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Dunkley’s gaze.
    â€˜This is your home for a while.’
    Dunkley hunkered down in his seat.
    â€˜I am not going to doss down with a bunch of clapped-out God-botherers.’
    Toohey winced as he caught a blast of Dunkley’s toxic breath.
    â€˜I’m a tolerant man, Martin, and I have never held your weird superstitions against you. But I am a card-carrying atheist. So were my parents. It’s an honourable family tradition.’
    Toohey sought to reassure his dishevelled companion.
    â€˜You’ve been released into my care. This is a genuinely safe house and they are good men. These are my friends, Harry, and they know how to keep a secret.’

CHAPTER FIVE
Beijing
    The morning sun had barely seeped into the Hall of Purple Light but the grand building was already ablaze.
    Jiang Xiu stepped around the scaffolding that encased the building and made his way inside. Over a hundred artisans and tradesmen had been indentured to renovate this edifice that had stood at the centre of noble Chinese ceremonies for centuries. They worked with fierce determination, intent on maintaining a cracking pace in order to please their supreme leader.
    The propaganda minister had played an important role in building the profile of his president, but it was a remarkably easy job. President Meng Tao exuded the certainty of those who are destined to rule. Thick jet-black hair crowned a strong face set with high cheekbones and intense, intelligent eyes. A touch of puffiness about his jowls hinted at too many state banquets and too little exercise. But his shoulders were wide and his armsstrong. His hands bore the traces of the long hours he had spent in hard physical labour in his youth.
    Although Meng was a ‘princeling’ – the son of a revolutionary veteran – his path to leadership had been arduous. His father had been vice premier but was purged and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. At fifteen, Meng left Beijing in shame, a ‘sent-down youth’ banished to a remote village in the Shaanxi Province for seven years.
    Those wilderness years in rural China were the ‘turning point’ in his life, according to the official biography that Jiang had commissioned. What was not recorded was that it was there that Meng had forged enduring bonds with other sent-down princelings, the ‘Shaanxi Gang’ ultimately rising to grasp four of the seven seats on China’s supreme governing body, the Politburo Standing Committee.
    Old hands had watched first in admiration then trepidation as Meng’s influence grew. Step by step he was taking control of all the supreme institutions in the Communist Party, the state and the military. He already chaired the National Security Committee and the Central Leading Group on Comprehensive Deepening of Economic Reform – two crucial decision-making bodies in Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s central headquarters.
    In this teeming state of 1.3 billion souls, his eyes and ears were everywhere. Jiang was one of the trusted few. The president was a micro-manager, right down to personally supervising the renovation of this monument of ancient power.
    Meng had closely studied revolutionary leaders and he’d been struck by George Washington’s passion for architecture andlandscape design. He had directed Jiang to read the detailed letters Washington had penned about the rebuilding and expansion of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, even as the British made their grand push against Brooklyn in August 1776. Washington hated disorder and had fussed over every detail of his estate, down to the wallpaper, paint colour and ceiling ornaments.
    So Meng ordered his palace as he ordered society – with the iron resolve of a budding dictator. The president would quote the ancient maxim ‘Virtues are central, punishment supplements them’ as he scoured the land to purge dissidents.
    He had a fearful temper and his moods had become