between the wall and ceiling, but it was no good; he could get his head through but not his shoulders or torso. Now Sir Henry Lai coughed rhythmically, as if uttering some last strange code-'Haa-cah… Haaa! — cah… Haaa! Haaa!' — and convulsed, his eyes peering in pained wonderment straight into Charlie's, then widening as his mouth filled with a reddish soup of undigested shrimp and pigeon and turtle that surged up over his lips and ran down both of his cheeks before draining back into his windpipe. He was too far gone to cough the vomit out of his lungs, and the tension in his hands eased-he was dying of a heart attack and asphyxiation at the same moment.
The attendant hurried back in with two waiters and Sir Henry's bodyguard. They pounded on the stall door with something, cracking the marble. The beautiful veined stone broke away in pieces, some falling on Sir Henry Lai's shoes. Charlie looked back at his face. Henry Lai was dead.
The men stepped into the stall and Charlie knew he was of no further use. He dropped back to the floor, picked up his jacket, and walked out of the men's restroom, expecting a commotion outside. A waiter sailed past with a tray of salmon roses; the assembled businessmen didn't know what had happened.
Mr. Ming watched him enter.
'I must leave you,' Charlie said graciously. 'I'm very sorry.'
Mr. Ming rose to shake hands.
'My daughter is due to call me tonight with important news.'
'Good news, I trust.'
The only news bankers liked. 'Perhaps. She's going to tell me if she is pregnant.'
'I hope you are blessed.' Mr. Ming smiled, teeth white as Ellie's estrogen pills.
Charlie nodded warmly. 'We're going to build a terrific factory, too. Should be on-line by the end of the year.'
'We are scheduled for lunch in about two weeks in New York?'
'Absolutely,' said Charlie. Every minute now was important.
Mr. Ming bent closer, his voice softening. 'And you will tell me then about the quad-port transformer you are developing?'
His secret new datacom switch, which would smoke the competition? No. 'Yes.' Charlie crinkled his face into a mask of agreeability. 'Sure deal.'
'Excellent,' pronounced Mr. Ming. 'Have a good flight.'
The stairs to the lobby spiraled along backlit cabinets of jade dragons and coral boats and who cared what else. He hurried past Tiffany glasswork and mahogany paneling. Don't run, Charlie told himself, don't appear to be in a hurry. But he was holding his coat-check ticket before he hit the last step. In London, seven hours behind Hong Kong, the stock market was still open. He pointed to his coat for the attendant and then, after dropping thirteen floors in the club's elevator, nodded at the first taxi waiting outside. The back door opened mechanically, and he jumped in.
'FCC.'
'Foreign Correspondents' Club?'
'Right away.'
It was the only place open at night in Hong Kong where he knew he could get access to a Bloomberg box- that magical electronic screen that displayed every stock and bond price in every market around the globe. He pulled out his cell phone and called his broker in London. He kept his trading account there so that he could straddle the Asian, European, and American markets.
'Jane, this is Charlie Ravich,' he said when she answered. 'I want to set up a huge put play. Drop everything.'
'This is not like you.'
'This is not like anything. Sell all my Microsoft now at the market price, sell all the Ford, the Merck, all the Lucent, all the Wal-Mart and Deutsche Telekom. Market orders all of them. Please, right now, before London closes.'
'All right. Now, for the tape, you are requesting we sell eight thousand shares of-'
'Yes, yes, I agree,' he blurted, for the purposes of the automatic recording device. 'Just hurry.'
Jane was off for a moment, getting another broker to carry out the orders. 'Zoom-de-doom,' she said when she returned. 'Let it rip.'
'This is going to add up to about one-point-oh-seven million,' he said. 'I'm buying puts on Gaming Technologies, the gambling company. It's American but trades in London.'
'Yes.' Now her voice held interest. ' Yes.'
'How many puts of GT can I buy with that?'
She was shouting orders to her clerks. 'Wait…' she said. 'Yes? Very good. I have your account on my screen. All those stocks are going to cash. We're filling those at the market, waiting for the-yes. The sells are showing up…' He heard keys clicking. 'We have… one million seventy thousand, U.S., plus change. Now then, Gaming Technologies is selling at sixty-six even a share-'
'Is the price dropping?'
'No, no, it's up an eighth last trade, two minutes ago, in fact.'
'How many puts can I buy with one-point-oh-seven?'
'Oh, I would say a huge number, Charlie.'
'How many?'
'About… one-point-six million shares.'
'That's huge, all right.' A put was the option to sell a stock at a certain price by a certain time. Because the cost of each put was a fraction of the share price, a small amount of money could leverage a huge sum.
'You want to protect that bet?' Jane asked.
'No. The stock is going down.'
'If you say so.'
'Buy the puts, Jane.'
'I am, Charlie, please. The price is stable. Yes, take this one
…' she was saying to a clerk. 'Give me puts on GT at market, immediately. Yes. Hang on, Charlie. One-point- six million at the money. Yes. At the money. I'm giving my authorization.'
The line was silent a moment. He had just spent more than a million dollars on the right to sell 1.6 million shares of GT at $66 a share.
'You sure, Charlie?'
'This is a bullet to the moon, Jane.'
'Biggest bet of your life, Charlie?'
'Oh, Jane, not even close.'
Outside his cab a silky red Rolls glided past, its license plate indicating it was owned by an officer of the People's Liberation Army. Hong Kong was like that now, the PLA-vulgar and dangerous and clever-getting rich, forcing corruption through the pipes. 'Got it?' he asked.
'Not quite. You going to tell me the play, Charlie?'
'When it goes through, Jane.'
'We'll get the order back in a minute or two.'
Die on the shitter, Charlie thought. Could happen to anyone. Happened to Elvis Presley, matter of fact.
'Charlie?'
'Yes.'
'We have your puts. One-point-six million, GT, at the price of sixty-six.' He heard the keys clicking. ' Now tell me?' Jane pleaded.
'I will,' Charlie said. 'Just give me the verbal confirmation for the tape.'
While she repeated the price and the volume of the order, he looked out the window to see how close the taxi was to the FCC. He'd first visited the club while on leave in 1970, when it was full of drunken television and newspaper journalists, CIA people, Army intelligence, retired British admirals who had gone native and were no longer welcome in their own clubs, crazy Texans provisioning the war, and just about every other expat lonesome for conversation; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.
'I just want to get my times right,' Charlie told Jane when she was done. 'It's now a few minutes after 9:00
