Page 26 of Air Force One
Thoughtful and sad, perhaps even the frisson of fear, he might have recognized. But he’d never understand the resignation to an unstoppable future or the silent tears for all that was lost no matter how she tried to hold on.
The commentator on the television had still found nothing useful to add to the new American President’s speech.
21
Wang Daiyu eased out of her bed and moved to the living room shutting the door quietly behind her. She could never sleep after sex, especially good sex. Tonight she felt supercharged as the sex had been particularly excellent.
Over these last months she had developed a simple routine. Once he slept, she would turn on the world news in the other room and do her yoga. Eleven at night in Beijing was ten a.m. in Washington, DC, and midday in Europe, so the news was rarely dull.
Daiyu could have been a world-class athlete in a different culture. But she’d had a bad cold on the one day the scout had come to their village and tested all the children. Her four-year-old underperformance that single day had relegated her to a life on a floundering collective farm fifty kilometers from the bitterly cold northern city of Yichun.
Refusing to accept such a fate, she began training herself for the military the next day and joined the Red Scarves of the Young Pioneers of China on her sixth birthday. On her fourteenth birthday she signed up for the Communist Youth League of China and at eighteen the PLA. Once away from Yichun, she’d never gone back.
After joining the People’s Liberation Army, she’d fought for every step up that ladder as well. She’d excelled by being smart about when to pretend stupidity. And she’d never neglected her body. It was the latter, as a title-winning ultra-marathoner for the PLA, that won her promotions by her commanders. It was the former that brought her to the attention of Liú Zuocheng, the vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and the second most powerful man in China.
She’d been striving for a position in the CMC’s Falcon Commandos. They were the elite, direct-action team who answered to the CMC—and no one else. She’d outcompeted the few women and many of the men physically, but all her training would not have been enough—had she not placed first in every intelligence test.
Daiyu was sent through the full training course and only learned afterward that she was not to join Falcon but rather become the vice chairman’s personal operative. He sent her into ever more challenging situations until he trusted her independent decisions to consistently serve his goals.
Only once had the assignment been a hardship. Her infiltration into General Zhang Ru’s household as a spy through the expedience of an arranged marriage had been hell—useful, but awful. In recompense, Zuocheng had allowed her to administer the coup de grâce and literally burn out the man’s black soul. With his death, she’d set that time firmly behind her.
Very tall for a Chinese woman at a hundred and sixty-two centimeters, she was precisely average for a Western woman: five-foot-four. The few times she had traveled to the West, she’d felt strangely small, as she normally towered over most other Chinese women and many of the men. Thankfully, her Manchu features were not as sharp as some, allowing her to pass as Han. No Manchu would be trusted by a Han—not after the tiny Manchu minority had ruled them for the three centuries before Mao’s revolution. No one would tolerate her rising to power, except for another outsider like Chairman Liú—Han but from as desperately a remote origin as hers. He alone knew her true heritage.
Here, in her apartment, she felt tall as she rose on her toes and reached for the sky to start her first Sun Salutation. Having left the warm bed, her bare skin prickled slightly in the cool apartment. She liked it that way and her lover seemed to enjoy the reminder of his own hardscrabble youth, never touching the thermostat or covering himself. On the rare occasions General Zuocheng didn’t fall asleep afterward, he would follow her from the bedroom to sit in the armchair and watch her exercise. He never interrupted, but he did enjoy watching. Always a very private person, she didn’t mind it from him. Not with the way their relationship had begun.
She smiled as she thought over how they had come to be more than master and field operative.
Their first real conversation had been a simple sharing of tea and discussing her eclectic collection of books upon her return from a particularly trying yet remarkably successful mission to investigate a plane crash in Antarctica. They discovered a shared passion for unearthing possible modern applications of traditional political and military wisdom.
From that day, they’d approached it together with the care and attention to detail of archeologists. Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Mo Di, and others fell to their debates over successive quiet teas on stolen afternoons. Soon he was encouraging her to refute his own policy decisions—not to change them as they rarely disagreed—but to hone them until sharper than a Mongol horseman’s spear. When one or the other of them hadn’t read a particular text, the other gifted it to them so that they could study it together.
One day he had gifted her a book they had not previously discussed. Also unusually, he had wrapped it. Open it after I leave, consider it, and let me know if you wish to discuss it.
It was a very old copy of Su Nü Jing–Classic of the White Goddess. A brief manuscript written nearly two thousand years ago, perhaps during the dynasty of the Three Kingdoms. It promised the teachings of three goddesses on the purpose and methods of Taoist sex. She didn’t open the text to read it, instead she waited.
Upon his next visit, after they had sat over tea dissecting a particular paragraph the Confucian philosopher Mencius had scribed three hundred years BCE, she opened the Classic of the White Goddess and read the first of the flirting movements aloud. Then she closed the book. They discussed the section at length and in tantalizing detail. Over the next months, they worked through the twenty paragraphs on flirting. As world events shifted, their primary focus remained on political discussions. But when she felt they had strayed too long afield, she would open the White Goddess’s book and read aloud the next section for consideration.
Each of the twenty-four tricks of intimacy they studied much more carefully and at quite some length before moving to the next.
After the seven Losses and upon reaching the second Benefit, an afternoon, even a long one, proved insufficient for their mutual study. Zuocheng’s wife, who had never been much of a factor, was returned to the distant countryside from which she and Zuocheng had both come. After that, their mutual explorations often continued long into the night. His large home felt too expansive, as if filled with ghosts. Enjoying her place in his bed, she’d been reluctant to mention the sensation. But when they reached the peculiar section of cautions about having sex with ghosts, she included her response to his home in the discussion. When she had, he hadn’t questioned or doubted. They had simply returned to spending their nights together in her small one-bedroom apartment whenever he could manage a visit and she was not off on an assignment.
Her body hummed as she shifted into Tree Pose, one heel placed high on her opposite thigh and both arms stretched to the sky. She could balance on her flat foot for five, even ten minutes. Zuocheng had initially observed that pose while looking at his watch. She had considered it a yogic triumph when he had finally set the watch aside and simply enjoyed the form her long body created. The time she slowly rose to her toes and managed to hold balance there, he had stood and applauded.
Tonight, they had combined the Third Method described by Xuannü the Black Woman with Daiyu’s yogic Setu Bandhasana Bridge Pose. The results had been revelatory. In honor, she again rose to her toes and held her Tree Pose far longer than ever before, maintaining her center well past when her leg trembled from the strain. Zuocheng would be very sorry to have missed his chance to witness that from his comfortable armchair, but he had earned his rest most thoroughly this night.
As she settled to a flat foot before switching to raise the other, the bright red flash on the screen drew her attention.
Breaking News.
22
Liú Zuocheng woke from a dream of glory only to discover it was real.
Wang Daiyu leaned over him, her fine, high breasts such a perfect balance above her trim waist and ribs. Even the accent of her strong shoulders enhanced their ideal shape and balance. The slightest mismatch only emphasized their beauty. She kept her black hair at chin length so that its slight Manchu curliness remained hidden. Personally, he deeply appreciated her keeping it short so that he might always see the curve of her neck and her unusually high cheekbones. Tonight it shadowed her face as she leaned over him, lit only by the flickering light of the television from the other room. He slid his hand out from under the blanket to run it up her warm thigh.
“You’ve been exercising without me.”
“There is something you need to see.”
