiny boat. The Star Ferries, lit up from stern to bow, were crossing from Hong Kong to Kowloon and back every fifteen minutes. A jetfoil bound for Macao rose up on its skis like a praying mantis. There, crawling up the mountain toward a saddle near the top, were the lights of the Peak Tram, a funicular railway that had put the coolies with their sedan chairs out of business nearly a hundred years ago. To the far west a fleet of green fishing trawlers, just visible in the dusk, was making for the typhoon shelter at Aberdeen where they’d raft up until Alan was spent.
    As the launch drew closer to Central, comparisons with Manhattan no longer held. There was no grid system; the jam-packed futuristic city had sprung up without any planning at all. It was as if a giant spaceship had stopped by one day and hurriedly unloaded ten thousand assorted buildings for storage; from the sea it was hard to understand how traffic, or even people, managed to squeeze between them.
    It was this intensity, physical and mental, Aston knew, that gave the place its fascination. There was no time to stand still and nospace to stand still in. Weeks, then months, then years had flashed by at ten times the speed to which he was accustomed. He had been drunk with excitement