The Mandarin Code Read online

  DEDICATION

  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.

  EPIGRAPH

  There is a devil there is no doubt,

  but is he trying to get in us or trying to get out?

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  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 – 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 – his prison – 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 fo
r 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. ‘Ting! 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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.

  Now here he was in the Oval Office, the epicentre of world power, an unrivalled, near-mythical place. The heart of the American empire. The new Rome.

  Jackson turned to the three bay windows behind the desk carved from the timbers of the British ship, the Resolute. He looked through bulletproof glass to the South Lawn, dusted with snow, imagining the Republican lions who’d stood here before him. Ted Roosevelt, Ike, Nixon – the weight of the world on their shoulders. A cancelled phone call had given him exactly five minutes to himself. He interlocked his fingers and lifted his hands above his head, pushing his palms towards the ceiling, stretching his shoulders and back. He rocked his head from side to side. It helped relieve the stress in his neck, which was already stiff and sore. If it got worse, his head would be thumping by day’s end.

  What would Reagan have done?

  It was one of his regular mind games, imagining how his favourite president might have reacted to a difficult challenge. It was based on the question his strict Presbyterian mother had frequently asked him: ‘What would Jesus have done?’

  Despite serving eight years as Governor of Mississippi, he was ill-prepared for this role, Leader of the Free World, the most powerful man on the planet. Trained for a life of law, he had risen steadily, though unspectacularly, through the Republican ranks to chair the deeply conservative Rankin County, Mississippi district, and had been picked as an observer during the controversial 2000 Florida Presidential re-count. He’d risen to public prominence in a referendum battle over the State flag: the last in the union to have the battle cross of the Confederacy emblazoned on it.

  A 2001 court ruling had opened the door for civil rights activists and local businessmen to move to expunge the Civil War remnant from the standard. That outraged Jackson and he was a man made for the fight. A direct descendant of General Thomas Jonathan ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, he was not about to stand by as his heritage was airbrushed to appease liberal do-gooders.

  Never an original thinker, Jackson lifted his rallying cry from the National Rifle Association: ‘You can have my flag when you peel it from my cold dead hands.’ It appealed to and amplified the many prejudices that fortified his natural constituency. It also helped that the proposed alternative was a circle of stars, suspiciously similar to the European Union banner: ‘The Euro fag flag,’ Jackson called it.

  It was a fight he couldn’t lose. The flag was retained with a two-thirds majority. Three years later, he was elected Governor. His charisma, crisp-good looks, folksy yet polished style of public speaking and impeccable Conservative credentials were a heady cocktail and he emerged from the pack to storm the 2012 Republican primaries.

  Jackson went into the presidential poll a rank underdog but he surprised the pundits, tapping into American trauma over the financial crisis and growing anxiety about the nation’s diminishing global authority. The people were hungry for a return to past glories so that’s what Jackson promised them.

  In a twist on the Reagan Morning in America campaign, Jackson’s crusade anthem was the theme from Star Wars and his slogan the aspirational ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ It was an aggressive mix of hope and xenophobia, which blamed outsiders and their liberal allies within the US for the nation’s decline.

  In a stroke of genius Jackson built a cartoon version of a rising China to replace the Axis of Evil as America’s new enemy-in-chief. He toured the rust belt, pointing to manufacturing jobs that had been ‘stolen’ by the emerging communist power. ‘Every “Made in China” tag you see is a pink slip handed to an American worker,’ was his mantra on the stump. ‘Every dollar you spend on foreign trinkets is money taken from American pockets and food taken from our children’s mouths.’ His campaign centrepiece was a solemn promise to declare China a ‘currency manipulator’, if he won office.

  Against the advice of every sane Republican, that’s what he did. And from day one in the Oval Office, his foreign policy battles began to rival his considerable domestic woes.

  The President checked his watch. ‘Lesley. . .’ he bellowed.

  His efficient PA pounced on the intercom. ‘Yes, Mr President?’

  ‘Send in my eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Yes sir. Coffee?’

  ‘No. I’ve had enough. Thanks.’

  Jackson stiffened as a high-powered group strode through the door: the cream of his national security team, accompanied by the Secretary of Treasury. He already knew that the CIA and the State Department were in rare agreement: his decision to declare China a currency manipulator had knocked over a domino and others were falling.

  China had responded belligerently. It declared currency to be a sovereign issue and called the US stance an act of aggression. It cancelled the annual meeting of the joint economic strategic dialogue and recalled its Ambassador to Beijing for ‘briefings’.

  Eight Chinese warships had then sailed through the twelve-nautical-mile zone, off the disputed Senkaku Islands, and the Japanese were threatening retaliation. China’s riposte was to schedule missile tests for the Taiwan Strait, something it had not done for nearly two decades. There was no way of telling how far the sabre-rattling would go.

  The President surveyed the room then motioned to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  ‘Mr President,’ Travis Manning spoke as directed. ‘As I explained in our last meeting, when I suggested we move slowly on the China front, the problem is that we don’t yet have a clear idea of the temperament of the new leadership. At almost the same time you were elected, the Communist Party’s 18th Congress appointed the people who will lead China for the nex
t five years. As I said in January, we needed time to let them settle in and for us to get some feel for just who we are dealing with. There’s a growing view that this new team is more deeply nationalist, and more dangerous, than the last.’

  ‘And as I told you, I am not going to break a pledge I made to the American people on my first day in office.’ Jackson spoke more loudly than necessary, meeting reason with volume. His tone dropped as he searched for an argument. ‘And for God’s sake, Clinton declared China a currency manipulator in ’94 and things didn’t go to hell in a handbasket then.’

  The Treasury Secretary jumped on the opening. ‘Mr President, China’s Gross Domestic Product in ’94 was $500 million. Ours was $7 trillion. Today, China’s GDP is $9 trillion, closing on our $15 trillion. Based on these growth rates, their economy will surpass ours before the end of the decade. And in 1994 we did about $10 billion worth of trade with China. Now it’s over half a trillion and rising.

  ‘In 1994 China was an insignificant player in the government bond market. It now owns more than $1 trillion worth of our bonds. To put that another way, Mr President, only the Federal Reserve controls more US Government debt than China.’

  ‘The point is: pissing them off is a bad idea,’ interjected Manning. ‘And there’s more. George has come back from Beijing with some disturbing intel.’

  George Blake, the CIA’s Beijing station chief, was a hardened intelligence careerist, and he knew China, its nuances and instincts better than anyone.

  ‘Sir, the new Chinese president, Meng Tao, was billed as continuing the market-oriented reform of Deng Xiaoping. But we have reason to believe his sympathies actually lie with the New Left, which is pushing back against growing inequality in China and wants the party to return to its Maoist roots.’

  Blake reached into his folder for a one-page briefing note and handed it to the President.

  ‘We intercepted a conversation between Meng and one of his allies, Jiang Xiu. It’s clear that they know your currency declaration is a domestic political ploy and could easily be negotiated in financial forums. But they see an opportunity to play Chinese public opinion against the US by painting us as an aggressor that’s trying to strangle Chinese growth before it becomes a threat.’