“Excellent. In addition to my duties, I would like to play tourist.”
“I hope you will find us acceptable hosts,” the little guy said. For his part, Gant was wondering if this smiling, bowing dwarf would hit his knees and offer a blow job, but diplomacy was an entirely new area for him. These were not investment bankers, who were generally polite sharks, giving you good food and drink before sitting you down and trying to bite your dick off. But they never concealed the fact that they were sharks. These people-he just wasn’t sure. This degree of politeness and solicitude was a new experience for Gant, but given his pre-mission brief, he wondered if the hospitality only presaged an unusually hostile meeting when they got to business. If the two things had to balance out, then the downside of this seesaw was going to be a son of a bitch, he was sure.
“So, you are not from the American State Department?” the Chinese man asked.
“No. I’m in the Department of the Treasury. I work directly for Secretary Winston.”
“Ah, then you are from the trading business?”
So, the little bastard’s been briefed… But that was to be expected. At this level of government you didn’t freelance things. Everyone would be thoroughly briefed. Everyone would have read the book on the Americans. The State Department members of the American crew had done the same. Gant, however, had not, since he wasn’t really a player per Se, and had only been told what he needed to know. That gave him an advantage over the Chinese assigned to look after him. He was not State Department, hence should not have been regarded as important-but he was the personal representative of a very senior American official, known to be part of that man’s inner circle, and that made him very important indeed. Perhaps he was even a principal adviser to the Rutledge man-and in a Chinese context, that might even mean that he, Gant, was the man actually running the negotiations rather than the titular chief diplomat, because the Chinese often ran things that way. It occurred to Gant that maybe he could fuck with their minds a little bit…, but how to go about it?
“Oh, yes, I’ve been a capitalist all my life,” Gant said, deciding to play it cool and just talk to the guy as though he were a human being and not a fucking communist diplomat. “So has Secretary Winston, and so has our President, you know.”
“But he was mainly an intelligence officer, or so I have been told.”
Time to stick the needle: “I suppose that’s partly true, but his heart is in business, I think. After he leaves government service, he and George will probably go into business together and really take the world over.” Which was almost true, Gant thought, remembering that the best lies usually were.
“And you have worked some years with Secretary Winston.” A statement rather than a question, Gant noted. How to answer it? How much did they really know about him…, or was he a man of mystery to the ChiComms? If so, could he make that work for him…?
A gentle, knowing smile. “Well, yeah, George and I made a little money together. When Jack brought him into the cabinet, George decided that he wanted me to come down with him and help make a little government policy. Especially tax policy. That’s been a real mess, and George turned me loose on it. And you know? We just might get all of that changed. It looks as though Congress is going to do what we told them to do, and that’s not bad, making those idiots do what we want them to do,” Gant observed, looking rather deliberately at the carved ivory fixture on the wooden display cabinet. Some craftsman with a sharp knife had spent a lot of time to get that thing just right… So, Mr. Chinaman, do I look important now? One thing about this guy. He would have been a pretty good poker player. His eyes told you nothing at all. Not a fucking thing. Gant looked down at the guy again. “Excuse me. I talk too much.”
The official smiled. “There is much of that at times like this. Why do you suppose everyone gets something to drink?” Amusement in his voice, letting Gant know, perhaps, who was really running this affair…?
“I suppose,” Gant observed diffidently and wandered off with the junior-or was he?-official in tow.
For his part, Rutledge was trying to decide if the opposition knew what his instructions were. There had been a few leaked hints in the media, but Adler had arranged the leaks with skill, so that even a careful observer-and the PRC ambassador in Washington was one of those-might have trouble deciding who was leaking what, and to what purpose. The Ryan administration had utilized the press with a fair degree of skill, probably, Rutledge thought, because the cabinet officers mainly took their lead from Ryan’s chief of staff, Arnie van Damm, who was a very skillful political operator. The new cabinet didn’t have the usual collection of in-and-out political figures who needed to stroke the press to further their own agendas. Ryan had chiefly selected people with no real agenda at all, which was no small feat-especially since most of them seemed to be competent technicians who, like Ryan, only seemed to want to escape Washington with their virtue intact and return to their real lives as soon as they finished serving their country for a short period of time. The career diplomat had not thought it possible that his country’s government could be so transformed. He assigned credit for all this to that madman Japanese pilot who’d killed so much of official Washington in that one lunatic gesture.
It was then that Xu Kun Piao showed up, sweeping in to the greeting room with his official entourage. Xu was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Chinese Politburo, though referred to in the media as the country’s “Premier,” which was something of a misnomer, but one adopted even in the diplomatic community. He was a man of seventy-one years, one of the second generation of Chinese leaders. The Long March survivors had long since died out-there were some senior officials who claimed to have been there, but a check of the numbers showed that if they had, they’d been sucking their mothers’ nipples at the time, and those men were not taken seriously. No, the current crop of Chinese political leaders were mainly the sons or nephews of the original set, raised in privilege and relative comfort, but always mindful of the fact that their place in life was a precarious one. On one side were the other political children who craved advancement beyond their parents’ places, and to achieve that they’d been more Catholic than the local communist pope. They’d carried their Little Red Books high as adults during the Cultural Revolution, and before that they’d kept their mouths shut and ears open during the abortive and predatory “Hundred Flowers” campaign of the late ‘50s, which had trapped a lot of intellectuals who’d thought to keep hidden for the first decade of Maoist rule. They’d been enticed into the open by Mao’s own solicitation for their ideas, which they’d foolishly given out, and in the process only extended their necks over the broad block for the axe that fell a few years later in the brutal, cannibalistic Cultural Revolution.
The current Politburo members had survived in two ways. First, they’d been secured by their fathers and the rank that attached to such lofty parentage. Second, they’d been carefully warned about what they could say and what they could not say, and so all along they’d observed cautiously, always saying out loud that Chairman Mao’s ideas were those which China really needed, and that the others, while interesting, perhaps, in a narrow intellectual sense, were dangerous insofar as they distracted the workers and peasants from The True Way of Mao. And so when the axe had fallen, borne as it had been by the Little Red Book, they’d been among the first to carry and show that book to others, and so escaped the destruction for the most part-a few of their number had been sacrificed, of course, but none of the really smart ones who now shared the seats on the Politburo. It had been a brutal Darwinian process that they had all gotten through by being a little smarter than those around them, and now, at the peak of the power won for them by brains and caution, it was time for them to enjoy that which they’d earned.