Jiang laughed. ‘You speak Mandarin?’
‘Just a little. My father, Charles Melfi, was a China scholar, back before the Collapse. He taught me the odd phrase or two.’
Jiang Lei bowed. ‘Then I shall be honoured to read for you, T’ai T’ai Shepherd… I haven’t brought anything with me, but I’m sure I can recite one or two from memory.’
Amos straightened. Then, stepping back across the fence, he smiled at Jiang.
‘I have all your stuff, Jiang Lei… including the spiky stuff. I especially like the one you called “Voices”.’
‘You have that?’
‘I could recite it for you, if you like.’
But Alexandra wasn’t having that. ‘Don’t tease our guest, Amos. They’re his poems and he should read them. That is, if he wants to.’
‘Did Tsao Ch’un send them to you?’ Jiang asked, intrigued now.
‘Not at all,’ Amos answered. ‘I’ve been an admirer of yours for some while. I bought each collection as it came out. My favourite is Restraint. So understated.’
Jiang looked down, embarrassed as always, by such praise. But it was true. Restraint was his best, and Shepherd understood that.
‘I was wondering,’ he said hesitantly, ‘if we could go out on the water. If it’s not possible, of course, just say. Only…’
He met Amos’s eyes, and saw how the man was grinning at him.
‘You had only to say,’ Amos said. ‘Beth… help me get the boat out… let’s show our good friend here how nautical we English are!’
Much later, alone once again in that narrow bed beneath the eaves, Jiang Lei found his thoughts returning to the day.
That afternoon, on the river, he had seen a different side to Amos: less intense, more relaxed, almost childlike. To think of him as the architect of their world was strange. But that was what he was. Without Amos Shepherd, Tsao Ch’un’s vision of a unified world state would have remained just that… a vision. For Chung Kuo was the City and its workings. And that city had sprung, fully formed, from Amos Shepherd’s head.
It was strange, being out there on the water. Amos had shipped the oars and let them drift, leaning back on the cushions, talking lazily of this and that. And, after a while, Jiang had found himself relaxing too.
He was here for a serious purpose, certainly. Next week he would meet his generals and put to them the strategies devised here in the Domain. Men would live or die according to those strategies. Many men. For the Americans, he knew, would not give up their empire without a struggle, no matter how divided they now were.
But so it would be, whether he commanded it or not. And maybe it was best that he was in charge, for another, more brutal man might have chosen a more costly approach, spilling blood carelessly.
That was not his way.
Jiang slept, to be woken hours later by the sound of rain on the thatch overhead.
He lay there a while, disoriented, vaguely aware that there was something he needed to attend to. Something he had to do.
Then he remembered where he was.
Slowly he sat up. Light was coming from the window to his right. He leaned forward, pulling the curtain aside, and looked.
Down in the garden, beneath the oak tree, a canopy had been set up. There beneath the awning, working by the light of an arc lamp, was Amos.
He was painting.
Jiang looked at his wrist timer. It was almost four-thirty.
What was he doing, working at this godforsaken hour? Did the man never sleep?
Jiang was tempted to go down and see what he was doing. To see what else had crawled from his mind in the night. Only he was tired.
He lay down again, turning on his side, facing away from the light.
Sleep. I need to sleep.
Only sleep would not come. Not immediately. He kept thinking about how pretty Alexandra and her daughter were. Not that he had any romantic ideas regarding them. Just that it was rare for him to find Western women attractive in that way. He had enjoyed reading his poems to them; enjoyed the way they’d applauded him.
Jiang yawned. The rain had woken him from a dream. A vague, meandering dream about Corfe and mechanical creatures that hopped and sprang and flew. A very odd dream, now that he came to think about it.
In the darkness, Jiang smiled. Maybe that was where Amos’s paintings came from. Maybe he simply painted his dreams.
He yawned again. It was such a comfortable bed…
There was a rustling in the thatch above, the light patter of raindrops. Soft, soothing sounds.
Jiang Lei slept.
‘Well? What do you think?’
Jiang Lei turned, watching as Amos came down the path towards him, ruddy with health and smiling.
Jiang turned back. He had been studying the canvas this past half hour, and he still wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not. It was a work of genius, certainly, only…
Only it was a little bit too honest for Jiang’s taste. A little bit too real, in its abstract way.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, bearing in mind what Amos had said about not holding back; about not being polite for the sake of it. If that was what Amos wanted…
‘Go on,’ Amos said, his eyes holding Jiang’s.
‘It’s brilliant, obviously… but uncomfortable.’
‘Should art be comfortable then, friend Jiang?’
‘No, but it shouldn’t… perhaps… be quite so disturbing.’
‘Do you find it so?’
‘Immensely so. I’ve stood here trying to argue myself out of it, but I can’t. This painting – in fact, this whole aspect of your work – unsettles me.’
Amos smiled. ‘Well done. That didn’t hurt now, did it?’
‘No, but…’ Jiang shook his head. ‘I feel you’re asking questions of me.’
‘In the painting?’
‘Yes. I feel… oh, I don’t know… insufficiently prepared.’
Amos laughed. ‘That makes you sound like an academic. It is but a dream, Jiang Lei. A vision I had. Have you ever seen the work of Samuel Butler?’
‘No… is he proscribed?’
‘Yes, but I have copies of all that stuff… in my vaults. I’ll show you in a while. But I guess what I was trying to illustrate was the corruption behind it all… The thing is, we experience but a minuscule slice of existence. A single safe segment. If we were capable of seeing the bigger picture – of seeing, say, a thousand years of life in an instant – we would see that life is but a heaving, ever-changing flow. All of our growth stems from death, and what we call life is but an endless cycle of corruption.’
Jiang stared at Shepherd.
But Amos was not done.
‘The campaign ahead… it will make you question what kind of a man you are, Jiang Lei. Whether you are intrinsically a good man or an evil one. When the bodies are piled high and the flies are at their thickest, when you can’t sleep for the foulness of your dreams, then and only then will you have your answer.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Oh yes. You will be forced to become the cause of great suffering, Marshal Jiang. How you cope with that… how you maintain your intrinsic self under such pressure… that is the important question. It’s one I’ve been seeking to answer.’
Jiang looked down, made uncomfortable by the way Amos looked at him, by the way he seemed to see right through him. He wanted to argue, only he knew at some instinctive level that Shepherd was right. That point in the future, that was when he would know. He had seen mass suffering before, particularly in Africa, but what lay ahead would top it all. He knew that. When an empire died, its convulsions could destroy continents.
‘Anyway,’ Amos said, turning his attention back to the painting. ‘Let’s have some breakfast now, okay? Then we can get down to the serious business. The stuff you came for.’
The planning of a war, Jiang thought, at the same time thinking how strange that was, that two men such as he and Shepherd should be responsible.
Beneath the simple, two-storey cottage was a cellar. Or rather, a specially excavated bunker, which could be reached through yet another of the ubiquitous airlocks.
‘It’s a nuclear shelter,’ Amos explained, as he tapped the code into the panel by the door. ‘Built to survive anything except a direct strike.’
Jiang Lei smiled, amused by that. ‘You think the Americans would miss?’
‘Not if their missiles could get through. Only there are two silos right here, on the Domain. They’d intercept practically anything the Americans could throw at us.’
‘The Americans know you’re my chief advisor?’
‘I’d say it was a certainty. They have their spies just as we have ours. And it’s an open secret what Tsao Ch’un has decided. The only thing they don’t know is the date of the invasion.’
The door hissed open, Beyond was a narrow corridor and then a set of steps leading down. Amos led the way.
‘I have a study upstairs,’ he said, as the lights flicked on overhead. ‘You may have noticed it. That’s where I do most of my work. But some days I come down here. It’s much more… high-tech, I’d guess you’d say.’
It was indeed. Standing in that huge cellar-room, Jiang Lei felt he was surrounded by the remnants of the old world – that high-tech glossy world that had existed before the Collapse.
‘I bought it all up,’ Amos explained, moving from machine to machine and turning them on, one by one. ‘Or stole it. Or discovered it later on. Some of it never even got onto the market, it was so advanced. Now it never will. Not unless Tsao Ch’un changes his mind. You know, I’ve even got a datscape – a fully working one.’
Jiang had been studying one of the machines, trying to work out what precisely it was, but when Amos mentioned the datscape, he looked up, interested suddenly.
‘Now isn’t that strange. I met someone, while I was processing the intake, down in Dorset… in a place called Corfe.’
‘I know Corfe.’
‘Yes, well, the man used to be a login. He was on Tsao Ch’un’s list. You know, the list of important Westerners to be killed. The Ministry wanted him, probably to finish off the job twenty years on, but I managed to get him on the programme. Reed, his name was.’
Amos was watching him intently now. ‘And he was a login? You’re sure of that?’
‘One hundred per cent.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘No, but I’m sure you could find out. Why the interest?’
‘Just that it’s a skill I’d like to learn. Did you ever see that immersion they did?’
Jiang Lei smiled. ‘I did. That was Reed.’
‘That was Reed… Interesting… I should locate the man, don’t you think? Get him to train me up.’
Jiang was about to say something more – to elaborate on the circumstances of his meeting with Reed – only Amos had moved on. He had picked up an old-fashioned paper map of the USA. Turning, he threw it to Jiang.
‘Here… Where would you like to start?’
Jiang laughed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean… where’s the bridgehead going to be?’
Two hours later they had the rough shape of it drawn up.
Much of their scheme was reliant upon the work Tsao Ch’un had done since the Collapse. As elsewhere, Tsao Ch’un’s agents had striven hard to limit the re-generation of American power. They were fighting a long guerrilla campaign to suppress any sign of resurgence, or any attempt by the Americans to cohere into a single nation once more; a sly and devious war of foul rumour, slanderous lies and outright terrorism, that achieved its aims mainly by setting one group of Americans against another.
America had fallen and was to remain fallen.
The most important aspect of that campaign had been to neutralize America’s atomic missile bases. To isolate their facilities and prevent them from becoming a threat.
Much of that careful work had been done long before Tsao Ch’un’s time, by the agents of the Chinese Communists. They had spent the best part of three decades infiltrating America’s computer systems, waiting for the day when they could shut it all down in an instant, even as they launched their own devastating counter-strike.
At least, that had been the plan. No one knew now whether they would have taken that fateful step. For on the day it all fell, it was Tsao Ch’un and not the Communists who had been in charge, and it had been Tsao Ch’un’s decision to disarm rather than destroy.
It had not been totally successful. Some missiles had still flown. Chinese cities had been destroyed, more than a hundred million citizens killed. But the core of America’s civil defence system remained intact, if disabled.
The long years of watchfulness had seen but a few minor incidents. Skirmishes mainly. But now the testing time lay ahead.
It was still possible that the Americans might try to use their missiles on the battlefield, against an invading force. Possible but unlikely, for Tsao Ch’un had built his own shadow network of missile bases controlled by his forces, designed to intercept at source any missiles they might attempt to launch.
Not that the Americans were a single socio-political force these days. It was many years since their President had spoken for them all with a single voice. As of that morning there were 118 separate ‘states’ within the borders of the original sixty-nine, with at least eighteen so-called ‘Presidents’, not a single one of whom was on speaking terms with another. Most of them were warlords, tinpot tyrants of the worst kind. Jiang Lei knew their sort. He had dealt with them many a time.
The biggest question was, who to take on first, and in which order.
Jiang Lei had no doubt at all where the bridgehead ought to be.
‘Richmond,’ he had answered; as he had answered Tsao Ch’un and the Seven nearly a week ago, on that morning at Tongjiang.
And for good reason: it was so eminently defensible, with the sea at his back and the Appalachian mountains forming a natural defensive barrier to the north and west.
‘Why not Washington?’ Amos had asked, playing devil’s advocate.
‘Because that’s what they expect.’
Jiang Lei had thought about this a lot since he had first suggested it, and it made more and more sense every time.
‘Washington we leave to rot. Or rather, we infiltrate and sow the seeds of its self-destruction. Were we to take it first it would become a symbol of liberty for the Americans. They would unite and throw everything at us to get it back. However, if we can make them perceive it as a den of corruption and self-interest…’
‘Sodom and Gomorrah…’
‘…then hopefully it will make our task much easier.’
‘And after Richmond?’
‘We roll back our enemies, state by state, along an ever-expanding front.’
‘Divide and conquer, eh?’
‘While we keep unified.’ Jiang paused. ‘Ideally we don’t really want to fight them, only I’m not sure we’ve got a choice. Some of them, I’m certain, could be bought. Some of them, I’m sure, can be persuaded to join us peacefully. But the majority will fight us tooth and nail. Poor and broken as their country is now, they still see themselves as the natural leaders of the world, and us as the usurpers. That’s where this whole campaign differs from the others. The Africans, the Europeans, even the Asians… each of them saw our coming as historically inevitable. But not the Americans. To them we’re little more than thieves, come to steal away their eminence, much as we stole their industry and their wealth.’
Amos studied him a moment longer. Then he smiled broadly and clapped Jiang on the back.
‘I’d say we’re done, dear friend. We can leave the detail to the generals, neh? Can’t have us do all their work for them!’
Jiang smiled at that.
Richmond it is, then. And within the month.
‘So it begins,’ he said, looking to Amos, seeing how his eyes seemed to glow with an unnatural excitement. ‘So it begins.’
Chapter 14
They came for Jake that morning, two dark-suited men from the Ministry. There was no time to pack a bag or say goodbye. Seated in the craft – the compartment completely empty but for the three of them – Jake began to wonder if he would ever see Mary or the kids again.
He knew what this was about. Boss Wu! Boss fucking Wu!
The silence, the sheer abstraction of the agents troubled him. Both were Han in their mid-twenties, and both wore shades, like old-school CIA agents. But they didn’t need those to create a sense of anonymity. Their faces, cold, expressionless and closed, served just as well.
How long the journey took he didn’t know. It must have been three hours at the very least, the whiteness of the City below them unvaried and unending. It was like some vast glacier, pierced in places by the dark, upthrusting shapes of mountains, looking like massive shards of flint embedded in that smoothly horizontal surface. Yet as they banked towards their final destination, so it opened up below him. There, jet black and strikingly magnificent after the pale uniformity of the rest, was the great ziggurat itself, home to the Thousand Eyes.
Bremen.
Jake’s head went down. This was it. This was where his luck ran out. He had had too many narrow escapes, too many second chances. They had given him the chance to fit in – to conform to their new world – and he had spurned it. Now he would be punished.
He felt sick at the thought. Not for himself – what did it matter, after all, whether he lived or died – but for those he’d left behind. For Peter and Mary and the girls. For what it would do to them.
They touched down on the landing strip amidst three, maybe four dozen other craft of differing sizes and designs, all of them the same matt black.
Just across from them was a massive glass door – glass, or was it ice? Only Jake barely noticed it, for he had looked up, awed by the sheer scale, the contrasting blackness of the building. There was something vaguely Egyptian about it all. Like its servants, it had a crisp anonymity.
The architecture of the dead, he thought, his fear given an edge by the sight of it.
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