The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  Palmer’s expression remained dispassionate as he elaborated his vision, but his words were spoken with mesmerizing fluency. “It is only in recent years that we have begun to see a seismic shift within China—a genuine turning outward, fueled by its incredibly swift insertion into the system of global capitalism. It was the very development that one American administration after another fervently hoped for, and sought to promote. But as the Chinese would say, one should be careful what one wishes for. We have awoken the tiger, hoping to ride it.” He paused, and his mouth formed a thin smile. “And, dreaming as we have of riding the tiger, we have forgotten what happens when you fall off it. The political strategists convinced themselves that economic convergence would lead to political convergence, a harmonization of interests. Something like the opposite is true. Two men in love with the same woman—a recipe for peaceable coexistence? I think not.” The sound of scattered laughter from the audience could be heard. “Likewise when two entities share the same competitive goal, whether economic domination in some realm or political dominion over the Pacific region. It seems to have escaped the attention of our myopic political masterminds that, as China has become increasingly market driven, she has become increasingly warlike as well. A decade after Mao’s death, China sank three Vietnamese ships in the area of the Spratly Islands. By 1994 you see the clash between American ships and a Chinese submarine in the Yellow Sea, and in subsequent years the seizure of Mischief Reef from the Philippines, the missiles fired by the coast of Taiwan, in an international waterway, and so on. The Chinese navy has acquired an aircraft carrier from the French and a series of surveillance radar systems from the British, while China has constructed a passage from the Yunnan Province to the Bay of Bengal, thus securing access to the Indian Ocean. The actions we have seen so far can be easily dismissed, for they are deceptively small in scale. In fact, these are probes, nothing less, attempts to assess the resolve of the international community. Time and again, they have learned of the toothlessness of their competitors, their rivals. And make no mistake, we are—for the first time in history—rivals.”

  Palmer’s gaze grew eerily intent as he pressed his point. “China is on fire, and it is the West that has provided the fuel. By its moves toward economic liberalization, China has gained hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign capital. We’re seeing a GDP growth rate upward of ten percent a quarter—faster than any nation has grown without massive upheaval. We’re seeing gigantic increases in consumption, as well: the awakening tiger will, within a few years, be consuming ten percent of the world’s petroleum production, a third of its steel production. Simply as a consumer, it has a disproportionate influence over the nations of Southeast Asia, as well as Korea, Japan, and, indeed, Taiwan. Our conglomerates increasingly depend upon the Chinese dynamo for their own growth. Does any of this sound familiar, ladies and gentlemen?”

  Again, Palmer fell silent, his eyes scanning the unseen audience before him. His sense of cadence was masterly. “Let me break it down for you. Consider a country that has experienced what could be called a second industrial revolution. A country where labor was cheap, capital and resources abundant—a country that was able to transform its economy into the most efficient and swiftest growing in the world. I refer”—he raised his voice subtly—“to the United States of America, as it appeared in the early years of the twentieth century. We all know what ensued. A period of unquestioned military, industrial, economic, and cultural supremacy—a period of power and prosperity we designate, in shorthand, as the American century.” He glanced down at the lectern before resuming. “The American century was a redoubtable thing. But nobody ever promised it would be permanent. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that it will not be—every reason to believe that the twenty-first century will, in retrospect, be identified as the Chinese century.”

  Murmurs from the audience were audible.

  “Whether this is a condition to be celebrated or bemoaned, it is not my place, as an impartial scholar, to say. I will only note the irony that this development will have been the fruits of our own labor. Well-meaning Americans, dominant within our foreign-policy establishment, have ceaselessly worked to awaken the tiger. To turn an inward-facing kingdom outward. Our children will live with the results.” In a soft voice he added, “Or die from them.”

  Ambler shuddered; he tried to remember other times when he had seen faces that exuded such self-certainty and zeal. The visages that presented themselves were not reassuring: Dr. Abimael Guzman, the murderous founder of Peru’s Shining Path terrorists, was one. David Koresh, the self-styled messiah of the Branch Davidians, was another. Yet Ashton Palmer had a quality of urbanity, of spurious civility, that distinguished him from such obvious fanatics—and made him, potentially, even more dangerous.

  “Again and again, our soi-disant ‘China hands’ misread the green tea leaves. Everyone here will recall the widespread unrest in China when her embassy in Belgrade was bombed in the course of an American air strike. Millions of Chinese citizens refused to believe that it could have been an accident. Hand-wringing could be seen throughout Washington. The resurgence of anti-Americanism was widely taken to be a bad thing. These experts have not learned the wisdom of what the Chinese sage Chung-wen Han called, simply, shuangxing, or ‘doubleness.’ In fact, the efflorescence of xenophobia might actually have been good for America. Anything that slows China’s integration into the community of nations, we know, will also serve as a drag on the engines of her growth. A skeptic might hold that any such development was a good thing for America, and a good thing for the world. Since I am an impartial and dispassionate scholar, of course, it is not my place to root for one outcome or another. But if, as I believe, we have reached a fork in the road, perhaps I can help direct our attention at what lies at the end of each path. Conflict with China is inevitable. What is not inevitable is whether we lose. That will depend on our choices—on choices we make today.”

  Clay Caston knelt down and typed a series of commands on the keyboard again, until another video clip began to play. This feed was fuzzier, apparently copied from a C-SPAN broadcast, from just a couple of years ago.

  “Here, you’ll hear him singing a different tune,” Caston said. “Of course, the Center for Strategic Studies conference was a closed event—it was Palmer speaking mainly to acolytes. The C-SPAN broadcast was of a panel assembled in Washington by another think tank, representing a diversity of opinions. He may have decided to assume a different face.”

  Among a panel of five sinologists, Ashton Palmer stood out; his expression was of icy imperturbability; his high forehead and clear gray gaze exuded intelligence and thoughtfulness.

  The clip began with a question asked by a young, gangly man in the audience, with a thick beard and thicker glasses. “Do you feel, Professor Palmer, that America’s policy toward China is insufficiently skeptical, insufficiently attuned to our own national interests? Because many people in the State Department today would look at the rise of President Liu Ang and call that a great success, and a tribute to their policy of ‘constructive engagement.’ ”

  Palmer smiled as the camera returned to him. “And that’s fair enough,” he said. “Liu Ang is a marvelously appealing politician. I have only the greatest hopes that he represents the future.”

  Palmer smiled again, showing white, even teeth. Despite the smooth avowal and easy manner, Ambler felt a chill: as he studied Palmer’s face, he detected—no, he simply saw—a profound and seething contempt and hostility toward the statesman of whom he spoke. At the very moment he uttered Liu Ang’s name, a fleeting expression passed over Palmer’s face that utterly belied his words.

  “. . . So I can only say that I truly hope the State Department triumphalists are correct,” Palmer concluded. “Anyway, we have to work with him.”

  Caston grunted. “The guy sounds totally plausible here, too. He’s a hard cat to figure.”

  Now it was Ambler’s turn to work the keyboard. The video software had an ico
n that enabled one to move the video display forward or back, and he reversed the clip until it reached the moment when Ashton Palmer said the name of the Chinese president. Now Ambler advanced the video frame by frame. There. In a micropause between the two parts of the Chinese name, Palmer’s face settled into a radically different expression. The eyes were drawn, the corners of his mouth pulled down, the nostrils flared: it was a face expressive of both outrage and disgust. By another frame or two, it had vanished, replaced by an artificial look of smiling approval.

  “Jesus Christ,” Caston said. Ambler said nothing.

  Caston shook his head. “I would never have picked up on that.”

  “There are a lot of things on heaven and earth that don’t show up on your almighty spreadsheets,” Ambler said.

  “Don’t underestimate me,” Caston said. “I get there in the end.”

  “Just in time to pick up the shells after the shoot-out is over, I’m sure. I’ve known a few analysts and number crunchers. You work with paper, computers, pore over printouts—charts, graphs, scatter plots—but you don’t deal with people. You’re more comfortable with bits and bytes.”

  Caston tilted his head. “John Henry did beat the steam drill—once. Maybe you were sleeping in when the information age dawned. Today, technology spans borders. It watches. It hears. It registers patterns, small statistical perturbations, and if we’re willing to pay attention—”

  “It can hear, but it can’t listen. It can watch, but it can’t observe. And it sure as hell can’t converse with the men and women we’ve got to deal with. There’s no substitute for that, goddammit.”

  “I find the money trail tends to be a lot more voluble and revealing than most people are.”

  “You would,” Ambler snapped. He stood up and started to pace. The room felt enclosed, stifling. “OK, you want to talk about logic and ‘probabilistic inference’? What’s happening in China these days, what does it all mean for a guy like Ashton Palmer? Why does he hate Liu Ang so much?”

  “I’m a numbers man, Ambler. I don’t do geopolitics.” He shrugged. “But I read the papers. And we’ve both heard Palmer’s rap at that Strategic Studies meeting. Since you ask, the main thing about Liu Ang seems to be that he’s enormously popular among his own people, and an incredible force of liberalization. He’s opened markets, established fair trading systems, even cracked down on media piracy, knockoff manufacturing, and the like.”

  “But it’s gradualism, right? That’s the Chinese way.”

  “Gradualism, yes, but on an accelerated schedule.”

  “That’s a contradiction in terms.”

  “Liu Ang is a paradoxical figure in a lot of ways. What was that word Palmer referred to? Doubleness. Follow the logic of Palmer’s argument, all that stuff about the Chinese century, about what could happen if an inward-looking kingdom starts to become gregarious, starts to become integrated in the community of nations. If you’re Palmer, Liu Ang is your worst nightmare.”

  “If you’re Palmer,” Ambler interjected, “you’d want to do something about it.”

  “I read somewhere that Liu Ang’s making some big state visit to America next month,” Caston said. He fell silent for a long moment. “I’m going to have to make some calls.”

  Ambler’s gaze returned to the frozen image of the scholar, trying to extract everything he could from his visage. Who are you? What do you want? He lowered his head, lost in thought.

  Then the image vanished.

  Ambler saw the monitor explode—blossoming into a cloud of glass fragments—even before he heard the popping sound that accompanied it.

  Time slowed.

  What had happened? A bullet. Large-caliber. Rifle. Silenced.

  He whirled around and saw a black-clad gunman, crouched commando style, at the end of the hallway outside the room. The man was holding a military assault rifle, a model Ambler recognized. The Heckler & Koch G36. A curved magazine mounted in front of the trigger guard held thirty rounds of 5.56×45mm NATO rounds; the optical sights used a red-dot reticle. Its casing was a high-strength, lightweight black polymer. Highly portable, highly lethal.

  Standard issue for the Consular Operations armory.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ambler threw himself down a split second before a triple burst drove more bullets in his direction. Caston, he saw, had hurtled himself toward the far side of the room, away from the commando’s sight line.

  For now.

  The commando was not alone; Ambler could see it in his eyes. He had the confidence of a member of a team.

  A team using special-ops-issue weaponry. How many? Four to six would be standard for a special-ops squad with a civilian target. If this was rapid response, however, it could be as few as two or three. They would have arrived using different routes of entrance—some through the door, some through the window. With a heat scope, it would have been a cinch to determine their exact position in the safe house.

  The question was why Ambler wasn’t already dead.

  As the first commando remained seated, a second black-clad gunman ran past him: a standard flanking maneuver.

  With a sudden movement, Ambler kicked the study’s door closed.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Caston breathed. He was cowering, his usually pallid face now sheet white. “But believe me, I had nothing to do with this.”

  “You don’t, and you didn’t,” Ambler said. “I know that. One of the downloads must have triggered an alarm. The I/O identifier would have given away the location. Like you said, this place was supposed to be unoccupied.”

  “So what now?”

  “It isn’t good. We’re dealing with pros. Armed with H&K G36 rifles. You have any idea what that means?”

  “The H&K G36,” Caston repeated, blinking rapidly. “On orders over a thousand, we pay a negotiated unit price of eight hundred forty-five dollars. However, the nonamortizable cost of cartridges—”

  “Silenced G36s,” Ambler cut him off. “These guys are a goddamn mop-up team.”

  A blast of bullets tore away at the upper half of the door, filling the air with splinters and the smell of carbonized wood. The door would not last much longer.

  Ambler leaped up and switched off the lights in the room before throwing himself on the floor again.

  Why was he alive?

  Because there were two of them. The infrared scopes would have told them as much. They had not shot Ambler because they had not been able to verify that it was Ambler. Identify, then kill: that would be the order of business. Their instructions did not cover the presence of a second party.

  “We don’t have anything to hold them off,” Caston said. “We’ve got to surrender.”

  Another triple burst had punched a large hole in the door—noisy damage from a silenced assault rifle.

  Ambler knew what would come next. The commandos would approach the aperture they had blasted into the door and then train their rifles on the two men; it would enable them to take as much time as they needed to verify the identity of their target.

  He had just seconds to put them off their game plan.

  Ambler’s only weapon was the small Glock 26—utterly useless against an assault rifle, a squirt gun to their water cannon. It had no sights, was inaccurate at any real distance, and its small-caliber bullets would not penetrate a commando’s lightweight Monocrys body armor. In this situation, it had essentially no offensive value at all.

  Revise and improvise.

  “Actually, you do have something you can use.” Ambler spoke to the harrowed auditor in a low voice.

  “I don’t think so. The remote control doesn’t work against these guys. I’ve already tried the PAUSE button.”

  “What you’ve got,” the operative said, “is a hostage.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Shut up and listen,” Ambler whispered. “You need to shout, loud as you can, that you’ve got a hostage and you’re going to shoot him if they take another step. Now.”

  “
I can’t do that.”

  “You can, and you will.” Ambler mouthed the word, Now.

  Caston looked deathly, but he nodded and took a deep breath. “I have a hostage,” he bellowed to the gunmen, in a surprisingly steady voice. “You take another step and I’ll shoot him.”

  A few seconds of silence were followed by a barely audible exchange between the gunmen.

  Ambler removed the small Glock 26 from his back holster and pressed it into the auditor’s hand. “You hold it to the back of my head, OK?”

  “Easy for you to say,” Caston whispered. “I’m the one they’re going to shoot dead.”

  “You’re just going to have to trust me on this. You’ve done well so far.”

  Caston’s anxiety and confusion were visible, yet Ambler could tell that he was also pleased by the reassurance.

  “You’re going to use my body as a shield,” Ambler said. “That means you don’t let them see you, if you can avoid it. It means keeping me between you and them at all times. I’ll help with that, but you need to understand the maneuver.”

  “Except you’re the one they’re after, right? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Just go with me on this,” Ambler repeated. It would take too long to explain the method in the madness. Hostages always made missions like this one messy. In the midst of a tension-fueled operation, nobody would think to second-guess the identity of hostage and hostage taker. It did not matter whether the gunmen had been given good photographs with their orders; they were not calmly studying images on a light table. They were men with guns, pumped with adrenaline, trying to complete their orders without a career-destroying mistake. Letting the hostage die could be that mistake. The active, enacted position of hostage and hostage taker would present itself to them as a vivid, present fact, and it would swamp other considerations, details like hair color and height.