they’ll use it as an excuse to intervene.”
Ayi Zhao raised her palm toward Jian-jun. “They don’t need an excuse. Their orders come from Beijing and the issues now are bigger than the symbolism of an old lady.” She pointed down toward the city. “Tell them I’m coming.”
Faith looked back and forth between Little Mei and Jian-jun, then gestured with her hand through the open door toward the scooter and said, “Go. I’ll find a car to bring her down.”
Jian-jun grabbed his jacket and then said to Ayi Zhao, “They’re in the backup generator room of the burned out Meinhard electronics factory.”
He turned to Faith. “It’s on the western edge of the city in the economic development zone.”
Faith’s body jerked sideways as the house jolted in an aftershock. She grabbed a chair back to steady herself. The scooter fell over. A glass next to the sink toppled and shattered.
As Jian-jun reached an arm around Ayi Zhao’s shoulders, he and Little Mei stared at each other, trading end-of-the-world looks.
In their anguished gaze, Faith saw that she was a Christian, too. Maybe an evangelical, and this was her secret.
The quake had half the force of the last one, and Faith’s internal calculator, calibrated by a lifetime in San Francisco, told her it was either a small aftershock nearby or a huge one far away.
Faith thought of the Three Gorges Dam, fearing that it had given way as the cracking and crumbling schools and hospitals of Chengdu had. But she said nothing, for she knew that they were all thinking the same thing, and they understood that if it had given way, it was too late for fear, or for hope.
“Most of the mob has moved back to the center of the city,” Jian-jun said to Faith. “But be careful. Don’t show yourselves until you get to the factory. I’ll come out to meet you.”
Jian-jun led Little Mei outside and then straightened up the scooter. He sat forward on the elongated seat and she climbed on behind him.
Faith walked to the door and looked past them and toward the valley, wondering what would greet them when they arrived.
The motor rattled, then engaged, shaking the bike. Exhaust belched from the tailpipe as he gunned it to keep it from stalling, then the cloud swirled in the air and grayed the rising sun.
Faith blocked the glare with her hand and squinted at the city. Smoke no longer drifted up from yesterday’s smoldering factories in the industrial clusters, but still billowed from the mile-diameter tire pile adjacent to the solid waste incineration plant. She knew that it would burn for months and suspected that the mob, now choking on its fumes, had come to regret having chosen arson as a form of protest. In the pollution that now blanketed the countryside, they had spread the scourge they had fought to contain.
Jian-jun leaned toward the handlebars, pushed the bike off its stand, and accelerated down the dirt street toward the center of town and then beyond it to the highway on the other side.
Ayi Zhao walked up next to Faith and looked up at her.
“You don’t need to do this,” Ayi Zhao said. “I can find a way down on my own.”
“We can protect each other,” Faith said. “Because of you, no one will harm me. And because of me, the army and police will see that the world is watching and perhaps will leave you alone.”
Faith thought for a moment. It struck her that the best way to shield Ayi Zhao from the army might be to recruit them to help.
“Is there an herbalist up here that you can trust?” Faith asked. “Maybe he can put something together to raise your blood pressure and make you look like you have a fever. Then we can ask the garrison to take you to the People’s Hospital. They won’t want you to die on their watch.”
Ayi Zhao nodded. “I can do it myself. All I need is ephedra, ginseng, and ginger. We can get those at the vegetable market.” She paused and then asked, “Do you have any cold pills? They always make my heart beat faster.”
“I think so,” Faith said, reaching out her hand and gripping Ayi Zhao’s shoulder. “Just be careful not to overdo it.”
CHAPTER 29
Vice President Cooper Wallace fidgeted with a paperweight on his desk in the West Wing of the White House. He rubbed his thumb across the gold presidential seal, then tossed it onto his blotter. For a moment it seemed turdlike, hard and dried and petrified. He fantasized the president sneaking from office to office, dropping his pants, squatting, and leaving a marker behind, and the thought disgusted him. And the thought that he even had the thought disgusted him more.
Wallace recalled a psychology class he’d taken at the University of Kansas the year after he’d returned from his second tour in Vietnam. The professor was a left-wing freak, a former priest who’d left the Jesuit order to marry the soon-to-be ex-wife of a parishioner. And the class was nothing but a camouflaged attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular, which the professor portrayed as a contradictory mass of outward projections of internal repressions and delusions.
Wallace remembered walking into the lecture hall one morning, seeing quotes from Martin Luther that the professor had written in bold letters on the chalkboard: I am like ripe shit and the world is a gigantic asshole. I have shit in the pants, and you can hang it around your neck and wipe your mouth with it.
He’d stopped in the descending aisle as he read the words, the acidic taste of bile rising in his throat. He’d swallowed hard, then dropped in the nearest seat and gritted his teeth and breathed in and out, steeling himself for what was to follow.
Then the professor launched off from the lines into a lecture about Freud and anality and the origins of Protestantism that Wallace didn’t hear-couldn’t hear-because all his senses had been obliterated by the sight of the words. He even had to feel for his legs after class was over so he could stand up, both his body and soul now too numbed even for rage.
That came later, during a night of wrenching, racing thoughts, at the end of which he resolved that someday, after he’d made his stake in Spectrum with his father, he’d enter politics and find a way to crush those lunatics and cleanse the universities.
But somehow that purpose had morphed over the following decades into something else. What that was, he now wasn’t certain, except it led him to the second most powerful office in the world-if he ignored the fact that it had no constitutional power at all. Even as president of the Senate he wasn’t his own man, for he had to follow the president’s orders.
Wallace glanced around at the blue couch and pale yellow chairs where he’d posed for photographs with the lesser leaders of the world.
Who the hell even knew where Comoros was? Or Burundi? Or Suriname? Or Tuvalu? Or whatever those piss-poor countries were called on the day their leaders came visiting. Collectively they had the gross national product of a Detroit pawnshop. Them coming to beg for money, putting their loyalty up for sale, first to the U.S., then to the Russians, then to the Chinese. Then to all three of the world powers at the same time.
He remembered staring at the wristwatch of one of their prime ministers, a crook who’d graduated from Missouri State, working his way through school handing out towels in the gym, then spending twenty years in his country’s civil service, and finally showing up in the White House wearing a hundred-thousand-dollar Rolex.
And the man kept glancing at it as if taunting Wallace, telling him that if the U.S. wanted to buy his country’s loyalty, it would have to make the down payment to him first.
But it didn’t work because they both knew that as China had done throughout Africa, the resources of his country could be bought for pocket change, just like Sudanese oil, and Zambian copper, and Nigerian natural gas.
A light knock on Wallace’s door pulled him from the reveries of the past and onto the obstacle course of the present and toward the president, who was standing by with the starter pistol.
Wallace could see the distant finish line, for it was always in the same place: Tuesday after the first Monday in November-but he hadn’t yet figured out how to get there.
