Nine Days by Fred Hiatt Read Free Book Online

he’d agitated for more self-rule. After Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, he’d kept on agitating for self-rule, only now his target was Beijing, not London.
    “If my father was in Hong Kong, I’m sure he would have seen Horace,” Ti-Anna had said.
    If? I’d thought. I’d never heard her doubt that her dad at least had started here.
    Horace Kwan didn’t know we were coming, and we didn’t know if he’d even be in his office. He’d been on the legislative council—like Hong Kong’s Congress—but now he was semiretired from politics. He was still a lawyer, though, Ti-Anna had said, and a successful one. I figured the earlier we got there, the better the chance we’d find him before he went to court or somewhere else.
    I took out the map once more, though I’d pored over it after dinner and was pretty sure which way to head. Ti-Anna quit examining the men passing before us. We walked past a couple of cool old buildings from colonial days and some great-looking palm trees—which I had never seen in real life—but mostly there were skyscrapers, each one sleeker and taller than the next.
    Kwan’s was one of the sleekest, all intimidating marble and glass. In the lobby two young women in powder-blue suits withpowder-blue caps sat behind a desk, but they didn’t seem to be blocking anyone from the bank of elevators. Trying to look like we knew what we were doing, we found Horace Kwan on the directory on the wall—floor 33—and joined the flow of people riding up.
    Double glass doors led to a thickly carpeted anteroom, where another young lady sat primly behind a wooden desk. It was weirdly quiet.
    Ti-Anna found her voice first.
    “We’d like to see Mr. Kwan, please,” she said in English. I realized I had yet to hear her speak Chinese since we’d landed.
    “Do you have an appointment?” the lady said.
    She didn’t exactly sneer, but she looked like she would have sneered if she hadn’t been trained not to. Obviously, she knew the answer to her question.
    Ti-Anna shook her head.
    “Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here? We don’t mind waiting.”
    “I’m afraid Mr. Kwan doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” she said.
    “I understand,” Ti-Anna said.
    “Would you like to make an appointment?” the woman asked icily. “Though Mr. Kwan is quite booked for the next several months.”
    You had to know Ti-Anna to tell when she was angry. I could sense that she wasn’t going to be inviting this woman to lunch any time soon.
    “Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here?” Ti-Anna repeated in a pleasant voice. “I think he might like to know.”
    The woman sighed, started to speak, glared at Ti-Anna and apparently decided that we weren’t going anywhere. Shaking her head, she disappeared through a door in the wood-paneled wall behind her desk.
    The door reopened almost instantly for a tall, distinguished man in a suit, with horn-rimmed glasses and a shock of black hair falling over his forehead.
    “Ti-Anna?” he said. “Is it really you?”
    She nodded. “And this is my friend Ethan.”
    “Horace Kwan,” he said. He gravely shook my hand, then put a hand on Ti-Anna’s shoulder without speaking.
    Finally, he gestured toward the door.
    “Please come in,” he said.
    Take that, I wanted to tell Miss Snooty, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 16
    Stepping into Horace Kwan’s office, you felt you might fall right into the harbor. The wall facing us was glass. You could see the Kowloon ferry dock we’d left from an hour before, and if you squinted and shielded your eyes from the sun bouncing off the waves you could even make out the railing where we’d met Wei and Mai.
    “Please,” Horace Kwan said again. “Do take a seat.”
    He pointed us toward a couch facing the glass and sat in an armchair to the side. His desk was at the other end of the room, dark wood with graceful curving legs.
    Nobody spoke.
    Well, I’m certainly not going first, I