“This is a transcript,” Lo said, “of a meeting that took place”—he looked at his watch—“about five hours ago, in Dharamsala.”
Fa thought, Five hours ago? How very timely.
“There were two participants in the meeting. The first speaker—with the committee’s indulgence, I would prefer not to identify him. He is in the Dung Lotus’s innermost circle. What’s more, he is Dung Lotus’s principal liaison with the criminal elements and agitators in Lhasa and the autonomous region. He is in the employ of the American CIA. This is a relationship that has been going on now for over a decade. Let us call him Hong. Wild Goose.
“The second speaker is his CIA control officer. That is, the one to whom he makes his reports. Not a bad field officer. Indeed, a man of some skill. But”—Lo smiled—“perhaps not quite as good as he thinks he is. Why don’t we call him . . . what’s a good American name? Mike. Yes, let us call him Mike. Shall I read?”
Fa, who had been listening to this with mounting anger, nodded tightly. As if reading the president’s thoughts, Lo said, “Naturally, Comrade President, I would have informed you of this first. But since you had already called the meeting, and given the late hour, I took the liberty of not disturbing your . . . dreams.”
Fa forced a smile. So you do have microphones in my bedroom, eh? He consoled himself by reflecting that he and Gang had wisely taken precautions.
“Yes,” Fa said. “We all need our sleep. I thank the minister for his courtesy. Proceed, then, with your . . . script.”
“Transcript.” Lo smiled. He read:
HONG: This is our moment.
MIKE: Hold on. Hold on. You need to give us time to get organized. That’s critical. Otherwise we’re just going to get a lot of people killed.
HONG: We are not concerned about that. What is death?
MIKE: Yeah, yeah, I know. I—we—understand all that. But, look, Washington doesn’t want a bloodbath. Bloodbaths are nonproductive. Noble? Okay. Maybe. Fine. But it’s not going to advance your cause. This is an opportunity to embarrass Beijing. Embarrass the crap out of them.
“ ‘Crap’?” inquired Minister Jen.
“Feces,” Lo explained.
“Ah.” Jen frowned.
Lo continued:
HONG: This is our chance to take back our country. That was stolen from us by these devils.
MIKE: I’m on your side. But be realistic. China’s not going to hand you back Tibet. But this is an opportunity to make those bastards in Beijing look like what they are.
HONG: (Angry) They must allow the Lotus to return. If they refuse to let him back, there will be trouble.
MIKE: You want to toss a couple of PLA soldiers off the cliff of Potala Palace? If that makes you happy, be my guest. But Washington will not support civil war. If we see that, you’re on your own. We walk away.
HONG: (Tone very angry) Yes, America has long record of walking away!
MIKE: Fuck you.
HONG: No, fuck you!
Lo looked up from his transcript and smiled. “Warm relations.” The ministers laughed.
MIKE: Look, Jangpom—
Lo looked up again. “The transcript appears not to have been completely redacted. My apologies.” He sniffed, “Certainly someone shall hear from me about that.” He continued:
MIKE: —we’re not looking for another Tiananmen. We’re looking for a Saffron Revolution, okay? Meanwhile, you can take it from me that Washington is going to bring big pressure, major pressure to let him come home. They’re going to bust chops.
“ ‘Chops’?” asked Minister Xu.
Lo said in a lofty, scholarly manner, as if interpreting a difficult Confucian analect, “He is saying that the Americans are planning to be very severe with us.”
Fa could take no more of this. “Comrade Lo, I think we all have the sense of this transcript of yours.”
“One more paragraph. In my opinion it is worth hearing.”
“As you wish,” Fa said.
HONG: What is Washington doing? What pressures are they making?
MIKE: You’ll see. But you have to remember who we’re dealing with here. We’re dealing with the CCP. Asshole Central. The Chinese invented gunpowder. They invented the compass. Paper. Printing. Hell, just about everything. But they also invented the concept of not giving a fuck. And that’s what we’re up against.
Lo took off his glasses. He smiled. “Well, Comrade Assholes. There you are.”
CHAPTER 17
WHY NOT JUST NUDGE THE THING ALONG A BIT?
Walter, you promised.”
“I know I did, baby. But things are crazy right now. We’re crashing on this huge presentation. It’s going gangbusters, but I’m getting about three hours’ sleep a night.”
Technically true. Bird was indeed staying up until all hours, pounding away at the novel, which—he reflected—might be a mis-allocation of priorities. But when you’re hot, you’re hot.
Turk’s shoulder oozed crimson from the hole put through it by Colonel Zong’s crack sniper, U Trang. He was leaking like a rusty crankcase but determined to complete the mission. Meanwhile, somewhere in the skies above him and the hellish, unforgiving terrain of Nibbut, “Bouncing” Betty O’Toole was standing sentinel over her warrior-lover at the controls of an AC-130 gunship capable of raining hell on Turk’s relentless pursuers. Unbeknownst, however, to Turk, the lead foil wrap around the muon device in his knapsack had been torn open by the same bullet that had pierced his shoulder. Muon-gas emanations were seeping out of the knapsack—invisible to the naked eye but clear as neon to the tracking device deployed by Colonel Zong’s wily tech-wizard lieutenant, Ing Pao. Ing quipped to his superior with an evil smirk, “The American might just as well have put a police siren in his knapsack! Muahaha!”
“No, Ing,” replied Zong, twiddling his highly oiled mustache. “Muon-ha-ha!”
Bird thought, Great stuff.
“Walter, are you listening?”
“Sorry, baby, someone was—what were you saying?”
“Do you have any idea what a distinction, what an honor it is to be featured in EQ magazine?”
Bird wanted to say, Is it like getting the Nobel Prize for Horsemanship? No, don’t go there. “I do, baby. Really. I’m so proud of you.”
Angel was gesticulating at Bird: Get. Off. The. Phone.
The announcement had just come in courtesy of Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, a bright shiny gem of mendacity, brilliant even by Communist standards of propaganda. It was a mere two-line item, buried next to an announcement of rail-service interruption between Fuzhou and Xiamen:
Deputy Minister Nei Li Meng of the Sanitary Subcommittee of the Central Directorate for the Tibetan Autonomous Region has announced that the application of Tenzin Gyatso is denied for reasons of protection of the general public health.
This curious pronouncement was open to two interpretations: (1) The Dalai Lama’s brain tumor might spread to the general population. (Who knew that brain tumors could be contagious? Doubtless, party medical researchers were working on a monograph about this amazing medical discovery.) A more likely interpretation was (2) that the Dalai Lama’s physical presence in Tibet might lead to mayhem and unrest, thus endangering the aforementioned “public health.”
Angel was trembling like a racehorse at the gate, champing to get out a statement expressing the institute’s incredulity and outrage. And here was her in-house PR maestro, yapping with the horsey wife. Get. Off. The. Pho-one!
Bird gestured: Two seconds.
“I told them you’d be here,” Myndi said. “They’re expecting you. I gave them your suit size, shoe size, everything.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Darling, they’re assembling an entire wardrobe for you. They’ve gone to incredible trouble.”
Bird paused. Had he heard correctly? “They’re bringing . . . what?”
“Clothes, darling,” Myndi said. “They sent me a PDF. You’re going to look smashing.”
> “Myn,” Bird said, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “I haven’t been on a horse for six years. Not since that one you told me was tame went psycho under me.” Two months in traction. Bird’s spine hadn’t been right since.
“You don’t have to get on a horse, sillykins. You do want to look nice, don’t you?”
“Myn,” Bird groaned. “I don’t want to be in a horse magazine.”
“Walter. I’m trying to include you in all this, and you’re acting put out.”
“You want me in costume? Okay. I’ll borrow one of Bewks’s Civil War uniforms. You can wear a hoop skirt. We’ll rub shoe polish on Belle. She can be Mammy. That’ll make a nice photo spread. They could call it ‘Gone with the Bullshit.’ ”
“Fine. You want to look like a slob in the pages of the country’s leading equestrian publication. Wear blue jeans for all I care. The ripped ones you love so dearly.”
“No, because I won’t be there. I’ll be here tomorrow. Why will I be here? Let me tell you why. Because here is where I earn the money that buys the oats for those nags. But wait. What am I saying? I don’t need to work, do I? We have our own personal banker now. The First Bank of Harry.”
“That is so . . .”
“Myn, can we talk about this some other time? My country needs me.”
“What are you doing anyway, that’s so urgent? You’ve been acting weird for weeks. And I don’t mean just your boozing.”
“It’s a defense program, Myn. It’s what I do.”
“You’ve never been like this. Are we about to be at war or something? I know I haven’t been paying much attention to the news, but someone would have mentioned.”
“Baby. We’ve been over this. I can’t talk about it.”
“Walter. Are you having an affair?”
“Myn. It’s eleven a.m. Who has affairs at eleven a.m.?”
“Well, tell me something! I’m your wife! All you do is push me away.”
“Baby, if I told you, I’d . . . be putting both our lives in danger.”
There was a pause.
“That is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Really?” he said.
“Yes. It’s the sort of thing you’d put in . . . in . . .”
“In what?”
“In one of your dumb unpublished novels!”
Bird ground enough enamel off his back molars to refinish a vintage bathtub. He was about to say something he knew he’d regret when Myndi spared him the trouble by hanging up. Bird slammed his phone down, a Pyrrhic, but satisfying, retaliation.
Angel looked on with an air of contemptuous bemusement. “I want to thank you,” she said.
“For what?” Bird snapped.
“For making me so-o grateful I’m not married.”
“Any White House reaction?”
“They’re ‘watching the situation,’ ” Angel said disdainfully. “Closely.”
“That’ll have Beijing quaking in its boots.”
“They’re such weenies, this administration. We should be dispatching carrier battle groups. Canceling military leave. Lofting bombers. Warming missiles. Patton, thou shouldn’t be living at this hour.”
Bird looked up at her. “Wordsworth? I’m impressed. I thought all you read was Jane’s Modern Weapons of Mass Destruction.” He swiveled in his chair and began to compose the institute’s J’accuse! Then paused.
“Maybe we should give the White House just a little time to get its stuff together. You know they’re meeting in the Sit Room right now.”
“Uh-huh,” Angel said, “picking lint out of their navels.”
“GODDAMN IT,” said Rogers P. Fancock, director of the National Security Council. “Really.”
The expostulation was directed at the cosmos in general rather than at his aide, a budding young internationalist by the name of Bletchin.
“As if we didn’t have enough on our plate,” Fancock said. “Once, just once, it would be nice if someone came through that door bringing me something other than another goddamned horror story.”
Was this a personal rebuke? Bletchin wondered.
Fancock scowled at the top-secret cable from the U.S. ambassador in Beijing alerting him to the development that had been announced on CNN twenty minutes before.
“Thanks for the warning,” Fancock grumbled rhetorically, crumbling the cable into a ball and tossing it into the wastebasket.
“Shouldn’t that go in the burn bag, sir?” Bletchin said. Every afternoon a Secret Service officer carrying a bag would come by and ask, “Classified trash?”
“Bletchin,” Fancock said. “It was just on CNN, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, sir. Still, it is a top-secret cable.”
“Why do we even have embassies at this point? Do you know why, Bletchin? So they can appoint their damned campaign finance director ambassador. I told him, ‘He wants to be ambassador? All right, send him to the Bahamas. Bermuda. Namibia. The Seychelles.’ And where does he send him? China. China! We need professionals out there, Bletchin. Not campaign fund-raisers. Hacks. That’s all they are.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fancock scratched at his shin. Stress exacerbated his psoriasis. “So they’re taking the position he’s a public-health hazard, are they? What Confucian in their Propaganda Department came up with that beauty, do you suppose?”
“I spoke to Jud Davis at State,” Bletchin said. “He thinks—”
“Actually, it’s rather deft. Do you know why, Bletchin?”
Bletchin thought he did, actually, but sensed that it would be politic to let Director Fancock continue with the mentoring.
“It’s code,” Fancock sniffed. “That’s what it is. Code. And do you know how it decrypts? We don’t give a hoot in Hades what you damned Americans think. So there! And they don’t. They truly don’t. You can do business with the Chinese, Bletchin. I’ve done my fair share, God knows. But the moment they feel their back is against the wall? Up comes the drawbridge, and archers to the tower. They won’t budge an inch on this. Game over. Will this make our job easier? Care to hazard a guess?”
“Shall I get Dr. Kissinger?” Bletchin’s favorite thing in life was to place urgent calls to Henry Kissinger, especially at strange hours.
Fancock puffed out his cheeks like a blowfish. Beacon Hill fugu. “No,” he said. “Let’s save Henry for when no one’s speaking to each other. Which day is coming as surely as tomorrow’s dawn. Unless we get lucky and His Holiness pops off to the great beyond before plunging the entire world into chaos.”
Fancock looked at his aide warily. Probably making notes for his White House memoir. “I’m only venting, Bletchin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have to vent around here or you’ll go cuckoo. Extraordinary man, the Dalai Lama. Spent a bit of time with him. Serene sort. Quick upstairs and a good sense of humor. Likes an off-color story. Ghastly business, this phemotomo . . .”
“Pheochromocytoma.”
“Yes, well, no picnic however you spell it. Suppose I ought to send a letter. Draft one, and make the tone personal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fondly I remember our visits together. Et cetera. Have Susan look them up in the log. Profited from his wisdom. So on. The president and First Lady join me, along with the entire nation. And so forth. Don’t suppose there’s any point in wishing him ‘a speedy recovery.’ Prayers. You might cast about for some appropriate Buddhist sentiment. And flowers, Bletchin. Fifty dollars ought to buy some decent flowers in Cleveland. Get it from the petty cash, not my personal account.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fancock’s expression reverted to its default position of perpetual indignation: a man of superior intellect, breeding, and culture, marooned on an island of proles and incompetents in a shark-infested sea. And yet the Brahmin Code of Honor—what the French call noblesse oblige—dictated that one must soldier on. To those to whom much has been given and all that.
“Why?” Fancock said. “Tell me, w
hy did they schedule a press conference knowing that this was coming? Really—that whole communications office is a disaster area. They ought to seal it off with yellow tape. Put up cones.”
Bletchin nodded. Director Fancock inculcated in his protégés a lofty disdain for the media—Foreign Affairs, the FT, the Economist, and the other British publications excepted.
“We can’t have him go out there and say that we’re continuing to watch the situation. However ‘closely.’ ”
Bletchin said, “Sir, Ambassador Ding’s office called.”
“Oh, joy. What do they want?”
“They’re requesting a meeting.”
“With the president? Absolutely not.”
“No, sir. With yourself. They made it a formal ‘urgent’ request. He’d like to see you. Today.”
“Tell them to imagine a snowball, surrounded by all the fires of the infernal regions.”
“I told him you had a busy schedule. Still . . .”
“All right. But stall. Tell them . . . six o’clock. Now, before you do anything else—get Barney Strecker in here. Tell him I need to see him tout de suite. I don’t care what he’s doing or who he’s doing it to. Quickly, Bletchin. What is it?”
“Shouldn’t we put that request through Director Deakins?” Bletchin said, referring to Strecker’s boss, head of CIA. “You know how he doesn’t like it when we go directly—”
“Just do it, Bletchin. Look lively, man.”
Bletchin scurried off to make the call.
Barney Strecker, deputy director for operations, CIA, pulled up at the West Wing less than an hour later, in his own car, trailed by two black SUVs full of bodyguards. The bodyguards had standing orders—signed by Strecker himself—to kill him rather than let him be taken hostage, if it came to that. As a young case officer, Strecker had spent three years shackled to a wall in a military prison in Rangoon and was resolved not to repeat the experience.
Bletchin always felt nervous around Strecker. He escorted him to the Situation Room with a minimum of small talk. Director Fancock was waiting, along with the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs as well as various military personnel from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fancock had included State and Pentagon so that he’d be able to say that they had been consulted. He had no interest in their views on the matter and planned to get them out of the room as quickly as possible.
They Eat Puppies, Don't They? Page 14