He was certain that Li, and possibly Natasha as well, were laughing at him on their nights out, as if he were an animal they constantly taunted through the bars of his cage.
The light of the bedside clock penetrated his eyelids. Barely an hour since he had returned from his 4 am rendezvous with Li at the restaurant in Chinatown. The General Tso’s chicken lay in his stomach like a ball of wax, unmoving and indigestible.
He turned once more, then rolled to the side of the bed and sat up. Today there was to be no respite in sleep, no way out of the noose tightening inexorably around him. Of course, he could ask Soraya for immunity from the coming phone hacking tsunami, but that would mean crawling back to her on his knees, groveling like the basest supplicant. He would be in her power forever, and he knew from bitter experience that she could be merciless when she felt she had been wronged. But what if she was his only recourse? Li had made noises about helping him, but he’d rather be tied to a third rail than be in that bastard’s debt.
No, he thought now, as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, Soraya was his last best hope of getting out of the water before the Justice Department investigation sank all boats.
Then he remembered that she was in the hospital, that she was carrying his baby, and all at once, the General Tso’s chicken moved inside him in an altogether unpleasant manner.
He jumped up, and, sprinting, just made it across his bedroom, over the bathroom tiles, to the toilet before vomiting with such force that he felt as if his intestines had turned inside out.
Li Wan, luxuriating between the impossibly long legs of Natasha Illion, picked up his enciphered mobile and pressed one button. The sounds on the line went immediately hollow as the call was shunted through a series of encrypted substations that hopscotched across the country, across the Pacific, at last ping-ponging dizzily through a cluster of top secret listening posts within Beijing. The offices of the State Administration of Grain were housed in the massive Guohong Building in the Central Government District. Though the top three floors bore the same SAG logo, none of its workers on the floors below were allowedaccess.Therewasaseparateelevatorthatrosefromthecolossal lobby to those top three floors without stopping at the intervening levels. As far as the workers below were concerned, those floors above them housed the offices of the ministers who directed the State Administration of Grain, connected directly to the Politburo itself. No one harbored a desire to go up there; in fact, for them it did not exist.
But for Li Wan, and people like him, those floors were all that existed in the Guohong Building. Their interests did not include grain production, quotas, or yearly allocations. The final destination of the call he initiated that morning in Washington, between Natasha Illion’s silky legs, was a vast office on the very top floor of the Guohong Building.
It was 6 pm in Beijing, but the hour of night or day was of no import, as that office, those three floors, in fact, were fully manned 24/7.
The High Minister stood at the edge of an immense open-plan room whose fifteen hundred computers, linked through a proprietary intranet, were manned by youngsters ranging in age from ten to nineteen. These youngster were hackers all, handpicked by the Chinese military, and their sole job was to hack through the firewalls and intranets of foreign governments and multinationals supplying foreign governments and militaries with cutting-edge weaponry and technologies. To do this, they were broken up into cadres, each one working on the next generation of Trojans, worms, and viruses, be they Stuxnet, Ginjerjar, or Stikyfingers. Anyone trying to backtrace the origins of these attacks would, after a long, arduous search, find that the ISP number belonged to Fi Xu Lang, a disgraced economics professor in a backwater village in Guangdong Province.
The Minister felt an unalloyed sense of pride at the operation that he himself had argued for and set up. The intelligence stolen from a variety of sources had already proved highly valuable to his friend General Hwang Liqun and the rest of the Chinese military.
The Minster felt the vibration of his mobile phone and went out of the cyber sweatshop, down to the far end of the hall, and into his office. He sat behind an ebony-wood desk, inlaid with elephant ivory, that was entirely clear of clutter. There was a rank of six corded phones on one side, a paperweight made of a thick chunk of rhino horn adorning the other side. In front of him was an open dossier marked top secret. The Minister, perhaps fifty, was possessed of the long, elegant face of a conductor or a choreographer. His black hair was slicked back from his wide, intelligent forehead. His hands, long and spidery-thin, were as carefully groomed as his hair and face. As he answered his mobile, he stared at a photo stapled to the inside cover of the dossier. He waited patiently as Li Wan’s call was routed to one of his phones. He held the phone to his ear without letting his gaze leave the photo, which was a black-and-white surveillance snapshot made with a long lens.
As soon as the encrypted connection opened, he said, “Speak.” His voice was high and keening, like that of a child being punished.
“Minister Ouyang, there has been a significant development.”
Ouyang’s eyelids dropped halfway. He was imagining the room his agent was calling from. It was five in the morning along America’s East Coast. He wondered whether Li Wan was alone or with his longlegged girlfriend.
“This could have a positive or negative impact on my evening, Li. What is it?”
“Through the auspices of stupidity, we have been given an extraordinary opportunity.”
“With Mr. Thorne?”
“Yes.”
“He and his coven of executives at Politics As Usual have been caught in a phone-hacking scandal that netted them some extraordinary exclusives over the past nineteen months, boosting their bottom line, but leaving them open to investigation by the American Justice Department.”
“This is not unknown to me.” In fact, Ouyang had a contact inside Justice. “Please continue, Citizen Li.”
“From day one, my mission in establishing a mutual conduit with Charles Thorne has been to get to his wife.”
“As chair of the newly formed Homeland Strategic Appropriations Committee, Senator Ann Ring is of extraordinary importance to us.” Ouyang kept staring at the photo, as if trying to unlock the secrets inside the brain of the man caught by one of his surveillance teams. Then he said pointedly, “So far, however, you have failed to engage her on any level apart from the superficial.”
“That time is at an end,” Li said. “Thorne’s back is against the wall. He needs my—our—help. I believe now is the time to extend our hand to support him in his hour of need.”
Ouyang grunted softly, delicately. “In return for what?”
“In return for Senator Ann Ring.”
“I was under the impression—an impression you gave me, I might remind you—that Thorne’s marital relationship is not all it might be, all it should be.”
The insane implication, via the stressed word, was that the couple’s personal troubles were somehow Li’s fault. This was Minister Ouyang through and through. Li set his mind to navigating the increasingly choppy waters.
“That slight estrangement will now work in our favor,” Li said.
Ouyang, running his fingertips ever so lightly over the face of the man in the photo, said, “Please explain.”
“If Thorne and Ann Ring were closer, I feel certain he would have confided in her about the impending investigation. He has told me nothing could be further from the truth. But if I—we—can provide him with a way out, a method of inoculating and indemnifying himself against implication, he would be grateful—and so would she.