Page 59 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Daiyu looked away from the Situation Room’s clocks. It was now three minutes after the hour in Beijing. Plenty of time.

“There is a saying often attributed to Sun Tzu, but it is actually from Mario Puzo in The Godfather, Part II, a text that General Liú did not study. It states: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. For three years I cultivated General Liú’s attentions with this precise moment in mind.

Though I did not anticipate where I would be sitting. ”

No one interrupted her.

“The enemy of everything decent and human in China is our current government. The President has surrounded himself with sycophants and is now ineffectual. The true power in China lies with the CMC. They were all General Liú Zuocheng’s handpicked men, and he was anything but ineffective.”

Again she glanced at the clock. Five minutes. The Novichok agent that she’d managed to acquire from Russia, rather than the American VX nerve agent, could kill in less than twenty seconds with dermal absorption of a few tenths of a milligram, less weight than a mosquito’s wings.

“As of this time, they no longer exist. I used a Russian poison to further sow confusion. Perhaps it will harm any alliance that might have allowed those two fascist regimes to prop one another up to commit more atrocities.”

She wanted to allow time for that to sink in but continued quickly as she didn’t wish to be interrupted prematurely.

“I must warn you that the People’s Republic is not Russia.

The President is not quite so beholden to sycophants as some of your Presidents have been.

He will replace them with men of skill, but it won’t matter; they won’t be men of competence.

Not one will dare gainsay their President.

Unlike General Liú, he has not studied Sun Tzu who said: He whose generals are able and not interfered with by the sovereign will be victorious.

Instead, he will consolidate the CMC’s power into his own control, losing flexibility and, with that, the power to act. ”

Daiyu inspected her hands. They had shaken badly after leaving Zuocheng’s office yesterday morning.

The fear of handling the Novichok had only been a part of that.

Her worst nerves had been that this whole gambit would fail.

But his final message said that his office in the Eight-One Building was now a bunker for the dead. Her hands were rock steady.

“Today I have paid him for that, for the crime of forcing me to marry an abuser so that I could spy on one of his own, for his future plans to use Mei-Li and Mui as weapons against their adopted country, and for many crimes far worse, including his unprovoked power grab in Antarctica and the attack on the US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.”

The room remained in stunned silence.

“I, Wang Daiyu, am the traitor to the CMC. No one still alive outside this room knows it. Their deaths will never make the news, but they are all dead by now.” She turned to Mui. “My sole regret is any pain I may have caused you in killing your grandfather.”