Threat Vector

Curious, Wei opened his eyes.

The office door flew open now, Fung ran in, and Wei’s body shook to the point he worried Fung would see his weakness.

He lowered the gun quickly.

“What is it?” Wei demanded.

Fung’s eyes were wide; he wore an incongruous smile on his face. He said, “General Secretary! Tanks! Tanks in the street!”

Wei lowered the gun carefully. What did this mean? “It’s just MPS. MPS has armored vehicles,” he responded.

“No, sir! Not armored personnel carriers. Tanks! Long lines of tanks coming from the direction of Tiananmen Square!”

“Tanks? Whose tanks?”

“Su! It must be General… excuse me, I mean Chairman Su! He is sending heavy armor to protect you. The MPS won’t dare arrest you in defiance of the PLA. How can they?”

Wei could not believe this turn of events. Su Ke Qiang, the Princeling four-star PLA general and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and one of the men he had made a direct appeal to the evening before, had come to his aid at the last possible moment.

The president of China and the general secretary of the CPC slid the pistol across the desk to his principal protection agent. “Major Fung… It appears I will not be needing this today. Take it from me before I hurt myself.”

Fung took the pistol, engaged the safety, and slid it into the holster on his hip. “I am very relieved, Mr. President.”

Wei did not think that Fung really cared whether he lived or died, but in this heady moment the president stood and shook his bodyguard’s hand anyway.

Any allies, even conditional allies, were worth having on a day like this.

Wei looked out the window of his office now, across the compound and to a point in the distance beyond the walls of Zhongnanhai. Tanks filled the streets, armed People’s Liberation Army troops walked in neat rows alongside the armor, their rifles in the crooks of their arms.

As the rumbling of the approaching tanks shook the floor and rattled books, fixtures, and furniture in the office, Wei smiled, but his smile soon wavered.

“Su?” he said to himself in bewilderment. “Of all people to save me… why Su?”

But he knew the answer. Though Wei was happy and thankful for the intervention of the military, he realized, even in those first moments, that his survival made him weaker, not stronger. There would be a quid pro quo.

For the rest of his rule, Wei Zhen Lin knew, he would be beholden to Su and his generals, and he knew exactly what they wanted from him.

FIVE

John Clark stood at his kitchen sink; he looked out the window and watched mist form in his back pasture as a gray afternoon turned into a grayer evening. He was alone, for a few minutes more anyway, and he decided he could put off no longer what he’d been dreading all day.

Clark and his wife, Sandy, lived in this farmhouse on fifty acres of rolling fields and forestland in Frederick County, Maryland, close to the Pennsylvania state line. Farm life was still new to John; just a few years ago the thought of himself as a country gentleman sipping iced tea on his back porch would have made him either chuckle or cringe.

But he loved his new place, Sandy loved it even more, and John Patrick, his grandson, absolutely adored his visits out to the country to see Grandpa and Grandma.

Clark wasn’t one for lengthy reflection; he preferred to live in the moment. But as he surveyed his property and thought about the task at hand, he did have to admit that he had managed to put together a good personal life for himself.

But now it was time to see if his professional life was over.

It was time to remove his bandages and test the function of his wounded hand.

Again.

Eight months earlier his hand had been broken — no, his hand had been shattered—by unskilled but energetic torturers in a seedy warehouse in the Mitino district of northwest Moscow. He’d suffered nine fractures to bones in his fingers, palm, and wrist, and had spent much of his time since the injury either preparing for or recovering from three surgeries.

He was two weeks post his fourth time under the knife, and today was the first day his surgeon would allow him to test the strength and mobility of the appendage.

A quick look at the clock on the wall told him that Sandy and Patsy would be home in a few minutes. His wife and his daughter had driven together to Westminster for groceries. They told him to wait on the function test of his hand until they returned, so they could be present. They claimed they wanted to be there to celebrate his recovery with dinner and wine, but John knew the real reason: They did not want him going through this alone. They were worried about a poor outcome, and they wanted to be close for moral support if he was not able to move his fingers any better than he could before surgery.

He agreed to their request at the time, but now he realized he needed to do this by himself. He was too anxious to wait, he was too proud to strain and struggle in front of his wife and daughter, but more than this, he knew he would need to push himself much further than his daughter, the doctor, or his wife, the nurse, would allow.

They were worried he might hurt himself, but John wasn’t worried about pain. He’d learned to process pain better than almost anyone in the world. No, John worried he might fail. He’d do whatever he physically could to avoid it, and he had a feeling it would not be pretty to watch. He’d test his strength and mobility by pushing himself as far as humanly possible.

Standing at the kitchen counter, he unwrapped his bandages and removed the small metal splints from between his fingers. Turning away from the window, he left the dressings on the counter and moved to the living room. There he sat on his leather chair and raised his hand to examine it. The surgical scars, both new and old, were small and not particularly dramatic, but he knew they belied the incredible damage done to his hand. His orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins was regarded as one of the best in the world, and he had performed the surgery through tiny incisions, using laparoscopic cameras and fluoroscopic images to help him find his way to the damaged bones and scar tissue.

John knew that even though his hand did not look too bad, his chances for a complete recovery were less than fifty percent.

Perhaps if the blunt trauma had been just a little higher on the hand, then the joints of the fingers would have less scar tissue, the doctors had said. Perhaps if he had been a little younger, his ability to heal would be enough to ensure a complete recovery, they hinted without saying.

John Clark knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about either issue.

He pushed the poor prognosis out of his mind and steeled himself for success.

He picked a racquetball off the coffee table in front of him and he looked it over — his eyes fixed with resolve.

“Here we go.”

Clark slowly began closing his fingers around the ball.

Almost immediately he realized he was still unable to completely mobilize his index finger.

His trigger finger.

Shit.

Both the proximal and middle phalanx bones had been virtually crushed by the torturer’s hammer, and the interphalangeal joint, already slightly arthritic from a lifetime of trigger pulling, was now severely damaged.

As his other fingertips pressed into the little blue ball, his trigger finger merely twitched.