Special counsel to the Central Committee, adviser to both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, a learned man whose value came from his ability to deliver desired results—as nothing secured privilege better than repeated success. Neither Mao nor Deng was the most effective administrator. Both governed with broad strokes across vast canvases and left the details to men like Pau. Tang knew Pau had led many archaeological digs throughout the country and had, at one point, overseen the terra-cotta warrior excavations.
Was the watch he held Pau’s?
It had to be.
He faced one of the warriors who stood at the army’s vanguard. He and the others with him would have been the first to descend on an enemy, followed by waves and waves of more terrifying men.
Seemingly endless. Indestructible.
Like China itself.
But the nation had come to a crossroads. Thirty years of unprecedented modernization had produced an impatient generation, one unmoved by the pretensions of a communist regime, one that focused on family, cultural and economic life, rather than nationality. The doctor at the hospital seemed an excellent example.
China was changing.
But not a single regime in all Chinese history had relinquished power without bloodshed, and the Communist Party would not be the first.
His plan for power would take daring, but he hoped that what he was searching to prove could provide a measure of certainty, an air of legitimacy, perhaps even a source of national pride.
Movement above caught his attention.
He’d been waiting.
At the railing five meters overhead a figure sheathed in black appeared, then another. Both forms were lean and muscular, their hair cut short, their faces unemotional.
“Down here,” he quietly said.
Both men disappeared.
When he’d summoned his expert from the West, he’d also ordered that two more men accompany him. They’d waited nearby until his call, which he’d made on his walk over from Pit 3.
The men appeared at the far end of the line of warriors and approached without a sound, stopping a few meters away.
“Burn it all,” he ordered. “There are electrical cables and a transformer, so the lights can be blamed.”
Both men bowed and left.
MALONE AND STEPHANIE CROSSED HØJBRO PLADS. THE LATE-AFTERNOON sun had receded behind Copenhagen’s jagged rooflines. Ivan was gone, back in one hour, saying there were matters that required his attention.
Malone stopped at a fountain and sat on its damp edge. “You had a purse snatched right here a couple of years ago.”
“I remember. Turned into quite an adventure.”
“I want to know exactly what this is all about.” She remained silent.
“You need to tell me what’s at stake,” he said. “All of it. And it’s not a lost child or the next premier of China.”
“Ivan thinks we don’t know, but we do.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s kind of remarkable, really. And turns on something Stalin learned from the Nazis.”
Now they were getting somewhere.
“During World War II, refineries in Romania and Hungary supplied much of Germany’s oil. By 1944 those refineries had been bombed to oblivion, and not so coincidentally the war ended soon after. Stalin watched as Germany literally ran out of oil. He resolved that Russia would always be self-sufficient. He saw oil dependency as a catastrophic weakness to be avoided at any cost.”
Not a big shock. “Wouldn’t everyone?”
“Unlike the rest of the world, including us, Stalin figured out how to do it. A professor named Nikolai Kudryavtsev supplied him the answer.”
He waited.
“Kudryavtsev postulated that oil had nothing to do with fossils.”
He knew the conventional wisdom. Over millions of years an ancient primeval morass of plants and animals, dinosaurs included, had been engulfed by sedimentary deposits. Millions more years of heat and pressure eventually compressed the mix into petroleum, and gave it the name
“Instead of being biotic, from once-alive material, Kudryavtsev said oil is abiotic—simply a primordial material the earth forms and exudes on a continual basis.”
He instantly grasped the implications. “It’s endless?”
“That’s the question that’s brought me here, Cotton. The one we have to answer.”
She explained about Soviet oil exploration in the 1950s that discovered massive reserves thousands of feet deep, at levels far below what would have been expected according to the fossil fuel theory.
“And it may have happened to us,” she said, “in the Gulf of Mexico. A field was found in 1972 more than a mile down. Its reserves have been declining at a surprisingly slow rate. The same thing has occurred at several sites on the Alaskan North Slope. It baffles geologists.”
“You’re saying wells replenish themselves?”
She shook her head. “I’m told it depends on the faulting in the surrounding rock. At the Gulf site the ocean floor is cut with deep fissures. That would theoretically allow the pressurized oil to move from deep below, closer to the surface. There’s one other thing, too.”
He could tell that, as usual, she’d come prepared.
