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once grumped to his wife. Actually, as he well knew, he had escaped censorship only because his paper was published in English, a language that few government officials spoke with any fluency. All the Chinese-language newspapers had a squad of resident apparatchiks from the New China News Agency who had to approve everything.
    As Rip worked on the story, a sense of impending doom came over him. There were several hundred banks in Hong Kong, most of them privately owned, yet China had no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Chinese banks outside of Hong Kong were owned by the state and theoretically could not fail. Of course, if those state-owned banks were examined using Western accounting standards, all were insolvent.
    The problem was the desperate financial straits of the Chinese government, which saw the privately owned banks in Hong Kong as a source of low-interest loans for noncompetitive state-owned industries that would collapse without cash infusions, industries that employed tens of millions of mainland workers.
    The Japanese who owned the Bank of the Orient had refused to make those loans to the Chinese government. Now the bank was failing, and thousands of people were going to be fiat-ass broke after a lifetime of work and saving.
    What was the Chinese government doing to prevent that outcome, if anything?
    As luck would have it, after he left the Star Ferry terminal Jake Grafton wandered along with the crowd, lost in thought. When he at last began paying attention to his surroundings he found himself in the square outside the Bank of the Orient, shoulder-to-shoulder with several thousand other people. The doors of the bank were apparently locked. From time to time people came out of the crowd to try the doors, which refused to open.
    Armed soldiers in uniform were visible here and there, but they were well back, away from the crowd, and seemed to be making no attempt to disperse it or prevent people from approaching the door of the bank to rattle it, pound on it, or press their foreheads against the glass and look in.
    Here and there knots of people argued loudly among themselves, waved passbooks, and stared openly and defiantly at the soldiers.
    For a moment, Jake thought of wandering on, finding another bank to cash his traveler's checks. Surely they all weren't closed today.
    Yet something made him finger. He found a few empty inches on a flower bed retainer wall and parked his bottom.
    Meanwhile, in the executive suite of the bank, President Sa-buro Genda was getting bad news from the assistant finance minister in Tokyo.
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    "We will not loan the bank additional funds. I'm sorry, but the prime minister and the finance minister are agreed."
    President Genda's forte was commercial loans to large companies. He had spent much of his adult life dealing with wealthy businessmen with a firm grasp of economic reality. He fought now to keep his temper with this obtuse government clerk.
    "You don't understand," he said, his voice tightly under control. "We are experiencing a run on the bank. There is a crowd of several thousand depositors outside demanding their money. Without additional cash, the bank cannot pay them. Without more money, the bank will collapse."
    "I am sorry, Mr. Genda," said the bureaucrat. "It is you who do not understand. The government has decided to let the bank fail. It would simply cost too much to save it."
    "But—"
    "The Bank of the Orient made far too many real estate loans in Hong Kong at astronomical evaluations. As you know, the market collapsed after the Communists took over. It may be twenty years before the market recovers. Indeed, it may never recover."
    "Mr. Assistant Minister, your ministry has known about the bad loans for years. Your colleagues were working with us. We have the assets to pay our depositors, but the assets are in accounts in Japan and you have