NOTE To Readers: This is part of a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents.

Ambassador Randt felt he could trust his staff with important communiques.

But within hours the contents of his message was all over the Internet.

"China threatens U.S. over Iraq, Taiwan" the headlines blared.

Within days the drumbeats for war were beating on Web sites like Freerepublic.com and Lucianne.org. Those are only read by foot soldiers, but the Administration was always more likely to be pressured by proven loyalists than anyone with a dissenting view.

Reaction in the markets was swifter.

The Chinese Yuan exchange rate to the dollar is technically fixed at 8.277 Yuan to the dollar. But there is a market that normally trades in a narrow range. And that market was going crazy.

George Soros, stung by Democrats' total defeat at the polls some weeks before, saw the opportunity and pounced. His firm began aggressively buying Yuans, selling dollars. In a thin market the price plunged, down to 8.0, then 7.5. He had broken the Bank of England. He could break the Fed. Especially as smaller traders, seeing his success, were quick to follow his lead.

Soros acted just as the International Finance Forum was getting under way in Langfang, Hebei province. Bankers had been pressing for reform. A floating yuan, able to rise in price against the dollar, would increase the price of China's exports and make other countries more competitive.

China had strenuously resisted. Until now.

Jin Renqing was not on the speakers' list. He wasn't in the hallways. Instead he had some of the critics of keeping the Yuan fixed, like Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell, brought to his suite at the Langfang International Hotel. There, he quietly informed them, off-the-record, that he understood their complaints and concerns, and that China planned on moving in just that direction very soon.

Mundell, a Canadian economist working at Columbia University in New York, asked point-blank what this would mean to China's holdings in American bonds. If the currency did float, the value of the bonds would fall as the value of the yuan rose.

Jin just shrugged his shoulders. "It's business," he said. "Businesses adjust to new situations and new opportunities. Nations must as well. I believe your President Nixon said that to Mao ZeDong on his 1972 visit here." Then he smiled. Quoting Nixon, even if the quote was probably apocryphal, Mundell thought. Jin was sure of his ground.

So it was that, on Thanksgiving weekend, with most American traders still digesting their turkey, Jin's ministry sent out a simple press release stating that the value of the Yuan against other major currencies would begin to float officially, starting the following Monday, and that actions would be taken over the next several months to allow ordinary Chinese to buy dollars at stable rates. This was being done in hopes of maintainng stability in the market, that was the phrase used. Many American politicians, like Larry Kudlow, had long been certain that, given the chance to buy dollars freely, the Chinese middle class would sink a floating Yuan.

He was about to be proven terribly, terribly wrong.