The Mandarin Club (4 page)

“That’s. . . well. . . different.” He could only laugh.

“If I’m the first to know that Senator Smithson is going to pull a flip-flop on the China trade agreement, there’s no reason I can’t use that information all over town. My job is to be my client’s eyes and ears. I’m not going to apologize for being good at it.”

They fenced on, Rachel amused, Alexander increasingly uneasy. She was too close a friend for him to play
60 Minutes
interrogator, and there was a limit to where he wanted to go with the reporter/source game. So, as he sipped his tea and carefully regarded this lacquered part of her personality, he tried to turn the conversation away from her affairs at TPB.

It was Rachel who persisted. “Let me tell you something about Mr. Talbott. Do you know what he does on weekends?”

“What?”

“While your caricature of a K Street lawyer has him quail hunting with senators, he’s in some inner city church basement helping with programs he sponsors. He supports about a dozen charities in this town—most of them anonymously. The man is like Ebenezer Scrooge—
after
he sees the ghost.”

“Wasn’t there something peculiar about your Mr. Porter, the bank lawyer who makes all those acquisitions?”

“Alan Porter does all the investment deals, sure.”

“So half your shop lobbies and the other half works with Porter investing the profits?”

“Alexander, this is totally off the record, right? Your paper is just doing a case study, an abstract—”

“Of course.”

“I’ll come after you, you know, Bonner. I’ll climb in your window at night and beat you about the head and shoulders if you burn me.”

“Remind me to check the locks.” He found himself amused at the thought of Rachel paying him a nocturnal visit. “Actually, I believe you would.”

“Damn right, I would.” She stared him down a moment before continuing. “Well, Mr. Talbott is rather indifferent to wealth. Money is just a way of keeping score for him. It’s Porter who runs the books and does the investment deals on the side. So there is your Chinese wall—right down the middle of the firm.”

They turned briefly to the headlines of the day—the administration’s latest judicial confirmation battle with the filibustering Senate and the endless hearings on the Katrina response. This was just obligatory, though; here they danced to separate tunes. There was an altogether predictable Red State/True Blue chasm dividing their views on all things political. Iraq they had agreed to stop discussing altogether—Rachel backed the unpopular mission to take the fight against terrorism overseas; Alexander condemned the politicized intelligence he insisted had led Washington to prosecute “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Rachel was a libertarian Republican, committed to small government, low taxes, and support for the commander in chief. Alexander remained a hopelessly pure, Howard Dean kind of Democrat, the only guy she knew
still
whining about the butterfly ballot, the hanging chads, and the Florida recount.

They shared a bit of gossip about their Stanford friends. Branko’s wife had given birth to a fifth child. Mickey was facing a nasty custody fight with his Beijing-born wife, divorce Chinese style. Booth was gearing up for Senator Smithson’s long anticipated presidential primary campaign. Lee was riding herd on North American affairs at Beijing’s Foreign Ministry, trying to keep China’s bitterly divided factions in line.

There were few surprises. They were all living the lives they had charted so many years ago. Their prophecies were being fulfilled, their talents applied, their dreams realized—or so it seemed.

Alexander spoke of his latest writing project: an essay for the
Sunday Books
section about a recent work on the 1970’s legacy, of all things. “I’m trying to find some deeper meaning in a decade everybody files under ‘vapid.’”

“It’s true,” Rachel chuckled. “I always felt ripped off. Came of age in a time without a purpose. Kind of embarrassing. I mean, Disco Fever, indeed.”

“You aren’t alone,” Alexander continued. “People think of the Seventies as some leftover decade. Formless, without transcendent meaning. After the Cultural Revolution. Before Reagan.”

“They got teach-ins and free love and birth control pills. We got Watergate and sexually transmitted diseases.”

“Seriously, we came of age surrounded by kitsch. Like the author says: ‘How does one connect the dots from
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
to Jimmy Carter to the Captain and Tennille?’”

“Vapid!” She was giggling now. “You’ve got that right; the word is inescapable.”

“So I’m playing with this thesis,” Alexander continued. “I argue that this whole anti-ideological swing colored Washington’s foreign policy. Take our relations with China. Suddenly, it didn’t matter if they’re Maoists, if only they’d buy our Treasury bonds. I mean, today Home Depot and WalMart are bigger in Beijing than they are in Little Rock. We’re starting to believe they’re all just like us.”

“You’re right.” Rachel was nodding in agreement. “We just don’t want them buying Unocal or Maytag!”

“Anyway, it’s blinded us to all the contradictions,” said Alexander, barreling ahead, jabbing the air with his fork for emphasis, “and now we’re going to pay for it.”

“Pay for it?”

“Yep,” Alexander insisted. “Sorry to darken your morning, but I see real danger ahead.”

“You sound like we’re going off to war against the godless Commies. Seems to me we’ve still got our hands full draining the swamp in Baghdad.”

“You can dismiss it all as war-gaming theory. You forget that a lot of those guys in Beijing actually
believe
their own rhetoric—you know, kinda like Wolfowitz and all his former Pentagon pals. That’s what the whole fight is still about inside all the Chinese government factions.”

“Alexander, it is
not
going to happen.”

“When did your capacity to be surprised hit its limit?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean to be alarmist, but look: in the last decade and a half, the Berlin Wall falls. The Soviet empire evaporates. A president gets impeached for lying about a blow job. The race for the White House ends in a
tie
. We see a million refugees flooded out of an American city. Not to mention 9/11, the holy wars with al-Quaida, and tracking Saddam down into some rat hole. What’s next—your guys gonna try to make Iraq the fifty-first state?”

Alexander was on a roll.

“So, you’d better be prepared to suspend disbelief all over again.”

“C’mon, you bleeding heart,” Rachel sighed, recalling all the anxious disappointments of those years. “I’ve got to make my nine o’clock, or I’ll be running late all day.”

As she stood, her cell phone rang: her secretary with an update. Mickey Dooley had just called in belatedly from San Francisco to cancel their morning meeting. Lee had bailed on his D.C. trip just last night—stuck in Beijing on some urgent matter, she said. A welcome hole now loomed in Rachel’s schedule and she breathed a bit more easily as they rose to leave.

Alexander walked her down Peacock Alley, the long mirrored hallway where, a century before, couples had once paraded in their elegant gowns. Neither Barry nor Alexander’s late wife, Anita, had ever been threatened by the friendship between their respective spouses. But then Anita had adored Alexander. She had nourished him, encouraging anything that brought forth his dry wit. Rachel assumed that Golden Boy Barry, the self-absorbed one, would never have noticed if another man had been sweet on his wife.

They reached the sidewalk behind the Willard Hotel and emerged into the sleet. Alexander was to turn right, to the Press Building on Fourteeth Street, Rachel to cross past the Borders Bookstore and the garage, into the beckoning oversized chrome and glass doors lettered “TPB.”

He offered a chaste one-armed hug again. But Rachel lingered, chin on his shoulder, her breath warm on his neck.

“You don’t like me as a lobbyist, do you?”

“It is not your best side, Rachel. But it’s a part of you.”

She pushed back, holding him at arm’s length.

“It’s all me, Alexander. The same old Wyoming cowgirl.” Then she kissed him in the center of his forehead, her fingertips soft and soothing at his temples. She kissed him so deliberately that he could feel both lips, moist and lingering.

A roar of sound erupted at that instant, accompanied by a flash of yellow light. The walls of the buildings shed a layer of brick and glass that began to cascade down from a darkening sky.

The concussive pulse staggered them. Shielded by Rachel’s frame, it felt to Alexander as if someone had blown out the windows of a car they had been racing. The force intensified, buckling their knees, shuddering all in its wake, like the earthquakes that used to rattle beneath his office high-rise in Taipei.

The FBI agent would later explain that the bomb was relatively small and amateurish. The poorly packed explosives, similar to those used at many construction sites, were consistent with the theory of a lone perpetrator—some disgruntled employee, some random anarchist with a cause.

Alexander remembered hearing a resonant series of thuds as he watched a wave of debris wafting above the avenue. From over Rachel’s shoulder, he viewed a riotous mix of yellow Post-Its and paper shreds suspended, icicles of glass and the casual vinyl flotsam of gravity-defying interiors, settling ever so slowly to the ground. The office detritus seemed herded in slow motion by the smoke, until hurtling at them south over F Street came a random section of window frame, striking Rachel squarely, slamming her on top of Alexander and pinning him to the ground.

W
hile Rachel was giving Alexander a good bye kiss, Branko Rosza was settling into his chair at the head of an oblong conference table on the seventh floor of the CIA headquarters building in suburban Virginia. Branko, the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, was uncharacteristically jumpy this Monday, having begun his workday in Langley with a modest hangover of domestic irritation.

The First of April started disagreeably for Branko. Spontaneity did not come easily to him. Branko and his wife Erika shared a passion for ritual. Though not a particularly religious couple, they had an accumulation of modest ceremonies that brought rhythm and order to their family life. Their McLean home was a cheerful place; their kitchen refrigerator was decorated with a magnetic calendar highlighting future causes for celebration. Such days had come to provide the anchors for the busy household of seven, a certain center amidst the blizzard of after-school lessons and sports activities. Everything from obscure European saints’ days to Hallmark holidays yielded cards and special meals.

With five children under sixteen—and the twelve-year-old an especially creative prankster—breakfast this day had been an adventure. The milk was green. The orange juice had been spiked with Sprite. The car keys were hidden under the ice in the automatic dispenser. Branko was a notoriously deliberate person. The early games of the day proved burdensome, challenging his compulsion for control.

A squat, dark-haired man with a wizened face, Branko moved forward with a sense of mission. He was playing a role that honored the brutal hardships his parents had endured. They were both Hungarian refugees and had met in a displaced persons camp in Europe in 1946. It was many years before they possessed enough faith in the future to start a family. Shortly thereafter, in 1956, Soviet tanks of occupation rolled past the Roszas’ Budapest apartment block, and the family fled across the border to Austria, then on to Liverpool, England, finally making it to Cleveland in the early 1960’s.

Branko was an infant when the Soviets invaded, and, ultimately, an only child. He was raised in an anxious home where frivolity was suspect, loyalty exalted. Branko, with his incongruous green eyes, would play chess for hours with his silent father, plotting elaborate stratagies, trained from a young age to think many moves ahead.

That the quiet boy had tested as a genius was no great surprise. His uncanny ability to assess motive and intent made him a brilliant analyst of information. He excelled, winning numerous academic scholarships and flourishing as a Chinese language specialist in Palo Alto, before moving seamlessly into his first government job in the intelligence business. He mailed in his thesis on Beijing decision-making, becoming the first of the Mandarin boys to secure his doctorate. Branko was a rarity, having worked his way through every significant Asia job at the Agency—in both analysis and operations. Now he sat, literally, at the head of the table for the intelligence community’s Asia work.