Flower Moon West was southeast of Palo Alto on Loyola Drive across from the Los Altos Golf and Country Club.
More like a kind of compound than just a regular restaurant, behind the modern glass building was a patchwork array of tiered gardens that took up several city blocks.
The vehicle that arrived at ten minutes to nine o’clock was a shiny new Chevy Suburban in iridescent black with tinted black windows. Its big twenty-two-inch tires crackled off the crushed stone as it came up the sloping driveway.
As they stopped and Harris got out to open her door, Dawn Warner turned and spotted Ethan Weber right away in the restaurant’s foyer.
“Hey, you,” Ethan said, smiling warmly as he and the maître d’ emerged out of the restaurant.
“Thanks so much for this,” he said as the maître d’ led them along a path away from the front door. “You look breathtaking, by the way. Everyone is here already. But Gandalf isn’t with you?”
“No. A few minutes behind us,” Warner said as the maître d’ pushed open a gate and guided them toward a lit door.
On the other side of it was the kitchen itself, and they were brought past stoves and steel tables and busy kitchen workers.
Instead of taking them through into the restaurant proper, the maître d’ parted some pocket doors just to the left of the swinging one.
Dawn Warner halted in the doorway as the two Chinese Communist Party officials who they were there to meet stood from the chef’s table.
The older one was silver-haired and bland-faced and round-cheeked with a bit of a beer belly while the younger one was slender and wore John Lennon glasses and had thick black hair.
As the men bowed, Dawn Warner couldn’t help but notice the perfect hang of their silk suits, the bespoke fit at the shoulder, the just-so break at the trouser cuff.
Savile Row, she thought, smiling approvingly. She loved Pacific Rim heavy hitters. Demure be damned. Why have it and not flaunt it?
“I am Bob,” the older one said, smiling. “And this is my partner, Frank. So very nice to meet you.”
Bob and Frank, Warner thought, almost laughing at the generic American car-salesmen-like cover names the agents had chosen. They certainly didn’t look like any Bob or Frank she’d ever met before.
She assumed Bob was the head honcho, but you never knew with these folks. These nosebleed-level party members didn’t do obvious. They were always playing some kind of game.
“Ni hao,” Weber said with a formal little bow in return.
Warner didn’t follow suit with the formal Chinese greeting but merely shook Bob’s hand.
As they all sat, she saw that Bob and Frank’s aides-de-camp were both young and female and annoyingly wearing midnight blue couture cocktail dresses that looked very much like the one Warner herself was wearing.
Great, Warner thought, shaking her head as one of them smiled at her subserviently. Instead of a world-shaker negotiating in a new global era, she thought, with the other females at the table she could have been just another goofy airhead bridesmaid in a cheesy wedding party.
Gandalf slipped in through the pocket doors two minutes later just behind the table-side bartender.
“So sorry I’m late,” the wiry, rumpled fifty-something said, shaking Ethan’s hand before leaning over and giving Warner an air kiss.
The good news about Gandalf’s looks was that he had a boyish face, she thought, watching him. The bad news was that with his weather-ravaged skin, deep-set eye bags and spiky dyed blond hair, it was the face of a homeless boy who was addicted to crack.
She’d never seen him in a suit before. Or in a shirt that had buttons, actually. He hadn’t shaved the poodle-like chin goatee, but he was sober enough to stand without assistance, so that was something at least.
Gandalf’s real name was Alex Novak and he was Sonexum’s resident supra-genius. From the gutters of Manchester, New Hampshire, he had graduated Brown at sixteen and by twenty-four was the youngest mathematics professor in Berkeley’s history.
“That’s one year younger than the Unabomber,” he told people at parties.
An enfant terrible of the worst kind, the only thing that rivaled his mathematical intellect, they said, was his voracious, insatiable, rock-star-level appetite for drugs.
Novak’s specialty was artificial intelligence, which was why he was there. If negotiations went the way they were expected to, Novak would be heading to China from the meeting on a two-year project to bring the Chinese government’s AI project up to snuff.
“Wo yao ning shei lai he yibei,” Novak suddenly cried as he slammed a fist on the linen. He grinned at the party officials as he fired up a Marlboro Red with a Zippo lighter.
Warner fiddled with her napkin, pretending she didn’t realize the stupid jerk had just asked two of the most powerful men on the planet who he had to screw to get a drink.
Across the table, the two grim-faced Chinese stared wide-eyed for a moment at the crazy American. Then their hard facades suddenly cracked as they let out roars of laughter.
As they did this, Ethan nodded over at Warner knowingly with his intelligent clear blue eyes. It was an all-systems-are-go look.
Whatever worked at this point, Dawn Warner thought as the tableside bartender uncorked the first bottle with a crisp pop.