They Eat Puppies, Don't They? Page 6

“Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  “Her father. Damn it.”

  “Whose father?”

  “The harridan’s.” Angel sighed heavily. “He was wounded at Iwo Jima. Well, that’s just great.”

  “Why did you call her a harridan anyway?”

  “Because she’s undermining the war effort. Do I really need to explain this to you?”

  Bird shrugged. “She seems like a nice person. You can hardly blame her for being upset about losing her son.”

  “She’s an opportunist. She’s making a killing on the lecture circuit.”

  Bird looked at Angel. “Could I suggest that you not say that on TV?”

  “She’s getting twenty-five grand a pop!”

  “Can’t you just say that the harridan comment was taken out of context and move on?”

  “Apologize? I’m not about to apologize to some grandstanding professional mourner—”

  “Just say it’s an emotional issue and we all get a little excited—blah, blah, blah. Her son died in a great cause—blah, blah, blah. In, out. And on to Beijing!”

  “She started it.”

  “Angel. You called her an opportunist for protesting against the war. I’d say you started it.”

  “ ‘Never, ever, ever, ever give in.’ Winston Churchill.”

  “Fine. Call her a whatever. While you’re at it, why not reach across the desk and bitch-slap her? Look, Angel, we need to move on this while our boy’s still in that hospital in Rome. Before long, he’ll be up and out and making huggy with the pope.” Bird paused. “We could say that they were trying to knock off both of them. The Dalai and the pope. Um. The Chinese hate Catholics, you know. They’re always tossing some poor bishop into prison for hearing confessions or handing out a Communion.”

  The car turned a corner. Angel groaned. It was indeed an impressive crowd. Including mounted police.

  “Cops on horseback,” Bird said. “You go, girl.”

  Burka accelerated around the corner and pulled up at the entrance to the basement ramp. A half dozen security guards and police stood by, looking nervous.

  “Templeton?” said a guard with a clipboard.

  Burka nodded.

  “Go on in. We’re trying to keep this entrance clear, but there’s a lot of angry folks here.”

  Angel had her compact open and was applying lipstick. She snapped it shut.

  “Welcome to the Angel Templeton Experience,” she said.

  TWO HOURS LATER she and Bird were back at the Institute for Continuing Conflict. Angel was a bit pale, even beneath the TV makeup that she still had on. She reached into the refrigerator under the wet bar and pulled out a frosted bottle of vodka, filled two glasses halfway, handed one to Bird.

  “For the record, I don’t usually drink this time of day,” she said.

  “You did fine,” Bird said. He sipped his vodka. “Do they normally have that many guards inside the studio?”

  Angel drained her glass. “Ohh. I got really blotto once with the head of Finnish Air Defense. God, Finns can drink. Well, I said what I had to say.”

  “You did. And I must say, it took guts to call her a ‘paid mourner.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen Chris Matthews at an actual loss for words.”

  Angel shook her head. She looked defeated.

  “Maybe you should lie down,” Bird said.

  “I’ve been through a lot worse than that. So you think this poison thing is the way to go?”

  “You know the saying, ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time—and those are the ones you need to concentrate on’? Yeah, I think it’s worth a shot.”

  “Let me talk to my peeps. Obviously, it can’t originate from here.” She considered a moment. “India.”

  “India?”

  “The Indian media will run anything. I’ve been feeding them stuff for years. Once it’s appeared in a newspaper there, then it gets requoted and you’re off and running.”

  Bird smiled. “I feel I’m in the presence of greatness.”

  “Greatness is easy.” Angel grunted. “Removing bloodstains is hard.”

  “Oh. Do you . . . have to do that often?”

  “Barry gets nosebleeds. The pediatrician says he’ll grow out of them. I was up all night with him. Poor baby. It’s scary for him, you know. You want to just hug them and say, ‘There, there, sweetie. It’ll be okay. Momma’s here.’ ”

  Bird was confused. One minute she’s bashing Private Ryan’s mother, the next she’s on the verge of tears about her little boy’s nosebleeds.

  He felt a stirring. She looked very attractive today, softer than her usual self. Feminine, without the show-off miniskirted legs and cleavage.

  The stirring increased. Uh-oh, he thought, and issued a mental cease-and-desist order to the testosterone-generating zone. Emergency shutdown!

  Bird had never cheated on Myndi—well, okay, except for that one scotch-drenched night in Seoul with the woman from the helicopter company. And even if he was tempted by Angel—okay, he was tempted—but even so, he knew perfectly well he was no match for Angel Templeton. She made the man-eating lions of Tsavo look like hamsters. She’d chew him up and spit him out in little balls of gristle.

  “Well,” he said, rising from his chair, “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  Oh, damn. Awk-ward.

  He swiveled to adjust his trousers.

  Embarrassing. Bird felt the blood rushing into his face. At least blushing was drawing it away from other parts.

  He saw from Angel’s bemused, faintly contemptuous look that she’d noticed. And that she was not in the least interested.

  IT WAS HARDLY the first spontaneous erectile hommage that Angel had been tendered. She was an old hand, indeed had been fending off overexcited, panting males for many years. The current fendee was—of all people—Tibor Fanon, one of the ICC’s resident scholars, a brilliant but extremely high-maintenance Hungarian émigré. He’d started sending her inappropriate e-mails. As if she could be attracted to a man thirty years her senior, fifty pounds overweight, with nicotine-stained teeth and badgerlike thickets of ear hair. The very thought of this slobbery Magyar cybergroping her . . . She’d have to do something about it before the annual ICC retreat next month at the Greenbrier. The prospect of him trying to play footsie with her under the conference table in the midst of a session on U.S. naval strategy in the Strait of Hormuz was . . . yucko.

  Ever since her time at the Pentagon, Angel had made it a rule never (again) to have in-house affairs. That resolution came to her one day there when she overheard one secretary gossiping with another and using what was—apparently—Angel’s Pentagon nickname: “Silo.” Silo! Mortifying!

  Now, looking at the crimson-faced Bird as he tried to conceal his woody . . . Angel thought, Oh, please.

  Not that he wasn’t cute. But she had another rule: no lobbyists. Anyway, Bird was married. Angel had done her due diligence. He and the wife lived in some sort of semi-grand house out in Horse-burg, Virginia. The wife was a Muffy. A looker, but right out of Town & Country. Probably wore white gloves during sex.

  Angel could do way better than Bird McIntyre. She’d come close, oh so close—most recently with that deputy secretary of defense, the big venture capitalist from California. Lots of zeros in that portfolio. Billions. The bastard had promised, sworn—four times—that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Angel. Then what happens? Wifey gets cancer. Great. But then he tells her he can’t very well leave the bitch now—how would that look? Dumping her while she’s hooked up to chemo bags and taking off with . . . Silo? He’s going to run for governor someday. Be patient, he says. Let nature take its course. The docs say six months, tops. Then what happens? The bitch recovers! Total remission! And by the way, how come her hair never fell out from chemotherapy? Now she’s back lunching every day at Café Milano. Wolfing down food with the girls.

  “Sorry, what did you say?” Angel said.

  “I said why don’t I let you get to wor
k.”

  “Oh. Yes. No e-mails.”

  “No, absolutely,” Bird said. E-mails were the new herpes: You were never rid of them.

  “No cell phones.”

  Bird nodded. “Strictly landline.”

  They were staring at each other.

  “Okay, then,” Bird said.

  “Okay. See you.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  TWO DAYS LATER the Delhi Beast ran a front-page article below the fold:

  WAS HIS HOLINESS DALAI LAMA

  POISONED BY CHINESE AGENTS?

  Any discerning reader of the article, whose “sources” consisted of anonymous “insiders,” would instantly conclude that the answer was, “Almost certainly not.” But people read the Delhi Beast for entertainment, not news.

  The moment after the story went up on thedelhibeast.com, Bird and Angel threw themselves into work, ensuring that the item would spider its way throughout cyberspace like a rapidly metastasizing tumor. Within hours, world media was abuzz.

  Three days later one of the American television networks couldn’t resist and did a two-and-a-half-minute story on it. The tone was somewhat skeptical. There were comments by a gastroenterologist, a former CIA operative (a “consultant” to the network, which is to say, “paid”). The story duly quoted the indignant denial issued by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, but in such a way as to make it sound defiantly mendacious. The segment ended on a note of seething outrage, supplied by Hollywood actor and Dalai Lama acolyte Branford Dane, wagging a finger at the camera.

  “I have a few words for the Chinese government in Beijing,” he said, “The whole world is watching.”

  CHAPTER 6

  COOL LIMPIDITY

  Fa Mengyao, president of the People’s Republic of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, sat in his office in Zhongnanhai, the leafy, walled enclave north of Tiananmen Square, studying the disturbing report that lay before him on his desk. It was not yet 7:00 a.m., but already he was smoking his fifth cigarette of the day. He rebuked himself. He must cut down—truly.

  Comrade President Fa was of the disidai, the fourth generation of Chinese leaders after Mao Zedong. He was sixty-three years old but could pass for a man of forty. (Mengyao translates roughly as “superior handsomeness,” a name that had occasioned much teasing during his school days.) If his looks were not—to be honest—quite of movie-star quality, Fa was certainly handsome enough, a soft-faced man of mild aspect, who might have spent his entire life inside an office, dealing with nothing more urgent than memoranda and having to lift nothing heavier than a stapler.

  His mind was a marvel to the party leadership and most of the other eight members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Total coal production in Guangxi province between 1996 and 2001? Fa could recite the entire column of figures right off the top of his head. His temperament was equable. No one—even his family—had ever heard him raise his voice. The Guards Division, who undertook the security of top party officials, assigned him the code name Ku Gingche: “Cool Limpidity.” Fa joked to his wife that he would have preferred a more impressive name, such as “Genghis” or “Terrible Immensity.” But either of those would have been an ill fit for Fa Mengyao, who regarded his high position with humbled awe.

  He held no grudges and made it his business to get along with everyone. (Although not every member of the Standing Committee reciprocated.) He shied from fanfare and was a paradigm of self-effacement, a quality greatly favored by the party. On public occasions when his presence front and center was required, he comported himself with reticence and demureness. One party wag went so far as to dub him “The Invisible Man.” This was not much of an exaggeration, for a secret study undertaken by the Central Committee revealed that about 70 percent of the Chinese people did not recognize his photograph. Fa was not entirely displeased when informed of this fact. He derived satisfaction enough from knowing that he was, indisputably, one of the most powerful men in the world, nominal leader of one-fifth of its population. Leader, of course, in consultation with the party—the real and true leader of the People’s Republic of China.

  On this particular morning, however, Fa Mengyao felt neither cool nor limpid as he read the disturbing top-secret paper before him. It had come in overnight, from the head of Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security (MSS).

  Fa read:

  Begin. Story originated in Indian newspaper DELHI BEAST, notorious purveyor of unreliable and often hostile news. Six and Ten Bureaus analyzing. Xinhua has issued formal denial and denunciation. Embassy Washington monitoring American media. Embassy Washington reports US State Department briefers actively downplaying story. Six Bureau Washington reports US intelligence agency involvement “unlikely” but is pursuing. US and world media continuing to play up story. Propaganda Office linking story to Falun Gong and White Lotus elements. End.

  The door opened. Gang, his personal assistant of more than twenty years.

  “Comrade President. Minister Lo has arrived.”

  “Thank you, Gang. Please show him in.”

  Fa stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. Why, he chided himself, had he filled his office with cigarette fumes right before meeting with the minister of state security? Not that Minister Lo Guowei would care an apricot whether or not Fa smoked. However, President Fa had recently unveiled—and with considerable fanfare—his “Four Improvements” campaign. The Fourth Improvement, following the first three—pollution, carpooling, and reporting tax evaders—was “Honor One’s Body and the Party by Ceasing to Smoke!” And Fa knew that Lo Guowei would derive mischievous pleasure from telling his colleagues at the ministry that the president was undertaking the Fourth Improvement with less than total commitment.

  Lo Guowei, whose given name meant “may the country be preserved,” was the most feared person in China, something of an accomplishment in a country of 1.3 billion. In this capacity he was chief policeman, jailer, interrogator, and keeper of state secrets. Fa exercised a certain caution in his dealings with Lo, for one reason above all: Lo had orchestrated the downfall of the previous minister of state security, Admiral Zhang. Years before, Zhang had taken an interest in the promising young deputy Fa Mengyao and had been a mentor to him as Fa rose through party ranks. Fa retained great affection for the old man and despite his ouster had kept in touch—a fact he did not advertise to Lo. Zhang, a man of quiet wisdom and deep humor, privately referred to Lo’s ascent as “The Great Leap Backward.”

  There was this, too: Lo had forged a close relationship with General Han, minister of national defense, China’s top military man. The coarse and untutored Han did not go out of his way to disguise his disdain for Fa, whom he regarded as soft. (In truth, General Han regarded everyone who had not endured actual combat as “soft.”) When Fa was made president and general secretary, it was Han who saw to it that Fa was not also given the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission along with his other titles. “Let Comrade Fa first demonstrate his mettle before being given stewardship of our military.” It was said that Han had even gone so far as to tell a fellow member of the Politburo Standing Committee that Fa had demonstrated “more tin than steel” in recent dealings with the criminal regime in Taiwan and the rebellious elements in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where Fa himself had spent three years as provincial committee secretary and should therefore know better.

  For these reasons Fa felt it prudent to maintain good, if somewhat formal, relations with the ministers of state security and national defense.

  Minister Lo Guowei entered. Fa rose, as was his custom when greeting anyone, whatever his or her rank or position, and came around his desk, smiling, hand extended.

  “Comrade Minister,” he said heartily. “Welcome.”

  “Comrade President.”

  “Well, look at you. Have you lost weight? You look thin. Too thin!”

  Lo Guowei was a heavyset man and therefore not immune to this flattery, especially when the converse was in fa
ct the case. He was a man of well-known appetites.

  Lo patted his stomach dismissively. “My wife feeds me too much and too well.” He pointed at Fa’s ashtray and grinned. “This is why I, too, have not yet taken up the Fourth Improvement.”

  Fa held up his hands in mock surrender. “Did I not say to myself this morning, ‘Foolish fellow, do not smoke until after Minister Lo has come and gone’? So now you have me. Please, Comrade, sit.”

  Lo settled into the overstuffed armchair, a decorative relic of the era of Sino-Soviet entente.

  “You’ve read the report?”

  “I have.” Fa frowned. “An unpleasant business. Who is behind this?” He added, “The Americans?”

  Lo shrugged. “We don’t know—yet. The Americans are usually more subtle with agitprop of this type. Ah, don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough. I assure you, great efforts are being expended.”

  “I have no doubt of that.” Fa nodded. “If only all our ministries were as diligent as yours—I could take every day off and go fishing.”

  Lo had served as chief of Six Bureau (Counterintelligence) in Washington, D.C., for several years. There he had distinguished himself with high-level recruitments, including CIA and State Department. Back in Beijing he had been promoted to head of Four Bureau—Technology, an area in which he took keen interest. It was under his direction that the American Internet company EPIC had been successfully hacked and compromised, resulting in its Russian-born chief, Melnikov, petulantly withdrawing his operations from China. As far as Lo was concerned, this was good riddance. He despised Russians almost as much as he did Taiwanese, Tibetans, and Americans.

  Some months earlier a listening device had been found in Fa’s limousine. What embarrassment! There were urgent meetings, scurryings-about, finger-pointings, and sackings. But under Minister Lo’s calm and resolute direction, Four Bureau concluded that the device was of a type used by the Russians, which almost certainly meant that it had been planted by the Americans, in the hope of implicating Moscow.