The Mandarin Code

by Steve Lewis

  Not too shabby, mate.

  His hands pinched at a belly several kilos heavier than he would have liked. But the back was ramrod straight and his arms retained enough muscle tone to suggest this body was a fine athletic specimen. Once.

  He was still entangled in his physical stocktaking when the bathroom’s digital radio burst into life. The familiar trumpet of the ABC’s NewsRadio heralded a lively discussion with Marius Benson about the morning’s headlines. Dunkley turned down the sound so as not to disturb his sleeping beauty.

  A cursory run through the Fairfax papers and Murdoch tabloids was the warm-up for a full-scale dissection of The Australian’s front page. Not all of it complimentary, either.

  ‘Thank you Marius,’ Dunkley muttered caustically.

  He stifled a yawn as he opened the front door to his small apartment. He avoided reading the papers online whenever possible, and was pleased to see real-world print resting with reassuring tactility on the porch.

  As he carried the five mastheads inside, he was dismayed by their meagre weight. The rise of the internet and changing reading habits were strip-mining advertising dollars from the old media, by the millions. And as the cash dried up and profits shrank, the farewells for journalist colleagues were becoming routine. Every paper in the country was fighting for its survival, slashing costs as it shed hardcopy readers. Jesus, even his local newsagent, Chris, was toying with scrapping the paper run.

  ‘It’s costing me money,’ Chris had told Dunkley recently as he’d settled his monthly account. ‘I only do it ’cause of customers like you. And you’re getting fewer every year.’

  It had hit Dunkley like a punch. Something that he’d assumed would be a permanent feature of his life was about to vanish. That reassuring thud of paper-on-grass would soon, like the clink of the milk run, become a story that grandparents told to wide-eyed youngsters. He thought about that often. He had always revelled in unwrapping the papers and spreading them out on his kitchen table, as he did now.

  A quick scan of the headlines to see if he’d been scooped by one of his colleagues in the blast furnace of the federal parliamentary press gallery, still the most competitive marketplace in journalism.

  Patrick Lion from the Tele had a small-beer yarn about yet another Coalition MP forced to pay back money for a dodgy travel claim. The MP had retreated with a template excuse. The jaunt across the country to attend a colleague’s birthday was a legitimate expense given the important matters of state that were inevitably discussed. But, just to clear the matter up and ‘to ensure the right thing is done by the taxpayer and alleviate any ambiguity’, the MP had agreed to repay $5000 clocked up in airfares and expenses.

  You grub.

  He knew Lion and his other rivals would be frothing over his own story – and, more importantly, so would their editors.

  By habit, Dunkley saved the national broadsheet until last.

  Despite nearly thirty years in the game, Dunkley still felt the same kid-in-a-toyshop thrill when he broke a yarn that would set the agenda. One that would be the envy of his mates and enemies on the Hill.

  A tingle took hold as he gazed at today’s headline: TOOHEY IS TERMINAL.

  Farrrkkkk.

  Dunkley shuddered and for once it was not the result of a late-night drinking bout but the sheer thrill of re-reading the lead on a yarn that hit like a prizefighter.

  Labor risks electoral annihilation with just one in four voters now backing the embattled Toohey Government, secret internal ALP polling reveals.

  The credibility of Prime Minister Martin Toohey has also crashed with voters abandoning a government that has been rocked by crisis.

  The polling, details of which have been obtained by The Australian, shows voters in battleground seats in western Sydney and Brisbane have lost faith in the government’s ability to manage the country.

  Labor insiders fear the party is beyond salvation and the public has stopped listening to the Prime Minister.

  ‘They are waiting with baseball bats and chainsaws,’ one senior source said. ‘When the election is held, the streets will run red with our blood. Toohey’s a great guy but this can’t go on.’

  This government is in more strife than Speed Gordon.

  But unlike the mythical superhero, there would be no salvation in the final frame. Half the front page of the national broadsheet was devoted to delighting in the latest piece of bad news for the Toohey Government, dissecting the troubles of a once great and proud Labor Party. Pointers promised more thrills inside, including a thundering editorial which would point out that, once again, the judgement of the Oz had been vindicated.

  A historical analysis revealed that Toohey was the least popular prime minister since Billy McMahon. The paper’s caustic ‘Cut and Paste’ column amused itself with a series of quotes from the ABC and Fairfax ripped from Toohey’s days of early promise, all designed to show the multiple delusions of the ‘Love Media’.

  Just to make sure that not a single reader was left in any doubt as to where the newspaper stood, The Australian’s chieftains had published a photo of a glowing Opposition leader, Emily Brooks, as she left a function full of cheering Tory types, with the caption ‘Headed for the Lodge’.

  Dunkley flinched. He had no trouble going in hard with the facts and Labor had brought most of its woes on itself. But he did worry that the paper looked as if it was barracking for the Opposition when it ran puff pieces on Brooks, as rarely had he met a more objectionable individual. While the country seemed poised to throw the government out, the punters weren’t hungering for the alternative. Would Brooks be better able to provide the three key things Dunkley believed Australians craved from their leaders – predictability, certainty and competence?

  Dunkley blamed most of the government’s grief on the now catatonic Foreign Minister, Catriona Bailey. The deposed prime minister had laid such rocky foundations in the first two years of her chaotic reign that she had been on track to be the first PM since Scullin in ’32 to be tossed out after a single term.

  Bailey had pissed record ratings up against the wall. She had started dozens of grand projects and never finished a single one. Her obnoxious and high-handed style coupled with a deluge of demented demands had alienated the bureaucracy inside six months.

  She’d lost Cabinet in the first year. But the real problem was the scorn she’d heaped on Caucus, totally misunderstanding that in a parliamentary democracy a prime minister is selected by her party, not the people.

  Caucus despised her.

  So they pulled the trigger in a minute-to-midnight coup just months out from a general election. But the unexpected and largely unexplained shift to Martin Toohey shocked and confused the public. The election had seen the major parties’ share of the vote split down the middle, leaving neither with the numbers to form government.

  Toohey had cobbled together a minority government. But the compromises, and the messy aftermath of the Bailey era, had crippled him.

  Bailey refused to go quietly, undermining him at every opportunity.

  At another time, under different circumstances, Dunkley believed Toohey might have made a decent PM. But that was a fantasy. History had punched Toohey’s card and before the end of the year his brief, unhappy term in office would be over.

  The sun pouring through a small eastward-facing window lit up a dust-covered Walkley Award, among a pile of other ill-treated honours on a cluttered shelf. The chaos of the Bailey–Toohey years had been the most successful of Dunkley’s long career covering politics. Labor had been good for journalism and he’d led the pack.

  So what.

  No award could mask the pain that followed the death of his only real friend, Kimberley Gordon. It was only after she was gone that he realised how alone he really was.

  He’d met Kimberley at university when she was a he: Ben Gordon, a hard-running rugby forward. The two were both instinctively loners, destined to find one great friendship in each other. They clicked instantly and shared ev
ery high and low for over two decades. They’d grown even closer through the years of Ben’s torment over his sexual identity. He’d finally decided to make his way as a woman. Dunkley wasn’t good at life advice but he was the one thing his friend had needed: someone to talk to.

  When Kimberley died Dunkley had no one to talk to. His marriage was over and his daughter distant. Kimberley had always been there, and her loss was a constant raw welt.

  Only now, in his budding relationship with Celia, had some of the pain begun to fade. But Dunkley knew he would always be tormented until he unravelled the mystery of Kimberley’s death. And avenged it.

  The official line, that she had been the victim of a gay-hate crime while cruising in a public toilet, infuriated Dunkley. It was a lie, a lazy bureaucratic dismissal of a rich and beautiful life. The police had cast Kimberley as a freak who’d invited her own death.

  But he was convinced her murder was linked to former Defence Minister Bruce Paxton and his murky ties to China.

  I pushed the rock that started the landslide.

  Dunkley had asked for Kimberley’s help with a photo that eventually implicated Paxton in electoral fraud. But she had turned up a more astonishing story: that Paxton and former prime minister, Catriona Bailey, had been courted by Chinese spies.

  The allegation was unprovable, the evidence circumstantial at best. And he was well aware that spooks were naturally paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories. But Dunkley could not reconcile one undeniable fact: within hours of Kimberley stumbling onto the links between Bailey and Chinese intelligence, she was dead. If she wasn’t the victim of a senseless crime there was only one logical conclusion.

  Someone knew what she knew and wanted it to die with her.

  Every day he felt the weight of guilt. She had died helping him. Dunkley had used his considerable investigative skills to try to track down the killer. All roads led to China, and he believed a third secretary, who had abruptly left the Chinese embassy in Canberra following Kimberley’s death, was the key. Dunkley had taken long-service leave to follow the trail to Beijing, but turned up nothing.

  So he’d come home and thrown himself back into his job with vigour. But the experience had hardened him against China. He’d written opinion pieces warning of the strategic risks that came with the opportunities of its rise, reminding Australia to remember who its real friends were. Since the Second World War, the United States had provided the security environment that had allowed China to flower peacefully. Dunkley doubted that China would be as benevolent when it was fully grown. Everything he saw confirmed his prejudice against a nation that seemed to be ever more aggressive in its dealings with neighbours.

  Dunkley’s opinions were at odds with the prevailing view and drew much criticism. But he’d found some in Cabinet, Defence and Canberra’s diplomatic community who were deeply grateful. The Japanese Ambassador was particularly helpful.

  Later this morning, he had an appointment with an old contact. He’d received the call a day earlier, out of the blue, from someone who kept more secrets than a Catholic priest.

  He licked his lips at the prospect of entering the confessional, just as a piece of toast, burned beyond recognition, sprang from the toaster. It was his last piece of wholemeal, too.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Canberra

  THE clean sheets felt pleasant against her skin, soothing and soft. The fresh linen acted as a balm for Catriona Bailey.

  For eighteen months, the Foreign Minister had lain paralysed, her world reduced to a small private hospital room, the hum-and-whirr of life-support machines as familiar as her own voice had been.

  This was her life, lungs, heartbeat. And her prison.

  Medical science had kept her alive, but every day was a battle against despair.

  The small things mattered, sustained her, like the daily change of linen.

  A stroke had robbed her of agility, and she could no longer speak. Her rare condition – locked-in syndrome – meant she was reduced to communicating through the one bodily function she could still control: her eyes.

  Bailey would have descended into madness but for the wonders of the information age that liberated her mind and unshackled her from these life-giving machines. Sanity had come from the computer that turned her eye-movements into words, and the internet that allowed her brilliant mind to wander the world.

  This had allowed her to retain her ministry. She’d become a cause célèbre, the disability lobby using her fame to press a weak government to keep her on the frontbench. And the Opposition, led by preening fools, had helped when it announced plans to deny her a parliamentary pair. It had been forced to retreat under a barrage of outrage, but Bailey feared the Coalition would try again.

  I must be ready.

  There was one other thing that sustained Bailey.

  Revenge.

  In the few quiet hours when she wasn’t blinking commands, or keeping up a steady stream of online banter, she was plotting the demise of the man responsible for her descent to in-patient: Martin Toohey.

  It began with his smash-and-grab plot to steal her prime ministerial crown. Although she’d been tagged the Tungsten Lady, her downfall, swift and unexpected, had been devastating.

  She was convinced her paralysis was directly linked to Toohey’s treachery.

  So the thought of revenge, of making him pay for his duplicity, sustained her. Hope, she’d learned, was a powerful elixir. With hope, miracles could happen.

  I must believe I can walk again. Talk again.

  Now, in the small hours of the Canberra morning, after finishing a discussion on Syria with her online disciples in the United States, she turned her mind to finding a cure for her condition. She scoured the internet for the latest information on anyone who had recovered from locked-in syndrome.

  The news was largely bad. The syndrome was rare, usually the result of a stroke which damaged the ventral pons at the base of the brain. It left sufferers paralysed and needing life support. Even medical journal articles admitted it was the stuff of nightmares.

  Bailey read one from the Texas Medical Association that neatly described how she felt.

  Imagine waking from a deep sleep to find yourself fully conscious but unable to move any voluntary muscles save for the muscles that control your vertical eye movements. You can see, hear, smell, taste . . . However, you are unable to speak or make any vocalizations at all. You are, in essence, locked in your own body. This scenario is not a fantasy that Rod Sterling would have written for a Twilight Zone episode but a recognized, though rare, neuropsychological syndrome.

  Enough of that.

  Bailey knew the problem all too well. What she was searching for were solutions.

  The gold standard was Kate Allatt, a forty-year-old who had almost completely recovered after two years. But Allatt was so rare as to be unique. Bailey feared she would never regain her old abilities.

  But there has been progress.

  Hours of painful therapy had seen some movement return to her hands. And as she tested the long disused muscles in her neck and back she felt that she would, before long, be able to sit upright.

  Even better, the doctors believed she would soon be able to breathe unassisted. That meant she would be able to test whether the tracheotomy in her neck had done permanent damage to her voice box.

  And if she could sit up, be taken off life support and speak she would be able to leave this room behind. She’d find liberation in a wheelchair, for her body and mind.

  If it is humanly possible, I will triumph.

  But time was pressing. An election was due later this year. She would take short-cuts if necessary, even if these were risky and untested.

  Bailey needed to rise again, more quickly than was humanly possible. And when she achieved that, she would turn off Martin Toohey’s life support.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Beijing

  The seven men filed on stage, all purpose and swagger, dressed in identical dark suits wi
th bold red ties, a neat symmetrical march of the recently elected, all-powerful Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Party’s Central Committee. The ones chosen to steer the nation through the next phase of its inexorable rise, to the peak of global power. This was a pantomime staged for the three hundred and seventy-six Communist Party central committee members drawn from every corner of the republic, stacked with the people who really ran China. Regional governors sat beside generals who nodded sagely at those who ran state-owned enterprises. A gathering of the communist elite. They had come together in the cavernous Great Hall of the People for the third plenum of the 18th Central Committee. Their task: to debate a five-year economic and strategic plan.

  Jiang Xiu stole a quick glance at the painting that spanned the stage, nearly thirty metres wide and eighteen high, ‘This Land So Rich in Beauty’. He loved its majesty, its aura of rugged charm. He stood near the far left of the elite line-up, his number six stamped on the floor, and obediently followed his comrades as they answered the audience applause with soft handclaps of their own.

  A surge of elation and responsibility pulsed through him. His poor debilitated mother would have been so proud.

  But Jiang knew this public forum was purely for show. Here in Beijing, the future direction of this autocratic State had already been thrashed out behind heavy wooden doors, fortified to resist armies.

  Jiang, his lush jet-black hair slicked back and glistening, gazed into the audience, seeking out familiar faces. An urge to smile came over him. But he knew that would be frowned upon, so he stood stony-faced.

  An hour earlier, the seven men had finished a secret meeting with no minders or note-takers, not even a servant to pour the tea. In power since November, the Standing Committee’s first gatherings had been perfunctory administrative affairs. But today’s meeting had been the first to test whether Jiang had correctly judged where the numbers and the will of his comrades lay.