The Washington Lawyer by Allan Topol Page A

were enormous, but so were the rewards.
    Yao didn’t follow up. Instead he told Liu, “One of the documents you summarized refers to a ‘Five-Year Plan for Asia and Pacific Deployment’ being finalized now by the Pentagon.”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œI want that five-year plan. Get it for me from Jasper.”
    â€œI’m not sure it’s been completed.”
    â€œThen, as soon as it is. I must have that document.”
    Yao’s eyes were boring in on Liu. The normally unflappable spymaster felt uncomfortable.
    Leaving the office, Liu decided to call Xiang in Washington and order him to fly to Beijing. A face to face meeting would be better to impress upon Xiang the importance of getting the plan from Jasper.

Washington
    F or Martin, the last several hours passed like an eternity. Finally, it was time to leave for the White House. First, he stopped in the men’s room, where he straightened the collar of his red and blue striped shirt with a matching silk tie, concentric blue circles against a red background. He looked damn good, he decided. But he had to give Francis credit.
    Coming into their marriage, he refused to spend a cent more than necessary for clothes. He remembered growing up, before his mother contracted polio, her taking him to Pittsburgh to Joseph Hornes and buying him his first suit when he was twelve. He recalled her waiting until the final reductions on the end of the season sales. He knew money was tight, but he’d felt sorry when she showed the salesman a defect, convincing him to knock it down another twenty percent.
    That was the way he always shopped until Francis dragged him kicking and screaming into Neiman’s to buy an Italian suit. It cost more than a couple months of his initial salary at the firm where he began his career and where he spent several years before leaving to open his own firm with Glass. Now he wore expensive suits, shirts, and ties, but he still felt guilty spending a lot of money for them.
    Riding down in the elevator, he thought: suppose someone had asked, “What would you give to be chief justice?” He would have answered, “Just about anything.”
    Martin decided to walk. He liked having his office building so close to the centers of power. This was a major factor, he recalled, in his decision to select this new building in the 800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue when they’d outgrown their prior space. The location with Martin & Glass plastered in large black letters across the front had to make an impact on clients. And it probably helped bring in the best lawyers.
    Walking west along Pennsylvania, as he stopped for a red light, he thought about how the firm had grown in the twenty-eight years since he and Fred Glass had opened up near DuPont Circle. Now there were five hundred and twenty lawyers, two hundred and seventy here in Washington. They had offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Beijing. The firm was strong—almost an institution. It was sure to survive and thrive, even if Martin left and became chief justice.
    The light changed. He stepped off the curb and winced. Damn left knee had been hurting for the last month. How much longer could he put off that surgery? He knew the cause: too much pounding in youthful basketball, followed by decades of jogging, skiing, and tennis. And he knew the solution was to replace the knee. But those operations never went as easily as the orthopods said. And, never mind their promises, you weren’t really as good as new. So he took pain killers from time to time, iced it after sports, hobbled when it bothered him, and hoped it would magically go away.
    He stopped at the guardhouse next to the opening in the black wrought iron fence separating the White House grounds from Pennsylvania Avenue. One of the soldiers inspected his driver’s license, checked it against a list of visitors on a clipboard, and waved him through.
    At the end of a twenty-yard