ABOVE THE FOLD
Alexander felt like a voyeur. Alone at midnight, he logged onto the Internet. It was a telling conceit, this habit of his, checking the placement of his big story, viewing the Times homepage to weigh his competition for the attention of the reading public. Page one, he congratulated himself as the paper’s website materialized. Above the fold. Before he could sleep, he scrolled once more through the story, imagining the reactions it would spark across the city and around the globe. It was a triumph:
WASHINGTON—Military officials in Taiwan are developing capabilities associated with nuclear weapons production, according to intelligence sources. These initiatives include the import of so-called “dual-use” technology, appropriate for use in a weapons program, and the alleged diversion of modest, but significant, amounts of spent nuclear fuel, a source of weapons-grade plutonium, the Times has learned.
Nice pithy lead. Gets the key facts right on the table.
State Department officials in Washington refused to confirm the reports of possible spent nuclear fuel diversion. But these officials concede that the implications of such a clandestine nuclear weapons development program on Taiwan would be profound for U.S. policymakers.
Truth is, they’re scared witless over at State. The “Taiwan-is-flirting-with-nukes-again” lead will force the U.S. to reassess positions throughout the region.
“This is an inevitable result of two decades of a pro-Beijing tilt by successive U.S. presidents: denying Taiwan the right to purchase advanced weapons,” states James Liu of the pro-independence Taiwanese Association for Public Affairs. “China’s build-up of ballistic missiles deployed against Taiwan requires a robust response.” Liu argues that the People’s Republic of China’s 15 percent annual increase in defense spending for each of the last three years justifies an aggressive Taiwanese response.
Dense paragraph. . . maybe I should have buried it. But it’s a strong quote and readers need context.
In recent weeks, Taiwan has imported substantial quantities of krytrons, high-speed electrical switches that can be used as trigger timers in nuclear warheads. Krytrons have very limited non-military uses in electrical circuitry and special effects filming. U.S. Customs sources confirm recent shipments from California via third countries to Taipei. UN inspection agency sources confirm troubling discrepancies during recent inspections of Taiwan’s nuclear power facilities.
Kwan’s stuff from the IAEA was key to the piece. Wonder if he turns up again to float a follow-up story?
The issues of Taiwan’s defense requirements and Taipei’s renewed interest in nuclear weapons are expected to severely complicate troubled U.S.-China ties, just weeks before a summit meeting slated for July 31 in Seattle, Washington. Last night, a Chinese government press official reached for comment warned of “the most grave consequences should the ruling clique on Taiwan toy with nuclear weapons.”
Love that closing. Should make for a fun morning—the phones definitely will be ringing.
Alexander slept as well as he had in days, a deep and satisfying slumber.
“You’re all over the news,” said Branko on the phone early the next morning. To Alexander’s surprise, Branko, seemingly in good humor, had made the direct call to his home.
“I just wish you’d called me back on this,” Alexander said. “I’m kinda out on a limb.”
“Wish I had, too. I have been tied up on something pressing. I would have told you your limb has no strength.”
“Say what?”
“Alexander, it’s crap.”
“What do you mean?” Alexander demanded as a wave of dread swept over him. “Which part?”
“Which part? Try all of it. It reeks.”
“What are you trying to—”
“You’ve been set up, Alexander. It’s obvious to me.”
“Set up? Where? I got three sources on the krytrons. Booth has it, too. The UN stuff on spent fuel I got from documents. I got the—”
“Alexander! It’s Branko here. Your sources may appear to speak the truth. They may believe it is the truth. However, things are not what they seem.”
“Where am I off?”
“This is an open line. I’m just warning you, one professional to another. You’re getting jerked around.”
“Are you saying it’s disinformation?”
“I can’t help you with that. Just go back and work the problem.” And then Branko was gone.
Alexander sat for a long time, his bare feet propped against a tidy desk. He felt as if he was going to puke.
He remembered once, when he was a kid, butchering a Spanish dialogue in front of the whole class of fifth graders. Two cute girls up front were laughing when he looked down and saw his fly was wide open. That is how he felt now, humiliated before his peers.
He hurled his ballpoint pen against the wall and cursed. He sat still for several more minutes, his mind rolling back through the conversations of recent days. Frantically, he began to reconstruct the story, going back again to rethink the pieces.
There had been Booth’s intelligence from the IAEA guy and his debrief. The confirming call with Kwan’s colleague in Vienna. The Customs stuff he had cold—two different guys had seen the item in the National Intelligence Digest brief that was all over official Washington. Even the State Department guy who’d tried hard to squash the story the previous evening had known about krytrons moving to Taipei via Canada.
What did I miss? Whose game have I stumbled into? Who’s messing with my head? He could only wonder as the day stretched ahead, long and miserable. He was forced to go to his managing editor for an agonizing conversation, Alexander warning that the entire foundation of their lead story was likely to collapse.
What a story it was. The diplomatic press corps was in a frenzy, with the morning briefers at both State and the Pentagon taking heated questions about Taiwan’s nuclear program. The IAEA staff in Vienna went dark, with the international bureaucracy offering a terse “no comment.” Kwan had vanished.
The White House knocked down the Bonner story hard, the press secretary assailing its author by name with adjectives like “irresponsible” and “sloppy.” The diplomatic damage was done, however, with collateral damage to U.S. international interests. By late evening, Washington time, official Beijing was up and about, issuing ominous statements.
“The reckless splittist forces in Taipei are playing with fire,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman warned. “Unless their American sponsors rein them in, there will be grave consequences for these actions, which are deeply offensive to all Chinese.”
No hastily produced American reassurance would calm them. China’s Ambassador to Washington was promptly recalled for consultations. He delivered a parting blast from Dulles Airport, insisting that Washington would bear “full responsibility” if Taiwan provoked military hostilities across the Taiwan Strait.
The White House responded by dispatching special emissaries to Beijing and Taipei in a desperate effort to curb tensions. In Taiwan, the stock market numbers were appalling, a twelve percent drop before all trading was suspended. The London insurance brokers doubled spot quotes for shipping that called at Taiwan’s ports. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ plummeted. Smart money fled to cash and gold.
Booth provided little help. The Senate aide had been under suspicion before for leaks. He was exceptionally cautious now. He couldn’t find Kwan himself, and began dodging Alexander’s follow-up calls until Amy finally took pity on him and put Booth on the line at home one evening. Booth apologized for being evasive. Senator Landle was apparently after Booth over the staffer’s allegations that the State Department was dissembling—“lying” was the word Booth used—about an alleged Chinese missile build-up. Booth could offer nothing to advance the story.
A grim week of humiliation unfolded. Alexander felt like a kid chasing falling snowflakes. Just when he thought he caught something in his hands, it had evaporated. As his story was replayed, dissected, and rebuked, friends seemed
to be calling to him from afar, rolling by like rubber-neckers at an accident scene.
“Do you know what it’s like to get really pounded?” Alexander lamented one evening on the phone with Rachel. “To be pitching in an enemy ballpark—you reach the seventh inning and you’re totally out of gas. But there’s nobody in the bullpen behind you. The game is yours to finish—and you’re just getting hammered?”
“You’ll rally.”
“My dad knew what it felt like. I saw it a few times—after he realized he’d never make the big leagues. Jesus, he’d take a beating.”
“But he’d finish the game?”
“Had to.”
“So finish it.”
Alexander stumbled as he absorbed the rain of blows. In the newsroom, he felt like a pariah. His first effort at a clean-up story was so full of caveats that he killed the piece himself. The fact was, he didn’t know what the truth was any more. Reality grew more elusive with each passing hour.
His editors were all over his case as the long Memorial Day weekend approached. He worked the phones futilely, trying to find anyone who could set him straight. By Saturday afternoon, there was nobody left in town to call. The coffee was cold. His tuna sandwich was going stale. So, when Rachel phoned with an invitation to Sunday lunch, he accepted her offer to ride out to her aunt’s place in the country.
She came for him at ten the next morning. Grinning and barefoot in her BMW, she was a most welcome distraction. He felt clumsy at first, like a teenager on a first date. She offered only tough love in response to his professional disaster. “You’ll get it right. But don’t go and ruin a blue sky Sunday because of it,” she insisted. “That would be a sin.”
As they talked, her optimism was like a tide of good cheer, pulling him forward. He shut off his Blackberry, casting a stealthy glance at her toe-nails, painted Stanford Cardinal red. Instead of Taiwan’s nuclear capabilities, he found himself wondering about whether she made love with her eyes open. The farther beyond the Beltway they drove, the more he began to mellow.
She rambled on about the old days, telling stories on Mickey Dooley and the boys. She was funny, but reflective, too, seemingly eager to question long ago incidents.
“Did you ever figure out where our stupid little Truth or Dare game came from?” she asked abruptly as they passed Chantilly on Route 50.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what was that all about?”
“It was your idea the other night,” Alexander noted.
“You’re right. That’s why I was thinking about it, because I was self-conscious at Mr. K’s. I wanted to strangle Barry that night, the way he shows up after weeks away and acts as if everything is hunky-dory.”
“Didn’t it start as Mickey’s game?” He still felt sluggish; Rachel was moving a bit too quickly for him.
“That’s the way I remembered it, too. Mickey’s game. To provoke debate, to supposedly bring us closer by sharing something personal. But then I flashed back to the first time, that card game, when the boys started talking strip poker. It was Barry’s idea. That was Barry’s game.”
“Barry?”
“Yeah, a game of self-revelation for people who never really shared their secrets. It was a goddamn tease. Just like Barry. It wasn’t about real intimacy.”
It all came back to him—the night Barry had been winning big at cards and offered to take clothes as markers. The forced grin on Rachel’s face, as she and Mickey’s date played along uncomfortably with the boys. The deceit inherent in Barry’s playing to the crowd. The way Barry used Mickey as the jovial pulling guard for his maneuvers. Barry held all the chips—all the power. He was the one exploiting his position of strength while the much younger Rachel followed along, all too eager to please.
“How are you doing with the whole separation thing?” Alexander asked as they rolled into open roads past Centerville.
“OK, I guess. I mean, I’ve tried on guilt. I’ve mourned—but not too long. I still feel like a failure.”
“I can understand that.”
“I feel out of sorts at the office, in a way I never did before. I get these flashes that being Ms. Professional with the great career is somehow, well. . . shallow.”
“You should feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.”
“I manage to fall just short in every single thing I do. Never got that Ph. D. Never had those four kids. Never had that perfect marriage. Then there’s work. It all seems incredibly banal these days. Some export license. Some earmarked appropriation. Big frickin’ deal.”
“So what interests you most?”
“Besides parenting? Well. . . I’m embarrassed to say.”
“What?”
“China. I still read everything I can get my hands on about it. One point three billion people, and we really don’t have a clue how they think.
Why is it so hard for us to understand them?”
“China. Goddamn China again. Why?”
She thought for a minute, gazing at the fields of corn, rising strong now after the recent rain. “Because it’s so elusive, yet so alluring. Maybe I just like the pursuit—trying to solve the riddle.”
“Makes sense.”
“Hey, that’s what my marriage was about, chasing the inaccessible. I mean, here we are, working on China more than twenty-five years. Studying it. Getting rich off it. Writing about it. Working for it. Spying on it. Building careers around it. But you know what? I think the joke’s on us. China has changed us more than we’ve affected China.”
“Whoa, you been drinking a lot of coffee?”
“Like three cups.” She tapped the gas up another five miles per hour. “Watch out for me today, boy. You’ve been warned.”
Then she continued. “I blew it somewhere. I had that perfect family feeling in Wyoming. I had it again with you guys at college—that same bond of belonging, as if we’d always find a way to cover for each other.”
“Why’d you ever leave Wyoming in the first place?”
“Oh, Alexander, I was just a kid from the sticks who wanted to see the world. My first boyfriend was a wrangler, for crissake. Rode bulls at the Cody Rodeo. I wanted something bigger. I thought a guy like Barry would take me places. I probably used him, too. I just figured if the intimate stuff was awkward, it must have been my fault, that maybe I was too much of a tomboy or something.”
“You’re anything but. So stop beating yourself up over it already.”
“You’ve dealt with losing Anita so remarkably well. How did you manage?”
“It’s taken some time.”
The silence hung between them as white rail fences flew by, cows gazing impassively. In the distance, the line of the Blue Ridge was just breaking the horizon to the west. It was several minutes before he continued.
“When Anita was first diagnosed, we went to Hawaii. We’d just sit on the beach and look at the stars. We didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have a lot of time. So we blew a wad staying at the Mauna Kea; it’s a beautiful old hotel on the dry side of the Big Island. When she was healthier, we’d always done national parks—wilderness places like Glacier and Zion—and did some amateur geology stuff.”
Alexander was looking off in the distance again, pausing to gather strength. “In Hawaii, we’d catch every dawn and sunset. Anita said it centered her. Made her appreciate the cyclical nature of life and death—the basics. She just turned to me one day and made me promise not to mourn too long. She dug out that old poem we’d use for our toasts—that British utopian Spender: ‘Never forget those who wore their hearts at the fire’s center. . .’”
“I remember. . . ‘Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun.’”
“It was brutal, Rachel. We were both angry with the gods. But she said that after she died, I had to live fully, that her horrid disease wouldn’t win if I defied it. She made me promise.
“I did a pretty lousy job of it at first. I was bitter. I missed having Anita to talk with, to laugh w
ith about something stupid that happened that day. It made me crazy! I actually forgot about twenty times a day that she was gone. The agony of it would surface all over when I confronted the fact again.
“About six months after she died, I tried my first solo vacation, hiking in the Sierra desert.”
“Didn’t you go to Death Valley—of all places?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “Bizarre place to pick. I was staying in the Furnace Creek Inn. It was about a hundred and ten degrees each day. I’d sleep in the afternoon, and start with the beers at dusk. I stayed sober one night and hiked out to the sand dunes for a sunrise. It was unbelievably cold. The desert got down to about forty at night, even in July. But there was this remarkable glow coming over the hills. It was as if I was present at the dawn of creation. There were all these layers of geology exposed around me—an incredible, ancient, dried-up inland seabed. I was sitting on this enormous pile of sand, sobbing, when I remembered my promise to Anita, that the only way I could triumph over the forces of despair was to revere life, to live fully.”
She reached over and gripped his shoulder. “You’re doing pretty damn good, Alexander.”
His tension was drained. When they arrived in Upperville at Rachel’s aunt’s place, he was refreshed by the distance they had covered. They rode horses—fast—through the woods on western saddles. They dove in the pool, Alexander feeling a bit sheepish as he checked out Rachel in her red bikini. They talked about local history and theatre with Rachel’s aunt, who seemed nonplussed to have Alexander there. When it came time to leave, Alexander wished they did not have to return so quickly to the battles of the big city.
It was nearly sunset as they crossed the Beltway and headed the last few miles back into D.C.. A dread began to creep over him, a familiar Sunday evening anxiety, like the night before a big school exam. But Rachel was next to him, driving, talking, gesturing like an Italian cabbie. She would squeeze his hand to emphasize a point. Somewhere along the last few blocks, she didn’t let go. When she pulled up and parked in front of his townhouse, his hand was firmly in her grip.
The Mandarin Club Page 18
