CHAPTER 5

Headlines
 
 Sam Sherman was one of those whom age hadn't treated kindly, though he himself hadn't helped. An avid golfer, he moved from lie to lie via cart. He was much too overweight to walk more than a few hundred yards in a day. It was rather sad for one who'd been a first-string guard for the Princeton Tigers, once upon a time. Well, Winston thought, muscle just turned to blubber if you didn't use it properly. But the overweight body didn't detract from the sharpness of his brain. Sherman had graduated about fifth in a class not replete with dummies, double-majoring in geology and business. He'd followed up the first sheet of parchment with a Harvard MBA, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, this one in geology as well, and so Samuel Price Sherman could not only talk rocks with the explorers but finance with his board members, and that was one of the reasons why Atlantic Richfield stock was as healthy as any oil issue in the known world. His face was lined by a lot of low sun and field grit, and his belly swollen by a lot of beers with the roughnecks out in many godforsaken places, plus hot dogs and other junk food preferred by the men who drifted into such employment. Winston was surprised that Sam didn't smoke, too. Then he spotted the box on the man's desk. Cigars. Probably good ones. Sherman could afford the best, but he still had the Ivy League manners not to light up in front of a guest who might be offended by the blue cloud they generated.
   Atlantic Richfield's home office was elsewhere, but as with most major corporations, it didn't hurt to have a set of offices in Washington, a better to influence members of Congress with the occasional lavish party. Sherman's personal office was in a corner on the top floor, and plush enough, with a thick beige carpet. The desk was either mahogany or well-seasoned oak, polished like glass, and probably cost more than his secretary made in a year or two.
   "So, how do you like working for the government, George?"
   "It's really a fun change of pace. Now I can play with all the things I used to bitch about – so, I guess I've kinda given up my right to bitch."
   "That is a major sacrifice, buddy," Sherman replied with a laugh. "It's kinda like going over to the enemy, isn't it?"
   "Well, sometimes you gotta pay back, Sam, and making policy the right way can be diverting."
   "Well, I have no complaints with what you guys are doing. The economy seems to like it. Anyway," Sherman sat up in his comfortable chair. It was time to change subjects. Sam's time was valuable, too, as he wanted his guest to appreciate. "You didn't come here for small talk. What can I do for you, Mr. Secretary?"
   "Russia."
   Sherman's eyes changed a little, as they might when the last card was laid in a high-stakes game of stud. "What about it?"
   "You have a high-powered exploration team working with the Russians... they find anything nice?"
   "George, that's sensitive stuff you're asking. If you were still running Columbus, this would constitute insider-trading information stuff. Hell, I can't buy any more of our stock now, based on this stuff."
   "Does that mean you'd like to?" TRADER asked with a smile.
   "Well, it'll be public soon enough anyway. Yeah, George. Looks like we've found the biggest goddamned oil field ever, bigger 'n the Persian Gulf, bigger 'n Mexico, damned sight bigger than Prudhoe Bay and Western Canada combined. I'm talking big, billions and billions of barrels of what looks like the very best light-sweet crude, just sitting there and waiting for us to pump it out of the tundra. It's a field we'll measure in years of production, not just barrels."
   "Bigger than the P.G.?"
   Sherman nodded. "By a factor of forty percent, and that's a very conservative number. The only beef is where it is. Getting that crude out is going to be a mother-humper – to get started, anyway. We're talking twenty billion dollars just for the pipeline. It'll make Alaska look like a kindergarten project, but it'll be worth it."
   "And your end of it?" the Secretary of the Treasury asked.
   That question generated a frown. "We're negotiating that now. The Russians seem to want to pay us a flat consulting fee, like a billion dollars a year – they're talking a lot less than that now, but you know how the hog-tradin' works at this stage, right? They say a couple of hundred million, but they mean a billion a year, for seven to ten years, I'd imagine. And that isn't bad for what we'd have to do for the money, but I want a minimum of five percent of the find, and that's not at all an unreasonable request on our part. They have some good people in the geology business, but nobody in the world can sniff out oil in ice like my people can, and they've got a lot to learn about how to exploit something like this. We've been there and done that in these environmental conditions. Ain't nobody knows this like we do, even the guys at BP, and theyre pretty good – but we're the best in the world, George. That's the barrel we have them over. They can do it without us, but with us helping, they'll make a ton more cash, and a hell of a lot faster, and they know that, and we know they know that. So, I got my lawyers talking to their lawyers – actually, they have diplomats doing the negotiating." Sherman managed a grin. "They're dumber than my lawyers."
   Winston nodded. Texas turned out more good private-practice attorneys than most parts of America, and the excuse was that in Texas there were more men needin' killin' than horses needin' stealin'. And the oil business paid the best, and in Texas, like everyplace else, talent went where the money was.
   "When will this go public?"
   "The Russians are trying to keep a cork in it. One of the things we're getting from our lawyers is that they're worried about how to exploit this one – really who to keep out of it, you know, their Mafia and stuff. They do have some serious corruption problems over there, and I can sympathize –"
   Winston knew he could ignore the next part. The oil industry did business all over the world. Dealing with corruption on the small scale (ten million dollars or less), or even the monstrous scale (ten billion dollars or more), was just part of the territory for such companies as Sam Sherman ran, and the United States government had never probed too deeply into that. Though there were federal statutes governing how American companies handled themselves abroad, many of those laws were selectively enforced, and this was merely one such example. Even in Washington, business was business.
   " – and so they're trying to keep it quiet until they can make the proper arrangements," Sherman concluded.
   "You hearing anything else?"
   "What do you mean?" Sherman asked in reply.
   "Any other geological windfalls," Winston clarified.
   "No, I'm not that greedy in what I pray for. George, I haven't made it clear enough, just how huge this oil field is. It's –"
   "Relax, Sam, I can add and subtract with the best of 'em," SecTreas assured his host.
   "Something I need to know about?" Sherman only saw hesitation. "Give and take, George. I played fair with you, remember?"
   "Gold," Winston clarified.
   "How much?"
   "They're not sure. South Africa at least. Maybe more."
   "Really? Well, that's not my area of expertise, but sounds like our Russian friends are having a good year for a change. Good for them," Sherman thought.
   "You like them?"
   "Yeah, as a matter of fact. They're a lot like Texans. They make good friends and fearsome enemies. They know how to entertain, and Jesus, do they know how to drink. About time they got some good luck. Christ knows they've had a lot of the other kind. This is going to mean a lot for their economy, and damned near all of it's going to be good news, 'specially if they can handle the corruption stuff and keep the money inside their borders where it'll do them some good, instead of finding its way onto some Swiss bank's computer. That new Mafia they have over there is smart and tough... and a little scary. They just got somebody I knew over there."
   "Really? Who was that, Sam?"
   "We called him Grisha. He took care of some high rollers in Moscow. Knew how to do it right. He was a good name to know if you had some special requirements," Sherman allowed. Winston recorded the information in his mind for later investigation.
   "Killed him?"
   Sherman nodded. "Yup, blew him away with a bazooka right there on the street – it made CNN, remember?" The TV news network had covered it as a crime story with no further significance except for its dramatic brutality, a story gone and forgotten in a single day.
   George Winston vaguely remembered it, and set it aside. "How often you go over there?"
   "Not too often, twice this year. Usually hop my G-V over direct out of Reagan or Dallas/Fort Worth. Long flight, but it's a one-hop. No, I haven't seen the new oil field yet. Expect I'll have to in a few months, but I'll try for decent weather. Boy, you don't know what cold means 'til you go that far north in the winter. Thing is, it's dark then, so you're better off waiting 'til summer anyway. But at best you can leave the sticks at home. Ain't no golf a' tall in that part of the world, George."
   "So take a rifle and bag yourself a bear, make a nice rug," Winston offered.
   "Gave that up. Besides, I got three polar bears. That one is number eight in the Boone and Crockett all-time book," Sherman said, pointing to a photo on the far wall. Sure enough, it showed a hell of a big polar bear. "I've made two kids on that rug," the president of Atlantic Richfield observed, with a sly smile. The pelt in question lay before his bedroom fireplace in Aspen, Colorado, where his wife liked to ski in the winter.
   "Why'd you give it up?"
   "My kids think there aren't enough polar bears anymore. All that ecology shit they learn in school now."
   "Yeah," SecTreas said sympathetically, "and they do make such great rugs."
   "Right, well, that rug was threatening some of our workers up at Prudhoe Bay back in... '75, as I recall, and I took him at sixty yards with my .338 Winchester. One shot," the Texan assured his guest. "I suppose nowadays you have to let the bear kill a human bein', and then you're supposed to do is just cage him and transport him to another location so the bear doesn't get too traumatized, right?"
   "Sam, I'm Secretary of the Treasury. I leave the birds and bees to EPA. I don't hug trees, not until they turn the wood chips into T -Bills, anyway."
   A chuckle: "Sorry, George. I'm always hearing that stuff at home. Maybe it's Disney. All wild animals wear white gloves and talk to each other in good Midwestern Iowa English."
   "Cheer up, Sam. At least they're laying off the supertankers out of Valdez now. How much of the eastern Alaska/Western Canada strike is yours?"
   "Not quite half, but that'll keep my stockholders in milk and cookies for a long time."
   "So, between that one and Siberia, how many options will they give you to exercise?" Sam Sherman got a nice salary, but at his level the way you earned your keep was measured in the number of options in the stock whose value your work had increased, invariably offered you by the board of directors, whose own holdings you inflated in value through your efforts.
   A knowing smile, and a raised eyebrow: "A lot, George. Quite a lot."
 
   Married life agrees with you, Andrea," President Ryan observed with a smile at his Principal Agent. She was dressing better, and there was a definite spring in her step now. He wasn't sure if her skin had a new glow, or maybe her makeup was just different. Jack had learned never to comment on a woman's makeup. He always got it wrong.
   "You're not the only one to say that, sir."
   "One hesitates to say such things to a grown adult female, especially if you're fashion-bereft, as I am," Jack said, his smile broadening somewhat. His wife, Cathy, still said she had to dress him because his taste was entirely, she said, in his mouth. "But the change is sufficiently marked that even a man such as myself can see it."
   "Thank you, Mr. President. Pat is a very good man, even for a Bureau puke."
   "What's he doing now?"
   "He's up in Philadelphia right now. Director Murray sent him off on a bank robbery, two local cops got killed in that one."
   "Caught that one on TV last week. Bad."
   The Secret Service agent nodded. "The way the subjects killed the cops, both in the back of the head, that was pretty ruthless, but there's people out there like that. Anyway, Director Murray decided to handle that one with a Roving Inspector out of Headquarters Division, and that usually means Pat gets to go do it."
   "Tell him to be careful," Ryan said. Inspector Pat O'Day had saved his daughter's life less than a year before, and that act had earned him undying Presidential solicitude.
   "Every day, sir," Special Agent Price-O'Day made clear.
   "Okay, what's the schedule look like?" His "business" appointments were on his desk already. Andrea Price-O'Day filled him in every morning, after his national-security briefing from Ben Goodley.
   "Nothing unusual until after lunch. National Chamber of Commerce delegation at one-thirty, and then at three the Detroit Red Wings, they won the Stanley Cup this year. Photo op, TV pukes and stuff, take about twenty minutes or so."
   "I ought to let Ed Foley do that one. He's the hockey fanatic –"
   "He's a Caps fan, sir, and the Red Wings swept the Caps four straight in the finals. Director Foley might take it personally," PriceO'Day observed with half a smile.
   "True. Well, last year we got the jerseys and stuff for his son, didn't we?"
   "Yes, sir."
   "Good game, hockey. Maybe I ought to catch a game or two. Trouble to arrange that?"
   "No, sir. We have standing agreements with all the local sports facilities. Camden Yards even has that special box for us – they let us help design it, the protective stuff, that is."
   Ryan grunted. "Yeah, I have to remember all the people who'd like to see me dead."
   "My job to think about that, sir, not yours," Price-O'Day told him.
   "Except when you won't let me go shopping or to a movie." Neither Ryan nor his family was entirely used to the restrictions imposed on the life of the President of the United States or his immediate family members. It was getting especially tough on Sally, who'd started dating (which was hard on her father), and dating was difficult with a lead car and a chase car (when the young gentleman drove himself) or an official car with a driver and a second armed agent up front (when he did not), and guns all over the place. It tended to restrain the young gentlemen in question – and Ryan hadn't told his daughter that this was just fine with him, lest she stop speaking to him for a week or so. Sally's Principal Agent, Wendy Merritt, had proven to be both a good Secret Service agent and a superb big sister of sorts. They spent at least two Saturdays per month shopping with a reduced detail – actually it wasn't reduced at all, but it appeared so to Sally Ryan when they went out to Tyson's Corner or the Annapolis Mall for the purpose of spending money, something for which all women seemed to have a genetic predisposition. That these shopping expeditions had been planned days in advance, with every site scouted by the Secret Service, and a supplementary detail of young agents selected for their relative invisibility who showed up there an hour before SHADOW's arrival, had never occurred to Sally Ryan. That was just as well, as the dating problems grated on her badly enough, along with being followed around St. Mary's School in Annapolis by the rifle squad, as she sometimes termed it. Little Jack, on the other hand, thought it was pretty neat, and had recently learned to shoot at the Secret Service Academy in Beltsville, Maryland, with his father's permission (and something he'd not allowed the press to learn, lest he get hammered on the front page of The New York Times for the social indiscretion of encouraging his own son to touch, much less actually to fire, something so inherently evil as a pistol!). Little Jack's Principal Agent was a kid named Mike Brennan, a South Boston Irishman, a third-generation Secret Service agent with fiery red hair and a ready laugh, who'd played baseball at Holy Cross and frequently played catch and pepper with the President's son on the South Lawn of the White House.
   "Sir, we never don't let you do anything," Price said.
   "No, you're pretty subtle about it," Ryan allowed. "You know that I'm too considerate of other people, and when you tell me about all the crap you people have to go through so that I can buy a burger at Wendy's, I usually back off... like a damned wimp." The President shook his head. Nothing frightened him more than the prospect that he'd somehow get used to all this panoply of "specialness," as he thought of it. As though he'd only recently discovered royal parentage, and was now to be treated like a king, hardly allowed to wipe his own ass after taking a dump. Doubtless some people who'd lived in this house had gotten used to it, but that was something John Patrick Ryan, Sr., wanted to avoid. He knew that he was not all that special, and not deserving of all this folderol... and besides, like every other man in the world, when he woke up in the morning the first thing he did was head to the bathroom. Chief Executive he might be, but he still had a working-class bladder. And thank God for that, the President of the United States reflected.
   "Where's Robby today?"
   "Sir, the Vice President is in California today, the Navy base at Long Beach, giving a speech at the shipyard."
   Ryan grinned a little sideways. "I work him pretty hard, don't I?"
   "That's the Vice President's job," Arnie van Damm said from the door. "And Robby's a big boy about it," added the President's Chief of Staff.
   "Your vacation was good for you," Ryan observed. He had a very nice tan. "What did you do?"
   "Mainly I laid on the beach and read all the books I haven't had time for. Thought I'd die of boredom," van Damm added.
   "You actually thrive on this crap, don't you?" Jack asked, a little incredulous at the thought.
   "It's what I do, Mr. President. Hey, Andrea," he added with a slight turn of the head.
   "Good morning, Mr. van Damm." She turned to Jack. "That's all I have for you this morning. If you need me, I'll be in the usual place." Her office was in the Old Executive Office Building, just across the street, and upstairs from the new Secret Service command post, called JOC, for Joint Operations Center.
   "Okay, Andrea, thanks." Ryan nodded, as she withdrew into the secretaries' room, from which she'd head down to the Secret Service Command Post. "Arnie, get some coffee?"
   "Not a bad idea, boss." The Chief of Staff took his usual seat and poured a cup. The coffee in the White House was especially good, a rich blend, about half Colombian and half Jamaica Blue Mountain, the sort of thing that Ryan could get used to as President. There had to be some place he could buy this after escaping from his current job, he hoped.
   "Okay, I've had my national security brief and my Secret Service brief. Now tell me about politics for the day."
   "Hell, Jack, I've been trying to do that for over a year now, and you still aren't getting it very well."
   Ryan allowed his eyes to flare at the simulated insult. "That's a cheap shot, Arnie. I've been studying this crap pretty hard, and even the damned newspapers say I'm doing fairly well."
   "The Federal Reserve is doing a brilliant job of handling the economy, Mr. President, and that has damned little to do with you. But since you are the President, you get credit for all the good things that happen, and that's nice, but do remember, you will also get the blame for all the bad things that are going to happen – and some will, remember that – because you just happen to be here, and the citizens out there think you can make the rain fall on their flowers and the sun come out for their picnics just by wishing it so.
   "You know, Jack," the Chief of Staff said after sipping his coffee. "We really haven't got past the idea of kings and queens. A lot of people really do think you have that sort of personal power –"
   "But I don't, Arnie, how can that be?"
   "It just is the truth, Jack. It doesn't have to make sense. It just is. Deal with it."
   I do so love these lessons, Ryan thought to himself. "Okay, today is...?"
   "Social Security."
   Ryan's eyes relaxed. "I've been reading up on that. The third rail of American political life. Touch it and die."
   For the next half hour, they discussed what was wrong and why, and the irresponsibility of the Congress, until Jack sat back with a sigh.
   "Why don't they learn, Arnie?"
   "What do they need to learn?" Arnie asked, with the grin of a Washington insider, one of the anointed of God. "They've been elected. They must know it all already! How else do you think they got here?"
   "Why the hell did I allow myself to stay in this damned place?" the President asked rhetorically.
   "Because you had a conscience attack and decided to do the right thing for your country, you dumbass, that's why."
   "Why is it you're the only person who can talk to me like that?"
   "Besides the Vice President? Because I'm your teacher. Back to today's lesson. We could leave Social Security alone this year. It's in decent enough fiscal shape to last another seven to nine years without intervention, and that means you could leave it to your successor to handle –"
   "That's not ethical, Arnie," Ryan snapped.
   "True," the Chief of Staff agreed, "but it's good politics, and fairly Presidential. It's called letting sleeping dogs lie."
   "You don't do that in the knowledge that as soon as it wakes up, it's going to rip the baby's throat out."
   "Jack, you really ought to be a king. You'd be a good one," van Damm said, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.
   "Nobody can handle that kind of power."
   "I know: 'Power corrupts, and absolute power is actually pretty neat.' So said a staffer for one of your predecessors."
   "And the bastard wasn't hanged for saying it?"
   "We need to work on that sense of humor, Mr. President. That was meant as a joke."
   "The scariest part of this job is that I do see the humor of it. Anyway, I told George Winston to start a quiet project to see what we can do with Social Security. Quiet project, I mean classified – black, this project doesn't exist."
   "Jack, if you have one weakness as President, that's it. You're into this secrecy thing too much."
   "But if you do something like this in the open, you get clobbered by ill-informed criticism before you manage to produce anything, and the press crawls up your ass demanding information you don't have yet, and so then they go make up stuff on their own, or they go to some yahoo who just makes up bullshit, and then we have to answer it."
   "You are learning," Arnie judged. "That's exactly how it works in this town."
   "That does not constitute 'working' by any definition I know of."
   "This is Washington, a government town. Nothing is really supposed to function efficiently here. It would scare the hell out of the average citizen if the government started to function properly."
   "How about I just fucking resign?" Jack asked the ceiling. "If I can't get this damned mess to start working, then why the hell am I here?"
   "You're here because some Japanese 747 pilot decided to crash the party at the House Chamber fifteen months ago."
   "I suppose, Arnie, but I still feel like a damned fraud."
   "Well, by my old standards, you are a fraud, Jack."
   Ryan looked up. "Old standards?"
   "Even when Bob Fowler took over the statehouse in Ohio, Jack, even he didn't try as hard as you to play a fair game, and Bob got captured by the system, too. You haven't yet, and that's what I like about you. More to the point, that's what Joe Citizen likes about you. They may not like your positions, but everybody knows you try damned hard, and they're sure you're not corrupt. And you're not. Now: Back to Social Security."
   "I told George to get a small group together, swear them to secrecy, and make recommendations – more than one – and at least one of them has to be completely outside the box."
   "Who's running this?"
   "Mark Gant, George's technical guy."
   The Chief of Staff thought that one over for a moment. "Just as well you keep it quiet. The Hill doesn't like him. Too much of a smart-ass."
   "And they're not?" SWORDSMAN asked.
   "You were naive with that, Jack. The people you tried to get elected, non-politicians, well, you semi-succeeded. A lot of them were regular people, but what you didn't allow for was the seductive nature of life in elected government service. The money isn't all that great, but the perks are, and a lot of people like being treated like a medieval prince. A lot of people like being able to enforce their will on the world. The people who used to be there, the ones that pilot fried in their seats, they started off as pretty good people, too, but the nature of the job is to seduce and capture. Actually, the mistake you made was to allow them to keep their staffs. Honestly, I think the problem down there is in the staffers, not the bosses. You have ten or more people around you all the time telling you how great you are, sooner or later you start believing that crap."
   "Just so you don't do that to me."
   "Not in this lifetime," Arnie assured him, as he stood to leave. "Make sure Secretary Winston keeps me in the loop on the Social Security project."
   "No leaks," Ryan told his Chief of Staff forcefully.
   "Me? Leak something? Me?" van Damm replied with open hands and an innocent face.
   "Yeah, Arnie, you." As the door closed, the President wondered how fine a spook Arnie might have made. He lied with the plausibility one might associate with a trusted member of the clergy, and he could hold all manner of contradictory thoughts in his head at the same time, like the best of circus jugglers... and somehow they never quite crashed to earth. Ryan was the current president, but the one member of the administration who could not be replaced was the chief of staff he'd inherited from Bob Fowler, by way of Roger Durling...
   And yet, Jack wondered, how much was he being manipulated by this staff employee? The truthful answer was that he couldn't tell, and that was somewhat troubling. He trusted Arnie, but he trusted Arnie, because he had to trust him. Jack would not know what to do without him... but was that a good thing?
   Probably not, Ryan admitted to himself, checking over his appointment list, but neither was being here in the Oval Office, and Arnie was at worst one more thing not to like about this job, and at best, he was a scrupulously honest, extremely hardworking, and utterly dedicated public servant...
   ...just like everyone else in Washington, D. C., Ryan's cynicism added.

CHAPTER 6

Expansion
 
 Moscow is eight hours ahead of Washington, a source of annoyance to diplomats who are either a day behind the times or too far out of synch with their body clocks to conduct business properly. This was more a problem for the Russians, as by five or six in the evening, most of them had had a few stiff drinks, and given the relative speed of all diplomatic exchange, it was well into the falling night in Moscow before American diplomats emerged from their "working lunches" to issue a demarche or communique, or a simple letter of reply to whatever the Russians had issued the previous working day. In both capitals, of course, there was always a night crew to read and evaluate things on a more timely basis, but these were underlings, or at best people on their way up but not quite there yet, who always had to judge which possibility was worse: waking up a boss with something unworthy of the nighttime phone call, or delaying until the post-breakfast morning something that the minister or secretary ought to have been informed of right now! And more than one career had been made or broken on such seeming trivialities.
   In this particular case, it would not be a diplomat's hide at risk. It was six-fifteen on the Russian spring evening, the sun high in the sky still, in anticipation of the "White Nights" for which the Russian summer is justly famous.
   "Yes, Pasha?" Lieutenant Provalov said. He'd taken over Klusov from Shablikov. This case was too important to leave in anyone else's hands – and besides, he'd never really trusted Shablikov: There was something a little too corrupt about him.
   Pavel Petrovich Klusov was not exactly an advertisement for the quality of life in the new Russia. Hardly one hundred sixty-five centimeters or so in height, but close to ninety kilos, he was a man the bulk of whose calories came in liquid form, who shaved poorly when he bothered at all, and whose association with soap was less intimate than it ought to have been. His teeth were crooked and yellow from the lack of brushing and a surfeit of smoking cheap, unfiltered domestic cigarettes. He was thirty-five or so, and had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of making forty-five, Provalov estimated. It was not as though he'd be much of a loss to society, of course. Klusov was a petty thief, lacking even the talent – or courage – to be a major violator of the law. But he knew those who were, and evidently scampered around them like a small dog, performing minor services, like fetching a bottle of vodka, the Militia lieutenant thought. But Klusov did have ears, which many people, especially criminals, had an odd inability to consider.
   "Avseyenko was killed by two men from St. Petersburg. I do not know their names, but I think they were hired by Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov. The killers are former Spetsnaz soldiers with experience in Afghanistan, in their late thirties, I think. One is blond, the other red-haired. After killing Grisha, they flew back north before noon on an Aeroflot flight."
   "That is good, Pasha. Have you seen their faces?"
   A shake of the head: "No, Comrade Lieutenant. I learned this from... someone I know, in a drinking place." Klusov lit a new cigarette with the end of its predecessor.
   "Did your acquaintance say why our friend Suvorov had Avseyenko killed?" And who the hell is Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov? the policeman wondered. He hadn't heard that name before, but didn't want Klusov to know that quite yet. Better to appear omniscient.
   The informant shrugged. "Both were KGB, maybe there was bad blood between them."
   "What exactly is Suvorov doing now?"
   Another shrug: "I don't know. Nobody does. I am told he lives well, but the source of his income, no one knows."
   "Cocaine?" the cop asked.
   "It is possible, but I do not know." The one good thing about Klusov was that he didn't invent things. He told the (relatively) unvarnished truth... most of the time, the militia lieutenant told himself.
   Provalov's mind was already spinning. Okay, a former KGB officer had hired two former Spetsnaz soldiers to eliminate another former KGB officer who'd specialized in running girls. Had this Suvorov chap approached Avseyenko for cooperation in a drug venture? Like most Moscow cops, he'd never grown to like the KGB. They'd been arrogant bullies most of the time, too besotted with their power to perform proper investigations, except against foreigners, for whom the niceties of civilized behavior were necessary, lest foreign nations treat Soviet citizens – worse, Soviet diplomats – the same way.
   But so many KGB officers had been let go by their parent service, and few of them had drifted into menial labor. No, they had training in conspiracy, and many had done foreign travel, and there met all manner of people, most of whom, Provalov was sure, could be persuaded to undertake illegal operations for the right inducement, which invariably meant money. For money, people would do anything, a fact known by every police officer in every country in the world.
   Suvorov. Must track that name down, the militia lieutenant told himself as he took a casual sip of his vodka. Examine his background, determine his expertise, and get a photo. Suvorov, Klementi Ivanovich.
   "Anything else?" the lieutenant asked.
   Klusov shook his head. "That is all I have uncovered."
   "Well, not too bad. Get back to work, and call me when you discover more."
   "Yes, Comrade Lieutenant." The informant stood up to leave. He left the bill with the cop, who'd pay it without much in the way of annoyance. Oleg Gregoriyevich Provalov had spent enough time in police work to understand that he might just have discovered something important. Of course, you couldn't tell at this stage, not until you ran it down, every single option and blind alley, which could take rather some time... but if it turned out to be something important, then it was worth it. And if not, it was just another blind alley, of which there were many in police work.
   Provalov reflected on the fact that he hadn't asked his informant exactly who had given him this new flood of information. He hadn't forgotten, but perhaps had allowed himself to be a little gulled by the descriptions of the alleged former Spetsnaz soldiers who'd made the murder. He had their descriptions in his mind, and then removed his pad to write them down. Blond and red-haired, experience in Afghanistan, both living in St. Petersburg, flew back just before noon on the day Avseyenko was murdered. So, he would check for the flight number and run the names on the manifest through the new computers Aeroflot used to tie into the global ticketing system, then cross-check it against his own computer with its index of known and suspected criminals, and also with the army's records. If he got a hit, he'd have a man talk to the cabin crew of that Moscow-St. Petersburg flight to see if anyone remembered one or both of them. Then he'd have the St. Petersburg militia do a discreet check of these people, their addresses, criminal records if any, a normal and thorough background check, leading, possibly, to an interview. He might not conduct it himself, but he'd be there to observe, to get a feel for the suspects, because there was no substitute for that, for looking in their eyes, seeing how they talked, how they sat, if they fidgeted or not, if the eyes held those of the questioner, or traveled about the room. Did they smoke then, and if so, rapidly and nervously or slowly and contemptuously... or just curiously, as would be the case if they were innocent of this charge, if not, perhaps, of another.
   The militia lieutenant paid the bar bill and headed outside.
   "You need to pick a better place for your meets, Oleg," a familiar voice suggested from behind. Provalov turned to see the face.
   "It is a big city, Mishka, with many drinking places, and most of them are poorly lit."
   "And I found yours, Oleg Gregoriyevich," Reilly reminded him. "So, what have you learned?"
   Provalov summarized what he'd found out this evening.
   "Two shooters from Spetsnaz? I suppose that makes some sense. What would that cost?"
   "It would not be inexpensive. As a guess... oh, five thousand euros or so," the lieutenant speculated as they walked up the street.
   "And who would have that much money to throw around?"
   "A Muscovite criminal... Mishka, as you well know, there are hundreds who could afford it, and Rasputin wasn't the most popular of men... and I have a new name, Suvorov, Klementi Ivan'ch."
   "Who is he?"
   "I do not know. It is a new name for me, but Klosov acted as though I ought to have known it well. Strange that I do not," Provalov thought aloud.
   "It happens. I've had wise guys turn up from nowhere, too. So, check him out?"
   "Yes, I will run the name. Evidently he, too, is former KGB."
   "There are a lot of them around," Reilly agreed, steering his friend into a new hotel's bar.
   "What will you do when CIA is broken up?" Provalov asked.
   "Laugh," the FBI agent promised.
 
   The city of St. Petersburg was known to some as the Venice of the North for the rivers and canals that cut through it, though the climate, especially in winter, could hardly have been more different. And it was in one of those rivers that the next clue appeared.
   A citizen had spotted it on his way to work in the morning, and, seeing a militiaman at the next corner, he'd walked that way and pointed, and the policeman had walked back, and looked over the iron railing at the space designated by the passing citizen.
   It wasn't much to see, but it only took a second for the cop to know what it was and what it would mean. Not garbage, not a dead animal, but the top of a human head, with blond or light brown hair. A suicide or a murder, something for the local cops to investigate. The militiaman walked to the nearest phone to make his call to headquarters, and in thirty minutes a car showed up, followed in short order by a black van. By this time, the militiaman on his beat had smoked two cigarettes in the crisp morning air, occasionally looking down into the water to make sure that the object was still there. The arriving men were detectives from the city's homicide bureau. The van that had followed them had a pair of people called technicians, though they had really been trained in the city's public-works department, which meant water-and-sewer workers, though they were paid by the local militia. These two men took a look over the rail, which was enough to tell them that recovering the body would be physically difficult but routine. A ladder was set up, and the junior man, dressed in waterproof coveralls and heavy rubber gauntlets, climbed down and grabbed the submerged collar, while his partner observed and shot a few frames from his cheap camera and the three policemen on the scene observed and smoked from a few feet away. That's when the first surprise happened.
   The routine was to put a flexible collar on the body under the arms, like that used by a rescue helicopter, so that the body could be winched up. But when he worked to get the collar under the body, one of the arms wouldn't move at all, and the worker struggled for several unpleasant minutes, working to get the stiff dead arm upward... and eventually found that it was handcuffed to another arm.
   That revelation caused both detectives to toss their cigarettes into the water. It was probably not a suicide, since that form of death was generally not a team sport. The sewer rat – that was how they thought of their almost-police comrades – took another ten minutes before getting the hoist collar in place, then came up the ladder and started cranking the winch.
   It was clear in a moment. Two men, not old ones, not badly dressed. They'd been dead for several days, judging by the distortion and disfigurement of their faces. The water had been cold, and that had slowed the growth and hunger of the bacteria that devoured most bodies, but water itself did things to bodies that were hard on the full stomach to gaze upon, and these two faces looked like... like Pokemon toys, one of the detectives thought, just like perverse and horrible Pokemon toys, like those that one of his kids lusted after. The two sewer rats loaded the bodies into body bags for transport to the morgue, where the examinations would take place. As yet, they knew nothing except that the bodies were indeed dead. There were no obviously missing body parts, and the general dishevelment of the bodies prevented their seeing anything like a bullet or knife wound. For the moment, they had what Americans would call two John Does, one with blond or light brown hair, the other with what appeared to be reddish hair. From appearances, they'd been in the water for three or four days. And they'd probably died together, handcuffed as they were, unless one had murdered the other and then jumped to his own death, in which case one or both might have been homosexual, the more cynical of the two detectives thought. The beat cop was told to write up the proper reporting forms at his station, which, the militiaman thought, would be nice and warm. There was nothing like finding a corpse or two to make a cold day colder still.
   The body-recovery team loaded the bags into their van for the drive to the morgue. The bags were not properly sealed because of the handcuffs, and they sat side by side on the floor of the van, perversely like the hands of lovers reaching out to each other in death... as they had in life? one of the detectives wondered aloud back in their car. His partner just growled at that one and continued his drive.
   It was, agreeably, a slow day in the St. Petersburg morgue. The senior pathologist on duty, Dr. Aleksander Koniev, had been in his office reading a medical journal and well bored by the inactivity of the morning, when the call came in, a possible double homicide. Those were always interesting, and Koniev was a devotee of murder mysteries, most of them imported from Britain and America, which also made them a good way to polish up his language skills. He was waiting in the autopsy room when the bodies arrived, were transferred to gurneys at the loading ramp and rolled together into his room. It took a moment to see why the two gurneys were wheeled side by side.
   "So," the pathologist asked with a sardonic grin, "were they killed by the militia?"
   "Not officially," the senior detective replied, in the same emotional mode. He knew Koniev.
   "Very well." The physician switched on the tape recorder. "We have two male cadavers, still fully dressed. It is apparent that both have been immersed in water – where were they recovered?" he asked, looking up at the cops. They answered. "Immersed in fresh water in the Neva. On initial visual inspection, I would estimate three to four days' immersion after death." His gloved hands felt around one head, and the other. "Ah," his voice said. "Both victims seem to have been shot. Both have what appear to be bullet holes in the center of the occipital region of both bodies. Initial impression is a small-caliber bullet hole in both victims. We'll check that later. Yevgeniy," he said, looking up again, this time at his own technician. "Remove the clothing and bag it for later inspection.
   "Yes, Comrade Doctor." The technician put out his cigarette and came forward with cutting tools.
   "Both shot?" the junior detective asked.
   "In the same place in both heads," Koniev confirmed. "Oh, they were handcuffed after death, strangely enough. No immediately visible bruising on either wrist. Why do it afterwards?" the pathologist wondered.
   "Keeps the bodies together," the senior detective thought aloud – but why might that be important? he wondered to himself. The killer or killers had an overly developed sense of neatness? But he'd been investigating homicides long enough to know that you couldn't fully explain all the crimes you solved, much less the ones you'd newly encountered.
   "Well, they were both fit," Koniev said next, as his technician got the last of their clothes off. "Hmm, what's that?" He walked over and saw a tattoo on the left biceps of the blond one, then turned to see – "They both have the same tattoo."
   The senior detective came over to see, first thinking that maybe his partner had been right and there was a sexual element to this case, but –
   "Spetsnaz, the red star and THUNDERbolt, these two were in Afghanistan. Anatoliy, while the doctor conducts his examination, let's go through their clothing."
   This they did, and in half an hour determined that both had been well dressed in fairly expensive clothing, but in both cases entirely devoid of identification of any kind. That was hardly unusual in a situation like this, but cops, like everyone else, prefer the easy to the hard. No wallet, no identity papers, not a banknote, key chain, or tie tack. Well, they could trace them through the labels on the clothes, and nobody had cut their fingertips off, and so they could also use fingerprints to identify them. Whoever had done the double murder had been clever enough to deny the police some knowledge, but not clever enough to deny them everything.
   What did that mean? the senior detective wondered. The best way to prevent a murder investigation was to make the bodies disappear. Without a body there was no proof of death, and therefore, no murder investigation, just a missing person who could have run off with another woman or man, or just decided to go someplace to start life anew. And disposing of a body was not all that difficult, if you thought about it a little. Fortunately, most killings were, if not exactly impulse crimes, then something close to it, and most killers were fools who would later seal their own fates by talking too much.
   But not this time. Had this been a sexual killing, he probably would have heard about it by now. Such crimes were virtually advertised by their perpetrators in some perverse desire to assure their own arrest and conviction, because no one who committed that kind of crime seemed able to keep his mouth shut about anything.
   No, this double killing had every hallmark of professionalism. Both bodies killed in the same way, and only then handcuffed together... probably for better and/or lengthier concealment. No sign of a struggle on either body, and both were manifestly fit, trained, dangerous men. They'd been taken unawares, and that usually meant someone they both knew and trusted. Why criminals trusted anyone in their community was something neither detective quite understood. "Loyalty" was a word they could scarcely spell, much less a principle to which any of them adhered... and yet criminals gave strange lip-service to it.
   As the detectives watched, the pathologist drew blood from both bodies for later toxicology tests. Perhaps both had been drugged as a precursor to the head shots, not likely, but possible, and something to be checked. Scrapings were taken from all twenty fingernails, and those, too, would probably be valueless. Finally, fingerprints were taken so that proper identification could be made. This would not be very fast. The central records bureau in Moscow was notoriously inefficient, and the detectives would beat their own local bushes in the hope of finding out who these two cadavers had once been.
   "Yevgeniy, these are not men of whom I would have made enemies lightly."
   "I agree, Anatoliy," the elder of the two said. "But someone either did not fear them at all... or feared them sufficiently to take very drastic action." The truth of the matter was that both men were accustomed to solving easy murders where the killer confessed almost at once, or had committed his crime in front of numerous witnesses. This one would challenge their abilities, and they would report that to their lieutenant, in the hope of getting additional assets assigned to the case.
   As they watched, photos were taken of the faces, but those faces were so distorted as to be virtually unrecognizable, and the photos would then be essentially useless for purposes of identification. But taking them prior to opening the skull was procedure, and Dr. Koniev did everything by the book. The detectives stepped outside to make a few phone calls and smoke in a place with a somewhat more palatable ambience. By the time they came back, both bullets were in plastic containers, and Koniev told them that the presumptive cause of both deaths was a single bullet in each brain, with powder tattooing evident on both scalps. They'd both been killed at short range, less than half a meter, the pathologist told them, with what appeared to be a standard, light 2.6-gram bullet fired from a 5.45-mm PSM police pistol. That might have generated a snort, since this was the standard-issue police side arm, but quite a few had found their way into the Russian underworld.
   "The Americans call this a professional job," Yevgeniy observed.
   "Certainly it was accomplished with skill," Anatoliy agreed. "And now, first..."
   "First we find out who these unlucky bastards were. Then, who the hell were their enemies."
 
   The Chinese food in China wasn't nearly as good as that to be found in LA, Nomuri thought. Probably the ingredients, was his immediate analysis. If the People's Republic had a Food and Drug Administration, it had been left out of his premission briefing, and his first thought on entering this restaurant was that he didn't want to check the kitchen out. Like most Beijing restaurants, this one was a small mom-and-pop operation, operating out of the first floor of what was in essence a private home, and serving twenty people out of a standard Chinese communist home kitchen must have involved considerable acrobatics. The table was circular, small, and eminently cheap, and the chair was uncomfortable, but for all that, the mere fact that such a place existed was testimony to fundamental changes in the political leadership of this country.
   But the mission of the evening sat across from him. Lian Ming. She wore the standard off-blue boiler suit that was virtually the uniform of low to mid-level bureaucrats in the various government ministries. Her hair was cut short, almost like a helmet. The fashion industry in this city must have been established by some racist son of a bitch who loathed the Chinese and tried his level best to make them as unattractive as he could. He'd yet to see a single local female citizen who dressed in a manner that anyone could call attractive except, maybe, for some imports from Hong Kong. Uniformity was a problem with the Orient, the utter lack of variety, unless you counted the foreigners who were showing up in ever-increasing numbers, but they stuck out like roses in a junkyard, and that merely emphasized the plethora of junk. Back home, at USC, one could have – well, one could look at, the CIA officer corrected himself – any sort of female to be had on the planet. White, black, Jewish, gentile, yellow in various varieties, Latina, some real Africans, plenty of real Europeans – and there you had ample variety, too: the dark-haired, earthy Italians, the haughty French, the proper Brits, and the stiff Germans. Toss in some Canadians, and the Spanish (who went out of their way to be separated from the local Spanish speakers) and lots of ethnic Japanese (who were also separated from the local Japanese, though in this case at the will of the latter rather than the former), and you had a virtual deli of people. The only sameness there came from the Californian atmosphere, which commanded that every individual had to work hard to be presentable and attractive, for that was the One Great Commandment of life in California, home of Rollerblading and surfing, and the tight figures that went along with both pastimes.
   Not here. Here everyone dressed the same, looked the same, talked the same, and largely acted the same way...
   ...except this one. There was something else to be had here, Nomuri thought, and that's why he'd asked her to dinner.
   It was called seduction, which had been part of the spy's playbook since time immemorial, though it would be a first for Nomuri. He hadn't been quite celibate in Japan, where mores had changed in the past generation, allowing young men and young women to meet and... communicate on the most basic of levels – but there, in a savage, and for Chester Nomuri a rather cruel, irony, the more available Japanese girls had a yen for Americans. Some said it was because Americans had a reputation for being better equipped for lovemaking than the average Japanese male, a subject of much giggling for Japanese girls who have recently become sexually active. Part of it was also that American men were reputed to treat their women better than the Japanese variety, and since Japanese women were far more obsequious than their Western counterparts, it probably worked out as a good deal for both sides of the partnerships that developed. But Chet Nomuri was a spook covered as a Japanese salaryman, and had learned to fit in so well that the local women regarded him as just another Japanese male, and so his sex life had been hindered by his professional skills, which hardly seemed fair to the field officer, brought up, like so many American men, on the movies of 007 and his numerous conquests: Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang, as he was known in the West Indies. Well, Nomuri hadn't handled a pistol either, not since his time at The Farm – the CIA's training school off Interstate 64 near Yorktown, Virginia – and hadn't exactly broken any records there in the first place.
   But this one had possibilities, the field officer thought, behind his normal, neutral expression, and there was nothing in the manual against getting laid on the job – what a crimp on Agency morale that would have been, he considered. Such stories of conquest were a frequent topic of conversation at the rare but real field-officer get-togethers that the Agency occasionally held, usually at The Farm, for the field spooks to compare notes on techniques – the after-hour beer sessions often drifted in this direction. For Chet Nomuri since getting to Beijing, his sex life had consisted of prowling Internet pornography sites. For one reason or another, the Asian culture made for an ample collection of such things, and while Nomuri wasn't exactly proud of this addiction, his sexual drive needed some outlet.
   With a little work, Ming might have been pretty, Nomuri thought. First of all she needed long hair. Then, perhaps, better frames on her eyeglasses. Those she wore had all the attraction of recycled barbed wire. Then some makeup. Exactly what sort Nomuri wasn't sure – he was no expert on such things, but her skin had an ivory-like quality to it that a little chemical enhancement might turn into something attractive. But in this culture, except for people on the stage (whose makeup was about as subtle as a Las Vegas neon sign), makeup meant washing your face in the morning, if that. It was her eyes, he decided. They were lively and... cute. There was life in them, or behind them, however that worked. She might even have had a decent figure, but it was hard to tell in that clothing.
   "So, the new computer system works well?" he asked, after the lingering sip of green tea.
   "It is MAGICal," she replied, almost gushing. "The characters come out beautifully, and they print up perfectly on the laser printer, as though from a scribe."
   "What does your minister think?"
   "Oh, he is very pleased. I work faster now, and he is very pleased by that!" she assured him.
   "Pleased enough to place an order?" Nomuri asked, reverting back to his salaryman cover.
   "This I must ask the chief of administration, but I think you will be satisfied by the response."
   That will make NEC happy, the CIA officer thought, again wondering briefly how much money he'd made for his cover firm. His boss in Tokyo would have gagged on his sake to know whom Nomuri really worked for, but the spook had won all of his promotions at NEC on merit, while moonlighting for his true country. It was a fortunate accident, Chet thought, that his real job and his cover one blended so seamlessly. That and the fact that he'd been raised in a very traditional home, speaking two native tongues... and more than that, the sense of on, the duty owed to his native land, far over and above that he pretended to owe to his parent culture. He'd probably gotten that from seeing his grandfather's framed plaque, the Combat Infantryman's Badge in the center on the blue velvet, surrounded by the ribbons and medallions that designated awards for bravery, the Bronze Star with combat "V," the Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation, and the campaign ribbons won as a grunt with the 442nd Regimental Combat team in Italy and Southern France. Fucked over by America, his grandfather had earned his citizenship rights in the ultimate and best possible way before returning home to the landscaping business that had educated his sons and grandsons, and taught one of them the duty he owed his country. And besides, this could be fun.
   It was now, Nomuri thought, looking deeply into Ming's dark eyes, wondering what the brain behind them was thinking. She had two cute dimples at the sides of her mouth, and, he thought, a very sweet smile on an otherwise unremarkable face.
   "This is such a fascinating country," he said. "By the way, your English is very good." And good that it was. His Mandarin needed a lot of help, and one doesn't seduce women with sign language.
   A pleased smile. "Thank you. I do study very hard."
   "What books do you read?" he asked with an engaging smile of his own.
   "Romances, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz. America offers women so many more opportunities than what we are used to here."
   "America is an interesting country, but chaotic," Nomuri told her. "At least in this society one can know his place."
   "Yes." She nodded. "There is security in that, but sometimes too much. Even a caged bird wishes to spread its wings."
   "I will tell you one thing I find bad here."
   "What is that?" Ming asked, not offended, which, Nomuri thought, was very good indeed. Maybe he'd get a Steele novel and read up on what she liked.
   "You should dress differently. Your clothing is not flattering. Women should dress more attractively. In Japan there is much variety in clothing, and you can dress Eastern or Western as the spirit moves you."
   She giggled. "I would settle for the underthings. They must feel so nice on the skin. That is not a very socialist thought," she told him, setting down her cup. The waiter came over, and with Nomuri's assent she ordered mao-tai, a fiery local liqueur. The waiter returned rapidly with two small porcelain cups and a flask, from which he poured daintily. The CIA officer nearly gasped with his first sip, and it went down hot, but it certainly warmed the stomach. Ming's skin, he saw, flushed from it, and there came the fleeting impression that a gate had just been opened and passed... and that it probably led in the right direction.
   "Not everything can be socialist," Nomuri judged, with another tiny sip. "This restaurant is a private concern, isn't it?"
   "Oh, Yes. And the food is better than what I cook. That is a skill I do not have."
   "Truly? Then perhaps you will allow me to cook for you sometime," Chet suggested.
   "Oh?"
   "Certainly." He smiled. "I can cook American style, and I am able to shop at a closed store to get the correct ingredients." Not that the ingredients would be worth a damn, shipped in as they were, but a damned sight better than the garbage you got here in the public markets, and a steak dinner was probably something she'd never had. Could he justify getting CIA to put a few Kobe beef steaks on his expense account? Nomuri wondered. Probably. The bean-counters at Langley didn't bother the field spooks all that much.
   "Really?"
   "Of course. There are some advantages to being a foreign barbarian," he told her with a sly smile. The giggling response was just right, he thought. Yeah. Nomuri took another careful sip of this rocket fuel. She'd just told him what she wanted to wear. Sensible, too, for this culture. However comfy it might be, it would also be quite discreet.
   "So, what else can you tell me about yourself?" he asked next.
   "There is little to tell. My job is beneath my education, but it carries prestige for... well, for political reasons. I am a highly educated secretary. My employer – well, technically I work for the state, as do most of us, but in fact I work for my minister as if he were in the capitalist sector and paid me from his own pocket." She shrugged. "I suppose it has always been so. I see and hear interesting things."
   Don't want to ask about them now, Nomuri knew. Later, sure, but not now.
   "It is the same with me, industrial secrets and such. Ahh," he snorted. "Better to leave such things at my official desk. No, Ming, tell me about you."
   "Again, there is little to tell. I am twenty-four. I am educated. I suppose I am lucky to be alive. You know what happens to many girl babies here..."
   Nomuri nodded. "I have heard the stories. They are distasteful," he agreed with her. It was more than that. It was not unknown for the father of a female toddler to drop her down a well in the hope that his wife would bear him a son on the next try. One-baby-per-family was almost a law in the PRC, and like most laws in a communist state, that one was ruthlessly enforced. An unauthorized baby was often allowed to come to term, but then as birth took place, when the baby "crowned," the top of the head appearing, the very moment of birth, the attending physician or nurse would take a syringe loaded with formaldehyde, and stab it into the soft spot at the crown of the almost-newborn's head, push the plunger, and extinguish its life at the moment of its beginning. It wasn't something the government of the PRC advertised as government policy, but government policy it was. Nomuri's one sister, Alice, was a physician, an obstetrician/gynecologist trained at UCLA, and he knew that his sister would take poison herself before performing such a barbarous act, or take a pistol to use on whoever demanded that she do it. Even so, some surplus girl babies somehow managed to be born, and these were often abandoned, and then given up for adoption, mainly to Westerners, because the Chinese themselves had no use for them at all. Had it been done to Jews, it would have been called genocide, but there were a lot of Chinese to go around. Carried to extremes, it could lead to racial extinction, but here it was just called population control. "In due course Chinese culture will again recognize the value of women, Ming. That is certain."
   "I suppose it is," she allowed. "How are women treated in Japan?"
   Nomuri allowed himself a laugh. "The real question is how well they treat us, and how well they permit us to treat them!"
   "Truly?"
   "Oh, yes. My mother ruled the house until she died."
   "Interesting. Are you religious?"
   Why that question? Chet wondered.
   "I have never decided between Shinto and Zen Buddhism," he replied, truthfully. He'd been baptized a Methodist, but fallen away from his church many years before. In Japan he'd examined the local religions just to understand them, the better to fit in, and though he'd learned much about both, neither had appealed to his American upbringing. "And you?"
   "I once looked into Falun Gong, but not seriously. I had a friend who got very involved. He's in prison now."
   "Ah, a pity." Nomuri nodded sympathy, wondering how close the friend had been. Communism remained a jealous system of belief, intolerant of competition of any sort. Baptists were the new religious fad, springing up as if from the very ground itself, started off, he thought, from the Internet, a medium into which American Christians, especially Baptists and Mormons, had pumped a lot of resources of late. And so Jerry Falwell was getting some sort of religious/ideological foothold here? How remarkable – or not. The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and also with Mao it would seem, was that as fine as the theoretical model was, it lacked something the human soul craved. But the communist chieftains didn't and couldn't like that very much. The Falun Gong group hadn't even been a religion at all, not to Nomuri's way of thinking, but for some reason he didn't fully understand, it had frightened the powers that be in the PRC enough to crack down on it as if it had been a genuinely counterrevolutionary political movement. He heard that the convicted leaders of the group were doing seriously hard time in the local prisons. The thought of what constituted especially hard time in this country didn't bear much contemplation. Some of the world's most vicious tortures had been invented in this country, where the value of human life was a far less important thing than in the nation of his origin, Chet reminded himself. China was an ancient land with an ancient culture, but in many ways these people might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings, so detached were their societal values from what Chester Nomuri had grown up with. "Well, I really don't have much in the way of religious convictions."
   "Convictions?" Ming asked.
   "Beliefs," the CIA officer corrected. "So, are there any men in your life? A fiance, perhaps?"
   She sighed. "No, not in some time."
   "Indeed? I find that surprising," Nomuri observed with studied gallantry.
   "I suppose we are different from Japan," Ming admitted, with just a hint of sadness in her voice.
   Nomuri lifted the flask and poured some more mao-tai for both. "In that case," he said, with a smile and a raised eyebrow, "I offer you a friendly drink."
   "Thank you, Nomuri-san."
   "My pleasure, Comrade Ming." He wondered how long it would take. Perhaps not too long at all. Then the real work would begin.

CHAPTER 7

Developing Leads
 
 It was the sort of coincidence for which police work is known worldwide. Provalov called militia headquarters, and since he was investigating a homicide, he got to speak with the St. Petersburg murder squad leader, a captain. When he said he was looking for some former Spetsnaz soldiers, the captain remembered his morning meeting in which two of his men had reported finding two bodies bearing possible Spetsnaz tattoos, and that was enough to make him forward the call.
   "Really, the RPG event in Moscow?" Yevgeniy Petrovich Ustinov asked. "Who exactly was killed?"
   "The main target appears to have been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko. He was a pimp," Provalov told his colleague to the north. "Also his driver and one of his girls, but they appear to have been inconsequential." He didn't have to elaborate. You didn't use an antitank rocket to kill a chauffeur and a whore.
   "And your sources tell you that two Spetsnaz veterans did the shooting?"
   "Correct, and they flew back to St. Petersburg soon thereafter."
   "I see. Well, we fished two such people from the River Neva yesterday, both in their late thirties or so, and both shot in the back of the head."
   "Indeed?"
   "Yes. We have fingerprints from both bodies. We're waiting for Central Army Records to match them up. But that will nor he very fast."
   "Let me see what I can do about that, Yevgeniy Petrovich. You see, also present at the murder was Sergey Nikolay'ch Golovko, and we have concerns that he might have been the true target of the killing."
   "That would be ambitious," Ustinov observed coolly. "Perhaps your friends at Dzerzhinskiy Square can get the records morons moving?"
   "I will call them and see," Provalov promised.
   "Good, anything else?"
   "Another name, Suvorov, Klementi Ivan'ch, reportedly a former KGB officer, but that is all I have at the moment. Does the name mean anything to you?" You could hear the man shaking his head over the phone, Provalov noted.
   "Nyet, never heard that one," the senior detective replied as he wrote it down. "Connection?"
   "My informant thinks he's the man who arranged the killing."
   "I'll check our records here to see if we have anything on him. Another former 'Sword and Shield' man, eh? How many of those guardians of the state have gone bad?" the St. Petersburg cop asked rhetorically.
   "Enough," his colleague in Moscow agreed, with an unseen grimace.
   "This Avseyenko fellow, also KGB?"
   "Yes, he reportedly ran the Sparrow School."
   Ustinov chuckled at that one. "Oh, a state-trained pimp. Marvelous. Good girls?"
   "Lovely," Provalov confirmed. "More than we can afford."
   "A real man doesn't have to pay for it, Oleg Gregoriyevich," the St. Petersburg cop assured his Moscow colleague.
   "That is true, my friend. At least not until long afterwards," Provalov added.
   "That is the truth!" A laugh. "Let me know what you find out?"
   "Yes, I will fax you my notes."
   "Excellent. I will share my information with you as well," Ustinov promised. There is a bond among homicide investigators across the world. No country sanctions the private taking of human life. Nation-states reserve such power for themselves alone.
   In his dreary Moscow office, Lieutenant Provalov made his notes for several minutes. It was too late to call the RVS about rattling the Central Army Records cage. First thing in the morning, he promised himself. Then it was time to leave. He picked his coat off the tree next to his desk and headed out to where his official car was parked. This he drove to a corner close to the American Embassy, and a place called Boris Godunov's, a friendly and warm bar. He'd only been there for five minutes when a familiar hand touched his shoulder.
   "Hello, Mishka," Provalov said, without turning.
   "You know, Oleg, it's good to see that Russian cops are like American cops."
   "It is the same in New York?"
   "You bet," Reilly confirmed. "After a long day of chasing bad guys, what's better than a few drinks with your pals?" The FBI agent waved to the bartender for his usual, a vodka and soda. "Besides, you get some real work done in a place like this. So, anything happening on the Pimp Case?"
   "Yes, the two who did the killing may have shown up dead in St. Petersburg." Provalov tossed down the last of his straight vodka and filled the American in on the details, concluding, "What do you make of that?"
   "Either it's revenge or insurance, pal. I've seen it happen at home."
   "Insurance?"
   "Yeah, had it happen in New York. The Mafia took Joey Gallo out, did it in public, and they wanted it to be a signature event, so they got a black hood to do the hit – but then the poor bastard gets shot himself about fifteen feet away. Insurance, Oleg. That way the subject can't tell anybody who asked him to take the job. The second shooter just walked away, never did get a line on him. Or it could have been a revenge hit: whoever paid them to do the job whacked them for hitting the wrong target. You pays your money and you takes your choice, pal."
   "How do you say, wheels within wheels?"
   Reilly nodded. "That's how we say it. Well, at least it gives you some more leads to run down. Maybe your two shooters talked to somebody. Hell, maybe they even kept a diary." It was like tossing a rock into a pond, Reilly thought. The ripples just kept expanding in a case like this. Unlike a nice domestic murder, where a guy whacked his wife for fucking around, or serving dinner late, and then confessed while crying his eyes out at what he'd done. But by the same token, it was an awfully loud crime, and those, more often than not, were the ones you broke because people commented on the noise, and some of those people knew things that you could use. It was just a matter of getting people out on the street, rattling doorknobs and wearing out shoes, until you got what you needed. These Russian cops weren't dumb. They lacked some of the training that Reilly took for granted, but for all that, they had the proper cop instincts, and the fact of the matter was that if you followed the proper procedures, you'd break your cases, because the other side wasn't all that smart. The smart ones didn't break the law in so egregious a way. No, the perfect crime was the one you never discovered, the murder victim you never found, the stolen funds missed by bad accounting procedures, the espionage never discovered. Once you knew a crime had been committed, you had a starting place, and it was like unraveling a sweater. There wasn't all that much holding the wool together if you just kept picking at it.
   "Tell me, Mishka, how worthy were your Mafia adversaries in New York?" Provalov asked after sipping his second drink.
   Reilly did the same. "It's not like the movies, Oleg. Except maybe Goodfellas. They're cheap hoods. They're not educated. Some of them are pretty damned dumb. Their cachet was that once upon a time they didn't talk, omerta they used to call it, the Law of Silence. I mean, they'd take the fall and never cooperate. But that changed over time. The people from the Old Country died out and the new generation was softer – and we got tougher. It's a lot easier to laugh your way through three years than it is to handle ten, and on top of that the organization broke down. They stopped taking care of the families while the dad was in the slammer, and that was real bad for morale. So, they started talking to us. And we got smarter, too, with electronic surveillance – now it's called 'special operations'; back then it was a 'black bag job' – and we weren't always very careful about getting a warrant. I mean, back in the '60s, a Mafia don couldn't take a leak without us knowing what color it was."
   "And they never fought back?"
   "You mean fuck with us? Mess with an FBI agent?" Reilly grinned at the very thought. "Oleg, nobody ever messes with the FBI. Back then, and still somewhat to this day, we are the Right Hand of God Himself, and if you mess with us, some really bad things are going to happen. The truth of the matter is that nothing like that has ever happened, but the bad guys worry that it might. The rules get bent some, but, no, we never really break them – at least not that I know about. But if you threaten a hood with serious consequences for stepping over the line, chances are he'll take you seriously."
   "Not here. They do not respect us that much yet."
   "Well, then you have to generate that respect, Oleg." And it really was about that simple in concept, though bringing it about, Reilly knew, would not be all that easy. Would it take having the local cops go off the reservation once in a while, to show the hoods the price of lese-majeste? That was part of American history, Reilly thought. Town sheriffs like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickock, Lone Wolf Gonzales of the Texas Rangers, Bill Tilghman and Billy Threepersons of the U.S. Marshal Service, the cops of their time who didn't so much enforce the law as embody it in the way they walked down the street. There was no corresponding Russian lawman of legend. Maybe they needed one. It was part of the heritage of every American cop, and from watching movies and TV westerns, American citizens grew up with the expectation that breaking the law would bring such a man into your life, and not to your personal profit. The FBI had grown up in an era of increased crime during the Great Depression, and had exploited the existing Western tradition with modern technology and procedures to create its own institutional mystique. To do that had meant convicting a lot of criminals, and killing a few on the street as well. In America there was the expectation that cops were heroic figures who didn't merely enforce the law, but who protected the innocent as well. There was no such tradition here. Growing it would solve many of the problems in the former Soviet Union, where the lingering tradition was of oppression rather than protection. No John Wayne, no Melvin Purvis in Russian movies, and this nation was the poorer for it. As much as Reilly liked working here, and as much as he'd come to like and respect his Russian counterparts, it was much like being dumped into a trash heap with instructions to make it as orderly as Bergdorf-Goodman's in New York. All the proper things were there, but organizing them made Hercules' task in the Augean stables seem trivial in comparison. Oleg had the right motivation, and the right set of skills, but it was some job he had ahead of him. Reilly didn't envy him the task, but he had to help as best he could.
   "I do not envy you very much, Mishka, but your organization's status in your country is something I would like to have."
   "It didn't just happen, Oleg. It's the product of many years and a lot of good men. Maybe I should show you a Clint Eastwood movie."
   "Dirty Harry? I have seen it." Entertaining, the Russian thought, but not overly realistic.
   "No, Hang Em High, about the Marshal Service, back in the Old West, when men were men and women were grateful. Actually it's not true in the usual sense. There wasn't much crime in the Old West."
   That made the Russian look up from his drink in surprise. "Then why do all the movies say otherwise?"
   "Oleg, movies have to be exciting, and there isn't much exciting about raising wheat or punching cattle. The American West was mainly settled by veterans of our Civil War. That was a hard and cruel conflict, but no man who'd survived the Battle of Shiloh was likely to be intimidated by some bozo on a horse, gun or not. A professor at Oklahoma State University did a book on this subject twenty or so years ago. He checked court records and such, and found out that except for saloon shootings – guns and whiskey make a crummy mix, right? – there wasn't a hell of a lot of crime in the West. The citizens could look after themselves, and the laws they had were pretty tough – not a hell of a lot of repeat offenders – but what it really came down to was that the citizens all had guns and all pretty much knew how to use them, and that is a big deterrent for the bad guys. A cop's less likely to shoot you than an aroused citizen, when you get down to it. He doesn't want to do all the paperwork if he can avoid it, right?" A sip and a chuckle from the American.
   "In that we are the same, Mishka," Provalov agreed.
   "And, by the way, all this quick-draw stuff in the movies. If it ever happened for real, I've never heard of such a case. No, that's all Hollywood bullshit. You can't draw and fire accurately that way. If you could, they would have trained us to do it that way at Quantico. But except for people who practice for special performances and tournaments and stuff, and that's always at the same angle and the same distance, it just can't be done."
   "You're sure of that?" Legends die hard, especially for an otherwise pretty smart cop who had, however, seen his share of Westerns.
   "I was a Principal Instructor in my Field Division, and damned if I can do it."
   "You are good shot, eh?"
   Reilly nodded with uncharacteristic modesty on this particular issue. "Fair," he allowed. "Pretty fair." There were less than three hundred names on the FBI Academy's "Possible Board," identifying those who'd fired a perfect qualifying course on graduating. Mike Reilly was one of them. He'd also been assistant head of the SWAT team in his first field division in Kansas City before moving over to the chess players in the OC – Organized Crime – department. It made him feel a little naked to walk around without his trusty S&W 1076 automatic, but that was life in the FBI's diplomatic service, the agent told himself. What the hell, the vodka was good here, and he was developing a taste for it. For that his diplomatic license plates helped. The local cops were pretty serious about giving tickets out. It was a pity they still had so much to learn about major criminal investigations.
   "So, our pimp friend was probably the primary target, Oleg?"
   "Yes, I think that is likely, but not entirely certain yet." He shrugged. "But we'll keep the Golovko angle open. After all," Provalov added, after a long sip of his glass, "it will get us lots of powerful cooperation from other agencies."
   Reilly had to laugh at that. "Oleg Gregoriyevich, you know how to handle the bureaucratic part of the job. I couldn't do that better myself!" Then he waved to the bartender. He'd spring for the next round.
 
   The Internet had to be the best espionage invention ever made, Mary Patricia Foley thought. She also blessed the day that she'd personally recommended Chester Nomuri to the Directorate of Operations. That little Nisei had some beautiful moves for an officer still on the short side of thirty. He'd done superb work in Japan, and had volunteered in a heartbeat for Operation GENGHIS in Beijing. His cover job at Nippon Electric Company could hardly have been better suited to the mission requirements, and it seemed that he'd waltzed into his niche like Fred Astaire on a particularly good day. The easiest part of all, it seemed, was getting the data out.
   Six years before, CIA had gone to Silicon Valley – undercover, of course – and commissioned a modern manufacturer to set up a brief production run of a very special modem. In fact, it seemed to many to be a sloppy one, since the linkup time it used was four or five seconds longer than was the usual. What you couldn't tell was that the last four seconds weren't random electronic noise at all, but rather the mating of a special encryption system, which when caught on a phone tap sounded just like random noise anyway. So, all Chester had to do was set up his message for transmission and punch it through. To be on the safe side, the messages were super-encrypted with a 256-bit system specially made at the National Security Agency, and the double-encipherment was so complex that even NSA's own bank of supercomputers could only crack it with difficulty and after a lot of expensive time. After that, it was just a matter of setting up a www-dot-something domain through an easily available public vendor and a local ISP – Internet Service Provider – with which the world abounded. It could even be used on a direct call from one computer to another – in fact, that was the original application, and even if the opposition had a hardwire phone tap, it would take a mathematical genius plus the biggest and baddest supercomputer that Sun Microsystems made even to begin cracking into the message.
   Lian Ming, Mary Pat read, secretary to... to him, eh? Not a bad potential source. The most charming part of all was that Nomuri included the sexual possibilities implicit in the recruitment. The kid was still something of an innocent; he'd probably blushed writing this, the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency thought to herself, but he'd included it because he was so damned honest in everything he did. It was time to get Nomuri a promotion and a raise. Mrs. Foley made the appropriate note on a Post-it for attachment to his file. James Bond-san, she thought with an internal chuckle. The easiest part was the reply: Approved, proceed. She didn't even have to add the "with caution" part. Nomuri knew how to handle himself in the field, which was not always the rule for young field officers. Then she picked up the phone and called her husband on the direct line.
   "Yeah, honey?" the Director of Central Intelligence said.
   "Busy?"
   Ed Foley knew that wasn't a question his wife asked lightly. "Not too busy for you, baby. Come on down." And hung up.
   The CIA Director's office is relatively long and narrow, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the woods and the special-visitors' parking lot. Beyond that are the trees overlooking the Potomac Valley and the George Washington Parkway, and little else. The idea of anyone's having a direct line of sight into any part of this building, much less the Office of the Director, would have been the cause of serious heartburn for the security pukes. Ed looked up from his paperwork when his wife came in and took the leather chair across from his desk.
   "Something good?"
   "Even better than Eddie's marks at school," she replied with a soft, sexy smile she reserved for her husband alone. And that had to be pretty good. Edward Foley, Jr., was kicking ass up at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York, and a starter on their hockey team, which damned near always kicked ass itself in the NCAA. Little Ed might earn a place on the Olympic team, though pro hockey was out. He'd make too much money as a computer engineer to waste his time in so pedestrian a pursuit. "I think we may have something here."
   "Like what, honey?"
   "Like the executive secretary to Fang Gan," she replied. "Nomuri's trying to recruit her, and he says the prospects are good."
   "GENGHIS," Ed observed. They ought to have picked a different name, but unlike most CIA operations, the name for this one hadn't been generated by a computer in the basement. The fact of the matter was that this security measure hadn't been applied for the simple reason that nobody had ever expected anything to come of it. CIA had never gotten any kind of agent into the PRC government. At least not above the rank of captain in the People's Liberation Army. The problems were the usual ones. First, they had to recruit an ethnic Chinese, and CIA hadn't had much success at that; next, the officer in question had to have perfect language skills, and the ability to disappear into the culture. For a variety of reasons, none of that had ever happened. Then Mary Pat had suggested trying Nomuri. His corporation did a lot of business in China, after all, and the kid did have good instincts. And so, Ed Foley had signed off on it, not really expecting much to result. But again his wife's field instincts had proven superior to his. It was widely believed that Mary Pat Foley was the best field officer the Agency had had in twenty years, and it looked as if she was determined to prove that. "How exposed is Chet?"
   His wife had to nod her concern at that one. "He's hanging out there, but he knows how to be careful, and his communications gear is the best we have. Unless they brute-force him, you know, just pick him up because they don't like his haircut, he ought to be pretty safe. Anyway –" She handed over the communication from Beijing.
   The DCI read it three times before handing it back. "Well, if he wants to get laid – it's not good fieldcraft, honey. Not good to get that involved with your agent –"
   "I know that, Ed, but you play the cards you're dealt, remember? And if we get her a computer like the one Chet's using, her security won't be all that bad either, will it?"
   "Unless they have somebody pick it apart," Ed Foley thought aloud.
   "Oh, Jesus, Ed, our best people would have a cast-iron mother-fucker of a time figuring it all out. I ran that project myself, remember? It's safe!"
   "Easy, honey." The DCI held up his hand. When Mary used that sort of language, she was really into the matter at hand. "Yeah, I know, it's secure, but I'm the worrier and you're the cowgirl, remember?"
   "Okay, honey-bunny." The usual sweet smile that went with seduction and getting her way.
   "You've already told him to proceed?"
   "He's my officer, Eddie."
   A resigned nod. It wasn't fair that he had to work with his wife here. He rarely won any arguments at the office, either. "Okay, baby. It's your operation, run with it, but –"
   "But what?"
   "But we change GENGHIS to something else. If this one pans out, then we go to a monthly name cycle. This one has some serious implications, and we've got to go max-security on it."
   She had to agree with that. As case officers, the two of them had run an agent known in CIA legend as CARDINAL, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, who'd worked inside the Kremlin for more than thirty years, feeding gold-plated information on every aspect of the Soviet military, plus some hugely valuable political intelligence. For bureaucratic reasons lost in the mists of time, CARDINAL had not been handled as a regular agent-in-place, and that had saved him from Aldrich Ames and his treacherous betrayal of a dozen Soviet citizens who'd worked for America. For Ames it had worked out to roughly $100,000 per life given away. Both of the Foleys regretted the fact that Ames was allowed to live, but they weren't in the law-enforcement business.
   "Okay, Eddie, monthly change-cycle. You're always so careful, honey. You call or me?"
   "We'll wait until she gives us something useful before going to all the trouble, but let's change GENGHIS to something else. It's too obviously a reference to China."
   "Okay." An impish smile. "How about SORGE for the moment?" she suggested. The name was that of Richard SORGE, one of the greatest spies who'd ever lived, a German national who'd worked for the Soviets, and just possibly the man who'd kept Hitler from winning his Eastern Front war with Stalin. The Soviet dictator, knowing this, hadn't lifted a hand to save him from execution. "Gratitude," Iosif Vissarionovich had once said, "is a disease of dogs."
   The DCI nodded. His wife had a lively sense of humor, especially as applied to business matters. "When do you suppose we'll know if she'll play ball with us?"
   "About as soon as Chet gets his rocks off, I suppose."
   "Mary, did you ever...?"
   "In the field? Ed, that's a guy thing, not a girl thing," she told her husband with a sparkling grin as she lifted her papers and headed back out. "Except with you, honey-bunny."
 
   The Alitalia DC-10 touched down about fifteen minutes early due to the favorable winds. Renato Cardinal DiMilo was pleased enough to think through an appropriate prayer of thanksgiving. A longtime member of the Vatican's diplomatic service, he was accustomed to long flights, but that wasn't quite the same as enjoying them. He wore his red – "cardinal" – and black suit that was actually more akin to an official uniform, and not a conspicuously comfortable one at that, despite the custom tailoring that came from one of Rome's better shops. One of the drawbacks to his clerical and diplomatic status was that he'd been unable to shed his suitcoat for the flight, but he'd been able to kick off his shoes, only to find that his feet had swollen on the flight, and getting them back on was more difficult than usual. That evoked a sigh rather than a curse, as the plane taxied to the terminal. The senior flight attendant ushered him to the forward door and allowed him to leave the aircraft first. One advantage to his diplomatic status was that all he ever had to do was wave his diplomatic passport at the control officers, and in this case a senior PRC government official was there to greet him at the end of the jetway.
   "Welcome to our country," the official said, extending his hand.
   "It is my pleasure to be here," the cardinal replied, noting that this communist atheist didn't kiss his ring, as was the usual protocol. Well, Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general were not exactly welcome in the People's Republic of China, were they? But if the PRC expected to live in the civilized world, then they'd have to accept representation with the Holy See, and that was that. And besides, he'd go to work on these people, and, who knew, maybe he could convert one or two. Stranger things had happened, and the Roman Catholic Church had handled more formidable enemies than this one.
   With a wave and a small escort group, the demi-minister conducted his distinguished visitor through the concourse toward the place where the official car and escort waited.
   "How was your flight?" the underling asked.
   "Lengthy but not unpleasant" was the expected reply. Diplomats had to act as though they loved flying, though even the flight crews found journeys of this length tiresome. It was his job to observe the new ambassador of the Vatican, to see how he acted, how he looked out the car's windows, even, which, in this case, was not unlike all the other first-time diplomats who came to Beijing. They looked out at the differences. The shapes of the buildings were new and different to them, the color of the bricks, and how the brickwork looked close up and at a distance, the way in which things that were essentially the same became fascinating because of differences that were actually microscopic when viewed objectively.
   It took a total of twenty-eight minutes to arrive at the residence/embassy. It was an old building, dating back to the turn of the previous century, and had been the largish home of an American Methodist missionary – evidently one who liked his American comforts, the official thought – and had passed through several incarnations, including, he'd learned the previous day, that of a bordello in the diplomatic quarter in the 1920s and '30s, because diplomats liked their comforts as well. Ethnic Chinese, he wondered, or Russian women who'd always claimed to be of the Czarist nobility, or so he'd heard. After all, Westerners enjoyed fucking noblewomen for some reason or other, as if their body parts were different somehow. He'd heard that one, too, at the office, from one of the archivists who kept track of such things at the Ministry. Chairman Mao's personal habits were not recorded, but his lifelong love for deflowering twelve-year-olds was well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Every national leader had something odd and distasteful about him, the young official knew. Great men had great aberrations.
   The car pulled up to the old wooden frame house, where a uniformed policeman opened the door for the visiting Italian, and even saluted, earning himself a nod from the man wearing the ruby-red skullcap.
   Waiting on the porch was yet another foreigner, Monsignor Franz Schepke, whose diplomatic status was that of DCM, or deputy chief of mission, which usually meant the person who was really in charge of things while the ambassador – mainly a man chosen for political reasons – reigned in the main office. They didn't know if that were the case here yet.
   Schepke looked as German as his ancestry was, tall and spare with gray-blue eyes that revealed nothing at all, and a wonderful language gift that had mastered not only the complex Chinese language, but also the local dialect and accent as well. Over the phone this foreigner could pass for a party member, much to the surprise of local officials who were not in the least accustomed to foreigners who could even speak the language properly, much less master it.
   The German national, the Chinese official saw, kissed his superior's ring. Then the Italian shook his hand and embraced the younger churchman. They probably knew each other. Cardinal DiMilo then led Schepke to the escort and introduced them – they'd met many times before, of course, and that made the senior churchman appear just a little backward to the local official. In due course, the luggage was loaded into the residence/embassy building, and the Chinese official got back in the official car for the ride to the Foreign Ministry, where he'd make his contact report. The Papal Nuncio was past his prime, he'd write, a pleasant enough old chap, perhaps, but no great intellect. A fairly typical Western ambassador, in other words.
   No sooner had they gotten inside than Schepke tapped his right ear and gestured around the building.
   "Everywhere?" the cardinal asked.
   'Ja, doch," Monsignor Schepke replied in his native German, then shifted to Greek. Not modern, but Attic Greek, that spoken by Aristotle, similar to but different from the modern version of that language, a language perpetuated only by a handful of scholars at Oxford and a few more Western universities. "Welcome, Eminence."
   "Even airplanes can take too long. Why can we not travel by ship? It would be a much gentler way to getting from point to point."
   "The curse of progress," the German priest offered weakly. The Rome-Beijing flight was only forty minutes longer than the one between Rome and New York, after all, but Renato was a man from a different and more patient age.
   "My escort. What can you tell me of him?"
   "His name is Qian. He's forty, married, one son. He will be our point of contact with the Foreign Ministry. Bright, well educated, but a dedicated communist, son of another such man," Schepke said, speaking rapidly in the language learned long before in seminary. He and his boss knew that this exchange would probably be recorded, and would then drive linguists in the Foreign Ministry to madness. Well, it was not their fault that such people were illiterate, was it?
   "And the building is fully wired, then?" DiMilo asked, heading over to a tray with a bottle of red wine on it.
   "We must assume so," Schepke confirmed with a nod, while the cardinal poured a glass. "I could have the building swept, but finding reliable people here is not easy, and..." And those able to do a proper sweep would then use the opportunity to plant their own bugs for whatever country they worked for – America, Britain, France, Israel, all were interested in what the Vatican knew.
   The Vatican, located in central Rome, is technically an independent country, hence Cardinal DiMilo's diplomatic status even in a country where religious convictions were frowned upon at best, and stamped into the earth at worst. Renato Cardinal DiMilo had been a priest for just over forty years, most of which time had been spent in the Vatican's foreign service. His language skills were not unknown within the confines of his own service, but rare even there, and damned rare in the outside world, where men and women took a great deal of time to learn languages. But DiMilo picked them up easily – so much so that it surprised him that others were unable to do so as well. In addition to being a priest, in addition to being a diplomat, DiMilo was also an intelligence officer – all ambassadors are supposed to be, but he was much more so than most. One of his jobs was to keep the Vatican – therefore the Pope – informed of what was happening in the world, so that the Vatican – therefore the Pope – could take action, or at least use influence in the proper direction.
   DiMilo knew the current Pope quite well. They'd been friends for years before his election to the chair of the Pontifex Maximus ("maximus" in this context meaning "chief," and "pontifex" meaning "bridge-builder," as a cleric was supposed to be the bridge between men and their God). DiMilo had served the Vatican in this capacity in seven countries. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, he'd specialized in Eastern European countries, where he'd learned to debate the merits of communism with its strongest adherents, mostly to their discomfort and his own amusement. Here would be different, the cardinal thought. It wasn't just the Marxist beliefs. This was a very different culture. Confucius had defined the place of a Chinese citizen two millennia before, and that place was different from what Western culture taught. There was a place for the teachings of Christ here, of course, as there was everywhere. But the local soil was not as fertile for Christianity as it was elsewhere. Local citizens who sought out Christian missionaries would do so out of curiosity, and once exposed to the gospel would find Christian beliefs more curious still, since they were so different from the nation's more ancient teachings. Even the more "normal" beliefs that were in keeping, more or less, with Chinese traditions, like the Eastern Spiritualist movement known as Falun Gong, had been ruthlessly, if not viciously, repressed. Cardinal DiMilo told himself that he'd come to one of the few remaining pagan nations, and one in which martyrdom was still a possibility for the lucky or luckless, depending on one's point of view. He sipped his wine, trying to decide what time his body thought it was, as opposed to what time is was by his watch. In either case, the wine tasted good, reminding him as it did of his home, a place which he'd never truly left, even in Moscow or Prague. Beijing, though – Beijing might be a challenge .

CHAPTER 8

Underlings and Underthings
 
 It wasn't the first time he'd done this. It was exciting in its way, and arousing, and marginally dangerous because of the time and place. Mainly it was an exercise in effective memory and the discerning eye. The hardest part was converting the English units to metric. The perfect female form was supposed to be 36-24-36, not 91.44-60.96-91.44.
   The last time he'd been in a place like this had been in the Beverly Center Mall in Los Angeles, buying for Maria Castillo, a voluptuous Latina who'd been delighted at his error, taking her waist for twenty-four rather than its true twenty-seven. You wanted to err on the low side in numbers, but probably the big side in letters. If you took a 36B chest to be a 34C, she wouldn't be mad, but if you took a twenty-four-inch waist for a twenty-eight-inch, she'd probably be pissed. Stress, Nomuri told himself with a shake of the head, came in many shapes and sizes. He wanted to get this right because he wanted Ming as a source, but he wanted her as a mistress, too, and that was one more reason not to make a mistake.
   The color was the easy part. Red. Of course, red. This was still a country in which red was the "good" color, which was convenient because red had always been the lively choice in women's underthings, the color of adventure and giggles and... looseness. And looseness served both his biological and professional purposes. He had other things to figure out, too. Ming was not tall, scarcely five feet – 151 centimeters or so, Nomuri thought, doing the conversion in his head. She was short but not really petite. There was no real obesity in China. People didn't overeat here, probably because of the lingering memory of times when food had not been in abundance and overeating was simply not possible. Ming would have been considered overweight in California, Chester thought, but that was just her body type. She was squat because she was short, and no amount of dieting or working out or makeup could change it. Her waist wouldn't be much less than twenty-seven inches. For her chest, 34B was about the best he could hope for... well, maybe 34C – no, he decided, B+ at most. So, a 34B bra, and medium shorts – panties – red silk, something feminine... something on the wild, whorish side of feminine, something that she could look into the mirror alone with and giggle... and maybe sigh at how different she looked wearing such things, and maybe smile, that special inward smile women had for such moments. The moment when you knew you had them – and the rest was just dessert.
   The best part of Victoria's Secret was the catalog, designed for men who really, and sensibly, wanted to buy the models themselves, despite the facial attitudes that sometimes made them look like lesbians on quaaludes – but with such bodies, a man couldn't have everything, could he? Fantasies, things of the mind. Nomuri wondered if the models really existed or were the products of computers. They could do anything with computers these days – make Rosie O'Donnell into Twiggy, or Cindy Crawford obsolete.
   Back to work, he told himself. This might be a place for fantasies, but not that one, not yet. Okay, it had to be sexy. It had to be something that would both amuse and excite Ming, and himself, too: That was all part of it. Nomuri took the catalog off the pile because it was a lot easier for him to see what he wanted in a filled rather than an unfilled condition. He turned pages and stopped dead on page 26. There was a black girl modeling it, and whatever genetic stew she'd come from must have had some fine ingredients, as her face would have appealed to a member of Hitler's SS just as much as Idi Amin. It was that sort of face. Better yet, she wore something called a Racerback bra with matching string bikini panties, and the color was just perfect, a red-purple that the Romans had once called Tyrrian Scarlet, the color on the toga stripe of members of the senatorial order, reserved by price and custom to the richest of the Roman nobility, not quite red, not quite purple. The bra material was satin and Lycra, and it closed in front, the easier for a girl to put it on, and the more interesting for a guy to take it off, his mind thought, as he headed over to the proper rack of clothing. Thirty-four-B, he thought. If too small, it would be all the more flattering... small or medium on the string bikini? Shit, he decided, get one of each. Just to be sure, he also got a no-wire triangle-pattern bra and thong panties in an orange-red color that the Catholic Church would call a mortal sin just for looking at. On impulse he got several additional panties on the assumption that they soiled more quickly than bras did, something he wasn't sure of despite being a field intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. They didn't tell you about such things at The Farm. He'd have to do a memo on that. It might give MP a chuckle in her seventh-floor office at Langley.
   One other thing, he thought. Perfume. Women liked perfume. You'd expect them to like it, especially here. The entire city of Beijing smelled like a steel mill, lots of coal dust and other pollutants in the air – as Pittsburgh had probably been at the turn of the last century – and the sad truth was that the Chinese didn't bathe as diligently as Californians did, and nowhere nearly as regularly as the Japanese. So, something that smelled nice...
   "Dream Angels," the brand was called. It came in a perfume spray, lotion, and other applications that he didn't understand, but he was sure Ming would, since she was a girl, and this was a quintessential girl thing. So, he bought some of that, too, using his NEC credit card to pay for it – his Japanese bosses would understand. There were skillfully arranged and choreographed sex tours that took Japanese salarymen to various places in Asia that catered to the sex trade. That was probably how AIDS had gotten to Japan, and why Nomuri used a condom for everything there except urinating. The total came to about 300 euros. The salesclerk wrapped everything and commented that the lady in his life was very lucky.
   She will be, Nomuri promised himself. The underthings he'd just bought her, well, the fabrics felt as smooth as flexible glass, and the colors would arouse a blind man. The only question was how they would affect a dumpy Chinese female secretary to a government minister. It wasn't as though he was trying to seduce Suzie Wong. Lian Ming was pretty ordinary rather than ordinarily pretty, but you never knew. Amy Irvin, his first conquest at the ripe old age of seventeen years and three months, had been pretty enough to inspire him – which meant, for a boy of that age, she had the requisite body parts, no beard like a Civil War general, and had showered in the previous month. At least Ming wouldn't be like so many American women now who'd visited the plastic SURGEON to have their tummies tucked, tits augmented to look like cereal bowls, and lips pumped full of chemicals until they looked like some strange kind of two-part fruit. What women did to attract men... and what men did in the hope of seducing them. What a potential energy source, Nomuri thought, as he turned the key in his company Nissan.
 
   What is it today, Ben?" Ryan asked his National Security Adviser. "CIA is trying to get a new operation underway in Beijing. For the moment it's called SORGE."
   "As in Richard SORGE?"
   "Correct."
   "Somebody must be ambitious. Okay, tell me about it."
   "There's an officer named Chester Nomuri, an illegal, he's in Beijing covered as a computer salesman for NEC. He's trying to make a move on a secretary, female, for a senior PRC minister, a guy named Fang Gan –"
   "Who is?" Ryan asked over his coffee mug.
   "Sort of a minister without portfolio, works with the Premier and the Foreign Minister."
   "Like that Zhang Han San guy?"
   "Not as senior, but yes. Looks like a very high-level go-fer type. Has contacts in their military and foreign ministries, good ideological credentials, sounding board for others in their Politburo. Anyway, Nomuri is trying to make a move on the girl."
   "Bond," Ryan observed in a studiously neutral voice, "James Bond. I know Nomuri's name. He did some good work for us in Japan when I had your job. This is for information only, not my approval?"
   "Correct, Mr. President. Mrs. Foley is running this one, and wanted to give you a heads-up."
   "Okay, tell MP that I'm interested in whatever take comes out of this." Ryan fought off the grimace that came from learning of another person's private – well, if not private, then his sex – life.
   "Yes, sir."

CHAPTER 9

Initial Results
   
Chester Nomuri had learned many things in his life, from his parents and his teachers and his instructors at The Farm, but one lesson he'd yet to learn was the value of patience, at least as it applied to his personal life. That didn't keep him from being cautious, however. That was why he'd sent his plans to Langley. It was embarrassing to have to inform a woman of his proposed sex life – MP was a brilliant field spook, but she still took her leaks sitting down, Nomuri reminded himself – but he didn't want the Agency to think that he was an alley cat on the government payroll, because the truth was, he liked his job. The excitement was at least as addictive as the cocaine that some of his college chums had played with.
   Maybe that's why Mrs. Foley liked him, Nomuri speculated. They were of a kind. Mary Pat, they said in the Directorate of Operations, was The Cowgirl. She'd swaggered through the streets of Moscow during the last days of the Cold War like Annie Fucking Oakley packing heat, and though she'd been burned by KGB's Second Chief Directorate, she hadn't given the fuckers anything, and whatever operation she'd run – this was still very, very secret – it must have been a son of a bitch, because she'd never gone back in the field but had scampered up the CIA career ladder like a hungry squirrel up an oak tree. The President thought she was smart, and if you wanted a friend in this business, the President of the United States was right up there, because he knew the spook business. Then came the stories about what President Ryan had once done. Bringing out the chairman of the fucking KGB? MP must have been part of that, the boys and girls of the DO all thought. All they knew even within the confines of CIA – except, of course, for those who needed to know (both of them, the saying went) – was what had been published in the press, and while the media generally knew jack shit about black operations, a CNN TV crew had put a camera in the face of a former KGB chairman now living in Winchester, Virginia. While he hadn't spilled many beans, the face of a man the Soviet government had declared dead in a plane crash was bean enough to make a very rich soup indeed. Nomuri figured he was working for a couple of real pros, and so he let them know what he was up to, even if that meant causing a possible blush for Mary Patricia Foley, Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency.
   He'd picked a Western-style restaurant. There were more than a few of them in Beijing now, catering both to the locals and to tourists who felt nostalgic for the taste of home (or who worried about their GI systems over here – not unreasonably, Nomuri thought). The quality wasn't anything close to a real American restaurant, but it was considerably more appealing than the deep-fried rat he suspected was on the menu of many Beijing eateries.
   He'd arrived first, and was relaxing with a cheap American bourbon when Ming came through the door. Nomuri waved in what he hoped was not an overly boyish way. She saw him do so, and her resulting smile was just about right, he thought. Ming was glad to see him, and that was step one in the plan for the evening. She made her way to his corner table in the back. He stood, showing a degree of gentlemanliness unusual in China, where women were nowhere near as valued as they were back home. Nomuri wondered if that would change, if all the killing of female babies could suddenly make Ming a valuable commodity, despite her plainness. He still couldn't get over the casual killing of children; he kept it in the front of his mind, just to keep clear who the good guys were in the world, and who the bad guys were.
   "It's so good to see you," he said with an engaging smile. "I was worried you might not meet me here."
   "Oh, really? Why?"
   "Well, your superior at work... I'm sure that he... well... needs you, I suppose is the polite way to put it," Nomuri said with a hesitant voice, delivering his rehearsed line pretty well, he thought. He had. The girl giggled a little.
   "Comrade Fang is over sixty-five," she said. "He is a good man, a good superior, and a fine minister, but he works long hours, and he is no longer a young man."
   Okay, so he fucks you, but not all that much, Nomuri interpreted that to mean. And maybe you'd like a little more, from somebody closer to your age, eh? Of course, if Fang was over sixty-five and still getting it on, then maybe he is worthy of some respect, Nomuri added to himself, then tossed the thought aside.
   "Have you eaten here before?" The place was called Vincenzo's, and pretended to be Italian. In fact the owner/operator was a half-breed Italian-Chinese from Vancouver, whose spoken Italian would have gotten him hit by the Mafia had he tried it in Palermo, or even Mulberry Street in Manhattan, but here in Beijing it seemed genuinely ethnic enough.
   "No," Ming replied, looking around at, to her, this most exotic of locations. Every table had an old wine bottle, its bottom wrapped in twine, and an old drippy red candle at the top. The tablecloth was checked white and red. Whoever had decorated this place had evidently seen too many old movies. That said, it didn't look anything like a local restaurant, even with the Chinese servers. Dark wood paneling, hooks near the door for hanging coats. It could have been in any East Coast city in America, where it would have been recognized as one of those old family Italian places, a mom-and-pop joint with good food and little flash. "What is Italian food like?"
   "At its best, Italian cooking is among the very finest in the world," Nomuri answered. "You've never had Italian food? Never at all? Then may I select for you?"
   Her response was girlish in its charm. Women were all the same. Treat them in the right way, and they turn into wax in your hand, to be kneaded and shaped to your will. Nomuri was starting to like this part of the job, and someday it might be useful in his personal personal life, too. He waved to the waiter, who came over with a subservient smile. Nomuri first of all ordered a genuine Italian white wine – strangely, the wine list here was actually first rate, and quite pricey to boot, of course – and, with a deep breath, fettuccine Alfredo, quintessential Italian heart-attack food. From looking at Ming, he figured that she'd not refuse rich food.
   "So, the new computer and printer systems continue to work out?"
   "Yes, and Minister Fang has praised me before the rest of the staff for choosing it. You have made me something of a hero, Comrade Nomuri."
   "I am pleased to hear that," the CIA officer replied, wondering if being called "comrade" was a good thing for the current mission or a bad one. "We are bringing out a new portable computer now, one you could take home with you, but which has the same power as your office mainframe, with all the same features and software, of course, even a modem for accessing the Internet."
   "Really? I get to do that so seldom. At work, you see, it is not encouraged for us to surf the 'Net, except when the Minister wants something specific."
   "Is that so? What 'Net interests does Minister Fang have?"
   "Mainly political commentary, and mainly in America and Europe. Every morning I print up various pieces from the newspapers, the Times of London, New York Times, Washington Post, and so on. The Minister especially likes to see what the Americans are thinking."
   "Not very much," Nomuri observed, as the wine arrived.
   "Excuse me?" Ming asked, getting him to turn back.
   "Hmph, oh, the Americans, they don't think very much. The shallowest people I have ever encountered. Loud, poorly educated, and their women..." Chet let his voice trail off.
   "What of their women, Comrade Nomuri?" Ming asked, virtually on command.
   "Ahh." He took a sip of the wine and nodded for the waiter to serve it properly. It was a pretty good one from Tuscany. "Have you ever seen the American toy, the Barbie doll?"
   "Yes, they are made here in China, aren't they?"
   "That is what every American woman wishes to be, hugely tall, with massive bosoms, a waist you can put your hands around. That is not a woman. It's a toy, a mannequin for children to play with. And about as intelligent as your average American woman. Do you think they have language skills, as you do? Consider: We now converse in English, a language native to neither of us, but we converse well, do we not?"
   "Yes," Ming agreed.
   "How many Americans speak Mandarin, do you suppose? Or Japanese? No, Americans have no education, no sophistication. They are a backward nation, and their women are very backward. They even go to SURGEONs to have their bosoms made bigger, like that stupid child's doll. It's comical to see them, especially to see them nude," he concluded with a dangle.
   "You have?" she asked, on cue.
   "Have what – you mean seen American women nude?" He got a welcome nod for his question. This was going well. Yes, Ming, I am a man of the world. "Yes, I have. I lived there for some months, and it was interesting in a grotesque sort of way. Some of them can be very sweet, but not like a decent Asian woman with proper proportions, and womanly hair that doesn't come from some cosmetics bottle. And manners. Americans lack the manners of an Asian."
   "But there are many of our people over there. Didn't you...?"
   "Meet one? No, the round-eyes keep them for themselves. I suppose their men appreciate real women, even while their own women turn into something else." He reached to pour some more wine into Ming's glass. "But in fairness, there are some things Americans are good at."
   "Such as?" she asked. The wine was already loosening her tongue.
   "I will show you later. Perhaps I owe you an apology, but I have taken the liberty of buying you some American things."
   "Really?" Excitement in her eyes. This was really going well, Nomuri told himself. He'd have to go easier on the wine. Well, half a bottle, two of these glasses, wouldn't hurt him in any way. How did that song go... It's okay to do it on the first date... Well, he didn't have to worry about much in the way of religious convictions or inhibitions here, did he? That was one advantage to communism, wasn't it?
   The fettuccine arrived right on time, and surprisingly it was pretty good. He watched her eyes as she took her first forkful. (Vincenzo's used silverware instead of chopsticks, which was a better idea for fettuccine Alfredo anyway) Her dark eyes were wide as the noodles entered her mouth.
   "This is fine... lots of eggs have gone into it. I love eggs," she confided.
   They're your arteries, honey, the case officer thought. He watched her inhale the first bit of the fettuccine. Nomuri reached across the table to top off her wine glass once more. She scarcely noticed, she attacked her pasta so furiously.
   Halfway through the plate of pasta, she looked up. "I have never had so fine a dinner," Ming told him.
   Nomuri responded with a warm grin. "I am so pleased that you are enjoying yourself." Wait'll you see the drawers I just got you, honey.
 
   Attention to orders!"
   Major General Marion Diggs wondered what his new command would bring him. The second star on his shoulder... well, he told himself that he could feel the additional weight, but the truth was that he couldn't, not really. His last five years in the uniform of his country had been interesting. The first commander of the reconstituted 10th Armored Cavalry Regiment – the Buffalo Soldiers – he'd made that ancient and honored regiment into the drill masters of the Israeli army, turning the Negev Desert into another National Training Center, and in two years he'd hammered every Israeli brigade commander into the ground, then built them up again, tripling their combat effectiveness by every quantifiable measure, so that now the Israeli troopers' swagger was actually justified by their skills. Then he'd gone off to the real NTC in the high California desert, where he'd done the same thing for his own United States Army. He'd been there when the Bio War had begun, with his own 11th ACR, the famous Blackhorse Cavalry, and a brigade of National Guardsmen, whose unexpected use of advanced battlefield-control equipment had surprised the hell out of the Blackhorse and their proud commander, Colonel Al Hamm. The whole bunch had deployed to Saudi, along with the 10th from Israel, and together they'd given a world-class bloody nose to the army of the short-lived United Islamic Republic. After acing his colonel-command, he'd really distinguished himself as a one-star, and that was the gateway to the second sparkling silver device on his shoulder, and also the gateway to his new command, known variously as "First Tanks," "Old Ironsides," or "America's Armored Division." It was the 1st Armored Division, based in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, one of the few remaining heavy divisions under the American flag.
   Once there had been a lot of them. Two full corps of them right here in Germany, 1st and 3rd Armored, 3rd and 8th Infantry, plus a pair of Armored Cavalry Regiments, 2nd and 11th, and the POMCUS sites – monster equipment warehouses – for stateside units like the 2nd Armored, and the 1st Infantry, the Big Red One out of Fort Riley, Kansas, which could redeploy to Europe just as fast as the airlines could deliver them, there to load up their equipment and move out. All that force – and it was a whole shitload of force, Diggs reflected – had been part of NATO's commitment to defend Western Europe from a country called the Soviet Union and its mirror-image Warsaw Pact, huge formations whose objective was the Bay of Biscay, or so the operations and intelligence officers in Mons, Belgium, had always thought. And quite a clash it would have been. Who would have won? Probably NATO, Diggs thought, depending on political interference, and command skills on both sides of the equation.
   But, now, the Soviet Union was no more. And with it was also gone the need for the presence of V and VII Corps in Western Germany, and so, 1st Armored was about the only vestige left of what had once been a vast and powerful force. Even the cavalry regiments were gone, the 11th to be the OpFor – "opposing force," or Bad Guys – at the National Training Center and the 2nd "Dragoon" Regiment essentially disarmed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, trying to make up new doctrine for weaponless troopers. That left Old Ironsides, somewhat reduced in size from its halcyon days, but still a formidable force. Exactly whom Diggs might fight in the event hostilities sprang unexpectedly from the ground, he had no idea at the moment.
   That, of course, was the job of his G-2 Intelligence Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Richmond, and training for it was the problem assigned to his G-3 Operations Officer, Colonel Duke Masterman, whom Diggs had dragged kicking and screaming from the Pentagon. It was not exactly unknown in the United States Army for a senior officer to collect about him younger men whom he'd gotten to know on the way up. It was his job to look after their careers, and their jobs to take care of their mentor – called a "rabbi" in the NYPD or a "Sea Daddy" in the United States Navy – in a relationship that was more father/son than anything else. Neither Diggs nor Richmond nor Masterman expected much more than interesting professional time in the 1st Armored Division, and that was more than enough. They'd seen the elephant – a phrase that went back in the United States Army to the Civil War to denote active participation in combat operations – and killing people with modern weapons wasn't exactly a trip to Disney World. A quiet term of training and sand-table exercises would be plenty, they all thought. Besides, the beer was pretty good in Germany.
   "Well, Mary, it's all yours," outgoing Major General (promotable) Sam Goodnight said after his formal salute. "Mary" was a nickname for Diggs that went back to West Point, and he was long since past getting mad about it. But only officers senior to him could use that moniker, and there weren't all that many of them anymore, were there?
   "Sam, looks like you have the kids trained up pretty well," Diggs told the man he'd just relieved.
   "I'm especially pleased with my helicopter troops. After the hoo-rah with the Apaches down in Yugoslavia, we decided to get those people up to speed. It took three months, but they're ready to eat raw lion now – after they kill the fuckers with their pocket knives."
   "Who's the boss rotor-head?"
   "Colonel Dick Boyle. You'll meet him in a few minutes. He's been there and done that, and he knows how to run his command."
   "Nice to know," Diggs allowed, as they boarded the World War II command car to troop the line, a goodbye ride for Sam Goodnight and welcome for Mary Diggs, whose service reputation was as one tough little black son of a bitch. His doctorate in management from the University of Minnesota didn't seem to count, except to promotion boards, and whatever private company might want to hire him after retirement, a possibility he had to consider from time to time now, though he figured two stars were only about half of what he had coming. Diggs had fought in two wars and comported himself well in both cases. There were many ways to make a career in the armed services, but none so effective as successful command on the field of battle, because when you got down to it, the Army was about killing people and breaking things as efficiently as possible. It wasn't fun, but it was occasionally necessary. You couldn't allow yourself to lose sight of that. You trained your soldiers so that if they woke up the next morning in a war, they'd know what to do and how to go about it, whether their officers were around to tell them or not.
   "How about artillery?" Diggs asked, as they drove past the assembled self-propelled 155-mm howitzers.
   "Not a problem there, Mary. In fact, no problems anywhere. Your brigade commanders all were there in 1991, mainly as company commanders or battalion S-3s. Your battalion commanders were almost all platoon leaders or company XOs. They're pretty well trained up. You'll see," Goodnight promised.
   Diggs knew it would all be true. Sam Goodnight was a Major General (promotable), which meant he was going to get star number three as soon as the United States Senate got around to approving the next bill with all the flag officers on it, and that couldn't be rushed. Even the President couldn't do that. Diggs had screened for his second star six months earlier, just before leaving Fort Irwin, to spend a few months parked in the Pentagon – an abbreviated "jointness" tour, as it was called-before moving back to Germany. The division was slated to run a major exercise against the Bundeswehr in three weeks. First AD vs. four German brigades, two tanks, two mechanized infantry, and that promised to be major test of the division. Well, that was something for Colonel Masterman to worry about. It was his neck on the line. Duke had come to Germany a week early to meet with his also-outgoing predecessor as divisional operations officer and go over the exercise's rules and assumptions. The German commander in the exercise was Generalmajor Siegfried Model. Siggy, as he was known to his colleagues, was descended from a pretty good Wehrmacht commander from the old-old days, and it was also said of him that he regretted the fall of the USSR, because part of him wanted to take the Russian Army on and rape it. Well, such things had been said about a lot of German, and a few American senior officers as well, and in nearly every case it was just that – talk, because nobody who'd seen one battlefield ever yearned to see another.
   Of course, Diggs thought, there weren't many Germans left who had ever seen a battlefield.
   "They look good, Sam," Diggs said, as they passed the last static display.
   "It's a hell of a tough job to leave, Marion. Damn." The man was starting to fight back tears, which was one way of telling who the really tough ones were in this line of work, Diggs knew. Walking away from the command of soldiers was like leaving your kid in the hospital, or maybe even harder. They'd all been Sam's kids, and now they would be his kids, Diggs thought. On first inspection, they looked healthy and smart enough.
 
   Yeah, Arnie," President Ryan said. His voice betrayed his emotions more than a growl or a shout could have.
   "Nobody ever said the job was fun, Jack. Hell, I don't know why you're complaining. You don't have to schmooze people to raise money for your reelection campaign, do you? You don't have to kiss ass. All you have to do is your work, and that saves you a good hour – maybe an hour and a half – per day to watch TV and play with your kids." If there was anything Arnie loved, Ryan thought, it was telling him (Ryan) how easy he had it in this fucking job.
   "But I still spend half my day doing unproductive shit instead of doing what I'm paid to do."
   "Only half, and still he complains," Arnie told the ceiling. "Jack, you'd better start liking this stuff, or it'll eat you up. This is the fun part of being President. And, hell, man, you were a government employee for fifteen years before you came here. You should love being unproductive!"
   Ryan nearly laughed, but managed to contain himself. If there was anything Arnie knew how to do, it was to soften his lessons with humor. That could be annoying as hell.
   "Fine, but exactly what do I promise them?"
   "You promise that you'll support this dam and barge-canal scheme."
   "But it's probably a waste of money."
   "No, it is not a waste of money. It provides employment in this two-state area, which is of interest to not one, not two, but three United States Senators, all of whom support you steadfastly on the Hill, and whom you, therefore, must support in turn. You reward them for helping you by helping them get reelected. And you help them get reelected by allowing them to generate about fifteen thousand construction jobs in the two states."
   "And screw with a perfectly good river for" – Ryan checked the briefing folder on his desk – "three and a quarter billion dollars... Jesus H. Christ," he finished with a long breath.
   "Since when have you been a tree-hugger? Cutthroat trout don't vote, Jack. And even if the barge traffic up the river doesn't develop, you'll still have one hell of a recreation area for people to water-ski and fish, toss in a few new motels, maybe a golf course or two, fast-food places..."
   "I don't like saying things and doing things I don't believe in," the President tried next.
   "For a politician, that is like colorblindness or a broken leg: a serious handicap," van Damm noted. "That's part of the job, too. Nikita Khrushchev said it: 'Politicians are the same all over the world, we build bridges where there aren't any rivers.' "
   "So wasting money is something we're supposed to do? Arnie, it isn't our money! It's the people's money. It belongs to them, and we don't have the right to piss it away!"
   "Right? Who ever said this is about what's right?" Arnie asked patiently. "Those three senators who're" – he checked his watch – "on their way down here right now got you your defense appropriations bill a month ago, in case you didn't remember, and you may need their votes again. Now, that appropriations bill was important, wasn't it?"
   "Yes, of course it was," President Ryan responded with guarded eyes.
   "And getting that bill through was the right thing for the country, wasn't it?" van Damm asked next.
   A long sigh. He could see where this was going. "Yes, Arnie, it was.
   "And so, doing this little thing does help you to do the right thing for the country, doesn't it?"
   "I suppose." Ryan hated conceding such things, but arguing with Arnie was like arguing with a Jesuit. You were almost always outgunned.
   "Jack, we live in an imperfect world. You can't expect to be doing the right thing all the time. The best you can expect to do is to make the right thing happen most of the time – actually, you will do well to have the right things outbalance the not-so-right things over the long term. Politics is the art of compromise, the art of getting the important things you want, while giving to others the less important things they want, and doing so in such a way that you're the one doing the giving, not them doing the taking – because that's what makes you the boss. You must understand that." Arnie paused and took a sip of coffee. "Jack, you try hard, and you're learning pretty well – for a fourth-grader in graduate school – but you have to learn this stuff to the point that you don't even think about it. It has to become as natural as zipping your pants after you take a piss. You still have no idea how well you're doing." And maybe that's a good thing, Arnie added to himself alone.
   "Forty percent of the people don't think I'm doing a good job."
   "Fifty-nine percent do, and some of those forty percent voted for you anyway!"
   The election had been a remarkable session for write-in candidates, and Mickey Mouse had done especially well, Ryan reminded himself.
   "What am I doing to offend those others?" Ryan demanded.
   "Jack, if the Gallup Poll had been around in ancient Israel, Jesus would probably have gotten discouraged and gone back to carpentry"
   Ryan punched a button on his desk phone. "Ellen, I need you."
   "Yes, Mr. President," Mrs. Sumter replied to their not-so-secret code. Thirty seconds later, she appeared through the door with her hand at her side. Approaching the President's desk, she extended her hand with a cigarette in it. Jack took it and lit it with a butane lighter, removing a glass ashtray from a desk drawer.
   "Thanks, Ellen."
   "Surely." She withdrew. Every other day Ryan would slip her a dollar bill to pay off his cigarette debt. He was getting better at this, mooching usually no more than three smokes on a stressful day.
   "Just don't let the media catch you doing that," Arnie advised.
   "Yeah, I know. I can get it on with a secretary right here in the Oval Office, but if I get caught smoking, that's like goddamned child abuse." Ryan took a long hit on the Virginia Slim, also knowing what his wife would say if she caught him doing this. "If I were king, then I'd make the goddamned rules!"
   "But you're not, and you don't," Arnie pointed out.
   "My job is to preserve, protect, and defend the country –"
   "No, your job is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which is a whole lot more complicated. Remember, to the average citizen 'preserve, protect, and defend' means that they get paid every week, and they feed their families, get a week at the beach every year, or maybe Disney World, and football every Sunday afternoon in the fall. Your job is to keep them content and secure, not just from foreign armies, but from the general vicissitudes of life. The good news is that if you do that, you can be in this job another seven-plus years and retire with their love."
   "You left out the legacy part."
   That made Arnie's eyes flare a bit. "Legacy? Any president who worries too much about that is offending God, and that's almost as dumb as offending the Supreme Court."
   "Yeah, and when the Pennsylvania case gets there –"
   Arnie held up his hands as though protecting against a punch. "Jack, I'll worry about that when the time comes. You didn't take my advice on the Supreme Court, and so far you've been lucky, but if – no, when that blows up in your face, it won't be pretty." Van Damm was already planning the defense strategy for that.
   "Maybe, but I won't worry about it. Sometimes you just let the chips fall where they may."
   "And sometimes you look out to make sure the goddamned tree doesn't land on you."
   Jack's intercom buzzed just as he put out the cigarette. It was Mrs. Sumter's voice. "The senators just came through the West Entrance."
   "I'm out of here," Arnie said. "Just remember, you will support the dam and canal on that damned river, and you value their support. They'll be there when you need them, Jack. Remember that. And you do need them. Remember that, too."
   "Yes, Dad," Ryan said.
 
   You walked here?" Nomuri asked, with some surprise.
   "It is only two kilometers," Ming replied airily. Then she giggled. "It was good for my appetite."
   Well, you went through that fettuccine like a shark through a surfer, Nomuri thought. I suppose your appetite wasn't hurt very much. But that was unfair. He'd thought this evening through very carefully, and if she'd fallen into his trap, it was his fault more than hers, wasn't it? And she did have a certain charm, he decided as she got into his company car. They'd already agreed that they'd come to his apartment so that he could give her the present he'd already advertised. Now Nomuri was getting a little excited. He'd planned this for more than a week, and the thrill of the chase was the thrill of the chase, and that hadn't changed in tens of thousands of years of male humanity... and now he wondered what was going on in her head. She'd had two stiff glasses of wine with the meal – and she'd passed on dessert. She'd jumped right to her feet when he'd suggested going to his place. Either his trap had been superbly laid, or she was more than ready herself.... The drive was short, and it passed without words. He pulled into his numbered parking place, wondering if anyone would take note of the fact that he had company today. He had to assume that he was watched here. The Chinese Ministry of State Security probably had an interest in all foreigners who lived in Beijing, since all were potential spies. Strangely, his apartment was not in the same part of the building as the Americans and other Westerners. It wasn't overt segregation or categorization, but it had worked out that way, the Americans largely in one section, along with most of the Europeans... and the Taiwanese, too, Nomuri realized. And so, whatever surveillance existed was probably over on that end of the complex. A good thing now for Ming, and later, perhaps, a good thing for himself.
   His place was a corner second-story walk-up in a Chinese interpretation of an American garden-apartment complex. The apartment was spacious enough, about a hundred square meters, and was probably not bugged. At least he'd found no microphones when he'd moved in and hung his pictures, and his sweep gear had discovered no anomalous signals – his phone had to be bugged, of course, but just because it was bugged didn't mean that there was somebody going over the tapes every day or even every week. MSS was just one more government agency, and in China they were probably little different from those in America, or France for that matter, lazy, underpaid people who worked as little as possible and served a bureaucracy that didn't encourage singular effort. They probably spent most of their time smoking the wretched local cigarettes and jerking off.
   He had an American Yale lock on the door, with a pick-resistant tumbler and a sturdy locking mechanism. If asked about this, he'd explain that when living in California for NEC, he'd been burglarized – the Americans were such lawless and uncivilized people – and he didn't want that to happen again.
   "So, this is the home of a capitalist," Ming observed, looking around. The walls were covered with prints, mainly movie posters.
   "Yes, well, it's the home of a salaryman. I don't really know if I'm a capitalist or not, Comrade Ming," he added, with a smile and arched eyebrow. He pointed to his couch. "Please have a seat. Can I get you anything?"
   "Another glass of wine, perhaps?" she suggested, spotting and then looking at the wrapped box on the chair opposite the couch.
   Nomuri smiled. "That I can do." He headed off into the kitchen, where he had a bottle of California Chardonnay chilling in the fridge. Popping the cork was easy enough, and he headed back to the living room with two glasses, one of which he handed to his guest. "Oh," he said then. "Yes, this is for you, Ming." With that he handed over the box, wrapped fairly neatly in red – of course – gift paper.
   "May I open it now?"
   "Certainly." Nomuri smiled, in as gentlemanly a lustful way as he could manage. "Perhaps you would want to unwrap it, well..."
   "Are you saying in your bedroom?"
   "Excuse me. just that you might wish some privacy when you open it. Please pardon me if I am too forward."
   The mirth in her eyes said it all. Ming took a deep sip of her white wine and walked off into that room and closed the door. Nomuri took a small sip of his own and sat down on the couch to await developments. If he'd chosen unwisely, she might throw the box at him and storm out... not much chance of that, he thought. More likely, even if she found him too forward, she'd keep the present and the box, finish her wine, make small talk, and then take her leave in thirty minutes or so, just to show good manners – effectively the same result without the overt insult – and Nomuri would have to search for another recruitment prospect. No, the best outcome would be...
   ...the door opened, and there she stood with a small, impish smile. The boiler suit was gone. Instead she wore the red-orange bra and panties set, the one with the front closure. She stood there holding her wine glass in salute, and it looked as if she'd taken another sip of her drink, maybe to work up her courage... or to loosen her inhibitions.
   Nomuri found himself suddenly apprehensive. He took another drink himself before standing, and he walked slowly, and a little uneasily, to the bedroom doorway.
   Her eyes, he saw, were a little uneasy themselves, a little frightened, and with luck maybe his were, too, because women everywhere liked their men to be just a little vulnerable. Maybe John Wayne hadn't gotten all the action he wanted, Nomuri thought quickly. Then he smiled.
   "I guessed right on the size."
   "Yes, and it feels wonderful, like a second skin, smooth and silky." Every woman has it, Nomuri realized: the ability to smile and, regardless of the exterior, show the woman within, often a perfect woman, full of tenderness and desire, demureness and coquetry, and all you had to do...
   ...his hand came out and touched her face as gently as his slight shaking allowed. What the hell was this? he demanded of himself. Shaking? James Bond's hands never shook. This was the time when he was supposed to scoop her up in his arms and stride in a masterful way off to the bed, there to possess her like Vince Lombardi taking over a football team, like George Patton leading an attack. But for all his triumphal anticipation of this moment, things were different from what he'd expected. Whoever or whatever Ming was, she was giving herself to him. There was no more in her than that – that was all she had. And she was giving it to him.
   He bent his head down to kiss her, and there he caught the scent of the Dream Angel perfume, and somehow it suited the moment perfectly. Her arms came around him sooner than he'd expected. His hands replicated her gesture, and he found that her skin was smooth, like oiled silk, and his hands rubbed up and down of their own accord. He felt something strange on his chest and looked down to see her small hands undoing his buttons, and then her eyes looked into his, and her face was no longer plain. He unbuttoned his own cuffs, and she forced his shirt off, down his back, then lifted his T-shirt over his head or tried to, for her arms were too short to make it quite all the way – and then he hugged her tighter, feeling the silklike artificial fibers of her new bra rub on his hairless chest. It was then that his hug became harder, more insistent, and his kiss harder on her mouth, and he took her face in his hands and looked hard into her dark, suddenly deep eyes, and what he saw was woman.
   Her hands moved and unfastened his belt and slacks, which fell to his ankles. He nearly fell himself when he moved one leg, but Ming caught him and both laughed a little as he lifted his feet clear of his loafers and the slacks, and with that they both took a step toward the bed. Ming took another and turned, displaying herself for him. He'd underestimated the girl. Her waist was a full four inches slimmer than he'd thought – must be the damned boiler suit she wore to work, Nomuri thought at once – and her breasts filled the bra to perfection. Even the awful haircut seemed right just now, somehow fitting the amber skin and slanted eyes.
   What came next was both easy and very, very hard. Nomuri reached out to her side, pulling her close, but not too close. Then he let his hand wander across her chest, for the first time feeling her breast through the gossamer fabric of the bra, at the same time watching her eyes closely for a reaction. There was little of that, though her eyes did seem to relax, perhaps even smile just a little at his touch, and then came the obligatory next step. With both hands, he unfastened the front closure of the bra. Instantly Ming's hands dropped to cover herself. What did that mean? the CIA officer wondered, but then her hands dropped and she pulled him to her, and their bodies met and his head came down to kiss her again, and his hands slid the bra straps off her arms and onto the floor. There was little left to be done, and both, so it seemed, advanced with a combination of lust and fear. Her hands went down and loosened the elastic band of his briefs, with her eyes now locked on his, and this time she smiled, a for-real smile that made him blush, because he was as ready as he needed to be, and then her hands pushed down on the briefs, and all that left was his socks, and then it was his turn to kneel and pull down on the red silklike panties. She kicked them loose and each stood apart to inspect the other. Her breasts were about a large B, Nomuri thought, the nipples brown as potting soil. Her waist was not nearly model-thin, but a womanly contrast with both the hips and upper body. Nomuri took a step and then took her hand and walked her to the bed, laying her down with a gentle kiss, and for this moment he was not an intelligence officer for his country.

CHAPTER 10

Lessons of the Trade
   
The pathway started in Nomuri's apartment, and from there went to a web site established in Beijing, notionally for Nippon Electric Company, but the site had been designed for NEC by an American citizen who worked for more than one boss, one of whom was a front operated by and for the Central Intelligence Agency. The precise address point for Nomuri's e-mail was then accessible to the CIA's Beijing station chief, who, as a matter of fact, didn't know anything about Nomuri. That was a security measure to which he would probably have objected, but which he would have understood as a characteristic of Mary Patricia Foley's way of running the Directorate of Operations – and besides which, Station Beijing hadn't exactly covered itself with glory in recruiting senior PRC officials to be American agents-in-place.
   The message the station chief downloaded was just gibberish to him, scrambled letters that might as easily have been typed by a chimpanzee in return for a bunch of bananas at some research university, and he took no note of it, just super-encrypting on his own in-house system called TAPDANCE and cross-loading it to an official government communications network that went to a communications satellite, to be downloaded at Sunnyvale, California, then uploaded yet again, and downloaded at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. From there the message went by secure fiber-optic landline to CIA headquarters at Langley, and then first of all into Mercury, the Agency's communications center, where the Station Beijing super-encryption was stripped away, revealing the original gibberish, and then cross-loaded one last time to Mrs. Foley's personal computer terminal, which was the only one with the encryption system and daily key-selection algorithm for the counterpart system on Chet Nomuri's laptop, which was called INTERCRYPT. MP was doing other things at the time, and took twenty minutes to log into her own system and note the arrival of a SORGE message. That piqued her interest at once. She executed the command to decrypt the message, and got gibberish, then realized (not for the first time) that Nomuri was on the other side of the date line, and had therefore used a different key sequence. So, adjust the date for tomorrow... and, yes! She printed a hard copy of the message for her husband, and then saved the message to her personal hard drive, automatically encrypting it along the way. From there, it was a short walk to Ed's office.
   "Hey, baby," the DCI said, without looking up. Not too many people walked into his office without announcement. The news had to be good. MP had a beaming smile as she handed the paper over.
   "Chet got laid last night!" the DDO told the DCI.
   "Am I supposed to break out a cigar?" the Director of Central Intelligence asked. His eyes scanned the message.
   "Well, it's a step forward."
   "For him, maybe," Ed Foley responded with a twinkling eye. "I suppose you can get pretty horny on that sort of assignment, though I never had that problem myself." The Foleys had always worked the field as a married couple, and had gone through The Farm together. It had saved the senior Foley from all the complications that James Bond must have encountered.
   "Eddie, you can be such a mudge!"
   That made the DCI look up. "Such a what?"
   "Curmudgeon!" she growled. "This could be a real breakthrough. This little chippy is personal secretary to Fang Gan. She knows all sorts of stuff we want to know."
   "And Chet got to try her out last night. Honey, that's not the same thing as recruitment. We don't have an agent-in-place quite yet," he reminded his wife.
   "I know, I know, but I have a feeling about this."
   "Woman's intuition?" Ed asked, scanning the message again for any sordid details, but finding only cold facts, as though The Wall Street Journal had covered the seduction. Well, at least Nomuri had a little discretion. No rigid quivering rod plunging into her warm moist sheath – though Nomuri was twenty-nine, and at that age the rod tended to be pretty rigid. Chet was from California, wasn't he? the DCI wondered. So, probably not a virgin, maybe even a competent lover, though on the first time with anybody you mainly wanted to see if the pieces fit together properly – they always did, at least in Ed Foley's experience, but you still wanted to check and see. He remembered Robin Williams's takeoff on Adam and Eve, "Better stand back, honey. I don't know how big this thing gets!" The combination of careful conservatism and out-of-control wishful thinking common to the male of the species. "Okay, so, what are you going to reply? 'How many orgasms did the two of you have'?" "God damn it, Ed!" The pin in the balloon worked, the DCI saw. He could almost see steam coming out of his wife's pretty ears. "You know damned well what I'm going to suggest. Let the relationship blossom and ease her into talking about her job. It'll take a while, but if it works it'll be worth the wait."
   And if it doesn't work, it's not a bad deal for Chester, Ed Foley thought. There weren't many professions in the world in which getting sex was part of the job that earned you promotions, were there?
   "Mary?"
   "Yes, Ed?"
   "Does it strike you as a little odd that the kid's reporting his sex life to us? Does it make you blush a little?"
   "It would if he were telling me face-to-face. The e-mail method is best for this, I think. Less human content."
   "You're happy with the security of the information transfer?"
   "Yeah, we've been through this. The message could just be sensitive business information, and the encryption system is very robust. The boys and girls at Fort Meade can break it, but it's brute force every time, and it takes up to a week, even after they make the right guesses on how the encryption system works. The PRC guys would have to go from scratch. The trapdoor in the ISP was very cleverly designed, and the way we tap into it should also be secure – even then, just because an embassy phone taps into an ISP doesn't mean anything. We have a consular official downloading pornography from a local Web site through that ISP as another cover, in case anybody over there gets real clever." That had been carefully thought through. It would be something that one would wish to be covert, something the counterintelligence agency in Beijing would find both understandable and entertaining in its own right, if and when they cracked into it.
   "Anything good?" Ed Foley asked, again, just to bedevil his wife.
   "Not unless you're into child abuse. Some of the subjects for this site are too young to vote. If you downloaded it over here, the FBI might come knocking on your door."
   "Capitalism really has broken out over there, eh?"
   "Some of the senior Party officials seem to like this sort of thing. I guess when you're pushing eighty, you need something special to help jump-start the motor." Mary Pat had seen some of the photographs, and once had been plenty. She was a mother, and all of those photographic subjects had been infants once, strange though that might seem to a subscriber to that Web site. The abusers of girls must have thought that they all sprang into life with their legs spread and a welcoming look in their doll-child faces. Not quite, the DDO thought, but her job wasn't to be a clergyman. Sometimes you had to do business with such perverts, because they had information which her country needed. If you were lucky, and the information was really useful, then you often arranged for them to defect, to live in the United States, where they could live and enjoy their perversions to some greater or lesser degree, after being briefed on the law, and the consequences of breaking it. Afterward there was always a bathroom and soap to wash your hands. It was a need of which she'd availed herself more than once. One of the problems with espionage was that you didn't always do business with the sort of people whom you'd willingly invite into your home. But it wasn't about Miss Manners. It was about getting information that your country needed to guard its strategic interests, and even to prevail in war, if it came to that. Lives were often at stake, either directly or indirectly. And so, you did business with anyone who had such information, even if he or she wasn't exactly a member of the clergy.
   "Okay, babe. Keep me posted," Foley told his wife.
   "Will do, honey-bunny." The DDO headed back to her own office. There she drew up her reply to Nomuri: MESSAGE RECEIVED. KEEP US POSTED ON YOUR PROGRESS. MP. ENDS.
 
   The reply came as a relief to Nomuri when he woke and checked his e-mail. It was a disappointment that he didn't wake up with company, but to expect that would have been unrealistic. Ming would have been ill-advised to spend the night anywhere but in her own bed. Nomuri couldn't even drive her back. She'd just left, carrying her presents – well, wearing some of them – for the walk back to her own shared flat where, Nomuri fervently hoped, she wouldn't discuss her evening's adventures with her roommates. You never knew about women and how they talked. It wasn't all that dissimilar with some men, Nomuri remembered from college, where some of his chums had talked at length about their conquests, as though they'd slain a dragon with a Popsicle stick. Nomuri had never indulged in this aural spectator sport. Either he'd had a spy's mentality even then, or he'd been somehow imbued with the dictum that a gentleman didn't kiss and tell. But did women? That was a mystery to him, like why it was that women seemed to go to the bathroom in pairs – he'd occasionally joked that that was when they'd held their "union meetings." Anyway, women talked more than men did. He was sure of that. And while they kept many secrets from men, how many did they keep from other women? Jesus, all that had to happen was for her to tell a roomie that she'd had her brains fucked out by a Japanese salaryman, and if that roomie was an informant to the MSS, Ming would get a visit from a security officer, who at the very least would counsel her never to see Nomuri again. More likely, the counseling would involve a demand to send that degenerate American bourgeois trash (the Victoria's Secret underthings) back to him, plus a threat to lose her ministry job if she ever appeared on the same street with him again. And that also meant that he'd be tailed and observed and investigated by the MSS, and that was something he had to take seriously. They didn't have to catch him committing espionage. This was a communist country, where due process of law was a bourgeois concept unworthy of serious consideration, and civil rights were limited to doing what one was told. As a foreigner doing business in the PRC, he might get some easiness of treatment, but not all that much.
   So, he hadn't just gotten his rocks off, Nomuri told himself, past the delightful memories of a passionate evening. He'd crossed a wide red line in the street, and his safety depended entirely upon on how discreet Ming was. He hadn't – could not have – warned her to keep her mouth shut about their time together. Such things weren't said, because they added a level of gravity to what was supposed to have been a time of joy and friendship... or even something potentially bigger than friendship. Women thought in such terms, Chester reminded himself, and for that reason he might see a pointed nose and whiskers the next time he looked in the mirror, but this was business, not personal, he told himself as he shut down his computer.
   Except for one small thing. He'd had sexual relations with an intelligent and not entirely unattractive young female human being, and the problem was that when you gave a little bit of your heart away, you never really got it back. And his heart, Nomuri belatedly realized, was distantly connected to his dick. He wasn't James Bond. He could not embrace a woman as a paid whore embraced a man. It just wasn't in him to be that sort of heartless swine. The good news was that for this reason he could stand to look in a mirror for the time being. The bad news was that this ability might be short-lived, if he treated Ming as a thing and not a person.
   Nomuri needed advice on how to feel about this operation, and he didn't have a place to get it. It wasn't the sort of thing to e-mail to Mary Pat or to one of the pshrinks the Agency employed for counseling DO people who needed a little guidance with their work. This sort of thing had to be handled face-to-face with a real person, whose body language you could read and whose tone of voice would deliver its own content. No, email wasn't the medium he needed right now. He needed to fly to Tokyo and meet a senior officer of the Directorate of Operations who could counsel him on how to handle things. But if the guy told him to cut himself off from intimate contact with Ming, then what would he do? Nomuri asked himself. It wasn't as though he had a girlfriend of any kind, and he had his needs for intimacy, too – and besides, if he cut her off, what effect would that have on his potential, prospective agent? You didn't check your humanity by the door when you joined up with the Agency, despite what all the books said and the public expectations were. All the chuckles over beer during the nights after training sessions seemed a distant thing now, and all the expectations he and his colleagues had had back then. They'd been so far off the mark, in spite of what their training officers had told them. He'd been a child then, and to some extent even in Japan, but suddenly he was a man, alone in a country that was at best suspicious, and at worst hostile to him and his country. Well, it was in her hands now, and that was something he couldn't change.
 
   Her co-workers noted a slight difference in their colleague. She smiled a little more, and in a somewhat different way. Something good must have happened to her, some of them thought, and for this they rejoiced, albeit in a reserved and private way. If Ming wished to share the experience with them, all well and good, and if not, that, too, was okay with them, because some things were private, even among a group of women who shared virtually everything, including stories of their minister and his fumbling, lengthy, and occasionally futile efforts at lovemaking. He was a wise man, and usually a gentle one, though as a boss he had his bad points. But Ming would notice none of those today. Her smile was sweeter than ever, and her eyes twinkled like little diamonds, the rest of the admin/secretarial staff all thought. They'd all seen it before, though not with Ming, whose love life had been an abbreviated one, and whom the minister liked a little too much, but whom he serviced imperfectly and too seldom. She sat at her computer to do her correspondence and translations of Western news articles that might be of interest to the Minister. Ming had the best English skills of anyone in this corner of the building, and the new computer system worked superbly. The next step, so the story went, was a computer into which you'd just speak, making the characters appear by voice command, sure to become the curse of every executive secretary in the world, because it would largely make them obsolete. Or maybe not. The boss couldn't fuck a computer, could he? Not that Minister Fang was all that intrusive in his demands. And the perks he delivered in return weren't bad at all.
   Her first morning assignment took the customary ninety minutes, after which she printed up the resulting copy and stapled the pages together by article. This morning she'd translated pieces by the Times of London, and The New York Times, plus The Washington Post, so that her Minister would know what the barbarians around the world thought of the enlightened policy of the People's Republic.
 
   In his private office, Minister Fang was going over other things. The MSS had a double report on the Russians: both oil and gold, the reports said. So, he thought, Zhang had been right all along, even more right than he knew. Eastern Siberia was indeed a treasure-house, full of things everyone needed. Oil, because petroleum was the very blood of modern society, and gold, because in addition to its negotiable value as an old but still very real medium of exchange, it still had industrial and scientific uses as well. And each had a cache of its own. What a pity that such riches should fall to a people without the wit to make proper use of them. It was so strange, the Russians who had given the world the gift of Marxism but then failed to exploit it properly, and then abandoned it, only to fail also in their transition to a bourgeois capitalist society. Fang lit a cigarette, his fifth of the day (he was trying to cut back as his seventieth birthday approached), and set the MSS report down on his desk before leaning back in his chair to puff on his unfiltered smoke and consider the information this morning had brought. Siberia, as Zhang had been saying for some years now, had so much that the PRC needed, timber, minerals in abundance – even greater abundance, so these intelligence documents said – and space, which China needed above all things.
   There were simply too many people in China, and that despite population-control measures that could only be called draconian both in their content, and in their ruthless application. Those measures were an affront to Chinese culture, which had always viewed children as a blessing, and now the social engineering was having an unexpected result. Allowed only one child per married couple, the people often chose to have boys instead of girls. It was not unknown for a peasant to take a female toddler of two years and drop her down a well – the merciful ones broke their necks first – to dispose of the embarrassing encumbrance. Fang understood the reasons for this. A girl child grew up to marry, to join her life to a man, while a boy child could always be depended upon to support and honor his parents, and provide security. But a girl child would merely spread her legs for some other couple's boy child, and where was the security for her parents in that?
   It had been true in Fang's case. As he'd grown to a senior party official, he'd made sure that his own mother and father had found a comfortable place to live out their lives, for such were the duties of a child for those who had given him life. Along the way, he'd married, of course – his wife was long dead of cardiovascular disease – and he'd given some lip service to his wife's parents... but not as much as he'd done for his own. Even his wife had understood that, and used her shadow-influence as the wife of a party official to make her own special but lesser arrangements. Her brother had died young, at the hands of the American army in Korea, and was therefore just a memory without practical value.
   But the problem for China that no one really talked about, even at Politburo level, was that their population policy was affecting the demographics of their country. In elevating the value of boy children over girls, the PRC was causing an imbalance that was becoming statistically significant. In fifteen years or so, there would be a shortage of women – some said that this was a good thing, because they would achieve the overarching national objective of population stability faster but it also meant that for a generation, millions of Chinese men would have no women to marry and mate with. Would this turn into a flood of homosexuality? PRC policy still frowned upon that as a bourgeois degeneracy, though sodomy had been decriminalized in 1998. But if there were no women to be had, what was a man to do? And in addition to killing off surplus girl babies, those abandoned by their parents were often given away, to American and European couples unable to have children of their own. This happened by the hundreds of thousands, with the children disposed of as readily and casually as Americans sold puppies in shopping malls. Something in Fang's soul bridled at that, but his feelings were mere bourgeois sentimentality, weren't they? National policy dictated what must be, and policy was the means to achieving the necessary goal.
   His was a life as comfortable as privilege could make it. In addition to a plush office as pleasant as any capitalist's, he had an official car and driver to take him to his residence, an ornate apartment with servants to look after his needs, the best food that his country could provide, good beverages, a television connected to a satellite service so that he could receive all manner of entertainment, even including Japanese pornographic channels, for his manly drives had not yet deserted him. (He didn't speak Japanese, but you didn't need to understand the dialogue in such movies, did you?)
   Fang still worked long hours, rising at six-thirty, and was at his desk before eight every morning. His staff of secretaries and assistants took proper care of him, and some of the female ones were agreeably compliant, once, occasionally twice per week. Few men of his years had his vigor, Fang was sure, and unlike Chairman Mao, he didn't abuse children, which he'd known of at the time and found somewhat distasteful. But great men had their flaws, and you overlooked them because of the greatness that made them who they were. As for himself and people like him, they were entitled to the proper environments in which to rest, good nourishment to sustain their bodies through their long and grueling workdays, and the opportunities for relaxation and recreation that men of vigor and intelligence needed. It was necessary that they live better than most other citizens of their country, and it was also earned. Giving direction to the world's most populous country was no easy task. It demanded their every intellectual energy, and such energy needed to be conserved and restored. Fang looked up as Ming entered with her folder of news articles.
   "Good morning, Minister," she said with proper deference.
   "Good morning, child." Fang nodded with affection. This one shared his bed fairly well, and for that reason merited more than a grunt. Well, he'd gotten her a very comfortable office chair, hadn't he? She withdrew, bowing proper respect for her father figure, as she always did. Fang noticed nothing particularly different about her demeanor, as he lifted the folder and took out the news articles, along with a pencil for making notations. He'd compare these with MSS estimates of the mood of other countries and their governments. It was Fang's way of letting the Ministry of State Security know that the Politburo members still had minds of their own with which to think. The MSS had signally failed to predict America's diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, though in fairness, the American news media didn't seem to predict the actions of this President Ryan all that well, either. What an odd man he was, and certainly no friend of the People's Republic. A peasant, the MSS analysts called him, and in many ways that seemed both accurate and appropriate. He was strangely unsophisticated in his outlook, something The New York Times commented upon rather frequently. Why did they dislike him? Was he not capitalist enough, or was he too capitalist? Understanding the American news media was beyond Fang's powers of analysis, but he could at least digest the things they said, and that was something the intelligence "experts" at the MSS Institute for American Studies were not always able to do. With that thought, Fang lit another cigarette and settled back in his chair.
 
   It was a miracle, Provalov thought. Central Army Records had gotten the files, fingerprints, and photographs of the two bodies recovered in St. Petersburg – but perversely sent the records to him rather than to Abramov and Ustinov, doubtless because he was the one who had invoked the name of Sergey Golovko. Dzerzhinskiy Square still inspired people to do their jobs in a timely fashion. The names and vital statistics would be taxed (faxed?) at once to St. Petersburg so that his northern colleagues might see what information could be developed. The names and photographs were only a start – documents nearly twenty years old showing youthful, emotionless faces. The service records were fairly impressive, though. Once upon a time, Pyotr Alekseyevich Amalrik and Pavel Borissovich Zimyanin had been considered superior soldiers, smart, fit... and highly reliable, politically speaking, which was why they'd gone to Spetsnaz school and sergeant school. Both had fought in Afghanistan, and done fairly well – they'd survived Afghanistan, which was not the usual thing for Spetsnaz troops, who'd drawn all of the dirtiest duty in an especially dirty war. They'd not reenlisted, which was not unusual. Hardly anyone in the Soviet Army had ever reenlisted voluntarily. They (Then?) they'd returned to civilian life, both working in the same factory outside Leningrad, as it had been called then. But Amalrik and Zimyanin had both found ordinary civilian life boring, and both, he gathered, had drifted into something else. He'd have to let the investigators in St. Petersburg find out more. He pulled a routing slip from his drawer and rubber-banded it to the records package. It would be couriered to St. Petersburg, where Abramov and Ustinov would play with the contents.
 
   A Mr. Sherman, Mr. Secretary," Winston's secretary told him over the intercom. "Line three."
   "Hey, Sam," SecTreas said, as he picked up the phone. "What's new?"
   "Our oil field up north," the president of Atlantic Richfield replied
   "Good news?"
   "You might say that. Our field people say the find is about fifty percent bigger than our initial estimates."
   "How solid is that information?"
   "About as reliable as one of your T -bills, George. My head field guy is Ernie Beach. He's as good at finding oil as you used to be playing up on The Street." Maybe even better, Sam Sherman didn't add. Winston was known to have something of an ego on the subject of his own worth. The addendum got through anyway.
   "So, summarize that for me," the Secretary of the Treasury commanded.
   "So, when this field comes on line, the Russians will be in a position to purchase Saudi Arabia outright, plus Kuwait and maybe half of Iran. It makes east Texas look like a fart in a tornado. It's huge, George."
   "Hard to get out?"
   "It won't be easy, and it won't be inexpensive, but from an engineering point of view it's pretty straightforward. If you want to buy a hot stock, pick a Russian company that makes cold-weather gear. They're going to be real busy for the next ten years or so," Sherman advised.
   "Okay, and what can you tell me of the implications for Russia in economic terms?"
   "Hard to say. It will take eight to twelve years to bring this field fully on line, and the amount of crude this will dump on the market will distort market conditions quite a bit. We haven't modeled all that out – but it's going to be huge, like in the neighborhood of one hundred billion dollars per year, current-year dollars, that is."
   "For how long?" Winston could almost hear the shrug that followed.
   "Twenty years, maybe more. Our friends in Moscow still want us to sit on this, but word's perking out in our company, like trying to hide a sunrise, y'know? I give it a month before it breaks out into the news media. Maybe a little longer'n that, but not much."
   "What about the gold strike?"
   "Hell, George, they're not telling me anything about that, but my guy in Moscow says the cat's gobbled down some kind of canary, or that's how it appears to him. That will probably depress the world price of gold about five, maybe ten percent, but our models say it'll rebound before Ivan starts selling the stuff he pulls out of the ground. Our Russian friends – well, their rich uncle just bit the big one and left them the whole estate, y'know?"
   "And no adverse effects on us," Winston thought.
   "Hell, no. They'll have to buy all sorts of hardware from our people, and they'll need a lot of expertise that only we have, and after that's over, the world price of oil goes down, and that won't hurt us either. You know, George, I like the Russians. They've been unlucky sonsabitches for a long time, but maybe this'll change that for 'em."
   "No objections here or next door, Sam," TRADER assured his friend. "Thanks for the information."
   "Well, you guys still collect my taxes." You bastards, he didn't add, but Winston heard it anyway, including the chuckle. "See you around, George."
   "Right, have a good one, Sam, and thanks." Winston killed one button on his phone, selected another line, and hit his number nine speed-dial line.
   "Yeah?" a familiar voice responded. Only ten people had access to this number.
   "Jack, it's George, just had a call from Sam Sherman, Atlantic Richfield."
   "Russia?"
   "Yeah. The field is fifty percent bigger than they initially thought. That makes it pretty damned big, biggest oil strike ever, as a matter of fact, bigger than the whole Persian Gulf combined. Getting the oil out will be a little expensive, but Sam says it's all cookbook stuff – hard, but they know how it's done, no new technology to invent, just a matter of spending the money – and not even all that much, 'cause labor is a lot cheaper there than it is here. The Russians are going to get rich."
   "How rich?" the President asked.
   "On the order of a hundred billion dollars per year once the field is fully on line, and that's good for twenty years, maybe more."
   Jack had to whistle at that. "Two trillion dollars. That's real money, George."
   "That's what we call it on The Street, Mr. President," Winston agreed. "Sure as hell, that's real money."
   "And what effect will it have on the Russian economy?"
   "It won't hurt them very much," SecTreas assured him. "It gets them a ton of hard currency. With that money they can buy the things they'd like to have, and buy the tools to build the things they can make on their own. This will re-industrialize their country, Jack, jump-start them into the new century, assuming they have the brains to make proper use of it and not let it all bug out to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
   "How can we help them?" POTUS asked.
   "Best answer to that, you and I and two or three others sit down with our Russian counterparts and ask them what they need. If we can get a few of our industrialists to build some plants over there, it won't hurt, and it'll damned sure look good on TV."
   "Noted, George. Get me a paper on that by the beginning of next week, and then we'll see if we can figure out a way to let the Russians know what we know."
 
   It was the end of another overlong day for Sergey Golovko. Running the SVR was job enough for any man, but he also had to back up Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy, President of the Russian Republic. President Grushavoy had his own collection of ministers, some of them competent, the others selected for their political capital, or merely to deny them to the political opposition. They could still do damage on the inside of Grushavoy's administration, but less than on the outside. On the inside they had to use small-caliber weapons, lest they be killed by their own shots.
   The good news was that the Economics Minister, Vasily Konstantinovich Solomentsev, was intelligent and seemingly honest as well, as rare a combination in the Russian political spectrum as anywhere else in the known world. He had his ambitions – it was a rare minister who did not – but mainly, it seemed, he wanted his nation to prosper, and didn't want to profit himself all that much. A little self-enrichment was all right with Golovko, just so that a man wasn't a pig about it. The line, for Sergey Nikolay'ch, was about twenty million euros. More than that was hoggish, but less was understandable. After all, if a minister was successful at helping his country, he or she was entitled to get a proper reward for doing so. The ordinary working people out there wouldn't mind, if the result was a better life for them, would they? Probably not, the spymaster thought. This wasn't America, overrun with pointless and counterproductive "ethics" laws. The American President, whom Golovko knew well, had an aphorism that the Russian admired: If you have to write your ethics rules down, you've already lost. No fool, that Ryan, once a deadly enemy, and now a good friend, or seemingly so. Golovko had cultivated that friendship by providing help to America in two serious international crises. He'd done it because it had, first of all, been in his nation's interest, and secondly, because Ryan was a man of honor, and unlikely to forget such favors. It had also amused Golovko, who'd spent most of his adulthood in an agency devoted to the destruction of the West.
   But what about himself? Was someone intent on his own destruction? Had someone desired to end his life in a loud and spectacular manner on the paving stones of Dzerzhinskiy Square? The more his mind dwelt on that question, the more frightening it became. Few healthy men could contemplate the end of their lives with equanimity, and Golovko wasn't one of them. His hands never shook, but he didn't argue at all with Major Shelepin's increasingly invasive measures to keep him alive. The car changed every day in color, and sometimes in make, and the routes to his office shared only the starting place – the SVR building was sufficiently large that the daily journey to work had a total of five possible end points. The clever part, which Golovko admired, was that he himself occasionally rode in the front seat of the lead vehicle, while some functionary sat in the back seat of the putative guarded car. Anatoliy was no fool, and even showed the occasional spark of creativity.
   But none of that now. Golovko shook his head and opened his last folder of the day, scanning first of all the executive summary – and his mind skidded to an almost instant halt, his hand reaching for a phone and dialing a number.
   "This is Golovko," he told the male voice who answered. He didn't have to say anything else.
   "Sergey Nikolay'ch," the minister's voice greeted him pleasantly five seconds later. "What can I do for you?"
   "Well, Vasily Konstantinovich, you can confirm these numbers to me. Are they possible?"
   "They are more than possible, Sergey. They are as real as the sunset," Solomentsev told the intelligence chief cum chief minister and advisor to President Grushavoy.
   "Solkin syn, " the intelligence chief muttered. Son of a bitch! "And this wealth has been there for how long?" he asked incredulously.
   "The oil, perhaps five hundred thousand years; the gold, rather longer, Sergey."
   "And we never knew," Golovko breathed.
   "No one really looked, Comrade Minister. Actually, I find the gold report the more interesting. I must see one of these gold-encrusted wolf pelts. Something for Prokofiev, eh? Peter and the Golden Wolf."
   "An entertaining thought," Golovko said, dismissing it immediately. "What will it mean to our country?"
   "Sergey Nikolay'ch, I would have to be a fortune-teller to answer that substantively, but it could be the salvation of our country in the long term. Now we have something that all nations want – two somethings, as a matter of fact – and it belongs to us, and for it those foreigners will pay vast sums of money, and do so with a smile. Japan, for example. We will answer their energy needs for the next fifty years, and along the way we will save them vast sums in transportation costs – ship the oil a few hundred kilometers instead of ten thousand. And perhaps America, too, though they've made their own big strike on the Alaskan-Canadian border. The question becomes how we move the oil to market. We'll build a pipeline from the field to Vladivostok, of course, but maybe another one to St. Petersburg so that we can sell oil more easily to Europe as well. In fact, we can probably have the Europeans, especially the Germans, build the pipeline for us, just to get a discount on the oil. Serge, if we'd found this oil twenty years ago, we –"
   "Perhaps." It wasn't hard to imagine what would come next: The Soviet Union would not have fallen but grown strong instead. Golovko had no such illusions. The Soviet government would have managed to fuck up these new treasures as it had fucked up everything else. The Soviet government had owned Siberia for seventy years but had never even gone looking for what might have been there. The country had lacked the proper experts to do the looking, but was too proud to let anyone else do it, lest they think less of the Motherland. If any one thing had killed the USSR, it wasn't communism, or even totalitarianism. It was that perverse amour propre that was the most dangerous and destructive aspect of the Russian character, created by a sense of inferiority that went back to the House of Romanov and beyond. The Soviet Union's death had been as self-inflicted as any suicide's, just slower and therefore far deadlier in coming. Golovko endured the next ninety seconds of historical speculation from a man who had little sense of history, then spoke: "All this is good, Vasily Konstantinovich, but what of the future? That is the time in which we will all live, after all."
   "It will do us little harm. Sergey, this is the salvation of our country. It will take ten years to get the full benefit from the outfields, but then we shall have a steady and regular income for at least one whole generation, and perhaps more besides."
   "What help will we need?"
   "The Americans and the British have expertise which we need, from their own exploitation of the Alaskan fields. They have knowledge. We shall learn it and make use of it. We are in negotiations now with Atlantic Richfield, the American oil company, for technical support. They are being greedy, but that's to be expected. They know that only they have what we need, and paying them for it is cheaper than having to replicate it ourselves. So, they will get most of what they now demand. Perhaps we will pay them in gold bricks," Solomentsev suggested lightly.
   Golovko had to resist the temptation to inquire too deeply into the gold strike. The oil field was far more lucrative, but gold was prettier. He, too, wanted to see one of those pelts that this Gogol fellow had used to collect the dust. And this lonely forest-dweller would have to be properly taken care of – no major problem, as he lived alone and was childless. Whatever he got, the state would soon get back, old as he was. And there'd be a TV show, maybe even a feature film, about this hunter. He'd once hunted Germans, after all, and the Russians still made heroes of such men. That would make Pavel Petrovich Gogol happy enough, wouldn't it?
   "What does Eduard Petrovich know?"
   "I've been saving the information until I had a full and reliable reading on it. I have that now. I think he will be pleased at the next cabinet meeting, Sergey Nikolay'ch."
   As well he should, Golovko thought. President Grushavoy had been as busy as a one-armed, one-legged paperhanger for three years. No, more like a stage MAGICian or conjurer, forced to produce real things from nothing, and his success in keeping the nation moving often seemed nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps this was God's own way of rewarding the man for his efforts, though it would not be an entirely unmixed blessing. Every government agency would want its piece of the gold-and-oil pie, each with its needs, all of them presented by its own minister as vital to the security of the state, in white papers of brilliant logic and compelling reasoning. Who knew, maybe some of them would even be telling the truth, though truth was so often a rare commodity in the cabinet room. Each minister had an empire to build, and the better he built it, the closer he would come to the seat at the head of the table that was occupied, for now, by Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy. Golovko wondered if it had been this way under the czars. Probably, he decided at once. Human nature didn't change very much. The way people had acted in Babylon or Byzantium was probably little different from the way they'd act at the next cabinet meeting, three days hence. He wondered how President Grushavoy would handle the news.
   "How much has leaked out?" the spymaster asked.
   "There are doubtless some rumors," Minister Solomentsev answered, "but the current estimates are less than twenty-four hours old, and it usually takes longer than that to leak. I will have these documents messengered to you – tomorrow morning?"
   "That will be fine, Vasily. I'll have some of my own analysts go over the data, so that I can present my own independent estimate of the situation.
   "I have no objection to that," the economics minister responded, surprising Golovko more than a little. But then this wasn't the USSR anymore. The current cabinet might be the modern counterpart to the old Politburo, but nobody there told lies... well, at least not big lies. And that was a measure of progress for his country, wasn't it?

CHAPTER 11

Faith of the Fathers
   
His name was Yu Fa An, and he said he was a Christian. That was rare enough that Monsignor Schepke invited him in at once. What he saw was a Chinese national of fifty-plus years and stooped frame, with hair a curious mix of black and gray that one saw only rarely in this part of the world.
   "Welcome to our embassy. I am Monsignor Schepke." He bowed quickly and then shook the man's hand.
   "Thank you. I am the Reverend Yu Fa An," the man replied with the dignity of truth, one cleric to another.
   "Indeed. Of what denomination?"
   "I am a Baptist."
   "Ordained? Is that possible?" Schepke motioned the visitor to follow him, and in a moment they stood before the Nuncio. "Eminence, this is the Reverend Yu Fa An – of Beijing?" Schepke asked belatedly.
   "Yes, that is so. My congregation is mainly northwest of here."
   "Welcome." Cardinal DiMilo rose from his chair for a warm handshake, and guided the man to the comfortable visitor's chair. Monsignor Schepke went to fetch tea. "It is a pleasure to meet a fellow Christian in this city."
   "There are not enough of us, and that is a fact, Eminence," Yu confirmed.
   Monsignor Schepke swiftly arrived with a tray of tea things, which he set on the low coffee table.
   "Thank you, Franz."
   "I thought that some local citizens should welcome you. I expect you've had the formal welcome from the Foreign Ministry, and that it was correct... and rather cold?" Yu asked.
   The Cardinal smiled as he handed a cup to his guest. "It was correct, as you say, but it could have been warmer."
   "You will find that the government here has ample manners and good attention to protocol, but little in the way of sincerity" Yu said, in English, with a very strange accent.
   "You are originally from...?"
   "I was born in Taipei. As a youth, I traveled to America for my education. I first attended the University of Oklahoma, but the call came, and I transferred to Oral Roberts University in the same state. There I got my first degree – in electrical engineering – and went on for my doctor of divinity and my ordination," he explained.
   "Indeed, and how did you come to be in the People's Republic?"
   "Back in the 1970s, the government of Chairman Mao was ever so pleased to have Taiwanese come here to live – rejecting capitalism and coming to Marxism, you see," he added with a twinkling eye. "It was hard on my parents, but they came to understand. I started my congregation soon after I arrived. That was troublesome for the Ministry of State Security, but I also worked as an engineer, and at the time the state needed that particular skill. It is remarkable what the State will accept if you have something it needs, and back then their need for people with my degree was quite desperate. But now I am a minister on a full-time basis." With the announcement of his triumph, Yu lifted his own teacup for a sip.
   "So, what can you tell us about the local environment?" Renato asked.
   "The government is truly communist. It trusts and tolerates no loyalty to anything except itself. Even the Falun Gong, which was not truly a religion – that is, not really a belief system as you or I would understand the term – has been brutally suppressed, and my own congregation has been persecuted. It is a rare Sunday on which more than a quarter of my congregation comes to attend services. I must spend much of my time traveling from home to home to bring the gospel to my flock."
   "How do you support yourself?" the Cardinal asked.
   Yu smiled serenely. "That is the least of my problems. American Baptists support me most generously. There is a group of churches in Mississippi that is particularly generous – many are black churches, as it turns out. I just received some letters from them yesterday. One of my classmates at Oral Roberts University has a large congregation near Jackson, Mississippi. His name is Gerry Patterson. We were good friends then, and he remains a friend in Christ. His congregation is large and prosperous, and he still looks after me." Yu almost added that he had far more money than he knew how to spend. In America, such prosperity would have translated into a Cadillac and a fine parsonage. In Beijing, it meant a nice bicycle and gifts to the needy of his flock.
   "Where do you live, my friend?" the Cardinal asked.
   The Reverend Yu fished in his pocket for a business card and handed it over. Like many such Chinese cards, it had a sketch-map on the back. "Perhaps you would be so kind as to join my wife and myself for dinner. Both of you, of course," he added.
   "We should be delighted. Do you have children?"
   "Two," Yu replied. "Both born in America, and so exempt from the bestial laws the communists have in place here."
   "I know of these laws," DiMilo assured his visitor. "Before we can make them change, we need more Christians here. I pray on this subject daily."
   "As do I, Eminence. As do I. I presume you know that your dwelling here is, well..."
   Schepke tapped his ear and pointed his finger around the room. "Yes, we know"
   "You have a driver assigned to you?"
   "Yes, that was very kind of the ministry," Schepke noted. "He's a Catholic. Isn't that remarkable?"
   "Is that a fact?" Yu asked rhetorically, while his head shook emphatically from side to side. "Well, I am sure he's loyal to his country as well."
   "But of course," DiMilo observed. It wasn't much of a surprise. The Cardinal had been in the Vatican's diplomatic service a long time, and he'd seen most of the tricks at least once. Clever though the Chinese communists were, the Catholic Church had been around a lot longer, loath though the local government might be to admit that fact.
   The chitchat went on for another thirty minutes before the Reverend Yu took his leave, with another warm handshake to send him on his way.
   "So, Franz?" DiMilo asked outside, where a blowing breeze would impede any microphones installed outside the dwelling itself.
   "First time I've seen the man. I've heard his name since I arrived here. The PRC government has indeed given him a bad time, and more than once, but he is a man of strong faith and no small courage. I hadn't known of his educational background. We could check on this."
   "Not a bad idea," the Papal Nuncio said. It wasn't that he distrusted or disbelieved Yu, just that it was good to be sure of things. Even the name of a classmate, now an ordained minister, Gerry Patterson. Somewhere in Mississippi, USA. That would make it easy. The message to Rome went out an hour later, over the Internet, a method of communication that lent itself so readily to intelligence operations.
   In this case, the time differences worked for them, as sometimes happened when the inquiries went west instead of east. In a few hours, the dispatch was received, decrypted, and forwarded to the proper desk. From there, a new dispatch, also encrypted, made its way to New York, where Timothy Cardinal McCarthy, Archbishop of New York and the chief of the Vatican's intelligence operations in the United States of America, received his copy immediately after breakfast. From there, it was even easier. The FBI remained a bastion of Irish-Catholic America, though not so much as in the 1930s, with a few Italians and Poles tossed in. The world was an imperfect place, but when the Church needed information, and as long as the information was not compromising to American national security, it was gotten, usually very quickly.
   In this case, particularly so. Oral Roberts University was a very conservative institution, and therefore ready to cooperate with the FBI's inquiries, official or not. A clerk there didn't even consult her supervisor, so innocuous was the phoned inquiry from Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jim Brennan of the FBI's Oklahoma City office. It was quickly established via computer records that one Yu Fa An had graduated the university, first with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering, and then spent an additional three years in the university for his doctor of divinity, both degrees attained "with distinction," the clerk told Brennan, meaning nothing lower than a B+. The alumni office added that the Reverend Yu's current address was in Beijing, China, where he evidently preached the gospel courageously in the land of the pagans. Brennan thanked the clerk, made his notes, and replied to the e-mail inquiry from New York, then went off to his morning meeting with the SAC to review the Field Division's activities in enforcing federal law in the Sooner State.
   It was a little different in Jackson, Mississippi. There it was the SAC – Special Agent in Charge – himself who made the call on Reverend Gerry Patterson's First Baptist Church, located in an upscale suburb of the Mississippi state capital. The church was three-quarters of the way into its second century, and among the most prosperous of such congregations in the region. The Reverend Patterson could scarcely have been more impressive, impeccably turned out in a white button-down shirt and a striped blue tie. His dark suit coat was hung in a corner in deference to the local temperature. He greeted the visiting FBI official with regal manners, conducted him to his plush office, and asked how he could be of service. On hearing the first question, he replied, "Yu! Yes, a fine man, and a good friend from school. We used to call him Skip – Fa sounded too much like something from The Sound of Music, you know? A good guy, and a fine minister of the gospel. He could give lessons in faith to Jerry Falwell. Correspond with him? You bet I do! We send him something like twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Want to see a picture? We have it in the church itself. We were both a lot younger then," Patterson added with a smile. "Skip's got real guts. It can't be much fun to be a Christian minister in China, you know? But he never complains. His letters are always upbeat. We could use a thousand more men like him in the clergy."
   "So, you are that impressed with him?" SAC Mike Leary asked.
   "He was a good kid in college, and he's a good man today, and a fine minister of the gospel who does his work in a very adverse environment. Skip is a hero to me, Mr. Leary." Which was very powerful testimony indeed from so important a member of the community. First Baptist Church hadn't had a mortgage in living memory, despite its impressive physical plant and amply cushioned pews.
   The FBI agent stood. "That's about all I need. Thank you, sir."
   "Can I ask why you came here to ask about my friend?"
   Leary had expected that question, and so had preframed his answer. "Just a routine inquiry, sir. Your friend isn't in any trouble at all – at least not with the United States government."
   "Good to know," the Reverend Patterson responded, with a smile and a handshake. "You know, we're not the only congregation that looks after Skip."
   Leary turned. "Really?"
   "Of course. You know Hosiah Jackson?"
   "Reverend Jackson, the Vice President's dad? Never met him, but I know who he is."
   Patterson nodded. "Yep. Hosiah's as good as they come." Neither man commented on how unusual it would have been a mere forty years earlier for a white minister to comment so favorably on a black one, but Mississippi had changed over time, in some ways even faster than the rest of America. "I was over at his place a few years ago and we got talking about things, and this subject came up. Hosiah's congregation sends Skip five or ten thousand dollars a year also, and he organized some of the other black congregations to help us look after Skip as well."
   Mississippi whites and blacks looking after a Chinese preacher, Leary thought. What was the world coming to? He supposed that Christianity might really mean something after all, and headed back to his office in his official car, content at having done some actual investigative work for a change, if not exactly for the FBI.
   Cardinal McCarthy learned from his secretary that his two requests for information had been answered before lunch, which was impressive even by the standards of the FBI-Catholic Church alliance. Soon after his midday meal, Cardinal McCarthy personally encrypted both of the replies and forwarded them back to Rome. He didn't know why the inquiry had come, but figured that he'd find out in due course if it were important, and if not, then not. It amused the churchman to be the Vatican's master spy in America.
 
   It would have amused him less to know that the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, was interested in this sideshow activity also, and that their monster Thinking Machines, Inc. supercomputer in the cavernous basement under the main building in the sprawling complex was on the case. This machine, whose manufacturer had gone bankrupt some years before, had been both the pride and joy and the greatest disappointment in the huge collection of computers at NSA, until quite recently, when one of the agency's mathematicians had finally figured out a way to make use of it. It was a massive parallel-processing machine and supposedly operated much as the human brain did, theoretically able to attack a problem from more than one side simultaneously, just as the human brain was thought to do. The problem was that no one actually knew how the human brain worked, and as a result drafting the software to make full use of the hugely powerful computer had been impossible for some years. This had relegated the impressive and expensive artifact to no more practical utility than an ordinary workstation. But then someone had recognized the fact that quantum mechanics had become useful in the cracking of foreign ciphers, wondered why this should be the case, and started looking at the problems from the programming unit. Seven months later, that intellectual sojourn had resulted in the first of three new operating systems for the Thinking Machines Super-Cruncher, and the rest was highly classified history. NSA was now able to crack any book or machine cipher in the world, and its analysts, newly rich with information, had pitched in to have a woodworker construct a sort of pagan altar to put before the Cruncher for the notional sacrifice of goats before their new god. (To suggest the sacrifice of virgins would have offended the womenfolk at the agency.) NSA had long been known for its eccentric institutional sense of humor. The only real fear was that the world would learn about the TAPDANCE system NSA had come up with, which was totally random, and therefore totally unbreakable, plus easy to manufacture – but it was also an administrative nightmare, and that would prevent most foreign governments from using it.
   The Cardinal's Internet dispatches were copied, illegally but routinely, by NSA and fed into the Cruncher, which spat out the clear text, which found its way quickly to the desk of an NSA analyst, who, it had been carefully determined beforehand, wasn't Catholic.
   That's interesting, the analyst thought. Why is the Vatican interested in some Chink minister? And why the hell did they go to New York to find out about him? Oh, okay, educated over here, and friends in Mississippi... what the hell is this all about? He was supposed to know about such things, but that was merely the theory under which he operated. He frequently didn't know beans about the information he looked at, but was honest enough to tell his superiors that. And so, his daily report was forwarded electronically to his supervisor, who looked it over, coded it, and then forwarded it to CIA, where three more analysts looked it over, decided that they didn't know what to make of it either, and then filed it away, electronically. In this case, the data went onto VHS-sized tape cassettes, one of which went into storage container Doc, and the other into Grumpy – there are seven such storage units in the CIA computer room, each named after one of Disney's Seven Dwarfs – while the reference names went into the mainframe so that the computer would know where to look for the data for which the United States government as yet had no understanding. That situation was hardly unknown, of course, and for that reason CIA had every bit of information it generated in a computerized and thoroughly cross-referenced index, instantly accessible, depending on classification, to anyone in either the New or Old Headquarters Buildings located one ridgeline away from the Potomac River. Most of the data in the Seven Dwarfs just sat there, forevermore to be untouched, footnotes to footnotes, never to be of interest even to the driest of academics.
 
   And so?" Zhang Han San asked.
   "And so, our Russian neighbors have the luck of the devil," Fang Gan replied, handing the folder over to the senior Minister Without Portfolio. Zhang was seven years older than Fang, closer to his country's Premier. But not that much, and there was little competition between the two ministers. "What we could do with such blessings..." His voice trailed off.
   "Indeed." That any country could have made constructive use of oil and gold was an obvious truth left unsaid. What mattered here and now was that China would not, and Russia would.
   "I had planned for this, you know."
   "Your plans were masterful, my friend," Fang said from his seat, reaching inside his jacket for a pack of cigarettes. He held it up to seek approval from his host, who'd quit the habit five years before. The response was a dismissive wave of the hand, and Fang tapped one out and lit it from a butane lighter. "But anyone can have bad luck."
   "First the Japanese failed us, and then that religious fool in Tehran," Zhang groused. "Had either of our supposed allies performed as promised, the gold and the oil would now be ours..."
   "Useful, certainly, for our own purposes, but I am somewhat doubtful on the subject of world acceptance of our notionally prosperous status," Fang said, with a lengthy puff.
   The response was yet another wave of the hand. "You think the capitalists are governed by principle? They need oil and gold, and whoever can provide it cheaply gets to sell the most of it. Look whom they buy from, my old friend, anyone who happens to have it. With all the oil in Mexico, the Americans can't even work up the courage to seize it. How cowardly of them! In our case, the Japanese, as we have learned to our sorrow, have no principles at all. If they could buy oil from the company which made the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would. They call it realism," Zhang concluded scornfully. The real cite came from Vladimir Il'ych Ulyanov, Lenin himself, who'd predicted, not unreasonably, that capitalist nations would compete among themselves to sell the Soviet Union the rope with which the Russians would later hang them all. But Lenin had never planned for Marxism to fail, had he? Just as Mao hadn't planned for his perfect political/economic vision to fail in the People's Republic, as evidenced by such slogans as "The Great Leap Forward," which, among other things, had encouraged ordinary peasants to smelt iron in their backyards. That the resulting slag hadn't been useful even to make andirons with was a fact not widely advertised in the East or West.
   "Alas, fortune did not smile upon us, and so, the oil and gold are not ours.
   "For the moment," Zhang murmured.
   "What was that?" Fang asked, not having quite caught the comment.
   Zhang looked up, almost startled from his internal reverie. "Hmph? Oh, nothing, my friend." And with that the discussion turned to domestic matters. It lasted a total of seventy-five minutes before Fang went back to his office. There began another routine. "Ming," Fang called, gesturing on the way to his inner office.
   The secretary stood and scampered after him, closing the door behind before finding her seat.
   "New entry," Fang said tiredly, for it had been a lengthy day. "Regular afternoon meeting with Zhang Han San, and we discussed..." His voice went on, relating the substance and contents of the meeting. Ming duly took her notes for her minister's official diary. The Chinese were inveterate diarists, and besides that, members of the Politburo felt both an obligation (for scholarly history) and a personal need (for personal survival) to document their every conversation on matters political and concerning national policy, the better to document their views and careful judgment should one of their number make an error of judgment. That this meant his personal secretary, as, indeed, all of the Politburo members' personal secretaries, had access to the most sensitive secrets of the land was not a matter of importance, since these girls were mere robots, recording and transcription machines, little more than that – well, a little more, Fang and a few of his colleagues thought with the accompanying smile. You couldn't have a tape machine suck on your penis, could you? And Ming was especially good at it. Fang was a communist, and had been for all of his adult life, but he was not a man entirely devoid of heart, and he had the affection for Ming that another man, or even himself, might have had for a favored daughter... except that you usually didn't fuck your own daughter.... His diary entry droned on for twenty minutes, his trained memory recounting every substantive part of his exchange with Zhang, who was doubtless doing the same with his own private secretary right at this moment – unless Zhang had succumbed to the Western practice of using a tape machine, which would not have surprised Fang. For all of Zhang's pretended contempt for Westerners, he emulated them in so many ways.
 
   Theyd also tracked down the name of Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov. He was yet another former KGB officer, part then of the Third Chief Directorate, which had been a hybrid department of the former spy agency, tasked to overseeing the former Soviet military, and also to overseeing certain special operations of the latter force, like the Spetsnaz, Oleg Provalov knew. He turned a few more pages in Suvorov's package, found a photograph and fingerprints, and also discovered that his first assignment had been in the First Chief Directorate, known as the Foreign Directorate because of its work in gathering intelligence from other nations. Why the change? he wondered. Usually in KGB, you stayed where you were initially put. But a senior officer in the Third had drafted him by name from the First... why? Suvorov, K. I., asked for by name by General Major Pavel Konstantinovich Kabinet. The name made Provalov pause. He'd heard it somewhere, but exactly where, he couldn't recall, an unusual state of affairs for a long-term investigator. Provalov made a note and set it aside.
   So, they had a name and a photo for this Suvorov fellow. Had he known Amalrik and Zimyanin, the supposed – and deceased – killers of Avseyenko the pimp? It seemed possible. In the Third Directorate he would have had possible access to the Spetsnaz, but that could have been a mere coincidence. The KGB's Third Directorate had been mainly concerned with political control of the Soviet military, but that was no longer something the State needed, was it? The entire panoply of political officers, the zampoliti who had so long been the bane of the Soviet military, was now essentially gone.
   Where are you now? Provalov asked the file folder. Unlike Central Army Records, KGB records were usually pretty good at showing where former intelligence officers lived, and what they were doing. It was a carryover from the previous regime that worked for the police agencies, but not in this case. Where are you? What are you doing to support yourself? Are you a criminal?Areyou a murderer? Homicide investigations by their nature created more questions than answers, and frequently ended with many such questions forever unanswered because you could never look inside the mind of a killer, and even if you could, what you might find there didn't have to make any sort of sense.
   This murder case had begun as a complex one, and was only becoming more so. All he knew for certain was that Avseyenko was dead, along with his driver and a whore. And now, maybe, he knew even less. He'd assumed almost from the beginning that the pimp had been the real target, but if this Suvorov fellow had hired Amalrik and Zimyanm to do the killing, why would a former – he checked – lieutenant colonel in the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB go out of his way to kill a pimp? Was not Sergey Golovko an equally likely target for the killing, and would that not also explain the murder of the two supposed killers, for eliminating the wrong target? The detective lieutenant opened a desk drawer for a bottle of aspirin. It wasn't the first headache this case had developed, and it didn't seem likely that this would be the last. Whoever Suvorov was, if Golovko had been the target, he had not made the decision to kill the man himself. He'd been a contract killer, and therefore someone else had made the decision to do the killing.
   But who?
   And why?
   Cui bonuo was the ancient question – old enough that the adage was in a dead language. To whom the good? Who profited from the deed?
   He called Abramov and Ustinov. Maybe they could run Suvorov down, and then he'd fly north to interview the man. Provalov drafted the fax and fired it off to St. Petersburg, then left his desk for the drive home. He checked his watch. Only two hours late. Not bad for this case.
 
   General Lieutanent Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko looked around his office. He'd had his three stars for a while, and sometimes he wondered if he'd get any farther. He'd been a professional soldier for thirty-one years, and the job to which he'd always aspired was Commanding General of the Russian Army. Many good men, and some bad ones, had been there. Gregoriy Zhukov, for one, the man who'd saved his country from the Germans. There were many statues to Zhukov, whom Bondarenko had heard lecture when he was a wet-nosed cadet all those years before, seeing the blunt, bulldog face and ice-blue determined eyes of a killer, a true Russian hero whom politics could not demean, and whose name the Germans had come to fear.
   That Bondarenko had come this far was no small surprise even to himself. He'd begun as a signals officer, seconded briefly to Spetsnaz in Afghanistan, where he'd cheated death twice, both times taking command of a panic-worthy situation and surviving with no small distinction. He'd taken wounds, and killed with his own hands, something few colonels do, and few colonels relished, except at a good officers' club bar after a few stiff ones with their comrades.
   Like many generals before him, Bondarenko was something of a "political" general. He'd hitched his career-star to the coattails of a quasi-minister, Sergey Golovko, but in truth he'd never have gone to general-lieutenant's stars without real merit, and courage on the battlefield went as far in the Russian army as it did in any other. Intelligence went farther still, and above all came accomplishment. His job was what the Americans called J-3, Chief of Operations, which meant killing people in war and training them in peace. Bondarenko had traveled the globe, learning how other armies trained their men, sifted through the lessons, and applied them to his own soldiers. The only difference between a soldier and a civilian was training, after all, and Bondarenko wanted no less than to bring the Russian army to the same razor-sharp and granite-hard condition with which it had kicked in the gates of Berlin under Zhukov and Koniev. That goal was still off in the future, but the general told himself that he'd laid the proper foundation. In ten years, perhaps, his army would be at that goal, and he'd be around to see it, retired by then, of course, honorably so, with his decorations framed and hanging on the wall, and grandchildren to bounce on his knee... and occasionally coming in to consult, to look things over and offer his opinion, as retired general officers often did.
   For the moment, he had no further work to do, but no particular desire to head home, where his wife was hosting the wives of other senior officers. Bondarenko had always found such affairs tedious. The military attache in Washington had sent him a book, Swift Sword, by a Colonel Nicholas Eddington of the American Army National Guard. Eddington, yes, he was the colonel who'd been training with his brigade in the desert of California when the decision had come to deploy to the Persian Gulf, and his troops – civilians in uniform, really – had performed well: Better than well, the Russian general told himself. They'd exercised the Medusa Touch, destroying everything they'd touched, along with the regular American formations, the 10th and 11th cavalry regiments. Together that one division-sized collection of forces had smashed a full four corps of mechanized troops like so many sheep in the slaughter pen. Even Eddington's guardsmen had performed magnificently: Part of that, Gennady Iosifovich knew, was their motivation. The biological attack on their homeland had understandably enraged the soldiers, and such rage could make a poor soldier into an heroic one as easily as flipping a light switch. "Will to combat" was the technical term. In more pedestrian language, it was the reason a man put his life at risk, and so it was a matter of no small importance to the senior officers whose job it was to lead those men into danger.
   Paging through the book, he saw that this Eddington – also a professor of history, the flap said; wasn't that interesting? – paid no small attention to that factor. Well, maybe he was smart in addition to being lucky. He'd had the good fortune to command reserve soldiers with many years of service, and while they'd only had part-time practice for their training, they'd been in highly stable units, where every soldier knew every other, and that was a virtually unknown luxury for regular soldiers. And they'd also had the revolutionary new American IVIS gear, which let all the men and vehicles in the field know exactly what their commander knew, often in great detail... and in turn told their commander exactly what his men saw. Eddington said that had made his job a lot easier than any mechanized-force commander had ever had it.
   The American officer also talked about knowing not only what his subordinate commanders were saying, but also the importance of knowing what they were thinking, the things they didn't have the time to say. The implicit emphasis was on the importance of continuity within the officer corps, and that, Bondarenko thought as he made a marginal note, was a most important lesson. He'd have to read this book in detail, and maybe have Washington purchase a hundred or so for his brother officers to read... even get reprint rights in Russia for it? It was something the Russians had done more than once.

CHAPTER 12

Conflicts of the Pocket
   
Okay, George, let's have it," Ryan said, sipping his coffee. The White House had many routines, and one that had evolved over the past year was that, after the daily intelligence briefing, the Secretary of the Treasury was Ryan's first appointment two or three days of the week. Winston most often walked across – actually under – 15th Street via a tunnel between the White House and Treasury Building that dated back to the time of FDR. The other part of the routine was that the President's Navy messmen laid out coffee and croissants (with butter) in which both men indulged to the detriment of their cholesterol numbers.
   "The PRC. The trade negotiations have hit the wall pretty hard. They just don't want to play ball."
   "What are the issues?"
   "Hell, Jack, what aren't the friggin' issues?" TRADER took a bite of croissant and grape jelly. "That new computer company their government started up is ripping off a proprietary hardware gadget that Dell has patented – that's the new doohickey that kicked their stock up twenty percent, y'know? They're just dropping the things into the boxes they make for their own market and the ones they just started selling in Europe. That's a goddamned violation of all sorts of trade and patent treaties, but when we point that out to them over the negotiating table, they just change the subject and ignore it. That could cost Dell something like four hundred million dollars, and that's real money for one company to lose, y'know? If I was their corporate counsel, I'd be flipping through the Yellow Pages for Assassins 'R Us. Okay, that's one. Next, they've told us that if we make too big a deal of these 'minor' disagreements, Boeing can forget the 777 order – twenty-eight aircraft they've optioned – in favor of Airbus."
   Ryan nodded. "George, what's the trade balance with the PRC now?"
   "Seventy-eight billion, and it's their way, not ours, as you know."
   "Scott's running this over at Foggy Bottom?"
   SecTreas nodded. "He's got a pretty fair team in place, but they need a little more in the way of executive direction."
   "And what's this doing to us?"
   "Well, it gets our consumers a lot of low-cost goods, about seventy percent of which is in low-tech stuff, lots of toys, stuffed animals, like that. But, Jack, thirty percent is upscale stuff. That amount's almost doubled in two and a half years. Pretty soon that's going to start costing us jobs, both in terms of production for domestic consumption and lost exports. They're selling a lot of laptops domestically – in their country I mean – but they don't let us into the market, even though we've got 'em beat in terms of performance and price. We know for sure they're taking part of their trading surplus with us and using it to subsidize their computer industries. They want to build that up for strategic reasons, I suppose.
   "Plus selling weapons to people we'd prefer not to have them," POTUS added. Which they also do for strategic reasons.
   "Well, doesn't everybody need an AK-47 to take care of his gophers?" A shipment of fourteen hundred true – that is, fully automatic – assault rifles had been seized in the Port of Los Angeles two weeks before, but the PRC had denied responsibility, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence services had tracked the transaction order back to a particular Beijing telephone number. That was something Ryan knew, but it had not been allowed to leak, lest it expose methods of intelligence collection – in this case to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade. The new Beijing telephone system hadn't been built by an American firm, but much of the design work had been contracted to a company that had made a profitable arrangement with an agency of the United States government. It wasn't strictly legal, but different rules were attached to national security matters.
   "They just don't play by the rules, do they?"
   Winston grunted. "Not hardly."
   "Suggestions?" President Ryan asked.
   "Remind the little slant-eyed fucks that they need us a shitload more than we need them."
   "You have to be careful talking like that to nation-states, especially ones with nuclear weapons," Ryan reminded his Treasury Secretary. "Plus the racial slur."
   "Jack, either it's a level playing field or it isn't. Either you play fair or you don't. If they keep that much more of our money than we do of theirs, then it means they've got to start playing fair with us. Okay, I know" – he held his hands up defensively – "their noses are a little out of joint over Taiwan, but that was a good call, Jack. You did the right thing, punishing them. Those little fucks killed people, and they probably had complicity in our last adventure in the Persian Gulf – and the Ebola attack on us – and so they had it coming. But nooooo, we can't punish them for murder and complicity in an act of war on the United States, can we? We have to be too big and strong to be so petty. Petty, my ass, Jack! Directly or indirectly, those little bastards helped that Daryaei guy kill seven thousand of our citizens, and establishing diplomatic relations with Taiwan was the price they paid for it – and a damned small price that was, if you ask me. They ought to understand that. They've got to learn that the world has rules. So, what we have to do is show them that there's pain when you break the rules, and we have to make the pain stick. Until they understand that, there's just going to be more trouble. Sooner or later, they have to learn. I think it's been long enough to wait."
   "Okay, but remember their point of view: Who are we to tell them the rules?"
   "Horseshit, Jack!" Winston was one of the very few people who had the ability – if not exactly the right – to talk that way in the Oval Office. Part of it came from his own success, part of it from the fact that Ryan respected straight talk, even if the language was occasionally off-color. "Remember, they're the ones sticking it to us. We are playing fair. The world does have rules, and those rules are honored by the community of nations, and if Beijing wants to be part of that community, well, then they have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does. If you want to join the club, you have to pay the cost of admittance, and even then you still can't drive your golf cart on the greens. You can't have it both ways."
   The problem, Ryan reflected, was that the people who ran entire nations especially large, powerful, important nations – were not the sort to be told how or why to do anything at all. This was all the more true of despotic countries. In a liberal democracy the idea of the rule of law applied to just about everyone. Ryan was President, but he couldn't rob a bank just because he needed pocket change.
   "George, okay. Sit down with Scott and work something out that I can agree to, and we'll have State explain the rules to our friends in Beijing." And who knows, maybe it might even work this time. Not that Ryan would bet money on it.
 
   This would be the important evening, Nomuri thought. Yeah, sure, he'd banged Ming the night before, and she seemed to have liked it, but now that she'd had time to think it over, would her reaction be the same? Or would she reflect that he'd plied her with liquor and taken advantage of her? Nomuri had dated and bedded his share of women, but he didn't confuse amorous successes with any sort of understanding of the female psyche.
   He sat at the bar of the medium-sized restaurant – different from the last one – smoking a cigarette, which was new for the CIA officer. He wasn't coughing, though his first two had made the room seem to spin around some. Carbon monoxide poisoning, he thought. Smoking reduced the oxygen supply to your brain, and was bad for you in so many ways. But it also made waiting a lot easier. He'd bought a Bic lighter, blue, with a facsimile of the PRC flag on it, so that it appeared like their banner was waving in a clear sky. Yeah, he thought, sure, and here I am wondering if my girl will show up, and she's already – he checked his watch – nine minutes late. Nomuri waved to the bartender and ordered another Scotch. It was a Japanese brand, drinkable, not overly expensive, and when you got down to it, booze was booze, wasn't it?
   Are you coming, Ming? the case officer's mind asked the air around him. Like most bars around the world, this one had a mirror behind the glasses and bottles, and the California native examined his face quizzically, pretending it was someone else's, wondering what someone else might see in it. Nervousness? Suspicion? Fear? Loneliness? Lust? There could be someone making that evaluation right now, some MSS counterintelligence officer doing his stakeout, careful not to look toward Nomuri too much of the time. Maybe using the mirror as an indirect surveillance tool. More likely sitting at an angle so that his posture naturally pointed his eyes to the American, whereas Nomuri would have to turn his head to see him, giving the surveillance agent a chance to avert his glance, probably toward his partner – you tended to do this with teams rather than an individual – whose head would be on the same line of sight, so that he could survey his target without seeming to do so directly. Every nation in the world had police or security forces trained in this, and the methods were the same everywhere because human nature was the same everywhere, whether your target was a drug dealer or a spook. That's just the way it was, Nomuri said to himself, checking his watch again. Eleven minutes late. It's cool, buddy, women are always late. They do it because they can't tell time, or it takes them fucking forever to get dressed and do their makeup, or because they don't remember to wear a watch... or most likely of all, because it gives them an advantage. Such behavior, perhaps, made women appear more valuable to men – after all, men waited for them, right? Not the other way around. It put a premium on their affection, which if not waited for, might not appear one day, and that gave men something to fear.
   Chester Nomuri, behavioral anthropologist, he snorted to himself, looking back up in the mirror.
   For Christ's sake, dude, maybe she's working late, or the traffic is heavy, or some friend at the office needed her to come over and help her move the goddamned furniture. Seventeen minutes. He fished out another Kool and lit it from his ChiComm lighter. The East is Red, he thought. And maybe this was the last country in the world that really was red... wouldn't Mao be proud...?
   Where are you?
   Well, whoever from the MSS might be watching, if he had any doubts about what Nomuri was doing, they'd damned sure know he was waiting for a woman, and if anything his stress would look like that of a guy bewitched by the woman in question. And spooks weren't supposed to be bewitched, were they?
   What are you worrying about that for, asshole, just because you might notget laid tonight?
   Twenty-three minutes late. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. If this was a mechanism women used to control men, then it was an effective one.
   James Bond never had these problems, the intelligence officer thought. Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang was always master of his women – and if anyone needed proof that Bond was a character of fiction, that was sure as hell it!
   As it turned out, Nomuri was so entranced with his thoughts that he didn't see Ming come in. He felt a gentle tap on his back, and turned rapidly to see –
   – she wore the radiant smile, pleased with herself at having surprised him, the beaming dark eyes that crinkled at the corners with the pleasure of the moment.
   "I am so sorry to be late," she said rapidly. "Fang needed me to transcribe some things, and he kept me in the office late."
   "I must talk to this old man," Nomuri said archly, hauling himself erect on the barstool.
   "He is, as you say, an old man, and he does not listen very well. Perhaps age has impeded his hearing."
   No, the old fucker probably doesn't want to listen, Nomuri didn't say. Fang was probably like bosses everywhere, well past the age when he looked for the ideas of others.
   "So, what do you want for dinner?" Nomuri asked, and got the best possible answer.
   "I'm not hungry." With sparkles in the dark eyes to affirm what she did want. Nomuri tossed off the last of his drink, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked out with her.
 
   So?" Ryan asked.
   "So, this is not good news," Arnie van Damm replied.
   "I suppose that depends on your point of view. When will they hear arguments?"
   "Less than two months, and that's a message, too, Jack. Those good 'strict-constructionist' justices you appointed are going to hear this case, and if I had to bet, I'd wager they're hot to overturn Roe. "
   Jack settled back in his chair and smiled up at his Chief of Staff. "Why is that bad, Arnie?"
   "Jack, it's bad because a lot of the citizens out there like to have the option to choose between abortion or not. That's why. 'Pro choice' is what they call it, and so far it's the law."
   "Maybe that'll change," the President said hopefully, looking back down at his schedule. The Secretary of the Interior was coming in to talk about the national parks.
   "That is not something to look forward to, damn it! And it'll be blamed on you!"
   "Okay, if and when that happens, I will point out that I am not a justice of the United States Supreme Court, and stay away from it entirely. If they decide the way I – and I guess you – think they will, abortion becomes a legislative matter, and the legislature of the 'several states,' as the Constitution terms them, will meet and decide for themselves if the voters want to be able to kill their unborn babies or not – but, Arnie, I've got four kids, remember. I was there to see them all born, and be damned if you are going to tell me that abortion is okay!" The fourth little Ryan, Kyle Daniel, had been born during Ryan's Presidency, and the cameras had been there to record his face coming out of the delivery room, allowing the entire nation – and the world, for that matter – to share the experience. It had bumped Ryan's approval rating a full fifteen points, pleasing Arnie very greatly at the time.
   "God damn it, Jack, I never said that, did I?" van Damm demanded. "But you and I do objectionable things every so often, don't we? And we don't deny other people the right to do such things, too, do we? Smoke, for example?" he added, just to twist Ryan's tail a little.
   "Arnie, you use words as cleverly as any man I know, and that was a good play. I'll give you that. But there's a qualitative difference between lighting up a goddamned cigarette and killing a living human being."
   "True, if a fetus is a living human being, which is something for theologians, not politicians."
   "Arnie, it's like this. The pro-abortion crowd says that whether or not a fetus is human is beside the point because it's inside a woman's body, and therefore her property to do with as she pleases. Fine. It was the law in the Roman Republic and Empire that a wife and children were property of the paterfamilias, the head of the family, and he could kill them anytime he pleased. You think we should go back to that?"
   "Obviously not, since it empowers men and dis-empowers women, and we don't do things like that anymore."
   "So, you've taken a moral issue and degraded it to what's good politically and what's bad politically. Well, Arnie, I am not here to do that. Even the President is allowed to have some moral principles, or am I supposed to check my ideas of right and wrong outside the door when I show up for work in the morning?"
   "But he's not allowed to impose it on others. Moral principles are things you keep on the inside, for yourself."
   "What we call law is nothing more or less than the public's collective belief, their conviction of what right and wrong is. Whether it's about murder, kidnapping, or running a red light, society decides what the rules are. In a democratic republic, we do that through the legislature by electing people who share our views. That's how laws happen. We also set up a constitution, the supreme law of the land, which is very carefully considered because it decides what the other laws may and may not do, and therefore it protects us against our transitory passions. The job of the judiciary is to interpret the laws, or in this case the constitutional principles embodied in those laws, as they apply to reality. In Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court went too far. It legislated; it changed the law in a way not anticipated by the drafters, and that was an error. All a reversal of Roe will do is return the abortion issue to the state legislatures, where it belongs."
   "How long have you been thinking about that speech?" Arnie asked. Ryan's turn of phrase was too polished for extemporaneous speech.
   "A little while," the President admitted.
   "Well, when that decision comes through, be ready for a firestorm," his Chief of Staff warned. "I'm talking demonstrations, TV coverage, and enough newspaper editorials to paper the walls of the Pentagon, and your Secret Service people will worry about the additional danger to your life, and your wife's life, and your kids. If you think I'm kidding, ask them."
   "That doesn't make any sense."
   "There's no law, federal, state, or local, which compels the world to be logical, Jack. The people out there depend on you to keep the fucking weather pleasant, and they blame you when you don't. Deal with it." With that, an annoyed Chief of Staff headed out and west toward his corner office.
   "Crap," Ryan breathed, as he flipped to the briefing papers for the Secretary of the Interior. Smokey Bear's owner. Also custodian of the national parks, which the President only got to see on the Discovery Channel, on such nights as he had free time to switch the TV on.
 
   There wasn't much to be said for the clothing people wore in this place, Nomuri thought again, except for one thing. When you undid the buttons and found the Victoria's Secret stuff underneath, well, it was like having a movie switch from black-and-white to Technicolor. This time Ming allowed him to do her buttons, then slide the jacket down her arms, and then get her trousers off. The panties looked particularly inviting, but then, so did her entire body. Nomuri scooped her up in his arms and kissed her passionately before dropping her on the bed. A minute later, he was beside her.
   "So, why were you late?"
   She made a face. "Every week Minister Fang meets with other ministers, and when he comes back, he has me transcribe the notes of the meetings so that he has a record of everything that was said."
   "Oh, do you use my new computer for that?" The question concealed the quivering Jesus! he felt throughout his body on hearing Ming's words. This girl could be one hell of a source! Nomuri took a deep breath and resumed his poker face of polite disinterest.
   "Of course."
   "Excellent. It's equipped with a modem, yes?"
   "Of course, I use it every day to retrieve Western news reports and such from their media web sites."
   "Ah, that is good." So, he'd taken care of business for the day, and with that job done, Nomuri leaned over for a kiss.
   "Before I came into the restaurant, I put the lipstick on," Ming explained. "I don't wear it at work."
   "So I see," the CIA officer replied, repeating the initial kiss, and extending it in time. Her arms found their way around his neck. The reason for her lateness had nothing to do with a lack of affection. That was obvious now, as his hands started to wander also. The front-closure on the bra was the smartest thing he'd done. Just a flick of thumb and forefinger and it sprang open, revealing both of her rather cute breasts, two more places for his hand to explore. The skin there was particularly silky... and, he decided a few seconds later, tasty as well.
   This resulted in an agreeable moan and squirm of pleasure from his... what? Friend? Well, okay, but not enough. Agent? Not yet. Lover would do for the moment. They'd never talked at The Farm about this sort of thing, except the usual warnings not to get too close to your agent, lest you lose your objectivity. But if you didn't get a little bit close, you'd never recruit the agent, would you? Of course, Chester knew that he was far more than a little bit close at the moment.
   Whatever her looks, she had delightful skin, and his fingertips examined it in great detail as his eyes smiled into hers, with the occasional kiss. And her body wasn't bad at all. A nice shape even when she stood. A little too much waist, maybe, but this wasn't Venice Beach, and the hourglass figure, however nice it might look in pictures, was just that, a picture look. Her waist was smaller than her hips, and that was enough for the moment. It wasn't as though she'd be walking down the ramp at some New York fashion show, where the models looked like boys anyway. So, Ming is not now and would never be a supermodel – deal with it, Chet, the officer told himself. Then it was time to put all the CIA stuff aside. He was a man, dressed only in boxer shorts, next to a woman, dressed only in panties. Panties large enough maybe to make a handkerchief, though orange-red wouldn't be a good color for a man to pull from his back pocket, especially, he added to himself with a smile, in some artificial silk fabric.
   "Why do you smile?" Ming asked.
   "Because you are pretty," Nomuri replied. And so she was, now, with that particular smile on her face. No, she'd never be a model, but inside every woman was the look of beauty, if only they would let it out. And her skin was first-class, especially her lips, coated with after-work lipstick, smooth and greasy, yet making his lips linger even so. Soon their bodies touched almost all over, and a warm, comfortable feeling it was, so nicely she fit under one arm, while his left hand played and wandered. Ming's hair didn't tangle much. She could evidently brush it out very easily, it was so short. Her underarms, too, were hairy, like many Chinese women's, but that only gave Nomuri something else to play with, teasing and pulling a little. That evidently tickled her. Ming giggled playfully and hugged him tighter, then relaxed to allow his hand to wander more. As it passed her navel, she lay suddenly still, relaxing herself in some kind of invitation. Time for another kiss as his fingertips wandered farther, and there was humor in her eyes now. What game could this be...?
   As soon as his hands found her panties, her bottom lifted off the mattress. He sat up halfway and pulled them down, allowing her left foot to kick them into the air, where the red-orange pants flew like a mono-colored RAINBOW, and then –
   "Ming!" he said in humorous accusation.
   "I've heard that men like this," she said with a sparkle and a giggle.
   "Well, it is different," Nomuri replied, as his hands traced over skin even smoother than the rest of her body. "Did you do this at work?"
   A riotous laugh now: "No, fool! This morning at my apartment! In my own bathroom, with my own razor."
   "Just wanted to make sure," the CIA officer assured her. Damn, isn't this something. Then her hand moved to do to him much the same as he was doing to her.
   "You are different from Fang," her voice told him in a playful whisper.
   "Oh? How so?"
   "I think the worst thing a woman can say to a man is 'Are you in yet?' One of the other secretaries said that to Fang once. He beat her. She came into work the next day with black eyes – he made her come in – and then the next night... well, he had me to bed," she admitted, not so much with shame as embarrassment. "To show what a man he still is. But I knew better than to say that to him. We all do, now."
   "Will you say that to me?" Nomuri asked with a smile and another kiss.
   "Oh, no! You are a sausage, not a string bean!" Ming told him enthusiastically.
   It wasn't the most elegant compliment he'd ever had, but it sufficed for the moment, Nomuri thought.
   "Do you think it's time for the sausage to find a home?"
   "Oh, yes!"
   As he rolled on top, Nomuri saw two things under him. One was a girl, a young woman with the usual female drives, which he was about to answer. The other was a potential agent, with access to political intelligence such as an experienced case officer only dreamed about. But Nomuri wasn't an experienced case officer. He was still a little wet behind the ears, and so he didn't know what was impossible. He'd have to worry about his potential agent, because if he ever recruited her successfully, her life would be in the gravest danger... he thought about what would happen, how her face would change as the bullet entered her brain... but, no, it was too ugly. With an effort, Nomuri forced the thought aside as he slipped into her. If he were to recruit her at all, he had to perform this function well. And if it made him happy, too, well, that was just a bonus.
 
   I'll think about it," POTUS promised the Secretary of the Interior, walking him to the door that led to the corridor, to the left of the fireplace. Sorry, buddy, but the money isn't there to do all that. His SecInterior was by no means a bad man, but it seemed he'd been captured by his departmental bureaucracy, which was perhaps the worst danger of working in Washington. He sat back down to read the papers the Secretary had handed over. Of course he wouldn't have time to read it all over himself. On a good day, he'd be able to skim through the Executive Summary of the documents, while the rest went to a staffer who'd go through it all and draft a report to the President – in effect, another Executive Summary of sorts, and from that document, typed up by a White House staff member of maybe twenty-eight years, policy would actually be made.
   And that was crazy! Ryan thought angrily. He was supposed to be the chief executive of the country. He was the only one who was supposed to make policy. But the President's time was valuable. So valuable, in fact, that others guarded it for him – and really those others guarded his time from himself, because ultimately it was they who decided what Ryan saw and didn't see. Thus, while Ryan was the Chief Executive, and did alone make executive policy, he made that policy often based solely on the information presented to him by others. And sometimes it worried him that he was controlled by the information that made it to his desk, rather as the press decided what the public saw, and thus had a hand in deciding what the public thought about the various issues of the day.
   So, Jack, have you been captured by your bureaucracy, too? It was hard to know, hard to tell, and hard to decide how to change the situation, if the situation existed in the first place.
   Maybe that's why Arnie likes me to get out of this building to where the real people are, Jack realized.
   The more difficult problem was that Ryan was a foreign-policy and national-security expert. In those areas he felt the most competent. It was on domestic stuff that he felt disconnected and dumb. Part of that came from his personal wealth. He'd never worried about the cost of a loaf of bread or a quart of milk – all the more so in the White House, where you never saw milk in a quart container anyway, but only in a chilled glass on a silver tray, carried by a Navy steward's mate right to your hands while you sat in your easy chair. There were people out there who did worry about such things, or at least worried about the cost of putting little Jimmy through college, and Ryan, as President, had to concern himself with their worries. He had to try to keep the economy in balance so that they could earn their decent livings, could go to Disney World in the summer, and the football games in the fall, and splurge to make sure there were plenty of presents under the Christmas tree every year.
   But how the hell was he supposed to do that? Ryan remembered a lament attributed to the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. On learning that he'd been declared a god, and that temples had been erected to him, and that people sacrificed to the statues of himself in those temples, Augustus angrily inquired: When someone prays to me to cure his gout, what am I supposed to do? The fundamental issue was how much government policy really had to do with reality. That was a question seldom posed in Washington even by conservatives who ideologically despised the government and everything it did in domestic terms, though they were often in favor of showing the flag and rattling the national saber overseas – exactly why they enjoyed this Ryan had never thought about. Perhaps just to be different from liberals who flinched from the exercise of force like a vampire from the cross, but who, like vampires, liked to extend government as far as they could get away with into the lives of everyone, and so suck their blood – in reality, use the instrument of taxation to take more and more to pay for the more and more they would have the government do.
   And yet the economy seemed to move on, regardless of what government did. People found their jobs, most of them in the private sector, providing goods and services for which people paid voluntarily with their after-tax money. And yet "public service" was a phrase used almost exclusively by and about political figures, almost always the elected sort. Didn't everyone out there serve the public in one way or another? Physicians, teachers, firefighters, pharmacists. Why did the media say it was just Ryan and Robby Jackson, and the 535 elected members of the Congress? He shook his head.
   Damn. Okay, I know how I got here, but why the hell did I allow myself to run for election? Jack asked himself. It had made Arnie happy. It had even made the media happy – perhaps because they loved him as a target? the President asked himself – and Cathy had not been cross with him about it. But why the hell had he ever allowed himself to be stampeded into this? He fundamentally didn't know what he was supposed to do as President. He had no real agenda, and sort of bumped along from day to day. Making tactical decisions (for which he was singularly unqualified) instead of large strategic ones. There was nothing important he really wanted to change about his country. Oh, sure, there were a few problems to be fixed. Tax policy needed rewriting, and he was letting George Winston ramrod that. And Defense needed firming up, and he had Tony Bretano working on that. He had a Presidential Commission looking at health-care policy, which his wife, actually, was overseeing in a distant way, along with some of her Hopkins colleagues, and all of that was kept quiet. And there was that very black look at Social Security, being guided by Winston and Mark Gant.
   The "third rail of American politics," he thought again. Step on it and die. But Social Security was something the American people really cared about, not for what it was, but for what they wrongly thought it to be – and, actually, they knew that their thoughts were wrong, judging by the polling data. As thoroughly mismanaged as any financial institution could possibly be, it was still part of a government promise made by the representatives of the people to the people. And somehow, despite all the cynicism out there – which was considerable – the average Joe Citizen really did trust his government to keep its word. The problem was that union chiefs and industrialists who'd dipped into pension funds and gone to federal prison for it had done nothing compared to what succeeding Congresses had done to Social Security – but the advantage of a crook in Congress was that he or she was not a crook, not legally. After all, Congress made the law. Congress made government policy, and those things couldn't be wrong, could they? Yet another proof that the drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the "Oops!" emanating from all those old graves. The people who'd drafted the Constitution had sat in a room dominated by George Washington himself, and whatever honor they'd lacked he'd probably provided from his own abundant supply, just by sitting there and looking at them. The current Congress had no such mentor/living god to take George's place, and more was the pity, Ryan thought. The mere fact that Social Security had shown a profit up through the 1960s had meant that – well, Congress couldn't let a profit happen, could it? Profits were what made rich people (who had to be bad people, because no one grew rich without having exploited someone or other, right?, which never stopped members of the Congress from going to those people for campaign contributions, of course) rich, and so profits had to be spent, and so Social Security taxes (properly called premiums, because Social Security was actually called OASDI, for Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) were transformed into general funds, to be spent along with everything else. One of Ryan's students from his days of teaching history at the Naval Academy had sent him a small plaque to keep on his White House desk. It read: THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE UNTIL THE DAY CONGRESS DISCOVERS THAT IT CAN BRIBE THE PUBLIC WITH THE PUBLIC'S MONEY – ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. Ryan paid heed to it. There were times when he wanted to grab Congress by its collective neck and throttle it, but there was no single such neck, and Arnie never tired of telling him how tame a Congress he had, the House of Representatives especially, which was the reverse of how things usually went.
   The President grumbled and checked his daily schedule for his next appointment. As with everything else, the President of the United States lived a schedule determined by others, his appointments made weeks in advance, the daily briefing pages prepared the day before so that he'd know who the hell was coming in, and what the hell he, she, or they wanted to talk about, and also what his considered position (mainly drafted by others) was. The President's position was usually a friendly one so that the visitor(s) could leave the Oval Office feeling good about the experience, and the rules were that you couldn't change the agenda, lest the Chief Executive say, "What the hell are you asking me for now!" This would alarm both the guest and the Secret Service agents standing right behind them, hands close to their pistols – just standing there like robots, faces blank but scanning, ears taking everything in. After their shift ended, they probably headed off to whatever cop bar they frequented to chuckle over what the City Council President of Podunk had said in the Oval Office that day – "Jesus, did you see the Boss's eyes when that dumb bastard...?" – because they were bright, savvy people who in many ways understood his job better than he did, Ryan reflected. Well they should. They had the double advantage of having seen it all, and not being responsible for any of it. Lucky bastards, Jack thought, standing for his next appointment.
 
   If cigarettes were good for anything, it was for this, Nomuri thought. His left arm was curled around Ming, his body snuggled up against her, staring at the ceiling in the lovely, relaxed, deflationary moment, and puffing gently on his Kool as an accent to the moment, feeling Ming's breathing, and feeling very much like a man. The sky outside the windows was dark. The sun had set.
   Nomuri stood, stopping first in the bathroom and then heading to the kitchenette. He returned with two wine glasses. Ming sat up in bed and took a sip from hers. For his part, Nomuri couldn't resist reaching over to touch her. Her skin was just so smooth and inviting.
   "My brain is still not working," she said, after her third sip.
   "Darling, there are times when men and women don't need their brains."
   "Well, your sausage doesn't need one," she responded, reaching down to fondle it.
   "Gently, girl! He's run a long hard race!" the CIA officer warned her with an inner smile.
   "Oh, so he has." Ming bent down to deliver a gentle kiss. "And he won the race."
   "No, but he did manage to catch up with you." Nomuri lit another cigarette. Then he was surprised to see Ming reach into her purse and pull out one of her own. She lit it with grace and took a long puff, finally letting the smoke out her nose.
   "Dragon girl!" Nomuri announced with a laugh. "Do flames come next? I didn't know you smoked."
   "At the office, everyone does."
   "Even the minister?"
   Another laugh: "Especially the minister."
   "Someone should tell him that smoking is dangerous to the health, and not good for the yang."
   "A smoked sausage is not a firm sausage," Ming said, with a laugh. "Maybe that's his problem, then."
   "You do not like your minister?"
   "He is an old man with what he thinks is a young penis. He uses the office staff as his personal bordello. Well, it could be worse," Ming admitted. "It's been a long time since I was his favorite. Lately he's fixed on Chai, and she is engaged, and Fang knows it. That is not a civilized act on the part of a senior minister."
   "The laws do not apply to him?"
   She snorted with borderline disgust. "The laws apply to none of them. Nomuri-san, these are government ministers. They are the law in this country, and they care little for what others think of them or their habits – few enough find out in any case. They are corrupt on a scale that shames the emperors of old, and they say they are the guardians of the common people, the peasants and workers they claim to love as their own children. Well, I suppose sometimes I am one of those peasants, eh?"
   "And I thought you liked your minister," Nomuri responded, goading her on. "So, what does he talk about?"
   "What do you mean?"
   "The late work that kept you away from here," he answered, waving at the bedclothes with a smile.
   "Oh, talk between the ministers. He keeps an extensive personal political diary – in case the president might want to oust him, that is his defense, you see, something he could present to his peers. Fang doesn't want to lose his official residence and all the privileges that come along with it. So, he keeps records of all he does, and I am his secretary, and I transcribe all his notes. Sometimes it can take forever."
   "On your computer, of course."
   "Yes, the new one, in perfect Mandarin ideographs now that you've given us the new software."
   "You keep it on your computer?"
   "On the hard drive, yes. Oh, it's encrypted," she assured him. "We learned that from the Americans, when we broke into their weapons records. It's called a robust encryption system, whatever that means. I select the file I wish to open and type in the decryption key, and the file opens. Do you want to know what key I use?" She giggled. "YELLOW SUBMARINE. In English because of the keyboard – it was before your new software – and it's from a Beatles song I heard on the radio once. 'We all live in a yellow submarine,' something like that. I listened to the radio a lot back then, when I was first studying English. I spent half an hour looking up submarines in the dictionary and then the encyclopedia, trying to find out why a ship was painted yellow. Ahh!" Her hands flew up in the air.
   The encryption key! Nomuri tried to hide his excitement. "Well, it must be a lot of folders. You've been his secretary for a lot of time," he said casually.
   "Over four hundred documents. I keep them by number instead of making up new names for them. Today was number four hundred eighty-seven, as a matter of fact."
   Holy shit, Nomuri thought, four hundred eighty-seven computer documents of inside-the-Politburo conversations. This makes a gold mine look like a toxic waste dump.
   "What exactly do they talk about? I've never met a senior government functionary," Nomuri explained.
   "Everything!" she answered, finishing her own cigarette. "Who's got ideas in the Politburo, who wants to be nice to America, who wants to hurt them – everything you can imagine. Defense policy. Economic policy. The big one lately is how to deal with Hong Kong. 'One Country, Two Systems' has developed problems with some industrialists around Beijing and Shanghai. They feel they are treated with less respect than they deserve – less than they get in Hong Kong, that is – and they are unhappy about it. Fang's one of the people trying to find a compromise to make them happy. He might. He's very clever at such things."
   "It must be fascinating to see such information – to really know what's going on in your country!" Nomuri gushed. "In Japan, we never know what the zaibatsu and the MITI people are doing – ruining the economy, for the most part, the fools. But because nobody knows, no action is ever taken to fix things. Is it the same here?"
   "Of course!" She lit another smoke, getting into the conversation, and hardly noticing that it wasn't about love anymore. "Once I studied my Marx and my Mao. Once I believed in it all. Once I even trusted the senior ministers to be men of honor and integrity, and totally believed the things they taught me in school. But then I saw how the army has its own industrial empire, and that empire keeps the generals rich and fat and happy. And I saw how the ministers use women, and how they furnish their apartments. They've become the new emperors. They have too much power. Perhaps a woman could use such power without being corrupted, but not a man."
   Feminism's made it over here, too? Nomuri reflected. Maybe she was too young to remember Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who could have given corruption lessons to the court of Byzantium.
   "Well, that is not a problem for people like us. And at least you get to see such things, and at least you get to know it. That makes you even more unique, Ming-chan," Nomuri suggested, tracing the palm of his hand over her left nipple. She shivered right on command..
   "You think so?"
   "Of course." A kiss this time, a nice lingering one, while his hand stroked her body. He was so close. She had told him of all the information she had – she'd even given him the fucking encryption key! So her 'puter was wired into the phone system – that meant he could call in to it, and with the right software he could go snooping around her hard drive, and with the encryption key he could lift things right off, and cross-load them right to Mary Pat's desk. Damn, first I get to fuck a Chinese citizen, and then I can fuck their whole country. It didn't get much better than this, the field spook decided, with a smile at the ceiling.

CHAPTER 13

Penetration Agent
   
Well, he left the prurient parts out this time, Mary Pat saw when she lit up her computer in the morning. Operation SORGE was moving right along.
   Whoever this Ming girl was, she talked a little too much. Odd. Hadn’t the MSS briefed all the executive secretaries about this sort of thing? Probably—it would have been a remarkable oversight if they hadn’t—but it also seemed likely that of the well-known reasons for committing treason and espionage (known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego), this one was Ego. Young Miss Ming was being used sexually by her Minister Fang, and she didn’t much like it, and that made perfect sense to Mary Patricia Foley. A woman only had so much to give, and to have it taken coercively by a man of power wasn’t something calculated to make a woman happy—though ironically the powerful man in question probably thought he was honoring her with his biological attention. After all, was he not a great man, and was she not a peasant? The thought was good for a snort as she took a sip of morning seventh-floor coffee. It didn’t matter what culture or race, men were all the same, weren’t they? So many of them thought from the dick instead of the brain. Well, it was going to cost this one dearly, the Deputy Director (Operations) concluded.
 
   Ryan saw and heard the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, every day. It covered intelligence information developed by CIA, was prepared late every night and printed early every morning, and there were less than a hundred copies, almost all of which were shredded and burned later in the day of delivery. A few copies, maybe three or four, were kept as archives, in case the electronic files somehow got corrupted, but even President Ryan didn’t know where the secure-storage site was. He hoped it was carefully guarded, preferably by Marines.
   The PDB didn’t contain everything, of course. Some things were so secret that even the President couldn’t be trusted. That was something Ryan accepted with remarkable equanimity. Sources’ names had to remain secret, even from him, and methods were often so narrowly technical that he’d have trouble understanding the technology used anyway. But even some of the “take,” the information obtained by the CIA through nameless sources and overly intricate methods, was occasionally hidden from the Chief Executive, because some information had to come from a certain limited number of sources. The intelligence business was one in which the slightest mistake could end the life of a priceless asset, and while such things had happened, nobody had ever felt good about it—though to some politicians, it had been a matter of infuriating indifference. A good field spook viewed his agents as his own children, whose lives were to be protected against all hazards. Such a point of view was necessary. If you didn’t care that much, then people died—and with their lost lives went lost information, which was the whole point of having a clandestine service in the first place.
   “Okay, Ben,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair and flipping through the PDB pages. “What’s interesting?”
   “Mary Pat has something happening in China. Not sure what it is, though. She’s keeping these cards pretty close. The rest of today’s document you can get on CNN.”
   Which was, depressingly, not infrequently the case. On the other hand, the world was fairly sedate, and penetrating information wasn’t all that necessary.., or apparently so, Ryan corrected himself. You could never tell. He’d learned that one at Langley, too.
   “Maybe I’ll call her about it,” POTUS said, flipping the page. “Whoa!”
   “The Russian oil and gas?”
   “Are these numbers for real?”
   “It appears so. They track with what TRADER’S been feeding us from his sources, step for step.”
   “Ummhmm,” Ryan breathed, looking over the resulting forecasts for the Russian economy. Then he frowned with some disappointment. “George’s people did a better evaluation of results.”
   “Think so? CIA’s economics troops have a pretty decent track record.”
   “George lives in that business. That’s better than being an academic observer of events, Ben. Academia is fine, but the real world is the real world, remember.”
   Goodley nodded. “Duly noted, sir.”
   “Throughout the ‘80s, CIA overestimated the Soviet economy. Know why?”
   “No, I don’t. What went wrong?”
   Jack smiled wryly. “It wasn’t what was wrong. It was what was right. We had an agent back then who fed us the same information the Soviet Politburo got. It just never occurred to us that the system was lying to itself. The Politburo based its decisions on a chimera. Their numbers were almost never right because the underlings were covering their own asses. Oops.”
   “Same thing in China, you suppose?” Goodley asked. “They’re the last really Marxist country, after all.”
   “Good question. Call Langley and ask. You’ll get an answer from the same sort of bureaucrat the Chinese have in Beijing, but to the best of my knowledge we don’t have a penetration agent in Beijing who can give us the numbers we want.” Ryan paused and looked at the fireplace opposite his desk. He’d have to have the Secret Service put a real fire in it someday . . . “No, I expect the Chinese have better numbers. They can afford to. Their economy is working, after a fashion They probably deceive themselves in other ways. But they do deceive themselves. It’s a universal human characteristic, and Marxism doesn’t ameliorate it very much.” Even in America, with its free press and other safeguards, reality often slapped political figures in the face hard enough to loosen some teeth. Everywhere, people had theoretical models based on ideology rather than facts, and those people usually found their way into academia or politics, because real-world professions punished that sort of dreamer more than politics ever did.
   “Morning, Jack,” a voice said from the corridor door.
   “Hey, Robby.” POTUS pointed to the coffee tray. Vice President Jackson got himself a cup, but passed on the croissants. His waistline looked a little tight. Well, Robby had never looked like a marathoner. So many fighter pilots tended to have thick waists. Maybe it was good for fighting g-forces, Jack speculated.
   “Read the PDB this morning. Jack, this Russian oil and gold thing. Is it really that big?”
   “George says it’s even bigger. You ever sit down with him to learn economics?”
   “End of the week, we’re going to play a round at Burning Tree, and I’m reading Milton Friedman and two other books to bone up for it. You know, George comes across as pretty smart.”
   “Smart enough to make a ton of money on The Street– and I mean if you put his money in hundred-dollar bills and weigh them, it is a fucking ton of money.”
   “Must be nice,” breathed a man who’d never made more than $130,000 in a year before taking on his current job.
   “Has its moments, but the coffee here’s still pretty good.”
   “It was better on Big John, once upon a time.”
   “Where?”
   “John F Kennedy, back when I was an 0-3, and doing fun work, like driving TOMCATs off the boat.”
   “Robby, hate to tell you, my friend, but you’re not twenty—six anymore."
   “Jack, you have such a way of brightening up my days for me. I’ve walked past death’s door before, but it’s safer and a hell of a lot more fun to do it with a fighter plane strapped to your back.”
   “What’s your day look like?”
   “Believe it or not, I have to drive down to the Hill and preside at the Senate for a few hours, just to show I know what the Constitution says I’m supposed to do. Then a dinner speech in Baltimore about who makes the best brassieres,” he added with a smile.
   “What?” Jack asked, looking up from the PDB. The thing about Robby’s sense of humor was that you never really knew when he was kidding.
   “National meeting of artificial fiber manufacturers. They also make bulletproof vests, but bras get most of their fibers, or so my research staff tells me. They’re trying to make a few jokes for the speech.”
   “Work on your delivery,” the President advised the Vice President.
   “You thought I was funny enough way back when,” Jackson reminded his old friend.
   “Rob, I thought I was funny enough way back when, but Arnie tells me I’m not sensitive enough.”
   “I know, no Polish jokes. Some Polacks learned to turn on their TVs last year, and there’s six or seven who know how to read. That doesn’t count the Polish gal who doesn’t use a vibrator because it chips her teeth.”
   “Jesus, Robby!” Ryan almost spilled his coffee laughing. “We’re not even allowed to think things like that anymore.”
   “Jack, I’m not a politician. I’m a fighter jock. I got the flight suit, the hack watch, and the dick to go along with the job title, y’dig?” the Vice President asked with a grin. “And I am allowed to tell a joke once in a while.”
   “Fine, just remember this isn’t the ready room on the Kennedy The media lacks the sense of humor enjoyed by naval aviators.”
   “Yeah, unless they catch us in something. Then it’s funnier ‘n hell,” the retired Vice Admiral observed.
   “Rob, you’re finally catching on. Glad to see it.” Ryan’s last sight of the departing subordinate was the back of a nicely tailored suit, accompanied by a muttered vulgarity:
 
   So, Misha, any thoughts?” Provalov asked. Reilly took a sip of his vodka. It was awfully smooth here. “Oleg, you just have to shake the tree and see what falls out. It could be damned near anything, but ‘don’t know’ means ‘don’t know.’ And at the moment, we don’t know.” Another sip. “Does it strike you that two former Spetsnaz guys are a lot of firepower to go after a pimp?”
   The Russian nodded. “Yes, of course, I’ve thought of that, but he was a very prosperous pimp, wasn’t he, Misha? He had a great deal of money, and very many contacts inside the criminal establishment. He had power of his own. Perhaps he’d had people killed as well. We never had his name come up in a serious way in any murder investigations, but that doesn’t mean that Avseyenko was not a dangerous man in his own right, and therefore worthy of such high-level attention.”
   “Any luck with this Suvorov guy?”
   Provalov shook his head. “No. We have a KGB file for him and a photograph, but even if that is for the right person, we haven’t found him yet.”
   “Well, Oleg Gregoriyevich, it looks as though you have a real head-scratcher on your hands.” Reilly lifted his hand to order another round.
   “You are supposed to be the expert on organized crime,” the Russian lieutenant reminded his FBI guest.
   “That’s true, Oleg, but I ain’t no gypsy fortune-teller, and I ain’t the Oracle of Delphi either. You don’t know who the real target was yet, and until you learn that, you don’t know jack shit. Problem is, to find out who the target was, you have to find somebody who knows something about the crime. The two things are wrapped up together, bro. Get one, get both. Get neither, get nothing.” The drinks arrived. Reilly paid and took another hit.
   “My captain is not pleased.”
   The FBI agent nodded. “Yeah, bosses are like that in the Bureau, too, but he’s supposed to know what the problems are, right? If he does, he knows he has to give you the time and the resources to play it out. How many men you have on it now?”
   “Six here, and three more in St. Petersburg.”
   “May want to get some more, bro.” In the FBI’s New York OC office, a case like this could have as many as twenty agents working it, half of them on a full-time basis. But the Moscow Militia was stretched notoriously thin. For as much crime as there was now in Moscow, the local cops were still sucking hind tit when it came to government support. But it could have been worse. Unlike much of Russian society, the militiamen were getting paid.
 
   “You tire me out,” Nomuri protested.
   “There is always Minister Fang,” Ming replied with a playful look.
   Was the enraged reply. “You compare me with an old man?”
   “Well, both of you are men, but better a sausage than a string bean,” she answered, grasping the former in her soft left hand.
   “Patience, girl, allow me to recover from the first race.” With that he lifted her body over his and let it down. She must really like me, Nomuri reflected. Three nights in a row. I suppose Fang isn’t the man he thinks he is. Well, can’t win ‘em all, Charlie. Plus the advantage of being forty years younger. There was probably something to that, the CIA officer admitted to himself.
   “But you run so fast!” Ming protested, rubbing her body on his.
   “There is something I want you to do.”
   A very playful smile. “What might that be?” she asked while her hand wandered a little.
   “Not that!”
   “Oh.. .“ The disappointment in her voice was noteworthy.
   “Something for work,” Nomuri explained on. Just as well she couldn’t feel the shaking inside his body, which, remarkably enough, didn’t show.
   “For work? I can’t bring you into the office for this!” she said with a laugh, followed by a warm, affectionate kiss.
   “Yes, something to upload onto your computer.” Nomuri reached into the night-table drawer and pulled out a CDROM. “Here, you just load this into your machine, click INSTALL, and then dispose of it when you’re done.”
   “And what will it do?” she asked.
   “Do you care?”
   “Well. . . .” Hesitation. She didn’t understand. “I must care.”
   “It will allow me to look at your computer from time to time.”
   “But why?”
   “Because of Nippon Electric—we make your computer, don’t you see?” He allowed his body to relax. “It is useful for my company to know how economic decisions are made in the People’s Republic,” Nomuri explained, with a well-rehearsed lie. “This will allow us to understand that process a little better, so that we can do business more effectively. And the better I do for them, the more they will pay me– and the more I can spend on my darling Ming.”
   “I see,” she thought, wrongly.
   He bent down to kiss a particularly nice spot. Her body shuddered in just the right way. Good, she wasn’t resisting the idea, or at least wasn’t letting it get in the way of this activity, which was good for Nomuri in more than one way. The intelligence officer wondered if someday his conscience would attack him for using this girl in such a way. But business, he told himself, was business.
   “No one will know?”
   “No, that is not possible.”
   “And it will not get me into trouble?”
   With that question he rolled over, finding himself on top. He held her face in both hands. “Would I ever do something to get Ming-chan in trouble? Never!” he announced, with a deep and passionate kiss.
   Afterward there was no talk about the CD-ROM, which she tucked into her purse before leaving. It was a nice-looking purse, a knockoff of something Italian that you could buy on the street here, rather like the genuine ones in New York that “fell off the back of the truck,” as the euphemism went.
   Every time they parted, it was a little hard. She didn’t want to leave, and truly he didn’t want her to depart, but it was necessary. For them to share an apartment would be commented upon. Even in her dreams, Ming couldn’t think of that, actually sleeping at the apartment of a foreigner, because she did have a security clearance, and she had been given her security brief by a bored MSS officer, along with all the other senior secretaries, and she hadn‘t reported this contact to her superiors or the office security chief as she ought to have done—why? Partly because she’d forgotten the rules, because she’d never broken them or known someone who had done so, and partly because like many people she drew a line between her private life and her professional one. That the two were not allowed to be separate in her case was something that the MSS briefing had covered, but in so clumsy a way as to have been disregarded even upon its delivery. And so here she was, not even knowing where and what here was. With luck, she’d never have to find out, Nomuri thought, watching her turn the corner and disappear from view. Luck would help. What the MSS interrogators did to young women in the Beijing version of the Lubyanka didn’t really bear much contemplation, certainly not when one had just made love to her twice in two hours.
   “Good luck, honey,” Nomuri whispered, as he closed the door and headed to the bathroom for a shower.

CHAPTER 14

(dot)com
 
 It was a sleepless night for Nomuri. Would she do it? Would she do what she was told? Would-she tell a security officer about it, and then about him? Might she be caught with the CD-ROM going into work and questioned about it? If so, a casual inspection would show it to be a music CD, Bill Conti’s musical score for Rocky—a poorly marked knockoff of an American intellectual property that was quite common in the PRC. But a more careful examination would have revealed that the first—outermost—data line on the metallic surface told the computer CD-ROM reader to skip to a certain place where the content was not music, but binary code, and very efficient binary code at that.
   The CD-ROM didn’t contain a virus per se, because a virus circulates mainly across computer networks, entering a computer surreptitiously the way a disease organism enters a living host (hence the term virus). But this one came in the front door, and on being read by the CD-ROM reader, a single prompt came up on the screen, and Ming, after a quick look-around in her office, moved her mouse to put the pointer on the prompt, clicked the INSTALL command, and everything immediately disappeared. The program thus implanted searched her hard drive at nearly the speed of light, categorizing every file and setting up its own index, then compressing it into a small file that hid in plain sight, as it were, identified by any disk-sorting program with a wholly innocent name that referred to a function carried out by another program entirely. Thus only a very careful and directed search by a skilled computer operator could even detect that something was even there. Exactly what the program did could only be determined by a one-by-zero reading of the program itself, something difficult to accomplish at best. It would be like trying to find what was wrong with a single leaf on a single tree in a vast forest where all the trees and all the leaves looked pretty much alike, except that this one leaf was smaller and humbler than most. CIA and NSA could no longer attract the best programmers in America. There was just too much money in the consumer electronics industry for government to compete effectively in that marketplace. But you could still hire them, and the work that came out was just as good. And if you paid them enough—strangely, you could pay lots more to a contractor than to an employee—they wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. And besides, they never really knew what it was all about anyway, did they?
   In this case, there was an additional level of complexity that went back over sixty years. When the Germans had overrun the Netherlands in 1940, they’d created a strange situation. In Holland the Germans had found both the most cooperative of their conquered nations and the most fiercely resistant. More Dutchmen per capita had joined the Germans than any other nationality—enough to form their own SS division, SS Nordland. At the same time, the Dutch resistance became the most effective in Europe, and one of their number was a brilliant mathematician/engineer working for the national telephone company. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the telephone had reached a developmental roadblock. When you lifted a phone, you were immediately connected with an operator to whom you gave the destination you were trying to call, and she then physically moved a plug into the proper hole. This system had been workable when only a few telephones were in use, but the appliance had rapidly proved too useful for limited applications. The solution to the problem, remarkably enough, had come from a mortician in the American South.
   Vexed by the fact that the local operator in his town referred the bereaved to a competing undertaker, he had invented the stepping switch, which enabled people to reach their own phone destinations merely by turning a rotary dial. That system served the world well, but also required the development of a whole body of new mathematical knowledge called “complexity theory,” which was systematized by the American company AT&T in the 1930s.
   Ten years later, merely by adding additional digits to be dialed, the Dutch engineer in the resistance had applied complexity theory to covert operations by creating theoretical pathways through the switching gear, thus enabling resistance fighters to call others without knowing whom they called, or even the actual telephone numbers they were calling.
   This bit of electronic skullduggery had first been noticed by an officer for the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, and, finding it very clever indeed, he’d discussed it over a beer with an American colleague in a London pub. The American OSS officer, like most of the men Wild Bill Donovan had chosen, was an attorney by profession, and in his case, a very thorough one, who wrote everything down and forwarded it up the line. The report on the Dutch engineer had made its way to the office of Colonel William Friedman, then America’s foremost code-breaker. Though not himself a hardware expert, Friedman had known something useful when he saw it, and he knew there would be an after-the-war, during which his agency—later reborn as the National Security Agency—would still be busy cracking other countries’ codes and ciphers and producing codes and ciphers itself. The ability to develop covert communications links through a relatively simple mathematical trick had seemed a gift from God’s own hand.
   In the 1940s and ‘50s, NSA had been able to hire American’s finest mathematicians, and one of the tasks assigned them had been to work with AT&T to create a universal telephone operating system that could be used covertly by American intelligence officers. Back then, AT&T was the only real rival NSA had had in the hiring of skilled mathematicians, and beyond that, AT&T had always been a prime contractor for just about every executive agency of the government. By 1955, it was done, and for a surprisingly modest fee AT&T provided the entire world with a model for telephone systems that most of the world adopted—the modest cost was explained by the desire of AT&T to make its systems compatible with every other country’s to ease international communications. With the 1970s had come push-button phones, which directed calls electronically by frequency-controlled codes even easier for electronic systems to use, and infinitely easier to maintain than the former electro-mechanical stepping switches that had made the mortician hugely rich. They also proved even easier for AT&T to rig for NSA. The operating systems first given the world’s telephone companies by AT&T’s Parsippany, New Jersey, research laboratory had been upgraded yearly at least, giving further improvements to the efficiency of the world’s phone systems—so much so that scarcely any telephone system in the world didn’t use it. And tucked into that operating system were six lines of binary code whose operational concept traced back to the Nazi occupation of Holland.
   Ming finished the installation and ejected the disk, discarding it into her waste can. The easy way to dispose of secret material was to have your adversary do it, through the front door, not the back one.
   Nothing really happened for some hours, while Ming did her usual office tasks and Nomuri visited three commercial businesses to sell his high-powered desktop computers. All that changed at 7:45 P.M.
   By this time, Ming was at her own home. Nomuri would get a night off; Ming had to do some things with her roommate to avoid too much suspicion—watching local television, chatting with her friend, and thinking about her lover, while the whole reason for the wispy smiles on her face played out entirely outside her consciousness. Strangely, it never occurred to her that her roomie had it all figured out in an instant, and was merely polite enough not to broach the subject.
   Her NEC desktop computer had long since gone into auto-sleep mode, leaving the monitor screen dark and blank, and the indicator light in the lower right position of the plastic frame amber instead of the green that went with real activity. The software she’d installed earlier in the day had been custom-designed for the NEC machines, which like all such machines had proprietary source-code unique to the brand. The source-code, however, was known to the National Security Agency.
   Immediately upon installation, the Ghost program—as it had been christened at Fort Meade, Maryland—had buried itself in a special niche in the NEC’s operating system, the newest version of Microsoft Windows. The niche had been created by a Microsoft employee whose favorite uncle had died over North Vietnam while flying an F-105 fighter-bomber, and who did his patriotic work entirely without the knowledge of his parent company. It also dovetailed exactly with the NEC code, with the effect of making it virtually invisible even to a line-by-line inspection of all the code within the machine by an expert software engineer.
   The Ghost had gone immediately to work, creating a di-rectory that sorted the documents on Ming’s computer first by date of creation modification, and then by file type. Some files, like the operating system, it ignored. It similarly ignored the NEC-created transcription program that converted Roman characters, actually the English phonemes of the spoken Mandarin language, into the corresponding ideographs, but the Ghost did not ignore the graphic-text files that resulted from that program. Those it copied, along with telephone indexes and every other text file on the five-gigabyte hard drive. This entire procedure took the machine, guided by the Ghost, seventeen-point-one-four seconds, leaving a large file that sat by itself.
   The machine did nothing for a second and a half, then new activity started. The NEC desktop machines had built-in high-speed modems. The Ghost activated these, but also turned off their internal mini-speakers so that no evidence of the transmission would be heard by anyone. (Leaving the speakers on was a primary security measure. The flashing lights that told of their activity were hidden because the modem was inside the box for this model.) The computer then dialed (this term had somehow survived the demise of rotary dials on telephones) a twelve-digit number rather than the usual seven used by the Beijing telephone system. The additional five digits sent the seeker-signal on a round-robin adventure through the hardware of the central switching computer, and it came out in the place designated two weeks before by the engineers at Fort Meade, who, of course, never had an idea what this was all for, or where it would happen, or who might be involved. The number that rang—actually there wasn’t a mechanical or electronic ringer of any sort—was the dedicated modem line that exited the wall by Chester Nomuri’s desk and ended in the back of his very high-end laptop—which was not an NEC, because here, as with most computer applications, the best was still American.
   Nomuri was also watching TV at the moment, though in his case it was the CNN international news, so that he could know what was going on at home. After that he’d switch to a Japanese satellite channel, because it was part of his cover. A samurai show he liked was on tonight, in theme and simplicity rather like the Westerns that had polluted American TV in the 1950s. Though an educated man and a professional intelligence officer, Nomuri liked mindless entertainment as much as anyone else. The beep made him turn his head. Though his computer had software similar to that running in Ming’s office, he’d allowed the aural prompt to tell him that something was coming in, and a three-key code lit up his screen to show exactly what it was and where it was coming from.
   Yes! the CIA officer exulted, his right fist slamming into his open left hand hard enough to sting. Yes. He had his agent in fucking place, and here was the take from Operation SORGE. A bar at the top of the screen showed that the data was coming it at a rate of 57,000 bits per second.
   That was pretty fast. Now, just hope that the local commie phone system didn’t develop a bad connection somewhere between Ming’s office and the switching center, and from the switching center to his flat, Chester thought. Shouldn’t be much of a problem. The outbound leg from Ming’s office would be first-rate, tasked as it was to the service of the Party nobility. And from the switching center to his place would be okay, because he’d gotten numerous messages that way, most of them from NEC in Tokyo to congratulate him on exceeding his sales quota already.
   Yeah, well, Chet, you are pretty good at making a sale, aren’t you? he asked himself on the way to the kitchen. He figured he owed himself a drink for this bit of performance. On returning, he saw that the download wasn’t finished yet.
   Damn. How much shit is she sending me? Then he realized that the text files he was getting were actually graphics files, because Ming’s computer didn’t store ideographs as letters, but rather as the pictures that they actually were. That made the files memory-intensive. Exactly how memory-intensive they were, he saw forty minutes later when the download ended.
   At the far end of the electronic chain, the Ghost program appeared to shut itself down, but in fact it slept rather as a dog did, one ear always cocked up, and always aware of the time of day. On finishing the transmission, the Ghost made a notation on its inside index of the files. It had sent everything up until this day. From now on, it would only send new ones—which would make for much shorter and faster transmissions—but only in the evening, and only after ninety-five minutes of total inactivity on the computer, and only when it was outwardly in auto-sleep mode. Tradecraft and caution had been programmed in.
   “Fuck,” Nomuri breathed on seeing the size of the download. In pictures this could be the porno shots of damned near every hooker in Hong Kong. But his job was only half done. He lit up a program of his own and selected the “Preferences” folder that controlled it. Already checked was the box for auto encryption. Virtually everything on his computer was encrypted anyway, which was easily explainable as trade and business secrets—Japanese companies are renowned for the secrecy of their operations—but with some files more encrypted than others. The ones that arrived from the Ghost got the most robust scrambling, from a mathematically derived transcription system, fully 512 bits in the key, plus an additional random element which Nomuri could not duplicate. That was in addition to his numeric password, 51240, the street number of his first “score” in East LA. Then it was time to transmit his take.
   This program was a close cousin to the Ghost he’d given Ming. But this one dialed the local Internet Service Provider, or ISP, and sent off a lengthy e-mail to a destination called patsbakery @brownienet.com. The “brownienet” was putatively a network established for bakeries and bakers, professional and amateur, who liked to swap recipes, often posting photos of their creations for people to download, which explained the occasional large file transferred. Photographs are notoriously rapacious in their demands for bytes and disk space.
   In fact, Mary Patricia Foley had posted her own highly satisfactory recipe for French apple pie, along with a photo her elder son had taken with his Apple electronic camera. Doing so hadn’t been so much a case of establishing a good cover as womanly pride in her own abilities as a cook, after spending an hour one night looking over the recipes others had put on this bulletin board. She’d tried one from a woman in Michigan a few weeks previously and found it okay, but not great. In coming weeks she wanted to try some of the bread recipes, which did look promising.
   It was morning when Nomuri uploaded his e-mail to Pat’s Bakery, an entirely real and legitimate business three blocks from the statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin, as a matter of fact, owned by a former CIA officer in the Science and Technology Directorate, now retired and a grandmother who was, however, too young for knitting. She’d created this Internet domain, paying the nominal fee and then forgetting about it, just as she’d forgotten nearly everything she’d ever done at Langley.
   “You’ve got mail,” the computer said when MP switched on her Internet mail service, which used the new Pony Express e-mail program. She keyed the download command and saw the originator was cgoodjadecastle.com. The username was from Gunsmoke. Marshal Dillon’s crippled sidekick had been named Chester Good.
 
   DOWNLOADING, the prompt-box on the screen said. It also gave an estimate for how long the download would take. 47MINUTES...!
 
   “Son of a bitch,” the DDO breathed, and lifted her phone. She pressed a button, waiting a second for the right voice to answer. “Ed, better come see this..
   “Okay, honey, give me a minute.”
   The Director of Central Intelligence came in, holding his morning mug of coffee, to see his wife of twenty-three years leaning back, away from her computer screen. Rarely in that time had Mary Pat ever backed away from anything. It just wasn’t her nature.
   “From our Japanese friend?” Ed asked his wife.
   “So it would seem,” MP replied.
   “How much stuff is this?”
   “Looks like a lot. I suppose Chester is pretty good in the sack.”
   “Who trained him?”
   “Whoever it was, we need to get his ass down to The Farm and pass all that knowledge along. For that matter,” she added, with a changed voice and an upward look to catch her husband’s eye, “maybe you could audit the course, honey-bunny.”
   “Is that a complaint?”
   “There’s always room for improvement—and, okay, yes, I need to drop fifteen pounds, too,” she added, to cut the DCI off before he could reply in kind. He hated when she did that. But not now. Now his hand touched her face quite tenderly, as the prompt screen said another thirty-four minutes to complete the download.
   “Who’s the guy at Fort Meade who put the Ghost programs together?”
   “They contracted a game place—a guy at a game company, I guess,” Mrs. Foley corrected herself. “They paid him four hundred fifty big ones for the job.” Which was more than the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director (Operations) made together, what with the federal pay caps, which didn’t allow any federal employee to make more than a member of Congress—and they feared raising their own salaries, lest they offend the voters.
   “Call me when you have it downloaded, baby.”
   “Who’s the best guy we have for China?”
   “Joshua Sears, Ph.D. from U-Cal Berkley, runs the China desk in the DI. But the guy at NSA is better for linguistic nuances, they say. His name’s Victor Wang,” the DCI said.
   “Can we trust him?” MP asked. Distrust of ethnic Chinese in the American national-security apparatus had reached a considerable level.
   “Shit, I don’t know. You know, we have to trust somebody, and Wang’s been on the box twice a year for the last eight years. The ChiComms can’t compromise every Chinese-American we have, you know. This Wang guy’s third-generation American, was an officer in the Air Force—ELINT guy, evidently worked out of Wright-Patterson—and just made super-grade at NSA. Tom Porter says he’s very good.”
   “Okay, well, let me see what all this is, then we’ll have Sears check it out, and then, maybe, if we have to, we’ll talk to this Wang guy. Remember, Eddie, at the end of this is an officer named Nomuri and a foreign national who has two eyes—”
   Her husband cut her off with a wave. “And two ears. Yeah, baby, I know. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. And we both have the T-shirts to prove it.” And he was about as likely to forget that as his wife was. Keeping your agents alive was as important to an intelligence agency as capital preservation was to an investor.
   Mary Pat ignored her computer for twenty minutes, and instead went over routine message traffic hand-carried up from MERCURY down in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building. That was not especially easy, but necessary nonetheless, because CIA’s Clandestine Service was running agents and operations all over the world—or trying to, Mary Pat corrected herself. It was her job to rebuild the Directorate of Operations, to restore the human– intelligence—HUMINT—capability largely destroyed in the late 1970s, and only slowly being rebuilt. That was no small task, even for an expert in the field. But Chester Nomuri was one of her pets. She’d spotted him at The Farm some years before and seen in him the talent, the gift, and the motivation. For him espionage was as much a vocation as the priesthood, something important to his country, and fun, as much fun as dropping a fifty-footer at Augusta was for Jack Nicklaus. Toss in his brains and street sense, and, Mary Pat had thought at the time, she had a winner there. Now Nomuri was evidently living up to her expectations. Big time. For the first time, CIA had an agent-in-place inside the ChiComm Politburo, and that was about as good as it got. Perhaps even the Russians didn’t have one of those, though you could never be sure, and you could lose a lot of money betting against the Russian intelligence services.
   “File’s done,” the computer’s electronic voice finally said. That occasioned a turn in her swivel chair. The DDO first of all backed up her newly downloaded file to a second hard drive, and then to a “toaster” disk, so called because the disk went in and out of the drive box like a slice of bread. With that done, she typed in her decryption code, 51240. She had no idea why Nomuri had specified that number, but knowing was not necessary, just so long as nobody else knew either. After typing in the five digits and hitting RETURN, the file icons changed. They were already aligned in list form, and MP selected the oldest. A page full of Chinese ideographs came up. With that bit of information, MP lifted her office phone and punched the button for her secretary. “Dr. Joshua Sears, DI, Chinese Section. Please ask him to come see me right away.”
   That took six endless minutes. It took rather a lot to make Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley shiver, but this was one such occasion. The image on her screen looked like something one might get from inking the feet of several drunken roosters, then making them loiter on a piece of white paper, but within the imagery were words and thoughts. Secret words and hidden thoughts. On her screen was the ability to read the minds of adversaries. It was the sort of thing that could win the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, but infinitely more important. It was the sort of thing that had won wars and altered history from the expected path determined by the most important of players, and in that was the value of espionage, the whole point of having an intelligence community, because the fates of nations really did ride on such things—
   –and therefore, the fates of nations rode on Chet Nomuri’s schwantz and how well he used it, Mrs. Foley reflected. What a crazy fucking world it was. How the hell could an historian ever get that right? How did you communicate the importance of seducing some nameless secretary, an underling, a modem-day peasant who merely transcribed the thoughts of the important, but in being compromised made those thoughts available to others, and in doing so, altered the course of history as surely as turning the rudder changed the course of a mighty ship. For Mary Pat, Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a moment of fulfillment to place alongside the birth of her children. Her entire raison d’etre lay in black-and-white ideographs on her computer monitor—and she couldn’t read the fucking things. She had the language skills to teach Russian literature at Moscow State University, but all she knew of Chinese was chop suey and moo goo gai pan.
   “Mrs. Foley?” A head appeared at her door. “I’m Josh Sears.” He was fifty, tall, losing his hair, most of it gray. Brown eyes. He hit the cafeteria line downstairs a little too hard, the DDO thought.
   “Please come in, Dr. Sears. I need you to translate some things for me.”
   “Sure,” he replied, picking a seat and relaxing into it. He watched the DDO take some pages off her laser printer and hand them across.
   “Okay, it says the date is last March twenty-first, and the place is Beijing—humph, the Council of Ministers Building, eh? Minister Fang is talking to Minister Zhang.” Sears ran his eyes down the page. “Mrs. Foley, this is hot stuff. They’re talking about the possibilities of Iran—no, the old UIR—taking over the entire Persian Gulf oil fields, and what effect it would have on China. Zhang appears to be optimistic, but guarded. Fang is skeptical.., oh, this is an aide-memofr isn’t it? It’s Fang’s notes from a private conversation with Zhang.”
   “The names mean anything to you?”
   “Both are Ministers Without Portfolio. They’re both full Politburo members without direct ministerial duties. That means they’re both trusted by the chairman, the PRC premier, Xu Kun Piao. They go back thirty years plus, well into the time of Mao and Chou. As you know, the Chinese are really into lengthy relationships. They develop—well, not friendships as we understand them, but associations. It’s a comfort-level thing, really. Like at a card table. You know what the other guy’s mannerisms and capabilities are, and that makes for a long, comfortable game. Maybe you won’t win big, but you won’t lose your shirt either.”
   “No, they don’t gamble, do they?”
   “This document demonstrates that. As we suspected, the PRC backed the Ayatollah Daryaei in his play, but they never allowed their support to be public. From skimming this, it appears that this Zhang guy is the one who ramrodded this—and the play the Japanese made. We’ve been trying to build a book on this Zhang guy—and Fang as well—without a whole lot of success. What do I need to know about this?” he asked, holding the page up.
   “It’s code word,” MP replied. By federal statute, “top secret” was as high as it went, but in reality there were more secret things than that, called “special-access programs,” which were designated by their controlling code words. “This one’s called SORGE.” She didn’t have to say that he could not discuss this information with anyone, and that even dreaming in bed about it was forbidden. Nor did she have to say that in SORGE was Sears’s path to a raise and much greater personal importance within the CIA’s pantheon of bureaucrats.
   “Okay.” Sears nodded. “What can you tell me?”
   “What we have here is a digest of conversations between Fang and Zhang, and probably other ministers as well.
 
   We’ve found a way to crash into their documents storage. We believe the documents are genuine,” MP concluded. Sears would know that he was being misled on sources and methods, but that was to be expected. As a senior member of the DI—the Directorate of Intelligence—it was his job to evaluate information provided to him by various sources, in this case the DO. If he got bad information, his evaluation would be bad as well, but what Mrs. Foley had just told him was that he would not be held at fault for bad information. But he’d also question the authenticity of the documents in an internal memo or two, just to cover his own ass, of course.
   “Okay, ma’am. In that case, what we have here is pure nitroglycerine. We’ve suspected this, but here’s confirmation. It means that President Ryan did the right thing when he granted diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. The PRC had it coming. They conspired to wage aggressive war, and since we got involved, you can say that they conspired against us. Twice, I bet. We’ll see if another of these documents refers to the Japanese adventure. You’ll recall that the Japanese industrialists implicated this Zhang guy by name. That’s not a hundred percent, but if it’s confirmed by this, then it’s almost something you could take before a judge. Mrs. Foley, this is some source we have here.”
   “Evaluation?”
   “It feels right,” the analyst said, reading over the page again. “It sounds like conversation. I mean, it’s unguarded, not official diplomatic-speak or even inside-minister-speak. So, it sounds like what it purports to be, the notes of a private, informal policy discussion between two senior colleagues.”
   “Any way to cross-check it?” MP asked next.
   An immediate shake of the head. “No. We don’t know much about either one of these guys. Zhang, well, we have the evaluation from Secretary Adler—you know, from the shuttle diplomacy after the Airbus shoot-down, which pretty well confirms what that Yamata guy told the Japanese police and our FBI guys about how the Chinese nudged them into the conflict with us, and what for. The PRC looks on eastern Siberia with covetous eyes,” Sears reminded her, showing his knowledge of the PRC policies and objectives. “For Fang Gan, we have photos of him sipping mao-tai at receptions in his Mao jacket and smiling benignly, like they all do. We know he’s tight with Xu, there are stories that he likes to play with the office help—but a lot of them do that—and that’s about it.”
   It was good of Sears not to remind her that playing with the office help wasn’t a character defect limited to China.
   “So, what do we think about them?”
   “Fang and Zhang? Well, both are Ministers Without Portfolio. So, they’re utility infielders, maybe even assistant coaches. Premier Xu trusts their judgment. They get to sit in at the Politburo as full voting members. They get to hear everything and cast votes on everything. They influence policy not so much by making it as shaping it. Every minister knows them. These two know all the others. They’ve both been around a long time. Both are well into their sixties or seventies, but people over there don’t mellow with age like they do in America. Both will be ideologically sound, meaning they’re both probably solid communists. That implies a certain ruthlessness, and you can add to that their age. At seventy-five, death starts being a very real thing. You don’t know how much time you have left, and these guys don’t believe in an afterlife. So, whatever goals they have, they have to address pretty quick at that age, don’t they?”
   “Marxism doesn’t mix well with humanity, does it?”
   Sears shook his head. “Not hardly, and toss in a culture that places a much lower value on human life than ours does.”
   “Okay. Good brief. Here,” she said, handing over ten printed pages. “I want a written evaluation after lunch. Whatever you might be working on now, SORGE is more important.”
   That meant a “seventh-floor tasking” to Dr. Sears. He’d be working directly for the Directors. Well, he had a private office already, and a computer that wasn’t hooked into any telephone lines, even a local area network, as many of the
 
   CIA’s ‘puters were. Sears tucked the papers into a coat pocket and departed, leaving Mary Pat to look out her floor-to-ceiling windows and contemplate her next move. Really it was Ed’s call, but things like this were decided collegially, especially when the DCI was your husband. This time she’d wander over to see him.
   The DCI’s office is long and relatively narrow, with the director’s office near the door, well away from the sitting area. Mary Pat took the easy chair across from the desk.
   “How good is it?” Ed asked, knowing the reason for her visit.
   “Calling this SORGE was unusually prescient for us. It’s at least that good.”
   Since Richard SORGE dispatches from Tokyo to Moscow might have saved the Soviet Union in 1941, that got Ed Foley’s eyes to widen some. “Who looked at it?”
   “Sears. He seems pretty smart, by the way. I’ve never really talked to him before.”
   “Harry likes him,” Ed noted, referring to Harry Hall, the current Deputy Director (Intelligence), who was in Europe at the moment. “Okay, so he says it looks pretty good, eh?”
   A serious nod. “Oh, yeah, Eddie.”
   “Take it to see Jack?” They could not not take this to the President, could they?
   “Tomorrow, maybe?”
   “Works for me.” Just about any government employee can find space in his or her day for a drive to the White House. “Eddie, how far can this one spread?”
   “Good question. Jack, of course. Maybe the Vice President. I like the guy,” the DCI said, “but usually the veep doesn’t get into stuff like this. SecState, SecDef, both are maybes. Ben Goodley, again a maybe. Mary, you know the problem with this.”
   It was the oldest and most frequent problem with really valuable high-level intelligence information. If you spread it too far, you ran the risk of compromising the information—which also meant getting the source killed—and that killed the goose laying the golden eggs. On the other hand, if you didn’t make some use of the information, then you might as well not have the eggs anyway. Drawing the line was the most delicate operation in the field of intelligence, and you never knew where the right place was to draw it. You also had to worry about methods of spreading it around. If you sent it encrypted from one place to another, what if the bad guys had cracked your encryption system? NSA swore that its systems, especially TAPDANCE, could not be broken, but the Germans had thought ENIGMA crack-proof, too.
   Almost as dangerous was giving the information, even by hand, to a senior government official. The bastards talked too much. They lived by talking. They lived by leaking. They lived by showing people how important they were, and importance in D.C. meant knowing what other people didn’t know. Information was the coin of the realm in this part of America. The good news here was that President Ryan understood about that. He’d been CIA, as high as Deputy Director, and so he knew about the value of security. The same was probably true of Vice President Jackson, former naval aviator. He’d probably seen lives lost because of bad intelligence. Scott Adler was a diplomat, and he probably knew as well. Tony Bretano, the well-regarded SecDef, worked closely with CIA, as all Secretaries of Defense had to do, and he could probably be trusted as well. Ben Goodley was the President’s National Security Advisor, and thus couldn’t easily be excluded. So, what did that total up to? Two in Beijing. At Langley, the DCI, DDCI, DDI, and DDO, plus Sears from inside the DI. That made seven. Then the President, Vice President, SecState, SecDef, and Ben Goodley. That made twelve. And twelve was plenty for the moment, especially in a town where the saying went, If two people know it, it’s not a secret. But the entire reason for having CIA was this sort of information.
   “Pick a name for the source,” Foley instructed his wife.
   “SONGBIRD will do for now.” It was a sentimental thing for MP, naming agents for birds. It dated back to CARDINAL.
   “Fair enough. Let me see the translations you get, okay?”
 
   “You bet, honey-bunny.” Mary Pat leaned over her husband’s desk to deliver a kiss, before heading back to her own office.
   On arriving there, MP checked her computer for the SORGE file. She’d have to change that, MP realized. Even the name of this special-access compartment would be classified top secret or higher. Then she did a page count, making a note on a paper pad next to the screen.
   ALL 1,349 PAGES OF RECIPES RECEIVED, she wrote as a reply to cgood@jadecastle.com. WILL LOOK THE RECIPES OVER. THANKS A BUNCH. MARY. She hit the RETURN key, and off the letter went, through the electronic maze called the Internet. One thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages, the DDO thought. It would keep the analysts busy for quite a while. Inside the Old Headquarters Building, analysts would see bits and pieces of SORGE material, covered under other transitory code names randomly chosen by a computer in the basement, but only Sears would know the whole story—and, in fact, he didn’t even know that, did he? What he knew might—probably would—be enough to get this Ming woman killed, once the MSS realized who’d had access to the information. They could do some things in Washington to protect her, but not much.
 
   Nomuri rose early in his Beijing apartment, and the second thing he did was to log on to check his e-mail. There it was, number seven in the list, one from patsbakery@brownienet.com. He selected the decryption system and typed in the key.., so, the pages had all been received. That was good. Nomuri dragged the message he’d dispatched to the “wipe-info” bin, where Norton Utilities not only deleted the file, but also five times electronically scrubbed the disk segments where they’d briefly resided, so that the files could never be recovered by any attempt, no matter how skilled. Next he eliminated the record of having sent any e-mail to brownienet. Now there was no record whatever of his having done anything, unless his telephone line was tapped, which he didn’t really suspect. And even then the data was scrambled, fully encrypted, and thus not recoverable. No, the only dangers in the operation now attached to Ming. His part of it, being the spymaster, was protected by the method in which her desktop computer called him, and from now on those messages would be sent out to brownienet automatically, and erased the same way, in a matter of seconds. It would take a very clever counterintelligence operation to hurt Nomuri now.