According to Ferris, there had been a bit of trouble brewing on the American side.
A recent increase in tariffs on US corn had crippled the competitiveness of that export in the China market, driving down revenues for farmers in the Midwest who were seeing lower bids in their futures contracts. This supported the hawkish administration’s long-standing argument that China unfairly disadvantaged foreign competition in its own market while exporting freely to the rest of the world. On top of this, the American agriculture lobby argued, China’s entire fertilizer industry was based on industrial techniques stolen from American companies during the last decade.
“Hold on a second. Is that last part even true?” I asked Ferris.
“It’s not entirely off the mark. In 2016 a DuPont agricultural engineer driving home late from work caught a Chinese agent digging up seeds from one of DuPont’s corn fields in the middle of the night while another agent waited in a car nearby. After they were arrested, federal authorities found hundreds of ears of stolen corn stashed away in a hidden storage facility in Des Moines. The agents had been secretly shipping seeds back to China in boxes of Pop Weaver brand microwave popcorn.”
“Wow,” I said. “That is impressively hardcore.”
Ferris shrugged. “Gotta respect the enemy, I guess. Probably not how I would have gone about it, but you can’t argue with results. The agents that got caught are in federal prison now, but on the scale of China’s population, the tech they stole, just by shaving off five percent of corn production costs, changed food accessibility on the scale of millions. Agent Lim was actually the agent in charge for the case.”
I was surprised by the dispassion in Ferris’s account. For him, it was a game of chess, and the only moral certainty was which side of the board he played on. I had a vision of him in another life deployed as the Chinese agent in Iowa under deep cover—Ferris among the alien corn.
“So how does all of this impact us?” I asked.
He gave me a stern look and I braced myself for what he was about to say next. “The AG has put pressure on the DOJ to deliver near-term prosecutorial victories against the China Initiative and show the agriculture lobby that the US will fight hard without dragging the country into a wider trade war. Right now, the most pressure is on Scully because his colleagues at the DOJ think of him as the person who’s primarily responsible for the China Initiative. What this means is that our timeline for luring Bo to the states has been compressed. We probably have no more than thirty days before the clock runs out.”
So the room for error had essentially been reduced to zero. I felt my shoulders clench up immediately and fought to maintain my composure in front of Ferris. “And then what happens?”
“If we can’t get Bo out within thirty days, Scully will order for you to be recalled back to the US.”
I was overcome with a sense of vertigo. Just as we neared the target, the floor was shifting under my feet, like the golf simulator at the Jockey Club. There was something revolting about the naked savagery of this setup: the Iowans demanded oriental scalps, and so it would have to be either Bo’s or my own.
“So that basically leaves us with the three weeks leading up to Reunions and only one week after. I’m guessing that my meeting with Yang is still our best bait. What’s our plan B if Bo doesn’t bite?”
“That’s correct. Yang is still plan A. As for plan B, let’s cross that bridge when we get there. We’ve still got one really good card left to play, so let’s make sure that we play it right.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. I tried not to fault him for it—surely it was part of Ferris’s specialized skill set to recognize when the odds on a mission turned long. Suddenly I wondered how many others before me he’d had similar conversations with. If Ferris couldn’t help me with a plan B, I thought, maybe I’d have to come up with one myself.