“Complete silence on the issue. My men shot up a car in heavy traffic, killing four men, and it’s like it never happened.”

“Like it never happened?” Smith said. “That takes a lot of juice in an age of cell phones and Twitter.”

He started coughing and put a hand to his mouth. It came back spattered with blood. Not much, though. It looked residual.

“Look, Jon. We’re going to get out of here and let you sleep. You focus on getting well and when the doctor gives the okay—hopefully in a few days—I’ll put you on a jet home. We can talk more then.”

16

16

Beijing
China

The military had closed the road to cars but pedestrians were being allowed to pass freely through the barricades.

The angry crowd had grown to over ten thousand people and Randi Russell was pretty sure that she’d collided with at least half of them. The wind direction changed and the familiar smog was reinforced by the smoke from a series of burning Japanese flags. The spike heels she was wearing weren’t exactly her first choice for massive political demonstrations, but she still managed to avoid getting run over by a pedal-powered food cart before finding some relatively clear sidewalk to the north.

Protests like this were breaking out all over China, driven by social media posts that were being selectively ignored by the government censors who spent their lives eradicating any hint of dissent from the Internet.

Of course the requisite soldiers had still been sent. There was no way the corrupt old men who ran China would let a gathering this size develop without the presence of the military. As long as the anger was aimed at their neighbor to the east, though, there would be no interference. In fact, a few soldiers had joined in and were shouting anti-Japanese slogans with at least as much gusto as the civilians around them. The difference was that instead of pumping their fists in the air, they were pumping rifles. It was an image that even Randi found disturbing. This situation had been heading nowhere good for a long time, and now the recent Senkaku standoff had combined with the attempt on Masao Takahashi’s life to fan the flame. It was time for the politicians on both sides to dump a bucket of cold water on this thing—but she doubted that would happen anytime soon. There was nothing like a little xenophobic paranoia to keep the rabble motivated.

She skirted a banner with a Photoshop-generated picture of Takahashi’s corpse and made a beeline for a high-rise condo building across the street.

A security guard nervously watching the demonstration through glass doors let her in and then quickly locked them inside. The shouts and bullhorn-amplified diatribes subsided a bit, but enough still penetrated to stave off any illusion of calm or normalcy.