Page 56 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Damn her!

Daiyu was supposed to be sending him good news about meeting with the American President.

Instead she’d sent half a quote from Han Fei’s twenty-three-hundred-year-old analysis of the Dao De Jing written three hundred years before that.

Worse, it was a reference to an alternate translation that they had ultimately decided was appropriate to Fei’s sentiments, but not his words.

Look for the Fei tiger by your side. Just that, no more.

Fei had been the first great philosopher to directly discuss traitors.

Prior to his supposed writing of the rule-devouring tigers, other philosophers had only written of degrees of loyalty.

They had written of spies and their uses and cautions in that use, but Daiyu had cited none of those references.

Into his ears alone, she’d shouted, The CMC has a traitor.

If she said it, there was nothing to question. Somehow she had found this fact and again proven her usefulness and loyalty. Perhaps some information she had wrested from the American President herself. Perhaps from one of her many contacts.

The source no longer mattered. This news threatened all he had built over the fifty-five years since he’d first joined the PLAAF.

He’d worked his way from errand boy to pilot.

During the Sino-Vietnamese War, he’d earned more kills that any other.

For fifty-five years he had battled his way to the co-leadership of the CMC.

Who was he kidding? The leadership of the CMC. When a President was weak and solely focused upon consolidating power into his own hands for the sake of ego, he cared little for the most important aspect of power—the military.

And after all that work, to have a traitor in his midst made his hands shake with rage. It was good that his heart was robust or it would explode out of his chest.

Instead, he managed to occupy himself with a series of routine emails as the other five members of the CMC filed into the room and took their customary places at the conference table.

It was all that kept him from pulling the Type 54 handgun out of his desk drawer—where he’d kept it close to hand for the decades since his service in the Sino-Viet War—and shooting them all.

Nobody was late. No trivial power plays. He’d said six a.m. and every man was here.

He knew them. He knew their history both military and personal. Their wives, mistresses, and the whores they were cheating on their mistresses with.

One was a traitor and before this meeting was over, he would know which one.

Zuocheng sent a message to Daiyu, The ruler regards his ministers. She would know the full quote.