“Well then,” Angel said silkily, “what would you suggest? I don’t think he’s just going to drop it. You know those investigative types.”
“Let me talk to my board,” Bird said.
Angel was smiling at him. Bird thought, Enjoying this, aren’t you?
“You do that,” Angel purred. “You talk to your board.”
Her fingers reached for his throat. Bird recoiled.
“Relax, Mr. Jumpy,” she said, tenderly adjusting his necktie, sliding the knot back up into place. Her perfume. “You want to look your best, now, don’t you? For the board?”
Angel pivoted on her miniskirted bottom, uncrossed her legs, and slid off Bird’s desk.
“Time to do battle with Dragon Lady.” She winked. “Wish Momma luck.”
“Good luck,” Bird croaked.
“Maybe I’ll stop by the Military-Industrial Duplex later and tell you how it went,” she said. “Barry’s off on an overnight field trip.”
“Oh?” Bird said. “Really? Gosh. What fun.”
“The Aberdeen Proving Ground. He’s so excited.”
“The Aberdeen Test Center? Where the army . . .”
“Tests all the latest toys. Yes. Barry adores artillery. They’re going to let him fire the M1 Abrams tank. Isn’t Momma clever? He couldn’t sleep last night he was so excited. Had to give him a whole pill.”
“Well,” Bird said, “that’ll certainly make for a great show-and-tell at school.”
“See you later. I’ll bring you one of Dragon Lady’s claws.”
Off she clicked, heels on marble.
BIRD WAITED SEVERAL MINUTES, then raced from the war room, out the back freight entrance, and hoofed it to the nearest pay phone. It occurred to him that he might be the only human being in Washington, D.C., who still used pay phones—other than spies and drug dealers and other pillars of the community.
“Birdman?” Chick Devlin said heartily. “How’s it hanging?”
“Houston, we have a problem.”
He explained about Tierney of the Times.
“Reporters,” Chick snorted. “Where’s the patriotism? Vultures. Well, feed him whatever you need to, but keep him away from us. They’re not asking about Taurus or anything, are they?”
“No,” Bird said. “Not yet anyway. But they are asking about Pan-Pacific Solutions.”
“Well, we built in enough cutaways between us and Pan-Pacific. By the time our money travels from Alabama to D.C., it’s been washed so many times the numbers are coming off the bills.”
“I know, but remember Watergate and ‘Follow the money’?”
“Well, Birdman, the name on the door is Pan-Pacific Solutions. I’ve got every confidence in you. I gotta go. I got three kraut physicists waiting on me, and you know how cranky they get. Keep me posted. Keep our good name out of the papers, now. We’ll talk.”
Bird cradled the greasy receiver. A homeless man elbowed him aside, reaching for the coin-return slot. Ah, the glamour of the clandestine life.
ANGEL HADN’T HAD to do much heavy lifting. Chris Matthews was sputtering with indignation. He’d been giving it to Winnie Chang hard about Beijing’s refusal to let the dying Dalai Lama return to his native Lhasa.
“How can a guy with a brain tumor pose a public-health problem?” Matthews demanded. “Do you really expect the world to swallow an explanation so obviously, transparently mendacious?”
“If you would give me a chance to explain—”
Matthews grinned. “Explain. Go ahead.”
“This is not such a simple issue as it would appear,” Winnie said. She looked stunning tonight: pearl earrings, Hermès scarf, sparkly eyes, cheekbones, and her never-flagging smile, behind which her mind was working furiously.
The truth was that Winnie was appalled by Beijing’s handling of the crisis. They could be so self-defeatingly stubborn sometimes! But surely they could have come up with something better than this. She’d conveyed her own recommendations, but she had no way of knowing whether Minister Lo had passed them on. It was clear, though, what message the party leadership was seeking to convey to the world: We don’t care what you think. And this occasioned some thinking on Winnie’s part.
It was a good life she lived here in Washington. She played tennis with the president. All doors were open to her. She had girlfriends who ran corporations, with whom she went on “girl weekends” aboard private planes to expensive spas in Arizona for networking and herbal scrubs.
But Minister Lo had made it clear: At the end of the year, she would return to Beijing. “I’m promoting you,” he told her. “I have great things in store for you.”
Winnie suspected what, among other “great things,” Minister Lo had in mind for her and recoiled at the thought. It was this prospect of having to leave her gilded life in Washington behind that made her susceptible to the (so far, Platonic) advances of Barney Strecker.
Meanwhile she was left to cope with this impossible situation of Beijing’s own making.
On the way into the studio today, Winnie had found herself musing on a line from Sun-tzu: “The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.” She also thought about the American bureaucratic mantra: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“Chris,” Winnie said, “may I say that I do not think that the government in Beijing has made itself one hundred percent clear with this statement? I wonder, perhaps, if there has been some error in translation.”
“Lost in translation? You’re saying this is a mistranslation?”
“I do not think that Beijing intended to say that His Holi-ness’s brain tumor—for which all people everywhere have such sympathy—I don’t think they mean to say that it is contagious. This would be a ridiculous assertion, truly. Silly.”
“Yeah? Okay? So?”
“No, I think what they are saying—but not so clearly—is that there are some elements in Tibet who have long been opposed to China’s nation-building efforts—”
“Nation-building? In Tibet? Come on. Nation-crushing is more like it.”
“Let me continue, please, Chris. That these elements might use the occasion of his return to foment turmoil and unrest. And whatever one’s views are on the Tibet question, this surely does pose a public-health problem. If you have people dying in the streets because of riots and unrest, is that not—a public-health problem?”
“It’s stretching it. But you’re being more honest about it than Beijing.”
“I can tell you that I have made some phone calls.”
“Oh oh, here it comes. Look out. The Big Spin!”
“Chris”—she smiled—“behave, now. I spoke today with someone in the Ministry of Health in Beijing. Because I myself personally want to comprehend this situation. And do you know, it appears that there is a medical problem with his returning to Lhasa.”
“This is going to be good. Okay, hit me.”
Winnie look a little breath as she stepped off the cliff into the void.
“His Holiness is afflicted, as we all know, with a severe tumor in the brain and lungs. A pheochromocytoma.” Winnie had practiced saying the word in front of the mirror. “Perhaps not so many people are aware that these tumors, in their final stages, are extremely sensitive to altitude.”
“Altitude? Wow. You’re not . . . you are serious!”
“Chris, let me explain. You see, Lhasa, the capital of the autonomous region—”
“Can we stop calling it that?” Matthews said. “Come on. Tibet. Try saying it. Tibet.”
“If you look at any world map, you will see that it is called the autonomous—”
“Okay, okay, we’ll do geography class after the break. Go on. So . . . tumor, altitude.”
“Lhasa is nearly three thousand five hundred meters high. This is over ten thousand feet, Chris. His Holiness has been living all these years at much lower altitudes. In Dharamsala, India, where he makes his residence, it is only sevent
een hundred meters high. Five thousand feet. Now he is in Cleveland, Ohio, which is nearly sea level. There are many medical authorities who will tell you that to expose a person with a terminal brain tumor to such extreme altitude might prove fatal. So China is now in this impossible situation, because if they let him back, that will kill him, and then everyone will say, ‘Aha, you see, that was their plan all along!’ ”
Matthews paused for several seconds—an eternity in Chris Matthews time. “I . . .” His face creased into a hundred smiles. “I have to say, that’s really good. Winnie Chang, I like you. I think you’re terrific. Even if you are a Chinese agent. And if you are, boy did you earn your paycheck today.”
He turned to Angel. “Angel Templeton, what do you make of that?”
Angel said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
“I’m asking!”
“Well, Chris, I’ll say this much: Ms. Chang is at least being a little more creative than her Orwellian bosses back in Beijing. But—hello?—does anyone on this planet truly think that Beijing’s big concern here is His Holiness’s health?” Angel burst out laughing. “Because if that is what they’re worried about, happily, there’s a solution—hyperbaric chamber. If His Holiness is put in a hyperbaric chamber, then there’s no change in pressure.”
“Hyperbaric chamber,” Matthews said. “You mean like one of those things Michael Jackson used to sleep in? With his pet chimpanzee?”
“I’d prefer, Chris, not to use the words His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee in the same sentence, but okay. Depressurizing chambers. What they put divers and pilots in. I’m sure NASA would be more than happy to lend the Chinese one.”
“That’s great. I like that. Don’t go away. You’re watching Hardball.”
CHAPTER 19
WHAT WONDERFUL FRIENDS WE HAVE
The dream was back now, every night.
President Fa dreaded the moment when he could no longer keep his eyes open, only to wake in terror, his bed linen twisted into knots.
He was chain-smoking. He’d lost fifteen pounds, and Fa was not a large person to begin with. He looked at food—any food—with revulsion. Madam Fa was at her wit’s end. She confided to her closest friends that the president was “not himself.” In desperation she turned to the faithful Gang, who had served her husband so loyally for over two decades now, but he would only say, “Our dear Comrade President Fa is under severe pressure.” Being the leader of Great China was an honor, to be sure, but a heavy burden. Not to worry, he told her—all will be well. But she’d known Gang long enough to know that there must be something else.
Gang himself, busy enough under normal circumstances, was truly exhausted. There was the regular business of state, and now on top of that the ongoing Lotus crisis. And on top of that he was now having to handle the most delicate secret communications with Admiral Zhang in San Diego, USA. Zhang—Agent Mankind Is Red—had established contact with Beluga. A most perilous under-taking. Gang felt that his every move was under observation by Minister Lo’s security apparatus. And so much depended on the operation.
As for Lo—his attitude toward President Fa now bordered on outright contempt. As global reaction continued to harden against China for its refusal to allow the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, the meetings of the Standing Committee had grown alternately stormy and chill.
Comrade President Fa presided over these with an increasingly haggard mien. This did not go unnoticed by the other members, especially Minister Lo and General Han. Fa could barely stay awake.
Gang, listening in on the meetings through earphones, was dismayed—no, disgusted, truly—by those committee members who had initially favored the president’s audacious solution and who now, sensing the changed wind, carried on as though they had always been on the side of the Lo-Han cabal. Disgraceful. A deplorable spectacle. And Lo, playing his part so coolly: What an opportunity we missed, Comrades. If only we had acted when we had the chance. Contemptible man!
But Gang’s thoughts were less for President Fa’s weakening political position than for his suffering master, who stood—or tottered and slumped—at the center of the hurricane.
Gang had procured, through the most discreet channels—namely, his college-attending daughter—sleeping pills and stay-awake pills. These he had begun to administer to the president without his knowledge. As a result the president was sleeping a bit better now and he was much more awake during the day. But certain effects had begun to manifest themselves. These were in evidence during the Standing Committee meeting on the day after the incident involving the television show in America, when China’s top trade representative, Comrade Chang, went off-message and created a sensation.
It was generally known within the Standing Committee that Comrade Chang, ostensibly an employee of the International Liaison Department, was in fact an agent of the Two Bureau (foreign affairs) at MSS; moreover that she reported directly to Minister Lo, who had recruited and trained her.
What a tumult she had caused!
Seldom had Gang listened in on a Standing Committee meeting with such intensity and apprehension. Collating the president’s briefing book the evening before, assembling the papers submitted by the various departments and ministries, Gang had noted that there was nothing—nothing at all—about the incident. Curious.
As presidential assistant, Gang had uncensored Internet access, and consequently well knew that Comrade Chang’s television appearance had released a swarm of hornets. Headlines everywhere. All this he relayed to his drowsy President Fa.
Gang pressed him. “You must focus on the Chang matter, Comrade President! Here is your opportunity to put Minister Lo on the defensive!”
“Yes, yes,” Fa said, as if not really hearing.
Gang decided to take bold action. He put not one but two stay-awake tablets into the president’s tea that morning before the meeting.
Now, as Gang listened in, it was clear that the stay-awake pills had taken effect. Indeed, nearly forty-five minutes into the meeting, the president had scarcely stopped talking. None of the other members had been able to get in a word so far.
The president had expressed himself on a vast range of matters, from the mudslides in Anhui province to the jamming of the Voice of America and the BBC, even discussing the question of whether the new leader of North Korea—to Gang’s mind a deeply deranged individual—should be permitted to enter China through Dandong in daylight or whether it was better to continue with the protocol of only letting him come and go like a rat in the dark.
Listening to the president prattle on about these less pressing matters, Gang mentally prodded him, Chang, Comrade President. Introduce the Chang matter!
Through his earphones Gang distinctly heard two committee members murmuring about the president’s strange loquacity. Oh, dear.
Then—
“Comrade Minister Xe,” Fa said. Gang heard him flipping through his briefing book so briskly it sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled. “Tell us about the latest public reactions in America with respect to the Lotus.”
Minister Xe rambled on in his usual monotone. As minister of the Department of Propaganda and Thought Work, Xe Lu Pi had the appropriate talent for saying as little as possible in the maximum number of words. There was nothing of interest to report, he said. The usual anti-China gangsterist elements were doing the predictable things. The department was working hand in hand with Comrade Minister Lo’s excellent and supportive Ministry for State Security.
Gang grimaced. What a toad, Xe Lu Pi.
On he droned, until Fa cut him off with a machine-gun burst of words.
“Yes, yes, good, good. But now what about this—”
Suddenly President Fa began to cough most violently. Gang winced. Another nicotine-wrought bronchospasm. It went on for an embarrassing duration, accompanied by bringings-up of phlegm and the necessity of a handkerchief.
“Are you . . . well, Comrade?” some member inquired.
“Harrrgh . . . You must excuse me, Comrades. A cold. Harrarghhhhh—”
“Steward. Water. Water for the president. Quickly!”
Gang heard the sound of water being gulped. A wiping of lips, a clearing of throat.
“Pardon me, pardon me, Comrades. Don’t worry. It is not catching. Must be the altitude!”
Gang thought, Oh, no, Comrade President.
“Tell me, Xe, tell me about Comrade Chang’s statement on American television, of course.”
Gang listened. Silence. Shuffling of paper. A nervous cough. At length Fa said, “Well, she seems to have caused quite a stir. Yes, quite a stir. Altitude. Well, I know all about that, as you are aware, Comrades.” He laughed. “Don’t sit near me when I’m giving a speech in Lhasa. Eh? Ha ho!”
Awkward laughter.
“Strange that you did not include mention of this in your briefing, Comrade.”
Another pause. How Gang wished he were in the room to watch Minister Xe squirm. To see the look on Lo’s face.
“It didn’t seem worth . . .” Xe temporized. “There is so much media attention. What is important is—”
“But surely this was worth including with the rest?”
Pause.
“Forgive me. I did not wish to overwhelm Comrade President with every detail. But turning to—”
“That is considerate. I must say. Very considerate. I thank you. So then, is this now our official position? That we are acting from humanitarian impulses? Because of the . . . altitude?”
Another long and awkward pause. The rattle of teacups.
At length Xe said, “No, Comrade President. I believe that Comrade Chang was . . .” Xe looked over pleadingly at Lo. “Sometimes these television appearances can take an unexpected direction. I’m sure she did not mean to give the impression that . . . she gave.”
Gang smiled. He’s covering for Lo. Lo—hiding behind Xe’s skirts, are we?
“Yes,” Fa said with animation. “Yes, I can imagine how such a thing could happen. But whatever impression she sought to give, she has given this impression. She is the face of China there. Perhaps Comrade Ambassador Ding should take a more active role?”
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