Free Battlefield 4: Countdown to War by Peter Grimsdale

short torso so the surface of the desk was a fraction too high for him, which gave him the look of a prefect sitting at the teacher’s desk. Although he had just flown in that morning the desk was swimming with documents as if he’d been there all night. He was tapping furiously at a camo-covered field laptop, which must have had somesentimental meaning for him, or was just an awkward attempt to convince visitors that he hadn’t always been desk-bound. In his crisp white shirt with sleeve garters and thin dark tie, he cultivated the image of a standard issue Langley suit, impossible to imagine dressed any other way. Kovic pictured him playing golf, standing behind a barbecue, screwing Mrs Cutler, all in the same, anonymous garb.
    ‘ Zǎoshànghǎo – Good morning.’
    Cutler nodded, put the remains of a packet of Oreos into a drawer and finished his coffee, didn’t look up.
    ‘Sit down, Kovic.’
    The Chief ’s cellphone buzzed. He pressed it to his ear and turned away.
    Nice start, thought Kovic.
    There were two kinds of Bureau Chief in his experience, doers and readers. Cutler was a reader. He measured performance by the weight of intel produced, so Kovic fed him raw data by the ton. Material Kovic should have just given salient lines from or have précised or even discarded, he sent whole; extremely verbose minutes of every district intelligence meeting he had bugged, endless transcripts of meetings with field agents, including the mind-numbing minutiae of their particular domestic gripes and tiresome pleas for more cash or other perks. But Kovic sifted what he sent very carefully, since he knew it was all opened and read by their opposite numbers in the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
    Cutler showed no interest in mastering the language. ‘I’m a generalist, not a specialist,’ was how he justified it to Kovic, which was another way of saying he didn’t want to get sidetracked on his way up the Agency’s greasy pole. He ate at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut wherever he was in the world, and ordered whatever he wanted online to avoid having to deal with local shop assistants. He was the type of Agency man who regarded all foreign influences as potentially suspect and was alert to the possibility of contamination at all times. Kovic was his absolute opposite; a nowhere man who submerged himself in whatever culture he found himself, who tradedon his indeterminate complexion, playing the ugly American only when it suited him. He ate local, lived in the heart of real Shanghai and excelled at the language, all of which Cutler found deeply troubling – even un-American.
    The Chief was listening hard to whatever was coming down his phone, his fingertips pressed to his forehead. In most other postings, there was the pervasive sense that America was the Superpower and called the shots. That’s what made Cutler hard. Places in the world where they had removed governments and put in new ones were even known as ‘off the peg’ governments, where heads of state were there at the Agency’s pleasure. But China was not one of them, and definitely not today.
    For Cutler’s kind, China was an insoluble Rubik’s cube. Nowhere else on Earth could you find burgeoning capitalism twinned with an utterly unbending, centralised ideology. The Communist high command had taken a shine to the free market; only they’d left the ‘free’ bit on the shelf. However many McDonald’s were opened, however many Buicks sold, they would never allow democracy. It only resembled Western society on the surface. Like the Prada knock-offs for sale along the Nanjing Road, it looked the part – but was from a very different place.
    Cutler was listening very hard, nodding occasionally to the unknown caller. Just by his demeanour Kovic could tell it was someone more senior. Was he being chewed out, or were they talking damage limitation? For once Kovic had to admit he was out of his depth too. Nothing of this magnitude had happened in his six