Kompromat

Chinese President Liu Wang-Ji sat at his desk in Zhongnanhai, the old imperial enclave that lay immediately west of the Forbidden City, waiting for Zhang Fu-Shen, the minister of State Security, to arrive. The two men had known each other a long time. They both belonged to the small group of people who could trace their ancestry back to the men or women who had been with Mao Tse-Tung on the Long March more than seventy years earlier. On the first of October each year, the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic, these direct descendants of the Heroes of the Revolution climbed up to the great wide balcony above the Gate of Heavenly Peace to gaze down on the crowds in Tiananmen Square.

‘Hello, old friend,’ Liu Wang-Ji said, when Zhang Fu-Shen arrived. ‘Have some tea.’

They sat in armchairs side by side. Liu poured tea.

Zhang had brought a small parcel with him, wrapped in brown paper with a red ribbon around it tied in a neat bow. He placed it on the ornamental carved-wood table in front of them.

‘Please open it, Mr President,’ he said. ‘My people couldn’t find the film, but they found these instead.’

The Chinese president unwrapped the package. ‘What are these?’ he asked, holding up the silk boxer shorts, emblazoned with the US Flag and the embroidered message: ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’.

‘They are the proof we need,’ Zhang replied.

‘Proof of what?’

‘Proof that we have been barking up the wrong tree. The DNA evidence was conclusive. No American was involved in the Golden Shower episode. Certainly not an American presidential candidate. The boxer shorts belonged to the FSB operative in St Petersburg who set up the whole scam in the first place.’

The president fingered the shorts. He examined the label. ‘It says “Bloomingdales Finest. Made in China”. That’s something to be proud of anyway, I suppose.’

Liu Wang-Ji lit a cigarette. His doctor had advised him to give up smoking, but to no avail. He might as well have asked a wolf to stop baying at the moon.

‘So what do we do now?’ President Liu asked. ‘You don’t seem to have made much progress so far. You failed to neutralize Edward Barnard. Britain voted to Leave and now the EU itself seems to be about to break up. Who knows what is going to happen in France, or even Germany? You thought you had a big fish there in the Kempinski Hotel, but you ended up with a minnow. I hope you have something else up your sleeve.’

The Chinese president’s voice still sounded friendly enough, but Zhang noticed a steely tone which had not been there before. He realized that his own future was poised on a knife-edge. Liu Wang-Ji, in his rise to the highest post in the land, had treated his rivals with extreme ruthlessness. Some of them had met with ‘unfortunate accidents’; others had gone to jail in remote provinces. Still others had simply disappeared and their bodies had never been found.

He knew he was sipping his green-leaf tea not in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, but in the Last Chance Saloon.

‘Well, yes, I do have a plan,’ he said, ‘a way to turn the tables.’

‘It had better be good,’ Liu Wang-Ji observed.

For the next fifteen minutes the Chinese president listened with increasing interest as Zhang Fu-Shen explained his new scheme in detail.

‘Do you remember that meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee we had back in May, here in Zhongnanhai, when we discussed US–China relations?’ Zhang asked.

‘Of course, I remember it. I chaired it.’

‘Then you will also remember,’ Zhang continued, ‘that we discussed the famous Amur tiger incident.’

‘I certainly do,’ Liu replied. ‘I dined out on that story for weeks.’

‘And do you remember that at that same Politburo meeting I reported that Ronald Craig, at that time a presidential candidate, had been treated in Khabarovsk General Hospital for a buttock wound?’

President Li smiled. ‘I laughed like a drain, as I recall.’

Zhang came to the point. ‘The Politburo’s instructions to the Ministry of State Security were recorded in the minutes of the May meeting of the Standing Committee. I have brought them with me. Shall I read out the precise words?’

Zhang fished the paper from his pocket. ‘Point 9 of the Minutes reads as follows:

“The Minister in charge of the Ministry of State Security is hereby instructed to investigate why the president of the Russian Federation, Igor Popov, shot US presidential candidate Ronald C. Craig in the backside with a tranquillizing dart”.’

Zhang laid the paper on the little wooden table next to the US-Flag boxer shorts. ‘What I am about to say now, Mr President, is for your ears only.’

‘Go ahead, Minister Zhang.’ Their friendship might have dated back for decades, but business was business. Zhang was going to have to come up with something pretty good or he was for the chop. Literally.