The Beijing conspiracy

CHAPTER 9

‘G ood to see you again, Chuck,’ Richard Halliwell said without any depth of meaning, as he showed Bolton to one of the leather couches at one end of his vast office. ‘Meeting go well?’ he asked as he pressed a button on a remote and crossed the thick-piled carpet to where a well-stocked liquor cabinet was slowly rotating from behind the far wall.

‘Very well,’ Vice President Bolton replied in his southern drawl. ‘At least the fucking National Rifle Association is on side, which is more than I can say for some of the treacherous bastards who inhabit the beltway around Washington,’ he added, still furious at O’Connor disagreeing with him over the Khalid Kadeer threats.

Halliwell nodded as he handed the Vice President a crystal tumbler of Elijah Craig bourbon and ice. ‘Our problem, Chuck, is that we’re too honest and open in this country. If we’re not careful Americans are going to pay a very heavy price. It’s not the terrorists I’m worried about. It’s the fucking Chinese. Did you read my report?’

The Vice President nodded as he savoured the eighteen-year-old bourbon. They were two of the most influential men in the United States, both driven by a lust for power and an unshakeable belief that the United States of America set the standard for the rest of the world. As the Presidential primaries to decide the next Republican candidate for the White House drew closer, their intense rivalry would surface, but for the moment, the Chinese threat to US dominance had them singing from the same deadly sheet of music.

‘I agree with you. The Muslims are a backward and fragmented lot with a false religion.’ Vice President Chuck Bolton wasn’t the least bit religious but where the war on terror was concerned he played to the ordinary Americans’ strong sense of the Almighty in their country’s destiny and it suited him to denigrate Islam at every turn. ‘But the Chinese are not constrained by religion, and that makes them more dangerous still.’

‘You won’t get any disagreement from me on that score,’ Halliwell said, taking a hefty swig from his glass.

‘Your report corresponds with other reports that have passed over my desk, and as of last week,’ the Vice President continued, ‘our gross domestic product stood at just over $10 trillion a year. That still puts us where we should be with the biggest share of the world’s total of $36 trillion, but the damn Chinese are catching up and catching up fast. $1.5 trillion might put them in seventh place but unless we find a way to reign these little slopes in, they’re going to overtake us within the next fifteen years, maybe ten.’

‘It’s worse than that, Chuck. That figure of $1.5 trillion is grossly misleading,’ Halliwell said, his eyes steely. ‘You can’t take it in isolation. Provincial governments in China routinely file very low productivity figures so they can continue to be classified as poverty zones and remain eligible for large Central Government funding injections. The internal regional productivity figures I’ve seen are much higher. On the poverty correction factor alone, the Chinese GDP is closer to $2 trillion. Our economy is growing at somewhere between 2 and 4 per cent, and the Fed thinks that’s healthy? For fuck’s sake, Chuck, China is growing at three times that!’ Dr Halliwell’s passionate dislike of the Chinese was on full display.

‘Last year,’ Halliwell went on, ‘we bought $150 billion more in goods from China than they bought from us. While the deficit here is going through the roof, our dollars are pouring into the Chinese treasury faster than they can count them. Believe me, Chuck, the Chinese GDP is closer to $7 trillion a year.’

Both men were incensed that dumb-arsed Americans and millions of other people around the globe were scrambling over one another to buy Chinese imports. They knew that in reality the Chinese economy was already the second largest in the world and it was threatening to swamp the lead position of the United States. ‘Tsunami’ was a very accurate metaphor.

The Vice President nodded. ‘The Chinese are going to use the Beijing Olympics as their passport to credibility, Richard. They’re putting so much into it that for the first time in history the International Olympic Committee has had to tell a host nation to slow down on construction. The IOC’s actually worried that they’ll have a white elephant sitting around for a year before the Games. Without the drama in the lead-up the media will lose interest.’

The Vice President drained his glass and Halliwell reached over to refill it. ‘If the Beijing Olympics is an outstanding success,’ Bolton said, ‘we can forget about attacking them over human rights and Tiananmen Square, so I was thinking that we ought to try and find another way to slow these little bastards down.’ In a macabre parallel with Khalid Kadeer’s plans, the Beijing conspiracy of Richard Halliwell and Vice President Bolton was taking on a sinister shape.

‘Have you got something specific in mind?’ Richard Halliwell already had something very specific in mind but he was missing a vital element.

The Vice President lowered his voice. ‘Has the office been swept?’

Halliwell nodded. ‘Just last week.’

Halliwell’s Chief Financial Officer, still in his office two floors below, adjusted his headphones. The sweeping of the CEO’s office was a security routine that Alan Ferraro made sure he was well aware of.

‘I was thinking that if Beijing was to be subjected to a nasty health scare a couple of months before the Games that it might take some of the gloss off the event.’

‘It would take more than a health scare, Chuck,’ Halliwell replied. ‘It would take something like Ebola or smallpox, although there are problems with Ebola.’ Dr Richard Halliwell, one of the most ruthless and nationalistic men ever to wield corporate power in America, had already given the scenario a great deal of thought and he watched for any sign of squeamishness in his equally ruthless Vice President. Bolton didn’t flinch.

‘Unlike smallpox, which can be transmitted by a sneeze or a cough, Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with an infected person or their body fluids,’ Halliwell explained. Although most of his time was taken up with maintaining Halliwell Pharmaceutical’s domination of the global pharmaceutical market, Richard Halliwell was a very experienced biochemist, and one of only a few scientists among the hundreds Halliwell Pharmaceuticals employed around the world qualified to work in a Level 4 hot-zone laboratory. He had every intention of keeping his hand in. ‘If we just used smallpox on its own the Chinese would put the weights on us for a smallpox vaccine. While that might be profitable,’ Halliwell added with a sneer, ‘eventually vaccines and strict worldwide quarantine might bring it back under control. On the other hand, there’s no vaccine for Ebola. If Ebola was crossed with smallpox the Chinese would have to contend with a super virus that was easily transmitted. We could claim that the vaccine for that was still being worked on – even if it was ready for our own people.’