Feng Yi leered across the long cherrywood table in the Hotel Sacher’s art deco conference room. Minister Ma had just told the American delegation that a particular body affiliated with the Chinese government—not one completely under his control, you understand—would crash every car in the Western world the very next day if the Americans didn’t make the trade concessions he demanded. The US secretary of state’s gigantic jaw trembled with rage. But he didn’t threaten war. Minister Ma was right. The Americans had fought too many times in too many places during the last decade and a half, and their economy was too weak to sustain a conflict with the Chinese superpower.
“I have to tell you in no uncertain terms that we consider the proposition by the honorable Minister Ma to be highly unproductive.” The American’s response to Ma’s threat was as animated as an accountant with a 1040EZ. He didn’t appear to doubt China’s ability to accomplish the devastating mass crash. Feng Yi felt the power to destroy the world rippling through him.
Minister Ma was blank and unreadable. Anyone who hadn’t observed him in a negotiation before would have assumed he was thinking of something that had happened last night—something whose details he could only vaguely recall. But every cell in his brain was present, assessing each syllable from the American, calibrating and recalibrating. Feng, however, barely paid attention. He was measuring his chances of getting the Swedish woman naked that night. She had agreed to travel with him. He tapped through the alerts on his cell phone. European airports were opening, he read, though the Americans were keeping theirs in lockdown for another day. Everything was falling into place. The Swede would take him on the business trip she had planned for that evening—away from her jealous husband. He imagined posing her naked body and recording its movements with his camera. He would take thousands of pictures. He would manipulate and distort them to make them perfect in their power to arouse him. Her form was the basic ingredient he needed for the pleasure of digital editing and montage. When he had reworked the images, they would show her riding motorbikes naked and engaging in sex with famous actresses or cut open to show the computer motherboards in her belly. He didn’t even have to persuade her to sleep with him—that was for men who failed to understand the possibilities of the web and of Photoshop. Women got it. It turned them on to display themselves to him, because he understood that there was no limit to pleasure, just as women’s ecstasy was not restricted the way men’s was to the insertion of the penis and the thrusting of hips and a brief moment of animal rapture.
Then Feng saw it. It interrupted his daydream as surely as a nudge from his neighbor at the negotiating table. Minister Ma’s tongue flicked across his lips. It was an unconscious gesture of excitement that was as clear to Feng as if the old bastard would have jumped up and cried out. Feng came out of his reverie and snapped his attention back to the table. What the hell did I miss? he thought.
“Thus in light of the consequences presented to us by Minister Ma, we are reluctantly prepared to accept the three points the Minister made about patent regulations,” the secretary of state said. “These shall be subject to further negotiation in the details during the working group stage, but for the purposes of statements to be made by the Chinese and United States delegations tonight, we can accept in principle the Minister’s three points, and we will instruct our representatives on the working groups to move toward a full understanding on these points.”
No way, Feng thought. He swiveled toward his boss. Ma was all stillness, except for his ankle, which jiggled hard under the table. It was happening. They had won. The Americans were caving.
“As a second concession, we are ready to agree to the two copyright policy adjustments raised by the Minister this morning in relation to intellectual property and the theft thereof by Chinese companies,” the American said.
Minister Ma broke in. “Alleged theft.”
“Alleged theft.” The American had a pencil between the fingertips of his two hands on the tabletop. He was squeezing it as hard as he could without snapping it.
“The tariffs?” Ma said.
“The tariffs on the importation of Chinese steel.” The secretary of state stared at his hands before he continued. “We are prepared to lower the tariffs from two hundred and sixty-five point five percent to a rate fixed at a more equitable—”
“Zero.”
“Now hold on there.”
“Zero tariff. Just as American steelmakers pay no tariff to reach Chinese markets.”
“American steelmakers don’t export to China because your domestic prices are—” The American realized this was no longer a negotiation. It was blackmail. “Zero percent tariff. Agreed.”
Feng was three seats down from Minister Ma. He could smell the old man’s pleasure. It drifted through the Chinese delegation like sex pheromones and made the minister’s aides wriggle and twitch.
Then Feng started to sweat. If the American conceded, Minister Ma wouldn’t want the crash operation to go ahead tomorrow. Feng would have to stop it. Damn their weakness, he thought, casting his eye along the table of senior US diplomats and Washington cadres. If one of them failed, the worst they could expect would be a transfer to the consulate in Kabul, or they might get stuck teaching political science at a university in one of those places in the Midwest where Americans come from but never seem to live. Fail Minister Ma and Feng would, at best, be kicked to death in the bunkroom of a laogai penal camp on his way to “reform through labor.” More likely he’d confess in front of the cameras that he had betrayed the old pig and beg for the pleasure of a bullet to the head so that he might serve as a reminder to others of the importance of pleasing the great minister.
Ma beckoned to him. Panic caught Feng. He scuttled toward Ma and knelt beside his chair. The minister lifted his hand to his face to disguise the movements of his lips. “I have what I want from these Americans. Nonetheless I shall pass many hours here in further negotiations before I let them off the hook.”
Feng pretended to show pleasure at his master’s cruelty and diplomatic skill. “Minister Ma, you have scored a great victory for the People’s Republic.”
“I want to give you time to call off the operation.” He surely saw the resentment in Feng’s eyes. “If the operation is carried out, it will cost the People’s Republic many billions of dollars. Billions that this clown”—he gestured toward the secretary of state—“has just tossed across the table to me. Don’t throw them away as he has done. Are you a clown? Don’t be a clown.”
Feng bowed his head. “I will see to it, Minister Ma.”
The minister laid his fingers on Feng’s hand to delay him. “You think you’re a big number, don’t you? Look at you, crouching at my side, staring up at me. You are a dog that yaps noisily all the time to demand attention. I do believe that perhaps you even sweat through your tongue the way a dog does.”
Feng realized that his mouth was wide open. He snapped it shut.
“When someone’s computer goes wrong, they telephone a faceless drone at a call center,” Ma said. “The poor drone helps them fix the computer. Then the customer hangs up on the drone and thinks what a waste of time it was, whether the computer was fixed or not. Do you understand?”
“I am the drone at the call center, and you are the one who called to get your computer fixed.”
“Now I am hanging up the phone.”
The power Feng had felt in his hotel room with the Swedish woman was gone. He was slack and limp. Minister Ma’s aides glared at him. The Americans watched him with contempt. He lifted himself from his knees.
For a moment, Feng thought he might speak. Tell them that he would crash all the cars anyway, and there was no amount of American concessions that could persuade him otherwise. Instead he slouched toward the exit and went into the corridor. The bodyguards turned toward him, the robotic US secret service meatheads and Minister Ma’s sleazy kung-fu practitioners with their ponytails and hair oil.
Screw them all. He would let the cars crash, and he would go to the airport with Maj and convince her not to return to her husband. He would hide himself in Sweden or Spain and fill the Internet with manipulated pictures of her body, and let Minister Ma take the rap for the failed trade talks and the billions of dollars’ worth of lost opportunities. He went into the next room, where the Chinese delegation had its secure lines. The communications woman looked up at him.
“I need to make a call for Minister Ma.” Feng picked up the phone and pulled Wyatt’s number from his pocket. He dialed the code that introduced an additional element of encryption above the algorithms already set up by the communications experts. It was a code known only to him because he had written it and uploaded the scrambler to the delegation’s system. Wyatt picked up at the first ring.
“I need you to call off the operation.” Feng spoke in Chinese.
Wyatt responded in the same language. “You do not sound happy.”
“What do you know about happiness? Are you in control of the remaining engineers? Are you able to get them a message that they must not go ahead with the plan?”
The line was silent. Then Wyatt spoke again. “I can see to it that the engineers do not carry out the plan. Are you certain? This is your wish?”
“Do as you are told,” Feng bellowed.
When Wyatt’s voice came down the line, it showed no reaction to Feng’s anger and volume. This was the ultimate signal of the American’s superiority. He didn’t need to teach Feng a lesson, to demonstrate his power. He was utterly calm even when abused. “I shall do as you ask.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I shall do as you command.”
“Make sure that you do.”
“What else do you have to say?”
Feng wanted to weep. He wanted to tell Wyatt that no one loved him the way they should. He had taken thousands of images of men and women he had befriended and pasted masks onto their faces digitally, all because no face had ever turned to him with genuine love. “That is all. Report to me through the Silent Circle app.”
Wyatt hung up. Feng tried to replace the handset in the cradle. He couldn’t get it to fit. Twice it clattered onto the desk. The communications woman reached out and slipped it neatly into place, stifling a giggle.
Feng went to the lobby and jumped the line at reception. “I need to make a phone call. It’s urgent. For the trade negotiations.”
The middle-aged man in the brown round-collared jerkin behind the reception desk glanced toward the doors of the hotel. The antiglobalization punks waved placards and yelled their chants about the blood on the hands of the banks and the eco-fascism of Starbucks. The hotel worker was clearly going to be happy once the trade talks were done. He gave Feng the handset with a sigh. Feng dialed and waited. When the Swedish woman picked up, he said, “Let’s go now to the airport. You are still in the hotel? Come to the lobby in five minutes. No, I don’t have any packing to do. Five minutes, okay?” He handed the phone back to the reception clerk.
He went to the bar and sank a brandy in two swigs. He was finishing a second one when Maj found him. He wanted to weep into her breasts. But then he remembered that they were small, and anyhow, he was finished with honest emotion for now. “Let’s go to the airport.”
As they passed the reception desk, a woman with scarred cheeks was spelling out a name in her American accent. “F-E-N-G, first name Y-I.”
The head of the European Union delegation was over by the door. A dozen reporters shoved digital voice recorders at him, and a handful of photographers jostled to the front of the press. “There has been a major breakthrough,” the EU man said. “China and the US have agreed on some important issues, and I think in an hour or two we shall have a full agreement here.”
Feng Yi scuttled into the revolving doors with the Swedish woman. He hustled along the sidewalk past the barricades. The antiglobalization people saw a Chinese man in a suit, so they decided he must be linked to the talks. They started up a chant that rhymed Beijing and the ka-ching of a cash register. He ducked around the corner and came to the row of limos. He spotted Minister Ma’s Red Horizon limo and his driver. He stepped in front of the parked car, perching against the rear of the next long, black vehicle in the line. Ma’s driver glanced at him with contempt. Feng waved and smiled and took a quick photo of the license plate with his cell phone. Then he grabbed the Swedish woman’s hand and climbed over the barricade toward the taxi rank across the street by the State Opera House.
As they reached the rear of the crowd, a short, bearded man in an old Russian army tunic and sweat pants pointed a finger and frowned, trying to put a face to a name. Then he snapped his fingers and said, “Maj. It’s Maj, isn’t it?”
The Swedish woman averted her eyes and moved past him. Feng glanced back at the confusion on the face of the man in the tunic. The protester shook his head, as though he were disappointed in someone. In Maj.
“You know that guy?” Feng said.
Maj skirted around the first taxi in the line and got inside without speaking. Feng craned to see over the heads of the protesters into the lobby of the hotel. The thin-faced reception clerk pointed toward the door. The American woman with the scars headed quickly back out onto the street. Feng Yi threw two fifty-euro notes at the taxi driver as he dived into the backseat. “Go to the airport. Very fast. I will give you four more of those.”
The driver swung out toward the Ringstrasse. The American woman came onto the sidewalk, scanning the crowd. Then she saw Feng, and she ran toward Kärntner Strasse. She was heading for a taxi when Feng went around the corner.
He didn’t need to know who she was. She was looking for him. No one called his name because they wanted to be nice to him. From Minister Ma to Colonel Wyatt to the American trade delegation, they wanted to use him or to hurt him.
Maj touched her finger to Feng’s chin. He pressed the tip of her nose lightly and made a growling sound. “I have our tickets in my purse,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you enjoy hot weather?”
“If it’s hot, you will take your clothes off, right? So I like hot weather.” He pressed his mouth to her ear. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Africa? Dubai? Greece? Come on, where?”
“Wait and see.”
He glanced through the rear window of the taxi as they weaved along the Ring. He focused on all the cabs behind him, on their passengers. He didn’t see the American woman with the scars. It was going to be all right.