The Mandarin Club (7 page)

It might turn out to be a fine day, after all.

He rolled the breakfast trolley aside, reaching for the television clicker. Surfing channels, he jumped from the ESPN scoreboard onto a live C-SPAN telecast from Washington. There on the screen behind Senator Smithson was a disgusted looking Martin Booth. Some Administration blowhard was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Asia policy, rambling on about human rights in Myanmar.

“Fuckin’ wuss!” Mickey hollered at the screen as the Assistant Secretary droned forth. “Same old State Department bullshit.”

Mickey clicked to NBC.
The Today Show
was not yet screening on the West Coast. Doubtless, a crowd had already gathered outside the studio—caffeine-overdosed citizens screaming for the cameras at dawn, rapturous for two seconds of on-air fame.

Mickey was bouncing his right knee nervously. He flipped to CNN, where the highlights from the late basketball games proved to be more lively. His Lakers were revived and rolling.

The secure phone rang again. Mickey shook his head, wondering what brand of scramblers they used to keep the satellite signals one step ahead of the FBI and the NSA and whoever else liked to listen to international businessmen talk. This time it was his man at Telstar, calling from down in Silicon Valley.

“Mickey? We need you to drop by today and go over the plan for the licenses on the jammers. You know, the electronic counter-measures kits.”

“Aw, shit.” There went the coveted hole in his schedule. “You guys still sweating that? I told you, I got that stuff all worked out back in Washington. I didn’t even have to go back there.”

“Yeah, but the boss is getting heat from the customer. Seems like they got ants in their pants on this one.”

Mickey did not welcome this. “I told you, it’s wired. We’ve got clearance from the Commerce Department. And State isn’t even in the loop. They get no interagency sign-off any more.”

“I hear you. We just gotta make sure this gets Fed Ex-ed in time.”

“
In time
? What’s the rush on a bunch of jammer payloads?” Even as he said the words, Mickey was sorry. He had made a lot of money over the years by not blurting out such thoughts.

“I don’t know, probably some kinda war-gaming. Making sure they won’t be blind if somebody starts jamming them. Just be here by noon. We’ll do one more walk through.”

“OK, OK,” Mickey grumbled before he calculated. “But listen, how about two o’clock?”

He could see things getting worse. If they were so anxious for him to baby-sit the next shipment, he probably would have to go back to Washington after all. He would be responsible for making sure the TPB team delivered an export license in a timely fashion. His visions of California leisure were crashing and burning.

“Good, then—whoa! Mickey? You still there?”

He was struggling to cling to his plan now.

“Check out CNN! A bomb’s gone off by the White House!”

It took a moment to register as Mickey’s eyes darted back to the picture. And then, there it was, in his suite, as well. There were the images before him, marching along as if in a macabre Bourbon Street dream parade.

He saw drifting smoke on the TV, just over a reporter’s head. A crawler at the bottom of the screen warned of “Graphic Footage.” He couldn’t find the damn remote. It was better without the sound anyway.

There was the TPB building, with shredded white curtains wafting gently through skeletal window frames—the very same TPB building where, according to the original schedule, he was to have been arriving within the hour. To Mickey, in his momentary horror, it came as no surprise that Alexander Bonner was on camera, too. There was Alexander, dazed and muttering.

It was the sight of Rachel Paulson’s inert body, her face caked in blood, that slapped Mickey back to reality.

L
i Jianjun sat on the darkened porch, sipping green tea, waiting for the moon to rise.

It was a cold night in Beijing, unusually bitter for the beginning of April, although the heavy layer of pollution backing up south from the mountains kept an edge off the chill. The resulting blanket tasted of diesel fuel, exhaust from buses, and industrial plants still encircling the northern capital despite the vaunted efforts of Beijing’s city planners.

Lee needed the moment of stillness away from the angry voices of his colleagues. He could hear them arguing even now as they lingered in the compound’s conference room. He was eager for reflection, struggling to find context for the third long day of debate over options he considered risky.
Were they truly prepared for the confrontations ahead
? He doubted it. In disgust, he flicked the ashes of his cigarette, watching them fall slowly like dying petals letting go.

They were in a recess on the last night of an extended spring policy planning exercise. His boss, the foreign minister, had left the Zhongnanhai compound to share a dessert toast to his elderly mother celebrating her birthday at a restaurant not far from the senior government employees’ enclosure. But he would be back to see his deputy Lee, the head of the North American Section, and to wrap up the session.

Lee had expected to be arriving in Washington at this hour, tending to Ministry business with his Chinese Embassy counterparts. He had abruptly aborted the trip, though, intercepted en route to the airport by a call from an anxious colleague. He had been tipped off to some mischief the boys at Defense were planning to spring at the conclusive policy session.

The call had proved prescient. The hotheads working under the old generals were pushing the envelope once more, proposing to launch another in a series of provocations, to test Taiwan and its vacillating American protectors. Taiwan, again. Lee had grown weary of the dangerous games the army boys were ever so eager to play.

Now he was drained, his bones stiff in the sharp night air. He stood and stretched, eyes closed. Gingerly, he executed a few toe touches. His hamstrings clutched. He thought of his father exercising amiably with the day nurse, Xu An, whose services Lee had procured. They were both a bit sweet on the middle-aged woman.

Parkinson’s was slowly shutting the old man down. His knuckles were curling, his shoulders hunching, and his feet increasingly deaf to the brain’s insistent commands. Yet the smile of the aging engineer grew ever gentler and child-like as the disease took hold. The irony tore at Lee, deepening his dread of the impending loss. As dementia set in and death approached, the old man’s rough edges were fading. The bullying commands were forgotten, the authoritarian voice having melted. What remained, underneath the layers of a life of trial, was an unexpected tenderness. It made Lee even sadder for the void looming beyond his father’s imminent passage into darkness.

Lee had taken to scrawling awkward verses in his journal. His attempts at poetry and short stories left him even emptier, though. He had fallen into idealizing his American days, especially those first weeks of freedom in Palo Alto. He allowed his mind to float, to think heretically once again. He would fantasize, and the revolutionary within would emerge briefly on paper. But then he would set his pen down and come back to earth, to the unsavory choices before him. One night, he burned the journal, feeding sheet by sheet into the blue flames of the coal burner.

In the end, he would be orphaned. He saw it now. At forty-eight, he gazed at an empty future—no parents, no children. It was too late for him; he would be left alone with his stubborn ideals and his rancorous countrymen.

In his father’s face the previous Sunday, he had seen a vision of his own demise. There would be no gentle hand to ease his passing. There would be no witness for him—no one to come to his rescue. He recognized now that his run had peaked, that his patriotism was misplaced, that he was sliding down from some precipice of experience, into his own inevitable decline.

He stood in the shadows, finishing his Camel, the cigarette tip the only light on the porch. It sparkled whenever he inhaled, pulsing like a firefly, illuminating his jet-black hair and severe eyes. Lee toyed with the smoke, attempting a picket line of rings by contorting his mouth in a brief moment of play. The nicotine and the air combined for a stimulating kick before he crushed the butt on the railing. Flicking it into the bushes, he hitched up his slacks before turning back to the policy wars.

A solitary figure remained in the conference room. It was Chen, making notes intently on a red file folder. The defense ministry’s global strategist, Chen was Lee’s foil in these interagency sessions. They clashed predictably, like an old couple familiar with each other’s pronouncements. They would measure themselves against one another, testing the limits of candor and dissent, sharpening their minds, playing devil’s advocate. Lee wondered if their set-piece encounters amused their colleagues, like the rancorous talk shows on CNN International with those jowly journalists trying to shout over each other.

Theirs was a clash grounded in mutual respect. Chen was the most reasonable of the brains at Defense, a modern man with a graduate degree from M.I.T., a man for whom the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were a horror never to be repeated. Chen had slowed down the faction that saw modernization merely as a way to restore a neo-Maoist purity to state control. Chen could see through the older military men, soldiers trapped in their web of rhetoric and fabricated deadlines for progress on Taiwan’s “reunification” with the Mainland. Yet, Chen also could still outmaneuver the clever young comrades who were so eager to manipulate their doctrinaire elders.

Then, again, Chen’s bureaucratic colleagues would instantly betray Lee if evidence of his past transgressions were ever uncovered—those dark times after Tiananmen when his struggle to honor the martyrs had led him to cross his own government. They would send Lee to a quick death by pistol shot.
Whom would they bill for the bullet?

For Lee, it sometimes seemed a question of when, not if, his stubborn idealism would prove fatal. He fancied himself a genuine patriot, determined to stand and fight to the end. Yet, in his private moments, he questioned his flirtations with discovery and death. He could anticipate no brighter future. Seeing no other way, he grew more daring with each passing challenge.

Chen, leaning over the long rectangular table, was holding his tea when Lee entered.

“Cable traffic?” Lee’s question seemed to startle his colleague.

“Yeah, same old crap. Guys in the field trying to suck up to the boss.”

“But the boss eats it up, right?”

Chen set his papers down and sighed. “Yes, Lee, just like your foreign affairs boys. The ministers always welcome such loyalty.”

He was only a few years younger than Chen. But Chen’s wife—who fussed affectionately over Lee, the divorced bachelor—insisted the burden of the Defense Ministry post had aged Chen prematurely. Chen was almost bald, with thick white eyebrows and John Lennon granny glasses, giving the appearance of a Chinese leprechaun.

“I’m sure this makes your contrarian views even more valuable.”

“Valuable? At present, I am not certain what value is placed on caution.”

“Deliberation has served us well on the Taiwan question. Bought us time.”

“Our leadership needs some results,” Chen said as he reached across the table for a cigarette from Lee’s pack. “May I?”

“Sure,” Lee said, noticing for the first time a slight tremor in his colleague’s hand.

“Results?” Lee made no effort to hide his skepticism. “Right.”

“It is real this time,” Chen warned. “We’re ratcheting things up, my friend. Finally going to kick Taiwan in the ass.”

“Really?”

“And you know what I think Washington is going to do about it? Nothing. Just like when our brave pilot rammed the American spy plane out of the sky over Hainan.”

“Now wait. They didn’t sit when the Taliban in Afghanistan let that Saudi madman attack their—”

“That wasn’t about Afghanistan. That was about New York, and the Pentagon. The fact is, most Americans can’t even find Taipei on a map. Besides, their military is already over-extended. If they make too big a stink, we can crash their stock market in a day just by sitting out their Treasury bond auctions.”