The Shadow Game (7 page)

Meng Tao placed his morning's copy of the
People's Daily
on his teak desk, smoothing his hands over a front page that captured his nation's inexorable rise.

China's insatiable appetite for oil to turbo-charge its economy featured prominently alongside an article reporting on the record numbers of Chinese travelling overseas, each an ambassador for the Middle Kingdom.

Trumping them, though, was a picture story headlined ‘A Night at the Opera'.

A prominent photo caught China's propaganda minister, Jiang Xiu, arriving at the National Centre for the Performing Arts with his glamorous wife. They were both perfectly groomed and stylishly dressed and the crowd seemed to part before them as they walked into the performance.

‘She is so beautiful, so elegant. He is as handsome as the president,' gushed one smitten theatre-goer.

He'd read the article twice. It breathlessly described Jiang's growing authority within the politburo, declaring he was ‘Meng Dada's strong and loyal right hand'.

That much was true. Jiang was his confidant, the indispensable ally who had helped wrest control of the Standing Committee from the fossils of the past as they forged the new China.

The president stared at the photograph once more before taking a sip of rich black tea. There was a gentle knock at the door.

‘Come.' Meng's assistant opened the door wide enough to poke her head in.

‘Sir, Jiang Xiu is waiting for you.'

‘Yes, see him in.'

The head of China's propaganda agency strode into the room, his face beaming.

‘Mr President.'

‘Xiu, how good to see you. Are you well?'

‘Very.'

The two men embraced warmly, Meng squeezing the shoulders of his loyal colleague perhaps a tad too hard. He stood well above Jiang and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his physical superiority.

He motioned to a seat and offered tea to his friend who seemed eager to share an update on a crucial project.

‘Good news. Australia's Cabinet has agreed to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.'

Meng clapped his hands. China had been expecting this decision, but it still sent a thrill through him. Another piece of the geo-strategic puzzle was falling into place. He had been planning this strategy for years, recalibrating the global financial order. The new China Bank would suck power from the American-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Truly, Meng and his underlings were creating the financial, trade and military architecture to reshape the world. The shift of power from West to East had leaped a generation. With the humiliation of the imperial superpower in the Taiwan Strait, China had roared an unmistakeable message: it was again at the centre of all things. Meng and Jiang had capitalised on the moment, rapidly expanding China's economic and military footprint, pushing ever outwards while America reeled.

But in recent months Jiang had begun to urge caution, worried that some of their plans were perhaps too ambitious and risked a regional and internal backlash. He feared they would stumble if they tried to run too fast. Meng dismissed any hesitation, convinced that he was a once in a thousand years leader. To pause was to fail.

‘Jackson is the weakest American president in a century,' Meng said now. ‘He is our greatest ally. We must continue to act quickly.'

‘Yes sir.' The minister nodded, but his sullen expression belied his agreement.

Meng had been through this discussion many times and had begun to take note of the points at which his younger confidant would raise carefully worded objections. He motioned to the large map on his wall which displayed China as the hub of the world.

‘We continue to push out in all directions and to bolster our defences,' he said. ‘But as history teaches, states are destroyed by internal weakness. That is why you, as propaganda minister, are my most important colleague.'

‘Thank you sir, I understand.' Jiang nodded. ‘The internet poses many challenges as you know. But it also raises many possibilities for keeping watch. We believe that we have all the monitoring and filtering systems we need. All the microblogging sites are covered. We have expanded the web surveillance teams. We have strengthened our control over universities.'

‘All good, but we must not underestimate the value of making regular public examples of those who defy us,' Meng replied before turning back to the map. ‘How are things progressing in the north and west?'

‘As you know better than me, sir, we are well advanced on developing the New Silk Road from Xi'an,' – he pointed to central China at the heart of the map – ‘through to Istanbul and then on to Europe.'

He swept his hand down to China's south.

‘Quanzhou is the port where the Maritime Silk Road begins. It runs through the South China Sea then up through the Malacca Strait to Kolkata in India. It goes on to Nairobi, up around the Horn of Africa, through the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean before linking with the land-based Silk Road in Venice.'

Meng didn't need to be told the story but he loved encouraging others to extol his visionary policies. He leaned back and held up his arms as if trying to embrace the world.

‘Through two roads, by land and sea, we will link three continents and once again we will be the Middle Kingdom, at the heart of the world of trade, power and culture.'

He turned to his disciple.

‘And we will arrive at our destination much sooner than you ever imagined, my friend.'

Jiang looked at his feet and nodded without making eye contact.

Meng adopted a fatherly tone.

‘You are troubled,' he said. ‘You know that you can speak freely with me. What is it?'

Jiang looked up, cleared his throat and glanced back at the map.

‘The sea lanes to the south are the key to this,' he said softly. ‘The South China Sea is ours, but other nations claim those waters. You demonstrated our power brilliantly when you turned back the USS
George Washington
. That is all we need to press for a negotiated settlement of our claims – to get everything we want without risk.'

‘What are you saying?' There was a whiff of annoyance in Meng's tone.

‘Militarising the islands in the South China Sea is courting disaster.' Jiang's voice was filled with urgency. ‘We have bluffed the world that we are the equals of America on the high seas, but we know – and the Americans know – that it is not true. There is still a choke point in the Malacca Strait. We still do not have the fleet to sustain a presence in the Indian Ocean. If we overreach in the South China Sea and are defeated then we will be set back years.'

Meng's eyes were both curious and reproachful.

‘You surprise me, my friend. We were the ones who saw and seized the opportunity to humble the United States.'

He swept his arm across the face of the world.

‘This was our objective.'

Jiang seemed fearful of provoking Meng's ire; his voice was almost pleading.

‘And we can have it, sir. We have demonstrated our power. Now let's show our wisdom. The regional players fear us. We can get what we want through diplomacy.'

Meng snorted.

‘I don't have to seek permission from Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines. They are pissants, all of them. I will take what I want, what is my birthright. The South China Sea project is our Great Sea Wall. The islands will be unsinkable aircraft carriers and resupply ships. Once we have finished terraforming the islands we will claim all the waters around them. The world will have to beg permission to pass.'

Meng's voice softened, but his tone remained insistent.

‘There is only one power that can challenge us and that is America. But it is ruled by a fool and a coward. Now is the time to act. If we pause we allow the United States time to play itself back into the game.'

The president leaned menacingly close to his minister.

‘The real threat . . . as it ever was . . . is internal weakness. It is your job to guard against that, not to be its mouthpiece.'

Jiang lifted his head, stood to attention and nodded. ‘Yes sir.'

He bowed respectfully and left the room. Only the ticking of an office clock meddled with the president's thoughts.

Meng re-read the front-page article about the glamorous couple's night at the opera. Suddenly he lifted the
People's Daily
in both hands and tore it in two. He threw the pieces to the floor and picked up his red phone. A female voice answered. ‘Sir?'

‘Send in the cleaners.'

‘You're playing Russian roulette with your life, Catriona.'

The doctor unwrapped the blood pressure cuff from Catriona Bailey's right arm, jotting down a few notes before turning to the opposition leader who sat impassively in her motorised wheelchair.

‘Five empty chambers is a fair bet,' Bailey said, the defiance in her voice matching the steel-blue coldness of her eyes.

Since emerging from the locked-in syndrome that followed the massive stroke she'd suffered in 2011, she'd engaged a Melbourne specialist to visit her every month. Discreetly. Her recovery after twenty months of hospitalisation had been miraculous, testament to her fierce determination, but she was running on a dangerous cocktail of experimental drugs and unquenchable ambition.

She'd won back the Labor leadership from Martin Toohey before narrowly losing the election to Elizabeth Scott. Now just
six seats stood between her and a return to the seductive Treasury benches.

She'd taken credit for the better than expected result and had ruthlessly entrenched her authority. She'd forced a change to the ALP's rules to ensure her parliamentary leadership could never again be snatched by just fifty-one per cent of the Labor caucus, neutering the faceless power harlots who practised the dark arts of political numerology. They despised her popularity, her power, her autocratic style that spurned their counsel.

But Bailey rode the heady heights of popular opinion. For the past year she'd held a commanding lead over Scott as preferred prime minister, and Labor was ahead in every poll.

She had followed her opponent's playbook and simply obstructed the work of government. Bailey had never been an idealist, so she had no trouble abandoning policy for pragmatism. Scott might be right about repairing the Budget, ending industry handouts and signing free trade agreements, but Bailey didn't care. Every debate was reduced to one word: fairness. Every government entreaty met the same answer: no.

Budget cuts were ‘unfair' because they slashed welfare. Cutting industry handouts was ‘unfair' because of the loss of subsidised jobs in the economic badlands. Free trade agreements were ‘unfair' to workers, farmers and protected businesses.

It was a message pounded daily in an endless parade of public and media appearances.

And Bailey's rise in popularity was given wings by Scott's hopeless tenure as she blundered from one prime ministerial disaster to the next.

In her few quiet moments, Bailey would imagine standing on the steps of Government House just after her ministry was sworn in: Catriona 3.0. But they would be a decoration: she would have all the power and wield it ferociously.

The stern tones of her specialist jolted Bailey from yet another lapse in which she found it hard to distinguish reality from drug-induced hallucination.

‘If you don't take my advice and pace yourself a little more, delegate some responsibilities to your colleagues and cut back on the travel, you may have just months to live. Or you could relapse and end up unable to move or speak again.'

Bailey's face, gaunt and layered with thick powder, slowly creased in a smile. Her right hand pressed a lever, swinging her wheelchair around. She glided towards the door.

‘If those are my choices then I choose risk and a short full life over a long and empty one,' she said. ‘I'll be prime minister next year. I'll worry about my health after that. Your job is to keep me upright until then.'

The lights of Parliament House sparkled as a gaggle of staffers and reporters boarded the Murrays coach. It was 4.30am and the early morning cool was forecast to give way to a summer scorcher.

It had been like this for more than a year. Every time federal parliament rose, the opposition leader would gather up a handful of colleagues and staff and embark on a blitz of electorates, the media trailing in the wake of the rock star political princess.

Bailey would usually fly to a state capital or regional centre, then board a chartered bus to continue a seemingly never-ending tour of safe and marginal seats alike. It was a perpetual election campaign, and Bailey would swat away claims that the public was tiring of the strategy with the riposte: ‘Look at the polls.'

Today the Bailey Express was going local, leaving from the front of parliament and travelling across the ACT border into Eden–Monaro. The bellwether seat was held by the Liberals with the barest of margins.

Emblazoned with Bailey's campaign catchphrase ‘Advance Australia Fair', the coach was primed for a barnstorming three-day tour through this must-win electorate. The reception promised to be good because Labor's polling showed Bailey was well ahead, from the high plateau of the Monaro to the lush pastures of the South Coast.

At every town, she would spruik from a purpose-built platform alongside the bus. Bailey would doorknock the nation to win back the office stolen from her. Nothing had given her greater satisfaction than dethroning the usurper, Martin Toohey, but his demise had come too close to the election for Bailey to salvage government. Now, with time and a relentless determination, the prize was again within sight.

Her fingers gripped the canister that daily dispensed the cocktail of drugs that kept her functioning. Three pills, three times a day. She swilled them down with a cup of water before easing herself
onto her queen-size bed, exhausted but satisfied after another relentless day.

It was 11pm and her touring party was nestled in at the Bega Downs Motor Inn, a modest establishment that offered enough beds for her entourage. There was still work to be done: some finetuning of a speech to be delivered to a local business chamber in the morning, and tinkering with the child care policy she'd been developing for the past four months.

She took a sip of brandy and cupped an iPhone 6 in her left hand. She began typing a message using Confide, the encrypted software app that sent self-destructing digital messages, safe from the many eyes prying online.

Tonight she would continue a conversation using a special code name.

I watch in awe as you go from strength to strength and I know that when I return to power we will do great things.

One minute later, a return message pinged its arrival.

We will.