Vice President Cooper Wallace scowled, looking past his wife sitting across from him in front of the inglenook fireplace in their official residence at the Naval Observatory.
“It was what?” Wallace said into his cell phone. “Arson? A billion-dollar arson?”
“That’s what the RAID people on the ground in Chengdu are reporting,” Chief of Staff Paul Nichols told Wallace. “It withstood the quake, but the story they’re hearing is that a mob broke through the perimeter fence. The guards were no match. They were posted there only to prevent thefts from the construction site, not to stop a rebellion.”
“What about the Spectrum distribution center?”
“Still standing. Looted, but still standing.”
Wallace pushed himself to his feet. “The Chinese government will have to pay RAID and Spectrum back every single dollar—”
“Yuan. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. You may even want to think twice about asking for it.”
“Why the devil not?”
“Because what Tiananmen Square was to political protest, Chengdu will be to economic protest, except worse. The turmoil in the city is starting to spread to other towns and villages in the earthquake zone.”
“What about the army?”
“It looks like they learned their lesson in 1989 and are staying out of it—for now.”
Nichols found himself once again looking for a way to dissuade Wallace from a course that would make a fool either out of himself or out of the president.
“It only confirms what you’ve been saying all along,” Nichols finally said, suppressing what he was afraid might sound like a patronizing tone. “Neither RAID nor Spectrum should’ve gone in there. Let them learn their lesson by eating their losses.”
Wallace paused and stared down at the morning’s Washington Times lying on the coffee table. His eyes fell on a profile of the marketing director of the Arizona Camelback mega-church. He then recited, more to himself than to Nichols, “Moses took the calf they had made and burnt it; he ground it to powder, sprinkled it on water, and made the Israelites drink it.”
“You’re right,” Wallace said to Nichols. “Let them choke on it. I warned them. If they’d spent as much time reading the Bible as they did spreadsheets and profit projections and financial models, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I also think we should call the folks at the Baptist Missionary Convention and tell them not to send any kids over there. The mobs haven’t turned on foreigners yet, but they will as soon as they connect the dots.”
“Connect the dots… What do you mean, connect the dots?”
Nichols cringed. Wallace was the leading Republican contender for the presidency, but he sometimes displayed a provincial naïveté.
“Corruption, Mr. Vice President. The RAID facility didn’t cost a billion dollars, it cost three-quarters of a billion, the rest was used to pay bribes from Beijing to Chengdu. And one of the things those payments bought was the right to pollute the countryside and poison the people. Right now the mobs are more focused on the corrupt officials who are responsible for the school and hospital collapses and the undrinkable water and the birth defects and rampant cancers, but in the Chinese way, it’s only a matter of time before they take revenge against the barbarian invaders.”
“If it wasn’t the mob, then who burned down RAID? Environmental terrorists? Falun Gong? The ghost of Chiang Kai-shek? Who?”
“We don’t know yet, and perhaps we never will. Whoever did it used the chaos that followed the earthquake to disguise who they were, otherwise they would’ve announced something on the Internet.”
“We need to lean on the CIA. What are they for, if not to find out who’s attacking American economic interests? If it happened to a Chinese factory in Nigeria you bet your ass the Chinese intelligence service would be on it.”
“I’ll make a call and see what resources they can put into it,” Nichols said, “but I wouldn’t count on getting definitive results very soon. They’re stretched pretty thin.”
“Then maybe what I need to propose as part of my presidential campaign is that we establish a financial security agency, modeled on the NSA.”
“Not a bad idea. Just make sure you figure out a way to control it better than anyone has been able to control the CIA.”
“Don’t worry, that’ll be on my agenda. For now, lean on them as hard as you can. If you’re not getting anywhere, then send the director to me and I’ll take care of it.”