The Ascendant: A Thriller (17 page)

(
NAME REDACTED
):
Sensitive much?

LEFEBVRE
:
Hate to interrupt your love fest, but how about raw materials? They import almost all their petroleum. That produces a lot of anxiety in the party leadership.

TRUFFANT
:
But they’ve got coal.

LEFEBVRE
:
Three billion tons a year. Largest producer in the world. But they have massive consumption rates as well. And it’s polluting their country. In the winter people burn so much coal in Beijing they can barely breathe. The government’s making a push for other energy sources—oil being the most obvious.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
Yeah, but why fight us over that? We don’t provide energy, or keep them from it. What’s the connection between oil and attacking us?

CLEMENS
:
Maybe they’re weakening us first, so we won’t be able to stop them. Once we’re on the defensive, they invade Saudi Arabia.

LEFEBVRE
:
You cannot be serious? China invades Saudi Arabia? The obstacles would be monumental. The world would have to end first. Zero percent probability.

CLEMENS
:
I was joking.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
I got your back, Bing. I think invading Saudi Arabia would be damn cool.

CLEMENS
:
It was a joke. It was.

CHEN
:
How about they invade Brunei? They’re sitting on a ton of oil. Or cordon off the South China Sea. Declare it an exclusion zone.

TRUFFANT
:
Makes a little more sense.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
But why go to war for oil when you can just buy it on the open market? Hell of a lot safer just spending cash. And they’ve got plenty of cash.

LEFEBVRE
:
Security. You conquer, you own it. Nobody can raise prices on you.

CHEN
:
Yeah, we invaded Iraq for oil. And we’ve got plenty of our own.

TRUFFANT
:
Celeste, this is not the time for conspiracy theories.

CHEN
:
It’s not a (
EXPLETIVE DELETED
) conspiracy theory. Even you don’t believe Saddam had weapons of (
EXPLETIVE DELETED
) mass destruction.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
Hey, ladies. We’re getting off topic.

CLEMENS
:
I get uncomfortable when you fight.

CHEN
:
Sorry, Alexis. (
UNINTELLIGIBLE
). I’m just tired.

LEFEBVRE
:
What about a clash of cultures or political systems? Communism versus capitalism. Wars have been fought over that.

CHEN
:
But what ideology does China represent today? They’re hardly a bastion of Communist thought anymore. The government’s too pragmatic. If we’ve learned anything from their leadership in the past twenty years, it’s that they’ll discard an ideology pronto if it doesn’t work for them.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
Attacks point to forethought. A strategic plan. We need to look at the pattern. Somebody in China is thinking this through, twisting the rope, and we’ve caught them in the middle of it. Maybe they weren’t expecting to be caught yet—I don’t know. But I do know that you don’t spend all that time and energy—hiding your tracks, but still leaving clues—without a reason. It’s all leading to something, something we don’t understand yet. There’s a point to this.

TRUFFANT
:
But we have no idea what that point is, so we’re still at square one. Everything we’ve come up with either has a flaw, or flies in the face of basic logic. No sleep until we solve this, people. To go to war with the United States of America, you need a reason.

LEFEBRVE
:
You’ve got to be a dog with a bone. Ballsy as hell.

CHEN
:
Or desperate.

CLEMENS
:
Or crazy.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
Wait. What did you say?

CLEMENS
:
They would have to be crazy.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
No, Celeste . . . ?

CHEN
:
Desperate.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
That’s it. That’s the answer right there.

LEFEBVRE
:
You lost me.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
They’re ballsy, sure, but to what end? None that we can see. We know they’re not crazy. Celeste just told us they’re incredibly pragmatic. So that leaves desperate. That’s where the answer lies—the Chinese are starting a war against us because they are desperate. Now we just have to figure out what they’re desperate about.

END OF CONVERSATION
.

END OF DMS TRANSMISSION
.

B
efore, when Xi Ling had been a poor factory worker, he never worried. He planned. He spent every waking moment scheming, plotting, saving, and strategizing. Wealth was his dream, his destiny. He would achieve it, or die trying.

But now, twenty-five years later—and finally wealthy—Xi Ling worried constantly. This was the paradox of his life, he thought. You get what you want, and then you worry about keeping it.

He was worried about his health (he was too fat, his doctor said, and was risking a heart attack), about his mistress (and his wife, come to think of it), about his reputation in Chongqing (he had thrown too many lavish parties), about his relationship with the local party leaders (he had bribed each of them separately, but were they now comparing amounts, preparing to ask for more?), even about who had been driving his brand-new Mercedes CL550 coupe without his permission (he would strangle the bastard when he caught him). And now, on top of all the rest, he was worried about his factory. Very worried.

His plant manager, Quan with the craggy face, had called him fifteen minutes ago, panicked, breathlessly babbling about the stitching machines and the workers fleeing the factory floor. Xi Ling had been fast asleep—a rare pleasure for him in his middle age—and was furious to be woken. He had given strict orders not to be disturbed on Tuesday and Thursday nights—his evenings with his mistress at the small apartment he had bought her on Songshi Avenue. He treasured his mistress nights. At least he had until last month, when she had started badgering him to buy her diamonds. Didn’t she understand that he was not made of money?

Well, that was not entirely true either. He
was
made of money. At least it seemed that way. Xi Ling had gotten rich making backpacks and tents and nylon bags for the European and American markets. He made fancy backpacks and not-so-fancy ones. His workers stitched together high-end brand-name bags, low-end generic bags, and illegal knockoffs of both the high-end and the low-end bags. He had all the bases covered. Some people might call that amoral, but they could go to hell. Xi Ling was nothing if not practical. At least in business. Come to think of it, he was that way in everything.

None of that mattered now, as Xi Ling swerved wildly down the four-lane highway leading west from Chongqing out into the hilly industrial suburbs at two-thirty in the morning. All of his money, all of his striving and planning could be washed away in an instant if his factory ran into production troubles. He had orders from seventeen different Western companies. Xi Ling’s factory ran twenty-four hours a day, every single day of the year. It even ran through Chinese New Year. He was in the middle of constructing dormitories so that his employees could walk a few yards to their beds at the end of their shifts, get a little sleep, and then go right back to work. Some people said that was ruthless and inhuman—damned reporter from that Italian newspaper—but Xi Ling knew that was the only way he could stay ahead of the product orders. And what was wrong with the Italians anyway? It was a company out of Milan that accounted for forty-two percent of his orders. They sold his goods to other Italians, for far cheaper than if a European worker had made them, and yet people from that same country came here and wrote that Xi Ling was a barbarian? Did they not enjoy his tents and backpacks? What did they care how he treated his employees?

And who were the Italians to lecture the Chinese on business? Their country was on the verge of bankruptcy. They were a disaster. A joke. The hypocrisy of the Europeans drove him to distraction.

He swung his Mercedes off the smooth gray highway and down a series of blackened side streets, between massive warehouses glowing in yellow halogen light and fenced-off construction sites. Even with the global economic downturn, people were still building new factories in Chongqing. That inspired him as he gripped the steering wheel and stomped hard on the gas pedal. He could always start over again. And the first thought he had as he saw workers streaming out of his factory gate was—he might have to do just that.

It was as his floor manager had said on the phone: women—all his stitchers
and sewers were women—were abandoning his factory, pushing their way onto the street, falling all over each other and yelling. Xi Ling slammed on the brakes and jumped out of his car, screaming at them even before he opened the door: “What are you doing! Get back to work! You cannot leave the factory! I will fire you! I will fire every one of you!”

And then Xi Ling noticed something peculiar. These workers weren’t actually fleeing the factory. They were running about in the yard between the steel cyclone fence and the factory building. Some were throwing their hands in the air, shouting. Others seemed to be dancing and singing. Had they all gone completely mad? He grabbed a young woman by the arm as she stumbled past. “What are you doing? Your shift is not over until the sun rises!”

“We are celebrating! Celebrate with us!” The young woman smiled ecstatically.

“I do not pay you to celebrate!” he shouted above the din.

The young woman stopped smiling and stared into Xi Ling’s face. The corners of her mouth drooped into a frown.

“It’s him!” she yelled. “The owner! The criminal! He’s here!”

And suddenly she was grabbing his arm, tugging at the fabric of his silk suit jacket.

“Let go of me,” Xi Ling barked. “How dare you assault me! I am your employer!” But it was too late. Scores of women were crowding around him, pushing in on him, clutching at his arms and at the hair on his head.

“Let go of me!” he screamed, but the women weren’t listening.

One of them, a grizzled older woman, yelled at the others: “Take him inside! Let’s feed him to the Tiger!”

A tiger? Xi Ling’s blood went cold. Had some lunatic brought a tiger into his factory? Was that why his workers had become hysterical? Xi Ling did not like animals—they scared him, always had, from the time he had been a child and his mother told him bedtime stories about snow tigers and black panthers. Big cats scared him more than anything else.

The women surrounding Xi Ling cheered in agreement, and all of a sudden Xi Ling found himself moving, inexorably, toward the front door of the factory, a helpless corked bottle floating on a sea of female factory workers. The women were four or five deep around him now, fifty or sixty of them in total, many holding fast to his clothes, shoving him through the factory door and into the cavernous entryway.

“I will have you all killed! I know everyone on the party Directorate!” he screamed. Blood was flowing freely from scratches on his forehead now, and his suit was in tatters. “Do you realize what you are doing?”

But they seemed to know exactly what they were doing. The mob forced Xi Ling across the entry room and through the large doorway that led to the factory floor; the doorway where Xi Ling’s enforcers body-searched every woman, head-to-toe, every day, twice a day, for contraband coming in and stolen product going out. And now Xi Ling was getting a version of the same treatment, as the mass of women groped and prodded him, one hand digging into his crotch while another set of nails drew more blood from his wrists. Xi Ling screamed in pain.

And then suddenly they set him free. The crowd parted and Xi Ling stumbled to his feet. The women had fallen silent, even as their screams echoed in Xi Ling’s ears. He wiped the blood from his eyes, expecting to see a giant jungle cat prowling his beloved factory floor, ready to pounce.

What he saw instead was a woman.

She was young, plain-looking, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her black hair cut in a mop top, like a farmer or a country bumpkin. She was surrounded by more of his workers, and some men too—men Xi Ling did not recognize. The young woman was clearly in charge, but she did not radiate force or hostility. She smiled pleasantly, as if this were a chat among friends about how to plan a birthday party. She was gesturing calmly to the machinery that crowded the factory floor. Around her, scores of other men and women—of all ages, and in all types of clothing—were methodically dismantling his sewing and stitching machines. There didn’t seem to be anger in what they were doing, but they were destroying his beloved machines nonetheless, unscrewing phalanges, tearing out cranks and gears, piling yards of unsewn leather and plastic into heaps and then pouring some kind of acid on the materials. The materials hissed and steamed under the corrosive effects of the acid.

Xi Ling gathered himself and marched toward the woman. “Who are you? What are you doing!” he barked. “Are you the Tiger?”

The young woman nodded, casting her eyes downward, in a sign of humility and respect. “I am Hu Mei. They call me the Tiger. But I do not encourage that name.”

“Well, Tiger,” Xi Ling raged, “this is my factory! You’re breaking the law! I will have the police in here in five minutes if you don’t stop immediately!”