He kissed his wife on the way out the door, promising to bring back things for the kids, as he always did, and lugging his travel bag out to his one personal indulgence, a red Mercedes two-seater, which he then drove south to the D.C. Beltway and south again toward Andrews Air Force Base. He had to arrive early, because the Air Force had gotten overly security-conscious. Maybe it was from that dumb-ass movie that had had terrorists getting past all the armed guards-even though they were merely Air Force, not Marines, they did carry rifles, and they did at least appear to be competent-and aboard one of the 89th Military Airlift Wing’s aircraft, which, Wise figured, was about as likely as having a pickpocket walk into the Oval Office and lift the President’s wallet. But the military followed its own rules, senseless though they might be-that was something he remembered well from his time in the Corps. So, he’d drive down, pass through all the checkpoints, whose guards knew him better than they knew their own CO, and wait in the plush Distinguished Visitors’ lounge at the end of Andrews’ Runway Zero-One Left for the official party to arrive. Then they’d board the venerable VC- 137 for the endless flight to Beijing. The seats were as comfortable as they could be on an airplane, and the service was as good as any airline’s first class, but flights this long were never fun.
“Never been there before,” Mark Gant said, answering George Winston’s question. “So-what’s the score on this Rutledge guy?”
The SecTreas shrugged. “Career State Department puke, worked his way pretty far up the ladder. Used to have good political connections-he was tight with Ed Kealty once upon a time.”
The former stock TRADER looked up. “Oh? Why hasn’t Ryan fired his ass?”
“Jack doesn’t play that sort of game,” Winston replied, wondering if in this case principle was getting in the way of common sense.
“George, he’s still pretty naive, isn’t he?”
“Maybe so, but he’s a straight shooter, and I can live with that. He sure as hell backed us up on tax policy, and that’s going to pass through Congress in another few weeks.”
Cant wouldn’t believe that until he saw it. “Assuming every lobbyist in town doesn’t jump in front of the train.”
That engendered an amused grunt. “So, the wheels get greased a little better. You know, wouldn’t it be nice to close all those bastards down…
George, Cant couldn’t say in this office, if you believe that, you’ve been hanging out with the President too long. But idealism wasn’t all that bad a thing, was it?
“I’ll settle for squeezing those Chinese bastards on the trade balance. Ryan’s going to back us up?”
“All the way, he says. And I believe him, Mark.”
“I guess we’ll see. I hope this Rutledge guy can read numbers.”
“He went to Harvard,” Secretary Winston observed.
“I know’ Cant said back. He had his own academic prejudice, having graduated from the University of Chicago twenty years earlier. What the hell was Harvard except a name and an endowment?
Winston chuckled. “They’re not all dumb.”
“I suppose we’ll see, boss. Anyway”-he lifted his suitcase up on its rollers; his computer bag went over his shoulder-”my car’s waiting downstairs.”
“Good trip, Mark.”
Her name was Yang Lien-Hua. She was thirty-four, nine months pregnant, and very frightened. It was her second pregnancy. Her first had been a son whom they had named Ju-Long, a particularly auspicious given name, which translated roughly as Large Dragon. But the youngster had died at the age of four, bumped by a bicycle off the sidewalk into the path of a passenger bus. His death had devastated his parents, and even saddened the local Communist Party officials who’d officiated at the inquest, which had absolved the bus driver of guilt and never identified the careless bicyclist. The loss has been sufficiently hard on Mrs. Yang that she’d sought comfort in a way that this country’s government did not especially approve.
That way was Christianity, the foreign religion despised in fact if not exactly in law. In another age she might have found solace in the teachings of Buddha or Confucius, but these, too, had been largely erased from the public consciousness by the Marxist government, which still regarded all religion as a public narcotic. A co-worker had quietly suggested that she meet a “friend” of hers, a man named Yu Fa An. Mrs. Yang had sought him out, and so had begun her first adventure in treason.
Reverend Yu, she found, was a well-educated and -traveled man, which added to his stature in her eyes. He was also a fine listener, who attended to her every word, occasionally pouring her some sympathetic tea, and gently touching her hand when tears streamed down her face. Only when she had finished her tale of woe had he begun his own lessons.
Ju-Long, he told her, was with God, because God was especially solicitous to the needs of innocent children. While she could not see her son at this moment, her son could see her, looking down from Heaven, and while her sorrow was completely understandable, she should believe that the God of the Earth was a God of Mercy and Love who had sent his Only Begotten Son to earth to show mankind the right path, and to give His own life for the sins of humanity. He handed her a Bible printed in the Gouyu, the national language of the PRC (also called Mandarin), and helped her find appropriate passages.
It had not been easy for Mrs. Yang, but so deep was her grief that she kept returning for private counseling, finally bringing along her husband, Quon. Mr. Yang proved a harder sell on any religion. He’d served his time in the People’s Liberation Army, where he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of his nation, and done sufficiently well in his test answers to be sent off to sergeant school, for which political reliability was required. But Quon had been a good father to his little Large Dragon, and he, too, found the void in his belief system too large to bridge easily. This bridge the Reverend Yu provided, and soon both of the Yangs came to his discreet church services, and gradually they’d come to accept their loss with confidence in the continued life of Ju-Long, and the belief that they would someday see him again in the presence of an Almighty God, whose existence became increasingly real to both of them.
Until then, life had to go on. Both worked at their jobs, as factory workers in the same factory, with a working-class apartment in the Di’Anmen district of Beijing near Jingshan-Coal Hill-Park. They labored at their factory during the day, watched state-run television at night, and in due course, Lien-Hua became pregnant again.
And ran afoul of the government’s population-control policy that was well to the left of draconian. It had long since been decreed that any married couple could have but one child. A second pregnancy required official government permission. Though this was not generally denied to those whose first child had died, pro forma permission had to be obtained, and in the case of politically unacceptable parents, this permission was generally withheld as a method of controlling the living population, as well. That meant that an unauthorized pregnancy had to be terminated. Safely, and at state expense in a state hospital-but terminated.
Christianity translated exactly into political unreliability for the communist government, and unsurprisingly the Ministry of State Security had inserted intelligence officers into Reverend Yu’s congregation. This individual-actually there were three, lest one be corrupted by religion and become unreliable himself-had entered the names of the Yangs on a master list of political unreliables. For that reason, when Mrs. Yang Lien-Hua had duly registered her pregnancy, an official letter had appeared in her box, instructing her to go to the Longfu Hospital located on Meishuguan Street for a therapeutic abortion.
This Lien-Hua was unwilling to do. Her given name translated as “Lotus Flower,” but inside she was made of much sterner stuff. She wrote a week later to the appropriate government agency, telling them that her pregnancy had miscarried. Given the nature of bureaucracies, her lie was never checked out.
That lie had merely won Lotus Flower six months of ever-increasing stress. She never saw a physician, not even one of the “barefoot medics” that the PRC had invented a generation earlier, much to the admiration of political leftists all over the world. Lien-Hua was healthy and strong, and the human body had been designed by Nature to produce healthy offspring long before the advent of obstetricians. Her swelling belly she was able to hide, mostly, in her ill-fitting clothing. What she could not hide-at least from herself-was her inward fear. She carried a new baby in her belly. She wanted it. She wanted to have another chance at motherhood. She wanted to feel her child suckling at her breast. She wanted to love it and pamper it, watch it learn to crawl and stand and walk and talk, to see it grow beyond four years, enter school, learn and grow into a good adult of whom she could be proud.