The Mandarin Club (13 page)

“I
need you,” Alexander said, pleading with Branko.

“I am likely to disappoint you.”

“See me. Talk to me.”

“No harm in listening, I suppose,” Branko relented.

“Gimme some markers, at least.”

“Don’t expect me to fill in all the blanks,” Branko said. “Besides, you fly solo quite well.”

“Yeah. Too many years of practice.”

As he replayed in his head the conversation on that most public of lines, a reporter’s cell phone query to the CIA, Alexander understood. He’d developed some sensitive information he was close to publishing. Could the Agency provide some guidance? Branko had implicitly acknowledged he would. The McLean Family Restaurant was a virtual second cafeteria for CIA veterans; its selection confirmed that this would be, in fact, a business meeting. Still, Alexander’s hopes were quite modest as he rolled north above the Virginia cliffs on the George Washington Parkway, struck by the beauty of the late day sun reflected in the river below.

As he took the Route 123 exit west, Alexander appreciated the irony of the setting, a relic of the Cold War. When it was first recognized that the White House and Congress rested in the cross hairs of a single nuclear strike, federal planners dispersed the security bureaucracy. The nascent Central Intelligence Agency was banished to Virginia farmland, far beyond Washington’s downtown.

Over the years, the suburbs crowded around, ringing the Agency fortress with a civilian moat of pricey housing developments and retail centers. Just down the road, past Potomac School and Langley High, sat remnants of an old shopping mall, with a barbershop sporting an old redand-white revolving pole. A whimsical pet store specializing in birdhouses and seed sat alongside an unimposing local eatery, which Alexander, the inveterate urbanite, almost overlooked.

The diner smelled to Alexander of another place and time. The red leather seats were sticky. The noisy kitchen churned out burgers and milkshakes, but also moussaka and a touch of feta in the house salads. The waitresses had tiara-like hats on their heads. The line of waiting families extended past the cash register, a pleasant mix of Little Leaguers in uniform and elderly couples out for an early supper, and added to the decibel level. The clamor was so great, Alexander realized, that even one of Telstar’s latest directional mikes could not sort a private conversation out of the background clatter. Here, a most public venue afforded considerable privacy to converse.

Branko was waiting at a table in the back when Alexander arrived.

“Greetings, my friend,” Alexander said, offering a strong hand and an easy smile. Branko had already lost his tie—a good sign. “Congratulations on number five. Pretty impressive for an old fart.”

“Thanks. You still got a couple in you.”

“Right,” Alexander nodded. “I just need to find a child bride.”

“Hey, c’mon. Erika is going on forty-three, and isn’t necessarily ready to quit. And I’m already facing the prospect of being in a wheelchair before the youngest gets to college.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“I tell Erika that every night.”

They both ordered cheeseburgers and fries. Branko had a chocolate shake, Alexander a Miller Lite.

“So, how’s Rachel doing?” Branko asked after a time. “She sounded rather disoriented when I telephoned her at the hospital.”

“Yeah. She’s mending OK. The shoulder turned out to be just a hairline fracture. But her head is sure in a different place.”

“I’m certain that was quite a life changing experience—near death, and all that. You went through it yourself, I’m sure.”

Alexander was sipping the tap water from an old Coca-Cola glass. “It’s been much tougher on her. I was in Sarajevo, remember.”

“Yes. And after what you went through with Anita the past few years. . . you know all about loss.”

Alexander thought to respond, but Branko’s bluntness was disarming. “Anyway, given that this was her office, and her people, it was like having her home violated.”

“Is she now back at work?”

“Just part-time, for now,” Alexander replied. “She’s spending a lot more hours at the house with Jamie. Motherhood still centers her. Helps her see things more clearly.”

“Any Barry sightings?”

“Oh, he’s trying to do the right thing, I guess. He’s been spending a lot of time with Jamie. Taking him to after-school stuff, even going down to Colonial Williamsburg. But it’s weird, Branko. When Barry takes Jamie away, Rachel just seems even more anxious, more out of sorts. It’s tough. She’s lousy at putting her own needs first.”

“Most mothers are, I’ve observed.”

“Then he just disappears—for days at a time. Mumbles something about the New York markets, and some trade deal. I figure he’s off selling warheads to Osama. Barry’s just so. . . distant.”

“Been that way ever since Stanford.”

“Anyway, it’s tough on Rachel. And now she’s heading back into the work routine, too soon in my opinion.”

“I’m sure there will be some ghosts there, though the Talbott firm just keeps grinding out those billable hours in temporary quarters, right?”

“Yeah, they knocked out a wall, moved a bunch of people up to their penthouse suite, and went back to work. I guess they got to eat.”

“Well, I’m certain they have competent security now.”

“It’s like an airport, Rachel says. A lot of rent-a-cops and metal detectors. Not too good for people in the PR business.”

Alexander paused as the beer and milkshake arrived. He drank eagerly from the frosted mug, letting the chill wash over his tongue, waiting to ask what he had wanted to ask for weeks.

“Do you think she was the target, Branko?”

“No.”

“How about Talbott?”

“I don’t really know.”

“What about all the foreigners who were due in that day? And Senator Smithson, even Mickey Dooley? Any evidence who else this guy might have been after?”

“Far as I know, it’s still not clear. It’s all with the D.C. Police and the FBI anyway. It’s domestic. Homeland Security. Not CIA business.”

“Hey, after all the screw-ups tracking Bin Laden, I thought you guys didn’t hold out on each other any more. Under the new system, aren’t the FBI and CIA supposed to share everything?”

“It takes some time to end decades-old rivalries.”

“But they must touch base with you, right? I mean, half the TPB clients are overseas. They must have a lot of enemies.”

“Alexander, you know I can’t go there. I don’t even have a solid hunch myself. Sounds like they are close to ID’ing the last of the bodies at the garage entrance. But I couldn’t help you even if I did know.”

“I recognize that. But that isn’t why I called. Still it bugs me they haven’t figured out the ‘who’ or the ‘why.’ And it’s Rachel, too, you know. I worry about her. And Jamie. I feel as if they’re really vulnerable.”

They were gazing past each other, both a bit embarrassed at where the conversation was taking them. Alexander let the silence linger. This was hard; he so admired Branko, the one guy whose sense of mission had not diminished over time.

Branko, like Alexander, was clumsy with fellowship. Yet, they had retained their mutual respect. Branko found Alexander’s insistence on getting the facts right highly admirable. Alexander, the solitary plodder, bereft of family, was a figure familiar to Branko from his own childhood.

It was Branko who spoke first this time, meandering again around the subject at hand. “You know what is so remarkable about aging? It strikes me whenever I’m in contact with any of our Stanford compatriots.”

“What’s that?”

“How unchanging people actually are as they mature. I saw it once again at my high school reunion a few years back, my thirtieth, in Cleveland. The jocks are still jocks—same with the nerdy guys. The good people from those days—the guys and girls you could see even then had heart, who knew their soul—haven’t changed. And the assholes, the worms, just got fatter.”

“Seems to me you warned me about that once.”

“Did I? But anyway, I digress. You called about the other matter.”

“Right.” Alexander was thrown off by Branko’s ruminations. “China.”

“What is it you think you’ve got?”

“I’ve been following up on Senator Smithson’s ambush of Hollandsworth. You know, when he did that little hit on the Chinese missile exports to Iran.”

“That’s hardly a new story.”

“I know, the Chinese getting promiscuous on exports again. Missiles to Syria, missiles to Iran. It’s just that I’m getting a lot more detail this time. I’m trying to explain the pattern to our readers. What’s a friend of the United States doing selling such dangerous stuff to our—”

“You mean, a ‘strategic competitor’ of the United States.”

“OK. A friendly strategic competitor whose ass has been kissed by six consecutive American presidents. I mean, what’s China trying to accomplish?”

“Make some money. It’s probably not any more complicated than that.” Branko was munching his cheeseburger. “Rarely is.”

“Well, I’ve got all the usual stuff about how Chinese exports fund their military technology base. And I’ve got some good quotes about their zero sum approach. You know, how they think that helping America’s adversaries lessens our ability to dominate the Third World.”

“Anything to fuck with our heads,” said Branko, agreeing. “It’s the same old foreign policy theory they have followed for centuries. Play the barbarians off against each other and pick up the spoils.”

“Sure,” said Alexander. “I hear the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan freaked their generals out. Made them rethink their whole approach to warfare.”

“No doubt,” said Branko. “Probably figured out they wouldn’t need to do amphibious landings to capture Taiwan. Just need to push a few buttons.”

“I mean, can you imagine what the Chinese military guys felt seeing all that precision-guided ordnance hitting home?” Alexander asked. “Well, anyway, I’ve been working this angle. Even got a Pentagon guy on record, though the White House folks will probably clip his wings. I’m just not sure I believe that kind of empty ideology really is still at work in Beijing in the twenty-first century. This isn’t Mao and the Cultural Revolutionaries we’re talking about any more.”

“Remember Lee’s Lesson Number One: they are not like us,” Branko said, smiling as he wiped ketchup from his moustache, again deflecting the subject at hand. “Funny, I went to a lecture a while back by Gaddis, the Cold War historian.”

“Great researcher.”

“He lectured about his recent book. Spent five years looking through old Soviet documents. Know what was the scariest thing he found?”

“What?”

“How many of the old Communist ideologues actually came to believe their own propaganda. They convinced themselves by repeating the catechism so many times. So don’t underestimate Communists’ capacity for self-delusion just because the Chinese are doing IPO’s for their Internet companies and trying to buy our oil companies.”

“Right,” said Alexander, nodding. “Where does the aggressiveness at home with missile deployments fit in?”

“Huh?”

“You know, the new stuff I’m hearing about Nanping activity.” This was the fishing part. But Branko was slow to bite, so Alexander continued. “My view is that it goes beyond routine. I understand this is the same base they used to rattle Taipei in 1996. Nanping. Fujian Province.”