Bird is desperate to succeed quickly and in a big way because it's costing a fortune in horseflesh to fund his wife Myndi's quest to make the US equestrian team and compete at the Tang Cup in — you guessed it — the People's Republic of China. Bird quickly finds a collaborator in Angel Templeton, PhD, former staffer for the National Security Council and the Pentagon.
 
Angel is now head of the Institute for Continuing Conflict and neoconservative dreamgirl. "For the cover of her most recent book, The Case for Pre-emptive War: Taking the ‘Re' out of Retaliation, she posed in a red, white and blue latex dominatrix outfit. With riding crop."
 
But despite her uproarious television appearances (which are a never-ending delight), Angel is a policy intellectual focused on the strategic threat posed by the emerging economic and military might of China.  That won't do for Bird because he can't sell it. Americans simply don't care about geopolitics. But when the Dalai Lama, in Rome to meet with the Pope, collapses and is hospitalised, Bird realises that Americans are interested in two things China-related-giant pandas and the Dalai Lama. Bird and Angel quickly concoct a rumour, which they plant in an Indian newspaper, that Chinese spies tried to poison the Dalai Lama.
 
From this point on, the novel alternates between Washington and meetings of the Chinese Communist politburo in Beijing.  When it turns out that the Dalai Lama really has contracted a fatal disease and has only months to live, the US government is under pressure to demand that he be allowed to return to Tibet to die or at least that his body be returned to Tibet for  burial. Either alternative would embarrass the Chinese government, but even worse would provoke an uprising in Tibet. US-Chinese tensions mount, and military      confrontation seems inevitable.