Ting phoned. ‘I think I’ve done something wrong,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Do you have a friend called Wang Wei?’
There were hundreds of thousands of men in China called Wang Wei, but as it happened, Kai did not have a friend of that name. ‘No, why?’
‘I was afraid of that. I was learning a long speech, and I picked up the phone. He asked for you and I told him you’d gone to the office. I was distracted and I just didn’t think. After I hung up, I realized I shouldn’t have told him anything. I’m so sorry.’
‘No harm done,’ he said. ‘Don’t do it again, but don’t worry about it.’
‘Oh, I’m glad you’re not mad at me.’
‘Is everything else all right?’
‘Yes, I’m about to leave for the market. I thought I’d make dinner tonight.’
‘Wonderful. See you later.’
The call had been from a spy, probably American or European. Kai’s home phone number was secret, but spies discovered secrets, it was their job. And the caller had learned something. He now knew that Kai had gone to the office on a Sunday morning. That told him there must be some kind of crisis.
Kai went to the conference room. His five senior men were there plus four North Korea specialists including Jin Chin-hwa, and the Guoanbu office in Pyongyang was attending remotely. Kai briefed them on the events of the last twenty-four hours, and each individual reported what information he had been able to glean in the past hour.
Then Kai said: ‘For today and probably the next few days, it’s imperative that we have real-time information about what’s happening in North Korea. Our president and our entire foreign policy establishment will be following events minute by minute, and considering whether China needs to intervene, and if so, what form the intervention will take – and they will be depending on us for reliable data.
‘All sources of intelligence must be milked. Satellite reconnaissance must focus on the military bases. Signals intelligence must monitor all the North Korean traffic we can access. Any sudden flurry of phone calls and messages could indicate a rebel attack.
‘The Guoanbu office in the Chinese embassy at Pyongyang will be working 24/7, as will our consulate at Chongjin. They ought to be able to provide some information. And don’t forget the diaspora. There are several thousand Chinese citizens living in North Korea – some businessmen, a few students, plus people married to Koreans. We should have phone numbers for all of them. This is the moment for them to prove their patriotism. I want every one called.’
Jin interrupted him. ‘Pyongyang is making an announcement.’ He translated as he listened. ‘They say they have arrested a number of American-controlled saboteurs and traitors at a military base this morning . . . they don’t say which base . . . nor how many people were arrested . . . Nothing about violence or gunfire . . . And that’s it. The announcement is over.’
‘This is surprising,’ Kai said. ‘They normally take hours or even days to respond to events.’
Jin said: ‘This has got the Pyongyang government agitated.’
‘Agitated?’ said Kai. ‘I think they’re more than agitated. I think they’re scared. And you know what? So am I.’
DEFCON 4
ABOVE NORMAL READINESS. HEIGHTENED INTELLIGENCE WATCH AND STRENGTHENED SECURITY MEASURES.
CHAPTER 20
President Green hated the cold. Growing up in Chicago, she might have got used to it, but she never did. As a little girl she had loved school but hated getting there in the winter. One day, she had vowed, she would live in Miami where, she had heard, you could sleep on the beach.
She never lived in Miami.
She put on a big puffy down coat to walk from the Residence to the West Wing at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. As she passed through the colonnade she thought about sex. Gerry had felt amorous last night. Pauline liked sex, but she was not driven by it, not since her early twenties. Gerry was the same, and their sex life had always been pleasant but undramatic, like the rest of their relationship.
Not anymore, she thought sadly.
Something had gone wrong in her feeling towards Gerry, and she thought she knew why. In the past she had always felt the reassuring sense that he had her back. They occasionally disagreed, but they never undermined one another. Their arguments were not angry because their conflicts did not run deep.
Until now.
Pippa was at the bottom of it. Their cute little baby had turned into a mutinous adolescent, and they could not agree on what to do. It was almost a cliché; there were probably articles about it in the women’s magazines that Pauline never read. She had heard that marital rows about how to raise the children were said to be the worst.