Simon Elegant

And he's in the force, and there's a terrible incident, because everybody in the force has to rotate through, quote-unquote, riot duty.

In other words, protest suppression, whatever you want to call them, riot squads.

Because there aren't enough people in the police to... The demonstrations are so great.

You know, a million people on the streets sometimes at one time.

Crazy numbers.

20% of the population.

So the police had to cycle through other offices so they wouldn't have enough money to control the crowd.

So yeah, there's an unfortunate incident.

He's basically exiled, sent away to what counts as a Siberian Hong Kong, which is such a small place.

It's not far.

And there's a murderer and he's asked if he'll take care of it.

So that's his road to getting back in the force.

No, not accidentally at all.

No, I deliberately want to... I mean, the climax of the book is the day that the national security law is passed, not in Hong Kong.

I mean, I guess for your readers, most of you obviously don't follow this that closely, but this struggle between the people of Hong Kong and the pretty incompetent local government trying to do what Beijing wanted them had been going on since 2004, when they first tried to pass this law, and the protests were so strong that their chief executive, the head of the...

the head of the administration, had to resign at the time.

So they resisted for 15 years at this point.

And basically Beijing was getting pretty exasperated because they really didn't, they just wanted to be left alone.

But they didn't want to endanger this issue that I talked about earlier, the golden goose of the IPO and basically the position that Hong Kong played.

So yeah, so it was very much very conscious.