Chapter 14
“Get me Chen,” demanded President Pardington.
“We’re trying, sir. He’s not answering.”
“We have a direct line. Someone must hear the fucking thing ringing. Get his Chief of Staff on the line. Call his head of intelligence. Call his wife, for God’s sake. I know he doesn’t have a trainer, so you can forget that. Just get him on the fucking line. Now!”
Chen Jiayang dropped his gaze to his screen and a message from his private secretary.
他又打来电话 已经打了三次了
He’s calling again. He’s called three times already. “Fuck.” Chen didn’t have time to speak to the American President. Nor the desire.
Since those damned alarms, he’d been sequestered, cut off from the world, in this vast government compound. The Chinese equivalent of the Kremlin.
Like many of his predecessors, he didn’t want to live in Zhongnanhai. He had a perfectly comfortable home in the Jade Spring Hill neighborhood of Beijing, where many of the power brokers lived. And none was more powerful than Chen Jiayang, the head of the CCP. The Chinese Communist Party.
Though at the moment, he did not feel powerful. In fact, he felt powerless. That, combined with lack of sleep and mounting anxiety, was making him angry. Very angry.
At the moment, his anger was directed at Wang Lai, his Minister of State Security. Chen needed answers, and he needed them now. For that, he needed Wang. But the man was late.
“Asshole,” Eeyore muttered.
He’d promised his wife he’d watch his language and was glad she wasn’t there to hear his outbursts. Though at times like this, he missed her calm, kindly presence. Her reminder that other things were important.
But not now. Now there was only one priority. Figuring out what was happening.
He looked at his watch again. Where the hell was Wang?
Chen had gathered the six other members of the Standing Committee for an update in the “small meeting room,” which was not small at all.
The only one missing—
The door banged open, and in rushed a short man with graying hair and glasses. He was disheveled. His shirt untucked. His jacket misbuttoned. Chen wished he could put it down to the crisis, but the fact was, his head of the MSS was looking more and more like a lunatic, even on good days.
He’d grown worried about his head of the MSS. Was he drinking? Taking drugs?
Something was very wrong. He’d asked Wang many times in the past six months, and each time, the man had denied it. But the signs were getting stronger.
That and Wang’s long absences had made up Chen’s mind.
He’d have to replace him. Enough was enough. The head of the MSS was too powerful a position to entrust to someone not in command of himself. Someone who could no longer be trusted to make wise decisions.
President Chen watched as his old friend bowed. Deeply. A gesture of profound apology.
“Duibuqui. Sorry I’m late. I’ve been trying to get precise information on the extent of this latest attack.”
“What attack?”
“Haven’t you heard? Elevators are stuck.”
“That’s hardly an attack,” said a member of the committee. “People can take the stairs, no?”
Wang turned to him. “Everywhere?”
“What?” said Chen.
“What?” said Wang.
They stared at each other.
“What’re you talking about?” Chen demanded.
“Elevators are stuck across China and, from what I can gather, around the world.”
Chen’s eyes widened, and his heart began to beat faster. This was the alarms all over again, only considerably more alarming.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he demanded. “Where did it start? What do you know?”
Wang seemed to have frozen. He just stood there staring. A blank look had drifted across his face, as though his brain had taken leave of his body.
“Wang!” The President was getting up, prepared to slap him. “Wang!”
But before he could, the man came to himself. He looked around, as though surprised.
“What was I saying?”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Chen.
Once again, Chen’s phone buzzed, and he suddenly knew why the American President was so desperate to speak to him. Though “speak” was probably a euphemism.
“Have you heard from your wife?” Wang asked.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything? Have you lost your mind?”
“They’re together.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“My wife just called from the university,” said Wang. “She’s trapped in between the third and fourth floors of her building. Your wife is with her, along with two of your grandchildren.”
Chen felt his cheeks grow numb and willed himself not to pass out. “In an elevator?”
“Shi. I’ve sent emergency crews to get them out.”
What the hell’s happening? Now Chen felt like he was floating in midair, in an out-of-body experience.
He pounded the table next to his chair with such force it upset the water glasses and sent shock waves up his arm.
It wasn’t so much out of anger as an attempt to focus.
It worked. The sudden pain brought him back to his body, and the room, and the crisis at hand.
And kept him from fixating on his wife. The children …
It was also, part of him realized, a sort of punishment. For failing to protect them. Failing all those poor people. Millions, there must be millions. Trapped. Because he’d missed something.
He’d assumed they had time before the next attack.
If there was going to be one, surely it would be timed for the People’s Congress at the New Year. Still days away.
Not now. Not so soon.
His fear had turned to fury. “We still don’t know what happened with the alarms, and now this? You must know more!”
“Mr. President.”
Pardington’s Chief of Staff stood at the door. Kathleen Wells had become like the telegram messengers in the First World War. If they appeared, there was never good news.
Pardington was trying not to hate her.
“Are they still stuck?”
“Yessir. We’ve called out the National Guard to rescue as many people as possible.”
“But there must be hundreds of thousands—”
“Millions,” she said, and Pardington felt himself loathing her even more.
“—of elevators. Of people trapped.”
He looked at the time. It had been six minutes. Only six minutes? If it seemed a lot longer for him, he could only imagine how those trapped must feel.
He’d ordered an immediate meeting of his crisis cabinet. “Are they assembled?”
“Almost. We’re still waiting for Mr. McAllister.”
“What is it?” There was clearly something his CofS did not want to say. “Out with it.”
“Your son,” said the telegram messenger.
Third and fourth floor. How high up was that?
Chen tried to work it out. Could they survive should it …
He forced his mind back to the meeting.
President Chen was used to getting answers almost as soon as he asked a question.
He’d been General Secretary of the CCP and President for almost fifteen years, abolishing term limits after his first two.
His first move had been to place Wang Lai in charge of the Ministry of State Security, perhaps the most important post in the Politburo.
The two had met thirty years earlier when they were both heads of the CCP in their provinces: Chen in Shaanxi and Wang in Fujian.
They’d bonded over late nights at party meetings, while the doddering senior members slept. The two young bucks got shit-faced on the national liquor, Moutai, and complained about where the General Secretary was taking the country.
Like minds and common goals. And booze. A potent combination.
Chen sometimes wondered what the younger generation thought of them. Were they the doddering old fools now, ready to be replaced? Likely.
What he did know, because he was astute enough to recognize it, was that in recent years, the distance between his office in Zhongnanhai and the headquarters of the MSS near the Summer Palace had grown.
The widening gulf had a lot to do with the fact that Wang’s ministry had grown exponentially.
It was now not only in charge of security at home; it also oversaw the United Front Work Department and its multitude of programs, as well as cybersecurity, which most notably included Double Dragon.
Since taking charge, Wang had populated those agencies with people he trusted.
His own people.
“We do know one thing,” Wang was now saying. “A strong signal, a burst lasting just seconds, was detected just before the elevators shut down in Türkiye, then progressed around the world. That signal originated here.”
“Here?” one of the members asked. “In Zhongnanhai?”
Wang turned to him. Some members of the Standing Committee were brighter than others. Some, he knew, had been placed there simply because they were malleable.
This man wasn’t just malleable, he was mush.
“Bù.” No. “China.”
Chen began to speak, but Wang interrupted him. More evidence that the head of the MSS had lost his mind.
“Because of the strength of the signal, essentially a virtual blast, we’ve been able to narrow down its origin within China.”
“Where?”
“What about my son?”
Pardington was no longer the President. Of anything. He was no longer a man. No longer breathing. All he was now was a father.
“He’s in an elevator stuck between the eleventh and twelfth floors of an apartment building in Kansas City.”
Timothy Tim. The Tim Man, the—Oh God. No. Pardington got a hold of himself. Almost.
Tim. His little boy. Now at college. But always his child.
“His Secret Service?”
“They’re working to get him, and the others, out.”
Pardington wanted to shout, I don’t give a fuck about the others. Just get my boy out! Instead, he said, “Get McAllister.”
When she left, Pardington put his head in his hands. How? How had they missed this? Were they so completely focused on figuring out how the alarms went off that they failed to anticipate what might follow? He clasped his fingers to his scalp and tugged so hard it hurt.
A lot.
And still he pulled, literally pulling his hair out.
“The signal to stop the elevators came from Shaanxi.”
“Shaanxi?” Chen was aghast.
How could this be? How could he not know what was going on in his home province? Where he had first risen through the party ranks.