The last rays of the sun abandon my backyard. I lean on a durable canvas pillow not far from the edge of the pool. There’s not the slightest breeze. Banks of cloud and a piece of moon are reflected in the quiet water of the pool.
Bright table lamps glow in every room of the house. Soffit lighting casts warm sprays on the sides of the building. A half dozen chaises line the side of the pool, yet I am the only person out here.
I have my feet on the coffee table in front of me and my laptop is positioned on my thighs so I can check out all these different vigils going on around the world. Forget about candlelight. The crowds use their mobile phones as flashlights, holding them upstretched. Apparently, it wasn’t only the Chinese that Wang was ratting on with his millions of files.
I hear Kathy’s voice and look up to see that she is leaning over the glass railing outside our upstairs bedroom.
“Dinner’s going to be late,” she informs me, which is good news. It means she is planning on cooking something. I look forward to it.
“Okay,” I respond with alacrity and a cheery tone.
A call comes in and I take it on the laptop.
“The Chinese Government is reeling,” Angela Hadad says, her long dark hair framing her young but impassive face. She speaks without a trace of enthusiasm, something that I figure Kadin must have taught her. Stay focused on the objective, he would have said. Don’t get emotionally invested.
I remind myself that the people Kadin had chosen to surround himself with most closely were much more than might meet a cursory examination. They were a team designed to carry out his plans, no matter what.
It’s quiet here. I can only hear the lapping of the water against the side of the pool, and the light breeze occasionally rustling in the leaves of the trees behind me. So I have no trouble speaking out loud to her over this scrambled connection. I can see Connor and Samira are seated behind her and are looking over her shoulder at me.
“There are large protests in a dozen major cities,” Angela goes on.
“They protest now because they know that they can. They never would have before. Legitimacy has been damaged,” I say.
“Or just temporarily held in abeyance,” Angela comes back.
“Power is transient but not a people’s will. Disclosures of widespread abuses of power will create a major crack. Why should I be surprised if it empowers protest everywhere?”
I apologize. I get pedantic. It can be an occupational hazard.
“Everywhere is right,” says Connor.
“I think it was Mao himself who said a single spark can start a prairie fire. China is an entire nation on the take. The top seventy members of the national legislature are worth ninety billion, more than ten times that of the entire Congress.2 The result is plutocracy, rule by the rich, an unstainable model of governance in the modern era. You can see the corruption in a variety of ways. Just one is China’s high speed rail. It may be the envy of the world, but it is also the biggest financial scandal in the history of the country.
“The government has made a deal with the people to produce a basic level of government competency in exchange for allowing one party rule. But with things like this that deal is off. However the world may try to provide the Chinese people access to the rest of the planet, online or otherwise, it will never be enough to really open things up. The country spends more on the surveillance of its own population than it does on national defense. And a lot of that surveillance is online. It is an updated version of the East Germany’s Stasi, that’s all.”
“Orwell to the nth degree,” Samira chimes in.
“There is a willingness to say that black is white as long as the government says it is. But I’m sure there are gatherings in other places.”
“Everywhere,” Angela rejoins.
“When journalists who reveal government abuses are persecuted and killed by their own governments much the same problem exists. Consider how the American government can turn vindictive and chase a whistleblower from bullied country to bullied country in an obvious attempt to silence and persecute, not just prosecute. How every state in that country has a very regressive tax system designed to push the cost of government onto those least able to pay, a philosophy that clearly says let them eat cake. How a country can have the finest and most expensive system of incarceration in the world with the world’s largest incarcerated population, one dominated by race and class, rather than deal with its social problems. How that country vacuums worldwide communications including those of its own citizens because it fails to understand how the cure can be worse than the disease, how that demonstrates how terror wins. Or consider how paralyzing politics and unrestrained bureaucratic power inevitably leads to diminishing, even losing, democracy. Creating secrecy within the state empowers bureaucracy and distorts public discourse until there is none left. It is the death of pluralism by a thousand cuts.”
“Too many nations have come to believe that the only way to win a war against their enemies is to get just as dirty as the enemy. What happens when they look in the mirror to find that in defeating their enemies they have made themselves irredeemable? What happens when they face the fact that instead of creating social equity, they waste trillions militarizing a democracy and pursuing pointless foreign adventures? All this rather than create a just society at home. Are we Sparta or Athens?”
“It happens,” says Connor.
“And it keeps happening in a repeating and widening circle.”
It gets quiet. I’ve had my say.
I miss Kadin.
I get a note on the screen that a brigadier general from the Netherlands, now the director of the Comprehensive Crisis and Operations Management Centre at SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers Europe, has some kind of announcement and is about to speak. I say my goodbyes to Angela, Connor and Samira and watch the general’s face come into view.
I don’t turn the sound up. Just knowing he has had to make an announcement important enough to be broadcast is sufficient.
The clouds move in thin plates and cover the moon from sight, but this makes the portions of empty sky that remain glow even brighter.
From somewhere in the house I hear Kathy calling.
Chapter 86
On Fire Page 85