The meeting only deteriorated from there. Wei went on the defensive, and by the end of the afternoon he had retreated to his quarters in the compound of Zhongnanhai, knowing that he had overestimated the ability of his fellow Standing Committee members to understand the grave nature of the threat. The men were not listening to his plan; there would be no more discussion of his plan.
He had become secretary and president because he had not joined an alliance, but in those hours of discussions about the grim future of the Chinese economy, he realized he could have done with some friends on the Standing Committee.
As an experienced politician with a strong sense of realpolitik, he knew his chances for saving his own skin in the current political climate were small unless he announced that the growth and prosperity proclaimed by thirty-five years of previous leadership would continue under his leadership. And as a brilliant economist with complete access to the ultra-secret financial ledgers of his country, he knew that prosperity in China was about to grind to a halt, and a reversal of fortune was the only future.
And it was not just the economy. A totalitarian regime could—theoretically, at least—paper over many fiscal problems. To one degree or another this is what he had been doing for years, using massive public-sector projects to stimulate the economy and give an unrealistic impression of its viability.
But Wei knew his nation was sitting on a powder keg of dissent that was growing by the day.
—
Three weeks after the disastrous meeting in Zhongnanhai compound, Wei realized his hold on power was under threat. While on a diplomatic trip to Hungary, one of the Standing Committee members, the director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party, ordered all the state-run media outlets in the nation, as well as CPC-controlled news services abroad, to begin airing reports critical of Wei’s economic leadership. This was unheard of, and Wei was furious. He raced back to Beijing and demanded a meeting with the propaganda director but was told the man was in Singapore until the end of the week. Wei then convened an emergency meeting at Zhongnanhai for the entire twenty-five-member Politburo, but only sixteen members appeared as requested.
Within days, charges of corruption appeared in the media, claims that Wei had abused his power for personal gain while mayor of Shanghai. The charges were corroborated with signed statements by dozens of Wei’s former aides and business associates in China and abroad.
Wei was not corrupt. As the mayor of Shanghai he’d fought corruption wherever he found it, in local business, in the police force, in the party apparatus. In this endeavor he made enemies, and these enemies were only too willing to give false witness against him, especially in cases where the high-ranking coup organizers made offers of political access in return for their statements.
An arrest warrant was issued for the Princeling leader by the Ministry of Public Security, China’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Wei knew exactly what was going on. This was an attempted coup.
The coup came to a head on the morning of the sixth day of the crisis, when the vice president stepped in front of cameras in Zhongnanhai and announced to a stunned international media that until the unfortunate affair involving President Wei was resolved, he would be taking charge of the government. The vice president then announced that the president was, officially, a fugitive from justice.
At the time Wei himself was only four hundred meters away in his living quarters at Zhongnanhai. A few loyalists had rallied at his side, but it seemed as though the tide had turned against him. He was informed by the office of the vice president that he had until ten a.m. the next morning to allow representatives from the Ministry of Public Security into his compound to effect his arrest. If he did not go quietly, he would be taken by force.
Late in the evening on the sixth day Wei finally went on the offensive. He identified those in his party who were conspiring against him, and he convened a secret meeting with the rest of the Politburo Standing Committee. He stressed to the five men who were not conspirators that he considered himself a “first among equals” and, should he remain president and general secretary, he would rule with an eye toward collective leadership. In short, he promised that each and every one of them would have more power than they would have if they put someone else in his place.
His reception from the Standing Committee was cold. It was as if they were looking at a doomed man, and they showed little interest in aligning themselves with him. The second-most-powerful man in China, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Su Ke Qiang, did not say a single word during the meeting.
Throughout the night Wei had no idea if he would be overthrown in the morning—arrested and imprisoned, forced to sign a false confession, and executed. In the predawn hours his future looked even darker. Three of the five PSC members who had yet to commit to the coup sent word that, though they would not encourage his deposal, they did not have the political clout to help him.
At five a.m. Wei met with his staff and told them he would step down for the good of the nation. The Ministry of Public Security was notified that Wei would surrender, and an arrest team was dispatched to Zhongnanhai from the MPS building on East Chang’an Avenue, on the other side of Tiananmen Square.
Wei told them he would go quietly.
But Wei had decided that he would not go quietly.
He would not go at all.
The fifty-four-year-old Princeling had no desire to play the role of a prop in a political theater, used by his enemies as the scapegoat for the country’s downfall.
They could have him in death, they could do with his legacy what they wished, but he would not be around to watch it.
As the police contingent from the Ministry of Public Security drove toward the government compound, Wei spoke to the director of his personal security, and Fung agreed to supply him with a pistol and a tutorial on its use.
—
Wei held the big black QSZ-92 pistol to his head; his hand trembled slightly, but he found himself to be rather composed, considering the situation. As he closed his eyes and began pressing the trigger harder, he felt his tremors increase; the quivering grew in his body, beginning in his feet and traveling upward.
Wei worried he would shake the muzzle off target and miss his brain, so he pressed the gun harder into his temple.
A shout came from the hallway outside his office. It was Fung’s voice, excited.
Curious, Wei opened his eyes.
The office door flew open now, Fung ran in, and Wei’s body shook to the point he worried Fung would see his weakness.
He lowered the gun quickly.
“What is it?” Wei demanded.
Fung’s eyes were wide; he wore an incongruous smile on his face. He said, “General Secretary! Tanks! Tanks in the street!”
Wei lowered the gun carefully. What did this mean? “It’s just MPS. MPS has armored vehicles,” he responded.
“No, sir! Not armored personnel carriers. Tanks! Long lines of tanks coming from the direction of Tiananmen Square!”
“Tanks? Whose tanks?”
“Su! It must be General . . . excuse me, I mean Chairman Su! He is sending heavy armor to protect you. The MPS won’t dare arrest you in defiance of the PLA. How can they?”
Wei could not believe this turn of events. Su Ke Qiang, the Princeling four-star PLA general and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and one of the men he had made a direct appeal to the evening before, had come to his aid at the last possible moment.
The president of China and the general secretary of the CPC slid the pistol across the desk to his principal protection agent. “Major Fung . . . It appears I will not be needing this today. Take it from me before I hurt myself.”
Fung took the pistol, engaged the safety, and slid it into the holster on his hip. “I am very relieved, Mr. Presi
dent.”
Wei did not think that Fung really cared whether he lived or died, but in this heady moment the president stood and shook his bodyguard’s hand anyway.
Any allies, even conditional allies, were worth having on a day like this.
Wei looked out the window of his office now, across the compound and to a point in the distance beyond the walls of Zhongnanhai. Tanks filled the streets, armed People’s Liberation Army troops walked in neat rows alongside the armor, their rifles in the crooks of their arms.
As the rumbling of the approaching tanks shook the floor and rattled books, fixtures, and furniture in the office, Wei smiled, but his smile soon wavered.
“Su?” he said to himself in bewilderment. “Of all people to save me . . . why Su?”
But he knew the answer. Though Wei was happy and thankful for the intervention of the military, he realized, even in those first moments, that his survival made him weaker, not stronger. There would be a quid pro quo.
For the rest of his rule, Wei Zhen Lin knew, he would be beholden to Su and his generals, and he knew exactly what they wanted from him.
FIVE
John Clark stood at his kitchen sink; he looked out the window and watched mist form in his back pasture as a gray afternoon turned into a grayer evening. He was alone, for a few minutes more anyway, and he decided he could put off no longer what he’d been dreading all day.
Clark and his wife, Sandy, lived in this farmhouse on fifty acres of rolling fields and forestland in Frederick County, Maryland, close to the Pennsylvania state line. Farm life was still new to John; just a few years ago the thought of himself as a country gentleman sipping iced tea on his back porch would have made him either chuckle or cringe.
But he loved his new place, Sandy loved it even more, and John Patrick, his grandson, absolutely adored his visits out to the country to see Grandpa and Grandma.
Clark wasn’t one for lengthy reflection; he preferred to live in the moment. But as he surveyed his property and thought about the task at hand, he did have to admit that he had managed to put together a good personal life for himself.
But now it was time to see if his professional life was over.
It was time to remove his bandages and test the function of his wounded hand.
Again.
Eight months earlier his hand had been broken—no, his hand had been shattered—by unskilled but energetic torturers in a seedy warehouse in the Mitino district of northwest Moscow. He’d suffered nine fractures to bones in his fingers, palm, and wrist, and had spent much of his time since the injury either preparing for or recovering from three surgeries.
He was two weeks post his fourth time under the knife, and today was the first day his surgeon would allow him to test the strength and mobility of the appendage.
A quick look at the clock on the wall told him that Sandy and Patsy would be home in a few minutes. His wife and his daughter had driven together to Westminster for groceries. They told him to wait on the function test of his hand until they returned, so they could be present. They claimed they wanted to be there to celebrate his recovery with dinner and wine, but John knew the real reason: They did not want him going through this alone. They were worried about a poor outcome, and they wanted to be close for moral support if he was not able to move his fingers any better than he could before surgery.
He agreed to their request at the time, but now he realized he needed to do this by himself. He was too anxious to wait, he was too proud to strain and struggle in front of his wife and daughter, but more than this, he knew he would need to push himself much further than his daughter, the doctor, or his wife, the nurse, would allow.
They were worried he might hurt himself, but John wasn’t worried about pain. He’d learned to process pain better than almost anyone in the world. No, John worried he might fail. He’d do whatever he physically could to avoid it, and he had a feeling it would not be pretty to watch. He’d test his strength and mobility by pushing himself as far as humanly possible.
Standing at the kitchen counter, he unwrapped his bandages and removed the small metal splints from between his fingers. Turning away from the window, he left the dressings on the counter and moved to the living room. There he sat on his leather chair and raised his hand to examine it. The surgical scars, both new and old, were small and not particularly dramatic, but he knew they belied the incredible damage done to his hand. His orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins was regarded as one of the best in the world, and he had performed the surgery through tiny incisions, using laparoscopic cameras and fluoroscopic images to help him find his way to the damaged bones and scar tissue.
John knew that even though his hand did not look too bad, his chances for a complete recovery were less than fifty percent.
Perhaps if the blunt trauma had been just a little higher on the hand, then the joints of the fingers would have less scar tissue, the doctors had said. Perhaps if he had been a little younger, his ability to heal would be enough to ensure a complete recovery, they hinted without saying.
John Clark knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about either issue.
He pushed the poor prognosis out of his mind and steeled himself for success.
He picked a racquetball off the coffee table in front of him and he looked it over—his eyes fixed with resolve.
“Here we go.”
Clark slowly began closing his fingers around the ball.
Almost immediately he realized he was still unable to completely mobilize his index finger.
His trigger finger.
Shit.
Both the proximal and middle phalanx bones had been virtually crushed by the torturer’s hammer, and the interphalangeal joint, already slightly arthritic from a lifetime of trigger pulling, was now severely damaged.
As his other fingertips pressed into the little blue ball, his trigger finger merely twitched.
He pushed this setback, and the sharp burning sensation that came with it, out of his mind and squeezed harder.
It hurt more. He grunted with the pain but kept trying to crush the little racquetball in his fist.
His thumb seemed as good as new, his last two fingers compressed the ball nicely, and his middle finger formed around it, its mobility restored by the surgery, though it did not seem to retain much strength.
He squeezed tighter on the ball, and a sharp ache in the back of his hand grew. Clark winced, but squeezed harder. The index finger had stopped twitching and relaxed, the frail muscles exhausted, and it went almost ramrod straight.
His hand hurt from the wrist all the way to his fingertips while he squeezed now.
He could live with the pain, and he could live with a slight lack of grip strength.
But the trigger finger was all but nonfunctional.
John relaxed his hand and the pain lessened. Sweat had formed on his forehead and around his collar.
The ball dropped to the hardwood floor and bounced across the room.
Yes, this was just his first test after the surgery, but he knew. He knew without a doubt that his hand would never be the same.
John’s right hand was damaged now, but he knew he could shoot a gun left-handed. Every Navy SEAL, and every CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary operations officer, spends more time on weak-hand shooting than most law enforcement officers do on strong-hand shooting, and John had spent nearly forty years as either a SEAL or a CIA operator. Weak-hand fire was necessary training for every shooter, because every shooter ran a real risk of getting wounded on or near his gun hand.
There is a widely held theory behind this phenomenon. When faced with the imminent danger of a gunfight, a potential victim tends to focus acutely on that which is threatening him. Not just the threat of the attacker, but the threat of the weapon itself. The little fire-breathing, lead-spitting tool tha
t is trying to reach out and rip the intended victim apart. For this reason it is disproportionately common for people involved in gunfights to take damage to their dominant firing hand or arm. The other gunfighter is looking at and focusing on the gun as he fires back, so it only stands to reason that much of his fire is directed right at the gun itself.
Weak-hand shooting is, therefore, an absolutely crucial skill to develop by anyone who might find him- or herself up against an armed opponent.
Clark knew he could fire a gun accurately again with his left hand if he stepped up his practice.
But it wasn’t just the hand. It was the rest of him, too.
“You’re old, John,” he said to himself as he stood up and walked out to the back porch. He looked out on the pasture again, watched the mist roll across the dewy grass, saw a red fox dart out of the trees and race across open ground. Pooled rainwater splashed into the air behind it as it skittered back into the forest.
Yeah, Clark told himself. He was old for operational work.
But not that old. John was roughly the same age as both Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, and they were still going strong in careers that required no small amount of physicality, even if there was no danger involved. And he’d recently read an article in the paper about a sixty-year-old Marine staff sergeant fighting in Afghanistan, walking daily mountain patrols in enemy territory with men young enough to be his grandchildren.
John thought he’d love to drink a beer with that guy, two tough sons of bitches sharing stories about the old days.
Age is just a number, John had always said.
But the body? The body was real, and as the number of years ticked ever higher, the mileage put on a man in John Clark’s profession wore the body down as certainly as a swiftly moving stream cuts a depression through a valley. Springsteen and Stallone and the other geezers out there jumping around for a living had jobs that did not require one-fiftieth the hardship that Clark had endured, and no amount of rationalizing could change that.