“That’s good,” Holloway nodded. “I’ll admit I had an ulterior motive to dropping in, James. I am a fan, but I wanted to get your read on China, if you don’t mind.”

  James was a little taken aback, but he could hardly say no.

  “Sure. What in particular?”

  It would be something quite particular, he was sure.

  “Supply chains. Specifically in the tech sector. Have you done much work on that?”

  “You’ve read my newsletter.”

  Holloway smiled.

  “I have. I wanted to get your take on just how vulnerable some of our bigger companies would be if this trade dispute went sideways, hard.”

  James resisted the urge to ask whether that was about to happen.

  “Look, you’d have to do risk assessments case by case. A company like Apple,” he gestured at Michele’s iPhone, “would already have their own mitigation plans in place. Others with less exposure, not so much. But generally speaking, yes, US tech companies, hardware makers, are extremely vulnerable to downside risk from any disruption to trade relations with Beijing. In some cases, I think it’s why you’re seeing investments in downstream assembly that can’t be justified as anything other than a hedge. Look at the iPhone. It’s worth a couple of hundred billion dollars a year. If things got nasty, Beijing could just turn that tap off. Of course, then they’d have the problem of millions of suddenly unemployed workers to feed… which circles back around to Michelle’s work on their domestic supply chains. They can’t feed themselves. Not from their own agricultural base. They’ve built out too much farmland and poisoned most of what’s left. Five years of drought haven’t helped either. Unless they want to starve themselves to prove a point, they’re stuck buying their groceries on the global market, specifically from Canada, Australia and the US for grains, pulses and protein. And ASEAN for rice, fruit, vegetables, that sort of thing.”

  Holloway and Nguyen exchanged a look.

  “James, would you be interested in writing a private briefing on this topic for the NSC?” Holloway asked.

  James sat up straight in his chair, blinking as if someone had just splashed cold water in his face. He could tell from Michelle Nguyen’s expression that she wasn’t at all surprised by the offer.

  “I er… I…” he groped for a reply, suddenly understanding why he’d made it past the front door today.

  “I don’t need an answer right this minute,” Holloway said. “But if you had capacity and you were interested, I would need to sign off the paperwork by close of business tomorrow. And I’d need the briefing by next Monday.”

  “Holy shit,” James said quietly, then apologised.

  “It’s okay,” Holloway smiled. “I know what an ambush feels like. But I’ll explain. I have to coordinate a multi-agency presentation at the White House before the next round of tariffs go into effect.”

  “The Doomsday round,” James said without thinking, using the hashtag the media new and old had settled on for the looming avalanche of massive tariffs and quotas on Chinese goods coming into the US. He’d been writing about it in every edition for months now.

  “Yes,” Holloway said, his tone grim. “The deadline is two weeks off. We don’t make policy of course…” his showed them his open hands, a gesture of futility as much as it was a show of honesty, “but we still advise on policy.”

  “Is anyone listening?” James asked.

  “These days, I fear nobody listens to anything but the counsel of their darkest angels,” Holloway admitted. “But we must do as we would were our path through the world not a trail of tears.”

  “Admiral you’ve been reading too much Whitman again,” Michelle put in.

  “You can never read too much Whitman, Michelle,” Holloway said. “James, thanks for coming in. And please, do think about it. We pay government rates, which are terrible, and your work will almost certainly be ignored by those who most need to attend to it, but son, I’ve done some digging on you, and I know you’re a young man who takes his responsibilities seriously. You’re a private citizen, James, and you’re free to walk out the door today and do what you will with whatever Michelle has told you. But you are also a citizen of the Republic and I’d ask you to consider your responsibilities to—”

  “I’ll do it.” James O’Donnell said.

  Both Michelle and Holloway seemed surprised.

  “Er… okay. Thank you,” Holloway said.

  “I would need to stay in Washington,” James said. “I have a newsletter to get out tomorrow. I can do it tonight, but only if I don’t have to drive back.”

  “I can get Marcie to take care of any bookings,” Michelle said to Holloway.

  “She might have to book by phone,” said Holloway. “Internet’s been flaky today.”

  4

  On my Six

  Nomi was snoring gently when Rick woke up. The curtains in their bedroom were parted, allowing a dusty beam of morning sunlight to stream through and gleam off her jet-black hair. She was beautiful. He was always struck by just how beautiful she looked when sleeping. Even her little snores were cute. He gently eased his massive arms around her shoulders and tummy and pulled her in close for a cuddle. She woke immediately, her eyes sparkling with delight, and she licked his face all over, from bristled chin to eyes squeezed shut.

  “Oh… no. Nomi. Don’t,” he cried out.

  The black Labrador barked and nuzzled in even closer, snuffling at his neck.

  “Gah. Brazen hussy! No means no.”

  He pushed her away, but playfully. Her tail wagging, she barked again. This was her favourite time of day, and there would be no respite for Rick Boreham until his best girl had all the cuddles she was due. He gave in. After five minutes of belly-rubbing and ear-scratching Nomi finally conceded he had done enough to prove his love. The bare minimum, but enough.

  She leapt from the bed, paws crashing down and skittering wildly on the wooden floorboards. She spun around in tight circles, barking.

  “Quiet,” Rick said. He didn’t raise his voice, but it was enough to silence her. She still panted with excitement, and whimpered a little with the effort of keeping her feelings bottled up when the only reasonable way to start a new day was to bark and jump and spin about with utterly foolish abandon. But she had her orders and she obeyed. Nomi was a good dog.

  The reward for being such a good dog was a raw egg cracked over her bowl of venison kibble. Rick scooped a full measure from a ten-pound Taste of the Wild bag, poured the dry food into Nomi’s stainless-steel bowl, and expertly broke open the egg with just one hand. Venison kibble sounded a lot fancier than it looked, and the egg was straight from the factory cage. He couldn’t afford no free range organic cackleberries. But Nomi was salivating when he placed the bowl on the floor.

  He looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  “On credit,” he said.

  She tilted her head slightly, frowning, as if questioning his sanity.

  “On credit,” he said again.

  Still she sat, a small clear tendril of drool dropping from her lower lip.

  “Paid for!” Rick declared, and she fell on her breakfast, wolfing most of it down in four or five noisy gulps.

  He let her out into the small garden while he performed his own toilet, cleaned up—both himself and her breakfast bowl—and changed for their morning walk. Rick and Nomi lived in a small, one bedroom bungalow, in a thin strip of forest between the Potomac River and the southernmost fairway of the Bretton Woods Golf Course in Seneca, Virginia. The bungalow, more of a shack really, came with his job. He was a 34-year-old ‘ball boy’, and that was just fine by him.

  “Let’s go, girl,” he called out, slipping a worn canvas bag over his shoulder.

  He locked the front door, then the screen door, set the burglar alarm, closed and padlocked the front gate, and gave Nomi a scratch behind the ear before telling her, “Go on.”

  She darted away, a flash of black lightning.

  She was only two years old and there was still a lot of puppy in her wild energy. Rick had once seen her leap six feet off the ground and pluck a crow out of the air. That’d been a hell of a mess to clean up, and he’d let her know that chomping birds on the wing was not something they did in this outfit. It would freak the kids out and he could lose his job and the little cabin that came with it. Unlike the Trump National Golf Course across the river, Bretton Woods was child friendly. There were always hundreds of families around on the weekend, the dads on the links, moms at the tennis club and the children scattered through adventure camps, the soccer academy, junior tennis and even swim coaching. They all loved Nomi, but that was because they’d never seen her tear apart a screeching bird or squirrel. And as long as Rick was training her, they never would.

  Their morning rounds of the course would take them on a five-mile hike, north past the soccer fields and tennis courts, turning west at the aquatic centre, and out past the duck pond before swinging around to head home via the western links. He would undoubtedly collect a dozen or so stray balls, which he’d drop into the big bucket back at the driving range, but he would do his real work later, scouring all eighteen holes while Nomi took the first of her long naps.

  Rick didn’t delude himself into imagining he was a vital cog in the polished machine that ran Bretton Woods. He took his work seriously—besides gathering stray golf balls he was also responsible for policing up rubbish and dead squirrels, some of them taken out by those stray golf balls, and general maintenance as directed by the head groundskeeper. But his work was also his therapy. The job and the cabin had both been arranged by his old regimental CO, Colonel Farrugia, whose brother-in-law was the general manager here. Rick had been riding in the Hummer behind Farrugia’s when Sunni militiamen set off a roadside bomb four years ago. He did not care to think about what’d happened next, but when he came back from Iraq for the last time, invalided out of the Army, Farrugia, minus one leg, was waiting for him with a job offer and the keys to a quiet cabin by the Potomac.

  “Nomi! To me,” Rick called out as he emerged from the woods by a par 3 green. It was late morning and the nearest golfers were two holes away. Bright morning sun flashed off the polished steel shaft of a golf club as Nomi came running out of the shadows into the light. She dutifully bounded over to Rick and sat down at his left heel.

  “Good girl,” he said, flicking her a piece of jerky from the stash in his shirt pocket.

  It disappeared so quickly it was as though a small, mouth-shaped black hole had randomly opened up in front of him, consumed the entire mass of the jerky, and instantly winked out of existence again.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “On my six.”

  Nomi fell in behind him and they began the long route march around the grounds. Rick loved it here. Enough that on some very rare and special days he could imagine that it was almost worth the terrible journey that had delivered him to this place. He’d been surprised to discover that the first sod for Bretton Woods had been turned in 1968, not as just another exclusive retreat for millionaire businessmen and the politicians they owned, but as a place that didn’t discriminate against anybody because they weren’t millionaire businessmen and connected insiders. Farrugia explained that the International Monetary Fund had originally built the place for its own staff, many of whom would never have been allowed into a whites-only country club. Half a century later it retained a wide open, welcoming air. The winding trails, the green lawns, all resting quietly behind thick ramparts of remnant old growth Virginia forest, it was so utterly removed from the heat, dust and horror of the sandbox that, if it weren’t for the need to buy groceries and do his therapy at the VA, he would probably never leave.

  But he had to go to the VA.

  Nomi was part of a research program investigating the benefits of companion animals for veterans with post-traumatic stress. He could never have afforded the thousands of dollars for a pure-bred, highly-trained dog like her. He could barely afford the dried venison feed, and it was subsidised as part of the study.

  Rick stopped to pick up a golf ball somebody had sliced off the seventh hole and on to one of the soccer fields. Sprinklers tick-tick-ticked away, shooting long jets of water over the playing field. He examined the stray ball. A Volvik Vista IV. Expensive. He dried it off with the small towel tucked into his belt and dropped it into the satchel at his hip.

  It was a weekday, mid-morning, and he was surprised to see a group of young teens on the grass lawn between the tennis courts. You saw lots of kids out here on the weekend, but Rick assumed they were probably doing a school excursion. Bretton Woods had arrangements with a couple of the local schools to lease out sporting facilities as needed. The kids in this group seemed to be doing some sort of acrobatics or gymnastics class. He smiled as he drew closer and recognised the instructor.

  Mel Baker.

  So, no. They were learning jujitsu.

  Melissa had them warming up at the moment, which meant a couple of dozen teenagers stretching and rolling and generally falling over themselves on the soft grass. Rick went back to scouting for golf balls, picking up another three before he reached the tennis courts, where Mel had the kids doing basic breakfalls.

  “Why do we have to do this?” somebody whined. “When do we get to hit someone?”

  Mel ignored the whining and waved at Rick and Nomi.

  When the kids realised there was a dog (possibly even a puppy) nearby, all semblance of order broke down. Only a couple of kids made the initial break, but when Mel made no effort to restrain them, all of the others quickly followed.

  “Sit. Stay,” Rick commanded as they were rushed.

  Nomi did as she was told, sitting in one spot, but her tail waged furiously at the promise of so much lovin’.

  Mel wandered over and joined the flash mob that had formed around Rick and his dog, asking him with a wordless glance and raised eyebrow whether he was okay.

  He nodded.

  There were times when suddenly getting mobbed like this would unravel him, put him back at a checkpoint in Ramadi, or the souk in Fallujah, but he was feeling good today, and Nomi lapped up the attention as greedily as she’d wolfed down her breakfast.

  “All right! Enough puppy time,” Mel called out over the tumult after a minute or two. “Let’s get back to it.”

  She rolled over the chorus of protests and complaints, clapping her hands together and shouting that the last one back would enjoy the privilege of racing her through a set of fifty push ups.

  Nobody wanted that, and nobody, especially not the boys, wanted to get beaten by her. They all raced back to the plot of grass she’d marked out as her open-air dojo.

  “What’s happening with you this morning, Master Sergeant?” Mel asked, shading her eyes from the morning sun.

  “Same old, same old, Constable Baker,” he replied.

  “You got a few minutes for a demo?” she asked.

  “Throws again?”

  “You are a big boy. It does impress.”

  He chuckled and shrugged.

  “Okay, sure.”

  They joined the school group back at the training mats Mel had brought down from the gym.

  “All right, listen up,” she called out in her thick London scent. Or at least Rick assumed it was a London accent. He assumed everyone from England came from London. “You are in for a treat this morning,” Mel went on. “Mister Boreham here, is a former Army Ranger. And he’s going to help me show you a few things.”

  Rick heard the change in tone, especially among the teenaged boys.

  “Now we’re gonna see some ass kicking,” somebody said in a stage whisper.

  They had no idea. Rick sent Nomi to lie down under the shade of an old oak tree and she happily trotted away to her assigned station, followed by the disappointed cries of her new fans. He slipped off the canvas satchel full of reclaimed golf balls and set it down on the grass.

  “How much do you weigh Mister Boreham?” Mel asked, dragging everybody’s attention back onto them.

  “Two hundred and fifteen pounds, ma’am,” Rick said.

  “And how tall are you?”

  “Six three ma’am.”

  “You think you can take me?”

  “Not even on my best day, ma’am.”

  His confession caused great amusement among the young audience.

  “You’re not much of a Ranger then,” some little asshole called out from the back of the pack.

  Mel turned on the heckler. Her smile was sweetly dangerous.

  “Oh, would you like to try your advanced combat skills against Master Sergeant Boreham, Nicholas?”

  Embarrassed silence followed by a few nervous giggles were her only answer.

  “I didn’t think so,” Mel said, before dropping into her instructor voice. “As you can see, Mister Boreham is at least half again as big as me. He could literally pick me up and throw me over your heads. And now he’ll try to do that.”

  Rick knew what was coming, and he mugged it up for the kids, suddenly dropping into character as a snarling, crouching monster. He went at Mel fast and hard, his arms spread wide as if to gather her up. He wasn’t sure what the name of the throw she executed was called. Unlike her, he didn’t have a black belt in judo or jujitsu. He simply knew it as ‘the hay bale throw’. She dropped beneath his centre of gravity and used his own mass and momentum against him, sort of folding up before his assault and rolling with it. It worked every time. Rick felt himself magically take flight and the world turned upside down. He tried to relax into the landing, exhaling fully, tucking in his chin.

  He crashed down, heard Nomi bark, and the kids all cheer and gasp, and then he marvelled as Melissa somehow materialised on his chest, pinning his arms to his side and miming a flurry of punches which would have turned his face to blood pudding.

  The kids broke into applause.

  Nomi barked delightedly.

  And for a few moments Rick Boreham smiled as the sorrows of the world fell away.

  5

  Malware Attack

 

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