by Unknown
'The worst-case scenario--' She tapped her cheek while thinking. 'A couple of weeks. But he's not going to deliver this by missile. The virus wouldn't survive that. He'd have to have some other system ready. The best of which would be another human being.'
'A couple of weeks,' muttered West, pushing back his chair and putting both hands on the table. 'We're with you for a couple of weeks, Jamie. Let's talk after that.'*
*****
One by one, Jim West delivered his guests into the hands of secret service agents who escorted them the short distance to their chalets. He turned back into the room, grateful to see Mary Newman and the Brocks helping themselves to a nightcap and settling down on the sofas away from the dining table. He hadn't looked forward to being left at Aspen with just the shuffling feet of the staff clearing the table. West stood by the dying fire, rubbing his hands, then turned and took the whisky Peter Brock had poured for him.
Newman was close enough for him to catch her perfume. For the first time he noticed how she had dressed for the dinner - a beige cashmere pullover and camel-colour pants with a pair of brown suede ankle boots. She had begun pulling the left boot off, but remembering where she was, and catching the disapproving eye of Brock, she stopped. West grinned and moving across to the huge window slid it open a bit to let the night air cool the room.
'Kick 'em off if you want, Mary,' said West. 'You guys were quiet, but great. So I want to know what you think.'
'On North Korea, Jim,' said Caroline Brock, 'my two-week scenario was very much worst case. You could have much longer. He's got to work out a way of getting IL-4 to react with smallpox and achieve the maximum infection. Given his technology, I'd say we're not in any immediate danger. But if it isn't fixed within six months to a year, start worrying.'
West stuck his hand out into the weather to check for rain and brought it back covered in glistening drops. The moon was consumed by dark clouds and the mountains forged harsh black rims across the skyline. 'Pete, you'll check things with Tom and Chris, before you turn in?'
'Sure will,' said Brock. He glanced at Caroline. 'We'd better get going anyway.'
Mary cupped her hands around her whisky glass. 'You know--' she began. Then seeing the Brocks get to their feet, she halted herself. West looked sharply in from near the window. Brock helped Caroline on with her coat. Two waiters began removing the glasses from the table. A gust of wind broke a branch from a tree and lifted it up to crack against the window glass.
'What are you cooking there, Mary? You got something on your mind, tell us.'
She smiled uncertainly, took another sip of whisky, put the glass down and got to her feet. 'It's a long, rambling academic analysis, best saved for the morning, I guess.'
Caroline buttoned up her coat. Brock wrapped a scarf around his neck. 'I'm seeing Caro home. Then I'll check the communications room, and drop back by in five or ten minutes,' he said, looking at Newman. 'Why don't you tell Jim what you're thinking, Mary? We can chew it over when I get back.'
As the Brocks closed the door behind them, the cold through breeze it had caused in the room stopped, and the warmth of the fading fire returned to the area around the sofa. West, still standing up, wasn't sure where to sit, until Newman patted the cushion next to her. 'Don't worry, Mr President,' she said, quietly so the waiters wouldn't hear. 'I'm not going to pounce.'
West smiled gratefully. 'Thanks, Mary. It's been one hell of a day.' For a moment, they each took refuge in their nightcaps, letting the sudden quiet of the Aspen living room seep through and change the atmosphere. West threw Newman a sideways glance. 'Do you miss David?' he asked, catching her eyes, then looking away. Newman didn't answer immediately, letting the question hang until West broke the silence: 'You don't mind me asking, do you?'
'Not at all.' Newman tilted her head towards him. 'It's not nice being betrayed. But do I miss having someone around? Sure, I do. It has to be someone who doesn't lie to you, which David did, so no way do I miss that.' She smiled. 'I won't ask about Valerie. It's written all over your face, every minute of the day.'
'That obvious?' sighed West.
'I'm afraid it is, Mr President.'
West laughed softly. 'Shall we make a new rule?' he suggested. 'When we're out of the White House and it's just the two of us, or even Pete and Caro, Jim's fine. It doesn't have to be--' He took another sip of whisky, letting the sentence finish itself.
Newman gave him a quizzical look. 'Jim's fine, is it?' she said, running her finger down the arm of the sofa. 'Any other occasions?' she teased. 'Or just when it's like this?'
'Well, what I can do is draw up a list,' began West, rolling his eyes sarcastically. He was about to go on when Newman jumped to her feet. 'You guys,' she shouted at the waiters. 'Can you just leave it all there, and excuse us for a moment.'
The waiters slipped away, and Newman walked over and studied the glasses and crockery on the table, her hand cupped pensively under her chin. She took off her spectacles and adjusted her focus to what she was examining. 'Just what I was thinking,' she said, pointing to Kozlov's place.
'The wine in his glasses, both red and white, is hardly touched. He swayed in before dinner, asking for sparkling mineral water and claiming he had been drinking with Yushchuk. Only after the meal, when the trolley came round, did he ask for a vodka. While talking to us, he filled it three times, which for a Russian is the equivalent of a teaspoonful.' West was standing next to her. She put her hand on his elbow to emphasize her point. 'He needed to show the vodka to give his speech the aura of a soul-searching, vodka-soaked Russian intellectual. But Andrei Kozlov was stone-cold sober throughout.'
'That doesn't mean he was lying,' said West.
'No, it doesn't,' agreed Newman slowly. 'In fact, far from it. He was sending you a message when he talked of freeing the serfs by not embracing NATO, the IMF and American values. Then, take what Kozlov said with this strange fish,' she said, pointing at the place where Song had been sitting. 'He's the one who really worries me. Not an ounce of humour in him all evening, then threatening us with forces he might not be able to control.' She leant against the table. 'He said there were twenty million Chinese living in poverty, in a population of what--'
'A billion, just over,' said West.
'Do you know how many live in poverty in America?'
'More than thirty million according to the US Census Bureau,' said West. 'Just over 16 per cent of all Americans. Any American aged twenty has a 60 per cent chance of spending at least one year living in poverty at some point in the future. I've just been in Detroit delivering a speech on it.'
'Exactly.' Newman went back to the sofa and waited for West to join her. 'We have thirty million out of what - a total population of 300 million. Jamie Song has twenty million out of 1.1 billion. Who's doing better?'
'Different kind of poverty.'
'Sure, but he wasn't citing statistics just for the hell of it.'
'I'm not sure I'm with you, Mary.'
Newman leant back and stretched her arms behind her head. 'I said it was a rambling academic analysis, and to be honest I don't know where it leads us, but my gut instinct is that we have to read underneath what both those guys said. I wouldn't trust them to stay with us on this one inch.' She brought her right hand down in front of her face. 'Not even one inch. Not even a millimetre,' she said, moving her thumb and forefinger closer and closer together until they touched.
'You know what they were saying,' she said, not bothering to hide her tiredness. 'Song was saying: "We're better than you." Kozlov was saying: "If you make us choose, we're with China."'
'And what about Mehta, his great ally?'
Newman laughed coldly. 'Mehta's in a quagmire, isn't he? He's expendable. Let him be our great twenty-first-century nuclear weapons experiment. No one wants to touch him.'
The words of Jamie Song in the ride back from the helicopter returned to West, echoing from Song's unreadable oriental face in pure Bostonian English. You don't get it, do you, Jim? Song speak
ing as if he was addressing an American simpleton.*
*****
'Thank you for frankness, Mary, however unpalatable it might be,' said West, shooting a look towards the door as it opened, light spilling in from the hall. Brock stepped in, followed by Pierce and Patton, who was speaking on a mobile phone. 'Do we have thirty minutes? . . . Good . . . I'm with the President.' He closed the call, flipped shut the phone and said, 'I'm sorry, Mr President, but I need an instruction on this now.'
Patton pulled up a hard chair. His heavy chin jutted forward and his eyes flickered across a file he rested on his lap. The others found seats around the room. Newman fetched a fresh bottle of water from the kitchen and poured them all a glass.
'I want you to bear with me, Mr President,' said Patton. 'I'll tell it straight through. We have time. Then you can decide.'
'Very well,' said West. The room had been transformed. For a moment it had been a sanctuary, but now it had suddenly exploded back into reality. He would have much preferred to have listened to Newman's late-night theories. Instead, he had Tom Patton with a new and real threat to America.
'Two days ago, a Cuban fishing boat landed at Key West,' began Patton. 'The skipper was found tied up in the cabin. Straight away the coastguard recognized it as anything but a routine alien-smuggling run. It was a hijacking - something completely different. On the boat were three Cuban fisherman, four if you count the captain. Their fishing permits and licences were in order. There were also two defectors, a husband and wife. Until a couple of weeks ago, Ernesto Tomas Morera, aged forty-eight, ran Cuba's air traffic control service. The wife, Elena Blanco Morera, aged forty-two, was a fairly high-ranking officer in Cuba's intelligence agency, Direccion General de Inteligencia or DGI. Both of them check out with our records. Elena's job was China.'
West, suddenly alert, looked across at Patton. 'Go on.'
'Why did they want to defect?' asked Patton rhetorically. 'Because suddenly the government had asked them to do things they knew they couldn't. Ernesto was told he had to go head up a neighbourhood committee in some place called Campechueta right at the other end of the island. Elena walked into work one day to find her in-tray filled with visa applications from West Africa.'
He paused for some water and drained the glass. West refilled it for him.
'It was Elena who spotted what had happened. A completely coincidental oversight had linked her job with Ernesto's in an area so sensitive that the DGI decided they would have to be separated. Over the next week, Elena dutifully issued visas for Africans. Ernesto made a show of preparing to take up his new job. But they also tracked down a boat crew, paid them some money and arranged the boat to get out. The crew omitted to let on that they would have to overpower the skipper.' He shrugged. 'But that's by the by. At the weekend, they made their escape and I've just come from hearing and corroborating their story.
'Over the past two weeks, according to Ernesto, there've been two flights by Chinese transport aircraft into Havana, using the Russian-built Antonov 225 - the biggest mother of a transport aircraft - flying across the Atlantic from Dakar in Senegal. Elena's China desk had been handling a deal, struck about ten years ago, that gave Cuba medium-range Chinese missiles in exchange for electronic eavesdropping facilities to listen in on the eastern American seaboard. If you remember, the Russians made a final pull-out from Cuba as part of their new relationship with us after Nine Eleven. The Chinese moved into the vacuum. The missile part of the deal has begun to be implemented now.'
Patton stopped for a moment to make sure that West and all in the room understood what he was saying. 'The missiles, according to Elena, include the DF-15, the DF-3 and the DF-21. Which ones are actually there now, she doesn't know.'
'You got any corroboration?' asked West. Patton took out of his briefcase a sheaf of photographs stamped with the circular logo of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency which handled satellite and surveillance imagery. 'As soon as we heard, we bought in the latest commercial satellite imagery over Cuba,' he said.
'We didn't have our own?' queried West.
'Most of it's tasked over Asia,' said Brock.
'The Ikonos satellite came up with this. It only has 0.75 metre resolution,' explained Patton, handing a photograph to West. Newman leant over to see. Brock and Pierce looked from over the back of the sofa. 'Our analysts reckon this is the Antonov 225 at Havana's main civilian airport. It's the only one that will take an aircraft so big. Now see this--' He pointed to a blurred oblong shape by the side of the aircraft. 'We believe this is a missile container. See its size against the aircraft. It's big. Very big.' Patton pulled out another image. 'We sent up the Global Hawk. It works with images like a computer search engine works with words. We told it what we were looking for, and a few hours later, after mapping the whole of Cuba, it came up with this. The main road between Havana and Pinar del Rio. See here. The road is closed for repairs. A convoy of three trucks: on the back of each is the same image picked up by the Global Hawk, matching the container seen by the Antonov 225.'
Even in a room of close friends, Jim West wanted to give nothing away about the thoughts running through his mind. The heated air in the room suddenly felt oppressive, and a sense of dread, like when his wife had bravely told him the diagnosis of her impending death, spread through his whole body, until it swept across his face and settled into a grey, controlled dullness emanating from his eyes.
'Someone fill me in on what these missiles do.'
Chris Pierce stood up and walked round to the window. Realizing that the President was looking at him against the backlight of the wall lamp, he moved further in and stood with his back to the fireplace. 'The DF-21 has a range of about 1,200 miles; the DF-15, 400 miles; and the DF-3, about 2,000 miles, which produces an arc to Tucson, Denver, Minneapolis/St Paul, Chicago and the eastern seaboard. The Chinese themselves can hit Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, so they've got us on both sides, covering the whole of the United States.'
West shook his head in disbelief. 'They're doing under our noses what we went to the brink of nuclear war to stop the Soviets doing in 1962? Did they believe we wouldn't find out?'
'According to our defectors, the deal was struck in January 2002,' said Patton. 'Elena Morera confirms that the first missiles only arrived two weeks ago. What we don't know is why has it taken so long to put it into action - and given the strengthening of our relationship with China, why now?'
'It's in blatant violation of every arms proliferation agreement,' said Newman.
'Pakistan, Korea, now China and Cuba,' said Pierce. 'I can give you military plans and scenarios, Mr President, but what's really needed is heavy diplomacy. We've just got too many fronts coming in on us.'
Patton cleared his throat. 'Except, right now, there's a Chinese transport plane on its way to Havana. It's halfway across the Atlantic, three hours from landing.'
'Bring it in,' said West without hesitation. 'Land the son of a bitch down into Guantanamo. Strip it out. I want to know every nut and bolt that it's carrying.'*
*****
Outside, away from the lit pathways between the chalets, Jamie Song and Andrei Kozlov trudged through rain which fell in fine drops, slicing into the snow. They meandered through shrubs and clusters of trees, their shapes softened by streaks of light refracted through rain splashing on to pathway lamps. Sometimes they disappeared altogether, absorbed into an empty, sooty darkness in the woods.
On the Camp David surveillance video, they were only filmed properly when they greeted each other on the crossroads of two paths and Jamie Song said, 'When I talked of us meeting soon, I didn't expect it would be in the grounds of Camp David.' That was according to experts who later read his lips. They pulled up the collars of their coats, lifted the earflaps of their hats, and headed off, heads lowered, away into the grounds where no one could know what they were saying and only occasionally would their hunched, slow-walking figures be caught on camera.
Had the night been clear and cold with white
falling snow, it might not have been unusual to walk off a good dinner. But this was a damp, windy and unpleasant night, where two men would only be out talking if they felt nowhere else was safe to do so.*
*****
In the morning, a Lincoln Town Car limousine pulled up outside Jamie Song's chalet. The Chinese President gave his hand luggage to the driver who put it in the boot. Lying on the back seat was a copy of the Washington Post, with a brief final-edition front-page story about a US air and naval military exercise in the Caribbean. As the limousine pulled out away from the trees around the chalet, Song had a long, clear view of the mountains. The wintry morning light had brought a drop in temperature, and fresh snow covered the dirt which had been brought in by the rain. Song's overcoat was still damp.
The limousine did not head out towards the main gate but swung round to Aspen where Jim West raised a friendly hand in greeting. When the car stopped, he opened the back door himself and got in. Secret service chase cars pulled out in front and behind the Lincoln and motorcycle outriders flanked the convoy as it set off.