The Mandarin Code (9 page)

When Kimberley died Dunkley had no one to talk to. His marriage was over and his daughter distant. Kimberley had always been there, and her loss was a constant raw welt.

Only now, in his budding relationship with Celia, had some of the pain begun to fade. But Dunkley knew he would always be tormented until he unravelled the mystery of Kimberley's death. And avenged it.

The official line, that she had been the victim of a gay-hate crime while cruising in a public toilet, infuriated Dunkley. It was a lie, a lazy bureaucratic dismissal of a rich and beautiful life. The police had cast Kimberley as a freak who'd invited her own death.

But he was convinced her murder was linked to former Defence Minister Bruce Paxton and his murky ties to China.

I pushed the rock that started the landslide.

Dunkley had asked for Kimberley's help with a photo that eventually implicated Paxton in electoral fraud. But she had turned up a more astonishing story: that Paxton and former prime minister, Catriona Bailey, had been courted by Chinese spies.

The allegation was unprovable, the evidence circumstantial at best. And he was well aware that spooks were naturally paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories. But Dunkley could not reconcile one undeniable fact: within hours of Kimberley stumbling onto the links between Bailey and Chinese intelligence, she was dead. If she wasn't the victim of a senseless crime there was only one logical conclusion.

Someone knew what she knew and wanted it to die with her.

Every day he felt the weight of guilt. She had died helping him. Dunkley had used his considerable investigative skills to try to track down the killer. All roads led to China, and he believed a third secretary, who had abruptly left the Chinese embassy in Canberra following Kimberley's death, was the key. Dunkley had taken long-service leave to follow the trail to Beijing, but turned up nothing.

So he'd come home and thrown himself back into his job with vigour. But the experience had hardened him against China. He'd written opinion pieces warning of the strategic risks that came with the opportunities of its rise, reminding Australia to remember who its real friends were. Since the Second World War, the United States had provided the security environment that had allowed China to flower peacefully. Dunkley doubted that China would be as benevolent when it was fully grown. Everything he saw confirmed his prejudice against a nation that seemed to be ever more aggressive in its dealings with neighbours.

Dunkley's opinions were at odds with the prevailing view and drew much criticism. But he'd found some in Cabinet, Defence and Canberra's diplomatic community who were deeply grateful. The Japanese Ambassador was particularly helpful.

Later this morning, he had an appointment with an old contact. He'd received the call a day earlier, out of the blue, from someone who kept more secrets than a Catholic priest.

He licked his lips at the prospect of entering the confessional, just as a piece of toast, burned beyond recognition, sprang from the toaster. It was his last piece of wholemeal, too.

Canberra

THE clean sheets felt pleasant against her skin, soothing and soft. The fresh linen acted as a balm for Catriona Bailey.

For eighteen months, the Foreign Minister had lain paralysed, her world reduced to a small private hospital room, the hum-and-whirr of life-support machines as familiar as her own voice had been.

This was her life, lungs, heartbeat. And her prison.

Medical science had kept her alive, but every day was a battle against despair.

The small things mattered, sustained her, like the daily change of linen.

A stroke had robbed her of agility, and she could no longer speak. Her rare condition – locked-in syndrome – meant she was reduced to communicating through the one bodily function she could still control: her eyes.

Bailey would have descended into madness but for the wonders of the information age that liberated her mind and unshackled her from these life-giving machines. Sanity had come from the computer that turned her eye-movements into words, and the internet that allowed her brilliant mind to wander the world.

This had allowed her to retain her ministry. She'd become a
cause c
é
l
è
bre
, the disability lobby using her fame to press a weak government to keep her on the frontbench. And the Opposition, led by preening fools, had helped when it announced plans to deny her a parliamentary pair. It had been forced to retreat under a barrage of outrage, but Bailey feared the Coalition would try again.

I must be ready.

There was one other thing that sustained Bailey.

Revenge.

In the few quiet hours when she wasn't blinking commands, or keeping up a steady stream of online banter, she was plotting the demise of the man responsible for her descent to in-patient: Martin Toohey.

It began with his smash-and-grab plot to steal her prime ministerial crown. Although she'd been tagged the Tungsten Lady, her downfall, swift and unexpected, had been devastating.

She was convinced her paralysis was directly linked to Toohey's treachery.

So the thought of revenge, of making him pay for his duplicity, sustained her. Hope, she'd learned, was a powerful elixir. With hope, miracles could happen.

I must believe I can walk again. Talk again.

Now, in the small hours of the Canberra morning, after finishing a discussion on Syria with her online disciples in the United States, she turned her mind to finding a cure for her condition. She scoured the internet for the latest information on anyone who had recovered from locked-in syndrome.

The news was largely bad. The syndrome was rare, usually the result of a stroke which damaged the ventral pons at the base of the brain. It left sufferers paralysed and needing life support. Even medical journal articles admitted it was the stuff of nightmares.

Bailey read one from the Texas Medical Association that neatly described how she felt.

Imagine waking from a deep sleep to find yourself fully conscious but unable to move any voluntary muscles save for the muscles that control your vertical eye movements. You can see, hear, smell, taste . . . However, you are unable to speak or make any vocalizations at all. You are, in essence, locked in your own body. This scenario is not a fantasy that Rod Sterling would have written for a
Twilight Zone
episode but a recognized, though rare, neuropsychological syndrome.

Enough of that.

Bailey knew the problem all too well. What she was searching for were solutions.

The gold standard was Kate Allatt, a forty-year-old who had almost completely recovered after two years. But Allatt was so rare as to be unique. Bailey feared she would never regain her old abilities.

But there has been progress.

Hours of painful therapy had seen some movement return to her hands. And as she tested the long disused muscles in her neck and back she felt that she would, before long, be able to sit upright.

Even better, the doctors believed she would soon be able to breathe unassisted. That meant she would be able to test whether the tracheotomy in her neck had done permanent damage to her voice box.

And if she could sit up, be taken off life support and speak she would be able to leave this room behind. She'd find liberation in a wheelchair, for her body and mind.

If it is humanly possible, I will triumph.

But time was pressing. An election was due later this year. She would take short-cuts if necessary, even if these were risky and untested.

Bailey needed to rise again, more quickly than was humanly possible. And when she achieved that, she would turn off Martin Toohey's life support.

Beijing

The seven men filed on stage, all purpose and swagger, dressed in identical dark suits with bold red ties, a neat symmetrical march of the recently elected, all-powerful Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Party's Central Committee. The ones chosen to steer the nation through the next phase of its inexorable rise, to the peak of global power. This was a pantomime staged for the three hundred and seventy-six Communist Party central committee members drawn from every corner of the republic, stacked with the people who really ran China. Regional governors sat beside generals who nodded sagely at those who ran state-owned enterprises. A gathering of the communist elite. They had come together in the cavernous Great Hall of the People for the third plenum of the 18th Central Committee. Their task: to debate a five-year economic and strategic plan.

Jiang Xiu stole a quick glance at the painting that spanned the stage, nearly thirty metres wide and eighteen high, ‘This Land So Rich in Beauty'. He loved its majesty, its aura of rugged charm. He stood near the far left of the elite line-up, his number six stamped on the floor, and obediently followed his comrades as they answered the audience applause with soft handclaps of their own.

A surge of elation and responsibility pulsed through him. His poor debilitated mother would have been so proud.

But Jiang knew this public forum was purely for show. Here in Beijing, the future direction of this autocratic State had already been thrashed out behind heavy wooden doors, fortified to resist armies.

Jiang, his lush jet-black hair slicked back and glistening, gazed into the audience, seeking out familiar faces. An urge to smile came over him. But he knew that would be frowned upon, so he stood stony-faced.

An hour earlier, the seven men had finished a secret meeting with no minders or note-takers, not even a servant to pour the tea. In power since November, the Standing Committee's first gatherings had been perfunctory administrative affairs. But today's meeting had been the first to test whether Jiang had correctly judged where the numbers and the will of his comrades lay.

Although technically one of the most junior of the seven, Jiang had led much of the debate around the carved wooden table, outlining his plans as the Minister for Propaganda.

He had been pushing hard for China to take an aggressive stance against the United States and its new President. The declaration of China as a currency manipulator was an insult that needed to be met with unshakeable resolution.

Jiang had known that the President was with him, as was one other. What had mattered was whether he could secure a fourth vote.

He was determined to push the committee into taking a hard line with the West. If he succeeded, then, for the first time in several decades, it would signal the nationalists were back in charge. It was Jiang's firm belief they should send a powerful message to any nation that did not afford China the respect it deserved.

His opening monologue had analysed America's weakness: a military fatigued by a decade of war, a faltering economy still staggering from the financial meltdown. The US Government's hand was losing its grip and its people were dismayed.

And China was growing more powerful by the day. The delegations of heads of government, financiers and industrialists from around the globe were evidence of a shift in the world order. Wealth bought military might: China would soon launch its latest nuclear-powered submarine to patrol the disputed waters of the East China Sea.

Tomorrow, a front-page article in the
People's Daily
would denounce America's financial attacks on China as part of a plan to contain its surge to pre-eminence. It would declare that China would not sit idle while its interests were threatened.

Jiang had told his comrades that America had made a critical strategic error and that it was an opportunity that should be seized: immediately and forcefully.

‘We need to press our advantage now, with all the means at our disposal – diplomatic, military and business – to put pressure on the United States,' Jiang had said. ‘We need to force it to publicly retreat from its pledge to pursue us as currency manipulators. If we can make the superpower take just one step back it will be a massive symbolic victory. A turning point in our history. A sign that China is now powerful enough to bring the US to heel. If they so much as blink, we have won.'