Page 60 of Air Force One
Holly could only stare at the small radio. It made her want to weep. Max had gotten out, made it clear of the too-hairy-edge of Spec Ops-level missions. He had a bar and a wife with a baby on the way. But, knowing the odds better than anyone, he’d just offered to come in after them if she screamed for help. Or at least to try.
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever not said aloud to her, except for Mike’s killer smile when she’d said they’d spend the rest of their lives together.
She really hoped it was longer than sunset today.
53
Daiyu faced the President across the Situation Room table. She was still alarmed to be sitting in that great inner sanctum of American fiction…and found it mildly disappointing. It could have been any windowless conference room in any high-end office. It was beautiful in its simplicity and rich wood paneling. The lighting was gentle and indirect, but not dark and brooding. It was a place of business—though she hadn’t missed the eight people stationed close outside the door at monitor-laden desks. They clearly were waiting for the least command from inside this room, whether for a file on someone or a nuclear-attack scenario.
Those of power sat here. The President, her Secret Service guardian, their most powerful military leader, and Taz for her deep connections both in and out of the Pentagon. Did Taz understand the tacit power she’d invoked in making this meeting a reality? Daiyu understood it. Daiyu discounted Mei-Li and Mui only because they were too young to have grown into who they would become.
Yet perhaps, just perhaps, Daiyu herself was the most powerful one in the room at this moment.
“Could you please turn off the monitoring of the room? What you do with the information after I impart it will be wholly up to you.”
The first reaction was from the Indian woman who no one had introduced. There’d been no need, as like recognized like.
Daiyu faced her. “I promise you, warrior to warrior, that I wish no one in this room any harm. If you wish to secure me to this chair, I will not complain or struggle.”
The woman studied her for several long seconds before turning to the President and nodding. She, in turn, reached out and tapped some control on the table.
“We’re private now.”
Daiyu nodded her thanks but made no other movement that might trigger the President’s personal warrior. “To my second point, as we left the Old Ebbitt Grill to come here, knowing we would have a chance to meet you after all, I sent a coded message to my superior, General Liú Zuocheng.”
The President glanced at the ceiling and the guard rose up on her toes.
“Ma’am?” the latter’s voice was soft but tight, not quite an order.
The President held up a hand. “I don’t wish to be slammed back into the PEOC. I only escaped it this morning.”
“My communiqué was not for an air strike on the White House or other US soil. Nothing like that,” Daiyu made patting motions for calm. “This is not Brunei.”
The President nodded carefully, acknowledging that indeed Daiyu had been a part of that as well. Her warrior didn’t understand and stayed braced for battle, her hand on her sidearm.
“In the message, I told him, using an historical reference that no one else would be likely to understand, that he has a traitor in the governing cohort of the Central Military Commission. I did not name the man as I don’t believe there is one.”
Daiyu inspected the wall clocks. They showed the time here in DC, but also Moscow, London, and Beijing. One more clock matched the DC time but was labeled POTUS. Just like in the movies, it must be set to the President’s physical time zone. She had been disappointed by the mundane conference room as the seat of such power as the United States wielded. But that simple clock said it was not so mundane after all.
“It is now five p.m. here; it is six in the morning there. He will have called an immediate meeting of the CMC. Except when the President is in attendance, they always meet in Zuocheng’s office. That is all that is necessary.”
54
Damn her!
Daiyu was supposed to be sending him good news about meeting with the American President. Instead she’d sent half a quote from Han Fei’s twenty-three-hundred-year-old analysis of the Dao De Jing written three hundred years before that. Worse, it was a reference to an alternate translation that they had ultimately decided was appropriate to Fei’s sentiments, but not his words.
Look for the Fei tiger by your side. Just that, no more.
Fei had been the first great philosopher to directly discuss traitors. Prior to his supposed writing of the rule-devouring tigers, other philosophers had only written of degrees of loyalty. They had written of spies and their uses and cautions in that use, but Daiyu had cited none of those references.
Into his ears alone, she’d shouted, The CMC has a traitor.
If she said it, there was nothing to question. Somehow she had found this fact and again proven her usefulness and loyalty. Perhaps some information she had wrested from the American President herself. Perhaps from one of her many contacts.
The source no longer mattered. This news threatened all he had built over the fifty-five years since he’d first joined the PLAAF. He’d worked his way from errand boy to pilot. During the Sino-Vietnamese War, he’d earned more kills that any other. For fifty-five years he had battled his way to the co-leadership of the CMC.
Who was he kidding? The leadership of the CMC. When a President was weak and solely focused upon consolidating power into his own hands for the sake of ego, he cared little for the most important aspect of power—the military.
