Page 45 of Air Force One
By the time he’d convinced himself of his fellow commission members’ innocence, Wang Daiyu was waiting outside his office. It gave him pause—which he was careful not to reveal even to her. What kind of connections had Wang Daiyu developed that she could be sufficiently certain so quickly? Or had she found the guilty? No, he could see that much revealed in her carefully schooled expression.
She waited until he’d closed his office door and swept the room for bugs. Neither of them fully trusted the other CMC members. Each was the best man he’d been able to place in the role—past the President’s whims. But that very competence made them much more dangerous and harder to trust.
“They’re stunned,” she waved a hand outward as she stood before his desk as an underling delivering a report properly would. “I thought it would require a long and careful quest, but they are like mythological Taoties, eating themselves for lack of anything else to feed upon. Every finger is pointed elsewhere, and none appear to have given any thought to leveraging the opportunity, even now.”
He let his smile tell her that he’d found much the same.
“Does no one think anymore?” She rarely showed anger; her gentle voice went deeper and grew a harsh edge. She stalked about his office as if fighting a cage, circling again and again around the conference table. He loved watching the way she, even when furious, moved with such grace and stealth. Zuocheng turned away to stare at the photograph of the mountain woodland cabin he’d grown up in.
He tried to picture the two of them there, an old man and his Black Jade. It wasn’t difficult. She had so loved the few times they’d managed to get away there together, hunting together for their dinner and making love together under the starlit heavens.
Then the slight shiver of nerves that had kept him alive and let him climb to the second most powerful position in China slid along his spine. Had Wang Daiyu become too dangerous to be his Hei Yù in such a dream? And if that was true, how much longer would the leash of loyalty keep control of her? For a while, he assured himself. For long enough. But then he would have to think hard about some of his choices.
He could still hear her circling the room like a falcon not yet freed from a long jess he kept tied to her ankle. He knew what being trained as a Falcon Commando meant; he’d simply never fully attributed those skills to his Black Jade. A dangerous mistake he wouldn’t make again.
“Those who can think, are afraid to…” he murmured.
“…and those who can’t, pretend.” She sighed, then stopped her circling and returned to stand before his desk. “We must make our innocence clear to the Americans.”
Zuocheng’s thoughts took longer to catch up with hers. When they did, he turned to face her—she was right. But how to convince them of China’s noninvolvement in their President’s death? His one back-channel contact into the US government was even now being extracted from the crashed airplane. The television screen showed that only two people’s remains had yet to be recovered.
“In person,” Daiyu pronounced. “Nothing less would be sufficient.”
Again, she was right. In this, Americans were practically Chinese—the power of face-to-face obeisance was not to be underestimated. He certainly couldn’t make the trip. The President had made it clear that he would wait and see, thus officially closing all diplomatic channels on this topic.
He could send Daiyu, but how would she reach so high, without being seen by Chinese operatives in the embassy—ones he might not trust the loyalty of? It would have to be done without her saying, I am the emissary of General Liú Zuocheng, co-chairman of the Chinese Military Commission.
“I have a way, if I may have permission to contact your granddaughter.”
Startled, he had to sit with that thought for many heartbeats. He didn’t see how, though he had no reason to doubt her assessment. That was not the main consequence. He had not anticipated using Chang Mui for some years to come, not until she and her lover had burrowed far deeper into the American systems. Activating an asset of such potential too soon might damage its future utility. Yet the situation was sufficiently urgent that he must grasp at any chance.
Reading his decision, she rose to her feet. She opened her phone and tapped something—sending a message she must have already composed. She had known it would come to this exact decision. Wang Daiyu, a weapon more dangerous than he’d ever have guessed. It still didn’t make her wrong. That’s when he noticed the small pack she’d brought with her.
He raised a single eyebrow.
“My plane departs from Beijing Capital International in precisely one hour.”
Zuocheng nodded and escorted her to the door.
Before he could open it, she stopped him with her fingertips on his chest. “No one knows of…us?” Her meaning was clear.
“My security guard. My administrative assistant knows only that you work for me. There are no others.”
She rested her palm against the center of his heart chakra. He recognized the gesture from her explanations of her yoga practices. “None of the committee or other guards?”
“None.”
Daiyu rested their foreheads together, touched noses, then shifted against him chakra by chakra down their bodies until their root chakras too were pressed together. They had never touched even a fingertip outside her apartment except for the brief period in his own bedroom. The arousal that raged through him at her pressing the entire length of her body to his here in his office at the very heart of the Eight-One Building at the Ministry of National Defense, was among the most powerful of his life.
For nine times nine heartbeats, just as Su Nü said of the first and most essential method of joining yin and yang, they remained pressed together down the length of their chakras. When Daiyu stepped back, he opened the door and held it for her.
She left with no words and no looking back.
37
There were presently five US companies with a market cap over two trillion dollars, all of them in the tech sector.
Though there were five of them, Chen Mei-Li thought of them as the Three Big Giants in the universe. A chip maker at the top made no sense and they were bound to crash, or at least diminish, when their stock prices equalized with reality. And at some point, everyone’s love for an overpriced smartphone was going to go away.
