by Fritz Galt
Mick nodded to himself. He had called that one correctly. “I told you to stop the transaction.”
“It was too late. The Shanghai Securities Exchange is going off like fireworks. Yet the Americans are telling me they intercepted the transaction. I don’t know if I should believe them.”
“Believe them. Have the Chinese offered assistance?”
“Not publicly.”
“Then why are you worried? Now listen to me. Nan-an tells me the military will only get his support if you repeal martial law.”
He heard Morisot’s footsteps circling behind him.
“I thought we were supporting Nan-an,” General Li said, confused. “Not the other way around.”
“If you don’t accede to his wishes, he will take charge.”
“That’s perfectly fine with me, but how do I repeal martial law?”
“These are his words, sir,” he said, composing the phrases quickly in his mind. “Tell the press that certain betelnut-chewing, pro-independence military staff tried to mount an internal coup. You have put it down. There’s no need for the Legislative Yuan to approve reinstating constitutional law. The president is still in power. You support him fully.”
He felt Morisot’s heavy weight on the trunk. The car began to roll toward the cliff.
“An ‘internal’ coup? What soldiers do we send to jail for that?” the general asked.
Mick yanked on the emergency brake and the car stopped just short of the drop-off. “Take your pick. Accuse anyone. You know how to bury a case in the courts.”
The general’s aged voice crackled with a laugh. “You make it sound so easy. And you really think the Chinese have no evidence of a transaction?”
“Of course not.” He held his breath.
“All I wanted was money for Nan-an.”
“He knows what you wanted. He’ll support the military. Taiwan is safe.”
“How can I believe we’re safe?”
“You’re the chief of staff.”
He threw the phone back in its black box.
“Look,” Morisot cried. “Helicopters.” He was pointing to tiny aircraft dropping over the western ridge.
Oh, no. Whose choppers were they?
Like a string of pearls, they entered the broad Taipei basin from the west, heading directly for the center of town.
The Presidential Palace was right in their path. Mick held his breath and waited for bursts of gunfire.
But there were none. Instead, they continued to fly eastward.
He tried to make out where they were going, and finally saw where they were headed. Some had already landed at Ta-an Park, near the American Institute in Taiwan. “They must be Americans.”
“Let’s get down there,” Morisot said, and began to scramble downhill with determination. “I need a seat on one of those babies.”
“I’m right behind you. But let’s take the stairs.”
A kilometer-long set of slate steps led from the windswept mountaintop to the once bustling shops of Tianmu.
Within an hour, they would reach town.
By dusk, he hoped to see his wife.
“Tell me,” Odette said in a small voice as she trailed her fingernails down Alec’s spine. “Do you make love to May-lin?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” she said, making a face. “I don’t make love with Orientals. Except my husband, of course.”
“Then you’re a faithful wife.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“So you have certain appetites. Do you meet many foreign men in Hong Kong?”
“Only the occasional tourist. The Cartier salesman. Men who talk about military hardware.” She laughed as if it were an inside joke.
“Does your husband know?”
“Ha. Women don’t have affairs, as far as he’s concerned. Only men do.”
“I see. Do you mind?”
“His affairs? No. We’re hardly what you call ‘in love.’”
“Would he mind us?”
She leveled her hard, brown eyes at him. “You wouldn’t survive the night.”
“Nice guy,” he said.
“Yeah. Real nice guy.”
“But he treats you well.”
“I let him.”
Although he didn’t trust her, he did believe her. For the moment, her side of the equation seemed to add up.
Just then he heard a knock on his cabin door.
“Come in,” Odette said. She didn’t bother to pull the sheet up.
A young Filipino entered with her clothes.
“Just set them on the chair,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and promptly left.
She kissed Alec lightly, then slipped out of bed.
“Tell me,” she said as she slid her long legs into a yellow, bamboo-patterned outfit. “You’re a scientist. You know what happened on Orchid Island.”
“I’m not blind. It’s not hard to recognize a nuclear explosion.”
“How do you suppose it happened?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know. It’s not my field. But Taiwan’s nuclear waste storage site is somewhere on the island.”
“Nuclear waste storage,” she said dismissively. “You do know that the French have been criticized for recent nuclear tests.”
“Of course. Their frogmen sabotaged Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace vessel, in New Zealand. It’s a long-running battle.”
“Some people want a nuclear-free zone in this part of the world.” She pulled a loose-fitting shirt over her head.
“It would be nice.”
“Would it?” she asked, shaking out her hair.
He frowned. Was her husband in the weapons business, or was she simply making a political point? “Do you have some sort of thing for bombs?”
“Not particularly.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“It was probably a nuclear test.” She began brushing out her hair.
“Yeah, probably,” Alec said. “Unfortunately, the radiation will blow all over Taiwan.”
“Do you see any hair falling out?” She shook her short brown hair over his body.
“No.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
She knelt on the bed and opened the curtain to the porthole.
May-lin still sat beneath her umbrella talking with Miles LaRue.
“I don’t care much for the Taiwanese,” she said. “See how she tries to keep her skin so pure and white?”
“Why blame the Taiwanese? Most Chinese value white skin.”
“They’re just trying to imitate the Japanese. Even with their silly little laughs.”
“Surely you don’t hold that against them as a nation.”
“Taiwan will profit the most from Hong Kong reverting back to China. What have they done for Hong Kong? They’re too busy thinking about themselves. No, I think the only country with a global plan for the Chinese is China itself. It lacks the ‘me-first’ attitude that I deplore in all these countries of the nouveau riches.”
“Since when are you a defender of the Chinese?”
“Since Margaret Thatcher signed away my future, and I learned I’d have to become Chinese myself.”
“You could leave Hong Kong.”
“Many people can. The middle class will leave. But we can’t. My husband’s interests have been drawn in too far. They’re clever, the Chinese. They make life so sweet for us that now we can’t pull out.”
“Then leave your husband.”
She turned back sharply. Her chest heaved and the alarming truth worked its way around her open face. “For whom?”
Beneath her glare, he felt reduced to an insignificant cad.
He saw her point.
President Charles Damon sat on the floor of his private quarters exercising in his pajamas when his secure bedside telephone rang.
He reached over and picked it up. It was Hugh Gutman, calling from Langley.
“Good news, Charles,” Gut
man said. “We have an operation underway in China as we speak. You’ll know by morning who’s behind this Taiwan affair.”
“Who’s working on it, analysis or operations?”
“Operations. We’re trying to coax out whoever coerced the Taiwan military and planted the bomb.”
“In the meantime, I’ve got Park working on some preemptive warning strikes. Shots across the bow. Might stir things up a bit. Could produce a desperate move on the part of whomever you’re tracking down.”
“Good thinking,” Gutman said. “I’ll keep in touch with Park on an hourly basis. Good night and brace for whatever happens tomorrow.”
Charles hung up the phone and stared at his legs splayed out in front of him. How was he supposed to sleep?
Chapter 36
As Typhoon Ivan spun on a northwesterly path toward China, rain fell heavily on the streets of Shanghai and the consulate prepared to close early.
While Stephanie made travel arrangements downstairs in her office, Eli remained in the consul general’s quarters.
Two rain-soaked men had stood vigil across the street from the consulate since early afternoon. He watched the orange embers of their cigarettes glow brighter in the gathering darkness.
A woman used a broom to nudge a bird’s nest off the top of her air conditioner. The twigs hung together as they plunged five stories to the wet pavement while adult birds shrieked impotently from a nearby ledge.
Eli Shaw was far away from home.
His home was a large, lonely Beijing apartment that was formerly occupied by a raucous detachment of marines.
At the very least, home was where he felt competent, where he at least understood the language. In Shanghai, he could barely make out the local dialect.
Was he really up to the job? He could see his résumé: “Skilled at democracy-building and proficient at bringing countries into the mainstream of international affairs.” His tools were a handful of cash and other sweet enticements to induce men to change their beliefs. He could only change their morals.
During his worst moments, he felt as if people took him for a fake. He borrowed all his jokes from conversations he overheard or magazines he read. Other families invited him to their Thanksgiving dinners. He brought the same cranberry sauce recipe that he had clipped out of Gourmet Magazine twelve years earlier as a bachelor. He no longer bothered to set up his four-foot, plastic Christmas tree before opening presents from his sons.
Then something caught his eye. A Chinese employee walked past the consulate’s guard booth and out onto the street. He was carrying the metal briefcase.
Who let the briefcase out of the office?
The rain-soaked men waited patiently for the nervous-looking man, who walked straight toward them, stopped to chat briefly and then handed them the briefcase.
He was about to run downstairs when something creaked behind him.
“Did he give them the briefcase?” a voice said.
It was Pete Cavanaugh glancing over his shoulder.
“You authorized this?” Eli said.
“It was Bronson Nichols’ idea.” Pete shrugged and walked back into his apartment.
The two wet men threw their cigarettes down and hurried around the corner with the briefcase.
Great. Eli had given away the evidence and the access codes to the money.
His feet felt numb. How could he stand around doing nothing while Taiwan’s future hung in the balance?
Yet he couldn’t move.
What could he do? He was no fighter. It took a woman to rescue him on a motorcycle.
Sure he could feel sorry for himself, but who was this man occupying his skin?
A traitor. A fake.
What features in that slouching figure with veined hands revved up the red-blooded American blonde? Sure, they had been casual friends for years. They had met in the agency as young case officers. They had amused each other occasionally over coffee in the sunny atrium that served as Langley’s employee cafeteria.
Then she had departed for Africa, Paris and most recently Hungary. He had circled the globe westward, snaking a trail through Jakarta, Sydney, Taipei and finally Beijing.
Was it finally the distinguished gray in his temples that attracted her? If so, she had fallen for one more quirk of nature over which he had no control.
He felt comfortable and excited when he stood beside her. Sex may have kept him alive, but it wasn’t what he lived for.
Why him?
She said it was his eyes. She said he was a nice man, in a suggestive way.
If he ever got the briefcase back and took it out of China, he would have to trust the instincts of the CIA recruiter who had hired him a decade and a half before. Because he no longer knew what he was good for.
He watched a bicyclist kick the fallen bird’s nest against the curb.
Maybe it was time to move on before the storm. Migrate to another country. Diplomats were like birds. They carried a universal passport and knew no borders.
They also knew no home.
Alec was enjoying his Chardonnay and veal brioche on Odette’s floating palace when an elderly Filipino headwaiter summoned his hostess away from the table.
“One moment, please,” she said, and dabbed her lips with her napkin.
Her silk dress swept against his shoulder as she swung up the companionway to the captain’s quarters.
That left the LaRues with their affable mood and May-lin with her stony silence.
When Odette returned, concern knotted her thin eyebrows.
“The Americans have just fired missiles at a target area just off the Chinese coast.”
His veal nearly turned upside down in his stomach.
Miles LaRue wiped a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “Is that anywhere near these waters?”
“No. Further north,” she said. “Into Chinese territorial waters.”
“That’s good.” Miles smiled broadly. “It’s their problem.”
Alec cleared his throat and asked as casually as he could, “What was China’s reaction?”
“They’ll bring it up at the UN Security Council.”
“Where the issue properly resides,” Miles said.
“What’s more,” Odette said, “Taiwan has requested emergency aid from the United Nations. China announced it will veto it, claiming territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.”
“Well that’s a bugger,” Miles said. “Taiwan wants aid and the Chinese won’t allow them to get it.”
“Not exactly. China is offering aid of their own.”
“Oh, that’s just as good,” Miles said, and began chewing again.
“But Taiwan has refused.”
“What?” Miles said, incredulous. “Refused emergency aid?”
“Yes. Taiwan insists on pressing the sovereignty issue with the United Nations.”
“What a time to bring up sovereignty with the UN,” Miles said. “That’s irresponsible government.”
May-lin spoke for the first time. “Would you be liking the People’s Liberation Army crawling all over your country?”
“Well, no,” Miles said. “Of course not.”
Alec’s wineglass slid with a roll of the ship. He reached out and grabbed it, leaving the fork in his mouth.
“Where are your shipboard manners?” Odette asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not used to eating on a rolling deck.”
“That’s curious,” Stacie LaRue said, “for a marine biologist.”
“What makes you think I’m a marine biologist? I’m a geologist.”
“Then why are you on a ship if you’re a geologist?”
“I’m studying the barnacles.” He sat back with resignation. “Why are you on this ship?”
“We’re here to have some fun,” Stacie said defensively. “Aren’t we, Smiley?”
Miles smiled back earnestly.
Alec couldn’t hold back. “We’re floating past an island of twenty-one million people who are pleading to the world for help
and on the brink of war, and you’re here to have fun?”
“We came to support and foster the tourist industry in these backward countries,” Stacie said with an air of nobility.
“I am here to report to Mr. Ouyang,” May-lin said with some bitterness. “He is my reason.”
Odette smiled pleasantly around the table, then looked pointedly at Alec. “Would anybody like to get off the ship in Taiwan?”
She could take a flying leap.
“The captain assures me that we’re making great headway,” she continued. “We should be home later tonight.”
A tremolo of mandolin strings drifted from the rear deck.
“Ah, the band,” she said. “In the mood for a dance?”
“What on earth are you trying to pull?” Bronson Nichols demanded of Taiwan’s vice president over the phone. His words echoed in his empty office.
Vice President Vincent Chu sounded nearly hysterical. “We had to call on the United Nations. They’ll save us from the Chinese.”
“The United States is lobbing missiles over there to defend you, and you’re practically inviting the Chinese in.”
“We didn’t expect their response. That was our tactical error.”
“Tactical error? Who’s running the show over there?” Bronson couldn’t contain the thunder in his voice. “I talked to General Li. He’s back over at his headquarters. You can’t pin this one on him.”
“He pulled his men out of our offices this afternoon,” Chu admitted. “Our government takes full responsibility for this one.”
“Well, I’m at a loss for words.” He glanced at his new Navy Seal watch in the twilight. “Listen, do you want some advice?”
“I’m listening.”
“The UN will open its doors in a few hours. Withdraw the request for aid. You’re getting all you need from our boys now. We’ve got a battle group about to put themselves in harm’s way between you and the People’s Republic of China. We’ve got cargo planes landing every ten minutes on runways that are lit by gas torches. You aren’t going to get any better help than that.”
“Sir, the issue is no longer about getting assistance,” Chu said. “You’re bound by law to defend us.”
He swallowed hard. The little twerp. “So what is the issue now?”