“What? You can’t be serious.”
“As a goddamn aneurysm. It’s only one possibility—but we have to check it out. Tarquin knew too much. Like I said, it got messy. I’m going to need a secure communications hookup to Washington. I’m talking end-to-end security. No little pink ears pressed to the wall.”
“We should really discuss this with—”
“Now, goddammit.”
“Then you want the keep—the secure datasphere chamber, upstairs. Swept every morning. Designed for acoustic, visual, and electronic privacy, all according to department specs.”
“I helped write those specs,” Ambler said witheringly. “Specs are one thing. Their execution is another.”
“I guarantee its security personally.”
“I’ve got a report to transmit. Which means I’m going to need to do some fast research, too. And let the chips fall where they may.”
“Of course,” Sampson said.
Ambler gave him a hard look. “Let’s go.”
Most major consular buildings contained some version of the “keep,” where intelligence was stored, processed, and transmitted. In the past few decades, U.S. Central Command facilities had become especially important to the projection of American power, the State Department less so, bowing to the ascent of military over diplomatic resources in the post–Cold War conjuncture. That was the world, but it was not the world people like Sampson lived in; they dutifully filed their analytical reports and regarded themselves as in the thick of the action, even though the action had long since passed them by.
The secure datasphere was situated behind two separate doors, and the ventilation system was designed to give the chamber a slightly positive pressure relative to the rooms outside, so that one would be immediately aware if either of the doors was opened. The doors themselves were blast resistant, of thick steel with a rubberized flange that ensured a tight, soundproof seal. Specs called for walls made of alternating layers of fiberglass and concrete.
Ambler stepped into the chamber and pressed the button that magnetically clamped the doors closed. For a moment, there was silence; the room was unpleasantly hot and dimly lit. Then there was the low sibilance of a ventilation system kicking into gear, and the halogen lighting system blinked on. Ambler was in a space that was approximately four hundred square feet. There were two workstations, arranged side by side, surfaced with some sort of white laminate, and a pair of “task” chairs with oval seats and backs, clad in black synthetic fabric. At the workstations were flat-panel screens like they had downstairs and black keyboards; beige computer towers rested on a rack overhead. By means of a continuous high-speed fiberoptic connection, highly encrypted data was exchanged with the digital storage complex in Washington; remote data facilities like this one were updated—synchronized—on an hourly basis.
The triple-bay configuration held an eighty-four-terabyte storage system, equipped with proactive monitoring, along with error detection and correction software. It was also programmed, Ambler knew, with automatic erase features in case of disturbance. Every precaution had been taken to ensure that this vast data storehouse would never end up in the wrong hands.
Ambler turned on the monitor and waited a few moments for it to flicker to life; the connection was already live, already on. Now he began to type the keywords of his search. He had brazened his way into the most sensitive place in the Cons Ops station; his ruse could be exposed at any moment. He was assuming that Lewalski’s trip to avenue Gabriel would take twenty minutes, but if traffic was light, it could be less. He would have to make use of his time wisely.
Wai-Chan Leung, he typed. A few seconds later, a standard biography appeared, prepared by the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the INR. Underlined hyperlinks led to separate files on the man’s parents, their commercial interests, origins, political ties. The appraisal of the parents’ business concerns revealed little of interest. Their dealings were not squeaky clean—friendly assemblymen duly received donations; minor payoffs to foreign officials in a position to expedite certain transactions were assumed, if not documented—but by the standards of the time and place conducted with a certain measure of probity. Impatiently he scanned the biography of Wai-Chan Leung himself, recognizing the familiar points on a familiar public time line.
There was no hint of the allegations that had been in the dossier prepared by the Political Stabilization Unit—and he was well acquainted with the methods of hinting, the techniques of indirection employed by professional intelligence analysts. They typically consisted of tepid disavowals preceded by “Despite rumors of contacts with . . .” Or “Although some have conjectured that . . . ” Yet there was nothing of the sort here. The analysts were mainly interested in how his prospects as a national political figure had been affected by his “determinedly nonbelligerent rhetoric” on the subject of relations with China. Ambler’s eyes skittered and bounced from paragraph to paragraph, like a racing coupe on a bumpy mountain road. Occasionally, he paused, at passages of potential significance.
Wai-Chan Leung had great confidence in a future of “convergent liberalization.” He believed that the emergence of a more democratic mainland China would lead to more intimate political relations. His opponents, by contrast, maintained the older, inflexible posture of stalwart hostility and suspicion—a posture that doubtless reinforced the hostility and suspicion rampant among their counterparts in the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army. Wai-Chan Leung’s position on this issue would probably have been politically untenable for any politician who lacked his enormous personal appeal.
The words were dry, carefully parsed, but they referred to the idealistic young candidate Ambler had seen—someone who had spoken up for his ideals, regardless of political expedience, and been respected for it all the more.
Kurt Sollinger’s file was far more cursory. A trade negotiator, he had spent fifteen years on economic affairs for Europe, under various designations—the European Common Market, the European Community, the European Union. He had been born in 1953 and grew up in Deurne, Belgium, a middle-class suburb of Antwerp. Father a Lausanne-trained osteopath; mother a librarian. There were the usual leftist affiliations from his years in high school and college—spent at the Lyceum van Deurne, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven—but nothing generationally unusual. He had been photographed with a group protesting the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Germany during the early eighties, had been a signatory of various petitions circulated by Greenpeace types and other environmental activists. But such activism did not survive his twenties. Instead, he had taken to the groves of academe with a certain single-mindedness, working on an economics doctorate with a Professor Lambrecht, something to do with local economies and European integration. Ambler’s eyes swept across the dry write-up, looking for—well, what? He couldn’t be sure. But if there was a pattern to be uncovered, this was the only way to do it. He had to leave himself open and receptive. He would see it. Or he would not.
Ambler continued to scroll down, skimming a mind-numbing list of the various bureaucratic promotions and preferments that the multilingual Dr. Kurt Sollinger had attained. His progress was steady, if unspectacular, but in a field of highly trained technocrats like himself, he had slowly developed a reputation for integrity and intelligence. The next section of Sollinger’s biosketch was headed “The East Team”; this report concerned his chairmanship of a special committee tasked with East-West trade issues. Ambler read more slowly. The group had been making notable strides in hammering out a special trade accord between Europe and China, an accord that, however, had been derailed by the death of the principal European negotiator, Kurt Sollinger.
His heart beginning to pound, Ambler keyed in the name of Benoit Deschesnes. He skimmed over the details of Deschesnes’ lycée and university training, the fellowships and faculty appointments, the bureaucratic details of the Frenchman’s consulting work for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and In
spection Commission, and then his rapid rise to the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
He found what he was looking for toward the end of the file. Deschesnes had appointed a special commission, tasked with investigating charges that the Chinese government had been engaging in nuclear proliferation. Many felt the charges had been made for political purposes; others worried that there could be fire where smoke had been detected. As director-general of the IAEA, Deschesnes had a reputation for rectitude and independence. The State Department’s own analysts had concluded, based on its all-source intelligence review, that the report, a year in the making, would exonerate the Chinese government. The latest update, submitted and posted only several hours earlier, stated that the release of the special commission’s findings would be postponed indefinitely due to the violent death of the principal investigator.
China.
The orb of the web was centered over China. The word told him everything and nothing. What was crystal-clear was that the assassination of Wai-Chan Leung did not arise from inadvertence; it was not the result of credulousness toward misinformation spread by his opponents. On the contrary, that misinformation was deliberately made use of. From every indication, Wai-Chan Leung’s death was part of a pattern. Part of a larger effort to eliminate various influential personages who seemed well disposed toward China’s new leadership. But why?
More questions, more conclusions. If he had been turned into a catspaw by cunning indirection, the same technique had no doubt been employed on others. Fenton’s very zealotry would make it all the easier for someone to use him. Zealots like him were always in danger of being misdirected when their fanaticism overrode their instinctive wariness. It would be easy to appeal to his patriotism and feed him fake intel—then sit back to watch the results.
But again, why?
Ambler glanced at his watch. He had already stayed too long; every passing moment escalated the risks. Before he switched off the monitor, however, he keyed in one final name.
Ten long seconds passed, as the eighty-four-terabyte array of hard disks whirled futilely before admitting failure.
NO RECORD FOR HARRISON AMBLER FOUND.
TWENTY-ONE
The Daimler limousine that took Ellen Whitfield to the estate waited in a graveled parking area as the undersecretary herself strode into the magnificent building.
The Château de Gournay, just forty minutes to the northwest of Paris, was a treasure of seventeenth-century architecture that, if far less ostentatious than nearby Versailles, was no less impressive in its details. Designed by François Mansart for a duke in Louis XIV’s court, the château was among the most noteworthy of its kind in France, from a foyer that was the apotheosis of the period’s classicism to its much-photographed buffet of carved stone. The eleven bedrooms were intact from its original construction; the tennis court and pools were more recent additions. Over the past half-century, it had been used by international conferences of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, by high-level conclaves of industrialists and their information-age successors. At the moment, it had been rented by a lavishly funded conservative think tank based out of Washington, at the behest of Professor Ashton Palmer, who chaired its Pacific Rim program and who always preferred settings that expressed the very finest of what civilization had to offer.
A liveried manservant greeted Undersecretary Whitfield in the foyer.
“Monsieur Palmer is waiting for you in the blue room, madame,” the French servant told her. He was a man in his late fifties, with a broken nose, a square jaw, and a wiry build—a man who, one suspected, had a range of experiences and expertise that was greater than was strictly required by his ostensible position. Whitfield would not have been surprised if Palmer had hired a former member of the French Foreign Legion; he was a great believer in “dual-purpose” employees—the valet who was also a translator, the butler who was also a bodyguard. Palmer’s penchant for multiplicity was related to an aesthetics of efficiency: he recognized that a person could play more than one role on the stage of history, that the best-chosen action would achieve more than one effect. Palmer’s doctrine of multiplicity was, indeed, key to the scenario that was even now being played out.
The blue room turned out to be an octagonal bay overlooking the stables. The vaulted ceiling was at least sixteen feet high, the carpets the finest broad-looms of the period, the chandeliers easily of museum quality. The undersecretary stepped over to the window, taking in the beautifully contoured landscape. The stables themselves, elegantly built of brick and wood, could have been converted into an elegant manse.
“They understood craftsmanship, didn’t they?”
Ashton Palmer’s voice.
Ellen Whitfield turned and saw Palmer entering from a discreet set of pocket doors. She smiled. “As you always say, ‘It is not the skill, it is the degree of skill.’ ”
“That was the striking thing about the Sun King’s court: the very highest level of civility, the greatest appreciation for accomplishments in literary, artistic, natural-scientific, and architectural realms. At the same time, there was much they were oblivious to—the seismic instabilities of the social order they battened upon. The basis for the revolution that would consume their children a century later. Theirs was a spurious sort of peace, which contained the seeds of its own destruction. People are quick to forget what Heraclitus taught us: ‘War is common, strife is customary, and all things happen because of strife and necessity.’ ”
“It’s good to see you, Ashton,” Whitfield said warmly. “These are—dare I invoke the old Chinese curse?—interesting times.”
Ashton Palmer smiled. His silver hair was thinner than it had been when Whitfield was his student, but no less tidy, his forehead high and impressive; sheer intelligence radiated from his slate eyes. There was something ageless about him, something that transcended the day-to-day. Whitfield had, in the course of her career, encountered many figures deemed historic, but she believed that he was the one truly great man she had ever met, a visionary in every sense. It had been a privilege when she first made his acquaintance—she was conscious of it even then, when she was in her early twenties. She was equally conscious of it now.
“What have you to tell me?” the sage asked. Whitfield knew he had just flown straight from Hong Kong, but he looked remarkably rested.
“So far, everything has been happening exactly as you’ve predicted.” There was a gleam in the undersecretary’s eye. “As you envisioned, I should say.” She glanced at herself in the elegant Venetian mirror. The pewter light of a French winter shafted through the leaded glass, accentuating her high cheekbones and strong features. Her chestnut hair, parted on one side, was carefully coiffed; she wore a cerise skirt suit and a single strand of pearls around her neck. Subtle eye shadow brought out the blue of her irises. “Quite a place you’ve got here.”
“The Center for Policy Studies is about to hold a conference here. ‘Currency Regulation: An East/West Perspective.’ What did you tell your people?”
“The Château de Gournay is on the itinerary, no worries. Meeting with scholars on currency liberalization.”
“Because precautions must still be taken.”
“I’m well aware of this,” the undersecretary said. She sat down at the giltwood table, and Palmer joined her there.
“I remember the first time I heard you lecture,” she said, looking off through the leaded glass. “I was a Radcliffe undergraduate, you were teaching a survey course on ‘global dominion’ held at Sanders Theatre, and you wrote three German words on the board: Machtpolitik, Geopolitik, and Realpolitik. Someone in the back of the lecture hall called out, ‘Are we going to have to speak German?’ And you said no, but that there was a language we’d need to learn, and that only a few of us here would gain fluency in it: the language of politics.”
Palmer’s eyes crinkled in recollection. “I thought it fair to warn people.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You announced that mos
t of us just wouldn’t ever have the knack. That only a few of us would master it on a high level, while the rest would fall into the clichés of the historically insignificant—the local alderman’s view of the universe, I think you called it. Strong stuff for young minds.”
“You had the mental sinews, even then,” Palmer said. “The sort of tough-mindedness you either have or you don’t.”
“I remember when you talked about Genghis Khan, and how, in modern terms, one would have to say that he was devoted to trade liberalization and freedom of religion, because that was how he ran his empire.”
“Which was precisely what made him so dangerous.” He spread his hands out upon the pearwood marquetry.
“Exactly. And on the map, you showed the extent of the Khan empire, how by 1241 his son and heir, Ogodei, had taken Kiev, destroyed a German army in the East, pushed through Hungary, and reached the gates of Vienna. Then the hordes stopped. The Mongol empire was almost exactly coterminous with the Eastern Bloc. That was the mindblower. You showed us the two areas, one of the Mongol dominion, the other the Communist empire, from North Korea and China all the way to Eastern Europe. It was the same area—the ‘footprint of history,’ you called it. And it was mere fortuity that the Mongols stopped at Vienna.”
“Mere fortuity,” Palmer repeated. “Ogodei had died, and the army leaders wanted to return to help select his successor.”
“You showed us that there was a pattern to the great empires. In the sixteenth century, Suleiman the Magnificent was the most powerful Ottoman sultan, and he was also the most committed to basic principles of equal justice, procedural fairness, free trade. As a historical proposition, you proved that the Eastern empires were always dangerous to the West in proportion to how liberal they were internally.”