“Our new enemies don’t play by the same rules we used to. In fact, they play by no rules at all. Family members are considered fair game now. The tactics are brutal, revolting. They turn my stomach,” Zang said, lighting his cigar and savoring the first puffs. “You are standing in my home, Mr. Middleton. It is too dangerous for men like myself and Comrade Chernayev to stay anywhere long enough for them to find us. There are fifty airfields like this scattered across China and I never spend more than a single night at a time in any one of them.”

Middleton studied Zang closer, matching the face to a different era, a different man. Same brilliant, confident smile draped in the shadow of hair not yet touched by white. Shorter, slighter, more effusive, but with the same eyes.

“I think I know you,” he started, “from the—”

“—Chinese secret po—”

“The Te-Wu,” Middleton said before Zang could finish.

Zang held his cigar at arm’s distance, frozen. “I’m impressed. Perhaps our paths have crossed somehow.”

“Not yours, your father’s. He was one of the Te-Wu charged with infiltrating the United States after the Korean War.”

“Not just one of. It was his operation!”

“You sound proud.”

“Of his efforts, of our heritage, yes. The Te-Wu dates back to 550 B.C.”

“I’ve heard the group even has its own clandestine dialect that makes infiltrating it impossible.”

Zang spat off some words in Chinese that made no sense to either Chernayev or Middleton. “But now,” he resumed, switching back to English, “we find ourselves with a different enemy, a different mission.”

“Sikari?”

“Chaos in general, of which Sikari represented only a small part, small but very dangerous because of its capacity to inflict incalculable harm on our precariously mutually dependent world.”

“The butterfly . . . ”

Zang nodded as he blew huge plumes of cigar smoke. “And in this case that butterfly is going to land on the Baglihar dam just hours from now. And if we do not force it to take flight again, the price will be the end of the new world stitched together by the precarious threads of euros and dollars.”

“War between India and Pakistan.”

“Exactly.”

“No,” Middleton disagreed. “We know the explosives Sikari’s people have can’t destroy the dam, and even if they manage to assassinate the secretary of state . . . ”

Middleton let his voice trail off, something in Zang’s suddenly tentative expression telling him he had it all wrong, that he was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

“It’s not the secretary of state who’s coming,” the head of the Te-Wu told him.