The Mandarin Code
Authors: Steve Lewis
For Flint, Charlie, Rosie and Harry.
And Rosemary, who's playing with the good angels, somewhere.
For Mary Rose and Gai Marie,
1 Corinthians 13:13.
There is a devil there is no doubt,
but is he trying to get in us or trying to get out?
Canberra
When he woke in a knot of panic, the sheets were stained with sweat. He'd not meant to sleep, for fear of the dark angels that had begun to haunt his dreams. His eyes flashed open to a void beyond black, and the still breath of midnight amplified his every heartbeat.
Canberra usually cooled with the sunset, but an unnatural heat lingered in this blast-furnace summer. A faint scent of smoke hinted at fire licking at the city's edges. The hour was nearly upon him.
Cradling a USB drive in his sticky palm, the Chinese national wondered how future generations would judge him. As a delusional zealot, or as a good man who'd tried to warn them?
Somewhere outside, a generator chugged its diesel drone. In the cramped cabin, the heavy, even breathing of his two roommates signalled they were asleep. It was time to move. But fear pressed down, a malign and unyielding weight.
Six months earlier, he'd been sent to this strange, empty land to help build an ultra-secret frontline. Listed as Asset 53, he was one of China's revered cyber-warriors. But he was a rebel who longed for intellectual freedom, who yearned to break the shackles of the stultifying regime that choked its people as the old dynasties had once bound the feet of its women. He'd lost faith when they'd forced an abortion on his mother for the crime of conceiving a second child. The botched procedure had taken the one person whom he had loved unconditionally. So he'd made a vow â to work within the system just as long as it took to gather the weapons that he needed to destroy it.
And now he had them, his own personal arsenal, carried on a tiny memory stick that he placed, carefully, in his left trouser pocket.
He mentally rehearsed his escape route. Nine hundred and eighty-seven steps to freedom. He'd measured the distance in cyberspace: from the compound that was his home, feverishly being transformed into a new Chinese embassy, to the fortified front gates of the embassy of the United States.
Briefly, he'd contemplated defecting to the Australians, but the risk was too great. Having witnessed their kow-towing at the altar of China's wealth, he feared they would hand him back if pressure was applied. No, the Americans were his best hope, and he would buy his freedom with the evidence in his pocket and the trove of priceless information in his head.
Now, lying as if paralysed on his bed, he willed himself back twenty years to focus on a ten-year-old child's last memory of his mother. He recalled the grimace of her death; the two lives butchered by a heartless, soulless state. The exercise worked its tonic: he was resolved. He would embrace the terrifying future and be ruthless with the past.
It was nudging 12.30am. There was no moon, but powerful arc lights lit the building site. Months of meticulous planning had collapsed to this moment. He had placed cloth under his mattress to dampen the squeak of his bed-springs, practised easing back the sheets without the faintest telltale rustle.
He had hoped for a breeze to muffle his footfall. The distant throb of the diesel engine offered some cover, but to him every step was a shouted betrayal of his escape.
He visualised what stood between him and freedom. He'd memorised the shortest path. One hundred swift paces to the fence, two rows of razor wire, then a dash to the US embassy.
With furtive steps, not glancing back, he stole out of the cabin to the expanse of the compound, hurrying to the shadows that would hide him from cameras on either side of the three-metre fence.
His heart beat a staccato pulse as he pushed a makeshift ladder into place and climbed to a narrow opening in the perimeter wire.
He leapt into the dark and landed with a crunch, his weight flattening the tinder-dry grass. The impact shuddered through his legs, and he rolled to cushion the fall, then took a breath to check his route.
Eucalypt bark, curled and brittle-dry, littered the ground. His every step would echo until he reached the concrete path. Slowly he navigated a glade of trees. A sticky web grabbed at his face and he stifled a gasp, clawing frantically at the gossamer threads wrapped across his cheeks. He froze. A creature slowly traced a path from his hairline to his temple. Its legs on his exposed skin. With a panicked flick he sent it to the bushes.
Exhaling, he continued towards the path that ran along the side of the compound. Soft-glow streetlights ahead marked a long avenue towards a city he had never seen. On his right, the dirt-block site that had been his home â his prison â for the past six months. Through a final stand of long grass, he reached the path, turned right and forced his limbs into a steady jog. He knew he was not safe. The path ran beside the compound for two-hundred metres. He could not relax until the fortress of the building site was behind him.
The quiet was shattered by a harsh voice, familiar, ordering him to halt. âTing! Ting!'
Two shadows emerged from the gloom, stepping out from a gate to the compound sixty or seventy metres ahead, blocking the path. He turned, and raced into the unknown.
He charged across a roadway, a route that he'd never intended to take. A hotel loomed on the right. Should he go there? No. His course was set. There was a bridge ahead, a well-lit route across the lake. This was his best chance. The city was there, on the other side. Freedom was there, on the other side. Could he lose his pursuers in this foreign place? He scanned his surroundings for signs of life, of help, but the street leading to the bridge was empty.
The footsteps were getting louder.
Harder. Faster.
He was still young, and had once been athletic. But in the panic to avoid capture, he had sprinted the first few hundred metres. Within a minute his muscles were burning more oxygen than his lungs could deliver and his body began to rebel.
Keep going.
The well-trained security men were closing on him, and were now, maybe, only fifty metres away. His chest was lead-heavy as he pushed up the incline to the bridge.
The lights of the city teased him, called to him. He could feel the pursuers on his heels now. They would catch him in seconds.
There was no time to think, little time to act. With one final effort, he surged towards the bridge railing on his left; pushing his hands down hard, he vaulted over the edge.
Four seconds of panic and a crack as his head met the water. His mother's face appeared, beckoning him to a better place.
Then everything went black.
Washington
Earle W Jackson III reclined in the sturdy leather chair, soaking up the majesty of the room, and considered the staggering improbability that he belonged in it. The three months since his election had passed in a blur of meetings and briefings that gave him few moments to reflect on the miracle of his becoming the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. In November's ballot, he'd shocked the fancied Democratic incumbent, winning with a populist blend of good ol' boy southern charm and homespun protectionism. Not since Truman's upset victory over Thomas E Dewey in '48 had the White House welcomed such an unexpected occupant.