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half his life just listing them aloud. They had no tradition, no honor, no chi, nothing that set a truly civilized society apart from the barbarians. Yes, yes, Communism was a bankrupt philosophy, Wu knew that, but the vestiges of it continued in China, and if you wanted to be a force, you had to deal in it and with it. It would not always be so. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred years? Mere heartbeats in the dragon’s breast. China herself abided, she absorbed all, in time.
    Wu intended to help China recover her glory and status. She was well on the way, but he would provide a small boost.
    History was full of men who, when they acted at the proper moment with the proper motion, had swung the course of events in new directions. Wu would be one of those men. He had spent half his life gathering the proper tools, and if he had to use one such as Shing, so be it. There were times when you fought fire with water, and times when you did it with fire. However distasteful Shing’s manner and mores, he was what Wu needed to go up against the Americans.
    One did not need to love the arrow one shot into the enemy’s heart. . . .
    Wu initiated a few minutes of polite civility, Shing responded appropriately, and eventually they came around to the reason the younger man was here.
    “Things are progressing well?” Wu asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” Shing said. “The U.S. Army hacks don’t know what happened. Can’t find how I got in, haven’t a clue how to keep me out or undo what I’ve started.”
    Wu kept his polite smile fixed firmly in place. “There will be no problems with keeping to the schedule, then?”
    “None I can see.”
    “And the . . . other thing?”
    Shing raised his eyebrows. He gave away entirely too much on his face—more of the legacy of all those years in America. “Well, that will be trickier—CyberNation’s security ops are the best. Our attacks there must be flawless. Still, I can do it. And set them against each other.”
    “Good. Well, then, I will let you be about your business.”
    Shing nodded. “Thank you, Comrade General.” He paused. “Do you suppose I might have another . . . small advance on my . . . stipend? There is, ah, a young woman I have met I wish to take to the casinos.” He smiled.
    Wu’s answering smile was genuine this time. “Of course. Youth should not be wasted entirely in rooms full of computers.” He opened his desk drawer and removed from under a file folder a plain manila envelope containing a thick stack of Japanese yen. He handed it to Shing, who probably thought that the comrade general’s smile was there for reasons other than it really was.
    Shing did not know that the young woman he had recently met was one of Wu’s agents. The woman, named Mayli, was beautiful, accomplished in many things—not the least of which were the erotic arts—and she had been instructed to do whatever was necessary to keep Shing happy. If that included marrying him and bearing his children, so be it. Wu already knew all about Shing’s favorite foods, the football team he rooted for, and his rather pedestrian sexual preferences. A handwritten report from Mayli detailing those—and much more—was in his desk drawer. He’d just moved it to retrieve the envelope of money he’d given to Shing.
    The report was the reason for the smile.
    Shing thought Wu a fossil, old, out of touch with modernity, and as a result, weak. Wu knew this because Shing was vain, egotistical, and prone to pillow talk, and Mayli’s memory was excellent. There was an old proverb Wu recalled, from his visits to the Middle East. It was Persian. One of the fighting instructors he had sometimes worked with there, Mushtaq Ali, a graybeard Sufi, had passed it along one day over thick, black, bitter coffee in some Turkish-style restaurant: “The young mouse thinks he can bite the lion’s tail because the lion is old.”
    Wu’s grin was one of knowledge.
    Mayli seemed to be doing her job properly. She had a watcher about