The Mandarin Club (8 page)

“Why now?” Lee turned his head sharply towards the door, but they were alone in the room, the others drinking tea and watching CNN.

“Because our fearless leaders have been farting around on the Taiwan issue for decades. How many Party Congresses can they make the same empty pledge to?”

“We’ve got plenty to show.” Lee’s voice shot up. “Hong Kong’s return. The trade agreement. We’ve come quite a ways since Tiananmen.”

“Why should our generals forget the promises to bring Taiwan back to the Motherland?”

“Generals always overestimate the utility of force.”

“So do politicians. But this isn’t a grad school seminar, my friend. You have military men here. They spend a generation building bases and missiles, they eventually want to use their toys.”

“You can’t—”

“It’s like the Americans’ Manhattan Project. Imagine the grief Truman would have caught if they’d spent all that money and effort, and then he didn’t drop the bomb?”

“But that is illogical.”

“It is inevitable,” Chen insisted. “Every year that goes by, Taiwan drifts farther away from us. Their kids have no memory of the Mainland. They sit there with all the treasures they stole from our National Museum. They are Chinese, yet they show us no respect. Problem is, they believe all that Star Wars stuff—that they’ll be able to sit for generations taunting us from behind some impregnable missile shield. Just like that corrupt old dog, Chiang Kai-Shek, hiding behind Eisenhower’s knees and the Seventh Fleet. Time is not on our side; that is where you make your fatal miscalculation.”

Lee tipped back in his chair, regarding his colleague carefully, searching for an opening. “Time. Yes, time. The damn political calendar seems to dictate everything. I mean, we’ve got to get the new missiles in Nanping before the Seattle summit meeting. We’ve got to have some Taiwan trophies before the next big Party Congress.”

“It’s true,” Chen chuckled. “We’ve become like the Americans. We even have WalMarts and suburban sprawl. There’s your convergence!”

“And what if it is our politicians who have miscalculated? What if their schemes for pressuring Taiwan blow up?” Lee’s tone grew harsh. “Are we ready for war over a goddamn island we never governed?”

“So you would do nothing?” Chen crushed his cigarette. “Typical Foreign Ministry bullshit.”

“Not nothing.”

“Admit it! You’d do nothing while twenty-five million countrymen on Taiwan drift away.”

Lee glared.
Where was this going?
He thought the wild boys in the Second Directorate were still checked by moderate forces over at Defense—that China’s modernization would not be hijacked by ideologues intent on a neo-Maoist restoration. At best, Chen sounded defeatist, and at worst, approving of the next round of provocations.

“There is a difference between cautious forward movement and acting precipitously. In chess, you don’t—”

“
Precipitously
? After almost sixty years of occupation of Taiwan by Chiang’s generals and their American military pals?”

“Time can be on our side, too. Taiwan’s moneymen are up to their ears in Mainland investments. We can crash their markets in an hour with one belligerent statement from our Foreign Ministry. We’ll end up owning them without firing a shot.”

“It’s true,” said Chen, again chuckling. “Throw in a few of our live missile drills, and half of Taiwan’s money will be wired to Switzerland overnight. We can knock out their whole electrical grid. Shut down every single computer on the island.”

Lee nodded in silent admiration.

A sudden commotion erupted in the next room, shouts followed by excited chatter. Anxious American voices could be heard booming from the television. The door flew open and a head shot in, calling to them.

“Hey, comrades! Come look at the news. Something’s hot in Washington!”

Lee and Chen rushed into the lounge, where a dozen aides were huddled. The air was thick with unfiltered cigarette smoke. A bottle of bai jiu wine was on the counter, waiting to share a ceremonial
ganbei
toast with the minister when he returned to close the conference. The shots had already been poured; they stood waiting, cloudy and yellow, in old cut glasses.

Posted on the big screen was a familiar American conceit. “Breaking News,” it read. Lee had seen the same crawler the first time when the fugitive football player had driven his white truck up and down the California freeway. The same with that interminable farce of a presidential election, when for weeks CNN had aired footage of dazed U.S. citizens hand-counting ballots. It had become a fixture again for the so-called anti-terrorist campaign and the New Orleans flood.

This time, an over-excited journalist was shouting through the sleet in Washington about some street-corner explosion. Lee waved his hand and began to turn away in disgust. Then he caught a glance of the picture, over the reporter’s shoulder. There was a smoking office building and beyond it, the side of the U.S. Treasury Department.

“That’s Telstar’s—” said Lee, catching himself as he strode forward, peering nervously, until he was almost on top of the screen.

Sure enough, it was the building where Telstar’s lobbyists worked—Rachel Paulson’s firm. The office where the American corporations had coordinated China’s defense during the recent trade debates. The office Mickey Dooley used as his Washington base of operations.

The office where I was supposed to be sitting. . . right about now.
Lee’s mind was careening.
Whose bomb? What was the target?

He started for the door. He needed to get a call through to his own guys in intelligence back at the Foreign Ministry, and his eyes darted about frantically as he considered his next move.

Then the television microphones picked up the curses of a man on his knees, leaning over a body. It looked like that old footage he’d seen at Stanford from the Kent State riot, or some of the pirated police film he’d viewed from that horrible 1989 night in Tiananmen Square, when the PLA had been sent to crush the democracy activists under their tank treads.

The camera zoomed in for a tighter shot and Lee was immobilized. He was sickened by a sense of the familiar as some long-imagined scene played out before him. He could see it coming now, that final moment of discovery, when disparate events would inevitably collide and burst upon him.

It was Alexander—Alexander Bonner—slowly turning as he bled, muttering oaths as the howl of approaching sirens grew louder.

Lee drew back, afraid for himself, afraid for his past and for his barren future. His colleagues were indifferent to his private terrors, busy wise-cracking as they began to speculate about motive. Just then, the Minister of Defense strode in. He stopped to watch a few moments before he let out a low whistle.

“Who the fuck’s guys pulled this one off?” the Minister chortled.

His was the line most fascinating to Branko’s team when they began to pore over the Bravo Compartment transcripts in Langley the next afternoon.

M
artin Booth was an amiable soul. Life had granted him more than his share of blessings, he believed—a loving wife and kids, a happy home, and good health. He approached each day fulfilled, driven still to do his good works. The onset of middle age helped him accept his failings and those of his fellow humans. Time had taken an edge off his righteousness, soothing the occasional disappointment. But as Booth sat that April Fool’s Monday in room number 419 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, his irritation with the boss was growing.

Jake Smithson was behind schedule again, and nowhere to be found. Three senators were milling about the dais and General Arno Hollandsworth, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, was sitting ramrod straight at the felt-covered witness table, his hands folded neatly on his papers. The klieg lights were on, warming a cavernous room that already felt stuffy. Senator Landle of Iowa, the committee’s ranking minority member and a man of impeccable manners, was stalling.

“The committee will come to order,” Landle said, gently rapping the base of the wooden gavel. “Good morning, Mr. Secretary. We are pleased to have you with us. I just wanted you to know we will have a brief recess as we await the Chairman, who seems, uh, to have been caught in traffic.”

Landle smiled vacantly, then turned back to Booth in the small staff chair behind him, offering his arched eyebrows in a theatrical scowl.

Booth had spent longer than usual preparing for this Monday morning session, held unusually early to accommodate the administration witness’ flight schedule. Booth was rather proud of Smithson’s opening statement, the intricate traps it laid, the irresistible bait it offered to the press. It was to be a key salvo for the California senator’s new campaign refrain, assailing “an administration adrift.” He’d designed it to underscore a theme Smithson was to use later in the week at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and then with the
New York Times
editorial board.

The goal was to land a punch on the White House during the appearance of the circumspect Hollandsworth. Smithson would have edited the line of questioning by now, absorbed it, made it his own. Barreling in late and rushing through the questioning would take the edge off the ambush.

Typical Smithson. Booth’s loyalty to the man extended beyond the issues, a filial faith from one ever hoping for the best from his adopted hero. Booth had long been the indispensable aide, a surrogate political son to the California senator. Booth had been there for Smithson—from the days of the Iran-contra arms scandals to his recent pointed questioning of the intelligence community about WMD-tracking failures before the invasion of Iraq.

The senator had blistered the White House for “kissing up to China” after Tiananmen; Booth had been the architect of the whole media campaign. The rhetoric was striking in its virulent anti-communist strain, coming as it did from the left. But then China and Taiwan Strait issues always made for strange political bedfellows. The media had loved the counterpoint: a liberal legislator moving to the right of a conservative White House—a senior politician with a high tech constituency who had the balls to put principles ahead of politics. Reporters wrote fawning stories about him with the same cynical subtext: “Honest Man Found in Washington.”

Silicon Valley and the aerospace interests had frowned on Smithson’s human rights crusade, and subsequently played hard-to-get with campaign funds. Then Booth organized the home state trade delegation to the Asian economic summit. That had worked, too. After the release of seven survivors of Tiananmen, Smithson brought all the California high tech execs back to his side through a dramatic switch to support the trade agreement with China. Booth had brokered the prisoner release, a master stroke that enjoyed the quiet cooperation of both Li Jianjun and Mickey Dooley. They had all played their hands brilliantly, as in the Club days of old.

Through it all, Booth had fiercely defended his boss. Booth was the consummate insider who drew great pleasure from his vocation, relishing the exercise of reflected power. But Booth remained troubled by Smithson’s recklessness; the senator’s relentless philandering offended him. Booth’s moralist upbringing, his absolutist sense of right and wrong, made him view Smithson’s flexible version of marital obligation as shallow and distasteful.

Booth’s own very harmonious marriage was a genuine union of spirit. His partnership with Amy stood in such a stark contrast to the private mess of Smithson’s life that the senator’s escapades became an issue for the staffer. Amy was a full-time homemaker, a magna cum laude Penn graduate who had given up her curator’s work with the Smithsonian because she had chosen to be there each day when the school buses rolled up. Late at night, as Booth and Amy talked, both began to dread the coming presidential campaign. Booth confessed to growing doubts he could endure the endless compromises required by the circus ahead.

Booth was a loyalist. But he had such an intimate view of the moral fissure in his boss that, at times, he often wanted to avert his gaze.
How could a leader so brilliant, so gifted at rallying the political center to the justness of a cause, risk so much?
Every time the media sex police exposed and brought down another of the high and mighty, Smithson’s aide cringed, fearing his boss was living on borrowed time.