“So what?”
“Why’s he changed his mind?”
Ball came back. “We’re in business!”
Benton smiled. “Larry’s got doubts.”
“You don’t say.”
“All I’m saying is that he didn’t say the information was new. So why does he want to do anything different than he did before? And by the way, he had a channel. Chen.”
“Maybe he doesn’t trust Chen.”
“Then why not send someone he does trust? Why act so aggressively and then change course just because we send him the same information we sent before.”
“Because he finally realizes he’s talking to someone who’s serious,” said Ball.
“Or because he thinks he can still keep control as long as he’s talking to us. That’s how he can keep stringing us out.”
“Hell’s bells, Larry! What else could you have wanted?” Benton glanced at Alan Ball in exasperation.
“A rationale,” said Olsen. “I want him to say, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize things were that bad. Now I see why I have to act.’”
“Look at what he does say. He recognizes the historical imperative to do something.”
“And he didn’t recognize that before? You mean someone had to point it out to him? Are we going to believe that?”
“Larry, I’m sorry.” Benton found himself straining to control his frustration. “It may be that he’s not going to give you everything you want in exactly the way you want it. Live with it.”
“I’m not saying we don’t talk to him. I’m just saying—”
“Mr. President,” said Ball, “we’re not laying on sanctions after a letter like that.”
“Of course not.”
“That’s exactly the point,” said Olsen.
“Larry, I don’t know what the hell more you could have wanted!” Benton struggled to restrain himself. “We’re going to talk to him. All right? The man says he wants to talk, we’re going to talk. We’re going to tell Bill Knight to go back and say we’ll talk, we’re serious about negotiating, we’re nominating someone who’ll have a direct line to me. That’s what we’re going to do, period.”
Olsen nodded.
Benton sat back in his chair and shook his head. “All right. Let’s focus on what we do next.”
“We need a negotiator,” said Ball. “Someone really good. I’ve got a couple of—”
“This is a State responsibility,” said Larry Olsen. “State will find a negotiator.”
“Two minutes ago you didn’t even want—”
“This is a State responsibility.” Olsen gazed at the president. “State will find a negotiator.”
Benton glanced at Ball. “Larry’s right.”
Ball clenched his jaw.
“Just keep Alan in the loop.”
“Sure,” said Olsen. He looked at Ball.
“How quick can we make this happen?”
“As quick as Wen wants,” said Olsen.
“Then to your point, Larry, that’ll show how serious Wen is. All right, where are we going to do it? It can’t be Washington. Can’t be Beijing.”
“Oslo,” said Olsen. “We tell them there’s some incredibly sensitive negotiation between us and China. They’ll think it’s about Taiwan. We’ll tell them it has to take place in utter secrecy and would they mind hosting it?” Olsen smiled sardonically. “Norwegians love stuff like that. They’ll wet themselves.”
~ * ~
Thursday, May 26
Eidsvoll, outside Oslo, Norway
The road led through a forest of fir and spruce. In the back of the car, alongside Oliver Wu, sat Pete Lisle, a tall, reddish-haired man in his fifties with a big blade of a nose and a chiseled chin. A State veteran, he had brokered the Turkish-Kurdish autonomy deal that put an end to decades of bloodshed in eastern Turkey. That had taken four long years of his life, half of it on horseback in the mountains of Kurdistan. He had succeeded through incredible patience on detail combined with unsentimental, ruthless decisiveness in forcing the crucial compromises at the crucial times, together with an uncanny ability to gain the trust of the people he negotiated with. No one at State knew more about getting a deal on the table and making it stick.
It was a warm spring morning. It reminded Lisle somewhat of spring mornings in the forest valleys east of Diyarbakir.
“I bet this place is cold as hell in the winter,” he murmured, staring out the window.
Oliver Wu nodded.
“I hate the cold. Comes from growing up in Chicago. When I retire I’m going to southern California.”
Wu began to laugh at that, then stopped, thinking of the data they had in their briefcases. Southern California wasn’t necessarily going to be much of a place to live.
Lisle turned to look at him. “Believe an agreement can be reached, Dr. Wu.” Pete Lisle held up a finger. “Lisle’s first law of negotiation. You have to believe it can be done. And then it can. It’s never rocket science. The answer’s never something no one’s thought of before—it’s just something one side or the other hasn’t been prepared to accept.”
Wu nodded, wondering whether the Chinese side was really prepared to accept the full cost of what had to be done. Or whether the United States was either, when it came to it.
Eventually the car turned onto a drive and pulled up at a house. It was a classical Scandinavian country lodge, two-story, white, formerly a hunting lodge for the Norwegian royal family. A pair of small pointed turrets poked up out of the roof.
A man from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was waiting to welcome them. The driver, another Foreign Ministry employee, pulled their cases out of the trunk.
“We the first ones here?” asked Lisle.
“The other parties are scheduled to arrive this afternoon, Mr. Lisle,” said the man from the Foreign Ministry, and he led them inside.
They knew who to expect. The Chinese side had forwarded two names, and the CIA had provided background on each one. Lin Shisheng was a talented Bank of China executive who had worked closely with Wen back in his Finance Ministry days and was often called upon, according to the CIA, when Wen needed someone for a particularly sensitive mission. Gao Jichuan was a more shadowy figure who had been around Wen for years as a kind of general aide or factotum. The creativity in the negotiation, if there was any, would come from Lin. Gao’s role was probably to hold him within the limits of whatever bounds Wen had set.
The objective of the initial phase of the discussion was limited. At this point, the aim was to share information with the Chinese side. In the planning sessions with Larry Olsen, there had been much discussion about the amount of information they should provide. Pete Lisle had been insistent that they supply everything they were going to provide up front. Olsen wanted to keep some of the data up his sleeve, but Lisle wouldn’t budge. The day he had to admit he had something more, he said, was the day he would lose his credibility with the other side. Eventually Olsen agreed, with the exception of data that would reveal the specialized sources operated by Dr. Richards’s unit. Lisle still wasn’t sure he had everything, but he knew he had as much as he was going to get.
The Norwegians had arranged for the negotiators to have a light meal together in the evening before a first, brief discussion session. Lin was of middle height, with receding hair and a round, lively face, and it was soon obvious that he was talkative and sociable. Gao was taller, heavy-featured. As they ate, Lin launched into a long story about his first visit to the United States as a student, culminating in a ludicrous incident when he was mistaken for the brother of a notorious gangster in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was hilarious the way he told it, but almost lethal at the time. Lisle reciprocated with a story about being caught in the crossfire between two warlords in Kurdistan. Or what he and his guides thought was crossfire, but turned out to be two wedding parties on either side of a valley that had become a little too competitive with the celebrations. Lin laughed appreciatively. Gao gave a slight smile. It wasn’t clear how good Gao’s English w
as. Wu said something in Mandarin about his closest brush with death being the time he tried to teach his sister to drive. Lin laughed at that as well. Gao smiled the same stiff smile.
After the meal, a Norwegian official took them into a room where there was a table and a sideboard with refreshments, and then withdrew, closing the door behind him. Lisle glanced at Wu, who excused himself and went up to his room to get the dossiers that had been prepared for them. When he came back, Pete Lisle was in the middle of a story, and Lin was listening with a smile of expectation on his face. Gao was stony-faced. Lisle got to the punch line and Lin rocked with laughter.
Wu put the dossiers on the table.
“Okay,” said Lisle, and he pushed the two dossiers across the table. “Here’s what we’ve got. Everything’s there. All the key data.”
Lin opened the file and began to leaf through the pages. Gao didn’t touch his copy.
“We’re putting everything on the table,” said Lisle. “No point beating around the bush. This is stuff that affects us, it’s stuff that affects you, so you may as well know it. I don’t know how much of this your people have seen already, but I want you to understand that we don’t have anything else. You read that, you know as much as we do. As much as President Benton does. I want to be very clear on that point.”
Lin looked up and nodded seriously. Oliver Wu could see that this move had an immediate effect on him. He had probably expected to receive nothing but a general description of the problem at the first session, and then to have to drag out the data piecemeal over the next few days.
Wu looked around and found Gao gazing at him.
Lin closed the folder. “We will have to look at this,” he said.
“Naturally,” replied Lisle.
“We should meet again tomorrow. Let’s say tomorrow evening. Then we can at least have made an initial study of the document.”
And have talked to Beijing, thought Wu.
“Of course,” said Lisle. He stood up. “After you.”
He waited for Lin and Gao to gather up their dossiers and leave the table. Then he waited for Wu to get up. As they left the room, Lisle surreptitiously pulled a map of the Taiwan Strait out of his pocket and left it on the sideboard for their Norwegian hosts to find.
~ * ~
Saturday, May 28
Eidsvoll, outside Oslo, Norway
Lisle and Wu were on a secure connection. Larry Olsen took the call at home.
“They say they need to go back to Beijing to consult,” said Lisle. “They pushed hard yesterday for more. I told them that was it, that’s all we had. I think they’ve finally accepted that.”
“Let’s park that for a minute,” said Olsen. “Tell me what your general feeling is. How do you think it went, giving them everything up front?”
“Definitely not what they expected. I think we short-circuited a month of demand-and-answer just by putting it all out there.”
“I agree,” said Wu. “They weren’t expecting it.”
That was good. Olsen was determined to force the pace. “The president thinks he’s won some kind of victory just by getting these guys to sit down and talk with us. He thinks Wen’s serious because it only took a week to get going. I think that doesn’t mean squat. It’s once you start talking you discover whether there’s going to be any progress. And look what we’ve got. Two days in, they’re already stalling.”
“Mr. Secretary,” said Lisle, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re stalling. If they believe they’ve now got the full set of numbers they genuinely are going to have to go back and consult.”
“Granted. But if this whole thing is a ploy by Wen to drag everything out—which I suspect it is—we need to expose that quickly and show the president so we can go in a different direction.”
“Mr. Secretary, it’s too early to say from what we’ve seen here what Wen’s intention is.”
“Okay, but my sense from what you’re saying is that we’re pushing a little more than they’re comfortable with. That’s what we need to do. Now, tell me, what do you make of them?”
Pete Lisle glanced at Wu before he answered. “Pretty much like we expected. Lin’s sharp, but he likes to be friends. That may be something we can use. But he’s smart, so it maybe something he’s consciously doing. We’ll have to see.”
“And Gao?”
Lisle laughed. “You remember those Addams Family films when you were a kid? They had a servant, right? A tall, silent guy like Frankenstein.”
“Lurch,” said Olsen.
“That’s him! I couldn’t remember the name. Gao’s like Lurch. Big guy, kind of spooky.”
Olsen laughed. “I loved those films.”
“He doesn’t say a damn thing.”
“He’s there to keep an eye on Lin?”
“Looks like it.”
“Oliver, what do you think?”
“I never saw those movies. What did you say they were called?”
“Doesn’t matter. What do you think?”
“I agree with Pete. Looks like he’s just watching.”
“I wouldn’t underestimate him,” said Lisle. “When it comes down to it, he may be the one Wen’s going to listen to more.”
“What would he be saying about you?” asked Olsen.
“What would he be saying about us, Oliver?”
“He doesn’t like me. Overseas Chinese. I’m betraying the motherland.” “You think we shouldn’t have you there?”
“If it creates an obstacle. If it gets personal, I guess we shouldn’t.”
“You think they’re irritated because you’re there?”
“It’s possible.”
“Pete? What’s your take?”
“I think there is a certain...hostility’s too strong a word. But there is some resentment. Especially from Lurch. But maybe that’s okay. Shows them this is a genuinely shared issue. Cuts across nationality, religion, whatever.”
“Forget that,” said Olsen. “I kind of like it if they’re irritated. We’re not kowtowing, right? That’s what this shows. We pull Oliver, next thing they’ll ask to nominate the people we send. Oliver, ramp it up a little more. Talk up. Make them engage with you.”
Wu glanced at Lisle questioningly. Lisle shook his head. He wasn’t going to let someone who had never even sat down with these guys dictate the way they should be handled. “We’ll play that by ear, Mr. Secretary. Let’s see how that goes.”
“Well, don’t let them intimidate you. Oliver, you hear what I said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. So what’s the next step? They take our numbers and go home and discuss it? Is that what you said?”
“That’s right,” said Lisle. “I can’t see how we can object.”
“Okay, but the truth is, there’s nothing there they don’t know already, unless Chen didn’t tell them. So we haven’t actually got anywhere.”
Lisle disagreed with that. “Mr. Secretary, we had to get this done. This gives us a firm base of shared data. Wen knows he has everything we have, and he knows we know it. Whether they’ve seen that stuff before or not, that doesn’t matter. What matters is now there’s no more room for excuses.”
“Okay,” said Olsen. “Fair enough. We had to do this. What next?”
“Next round of meetings, we talk solutions,” said Lisle.
“Have they agreed to that?”
“No. We haven’t discussed that yet. That’s what I want to check with you, sir. My instinct is to say at this point, after they look at the numbers, we both come back with proposals.”
Olsen thought about it.
“I don’t think there’s anything else now, Mr. Secretary. They have the numbers, same numbers that we have. Now it’s time to talk about what we do.”
“Go on,” said Olsen.
“If they don’t actually put something down, and we do, then we end up giving them stuff and negotiating against nothing. That’s always a mistake. They’ll pocket what we offer and come back for mor
e. So what I want to say to them is, next time, each of us comes back with a proposal. Neither proposal is binding on the party that makes it. They can put in whatever they want, and so can we, and there’s no commitment. Then we work through the differences. Only when we both agree on something, does that thing become a commitment on either side.”
“You think that’s the way to do it?”
“In my experience, Mr. Secretary, given what I’ve been told about what’s already happened, that’s the only way we’re going to get something out of them. They have to come back with something. It also protects our position. It means we can present something and they can’t pocket it. That’s critical. The same rules have to apply to both sides.”
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