In Jackson, Mississippi, Reverend Gerry Patterson was accustomed to rising early in preparation for his morning jog around the neighborhood, and he turned on the bedroom TV while his wife went to fix his hot chocolate (Patterson didn't approve of coffee any more than he did of alcohol). His head turned at the words "Reverend Yu," then his skin went cold when he heard, "a Baptist minister here in Beijing . . ." He came back into the bedroom just in time to see a Chinese face go down, and shoot out blood as from a garden hose. The tape didn't allow him to recognize a face.
   "My God . . . Skip . . . God, no . . ." the minister breathed, his morning suddenly and utterly disrupted. Ministers deal with death on a daily basis, burying parishioners, consoling the bereaved, entreating God to look after the needs of both. But it was no easier for Gerry Patterson than it would have been for anyone else this day, because there had been no warning, no "long illness" to prepare the mind for the possibility, not even the fact of age to reduce the surprise factor. Skip was– what? Fifty-five? No more than that. Still a young man, Patterson thought, young and vigorous to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to his flock. Dead? Killed, was it? Murdered? By whom? Murdered by that communist government? A Man of God, murdered by the godless heathen?

   Oh, shit," the President said over his eggs. "What else do we know, Ben? Anything from SORGE?" Then Ryan looked around the room, realizing he'd spoken a word that was itself classified. The kids weren't looking his way, but Cathy was. "Okay, we'll talk about it when you get in." Jack hit the kill button on the phone and set it down.
   "What's the story?"
   "It's a real mess, babe," SWORDSMAN told SURGEON. He explained what he knew for a minute or so. "The ambassador hasn't gotten to us with anything CNN didn't just show."
   "You mean with all the money we spend on CIA and stuff, CNN is the best source of information we have?" Cathy Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously.
   "You got it, honey," her husband admitted.
   "Well, that doesn't make any sense!"
   Jack tried to explain: "CIA can't be everywhere, and it would look a little funny if all our field spooks carried video-cams everywhere they went, you know?"
   Cathy made a face at being shut down so cavalierly. "But—"
   "But it's not that easy, Cathy, and the news people are in the same business, gathering information, and occasionally they get there first."
   "But you have other ways of finding things out, don't you?"
   "Cathy, you don't need to know about things like that," POTUS told FLOTUS.
   That was a phrase she'd heard before, but not one she'd ever learned to love. Cathy went back to her morning paper while her husband graduated to the Early Bird. The Beijing story, Jack saw, had happened too late for the morning editions, one more thing to chuff up the TV newsies and annoy the print ones. Somehow the debate over the federal education budget didn't seem all that important this morning, but he'd learned to scan the editorials, because they tended to reflect the questions the reporters would ask at the press conferences, and that was one way for him to defend himself.
   By 7:45, the kids were about ready for their drive to school, and Cathy was ready for her flight to Hopkins. Kyle Daniel went with her, with his own Secret Service detail, composed exclusively of women who would look after him at the Hopkins daycare center rather like a pack of she-wolves. Katie would head back to her daycare center, the rebuilt Giant Steps north of Annapolis. There were fewer kids there now, but a larger protective detail. The big kids went to St. Mary's. On cue, the Marine VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter eased down on the South Lawn helipad. The day was about to start for real. The entire Ryan family took the elevator downstairs. First Mom and Dad walked the kids to the west entrance of the West Wing, where, after hugs and kisses, three of the kids got into their cars to drive off. Then Jack walked Cathy to the helicopter for the kiss goodbye, and the big Sikorsky lifted off under the control of Colonel Dan Malloy for the hop to Johns Hopkins. With that done, Ryan walked back to the West Wing, and inside to the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was waiting for him.
   "How bad?" Jack asked his national security adviser.
   "Bad," Goodley replied at once.
   "What was it all about?"
   "They were trying to stop an abortion. The Chinese do them late-term if the pregnancy is not government-approved. They wait until just before the baby pops out and zap it in the top of the head with a needle before it gets to take a breath. Evidently, the woman on the tape was having an unauthorized baby, and her minister—that's the Chinese guy who gets it in the head, a Baptist preacher educated, evidently, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, would you believe? Anyway, he came to the hospital to help. The Papal Nuncio, Renato Cardinal DiMilo, evidently knew the Baptist preacher pretty well and came to offer assistance. It's hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it blew up real bad, as the tape shows."
   "Any statements?"
   "The Vatican deplores the incident and has requested an explanation. But it gets worse. Cardinal DiMilo is from the DiMilo family. He has a brother, Vincenzo DiMilo, who's in the Italian parliament—he was a cabinet minister a while back—and so the Italian government has issued its own protest. Ditto the German government, because the Cardinal's aide is a German monsignor named Schepke, who's a Jesuit, and he got a little roughed up, and the Germans aren't very happy either. This Monsignor Schepke was arrested briefly, but he was released after a few hours when the Chinese remembered he had diplomatic status. The thinking at State is that the PRC might PNG the guy, just to get him the hell out of the country and make the whole thing all go away."
   "What time is it in Beijing?"
   "Us minus eleven, so it's nine at night there," CARDSHARP answered.
   "The trade delegation will need instructions of some sort about this. I need to talk to Scott Adler as soon as he gets in this morning."
   "You need more than that, Jack." It was the voice of Arnold van Damm, at the door to the office.
   "What else?"
   "The Chinese Baptist who got killed, I just heard he has friends over here."
   "Oral Roberts University," Ryan said. "Ben told me."
   "The churchgoers are not going to like this one, Jack," Arnie warned.
   "Hey, guy, I don't goddamn like it," the President pointed out. "Hell, I don't like abortion under the best of circumstances, remember?"
   "I remember," van Damm said, recalling all the trouble Ryan had gotten into with his first Presidential statement on the issue.
   "And this kind of abortion is especially barbaric, and so, two guys go to the fucking hospital and try to save the baby's life, and they get killed for it! Jesus," Ryan concluded, "and we have to do business with people like this."
   Then another face showed up at the door. "You've heard, I suppose," Robby Jackson observed.
   "Oh, yeah. Hell of a thing to see over breakfast."
   "My Pap knows the guy."
   "What?" Ryan asked.
   "Remember at the reception last week? He told you about it. Pap and Gerry Patterson both support his congregation out of Mississippi– some other congregations, too. It's a Baptist thing, Jack. Well-off churches look after ones that need help, and this Yu guy sure as hell needed help, looks like. I haven't talked to him yet, but Pap is going to raise pure fucking hell about this one, and you can bet on it," the Vice President informed his Boss.
   "Who's Patterson?" van Damm asked.
   "White preacher, got a big air-conditioned church in the suburbs of Jackson. Pretty good guy, actually. He and Pap have known each other forever. Patterson went through school with this Yu guy, I think."
   "This is going to get ugly," the Chief of Staff observed.
   "Arnie, baby, it's already ugly," Jackson pointed out. The CNN cameraman had been a little too good, or had just been standing in a good place, and had caught both shots in all their graphic majesty.
   "What's your dad going to say?" Ryan asked.
   TOMCAT made them wait for it. "He's going to call down the Wrath of Almighty God on those murdering cocksuckers. He's going to call Reverend Yu a martyr to the Christian faith, right up there with the Maccabees of the Old Testament, and those courageous bastards the Romans fed to the lions. Arnie, have you ever seen a Baptist preacher calling down the Vengeance of the Lord? It beats the hell out of the Super Bowl, boy," Robby promised. "Reverend Yu is standing upright and proud before the Lord Jesus right now, and the guys who killed him have their rooms reserved in the Everlasting Fires of Hell. Wait till you hear him go at it. It's impressive, guys. I've seen him do it. And Gerry Patterson won't be far behind."
   "And the hell of it is, I can't disagree with any of it. Jesus," Ryan breathed. "Those two men died to save the life of a baby. If you gotta die, that's not a bad reason for it."

   They both died like men, Mr. C," Chavez was saying in Moscow. "I wish I was there with a gun." It had hit Ding especially hard. Fatherhood had changed his perspective on a lot of things, and this was just one of them. The life of a child was sacrosanct, and a threat against a child was an invitation to immediate death in his ethical universe. And in the real universe, he was known to have a gun a lot of the time, and the training to use it efficiently.
   "Different people have different ways of looking at things," Clark told his subordinate. But if he'd been there, he would have disarmed both of the Chinese cops. On the videotape, they hadn't looked all that formidable. And you didn't kill people to make a fashion statement. Domingo still had the Latin temperament, John reminded himself. And that wasn't so bad a thing, was it?
   "What are you saying, John?" Ding asked in surprise.
   "I'm saying two good men died yesterday, and I imagine God'll look after both of them."
   "Ever been to China?"
   He shook his head. "Taiwan once, for R and R, long time ago. That was okay, but aside from that, no closer than North Vietnam. I don't speak the language and I can't blend in." Both factors were distantly frightening to Clark. The ability to disappear into the surroundings was the sine qua non of being a field-intelligence officer.
   They were in a hotel bar in Moscow after their first day of lecturing their Russian students. The beer on tap was acceptable. Neither of them was in a mood for vodka. Life in Britain had spoiled them. This bar, which catered to Americans, had CNN on a large-screen TV next to the bar, and this was CNN's lead story around the globe. The American government, the report concluded, hadn't reacted to the incident yet.
   "So, what's Jack going to do?" Chavez wondered.
   "I don't know. We have that negotiations team in Beijing right now for trade talks," Clark reminded him.
   "The diplomatic chatter might get a little sharp," Domingo thought.

   Scott, we can't let this one slide," Jack said. A call from the White House had brought Adler's official car here instead of Foggy Bottom.
   "It is not, strictly speaking, pertinent to trade talks," the Secretary of State pointed out.
   "Maybe you want to do business with people like that," Vice President Jackson responded, "but the people outside the Beltway might not."
   "We have to consider public opinion on this, Scott," Ryan said. "And, you know, we have to damn well consider my opinion. The murder of a diplomat is not something we can ignore. Italy is a NATO member. So is Germany. And we have diplomatic relations with the
   Vatican and about seventy million Catholics in the country, plus millions more Baptists."
   "Okay, Jack," EAGLE said, with raised, defensive hands. "I am not defending them, okay? I'm talking about the foreign policy of the United States of America here, and we're not supposed to manage that on the basis of emotions. The people out there pay us to use our heads, not our dicks."
   Ryan let out a long breath. "Okay, maybe I had that coming. Go on."
   "We issue a statement deploring this sorry incident in strong language. We have Ambassador Hitch make a call on their foreign ministry and say the same thing, maybe even stronger, but in more informal language. We give them a chance to think this mess through before they become an international pariah, maybe discipline those trigger-happy cops—hell, maybe shoot them, given how the law works over there. We let common sense break out, okay?"
   "And what do I say?"
   Adler thought that one over for a few seconds. "Say whatever you want. We can always explain to them that we have a lot of churchgoers here and you have to assuage their sensibilities, that they have inflamed American public opinion, and in our country, public opinion counts for something. They know that on an intellectual level, but deep down in the gut they don't get it. That's okay," SecState went on. "Just so they get it in the brain, because the brain talks to the gut occasionally. They have to understand that the world doesn't like this sort of thing."
   "And if they don't?" the Vice President asked.
   "Well, then we have a trade delegation to show them the consequences of uncivilized behavior." Adler looked around the room. "Are we okay on that?"
   Ryan looked down at the coffee table. There were times when he wished he were a truck driver, able to scream out bloody murder when certain things happened, but that was just one more freedom the President of the United States didn't have. Okay, Jack, you have to be sensible and rational about all this. He looked up. "Yes, Scott, we're sort of okay on that."
   "Anything from our, uh, new source on this issue?"
   Ryan shook his head. "No, MP hasn't sent anything over yet."
   "If she does..."
   "You'll get a copy real fast," the President promised. "Get me some talking points. I'll have to make a statement—when, Arnie?"
   "Elevenish ought to be okay," van Damm decided. "I'll talk to some media guys about this."
   "Okay, if anybody has ideas later today, I want to hear them," Ryan said, standing, and adjourning the meeting.

CHAPTER 26

Glass Houses and Rocks
   
Fang Gan had worked late that day because of the incident that had Washington working early. As a result, Ming hadn't transcribed his discussion notes and her computer hadn't gotten them out on the 'Net as early as usual, but Mary Pat got her e-mail about 9:45. This she read over, copied to her husband, Ed, and then shot via secure fax line to the White House, where Ben Goodley walked it to the Oval Office. The cover letter didn't contain Mary Pat's initial comment on reading the transmission: "Oh, shit. . ."
   "Those cocksuckers!" Ryan snarled, to the surprise of Andrea Price, who happened to be in the room just then.
   "Anything I need to know about, sir?" she asked, his voice had been so furious.
   "No, Andrea, just that thing on CNN this morning." Ryan paused, blushing that she'd heard his temper let go again—and in that way. "By the way, how's your husband doing?"
   "Well, he bagged those three bank robbers up in Philadelphia, and they did it without firing a shot. I was a little worried about that."
   Ryan allowed himself a smile. "That's one guy I wouldn't want to have a shoot-out with. Tell me, you saw CNN this morning, right?"
   "Yes, sir, and we replayed it at the command post."
   "Opinion?"
   "If I'd've been there, my weapon would have come out. That was cold-blooded murder. Looks bad on TV when you do dumb stuff like that, sir."
   "Sure as hell does," the President agreed. He nearly asked her opinion on what he ought to do about it. Ryan respected Mrs. O'Day's (she still went by Price on the job) judgment, but it wouldn't have been fair to ask her to delve into foreign affairs, and, besides, he already had his mind pretty well made up. But then he speed-dialed Adler's direct line on his phone.
   "Yes, Jack?" Only one person had that direct line.
   "What do you make of the SORGE stuff?"
   "It's not surprising, unfortunately. You have to expect them to circle wagons."
   "What do we do about it?" SWORDSMAN demanded.
   "We say what we think, but we try not to make it worse than it already is," SecState replied, cautious as ever.
   "Right," Ryan growled, even though it was exactly the good advice he'd expected from his SecState. Then he hung up. He reminded himself that Arnie had told him a long time ago that a president wasn't allowed to have a temper, but that was asking a hell of a lot, and at what point was he allowed to react the way a man needed to react? When was he supposed to stop acting like a goddamned robot?
   "You want Callie to work up something for you in a hurry?" Arnie asked over the phone.
   "No," Ryan replied, with a shake of the head. "I'll just wing it."
   "That's a mistake," the Chief of Staff warned.
   "Arnie, just let me be me once in a while, okay?"
   "Okay, Jack," van Damm replied, and it was just as well the President didn't see his expression.
   Don't make things worse than they already are, Ryan told himself at his desk. Yeah, sure, like that's possible . . .
 
   "Hi, Pap," Robby Jackson was saying in his office at the northwest corner of the West Wing. "Robert, have you seen—"
   "Yes, we've all seen it," the Vice President assured his father. "And what are y'all going to do about it?"
   "Pap, we haven't figured that out yet. Remember that we have to do business with these people. The jobs of a lot of Americans depend on trade with China and—"
   "Robert"—the Reverend Hosiah Jackson used Robby's proper name mainly when he was feeling rather stern—"those people murdered a man of God—no, excuse me, they murdered two men of God, doing their duty, trying to save the life of an innocent child, and one does not do business with murderers."
   "I know that, and I don't like it any more than you do, and, trust me, Jack Ryan doesn't like it any more than you do, either. But when we make foreign policy for our country, we have to think things through, because if we screw it up, people can lose their lives."
   "Lives have already been lost, Robert," Reverend Jackson pointed out.
   "I know that. Look, Pap, I know more about this than you do, okay? I mean, we have ways of finding out stuff that doesn't make it on CNN," the Vice President told his father, with the latest SORGE report right in his hand. Part of him wished that he could show it to his father, because his father was easily smart enough to grasp the importance of the secret things that he and Ryan knew. But there was no way he could even approach discussing that sort of thing with anyone without a TS/SAR clearance, and that included his wife, just as it included Cathy Ryan. Hmm, Jackson thought—maybe that was something he should discuss with Jack. You had to be able to talk this stuff over with someone you trusted, just as a reality check on what was right and wrong. Their wives weren't security risks, were they?
   "Like what?" his father asked, only halfway expecting an answer.
   "Like I can't discuss some things with you, Pap, and you know that. I'm sorry. The rules apply to me just like they do to everybody else."
   "So, what are we going to do about this?"
   "We're going to let the Chinese know that we are pretty damned angry, and we expect them to clean their act up, and apologize, and—"
   "Apologize!" Reverend Jackson shot back. "Robert, they murdered two people!"
   "I know that, Pap, but we can't send the FBI over to arrest their government for this, can we? We're very powerful here, but we are not God, and as much as I'd like to hurl a thunderbolt at them, I can't."
   "So, we're going to do what?"
   "We haven't decided yet. I'll let you know when we figure it out," TOMCAT promised his father.
   "Do that," Hosiah said, hanging up far more abruptly than usual.
   "Christ, Pap," Robby breathed into the phone. Then he wondered how representative of the religious community his father was. The hardest thing to figure was public reaction. People reacted on a subintellectual level to what they saw on TV. If you showed some chief of state tossing a puppy dog out the window of his car, the ASPCA might demand a break in diplomatic relations, and enough people might agree to send a million telegrams or e-mails to the White House. Jackson remembered a case in California where the killing of a dog had caused more public outrage than the kidnap-murder of a little girl. But at least the bastard who'd killed the girl had been caught, tried, and sentenced to death, whereas the asshole who'd tossed the little dog into traffic had never been identified, despite the ton of reward money that had been raised. Well, it had all happened in the San Francisco area. Maybe that explained it. America wasn't supposed to make policy on the basis of emotion, but America was a democracy, and therefore her elected officials had to pay attention to what the people thought—and it wasn't easy, especially for rational folk, to predict the emotions of the public at large. Could the television image they'd just seen, theoretically upset international trade? Without a doubt, and that was a very big deal.
   Jackson got up from his desk and walked to Arnie's office. "Got a question," he said, going in.
   "Shoot," the President's Chief of Staff replied.
   "How's the public going to react to this mess in Beijing?"
   "Not sure yet," van Damm answered.
   "How do we find out?"
   "Usually you just wait and see. I'm not into this focus-group stuff. I prefer to gauge public opinion the regular way: newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and the mail we get here. You're worried about this?"
   "Yep." Robby nodded.
   "Yeah, so am I. The Right-to-Lifers are going to be on this like a lion on a crippled gazelle, and so are the people who don't like the PRC. Lots of them in Congress. If the Chinese think they're going to get
   MFN this year, they're on drugs. It's a public relations nightmare for the PRC, but I don't think they're capable of understanding what they started. And I don't see them apologizing to anybody."
   "Yeah, well, my father just tore me a new asshole over this one," Vice President Jackson said. "If the rest of the clergy picks this one up, there's going to be a firestorm. The Chinese have to apologize loud and fast if they want to cut their losses."
   Van Damm nodded agreement. "Yeah, but they won't. They're tod damned proud."
   "Pride goeth before the fall," TOMCAT observed.
   "Only after you feel the pain from the broken assbone, Admiral," van Damm corrected the Vice President.
 
   Ryan entered the White House press room feeling tense. The usual cameras were there. CNN and Fox would probably be running this news conference live and maybe C-SPAN as well. The other networks would just tape it, probably, for use in their news feeds to the local stations and their own flagship evening news shows. He came to the lectern and took a sip of water before staring into the faces of the assembled thirty or so reporters.
   "Good morning," Jack began, grasping the lectern tightly, as he tended to do when angry. He didn't know that reporters knew about it, too, and could see it from where they sat.
   "We all saw those horrible pictures on the television this morning, the deaths of Renato Cardinal DiMilo, the Papal Nuncio to the People's Republic of China, and the Reverend Yu Fa An, who, we believe, was a native of the Republic of China and educated at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. First of all, the United States of America extends our condolences to the families of both men. Second, we call upon the government of the People's Republic to launch an immediate and full investigation of this horrible tragedy, to determine who, if anyone, was at fault, and if someone was at fault, for such person or persons to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
   "The death of a diplomat at the hands of an agent of a government is a gross violation of international treaty and convention. It is a quintessentially uncivilized act that must be set right as quickly and definitively as possible. Peaceful relations between nations cannot exist without diplomacy, and diplomacy cannot be carried out except through men and women whose personal safety is sacrosanct. That has been the case for literally thousands of years. Even in time of war, the lives of diplomats have always been protected by all sides for this very reason. We require that the government of the PRC explain this tragic event and take proper action to see to it that nothing of this sort will ever happen again. That concludes my statement. Questions?" Ryan looked up, trying not to brace too obviously for the storm that was about to break.
   "Mr. President," the Associated Press said, "the two clergymen who died were there to prevent an abortion. Does that affect your reaction to this incident?"
   Ryan allowed himself to show surprise at the stupid question: "My views on abortion are on the public record, but I think everyone, even the pro-choice community, would respond negatively to what happened here. The woman in question did not choose to have an abortion, but the Chinese government tried to impose its will on her by killing a full-term fetus about to be born. If anyone did that in the United States, that person would be guilty of a felony—probably more than one—yet that is government policy in the People's Republic. As you know, I personally object to abortion on moral grounds, but what we saw attempted on TV this morning is worse even than that. It's an act of incomprehensible barbarism. Those two courageous men tried to stop it, and they were killed for their efforts, but, thank God, the baby appears to have survived. Next question?" Ryan pointed next to a known troublemaker.
   "Mr. President," the Boston Globe said, "the government's action grew out of the People's Republic's population-control policy. Is it our place to criticize a country's internal policy?"
   Christ, Ryan thought, another one? "You know, once upon a time, a fellow named Hitler tried to manage the population of his country– in fact, of a lot of Europe—by killing the mentally infirm, the socially undesirable, and those whose religions he didn't like. Now, yes, Germany was a nation-state, and we even had diplomatic relations with Hitler until December 1941. But are you saying that America does not have the right to object to a policy we consider barbaric just because it is the official policy of a nation-state? Hermann Goring tried that defense at the Nuremberg Trials. Do you want the United States of America to recognize it?" Jack demanded.
   The reporter wasn't as used to answering questions as to asking them. Then she saw that the cameras were pointed her way, and she was having a bad-hair day. Her response, therefore, could have been a little better: "Mr. President, is it possible that your views of abortion have affected your reaction to this event?"
   "No, ma'am. I've disapproved of murder even longer than I've objected to abortion," Ryan replied coldly.
   "But you've just compared the People's Republic of China to Hitler's Germany," the Globe reporter pointed out. You can't say that about them!
   "Both countries shared a view of population control that is antithetical to American traditions. Or do you approve of imposing late-term abortions on women who choose not to have one?"
   "Sir, I'm not the President," the Globe replied, as she sat down, avoiding the question, but not the embarrassed blush.
   "Mr. President," began the San Francisco Examiner, "whether we like it or not, China has decided for itself what sort of laws it wants to have, and the two men who died this morning were interfering with those laws, weren't they?"
   "The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King interfered with the laws of Mississippi and Alabama back when I was in high school. Did the Examiner object to his actions then?"
   "Well, no, but—"
   "But we regard the personal human conscience as a sovereign force, don't we?" Jack shot back. "The principle goes back to St. Augustine, when he said that an unjust law is no law. Now, you guys in the media agree with that principle. Is it only when you happen to agree with the person operating on that principle? Isn't that intellectually dishonest? I do not personally approve of abortion. You all know that. I've taken a considerable amount of heat for that personal belief, some of which has been laid on me by you good people. Fine. The Constitution allows us all to feel the way we choose. But the Constitution does not allow me not to enforce the law against people who blow up abortion clinics. I can sympathize with their overall point of view, but I cannot agree or sympathize with the use of violence to pursue a political position. We call that terrorism, and it's against the law, and I have sworn an oath to enforce the law fully and fairly in all cases, regardless of how I may or may not feel on a particular issue.
   "Therefore, if you do not apply it evenhandedly, ladies and gentlemen, it is not a principle at all, but ideology, and it is not very helpful to the way we govern our lives and our country.
   "Now, on the broader question, you said that China has chosen its laws. Has it? Has it really? The People's Republic is not, unfortunately, a democratic country. It is a place where the laws are imposed by an elite few. Two courageous men died yesterday objecting to those laws, and in the successful attempt to save the life of an unborn child. Throughout history, men have given up their lives for worse causes than that. Those men are heroes by any definition, but I do not think anyone in this room, or for that matter anyone in our country, believes that they deserved to die, heroically or not. The penalty for civil disobedience is not supposed to be death. Even in the darkest days of the 1960s, when black Americans were working to secure their civil rights, the police in the southern states did not commit wholesale murder. And those local cops and members of the Ku Klux Klan who did step over that line were arrested and convicted by the FBI and the Justice Department.
   "In short, there are fundamental differences between the People's Republic of China and America, and of the two systems, I much prefer ours."
   Ryan escaped the press room ten minutes later, to find Arnie standing at the top of the ramp.
   "Very good, Jack."
   "Oh?" The President had learned to fear that tone of voice.
   "Yeah, you just compared the People's Republic of China to Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan."
   "Arnie, why is it that the media feel such great solicitude for communist countries?"
   "They don't, and—"
   "The hell they don't! I just compared the PRC to Nazi Germany and they damned near wet their pants. Well, guess what? Mao murdered more people than Hitler did. That's public knowledge—I remember when CIA released the study that documented it—but they ignore it. Is some Chinese citizen killed by Mao less dead than some poor Polish bastard killed by Hitler?"
   "Jack, they have their sensibilities," van Damm told his President.
   "Yeah? Well, just once in a while, I wish they'd display something I can recognize as a principle." With that, Ryan strode back to his office, practically trailing smoke from his ears.
   "Temper, Jack, temper," Arnie said to no one in particular. The President still had to learn the first principle of political life, the ability to treat a son of a bitch like your best friend, because the needs of your nation depended on it. The world would be a better place if it were as simple as Ryan wished, the Chief of Staff thought. But it wasn't, and it showed no prospect of becoming so.
 
   A few blocks away at Foggy Bottom, Scott Adler had finished cringing and was making notes on how to mend the fences that his President had just kicked over. He'd have to sit down with Jack and go over a few things, like the principles he held so dear.
   "What did you think of that, Gerry?"
   "Hosiah, I think we have a real President here. What does your son think of him?"
   "Gerry, they've been friends for twenty years, back to when they both taught at the Naval Academy. I've met the man. He's a Catholic, but I think we can overlook that."
   "We have to." Patterson almost laughed. "So was one of the guys who got shot yesterday, remember?"
   "Italian, too, probably drank a lot of wine."
   "Well, Skip was known to have the occasional drink," Patterson told his black colleague.
   "I didn't know," Reverend Jackson replied, disturbed at the thought.
   "Hosiah, it is an imperfect world we live in."
   "Just so he wasn't a dancer." That was almost a joke, but not quite.
   "Skip? No, I've never known him to dance," Reverend Patterson assured his friend. "By the way, I have an idea."
   "What's that, Gerry?"
   "How about this Sunday you preach at my church, and I preach at yours? I'm sure we're both going to speak on the life and martyrdom of a Chinese man."
   "And what passage will you base your sermon on?" Hosiah asked, surprised and interested by the suggestion.
   "Acts," Patterson replied at once.
   Reverend Jackson considered that. It wasn't hard to guess the exact passage. Gerry was a fine biblical scholar. "I admire your choice, sir."
   "Thank you, Pastor Jackson. What do you think of my other suggestion?"
   Reverend Jackson hesitated only a few seconds. "Reverend Patter-son, I would be honored to preach at your church, and I gladly extend to you the invitation to preach at my own."
   Forty years earlier, when Gerry Patterson had been playing baseball in the church-sponsored Little League, Hosiah Jackson had been a young Baptist preacher, and the mere idea of preaching in Patterson's church could have incited a lynching. But, by the Good Lord, they were men of God, and they were mourning the death—the martyrdom—of another man of God of yet another color. Before God, all men were equal, and that was the whole point of the Faith they shared. Both men were thinking quickly of how they might have to alter their styles, because though both were Baptists, and though both preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Baptist congregations, their communities were a little bit different and required slightly different approaches. But it was an accommodation both men could easily make.
   "Thank you, Hosiah. You know, sometimes we have to acknowledge that our faith is bigger than we are."
   For his part, Reverend Jackson was impressed. He never doubted the sincerity of his white colleague, and they'd chatted often on matters of religion and scripture. Hosiah would even admit, quietly, to himself, that Patterson was his superior as a scholar of the Holy Word, due to his somewhat lengthier formal education, but of the two, Hosiah Jackson was marginally the better speaker, and so their relative talents played well off each other.
   "How about we get together for lunch to work out the details?" Jackson asked.
   "Today? I'm free."
   "Sure. Where?"
   "The country club? You're not a golfer, are you?" Patterson asked hopefully. He felt like a round, and his afternoon was free today for a change.
   "Never touched a golf club in my life, Gerry." Hosiah had a good laugh at that. "Robert is, learned at Annapolis and been playing ever since. Says he kicks the President's backside every time they go out." He'd never been to the Willow Glen Country Club either, and wondered if the club had any black members. Probably not. Mississippi hadn't changed quite that much yet, though Tiger Woods had played at a PGA tournament there, and so that color line had been breached, at least.
   "Well, he'd probably whip me, too. Next time he comes down, maybe we can play a round." Patterson's membership at Willow Glen was complimentary, another advantage to being pastor of a well-to-do congregation.
   And the truth of the matter was that, white or not, Gerry Patter-son was not the least bit bigoted, Reverend Jackson knew. He preached the Gospel with a pure heart. Hosiah was old enough to remember when that had not been so, but that, too, had changed once and for all. Praise God.
 
   For Admiral Mancuso, the issues were the same, and a little different. An early riser, he'd caught CNN the same as everyone else. So had Brigadier General Mike Lahr.
   "Okay, Mike, what the hell is this all about?" CINCPAC asked when his J-2 arrived for his morning intel brief.
   "Admiral, it looks like a monumental cluster-fuck. Those clergy stuck their noses in a tight crack and paid the price for it. More to the point, NCA is seriously pissed." NCA was the code-acronym for National Command Authority, President Jack Ryan.
   "What do I need to know about this?"
   "Well, things are likely to heat up between America and China, for starters. The trade delegation we have in Beijing is probably going to catch some heat. If they catch too much, well..." His voice trailed off.
   "Give me worst case," CINCPAC ordered.
   "Worst case, the PRC gets its collective back up, and we recall the trade delegation and the ambassador, and things get real chilly for a while."
   "Then what?"
   "Then—that's more of a political question, but it wouldn't hurt for us to take it a little seriously, sir," Lahr told his boss, who took just about everything seriously.
   Mancuso looked at his wall map of the Pacific. Enterprise was back at sea doing exercises between Marcus Island and the Marianas. John Stennis was alongside in Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman was en route to Pearl Harbor after taking the long way around Cape Horn—modern aircraft carriers are far too beamy for the Panama Canal. Lincoln was finishing up a bobtail refit in San Diego and about to go back to sea. Kitty Hawk and Independence, his two old, oil-fired carriers, were both in the Indian Ocean. At that, he was lucky. First and Seventh Fleets had six carriers fully operational for the first time in years. So, if he needed to project power, he had the assets to give people something to think about. He also had a lot of Air Force aircraft at his disposal. The 3rd Marine Division and the Army's 25th Light based right there in Hawaii wouldn't play in this picture. The Navy might bump heads with the ChiComms, and the Air Force, but he lacked the amphibious assets to invade China, and besides, he wasn't insane enough to think that was a rational course of action under any circumstances.
   "What do we have in Taiwan right now?"
   "Mobile Bay, Milius, Chandler, and Fletcher are showing the flag. Frigates Curtis and Reid are doing operations with the ROC navy. The submarines La Jolla, Helena, and Tennessee are trolling in the Formosa Strait or along the Chinese coast looking at their fleet units."
   Mancuso nodded. He usually kept some high-end SAM ships close to Taiwan. Milius was a Burke-class destroyer, and Mobile Bay was a cruiser, both of them with the Aegis system aboard to make the ROC feel a little better about the putative missile threat to their island. Mancuso didn't think the Chinese were foolish enough to launch an attack against a city with some U.S. Navy ships tied alongside, and the Aegis ships had a fair chance of stopping anything that flew their way. But you never knew, and if this Beijing incident blew up any more . . . He lifted the phone for SURFPAC, the three-star who administratively owned Pacific Fleet's surface ships.
   "Yeah," answered Vice Admiral Ed Goldsmith.
   "Ed, Bart. What material shape are those ships we have in Taipei harbor in?"
   "You're calling about the thing on CNN, right?"
   "Correct," CINCPAC confirmed.
   "Pretty good. No material deficiencies I know about. They're doing the usual port-visit routine, letting people aboard and all. Crews are spending a lot of time on the beach."
   Mancuso didn't have to ask what they were doing on the beach. He'd been a young sailor once, though never on Taiwan.
   "Might not hurt for them to keep their ears perked up some."
   "Noted," SURFPAC acknowledged. Mancuso didn't have to say more. The ships would now stand alternating Condition-Three on their combat systems. The SPY radars would be turned on aboard one of the Aegis ships at all times. One nice thing about Aegis ships was that they could go from half-asleep to fully operational in about sixty seconds; it was just a matter of turning some keys. They'd have to be a little careful. The SPY radar put out enough power to fry electronic components for miles around, but it was just a matter of how you steered the electronic beams, and that was computer-controlled. "Okay, sir, I'll get the word out right now."
   "Thanks, Ed. I'll get you fully briefed in later today."
   "Aye, aye," SURFPAC replied. He'd put a call to his squadron commanders immediately.
   "What else?" Mancuso wondered.
   "We haven't heard anything directly from Washington, Admiral," BG Lahr told his boss.
   "Nice thing about being a CINC, Mike. You're allowed to think on your own a little."
 
   “What a fucking mess," General-Colonel Bondarenko observed to his drink. He wasn't talking about the news of the day, but about his command, even though the officers' club in Chabarsovil was comfortable. Russian general officers have always liked their comforts, and the building dated back to the czars. It had been built during the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the previous century and expanded several times. You could see the border between pre-revolution and post-revolution workmanship. Evidently, German POWs hadn't been trained this far cast—they'd built most of the dachas for the party elite of the old days. But the vodka was fine, and the fellowship wasn't too bad, either.
   "Things could be better, Comrade General," Bondarenko's operations officer agreed. "But there is much that can be done the right way, and little bad to undo."
   That was a gentle way of saying that the Far East Military District was less of a military command than it was a theoretical exercise. Of the five motor-rifle divisions nominally under his command, only one, the 265th, was at eighty-percent strength. The rest were at best regimental-size formations, or mere cadres. He also had theoretical command of a tank division—about a regiment and a half—plus thirteen reserve divisions that existed not so much on paper as in some staff officer's dreams. The one thing he did have was huge equipment stores, but a lot of that equipment dated back to the 1960s, or even earlier. The best troops in his area of command responsibility were not actually his to command. These were the Border Guards, battalion-sized formations once part of the KGB, now a semi-independent armed service under the command of the Russian president.
   There was also a defense line of sorts, which dated back to the 1930s and showed it. For this line, numerous tanks—some of them actually German in origin—were buried as bunkers. In fact, more than anything else the line was reminiscent of the French Maginot Line, also a thing of the 1930s. It had been built to protect the Soviet Union against an attack by the Japanese, and then upgraded halfheartedly over the years to protect against the People's Republic of China—a defense never forgotten, but never fully remembered either. Bondarenko had toured parts of it the previous day. As far back as the czars, the engineering officers of the Russian Army had never been fools. Some of the bunkers were sited with shrewd, even brilliant appreciation for the land, but the problem with bunkers was explained by a recent American aphorism: If you can see it, you can hit it, and if you can hit it, you can kill it. The line had been conceived and built when artillery fire had been a chancy thing, and an aircraft bomb was fortunate to hit the right county. Now you could use a fifteen-centimeter gun as accurately as a sniper rifle, and an aircraft could select which windowpane to put the bomb through on a specific building.
   "Andrey Petrovich, I am pleased to hear your optimism. What is your first recommendation?"
   "It will be simple to improve the camouflage on the border bunkers. That's been badly neglected over the years," Colonel Aliyev told his commander-in-chief. "That will reduce their vulnerability considerably."
   "Allowing them to survive a serious attack for ... sixty minutes, Andrushka?"
   "Maybe even ninety, Comrade General. It's better than five minutes, is it not?" He paused for a sip of vodka. Both had been drinking for half an hour. "For the 265th, we must begin a serious training program at once. Honestly, the division commander did not impress me greatly, but I suppose we must give him a chance."
   Bondarenko: "He's been out here so long, maybe he likes the idea of Chinese food."
   "General, I was out here as a lieutenant," Aliyev said. "I remember the political officers telling us that the Chinese had increased the length of the bayonets on their AK-47s to get through the extra fat layer we'd grown after discarding true Marxism-Leninism and eating too much."
   "Really?" Bondarenko asked.
   "That is the truth, Gennady Iosifovich."
   "So, what do we know of the PLA?"
   "There are a lot of them, and they've been training seriously for about four years now, much harder than we've been doing."
   "They can afford to," Bondarenko observed sourly. The other thing he'd learned on arriving was how thin the cupboard was for funds and training equipment. But it wasn't totally bleak. He had stores of consumable supplies that had been stocked and piled for three generations. There was a virtual mountain of shells for the 100-mm guns on his many—and long-since obsolete—T-54/55 tanks, for example, and a sea of diesel fuel hidden away in underground tanks too numerous to count. The one thing he had in the Far East Military District was infrastructure, built up by the Soviet Union over generations of institutional paranoia. But that wasn't the same as an army to command.
   "What about aviation?"
   "Mainly grounded," Aliyev answered glumly. "Parts problems. We used up so much in Chechnya that there isn't enough to go around, and the Western District still has first call."
   "Oh? Our political leadership expects the Poles to invade us?"
   "That's the direction Germany is in," the G-3 pointed out.
   "I've been fighting that out with the High Command for three years," Bondarenko growled, thinking of his time as chief of operations for the entire Russian army. "People would rather listen to themselves than to others with the voice of reason." He looked up at Aliyev. "And if the Chinese come?"
   The theater operations officer shrugged. "Then we have a problem."
   Bondarenko remembered the maps. It wasn't all that far to the new gold strike . . . and the ever-industrious army engineers were building the damned roads to it...
   "Tomorrow, Andrey Petrovich. Tomorrow we start drawing up a training regimen for the whole command," CINC-FAR EAST told his own G-3.

CHAPTER 27

Transportation
   
Diggs didn't entirely like what he saw, but it wasn't all that unexpected. A battalion of Colonel Lisle's 2nd Brigade was out there, maneuvering through the exercise area—clumsily, Diggs thought. He had to amend his thoughts, of course. This wasn't the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and Lisle's 2nd Brigade wasn't the 11th ACR, whose troopers were out there training practically every day, and as a result knew soldiering about as well as a SURGEON knew cutting. No, 1st Armored Division had turned into a garrison force since the demise of the Soviet Union, and all that wasted time in what was left of Yugoslavia, trying to be "peacekeepers," hadn't sharpened their war-fighting skills. That was a term Diggs hated. Peacekeepers be damned, the general thought, they were supposed to be soldiers, not policemen in battle dress uniform. The opposing force here was a German brigade, and by the looks of it, a pretty good one, with their Leopard-11 tanks. Well, the Germans had soldiering in their genetic code somewhere, but they weren't any better trained than Americans, and training was the difference between some ignorant damned civilian and a soldier. Training meant knowing where to look and what to do when you saw something there. Training meant knowing what the tank to your left was going to do without having to look. Training meant knowing how to fix your tank or Bradley when something broke. Training eventually meant pride, because with training came confidence, the sure knowledge that you were the baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and you didn't have to fear no evil at all.
   Colonel Boyle was flying the UH-60A in which Diggs was riding.
   Diggs was in the jump scat immediately aft and between the pilots' seats. They were cruising about five hundred feet over the ground.
   "Oops, that platoon down there just walked into something," Boyle reported, pointing. Sure enough the lead tank's blinking yellow light started flashing the I'm dead signal.
   "Let's see how the platoon sergeant recovers," General Diggs said.
   They watched, and sure enough, the sergeant pulled the remaining three tanks back while the crew bailed out of the platoon leader's M1A2 main battle tank. As a practical matter, both it and its crew would probably have survived whatever administrative "hit" it had taken from the Germans. Nobody had yet come up with a weapon to punch reliably through the Chobham armor, but someone might someday, and so the tank crews were not encouraged to think themselves immortal and their tanks invulnerable.
   "Okay, that sergeant knows his job," Diggs observed, as the helicopter moved to another venue. The general saw that Colonel Masterman was making notes aplenty on his pad. "What do you think, Duke?"
   "I think they're at about seventy-five percent efficiency, sir," the G-3 operations officer replied. "Maybe a little better. We need to put everybody on the SIMNET, to shake 'em all up a little." That was one of the Army's better investments. SIMNET, the simulator network, comprised a warehouse full of Ml and Bradley simulators, linked by supercomputer and satellite with two additional such warehouses, so that highly complex and realistic battles could be fought out electronically. It had been hugely expensive, and while it could never fully simulate training in the field, it was nevertheless a training aid without parallel.
   "General, all that time in Yugoslavia didn't help Lisle's boys," Boyle said from the chopper's right seat.
   "I know that," Diggs agreed. "I'm not going to kill anybody's career just yet," he promised.
   Boyle's head turned to grin. "Good, sir. I'll spread that word around."
   "What do you think of the Germans?"
   "I know their boss, General Major Siegfried Model. He's damned smart. Plays a hell of a game of cards. Be warned, General."
   "Is that a fact?" Diggs had commanded the NTC until quite recently, and had occasionally tried his luck at Las Vegas, a mere two hours up I-15 from the post.
   "Sir, I know what you're thinking. Think again," Boyle cautioned his boss.
   "Your helicopters seem to be doing well."
   "Yep, Yugoslavia was fairly decent training for us, and long as we have gas, I can train my people."
   "What about live-fire?" the commanding general of First Tanks asked.
   "We haven't done that in a while, sir, but again, the simulators are almost as good as the real thing," Boyle replied over the intercom. "But I think you'll want your track toads to get some in, General." And Boyle was right on that one. Nothing substituted for live fire in an Abrams or a Bradley.
 
   The stakeout on the park bench turned out to be lengthy and boring. First of all, of course, they'd pulled the container, opened it, and discovered that the contents were two sheets of paper, closely printed with Cyrillic characters, but encrypted. So the sheet had been photographed and sent off to the cryppies for decryption. This had not proven to be easy. In fact, it had thus far proven to be impossible, leading the officers from the Federal Security Service to conclude that the Chinese (if that was who it was) had adopted the old KGB practice of using one-time pads. These were unbreakable in theoretical terms because there was no pattern, formula, or algorithm to crack.
   The rest of the time was just a matter of waiting to see who came to pick up the package.
   It ended up taking days. The FSS put three cars on the case. Two of them were vans with long-lens cameras on the target. In the meanwhile, Suvorov/Koniev's apartment was as closely watched as the Moscow Stock Exchange ticker. The subject himself had a permanent shadow of up to ten trained officers, mainly KGB trained spy-chasers instead of Provalov's homicide investigators, but with a leavening of the latter because it was technically still their case. It would remain a homicide case until some foreign national—they hoped—picked up the package under the bench.
   Since it was a park bench, people sat on it regularly. Adults reading papers, children reading comic books, teenagers holding hands, people chatting amiably, even two elderly men who met every afternoon for a game of chess played on a small magnetic board. After every such visit, the stash was checked for movement or disturbance, always without result. By the fourth day, people speculated aloud that it was all some sort of trick. This was Suvorov/Koniev's way of seeing if he were being trailed or not. If so, he was a clever son of a bitch, the surveillance people all agreed. But they already knew that.
   The break came in the late afternoon of day five, and it was the man they wanted it to be. His name was Kong Deshi, and he was a minor diplomat on the official list, age forty-six, a man of modest dimensions, and, the form card at the Foreign Ministry said, modest intellectual gifts—that was a polite way of saying he was considered a dunce. But as others had noted, that was the perfect cover for a spy, and one which wasted a lot of time for counter-intelligence people, making them trail dumb diplomats all over the world who turned out to be nothing more than just that—dumb diplomats—of which the global supply was ample. The man was walking casually with another Chinese national, who was a businessman of some sort, or so they'd thought. Sitting, they'd continued to chat, gesturing around until the second man had turned to look at something Kong had pointed at. Then Kong's right hand had slipped rapidly and almost invisibly under the bench and retrieved the stash, possibly replacing it with another before his hand went back in his lap. Five minutes later, after a smoke, they'd both walked off, back in the direction of the nearest Metro station.
   "Patience," the head FSS officer had told his people over the radio circuit, and so they'd waited over an hour, until they were certain that there were no parked cars about keeping an eye on the dead-drop. Only then had an FSS man walked to the bench, sat down with his afternoon paper, and pulled the package. The way he flicked his cigarette away told the rest of the team that there had been a substitution.
   In the laboratory, it was immediately discovered that the package had a key lock, and that got everyone's attention. The package was x-rayed immediately and found to contain a battery and some wires, plus a semi-opaque rectangle that collectively represented a pyrotechnic device. Whatever was inside the package was therefore valuable. A skilled locksmith took twenty minutes picking the lock, and then the holder was opened to reveal a few sheets of flash paper. These were removed and photographed, to show a solid collection of Cyrillic letters—and they were all random. It was a one-time-pad key sheet, the best thing they could have hoped to find. The sheets were refolded exactly as they had been replaced in the holder, and then the thin metal container—it looked like a cheap cigarette case—was returned to the bench.
   "So?" Provalov asked the Federal Security Service officer on the case.
   "So, the next time our subject sends a message, we'll be able to read it."
   "And then we'll know," Provalov went on.
   "Perhaps. We'll know something more than we know now. We'll have proof that this Suvorov fellow is a spy. That I can promise you," the counter-intelligence officer pronounced.
   Provalov had to admit to himself that they were no closer to solving his murder case than they'd been two weeks before, but at least things were moving, even if the path merely led them deeper into the fog.
 
   So, Mike?" Dan Murray asked, eight time zones away. "No nibbles yet, Director, but now it looks like we're chasing a spook. The subject's name is Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov, currently living as Ivan Yurievich Koniev." Reilly read off the address. "The trail leads to him, or at least it seems to, and we spotted him making probable contact with a Chinese diplomat."
   "And what the hell does all this mean?" FBI Director Murray wondered aloud into the secure phone.
   "You got me there, Director, but it sure has turned into an interesting case."
   "You must be pretty tight with this Provalov guy."
   "He's a good cop, and yes, sir, we get along just fine."
 
   That was more than Cliff Rutledge could say about his relationship with Shen Tang.
   "Your news coverage of this incident was bad enough, but your President's remarks on our domestic policy is a violation of Chinese sovereignty!" the Chinese foreign minister said almost in a shout, for the seventh time since lunch.
   "Minister," Cliff Rutledge replied. "None of this would have happened but for your policeman shooting an accredited diplomat, and that is not, strictly speaking, an entirely civilized act."
   "Our internal affairs are our internal affairs," Shen retorted at once.
   "That is so, Minister, but America has her own beliefs, and if you ask us to honor yours, then we may request that you show some respect for ours."
   "We grow weary of America's interference with Chinese internal affairs. First you recognize our rebellious province on Taiwan. Then you encourage foreigners to interfere with our internal policies. Then you send a spy under the cover of religious beliefs to violate our laws with a diplomat from yet another country, then you photograph a Chinese policeman doing his duty, and then your President condemns us for your interference with our internal affairs. The People's Republic will not tolerate this uncivilized activity!"
   And now you're going to demand most-favored-nation trade status, eh? Mark Gant thought in his chair. Damn, this was like a meeting with investment bankers—the pirate kind—on Wall Street.
   "Minister, you call us uncivilized," Rutledge replied. "But there is no blood on our hands. Now, we are here, as I recall, to discuss trade issues. Can we return to that agenda?"
   "Mr. Rutledge, America does not have the right to dictate to the People's Republic on one hand and to deny us our rights on the other," Shen retorted.
   "Minister, America has made no such intrusion on China's internal affairs. If you kill a diplomat, you must expect a reaction. On the question of the Republic of China—"
   "There is no Republic of China!" the PRC's Foreign Minister nearly screamed. "They are a renegade province, and you have violated our sovereignty by recognizing them!"
   "Minister, the Republic of China is an independent nation with a freely elected government, and we are not the only country to recognize this fact. It is the policy of the United States of America to encourage the self-determination of peoples. At such time as the people in the ROC elect to become part of the mainland, that is their choice. But since they have freely chosen to be what they are, America chooses to recognize them. As we expect others to recognize America as a legitimate government because it represents the will of her people, so it is incumbent upon America to recognize the will of other peoples." Rutledge sat back in his chair, evidently bored with the course the afternoon had taken. The morning he'd expected. The PRC had to blow off some steam, but one morning was enough for that. This was getting tiresome.
   "And if another of our provinces rebels, will you recognize that?"
   "Is the Minister telling me of further political unrest in the People's Republic?" Rutledge inquired at once, a little too fast and too glibly, he told himself a moment later. "In any case, I have no instructions for that eventuality." It was supposed to have been a (semi) humorous response to rather a dumb question, but Minister Shen evidently didn't have his sense of humor turned on today. His hand came up, finger extended, and now he shook it at Cliff Rutledge and the United States.
   "You cheat us. You interfere with us. You insult us. You blame us for the inefficiency of your economy. You deny us fair access to your markets. And you sit there as though you are the seat of the world's virtue. We will have none of this!"
   "Minister, we have opened our doors to trade with your country, and you have closed your door in our face. It is your door to open or close," he conceded, "but we have our doors to close as well if you so force us. We have no wish to do this. We wish for fair and free trade between the great Chinese people and the American people, but the impediments to that trade are not to be found in America."
   "You insult us, and then you expect us to invite you into our home?"
   "Minister, America insults no one. A tragedy happened in the People's Republic yesterday. It was probably something you would have preferred to avoid, but even so, it happened. The President of the United States has asked for you to investigate the incident. That is not an unreasonable request. What do you condemn us for? A journalist reported the facts. Does China deny the facts we saw on television? Do you claim that a private American company fabricated this event? I think not. Do you say that those two men are not dead? Regrettably, this is not the case. Do you say that your policeman was justified in killing an accredited diplomat and a clergyman holding a newborn child?" Rutledge asked in his most reasonable voice. "Minister, all you have said for the past three and a half hours is that America is wrong for objecting to what appears to be cold-blooded murder. And our objection was merely a request for your government to investigate the incident. Minister, America has neither done nor said anything unreasonable, and we grow weary of the accusation. My delegation and I came here to discuss trade. We would like the People's Republic to open up its markets more so that trade can become trade, the free exchange of goods across international borders. You request a most-favored-nation trading relationship with the United States. That will not happen until such time as your markets are as open to America as America's are open to China, but it can happen at such time as you make the changes we require."
   "The People's Republic is finished with acceding to America's insulting demands. We are finished with tolerating your insults to our sovereignty. We are finished with your interference in our internal affairs. It is time for America to consider our reasonable requests. China desires to have a fair trading relationship with the United States. We ask no more than what you give other nations: most favored nation."
   "Minister, that will not happen until such time as you open your markets to our goods. Trade is not free if it is not fair. We object also to the PRC's violation of copyright and trademark treaties and agreements. We object to having industries fully owned by agencies of the government of the People's Republic to violate patent treaties, even to the point of manufacturing proprietary American products without permission or compensation and—"
   "So now you call us thieves?" Shen demanded.
   "Minister, I point out that such words have not escaped my lips. It is a fact, however, that we have examples of products made in China by factories owned by agencies of your government, which products appear to contain American inventions for which the inventors have not been compensated, and from whom permission to manufacture the copies has not been obtained. I can show you examples of those products if you wish." Shen's reaction was an angry wave of the hand, which Rutledge took to mean No, thank you. Or something like that.
   "I have no interest in seeing physical evidence of American lies and distortions."
   Gant just sat back in his chair while Rutledge made his injured reply, like a spectator at a prizefight, wondering if anyone would land the knockdown punch. Probably not, he thought. Neither had a glass chin, and both were too light on their feet. What resulted was a lot of flailing about, but no serious result. It was just a new kind of boring for him, exciting in its form, but dull in its result. He made some notes, but those were merely memory aids to help him remember how this had gone. It might make a fun CHAPTER in his autobiography. What title, he wondered. TRADER and Diplomat, maybe?
   Forty-five minutes later, it broke up, with the usual handshakes, as cordial as the meeting had been contentious, which rather amazed Mark Gant.
   "It's all business, not personal," Rutledge explained. "I'm surprised they're dwelling on this so much. It's not as though we've actually accused them of anything. Hell, even the President just asked for an investigation. Why are they so touchy?" he wondered aloud.
   "Maybe they're worried they won't get what they want out of the talks," Gant speculated.
   "But why are they that worried?" Rutledge asked.
   "Maybe their foreign-exchange reserves are even lower than my computer model suggests." Gant shrugged.
   "But even if they are, they're not exactly following a course that would ameliorate it." Rutledge slammed his hands together in frustration. "They're not behaving logically. Okay, sure, they're allowed to have a conniption fit over this shooting thing, and, yeah, maybe President Ryan pushed it a little too far saying some of the things he said—and Christ knows he's a real Neanderthal on the abortion issue. But all of that does not justify the time and the passion in their position."
   "Fear?" Gant wondered.
   "Fear of what?"
   "If their cash reserves are that low, or maybe even lower, then they could be in a tight crack, Cliff. Tighter than we appreciate."
   "Assume that they are, Mark. What makes it something to be fearful about?"
   "A couple of things," Gant said, leaning forward in his limo seat. "It means they don't have the cash to buy things, or to meet the payments on the things they've already bought. It's an embarrassment, and like you said, these are proud people. I don't see them admitting they're wrong, or wanting to show weakness."
   "That's a fact," Rutledge agreed.
   "Pride can get people into a lot of trouble, Cliff," Gant thought aloud. He remembered a fund on Wall Street that had taken a hundred-million-dollar hit because its managing director wouldn't back off a position that he'd thought was correct a few days earlier, but then stayed with after it was manifestly clear that he was wrong. Why? Because he hadn't wanted to look like a pussy on The Street. And so instead of appearing to be a pussy, he'd proclaimed to the whole world that he was an ass. But how did one translate that into foreign affairs? A chief of state was smarter than that, wasn't he?
 
   It's not going well, my friend," Zhang told Fang. "That foolish policeman is to blame. Yes, the Americans were wrong to react so strongly, but that would not have taken place at all if not for the overzealous police officer."
   "President Ryan—why does he hate us so?"
   "Zhang, twice you have plotted against the Russians, and twice you've played your intrigue against America. Is it not possible that the Americans know of this? Is it not possible that they guessed it was the case? Has it not occurred to you that this is why they recognized the Taiwan regime?"
   Zhang Han San shook his head. "This is not possible. Nothing was ever written down." And our security was perfect in both cases, he didn't trouble himself to add.
   "When things are said around people with ears, Zhang, they remember them. There are few secrets in the world. You can no more keep the affairs of state secret than you can conceal the sunrise," Fang went on, thinking that he'd make sure that this phrase went into the record of the talk that Ming would write up for him. "They spread too far. They reach too many people, and each of them has a mouth."
   "Then what would you have us do?"
   "The American has requested an investigation, so, we give him one. The facts we discover will be whatever facts we wish them to be. If a policeman must die, there are many others to take his place. Our trading relationship with America is more important than this trivial matter, Zhang."
   "We cannot afford to abase ourselves before the barbarian."
   "We cannot not afford not to in this case. We cannot allow false pride to put the country at risk." Fang sighed. His friend Zhang had always been a proud one. A man able to see far, certainly, but too aware of himself and the place he wanted. Yet the one he'd chosen was difficult. He'd never wanted the first place for himself, but instead to be the man who influenced the man at the top, to be like the court eunuchs who had directed the various emperors for over a thousand years. Fang almost smiled, thinking that no amount of power was worth becoming a eunuch, at the royal court or not, and that Zhang probably didn't wish to go that far, either. But to be the man of power behind the curtain was probably more difficult than to be the man in the first chair . . . and yet, Fang remembered, Zhang had been the prime mover behind Xu's selection to general secretary. Xu was an intellectual nonentity, a pleasant enough man with regal looks, able to speak in public well, but not himself a man of great ideas . . .
   ... and that explained things, didn't it? Zhang had helped make Xu the chief of the Politburo precisely because he was an empty vessel, and Zhang was the one to fill the void of ideas with his own thoughts. Of course. He ought to have seen it sooner. Elsewhere, it was believed that Xu had been chosen for his middle-of-the-road stance on everything– a conciliator, a consensus-maker, they called him outside the PRC. In fact, he was a man of few convictions, able to adopt those of anyone else, if that someone—Zhang—looked about first and decided where the Politburo should go.
   Xu was not a complete puppet, of course. That was the problem with people. However useful they might be on some issues, on others they held to the illusion that they thought for themselves, and the most foolish of them did have ideas, and those ideas were rarely logical and almost never helpful. Xu had embarrassed Zhang on more than one occasion, and since he was chairman of the Politburo, Xu did have real personal power, just not the wit to make proper use of it. But—what? Sixty percent of the time, maybe a little more?—he was merely Zhang's mouthpiece. And Zhang, for his part, was largely free to exert his own influence, and to make his own national policy. He did so mostly unseen and unknown outside the Politburo itself, and not entirely known inside, either, since so many of his meetings with Xu were private, and most of the time Zhang never spoke of them, even to Fang.
   His old friend was a chameleon, Fang thought, hardly for the first time. But if he showed humility in not seeking prominence to match his influence, then he balanced that with the fault of pride, and, worse, he didn't seem to know what weakness he displayed. He thought either that it wasn't a fault at all, or that only he knew of it. All men had their weaknesses, and the greatest of these were invariably those unknown to their practitioners. Fang checked his watch and took his leave. With luck, he'd be home at a decent hour, after he transcribed his notes through Ming. What a novelty, getting home on time.

CHAPTER 28

Collision Courses
   
"Those sonsabitches," Vice President Jackson observed with his coffee.
   "Welcome to the wonderful world of statecraft, Robby," Ryan told his friend. It was 7:45 A.M. in the Oval Office. Cathy and the kids had gotten off early, and the day was starting fast. "We've had our suspicions, but here's the proof, if you want to call it that. The war with Japan and that little problem we had with Iran started in Beijing—well, not exactly, but this Zhang guy, acting for Xu, it would seem, aided and abetted both."
   "Well, he may be a nasty son of a bitch, but I wouldn't give him points for brains," Robby said, after a moment's reflection. Then he thought some more. "But maybe that's not fair. From his point of view, the plans were pretty clever, using others to be his stalking horse. He risked nothing himself, then he figured to move in and profit on the risks of others. It certainly looked efficient, I suppose."
   "Question is, what's his next move?"
   "Between this and what Rutledge reports from Beijing, I'd say we have to take these people a little seriously," Robby reflected. Then his head perked up some more. "Jack, we have to get more people in on this."
   "Mary Pat will flip out if we even suggest it," Ryan told him.
   "Too damned bad. Jack, it's the old problem with intelligence information. If you spread it out too much, you risk compromising it, and then you lose it—but if you don't use it at all, you might as well not even have it. Where do you draw the line?" It was a rhetorical question. "If you err, you err on the side of safety—but the safety of the country, not the source."
   "There's a real, live person on the other end of this sheet of paper, Rob," Jack pointed out.
   "I'm sure there is. But there are two hundred fifty million people outside this room, Jack, and the oath we both swore was to them, not some Chinese puke in Beijing. What this tells us is that the guy making policy in China is willing to start wars, and twice now we've sent our people to fight wars he's had a part in starting. Jesus, man, war is supposed to be a thing of the past, but this Zhang guy hasn't figured that one out yet. What's he doing that we don't know about?"
   "That's what SORGE’S all about, Rob. The idea is that we find out beforehand and have a chance to forestall it."
   Jackson nodded. "Maybe so, but once upon a time, there was a source called MAGIC that told us a lot about an enemy's intentions, but when that enemy launched the first attack, we were asleep—because MAGIC was so important we never told CINCPAC about it, and he ended up not preparing for Pearl Harbor. I know intel's important, but it has its operational limitations. All this really tells us is that we have a potential adversary with little in the way of inhibitions. We know his mindset, but not his intentions or current operations. Moreover, SORGE’S giving us recollections of private conversations between one guy who makes policy and another guy who tries to influence policy. A lot of stuff is being left out. This looks like a cover-your-ass diary, doesn't it?"
   Ryan told himself that this was a particularly smart critique. Like the people at Langley, he'd allowed himself to wax a little too euphoric about a source they'd never even approached before. SONGBIRD was good, but not without limitations. Big ones.
   "Yeah, Rob, that's probably just what it is. This Fang guy probably keeps the diary just to have something to pull out of the drawer if one of his colleagues on the Chinese Politburo tries to butt-fuck him."
   "So, it isn't Sir Thomas More whose words we're reading," TOMCAT observed.
   "Not hardly," Ryan conceded. "But it's a good source. All the people who've looked at this for us say it feels very real."
   "I'm not saying it isn't true, Jack, I'm saying it isn't all," the Vice President persisted.
   "Message received, Admiral." Ryan held up his hands in surrender. "What do you recommend?"
   "SecDef for starters, and the Chiefs, and J-3 and J-5, and probably CINCPAC, your boy Bart Mancuso," Jackson added, with a hint of distaste.
   "Why don't you like the guy?" SWORDSMAN asked.
   "He's a bubble-head," the career fighter pilot answered. "Submariners don't get around all that much . . . but I grant you he's a pretty good operator." The submarine operation he'd run on the Japs using old boomers had been pretty swift, Jackson admitted to himself.
   "Specific recommendations?"
   "Rutledge tells us that the ChiComms are talking like they're real torqued over the Taiwan thing. What if they act on that? Like a missile strike into the island. Christ knows they have enough missiles to toss, and we have ships in harbor there all the time."
   "You really think they'd be dumb enough to launch an attack on a city with one of our ships tied alongside?" Ryan asked. Nasty or not, this Zhang guy wasn't going to risk war with America quite that foolishly, was he?
   "What if they don't know the ship's there? What if they get bad intel? Jack, the shooters don't always get good data from the guys in the back room. Trust me. Been there, done that, got the fucking scars, y'know?"
   "The ships can take care of themselves, can't they?"
   "Not if they don't have all their systems turned on, and can a Navy SAM stop a ballistic inbound?" Robby wondered aloud. "I don't know. How about we have Tony Bretano check it out for us?"
   "Okay, give him a call." Ryan paused. "Robby, I have somebody coming in a few minutes. We need to talk some more about this. With Adler and Bretano," the President added.
   "Tony's very good on hardware and management stuff, but he needs a little educating on operations."
   "So, educate him," Ryan told Jackson.
   "Aye, aye, sir." The Vice President headed out the door.
 
   They got the container back to its magnetic home less than two hours after removing it, thanking God—Russians were allowed to do that now—that the lock mechanism wasn't one of the new electronic ones.
   Those could be very difficult to break. But the problem with all such security measures was that they all too often ran the chance of going wrong and destroying that which they were supposed to protect, which only added complexity to a job with too much complexity already. The world of espionage was one in which everything that could go wrong invariably did, and so over the years, every way of simplifying operations had been adopted by all the players. The result was that since what worked for one man worked for all, when you saw someone following the same procedures as your own intelligence officers and agents, you knew you had a player in your sights.
   And so the stakeout on the bench was renewed—of course it had never been withdrawn, in case Suvorov/Koniev should appear unexpectedly while the transfer case was gone off to the lab—with an ever-changing set of cars and trucks, plus coverage in a building with a line-of-sight to the bench. The Chinese subject was being watched, but no one saw him set a telltale for the dead-drop. But that could be as simple as calling a number for Suvorov/Koniev's beeper ... but probably no, since they'd assume that every phone line out of the Chinese embassy was bugged, and the number would be captured and perhaps traced to its owner. Spies had to be careful, because those who chased after them were both resourceful and unrelenting. That fact made them the most conservative of people. But difficult to spot though they might be, once spotted they were usually doomed. And that, the FSS men all hoped, would be the case with Suvorov/Koniev.
   In this case, it took until after nightfall. The subject left his apartment building and drove around for forty minutes, following a path identical to one driven two days before—probably checking to see if he had a shadow, and also to check for some telltale alert the FSS people hadn't spotted yet. But this time, instead of driving back to his flat, he came by the park, parked his car two blocks from the bench, and walked there by an indirect route, pausing on the way twice to light a cigarette, which gave him ample opportunity to turn and check his back. Everything was right out of the playbook. He saw nothing, though three men and a woman were following him on foot. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, which gave her the excuse to stop every so often to adjust the infant's blanket. The men just walked, not looking at the subject or, so it seemed, anything else.
   "There!" one of the FSS people said. Suvorov/Koniev didn't sit on the bench this time. Instead he rested his left foot on it, tied his shoelace, and adjusted his pants cuff. The pickup of the holder was accomplished so skillfully that no one actually saw it, but it seemed rather a far-fetched coincidence that he would pick that particular spot to tie his shoes—and besides, one of the FSS men would soon be there to see if he'd replaced one holder with another. With that done, the subject walked back to his car, taking a different circuitous route and lighting two more American Marlboros on the way.
   The amusing part, Lieutenant Provalov thought, was how obvious it was once you knew whom to look at. What had once been anonymous was now as plain as an advertising billboard.
   "So, now what do we do?" the militia lieutenant asked his FSS counterpart.
   "Not a thing," the FSS supervisor replied. "We wait until he places another message under the bench, and then we get it, decode it, and find out what exactly he's up to. Then we make a further decision."
   "What about my murder case?" Provalov demanded.
   "What about it? This is an espionage case now, Comrade Lieutenant, and that takes precedence."
   Which was true, Oleg Gregoriyevich had to admit to himself. The murder of a pimp, a whore, and a driver was a small thing compared to state treason.
 
   His naval career might never end, Admiral Joshua Painter, USN (Ret.), thought to himself. And that wasn't so bad a thing, was it? A farm boy from Vermont, he'd graduated the Naval Academy almost forty years earlier, made it through Pensacola, then gotten his life's ambition, flying jets off aircraft carriers. He'd done it for the next twenty years, plus a stint as a test pilot, commanded a carrier air wing, then a carrier, then a group, and finally topped out as SACLANT/CINCLANT/CINCLANTFLT, three very weighty hats that he'd worn comfortably enough for just over three years before removing the uniform forever. Retirement had meant a civilian job paying about four times what the government had, mainly consulting with admirals he'd watched on the way up and telling them how he would have done it. In fact, it was something he would have done for free in any officers' club on any Navy base in America, maybe for the cost of dinner and a few beers and a chance to smell the salt air.
   But now he was in the Pentagon, back on the government payroll, this time as a civilian supergrade and special assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Tony Bretano, Josh Painter thought, was smart enough, a downright brilliant engineer and manager of engineers. He was prone to look for mathematical solutions to problems rather than human ones, and he tended to drive people a little hard. All in all, Bretano might have made a decent naval officer, Painter thought, especially a nuc.
   His Pentagon office was smaller than the one he'd occupied as OP-05—Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Air—ten years earlier, a job since de-established. He had his own secretary and a smart young commander to look after him. He was an entry-port to the SecDef's office for a lot of people, one of whom, oddly enough, was the Vice President.
   "Hold for the Vice President," a White House operator told him on his private line.
   "You bet," Painter replied.
   "Josh, Robby."
   "Good morning, sir," Painter replied. This annoyed Jackson, who'd served under Painter more than once, but Josh Painter wasn't a man able to call an elected official by his Christian name. "What can I do for you?"
   "Got a question. The President and I were going over something this morning, and I didn't have the answer to his question. Can an Aegis intercept and kill a ballistic inbound?"
   "I don't know, but I don't think so. We looked at that during the Gulf War and—oh, okay, yeah, I remember now. We decided they could probably stop one of those Scuds because of its relatively slow speed, but that's the top end of their ability. It's a software problem, software on the SAM itself." Which was the same story for the Patriot missiles as well, both men then remembered. "Why did that one come up?"
   "The President's worried that if the Chinese toss one at Taiwan and we have a ship alongside, well, he'd prefer that the ship could look after herself, y'know?"
   "I can look into that," Painter promised. "Want me to bring it up with Tony today?"
   "That's affirmative," TOMCAT confirmed.
   "Roger that, sir. I'll get back to you later today."
   "Thanks, Josh," Jackson replied, hanging up.
   Painter checked his watch. It was about time for him to head in anyway. The walk took him out into the busy E-Ring corridor, then right again into the SecDef's office, past the security people and the various private secretaries and aides. He was right on time, and the door to the inner office was open.
   "Morning, Josh," Bretano greeted.
   "Good morning, Mr. Secretary."
   "Okay, what's new and interesting in the world today?"
   "Well, sir, we have an inquiry from the White House that just came in."
   "And what might that be?" THUNDER asked. Painter explained. "Good question. Why is the answer so hard to figure out?"
   "It's something we've looked at on and off, but really Aegis was set up to deal with cruise-missile threats, and they top out at about Mach Three or so."
   "But the Aegis radar is practically ideal for that sort of threat, isn't it?" The Secretary of Defense was fully briefed in on how the radar-computer system worked.
   "It's a hell of a radar system, sir, yes," Painter agreed.
   "And making it capable for this mission is just a question of software?
   "Essentially yes. Certainly it involves software in the missile's seekerhead, maybe also for the SPY and SPG radars as well. That's not exactly my field, sir."
   "Software isn't all that difficult to write, and it isn't that expensive either. Hell, I had a world-class guy at TRW who's an expert on this stuff, used to work in SDIO downstairs. Alan Gregory, retired from the Army as a half-colonel, Ph.D. from Stony Brook, I think. Why not have him come in to check it out?"
   It amazed Painter that Bretano, who'd run one major corporation and had almost been headhunted away to head Lockheed-Martin before President Ryan had intercepted him, had so little appreciation for procedure.
   "Mr. Secretary, to do that, we have to—"
   "My ass," THUNDER interrupted. "I have discretionary authority over small amounts of money, don't I?"
   "Yes, Mr. Secretary," Painter confirmed.
   "And I've sold all my stock in TRW, remember?"
   "Yes, sir." "So, I am not in violation of any of those fucking ethics laws,
   "No, sir," Painter had to agree.
   "Good, so call TRW in Sunnyvale, get Alan Gregory, I think he's a junior vice president now, and tell him we need him to fly here right away and look into this, to see how easy it would be to upgrade Aegis to providing a limited ballistic-missile-defense capability."
   "Sir, it won't make some of the other contractors happy." Including, Painter did not add, TRW.
   "I'm not here to make them happy, Admiral. Somebody told me I was here to defend the country efficiently."
   "Yes, sir." It was hard not to like the guy, even if he did have the bureaucratic sensibilities of a pissed-off rhinoceros.
   "So let's find out if Aegis has the technical capabilities do this particular job."
   "Aye, aye, sir."
   "What time do I have to drive up to the Hill?" the SecDef asked next.
   "About thirty minutes, sir."
   Bretano grumbled. Half his working time seemed to be spent explaining things to Congress, talking to people who'd already made up their minds and who only asked questions to look good on C-SPAN. For Tony Bretano, an engineer's engineer, it seemed like a hellishly unproductive way to spend his time. But they called it public service, didn't they? In a slightly different context, it was called slavery, but Ryan was even more trapped than he was, leaving THUNDER with little room to complain. And besides, he'd volunteered, too.
 
   They were eager enough, these Spetsnaz junior officers, and Clark remembered that what makes elite troops is often the simple act of telling them that they are elite—then waiting for them to live up to their own self-image. There was a little more to it, of course. The Spetsnaz were special in terms of their mission. Essentially they'd been copies of the British Special Air Service. As so often happened in military life, what one country invented, other countries tended to copy, and so the Soviet Army had selected troops for unusually good fitness tests and a high degree of political reliability—Clark never learned exactly how one tested for that characteristic—and then assigned them a different training regimen, turning them into commandos. The initial concept had failed for a reason predictable to anyone but the political leadership of the Soviet Union: The great majority of Soviet soldiers were drafted, served two years, then went back home. The average member of the British SAS wasn't even considered for membership until he'd served four years and had corporal's stripes, for the simple reason that it takes more than two years to learn to be a competent soldier in ordinary duties, much less the sort that required thinking under fire—yet another problem for the Soviets, who didn't encourage independent thought for any of those in uniform, much less conscripted non-officers. To compensate for this, some clever weapons had been thought up. The spring-loaded knife was one with which Chavez had played earlier in the day. At the push of a button, it shot off the blade of a serious combat knife with a fair degree of accuracy over a range of five or six meters. But the Soviet engineer who'd come up with this idea must have been a movie watcher, because only in the movies do men fall silently and instantly dead from a knife in the chest. Most people find this experience painful, and most people respond to pain by making noise. As an instructor at The Farm, Clark had always warned, "Never cut a man's throat with a knife. They flop around and make noise when you do that."
   By contrast, after all the thought and good engineering that had gone into the spring-knife, their pistol silencers were garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots, when manufacturing a decent suppressor required only about fifteen minutes of work from a semi-skilled machinist. John sighed to himself. There was no understanding these people.
   But the individual troopers were just fine. He'd watched them run with Ding's Team-2, and not one of the Russians fell out of the formation. Part of that had been pride, of course, but most of it had been ability. The shoot-house experience had been less impressive. They weren't as carefully trained as the boys from Hereford, and not nearly so well equipped. Their supposedly suppressed weapons were sufficiently noisy to make John and Ding both jump . . . but for all that, the eagerness of these kids was impressive. Every one of the Russians was a senior lieutenant in rank, and each was airborne-qualified. They all were pretty good with light weapons—and the Russian snipers were as good as Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber, much to the surprise of the latter. The Russian sniper rifles looked a little clunky, but they shot pretty well—at least out to eight hundred meters.
   "Mr. C, they have a ways to go, but they got spirit. Two weeks, and they'll be right on line," Chavez pronounced, looking skeptically at the vodka. They were in a Russian officers' club, and there was plenty of the stuff about.
   "Only two?" John asked.
   "In two weeks, they'll have all their skills down pat, and they'll master the new weapons." RAINBOW was transferring five complete team-sets of weapons to the Russian Spetsnaz team: MP-10 submachine guns, Beretta .45 pistols, and most important, the radio gear that allowed the team to communicate even when under fire. The Russians were keeping their own Dragunov long-rifles, which was partly pride, but the things could shoot, and that was sufficient to the mission. "The rest is just experience, John, and we can't really give 'em that. All we can really do is set up a good training system for 'em, and the rest they'll do for themselves."
   "Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn't fight." Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.
   "Shame their country's in such a mess," Chavez observed.
   "It's their mess to clean up, Domingo. They'll do it if we keep out of their way." Probably, John didn't add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He'd been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an "illegal" field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he'd been back in the '70s and '80s. Jesus, the chances he'd taken back then! More recently, he'd been in KGB—to him it would always be KGB—headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he'd hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.
   "Ivan Sergeyevich!" a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces—a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.
   "Yuriy Andreyevich," Clark responded. He'd kept his given name and patronymic from his CIA cover as a convenience that, he was sure, the Russians knew all about anyway. So, no harm was done. He lifted a vodka bottle. It was apple vodka, flavored by some apple skins at the bottom of the bottle, and not bad to the taste. In any case, vodka was the fuel for any sort of business meeting in Russia, and since he was in Rome it was time to act Italian.
   Kirillin gunned down his first shot as though he'd been waiting all week for it. He refilled and toasted John's companion: "Domingo Stepanovich," which was close enough. Chavez reciprocated the gesture. "Your men are excellent, comrades. We will learn much from them."
   Comrades, John thought. Son of a bitch! "Your boys are eager, Yuriy, and hard workers."
   "How long?" Kirillin asked. His eyes didn't show the vodka one little bit. Perhaps they were immune, Ding thought. He had to go easy on the stuff, lest John have to guide him home.
   "Two weeks," Clark answered. "That's what Domingo tells me."
   "That fast?" Kirillin asked, not displeased by the estimate.
   "They're good troops, General," Ding said. "Their basic skills are there. They're in superb physical condition, and they're smart. All they need is familiarization with their new weapons, and some more directed training that we'll set up for them. And after that, they'll be training the rest of your forces, right?"
   "Correct, Major. We will be establishing regional special-operations and counterterror forces throughout the country. The men you train this week will be training others in a few months. The problem with the Chechens came as a surprise to us, and we need to pay serious attention to terrorism as a security threat."
   Clark didn't envy Kirillin the mission. Russia was a big country containing too many leftover nationalities from the Soviet Union—and for that matter from the time of the czars—many of whom had never particularly liked the idea of being part of Russia. America had had the problem once, but never to the extent that the Russians did, and here it wouldn't be getting better anytime soon. Economic prosperity was the only sure cure—prosperous people don't squabble; it's too rough on the china and the silverware—but prosperity was a way off in the future yet.
   "Well, sir," Chavez went on, "in a year you'll have a serious and credible force, assuming you have the funding support you're going to need."
   Kirillin grunted. "That is the question here, and probably in your country as well, yes?"
   "Yeah." Clark had himself a laugh. "It helps if Congress loves you."
   "You have many nationalities on your team," the Russian general observed.
   "Yeah, well, we're mainly a NATO service, but we're used to working together. Our best shooter now is Italian."
   "Really? I saw him, but—"
   Chavez cut him off. "General, in a previous life, Ettore was James Butler Hickock. Excuse me, Wild Bill Hickock to you. That son of a bitch can sign his name with a handgun."
   Clark refilled the vodka glasses. "Yuriy, he's won money off all of us at the pistol range. Even me."
   "Is that a fact?" Kirillin mused, with the same look in his eyes that Clark had had a few weeks earlier. John punched him on the arm.
   "I know what you're thinking. Bring money when you have your match with him, Comrade General," John advised. "You'll need it to pay off his winnings."
   "This I must see," the Russian announced.
   "Hey, Eddie!" Chavez waved his number-two over.
   "Yes, sir?"
   "Tell the general here how good Ettore is with a pistol."
   "That fucking Eyetalian!" Sergeant Major Price swore. "He's even taken twenty pounds off Dave Woods."
   "Dave's the range-master at Hereford, and he's pretty good, too,"
   Ding explained. "Ettore really ought to be in the Olympics or something—maybe Camp Perry, John?"
   "I thought of that, maybe enter him in the President's Cup match next year . . ." Clark mused. Then he turned. "Go ahead, Yuriy. Take him on. Maybe you will succeed where all of us failed."
   "All of you, eh?"
   "Every bloody one of us," Eddie Price confirmed. "I wonder why the Italian government gave him to us. If the Mafia want to go after him, I wish the bastards luck."
   "This I must see," Kirillin persisted, leading his visitors to wonder how smart he was.
   "Then you will see it, Tovarisch General, "Clark promised.
   Kirillin, who'd been on the Red Army pistol team as a lieutenant and a captain, couldn't conceive of being beaten in a pistol match. He figured these NATO people were just having fun with him, as he might do if the situation were reversed. He waved to the bartender and ordered pepper vodka for his own next round. But all that said, he liked these NATO visitors, and their reputation spoke forcefully for itself. This Chavez, a major—he was really CIA, Kirillin knew, and evidently a good spy at that, according to his briefing from the SVR—had the look of a good soldier, with confidence won in the field, the way a soldier ought to win his confidence. Clark was much the same—and also very capable, so the book on him read—with his own ample experience both as a soldier and a spy. And his spoken Russian was superb and very literate, his accent of St. Petersburg, where he probably could—and probably once or twice had, Kirillin reflected—pass for a native. It was so strange that such men as these had once been his sworn enemies. Had battle happened, it would have been bloody, and its outcome very sad. Kirillin had spent three years in Afghanistan, and had learned firsthand just how horrid a thing combat was. He'd heard the stories from his father, a much-decorated infantry general, but hearing them wasn't the same as seeing, and besides, you never told the really awful parts because you tended to edit them out of your memory. One did not discuss seeing a friend's face turn to liquid from a rifle bullet over a few drinks in a bar, because it was just not the sort of thing you could describe to one who didn't understand, and you didn't need to describe it to one who did. You just lifted your glass to toast the memory of Grisha or Mirka, or one of the others, and in the community of arms, that was enough. Did these men do it? Probably. They'd lost men once, when Irish terrorists had attacked their own home station, to their ultimate cost, but not without inflicting their own harm on highly trained men.
   And that was the essence of the profession of arms right there. You trained to skew the odds your way, but you could never quite turn them all the way in the direction you wished.
 
   Yu Chun had experienced a thoroughly vile day. In the city of Taipei to look after her aged and seriously ill mother, she'd had a neighbor call urgently, telling her to switch on her TV, then seen her husband shot dead before her blinking eyes. And that had just been the first hammer blow of the day.
   The next one involved getting to Beijing. The first two flights to Hong Kong were fully booked, and that cost her fourteen lonely and miserable hours sitting in the terminal as an anonymous face in a sea of such faces, alone with her horror and additional loneliness, until she finally boarded a flight to the PRC capital. That flight had been bumpy, and she had cowered in her last-row window seat, hoping that no one could see the anguish on her face, but hiding it as well as she might conceal an earthquake. In due course, that trial had ended, and she managed to leave the aircraft, and actually made it through immigration and customs fairly easily because she carried virtually nothing that could conceal contraband. Then it started all over again with the taxi to her home.
   Her home was hidden behind a wall of policemen. She tried to pass through their line as one might wiggle through a market checkout, but the police had orders to admit no one into the house, and those orders did not include an exception for anyone who might actually live there. That took twenty minutes and three policemen of gradually increasing rank to determine. By this time, she'd been awake for twenty-six hours and traveling for twenty-two of them. Tears did not avail her in the situation, and she staggered her way to the nearby home of a member of her husband's congregation, Wen Zhong, a man who operated a small restaurant right in his home, a tall and rotund man, ordinarily jolly, liked by all who met him. Seeing Chun, he embraced her and took her into his home, at once giving her a room in which to sleep and a few drinks to help her relax. Yu Chin was asleep in minutes, and would remain that way for some hours, while Wen figured he had his own things to do. About the only thing Chun had managed to say before collapsing from exhaustion was that she wanted to bring Fa An's body home for proper burial. That Wen couldn't do all by himself, but he called a number of his fellow parishioners to let them know that their pastor's widow was in town. He understood that the burial would be on the island of Taiwan, which was where Yu had been born, but his congregation could hardly bid their beloved spiritual leader farewell without a ceremony of its own, and so he called around to arrange a memorial service at their small place of worship. He had no way of knowing that one of the parishioners he called reported directly to the Ministry of State Security.
 
   Barry Wise was feeling pretty good about himself. While he didn't make as much money as his colleagues at the other so-called "major" networks—CNN didn't have an entertainment division to dump money into news—he figured that he was every bit as well known as their (white) talking heads, and he stood out from them by being a serious newsie who went into the field, found his own stories, and wrote his own copy. Barry Wise did the news, and that was all. He had a pass to the White House press room, and was considered in just about every capital city in the world not only as a reporter with whom you didn't trifle, but also as an honest conveyor of information. He was by turns respected and hated, depending on the government and the culture. This government, he figured, had little reason to love him. To Barry Wise, they were fucking barbarians. The police here had delusions of god-hood that evidently devolved from the big shots downtown who must have thought their dicks were pretty big because they could make so many people dance to their tune. To Wise, that was the sign of a little one, instead, but you didn't tell them that out loud, because, small or not, they had cops with guns, and the guns were certainly big enough. But these people had huge weaknesses, Wise also knew. They saw the world in a distorted way, like people with astigmatism, and assumed that was its real shape. They were like scientists in a lab who couldn't see past their own theories and kept trying to twist the experimental data into the proper result—or ended up ignoring the data which their theory couldn't explain.
   But that was going to change. Information was getting in. In allowing free-market commerce, the government of the PRC had also allowed the installation of a forest of telephone lines. Many of them were connected to fax machines, and even more were connected to computers, and so lots of information was circulating around the country now. Wise wondered if the government appreciated the implications of that. Probably not. Neither Marx nor Mao had really understood how powerful a thing information was, because it was the place where one found the Truth, once you rooted through it a little, and Truth wasn't Theory. Truth was the way things really were, and that's what made it a son of a bitch. You could deny it, but only at your peril, because sooner or later the son of a bitch would bite you on the ass. Denying it just made the inevitable bite worse, because the longer you put it off, the wider its jaws got. The world had changed quite a bit since CNN had started up. As late as 1980, a country could deny anything, but CNN's signals, the voice and the pictures, came straight down from the satellite. You couldn't deny pictures worth a damn.
   And that made Barry Wise the croupier in the casino of Information and Truth. He was an honest dealer—he had to be in order to survive in the casino, because the customers demanded it. In the free marketplace of ideas, Truth always won in the end, because it didn't need anything else to prop it up. Truth stood by itself, and sooner or later the wind would blow the props away from all the bullshit.
   It was a noble enough profession, Wise thought. His mission in life was reporting history, and along the way, he got to make a little of it himself—or at least to help—and for that reason he was feared by those who thought that defining history was their exclusive domain. The thought often made him smile to himself. He'd helped a little the other day, Wise thought, with those two churchmen. He didn't know where it would lead. That was the work of others.
   He still had more work of his own to do in China.

CHAPTER 29

Billy Budd
   
So, what else is going to go wrong over there?" Ryan asked.
   "Things will quiet down if the other side has half a brain," Adler said hopefully.
   "Do they?" Robby Jackson asked, just before Arnie van Damm could.
   "Sir, that's not a question with an easy answer. Are they stupid? No, they are not. But do they see things in the same way that we do? No, they do not. That's the fundamental problem dealing with them—"
   "Yeah, Klingons," Ryan observed tersely. "Aliens from outer space. Jesus, Scott, how do we predict what they're going to do?"
   "We don't, really," SecState answered. "We have a bunch of good people, but the problem is in getting them all to agree on something when we need an important call. They never do," Adler concluded. He frowned before going on. "Look, these guys are kings from a different culture. It was already very different from ours long before Marxism arrived, and the thoughts of our old friend Karl only made things worse. They're kings because they have absolute power. There are some limitations on that power, but we don't fully understand what they are, and therefore it's hard for us to enforce or to exploit them. They are Klingons. So, what we need is a Mr. Spock. Got one handy, anyone?"
   Around the coffee table, there were the usual half-humorous snorts that accompany an observation that is neither especially funny nor readily escapable.
   "Nothing new from SORGE today?" van Damm asked.
   Ryan shook his head. "No, the source doesn't produce something every day."
   "Pity," Adler said. "I've discussed the take from SORGE with some of my I and R people—always as my own theoretical musings ..."
   "And?" Jackson asked.
   "And they think it's decent speculation, but not something to bet the ranch on."
   There was amusement around the coffee table at that one.
   "That's the problem with good intelligence information. It doesn't agree with what your own people think—assuming they really think at all," the Vice President observed.
   "Not fair, Robby," Ryan told his VP.
   "I know, I know." Jackson held up surrendering hands. "I just can't forget the motto of the whole intelligence community: 'We bet your life.' It's lonely out there with a fighter plane strapped to your back, risking your life on the basis of a piece of paper with somebody's opinion typed on it, when you never know the guy it's from or the data it's based on." He paused to stir his coffee. "You know, out in the fleet we used to think—well, we used to hope—that decisions made in this room here were based on solid data. It's quite a disappointment to learn what things are really like."
   "Robby, back when I was in high school, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember wondering if the world was going to blow up. But I still had to translate half a page of Caesar's goddamned Gallic Wars, and I saw the President on TV, and I figured things were okay, because he was the President of the United Goddamned States, and he-had to know what was really going on. So, I translated the battle with the Helvetii and slept that night. The President knows, because he's the President, right? Then I become President, and I don't know a damned thing more than I knew the month before, but everybody out there"—Ryan waved his arm at the window—"thinks I'm fucking omniscient. . . . Ellen!" he called loudly enough to get through the door.
   The door opened seven seconds later. "Yes, Mr. President?"
   "I think you know, Ellen," Jack told her.
   "Yes, sir." She fished in her pocket and pulled out a fliptop box of Virginia Slims. Ryan took one out, along with the pink butane lighter stashed inside. He lit the smoke and took a long hit. "Thanks, Ellen."
   Her smile was downright motherly. "Surely, Mr. President." And she headed back to the secretaries' room, closing the curved door behind her.
   "Jack?"
   "Yeah, Rob?" Ryan responded, turning. – "That's disgusting."
   "Okay, I am not omniscient, and I'm not perfect," POTUS admitted crossly after the second puff. "Now, back to China."
   "They can forget MFN," van Damm said. "Congress would impeach you if you asked for it, Jack. And you can figure that the Hill will offer Taiwan any weapons system they want to buy next go-round."
   "I have no problems with that. And there's no way I was going to offer them MFN anyway, unless they decide to break down and start acting like civilized people."
   "And that's the problem," Adler reminded them all. "They think we're the uncivilized ones."
   "I see trouble," Jackson said, before anyone else could. Ryan figured it was his background as a fighter pilot to be first in things. "They're just out of touch with the rest of the world. The only way to get them back in touch will involve some pain. Not to their people, especially, but sure as hell to the guys who make the decisions."
   "And they're the ones who control the guns," van Damm noted.
   "Roger that, Arnie," Jackson confirmed.
   "So, how can we ease them the right way?" Ryan asked, to center the conversation once more.
   "We stick to it. We tell them we want reciprocal trade access, or they will face reciprocal trade barriers. We tell them that this little flare-up with the Nuncio makes any concessions on our part impossible, and that's just how things are. If they want to trade with us, they have to back off," Adler spelled out. "They don't like being told such things, but it's the real world, and they have to acknowledge objective reality. They do understand that, for the most part," SecState concluded.
   Ryan looked around the room and got nods. "Okay, make sure Rutledge understands what the message is," he told EAGLE.
   "Yes, sir," SecState agreed, with a nod. People stood and started filing out. Vice President Jackson allowed himself to be the last in the line of departure.
   "Hey, Rob," Ryan said to his old friend.
   "Funny thing, watched some TV last night for a change, caught an old movie I hadn't seen since I was a kid."
   "Which one?"
   "Billy Budd, Melville's story about the poor dumb sailor who gets himself hanged. I'd forgot the name of Billy's ship."
   "Yeah?" So had Ryan.
   "It was The Rights of Man. Kind of a noble name for a ship. I imagine Melville made that up with malice aforethought, like writers do, but that's what we fight for, isn't it? Even the Royal Navy, they just didn't fight as well as we did back then. The Rights of Man, " Jackson repeated. "It is a noble sentiment."
   "How does it apply to the current problem, Rob?"
   "Jack, the first rule of war is the mission: First, why the hell are you out there, and then what are you proposing to do about it. The Rights of Man makes a pretty good starting point, doesn't it? By the way, CNN's going to be at Pap's church tomorrow and at Gerry Patterson's. They're switching off, preaching in each other's pulpit for the memorial ceremonies, and CNN decided to cover it as a news event in and of itself. Good call, I think," Jackson editorialized. "Wasn't like that in Mississippi back when I was a boy."
   "It's going to be like you said?"
   "I'm only guessing," Robby admitted, "but I don't see either one of them playing it cool. It's too good an opportunity to teach a good lesson about how the Lord doesn't care a rat's ass what color we are, and how all men of faith should stand together. They'll both probably fold in the abortion thing—Pap ain't real keen on abortion rights, and neither's Patterson—but mainly it'll be about justice and equality and how two good men went to see God after doing the right thing."
   "Your dad's pretty good with a sermon, eh?"
   "If they gave out Pulitzers for preaching, he'd have a wall covered in the things, Jack, and Gerry Patterson ain't too bad for a white boy either."
 
   "Ah," Yefremov observed. He was in the building perch instead of one of the vehicles. It was more comfortable, and he was senior enough to deserve and appreciate the comforts. There was Suvorov/Koniev, sitting back on the bench, an afternoon newspaper in his hands. They didn't have to watch, but watch they did, just to be sure. Of course, there were thousands of park benches in Moscow, and the probability that their subject would sit in the same one this many times was genuinely astronomical. That's what they would argue to the judge when the time came for the trial... depending on what was in the subject's right hand. (His KGB file said that he was right-handed, and it seemed to be the case.) He was so skillful that you could hardly see what he did, but it was done, and it was seen. His right hand left the paper, reached inside his jacket, and pulled out something metallic. Then the hand paused briefly, and as he turned pages in the paper—the fluttering of the paper was a fine distraction to anyone who might be watching, since the human eye is always drawn to movement—the right hand slid down and affixed the metal transfer case to the magnetic holder, then returned for the paper, all in one smooth motion, done so quickly as to be invisible. Well, almost, Yefremov thought. He'd caught spies before—four of them, in fact, which explained his promotion to a supervisory position—and every one had a thrill attached to it, because he was chasing and catching the most elusive of game. And this one was Russian-trained, the most elusive of all. He'd never bagged one of them before, and there was the extra thrill of catching not just a spy but a traitor as well. . . and perhaps a traitor guilty of murder? he wondered. That was another first. Never in his experience had espionage involved the violation of that law. No, an intelligence operation was about the transfer of information, which was dangerous enough. The inclusion of murder was an additional hazard that was not calculated to please a trained spy. It made noise, as they said, and noise was something a spy avoided as much as a cat burglar, and for much the same reason.
   "Call Provalov," Yefremov told his subordinate. Two reasons for that. First, he rather owed it to the militia lieutenant, who'd presented him with both the case and the subject. Second, the civilian cop might know something useful to his part of this case. They continued to watch Suvorov/Koniev for another ten minutes. Finally, he stood and walked back to his car for the drive back to his apartment, during which he was duly followed by the ever-changing surveillance team. After the requisite fifteen minutes, one of Yefremov's people crossed the street and retrieved the case from the bench. It was the locked one again, which told them that the item inside was perhaps more important. You had to get past the anti-tamper device to keep the contents from being destroyed, but the FSS had people well skilled in that, and the key for this transfer case had already been struck. That was confirmed twenty minutes later, when the case was opened and the contents extracted, unfolded, photographed, refolded, reinserted, and, finally, relocked in the container, which was immediately driven back to the bench.
   Back at FSS headquarters, the decryption team typed the message into a computer into which the one-time-pad had already been inputted. After that, it was a matter of mere seconds before the computer performed a function not unlike sliding a document over a printed template. The clear-text message was, agreeably, in Russian. The content of the message was something else.
   "Yob tvoyu maht!" the technician breathed, in one of his language's more repulsive imprecations: Fuck your mother. Then he handed the page to one of the supervising inspectors, whose reaction was little different. Then he walked to the phone and dialed Yefremov's number.
   "Pavel Georgeyevich, you need to see this."
   Provalov was there when the chief of the decryption section walked in. The printout was in a manila folder, which the head cryppie handed over without a word.
   "Well, Pasha?" the homicide investigator asked.
   "Well, we have answered our first question."
   The motorcar was even purchased at the same dealership in central Moscow, the sheet read. There is no fault to be found here. The men who performed the mission are both dead in St. P. Before I can make another attempt, I need an indication from you on the timeline, and also on the payment to my contractors.
   "Golovko was the target, then," Provalov observed. And the head of our country's intelligence service owes his life to a pimp.
   "So it would appear," Yefremov agreed. "Note that he doesn't ask payment for himself. I would imagine he's somewhat embarrassed at having missed his target on the first attempt."
   "But he's working for the Chinese?"
   "So that would appear as well," the FSS man observed, with an inward chill. Why, he asked himself, would the Chinese wish to do such a thing? Isn't that nearly an act of war? He sat back in his chair and lit up a smoke, looking into the eyes of his police colleague. Neither man knew what to say at the moment, and both kept silent. It would all soon be out of and far beyond their hands. With that decided, both men headed home for dinner.
 
   The morning broke more brightly than usual in Beijing. Mrs. Yu had slept deeply and well, and though she awoke with a slight headache, she was grateful for Wen's insistence on a couple of drinks before retiring. Then she remembered why she was in Beijing, and any good feelings departed from her mind. Breakfast was mainly green tea and was spent looking down, remembering the sound of her husband's voice in the bleak acceptance of the fact that she'd never hear it again. He'd always been in a good mood over breakfast, never forgetting, as she had just done, to say grace over the morning meal and thank God for another day in which to serve Him. No more. No more would he do that, she reminded herself. But she had duties of her own to perform.
   "What can we do, Zhong?" she asked, when her host appeared.
   "I will go with you to the police post and we will ask for Fa An's body, and then I will help you fly our friend home, and we will have a memorial prayer service at the—"
   "No, you can't, Zhong. There are police there to keep everyone out. They wouldn't even let me in, even though I had my papers in order."
   "Then we will have it outside, and they will watch us pray for our friend," the restaurateur told his guest with gentle resolve.
   Ten minutes later, she'd cleaned up and was ready to leave. The police station was only four blocks away, a simple building, ordinary in all respects except for the sign over the door.
   "Yes?" the desk officer said when his peripheral vision noted the presence of people by his desk. He looked up from the paper forms that had occupied his attention for the past few minutes to see a woman and a man of about the same age.
   "I am Yu Chun," Mrs. Yu answered, seeing some recognition in the desk officer's eyes result from her words.
   "You are the wife of Yu Fa An?" he asked.
   "That is correct."
   "Your husband was an enemy of the people," the cop said next, sure of that but not sure of much else in this awkward case.
   "I believe he was not, but all I ask is for his body, so that I might fly it home for burial with his family."
   "I do not know where his body is," the cop said.
   "But he was shot by a policeman," Wen put in, "and the disposal of his body is therefore a police matter. So, might you be so kind, comrade, as to call the proper number so that we can remove our friends body?" His manners did not allow anger on the part of the desk officer.
   But the desk cop really didn't know what number to call, and so he called someone inside the building, in the large administration division. He found this embarrassing to do with two citizens standing by his desk, but there was no avoiding that.
   "Yes?" a voice answered on his third internal call.
   "This is Sergeant Jiang at the desk in the public lobby. I have Yu Chun here, seeking the body of her husband, Yu Fa An. I need to tell her where to go."
   The reply took a few seconds for the man on the other end of the phone, who had to remember.... "Ah, yes, tell her she can go to the Da Yunhe River. His body was cremated and the ashes dumped in the water last evening."
   And, enemy of the people or not, it would not be a pleasant thing to tell his widow, who'd probably had feelings for him. Sergeant Jiang set the phone down and decided to give her the news.
   "The body of Yu Fa An was cremated and the ashes scattered in the river, comrade."
   "That is cruel!" Wen said at once. Chun was too stunned to say anything at the moment.
   "I cannot help you more than that," Jiang told his visitors and looked back down at his paperwork to dismiss them.
   "Where is my husband?" Yu Chun managed to blurt, after thirty seconds or so of silence.
   "Your husband's body was cremated and the ashes scattered," Jiang said, without looking up, because he really didn't wish to see her eyes under these circumstances. "I cannot help you further. You may leave now."
   "I want my husband back!" she insisted.
   "Your husband is dead and his body has been cremated. Be gone now!" Sergeant Jiang insisted in return, wishing she'd just go away and allow him to get back to his paperwork.
   "I want my husband," she said louder now, causing a few eyes to turn her way in the lobby.
   "He is gone, Chun," Wen Zhong told her, taking her arm and steering her to the door. "Come, we will pray for him outside,"
   "But why did they—I mean, why is he—and why did they—" It had just been too much for one twenty-four-hour period. Despite the night's sleep, Yu Chun was still too disoriented. Her husband of over twenty years had vanished, and now she could not even see the urn containing his ashes? It was a lot to absorb for a woman who'd never so much as bumped into a policeman on the street, who'd never done a single thing to offend the state—except, perhaps, to marry a Christian– but what did that hurt, anyway? Had either of them, had any of their congregation ever plotted treason against the state? No. Had any of them so much as violated the criminal or civil law? No. And so why had this misfortune fallen upon her? She felt as though she'd been struck by an invisible truck while crossing the street, then had it decided that her injuries were all her fault. Behind one invisible truck was just another, and all the more merciless at that.
   There was nothing left for her to do, no recourse, legal or otherwise. They couldn't even go into her home, whose living room had so often served as their church, there to pray for Yu's soul and entreat God for mercy and help. Instead they'd pray . . . where? she wondered. One thing at a time. She and Wen walked outside, escaping the eyes of the lobby, which had zoomed in on them with almost physical impact. The eyes and the weight they'd carried were soon left behind, but the sun outside was just one more thing that intruded on what ought to have been, and what needed to be, a day of peace and lonely prayer to a God whose mercy was not very evident at the moment. Instead, the brightness of the sun defeated her eyelids, bringing unwanted brilliance into the darkness that might have simulated, if not exactly granted, peace. She had a flight booked back to Hong Kong, and from there back to Taipei, where she could at least weep in the presence of her mother, who was awaiting her death as well, for the woman was over ninety and frail.
   For Barry Wise, the day had long since begun. His colleagues in Atlanta had praised him to the heavens in an e-mail about his earlier story. Maybe another Emmy, they said. Wise liked getting the awards, but they weren't the reason for his work. It was just what he did. He wouldn't even say he enjoyed it, because the news he reported was rarely pretty or pleasant. It was just his job, the work he'd chosen to do. If there was an aspect of it that he actually liked, it was the newness of it. Just as people awoke wondering what they'd see on CNN every day, from baseball scores to executions, so he awoke every day wondering what he'd report. He often had some idea of where the story would be and roughly what it would contain, but you were never really sure, and in the newness was the adventure of his job. He'd learned to trust his instincts, though he never really understood where they came from or how they seemed to know what they did, and today his instincts reminded him that one of the people he'd seen shot the other day had said he was married, and that his wife was on Taiwan. Maybe she'd be back now? It was worth trying out. He'd tried to get Atlanta to check with the Vatican, but that story would be handled by the Rome bureau. The aircraft containing Cardinal DiMilo's body was on its way back to Italy, where somebody would be making a big deal about it for CNN to cover live and on tape to show to the entire world ten times at least.
   The hotel room had a coffeemaker, and he brewed his own from beans stolen from the CNN Beijing bureau office. Sipping coffee, for him as for so many others, helped him think.
   Okay, he thought, the Italian guy, the Cardinal, his body was gone, boxed and shipped out on an Alitalia 747, probably somewhere over Afghanistan right now. But what about the Chinese guy, the Baptist minister who took the round in the head? He had to have left a body behind, too, and he had a congregation and—he said he was married, didn't he? Okay, if so, he had a wife somewhere, and she'd want the body back to bury. So, at the least he could try to interview her . . . it would be a good followup, and would allow Atlanta to play the tape of the killings again. He was sure the Beijing government had written him onto their official shitlist, but fuck 'em, Wise thought with a sip of the Starbucks, it was hardly a disgrace to be there, was it? These people were racist as hell. Even folks on the street cringed to see him pass, with his dark skin. Even Birmingham under Bull Connor hadn't treated black Americans like aliens from another goddamned planet. Here, everyone looked the same, dressed the same, talked the same. Hell, they needed some black people just to liven up the mix some. Toss in a few blond Swedes and maybe a few Italians to set up a decent restaurant. . . .
   But it wasn't his job to civilize the world, just to tell people what was going on in it. The trade talks were not where it was happening, not today, Wise thought. Today he and his satellite truck would head back to the home of Reverend Yu Fa An. Wise was playing a hunch. No more than that. But they'd rarely failed him before.
 
   Ryan was enjoying another night off. The following night would be different. He had to give another goddamned speech on foreign policy. Why he couldn't simply announce policy in the press room and be done with it, nobody had yet told him—and he hadn't asked, for fear of looking the fool (again) before Arnie. This was just how it was done. The speech and the subject had nothing to do with the identity of the group he was addressing. Surely there had to be an easier way to tell the world what he thought. This way, too, Cathy had to come with him, and she hated these things even more than he did, because it took her away from her patient notes, which she guarded about as forcefully as a lion over the wildebeests he'd just killed for lunch. Cathy often complained that this First Lady stuff was hurting her performance as a SURGEON. Jack didn't believe that. It was more likely that like most women, Cathy needed something to bitch about, and this subject was worthier than her more pedestrian complaints, like being unable to cook dinner once in a while, which she missed a lot more than the women's lib people would have cared to learn. Cathy had spent over twenty years learning to be a gourmet cook, and when time allowed (rarely) she'd sneak down to the capacious White House kitchen to trade ideas and recipes with the head chef. For the moment, however, she was curled up in a comfortable chair making notes on her patient files and sipping at her wineglass, while Jack watched TV, for a change not under the eyes of the Secret Service detail and the domestic staff.
   But the President wasn't really watching TV. His eyes were pointed in that direction, but his mind was looking at something else. It was a look his wife had learned to understand in the past year, almost like open-eyed sleep while his brain churned over a problem. In fact, it was something she did herself often enough, thinking about the best way to treat a patient's problem while eating lunch at the Hopkins doctors' cafeteria, her brain creating a picture as though in a Disney cartoon, simulating the problem and then trying out theoretical fixes. It didn't happen all that much anymore. The laser applications she'd helped to develop were approaching the point that an auto mechanic could perform them—which was not something she or her colleagues advertised, of course. There had to be a mystique with medicine, or else you lost your power to tell your patients what to do in a way that ensured that they might actually do it.
   For some reason, that didn't translate to the Presidency, Cathy thought. With Congress, well, most of the time they went along with him—as well they ought, since Jack's requests were usually as reasonable as they could be—but not always, and often for the dumbest reasons. "It may be good for the country, but it's not so good for my district, and..." And they all forgot the fact that when they had arrived in Washington, they'd sworn an oath to the country, not to their stupid little districts. When she'd said that to Arnie, he'd had a good laugh and lectured her on how the real world worked—as though a physician didn't know that! she fumed. And so Jack had to balance what was real with what wasn't but ought to be—as opposed to what wasn't and never would be. Like foreign affairs. It made a lot more sense for a married man to have an affair with some floozy than it did to try to reason with some foreign countries. At least you could tell the floozy that it was all over after three or four times, but these damned foreign chiefs of state would stay around forever with their stupidity.
   That was one nice thing about medicine, Professor Ryan thought. Doctors all over the world treated patients pretty much the same way because the human body was the same everywhere, and a treatment regimen that worked at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore worked just as well in Berlin or Moscow or Tokyo, even if the people looked and talked different—and if that was true, why couldn't people all over the world think the same way? Their damned brains were the same, weren't they? Now it was her turn to grumble, as her husband did often enough.
   "Jack?" she said, as she put her notebook down.
   "Yeah, Cathy?"
   "What are you thinking about now?"
   Mainly how I wish Ellen Sumter was here with a cigarette, he couldn't say. If Cathy knew he was sneaking smokes in the Oval Office, she didn't let on, which was probably the case, since she didn't go around looking for things to fight over, and he never ever smoked in front of her or the kids anymore. Cathy allowed him to indulge his weaknesses, as long as he did so in the utmost moderation. But her question was about the cause for his yearning for some nicotine.
   "China, babe. They really stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes this time, but they don't seem to know how bad it looked."
   "Killing those two people—how could it not look bad?" SURGEON asked.
   "Not everybody values human life in the same way that we do, Cath."
   "The Chinese doctors I've met are—well, they're doctors, and we talk to each other like doctors."
   "I suppose." Ryan saw a commercial start on the TV show he was pretending to watch, and stood to walk off to the upstairs kitchen for another whiskey. "Refill, babe?"
   "Yes, thank you." With her Christmas-tree smile.
   Jack lifted his wife's wineglass. So, she had no procedures scheduled for the next day. She'd come to love the Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay they'd first sampled at Camp David. For him tonight, it was Wild Turkey bourbon over ice. He loved the pungent smell of the corn and rye grains, and tonight he'd dismissed the upstairs staff and could enjoy the relative luxury of fixing his own—he could even have made a peanut butter sandwich, had he been of such a mind. He walked the drinks back, touching his wife's neck on the way, and getting the cute little shiver she always made when he did so.
   "So, what's going to happen in China?"
   "We'll find out the same way as everybody else, watching CNN. They're a lot faster than our intelligence people on some things. And our spooks can't predict the future any better than the TRADERs on Wall Street." You'd be able to identify such a man at Merrill Lynch easily if he existed, Jack didn't bother saying aloud. He'd be the guy with all the millionaires lined up outside his office.
   "So, what do you think?"
   "I'm worried, Cath," Ryan admitted, sitting back down.
   "About what?"
   "About what we'll have to do if they screw things up again. But we can't warn them. That only makes it certain that bad things are going to happen, because then they'll do something really dumb just to show us how powerful they are. That's how nation-states are. You can't talk to them like real people. The people who make the decisions over there think with their ..."
   ". . . dicks?" Cathy offered with a half giggle.
   "Yep," Jack confirmed with a nod. "A lot of them follow their dicks everywhere they go, too. We know about some foreign leaders who have habits that would get them tossed out of any decent whorehouse in the world. They just love to show everybody how tough and manly they are, and to do that, they act like animals in a goddamned barnyard."
   "Secretaries?"
   "A lot of that." Ryan nodded. "Hell, Chairman Mao liked doing twelve-year-old virgins, like changing shirts. I guess old as he was, it was the best he could do—"
   "No Viagra back then, Jack," Cathy pointed out.
   "Well, you suppose that drug will help civilize the world?" he asked, turning to grin at his physician wife. It didn't seem a likely prospect.
   "Well, maybe it'll protect a lot of twelve-year-olds."
   Jack checked his watch. Another half hour and he'd be turning in. Until then, maybe he could actually watch the TV for a little while.
 
   Rutledge was just waking up. Under his door was an envelope, which he picked up and opened, to find an official communique from Foggy Bottom, his instructions for the day, which weren't terribly different from those of the previous day. Nothing in the way of concessions to offer, which were the grease of dealing with the PRC. You had to give them something if you wanted to get anything, and the Chinese never seemed to realize that such a procedure could and occasionally should work the other way as well. Rutledge headed to his private bathroom and wondered if it had been like this chatting with German diplomats in May 1939. Could anyone have prevented that war from breaking out? he wondered. Probably not, in retrospect. Some chiefs of state were just too damned stupid to grasp what their diplomats told them, or maybe the idea of war just appealed to one sort of mind. Well, even diplomacy had its limitations, didn't it?
   Breakfast was served half an hour later, by which time Rutledge was showered and shaved pink. His staff were all there in the dining room, looking over the papers for the most part, learning what was going on back home. They already knew, or thought they knew, what was going to happen here. A whole lot of nothing. Rutledge agreed with that assessment. He was wrong, too.

CHAPTER 30
And the Rights of Men
   
"Got the address?" Wise asked his driver. He was also the team's cameraman, and drew the driving duty because of his steady hands and genius for anticipating traffic clogs.
   "Got it, Barry," the man assured him. Better yet, it had been inputted into the satellite-navigation system, and the computer would tell them how to get there. Hertz was going to conquer the world someday, Wise reflected with a chuckle. Just so they didn't bring back the O.J. commercials.
   "Going to rain, looks like," Barry Wise thought.
   "Could be," his producer agreed.
   "What do you suppose happened to the gal who had the baby?" the cameraman asked from the driver's seat.
   "Probably home with her kid now. I bet they don't keep mothers in the hospital very long here," Wise speculated. "Trouble is, we don't know her address. No way to do a follow-up on her and the kid." And that was too bad, Wise could have added. They had the surname, Yang, on their original tape, but the given names of the husband and wife were both garbled.
   "Yeah, I bet there's a lot of Yangs in the phone book here."
   "Probably," Wise agreed. He didn't even know if there was such a thing as a Beijing phone book—or if the Yang family had a phone—and none of his crew could read the ideographic characters that constituted the Chinese written language. All of those factors combined to make a stone wall.
   "Two blocks," the cameraman reported from the front seat. "Just have to turn left. . . here . . ."
   The first thing they saw was a crowd of khaki uniforms, the local police, standing there like soldiers on guard duty, which was essentially what they were, of course. They parked the van and hopped out, and were immediately scrutinized as though they were alighting from an alien spacecraft. Pete Nichols had his camera out and up on his shoulder, and that didn't make the local cops any happier, because they'd all been briefed on this CNN crew at the Longfu hospital and what they'd done to damage the People's Republic. So the looks they gave the TV crew were poisonous—Wise and his crew could not have asked for anything better for their purposes.
   Wise just walked up to the cop with the most rank-stuff on his uniform.
   "Good day," Barry said pleasantly.
   The sergeant in command of the group just nodded. His face was entirely neutral, as though he were playing cards for modest stakes.
   "Could you help us?" Wise asked.
   "Help you do what?" the cop asked in his broken English, suddenly angry at himself for admitting he could speak the language. Better if he'd played dumb, he realized a few seconds too late.
   "We are looking for Mrs. Yu, the wife of the Reverend Yu, who used to live here."
   "No here," the police sergeant replied with a wave of the hands. "No here."
   "Then we will wait," Wise told him.
 
   "Minister," Cliff Rutledge said in greeting. Shen was late, which was a surprise to the American delegation. It could have meant that he was delivering a message to his guests, telling them that they were not terribly important in the great scheme of things; or he might have been delayed by new instructions from the Politburo; or maybe his car hadn't wanted to start this morning. Personally, Rutledge leaned toward option number two. The Politburo would want to have input into these talks. Shen Tang had probably been a moderating influence, explaining to his colleagues that the American position, however unjust, would be difficult to shake in this series of talks, and so the smart long-term move would be to accommodate the American position for now, and make up for the losses in the next go-around the following year—the American sense of fair play, he would have told them, had cost them more negotiations than any other single factor in history, after all.
   That's what Rutledge would have done in his place, and he knew Shen was no fool. In fact, he was a competent diplomatic technician, and pretty good at reading the situation quickly. He had to know—no, Rutledge corrected himself, he should know or ought to know—that the American position was being driven by public opinion at home, and that that public opinion was against the interests of the PRC, because the PRC had fucked up in public. So, if he'd been able to sell his position to the rest of the Politburo, he'd start off with a small concession, one which would show the course the day would take, allowing Rutledge to beat him back a few steps by the close of the afternoon session. Rutledge hoped for that, because it would get him what his country wanted with little further fuss, and would, by the way, make him look pretty good at Foggy Bottom. So he took a final sip of the welcoming tea and settled back in his chair, motioning for Shen to begin the morning's talks.
   "We find it difficult to understand America's position in this and other matters—"
   Uh-oh. . .
   "America has chosen to affront our sovereignty in many ways. First, the Taiwan issue..."
   Rutledge listened to the earphone which gave him the simultaneous translation. So, Shen hadn't been able to persuade the Politburo to take a reasonable tack. That meant another unproductive day at these talks, and maybe—possible but not likely as yet—failed talks entirely. If America was unable to get concessions from China, and was therefore forced to impose sanctions, it would be ruinous to both sides, and not calculated to make the world a safer or better place. The tirade lasted twenty-seven minutes by his watch.
   "Minister," Rutledge began when it was his turn, "I find it difficult as well to understand your intransigence—" He went on along his own well-grooved path, varying only slightly when he said, "We put you on notice that unless the PRC allows its markets to be opened to American trade goods, the government of the United States will enact the provisions of the Trade Reform Act—"
   Rutledge saw Shen's face coloring up some. Why? He had to know the rules of the new game. Rutledge had said this half a hundred times in the previous few days. Okay, fine, he'd never said "put on notice," which was diplo-speak for no shit, Charlie, we're not fuckin' kidding anymore, but the import of his earlier statements had been straightforward enough, and Shen was no fool . . . was he? Or had Cliff Rutledge misread this whole session?
 
   Hello," a female voice said. Wise's head turned sharply. "Hi. Have we met?"
   "You met my husband briefly. I am Yu Chun," the woman said, as Barry Wise came to his feet. Her English was pretty good, probably from watching a lot of TV, which was teaching English (the American version, anyway) to the entire world.
   "Oh." Wise blinked a few times. "Mrs. Yu, please accept our condolences for the loss of your husband. He was a very courageous man."
   Her head nodded at the good wishes, but they made her choke up a little, remembering what sort of man Fa An had been. "Thank you," she managed to say, struggling not to show the emotions that welled up within her, held back, however, as though by a sturdy dam.
   "Is there going to be a memorial service for your husband? If so, ma'am, we would ask your permission to make a record of it." Wise had never grown to like the oh-your-loved-one-is-dead, what's-it-feel-like? school of journalism. He'd seen far more death as a reporter than as a Marine, and it was all the same all over the world. The guy on the pale horse came to visit, always taking away something precious to somebody, most of the time more than one somebody, and the vacuum of feelings it left behind could only be filled by tears, and that language was universal. The good news was that people all over the world understood. The bad news was that getting it out did further harm to the living victims, and Wise had trouble stomaching his occasional obligation to do that, however relevant it was to the all-important story.
   "I do not know. We used to worship there in our house, but the police will not let me inside," she told him.
   "Can I help?" Wise offered, truly meaning it. "Sometimes the police will listen to people like us." He gestured to them, all of twenty meters away. Quietly, to Pete Nichols: "Saddle up."
   How it looked to the cops was hard for the Americans to imagine, but the widow Yu walked toward them with this American black man in attendance and the white one with the camera close behind.
   She started talking to the senior cop, with Wise's microphone between the two of them, speaking calmly and politely, asking permission to enter her home.
   The police sergeant shook his head in the universal No, you cannot gesture that needed no translation.
   "Wait a minute. Mrs. Yu, could you please translate for me?" She nodded. "Sergeant, you know who I am and you know what I do, correct?" This generated a curt and none too friendly nod. "What is the reason for not allowing this lady to enter her own home?"
   " 'I have my orders,' " Chun translated the reply.
   "I see," Wise responded. "Do you know that this will look bad for your country? People around the world will see this and feel it is improper." Yu Chun duly translated this for the sergeant.
   " 'I have my orders,' " he said again, through her, and it was plain that further discussion with a statue would have been equally productive.
   "Perhaps if you called your superior," Wise suggested, and to his surprise the Chinese cop leaped on it, lifting his portable radio and calling his station.
   " 'My lieutenant come,' " Yu Chun translated. The sergeant was clearly relieved, now able to dump the situation on someone else, who answered directly to the captain at the station.
   "Good, let's go back to the truck and wait for him," Wise suggested. Once there, Mrs. Yu lit up an unfiltered Chinese cigarette and tried to retain her composure. Nichols let the camera down, and everyone relaxed for a few minutes.
   "How long were you married, ma'am?" Wise asked, with the camera shut off.
   "Twenty-four years," she answered.
   "Children?"
   "One son. He is away at school in America, University of Oklahoma. He study engineering," Chun told the American crew.
   "Pete," Wise said quietly, "get the dish up and operating."
   "Right." The cameraman ducked his head to go inside the van. There he switched on the uplink systems. Atop the van, the mini-dish turned fifty degrees in the horizontal and sixty degrees in the vertical, and saw the communications satellite they usually used in Beijing. When he had the signal on his indicator, he selected Channel Six again and used it to inform Atlanta that he was initiating a live feed from Beijing. With that, a home-office producer started monitoring the feed, and saw nothing. He might have succumbed to immediate boredom, but he knew Barry Wise was usually good for something, and didn't go live unless there was a good reason for it. So, he leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair and sipped at his coffee, then notified the duty director in Master Control that there was a live signal inbound from Beijing, type and scope of story unknown. But the director, too, knew that Wise and his crew had sent in a possible Emmy-class story just two days earlier, and to the best of anyone's knowledge, none of the majors was doing anything at all in Beijing at the moment—CNN tracked the communications-satellite traffic as assiduously as the National Security Agency, to see what the competition was doing.
   More people started showing up at the Wen house/church. Some were startled to see the CNN truck, but when they saw Yu Chun there, they relaxed somewhat, trusting her to know what was happening. Showing up in ones and twos for the most part, there were soon thirty or so people, most of them holding what had to be Bibles, Wise thought, getting Nichols up and operating again, but this time with a live signal going up and down to Atlanta.
   "This is Barry Wise in Beijing. We are outside the home of the Reverend Yu Fa An, the Baptist minister who died just two days ago along with Renato Cardinal DiMilo, the Papal Nuncio, or Vatican Ambassador to the People's Republic. With me now is his widow, Yu Chun. She and the reverend were married for twenty-four years, and they have a son now studying at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. As you can imagine, this is not a pleasant time for Mrs. Yu, but it is all the more unpleasant since the local police will not allow her to enter her own home. The house also served as the church for their small congregation, and as you can see, the congregation has come together to pray for their departed spiritual leader, the Reverend Yu Fa An.
   "But it does not appear that the local government is going to allow them to do so in their accustomed place of worship. I've spoken personally with the senior police official here. He has orders, he says, not to admit anyone into the house, not even Mrs. Yu, and it appears that he intends to follow those orders." Wise walked to where the widow was.
   "Mrs. Yu, will you be taking your husband's body back to Taiwan for burial?" It wasn't often that Wise allowed his face to show emotion, but the answer to this question grabbed him in a tender place.
   "There will be no body. My husband—they take his body and burn it, and scatter the ashes in river," Chun told the reporter, and saying it cracked both her composure and her voice.
   "What?" Wise blurted. He hadn't expected that any more than she had, and it showed on his face. "They cremated his body without your permission?"
   "Yes," Chun gasped.
   "And they're not even giving you the ashes to take home with you?"
   "No, they scatter ashes in river, they tell me."
   "Well" was all Wise could manage. He wanted to say something stronger, but as a reporter he was supposed to maintain some degree of objectivity, and so he couldn't say what he might have preferred to say. Those barbarian cocksuckers. Even the differences in culture didn't explain this one away.
   It was then that the police lieutenant arrived on his bicycle. He walked at once to the sergeant, spoke to him briefly, then walked to where Yu Chun was.
   "What is this?" he asked in Mandarin. He recoiled when the TV camera and microphone entered the conversation. What is THIS? his face demanded of the Americans.
   "I wish to enter my house, but he won't let me," Yu Chun answered, pointing at the sergeant. "Why can't I go in my house?"
   "Excuse me," Wise put in. "I am Barry Wise. I work for CNN. Do you speak English, sir?" he asked the cop.
   "Yes, I do."
   "And you are?"
   "I am Lieutenant Rong."
   He could hardly have picked a better name for the moment, Wise thought, not knowing that the literal meaning of this particular surname actually was weapon.
   "Lieutenant Rong, I am Barry Wise of CNN. Do you know the reason for your orders?"
   "This house is a place of political activity which is ordered closed by the city government."
   "Political activity? But it's a private residence—a house, is it not?"
   "It is a place of political activity," Rong persisted. "Unauthorized political activity," he added.
   "I see. Thank you, Lieutenant." Wise backed off and started talking directly to the camera while Mrs. Yu went to her fellow church members. The camera traced her to one particular member, a heavyset person whose face proclaimed resolve of some sort. This one turned to the other parishioners and said something loud. Immediately, they all opened their Bibles. The overweight one flipped his open as well and started reading a passage. He did so loudly, and the other members of the congregation looked intently into their testaments, allowing the first man to take the lead.
   Wise counted thirty-four people, about evenly divided between men and women. All had their heads down into their own Bibles, or those next to them. That's when he turned to see Lieutenant Rong's face. It twisted into a sort of curiosity at first, then came comprehension and outrage. Clearly, the "political" activity for which the home had been declared off-limits was religious worship, and that the local government called it "political" activity was a further affront to Barry Wise's sense of right and wrong. He reflected briefly that the news media had largely forgotten what communism really had been, but now it lay right here in front of him. The face of oppression had never been a pretty one. It would soon get uglier.
   Wen Zhong, the restaurateur, was leading the ad-hoc service, going through the Bible but doing so in Mandarin, a language which the CNN crew barely comprehended. The thirty or so others flipped the pages in their Bibles when he did, following his scriptural readings very carefully, in the way of Baptist, and Wise started wondering if this corpulent chap might be taking over the congregation right before his eyes. If so, the guy seemed sincere enough, and that above all was the quality a clergyman needed. Yu Chun headed over to him, and he reached out to put his arm around her shoulder in a gesture that didn't seem Chinese at all. That was when she lost it and started weeping, which hardly seemed shameful. Here was a woman married over twenty years who'd lost her husband in a particularly cruel way, then doubly insulted by a government which had gone so far as to destroy his body, thus denying her even the chance to look upon her beloved's face one last time, or the chance to have a small plot of ground to visit.
   These people are barbarians, Wise thought, knowing he couldn't say such a thing in front of the camera, and angry for that reason, but his profession had rules and he didn't break them. But he did have a camera, and the camera showed things that mere words could not convey.
   Unknown to the news crew, Atlanta had put their feed on live, with voice-over commentary from CNN headquarters because they hadn't managed to get Barry Wise's attention on the side-band audio circuit. The signal went up to the satellite, then down to Atlanta, and back up to a total of four orbiting birds, then it came down all over the world, and one of the places it came to was Beijing.
   The members of the Chinese Politburo all had televisions in their offices, and all of them had access to the American CNN, which was for them a prime source of political intelligence. It came down also to the various hotels in the city, crowded as they were with businessmen and other visitors, and even some Chinese citizens had access to it, especially business people who conducted their affairs both within and without the People's Republic and needed to know what was happening in the outside world.
   In his office, Fang Gan looked up from his desk to the TV that was always kept on while he was there. He lifted the controller to get the sound, and heard English, with some Chinese language in the background that he could not quite understand. His English wasn't very good, and he called Ming into his office to translate.
   "Minister, this is coverage of something right here in Beijing," she told him first of all.
   "I can see that, girl!" he snapped back at her. "What is being said?"
   "Ah, yes. It is associates of the man Yu who was shot by the police two days ago ... also his widow . . . this is evidently a funeral ceremony of some sort—oh, they say that Yu's body was cremated and scattered, and so his widow has nothing to bury, and that explains her added grief, they say."
   "What lunatic did that?" Fang wondered aloud. He was not by nature a very compassionate man, but a wise man did not go out of his way to be cruel, either. "Go on, girl!"
   "They are reading from the Christian Bible, I can't make out the words, the English speaker is blanking them out . . . the narrator is mainly repeating himself, saying ... ah, yes, saying they are trying to establish contact with their reporter Wise here in Beijing but they are having technical difficulties . . . just repeating what he has already said, a memorial ceremony for the man Yu, friends . . . no, members of his worship group, and that is all, really. They are now repeating what happened before at the Longfu hospital, commenting also on the Italian churchman whose body will soon arrive back in Italy."
   Fang grumbled and lifted his phone, calling for the Interior Minister.
   "Turn on your TV!" he told his Politburo colleague at once. "You need to get control of this situation, but do so intelligently! This could be ruinous for us, the worst since those foolish students at Tiananmen Square."
   Ming saw her boss grimace before setting the phone down and mutter, "Fool!" after he did so, then shake his head with a mixture of anger and sorrow.
   "That will be all, Ming," he told her, after another minute.
   His secretary went back to her desk and computer, wondering what was happening with the aftermath of the man Yu's death. Certainly it had seemed sad at the time, a singularly pointless pair of deaths which had upset and offended her minister for their stupidity. He'd even advocated punishing the trigger-happy policemen, but that suggestion had come to nothing, for fear of losing face for their country. With that thought, she shrugged and went back to her daily work.
   The word from the Interior Minister went out fast, but Barry Wise couldn't see that. It took another minute for him to hear the voices from Atlanta on his IFB earphone. Immediately thereafter, he went live on audio and started again to do his own on-the-scene commentary for a global audience. He kept turning his head while Pete Nichols centered the video on this rump religious meeting in a narrow, dirty street. Wise saw the police lieutenant talk into his portable radio—it looked like a Motorola, just like American cops used. He talked, listened, talked again, then got something confirmed. With that, he holstered the radio and came walking directly to the CNN reporter. There was determination on his face, a look Wise didn't welcome, all the more so that on the way over, this Lieutenant Rong spoke discreetly with his men, who turned in the same direction, staying still but with a similar look of determination on their faces as they flexed their muscles in preparation for something.
   "You must turn camera off," Rong told Wise.
   "Excuse me?"
   "Camera, turn off," the police lieutenant repeated.
   "Why?" Wise asked, his mind going immediately into race mode.
   "Orders," Rong explained tersely.
   "What orders?"
   "Orders from police headquarter," Rong said further.
   "Oh, okay," Wise replied. Then he held out his hand.
   "Turn off camera now!" Lieutenant Rong insisted, wondering what the extended hand was all about.
   "Where is the order?"
   "What?"
   "I cannot turn my camera off without a written order. It is a rule for my company. Do you have a written order?"
   "No," Rong said, suddenly nonplussed.
   "And the order must be signed by a captain. A major would be better, but it must be a captain at least to sign the order," Wise went on. "It is a rule of my company."
   "Ah," Rong managed to say next. It was as if he'd walked headfirst into an invisible wall. He shook his head, as though to shake off the force of a physical impact, and walked five meters away, pulling out his radio again to report to someone elsewhere. The exchange took about a minute, then Rong came back. "Order come soon," the lieutenant informed the American.
   "Thank you," Wise responded, with a polite smile and half bow.
   Lieutenant Rong went off again, looking somewhat confused until he grouped his men together. He had instructions to carry out now, and they were instructions he and they understood, which was usually a good feeling for citizens of the PRC, especially those in uniform.
   "Trouble, Barry," Nichols said, turning the camera toward the cops. He'd caught the discussion of the written order, and managed to keep his face straight only by biting his tongue hard. Barry had a way of confounding people. He'd even done it to presidents more than once.
   "I see it. Keep rolling," Wise replied off-mike. Then to Atlanta: "Something's going to happen here, and I don't like the looks of it. The police appear to have gotten an order from someone. As you just heard, they asked us to turn our camera off and we managed to refuse the request until we get a written order from a superior police official, in keeping with CNN policy," Wise went on, knowing that someone in Beijing was watching this. The thing about communists, he knew, was that they were maniacally organized, and found a request in writing to be completely reasonable, however crazy it might appear to an outsider. The only question now, he knew, was whether they'd follow their verbal radioed order before the draft for the CNN crew came. Which priority came first...?
   The immediate priority, of course, was maintaining order in their own city. The cops took out their batons and started heading toward the Baptists.
   "Where do I stand, Barry?" Pete Nichols asked.
   "Not too close. Make sure you can sweep the whole playing field," Wise ordered.
   "Gotcha," the cameraman responded.
   They tracked Lieutenant Rong right up to Wen Zhong, where a verbal order was given, and just as quickly rejected. The order was given again. The shotgun mike on the camera just barely caught the reply for the third iteration:
   "Diao ren, chou ni ma di be!" the overweight Chinese shouted into the face of the police official. Whatever the imprecation meant, it made a few eyes go wide among the worshippers. It also earned Wen a smashed cheekbone from Rong's personal baton. He fell to his knees, blood already streaming from the ripped skin, but then Wen struggled back to his feet, turned his back on the cop, and turned to yet another page in his Bible. Nichols changed position so that he could zoom in on the testament, and the blood dripping onto the pages.
   Having the man turn his back to him only enraged Lieutenant Rong more. His next swing came down on the back of Wen's head. That one buckled his knees, but amazingly failed to drop him. This time, Rong grabbed his shoulder with his left hand and spun him about, and the third blow from the baton rammed directly into the man's solar plexus. That sort of blow will fell a professional boxer, and it did so to this restaurateur. A blink later, he was on his knees, one hand holding his Bible, the other grasping at his upper abdomen.
   By this time, the other cops were moving in on the remainder of the crowd, swinging their own nightsticks at people who cringed but didn't run. Yu Chun was the first of them. Not a tall woman even by Chinese standards, she took the full force of a blow squarely in the face, which broke her nose and shot blood out as though from a garden sprinkler.
   It didn't take long. There were thirty-four parishioners and twelve cops, and the Christians didn't resist effectively, not so much because of their religious beliefs as because of their societal conditioning not to resist the forces of order in their culture. And so, uniformly they stood, and uniformly they took the blows with no more defense than a cringe, and uniformly they collapsed to the street with bleeding faces. The policemen withdrew almost immediately, as though to display their work to the CNN camera, which duly took the shots and transmitted them around the world in a matter of seconds.
   "You getting this?" Wise asked Atlanta.
   "Blood and all, Barry," the director replied, from his swivel chair at CNN headquarters. "Tell Nichols I owe him a beer."
   "Roger that."
   "It seems that the local police had orders to break up this religious meeting, which they regard as something of a political nature, and politically threatening to their government. As you can see, none of these people are armed, and none resisted the attack by the police in any way. Now—" He paused on seeing another bicycle speed its way up the street to where they were. A uniformed cop jumped off and handed something to Lieutenant Rong. This the lieutenant carried to Barry Wise.
   "Here order. Turn camera off!" he demanded.
   "Please, allow me to look at the order," Wise replied, so angry at what he'd just seen that he was willing to risk a cracked head of his own, just so Pete got it up to the satellite. He scanned the page and handed it back. "I cannot read this. Please excuse me," he went on, deliberately baiting the man and wondering exactly where the limits were, "but I cannot read your language."
   It looked as though Rong's eyes would pop out of his head. "It say here, turn camera off!"
   "But I can't read it, and neither can my company," Wise responded, keeping his voice entirely reasonable.
   Rong saw the camera and microphone were both pointed his way, and now he realized that he was being had, and had badly. But he also knew he had to play the game. "It say here, must turn camera off now." Rong's fingers traced the page from one symbol to another.
   "Okay, I guess you're telling me the truth." Wise stood erect and turned to face the camera. "Well, as you have just seen, we've been ordered by the local police to cease transmission from this place. To summarize, the widow of the Reverend Yu Fa An and members of his congregation came here today to pray for their departed pastor. It turns out that Reverend Yu's body was cremated and his ashes scattered. His widow, Yu Chun, was denied access to her home by the police because of alleged improper 'political' activity, by which I guess they mean religious worship, and as you just saw, the local police attacked and clubbed members of the congregation. And now we're being chased away, too. Atlanta, this is Barry Wise, reporting live from Beijing." Five seconds later, Nichols dropped the camera off his shoulder and turned to stow it in the truck. Wise looked back down at the police lieutenant and smiled politely, thinking, You can shove this up your skinny little ass, Gomer! But he'd done his job, getting the story out. The rest was in the hands of the world.

CHAPTER 31

The Protection of Rights
   
CNN transmits its news coverage twenty-four hours a day to satellite dishes all over the world, and so the report from the streets of Beijing was noted not only by the American intelligence services, but by accountants, housewives, and insomniacs. Of the last group, a goodly number had access to personal computers, and being insomniacs, many of them also knew the e-mail address for the White House. E-mail had almost overnight replaced telegrams as the method of choice for telling the U.S. government what you thought, and was a medium which they appeared to heed, or at least to read, count, and catalog. The latter was done in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building, the OEOB, the Victorian monstrosity immediately to the west of The House. The people who ran this particular office reported directly to Arnold van Damm, and it was actually rather a thorough and well-organized measure of American public opinion, since they also had electronic access to every polling organization in the country—and, indeed, the entire world. It saved money for the White House not to conduct its own polling, which was useful, since this White House didn't really have a political office per se, somewhat to the despair of the Chief of Staff. Nevertheless, he ran that part of White House operations himself, and largely uncompensated. Arnie didn't mind. For him, politics was as natural as breathing, and he'd decided to serve this President faithfully long before, especially since serving him so often meant protecting him from himself and his frequently stunning political ineptitude.
   The data which started arriving just after midnight, however, didn't require a political genius to understand it. Quite a few of the e-mails had actual names attached—not mere electronic "handles"—and a lot of them were DEMANDING!!! action. Arnie would remark later in the day that he hadn't known that so many Baptists were computer-literate, something he reproached himself for even thinking.
   In the same building, the White House Office of Signals duly made a high-quality tape of the report and had it walked to the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the world, the CNN report from Beijing arrived at breakfast time, causing more than a few people to set their coffee (or tea) cups down immediately before a groan of anger. That occasioned brief dispatches from American embassies around the world, informing the Department of State that various foreign governments had reacted adversely to the story on CNN, and that various PRC embassies had found demonstrators outside their gates, some of them quite vociferous. This information rapidly found its way to the Diplomatic Protection Service, the State Department agency tasked with the job of securing foreign diplomats and their embassies. Calls went out from there to the D.C. police to increase the uniformed presence near the PRC's various missions to America, and to arrange a rapid backup should any similar problems develop right here in Washington.
   By the time Ben Goodley awoke and drove over to Langley for his morning briefing, the American intelligence community had pretty well diagnosed the problem. As Ryan had so colorfully said it himself, the PRC had stepped very hard on the old crank with the golf shoes, and even they would soon feel the pain. This would prove to be a gross understatement.
 
   The good news for Goodley, if you could call it that, was that Ryan invariably had his breakfast-room TV tuned to CNN, and was fully aware of the new crisis before putting on his starched white button-down shirt and striped tie. Even kissing his wife and kids on their way out of The House that morning couldn't do much to assuage his anger at the incomprehensible stupidity of those people on the other side of the world. "God damn it, Ben!" POTUS snarled when Goodley came into the Oval Office.
   "Hey, Boss, I didn't do it!" the National Security Adviser protested, surprised at the President's vehemence.
   "What do we know?"
   "Essentially, you've seen it all. The widow of the poor bastard who got his brains blown out the other day came to Beijing hoping to bring his body back to Taiwan for burial. She found out that the body had been cremated, and the ashes disposed of. The local cops would not let her back into her house, and when some members of the parish came by to hold a prayer service, the local cops decided to break it up." He didn't have to say that the attack on the widow had been caught with particular excellence by the CNN cameraman, to the point that Cathy Ryan had commented upstairs that the woman definitely had a broken nose, and possibly worse, and would probably need a good maxillary SURGEON to put her face back together. Then she'd asked her husband why the cops would hate anyone so much.
   "She believes in God, I suppose," Ryan had replied in the breakfast room.
   "Jack, this is like something out of Nazi Germany, something from that History Channel stuff you like to watch." And doctor or not, she'd cringed at the tape of the attacks on Chinese citizens armed only with Bibles.
   "I've seen it, too," van Damm said, arriving in the Oval Office. "And we're getting a flood of responses from the public."
   "Fuckin' barbarians," Ryan swore, as Robby Jackson came in to complete the morning's intelligence-briefing audience.
   "You can hang a big roger on that one, Jack. Damn, I know Pap's going to see this, too, and today's the day for him to do the memorial service at Gerry Patterson's church. It's going to be epic, Jack. Epic," the Vice President promised.
   "And CNN's going to be there?"
   "Bet your bippy, My Lord President," Robby confirmed.
   Ryan turned to his Chief of Staff. "Okay, Arnie, I'm listening."
   "No, I'm the one listening, Jack," van Damm replied. "What are you thinking?"
   "I'm thinking I have to talk to the public about this. Press conference, maybe. As far as action goes, I'll start by saying that we have a huge violation of human rights, all the more so that they had the fucking arrogance to do it in front of world opinion. I'll say that America has trouble doing business with people who act in this way, that commercial ties do not justify or cancel out gross violations of the principles on which our country is founded, that we have to reconsider all of our relations with the PRC."
   "Not bad," the Chief of Staff observed, with a teacher's smile to a bright pupil. "Check with Scott for other options and ideas."
   "Yeah." Jack nodded. "Okay, broader question, how will the country react to this?"
   "The initial response will be outrage," Arnie replied. "It looks bad on TV, and that's how most people will respond, from the gut. If the Chinese have the good sense to make some kind of amends, then it'll settle down. If not"—Arnie frowned importantly—"I have a bad feeling. The church groups are going to raise hell. They've offended the Italian and German governments—so our NATO allies are also pissed off at this—and smashing that poor woman's face isn't going to win them any friends in the women's rights movement. This whole business is a colossal loser for them, but I'm not sure they understand the implications of their actions."
   "Then they're going to learn, the easy way or the hard way," Goodley suggested to the group.
 
   Dr. Alan Gregory always seemed to stay at the same Marriott overlooking the Potomac, under the air approach to Reagan National Airport. He'd again taken the red-eye in from Los Angeles, a flight which hadn't exactly improved with practice over the years. Arriving, he took a cab to the hotel for a shower and a change of clothes, which would enable him to feel and look vaguely human for his 10:15 with the SecDef. For this at least, he would not need a taxi. Dr. Bretano was sending a car for him. The car duly arrived with an Army staff sergeant driving, and Gregory hopped in the back, to find a newspaper. It took only ten minutes to pull up to the River Entrance, where an Army major waited to escort him through the metal detector and onto the E-ring.
   "You know the Secretary?" the officer asked on the way in.
   "Oh, yeah, from a short distance, anyway."
   He had to wait half a minute in an anteroom, but only half a minute.
   "Al, grab a seat. Coffee?"
   "Yes, thank you, Dr. Bretano."
   "Tony," the SecDef corrected. He wasn't a forma! man most of the time, and he knew the sort of work Gregory was capable of. A Navy steward got coffee for both men, along with croissants and jam, then withdrew. "How was the flight?"
   "The red-eye never changes, sir—Tony. If you get off alive, they haven't done it right."
   "Yeah, well, one nice thing about this job, I have a G waiting for me all the time. I don't have to walk or drive very much, and you saw the security detail outside."
   "The guys with the knuckles dragging on the floor?" Gregory asked.
   "Be nice. One of them went to Princeton before he became a SEAL."
   That must be the one who reads the comic books to the others, Al didn't observe out loud. "So, Tony, what did you want me here for?"
   "You used to work downstairs in SDIO, as I recall."
   "Seven years down there, working in the dark with the rest of the mushrooms, and it never really worked out. I was in the free-electron-laser project. It went pretty well, except the damned lasers never scaled up the way we expected, even after we stole what the Russians were doing. They had the best laser guy in the world, by the way. Poor bastard got killed in a rock-climbing accident back in 1990, or that's what we heard in SDIO. He was bashing his head against the same wall our guys were. The 'wiggle chamber,' we called it, where you lase the hot gasses to extract the energy for your beam. We could never get a stable magnetic containment. They tried everything. I helped for nineteen months. There were some really smart guys working that problem, but we all struck out. I think the guys at Princeton will solve the fusion-containment problem before this one. We looked at that, too, but the problems were too different to copy the theoretical solutions. We ended up giving them a lot of our ideas, and they've been putting it to good use. Anyway, the Army made me a lieutenant colonel, and three weeks later, they offered me an early out because they didn't have any more use for me, and so I took the job at TRW that Dr. Flynn offered, and I've been working for you ever since." And so Gregory was getting eighty percent of his twenty-year Army pension, plus half a million a year from TRW as a section leader, with stock options, and one hell of a retirement package.
   "Well, Gerry Flynn sings your praises about once a week."
   "He's a good man to work for," Gregory replied, with a smile and a nod.
   "He says you can do software better than anyone in Sunnyvale."
   "For some things. I didn't do the code for 'Doom,' unfortunately, but I'm still your man for adaptive optics."
   "How about SAMs?"
   Gregory nodded. "I did some of that when I was new in the Army. Then later they had me in to play with Patriot Block-4, you know, intercepting Scuds. I helped out on the warhead software." It had been three days too late to be used in the Persian Gulf War, he didn't add, but his software was now standard on all Patriot missiles in the field.
   "Excellent. I want you to look over something for me. It'll be a direct contract for the Office of the Secretary of Defense—me—and Gerry Flynn won't gripe about it."
   "What's that, Tony?"
   "Find out if the Navy's Aegis system can intercept a ballistic inbound."
   "It can. It'll stop a Scud, but that's only Mach three or so. You mean a real ballistic inbound?"
   The SecDef nodded. "Yeah, an ICBM."
   "There's been talk about that for years ..." Gregory sipped his coffee. "The radar system is up to it. May be a slight software issue there, but it would not be a hard one, because you'll be getting raid-warning from other assets, and the SPY radar can see a good five hundred miles, and you can do all sorts of things with it electronically, like blast out seven million watts of RF down half a degree of bearing. That'll fry electronic components out to, oh, seven or eight thousand meters. You'll end up having two-headed kids, and have to buy a new watch.
   "Okay," he went on, a slightly spacey look in his eyes. "The way Aegis works, the big SPY radar gives you a rough location for your target-interception, so you can loft your SAMs into a box. That's why Aegis missiles get such great range. They go out on autopilot and only do actual maneuvering for the last few seconds. For that, you have the
   SPG radars on the ships, and the seeker-head on the missile tracks in on the reflected RF energy off the target. It’s a killer system against airplanes, because you don't know you're being illuminated until the last couple of seconds, and it's hard to eyeball the missile and evade in so short a time.
   "Okay, but for an ICBM, the terminal velocity is way the hell up there, like twenty-five thousand feet per second, like Mach eleven. That means your targeting window is very small... in all dimensions, but especially depth. Also you're talking a fairly hard, robust target. The RV off an ICBM is fairly sturdy, not tissue paper like the boosters are. I'll have to see if the warhead off a SAM will really hurt one of those." The eyes cleared and he looked directly into Bretano's eyes. "Okay, when do I start?"
   "Commander Matthews," THUNDER said into his intercom phone. "Dr. Gregory is ready to talk to the Aegis people. Keep me posted, Al" was Bretano's final order.
   "You bet."
 
   The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson's study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them—Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry's part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn't get him into any trouble with this congregation. There'd be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they'd be tortured souls because of it. Those times had passed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he'd been the one walking in the streets—he'd been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a municipal bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn't liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable—after it had come to pass—and they'd learned to deal with it, and they'd also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he'd gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of God was supposed to look.
   The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing . . . they couldn't help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant passion that he was accustomed to ... but he'd love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back corners of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who'd painted the woodwork.
   "Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.
   "Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.
   "To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the chapel at the local hospital. It'd been a bad day for both of us. We'd both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask God the same question. It's the question all of us have asked– why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful God permit it?
   "Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of God, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.
   "But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when God made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord God told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was God's desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following God's Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.
   "Gerry and I had a good talk that day, and that was the beginning of our friendship, as all ministers of the Gospel ought to be friends, because we preach the same Gospel from the same God.
   "The next week we were talking again, and Gerry told me about his friend Skip. A man from the other side of the world, a man from a place where the religious traditions do not know Jesus. Well, Skip learned about all that at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, the same as many others, and he learned it so well that he thought long and hard and decided to join the ministry and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ..."
 
   “Skip's skin was a different color than mine," Gerry Patterson was saying in another pulpit less than two miles away. "But in God's eyes, we are all the same, because the Lord Jesus looks through our skin into our hearts and our souls, and He always knows what's in there." "That's right," a man's voice agreed in the congregation. "And so, Skip became a minister of the Gospel. Instead of returning to his native land, where freedom of religion is something their government protects, Skip decided to keep flying west, into communist
   “China. Why there?" Patterson asked. "Why there indeed! The other China does not have freedom of religion. The other China refuses to admit that there is such a thing as God. The other China is like the Philistines of the Old Testament, the people who persecuted the Jews of Moses and Joshua, the enemies of God Himself. Why did Skip do this? Because he knew that no other place needed to hear the Word of God more than those people, and that Jesus wants us to preach to the heathen, to bring His Holy Word to those whose souls cry out for it, and this he did. No United States Marine storming the shores of Iwo Jima showed more courage than Skip did, carrying his Bible into Red China and starting to preach the Gospel in a land where religion is a crime."
 
   And we must not forget that there was another man there, a Catholic cardinal, an old unmarried man from a rich and important family who long ago decided on his own to join the clergy of his church," Jackson reminded those before him. "His name was Renato, a name as foreign to us as Fa An, but despite that, he was a man of God who also took the Word of Jesus to the land of the heathen.
   "When the government of that country found out about Reverend Yu, they took Skip's job away. They hoped to starve him out, but the people who made that decision didn't know Skip. They didn't know Jesus, and they didn't know about the faithful, did they?"
   "Hell, no!" replied a white male voice from the pews, and that's when Hosiah knew he had them.
   "No, sir! That's when your Pastor Gerry found out and that's when you good people started sending help to Skip Yu, to support the man his godless government was trying to destroy, because they didn't know that people of faith share a commitment to justice!"
 
   Patterson's arm shot out. "And Jesus pointed and said, see that woman there, she gives from her need, not from her riches. It takes more for a poor man or a poor woman to give than it does for a rich man to do it. That was when you good people began helping my congregation to support my friend Skip. And Jesus also said that which you do for the least of My brethren you do also unto Me. And so your church and my church helped this man, this lonely minister of the Gospel in the land of the pagans, those people who deny the Name and Word of God, those people who worship the corpse of a monster named Mao, who put his embalmed body on display as though it were the body of a saint! He was no saint. He was no man of God. He was hardly a man at all. He was a mass murderer worse than anything our country has ever seen. He was like the Hitler that our fathers fought to destroy sixty years ago. But to the people who run that country, that killer, that murderer, that destroyer of life and freedom is the new god. That 'god' is false," Patterson told them, with passion entering his voice. "That 'god' is the voice of Satan. That 'god' is the mouthpiece for the fires of Hell. That 'god' was the incarnation of evil—and that 'god' is dead, and now he's a stuffed animal, like the dead bird you might see over the bar in a saloon, or the deer head a lot of you have in your den—and they still worship him. They still honor his word, and they still revere his beliefs—the beliefs that killed millions of people just because their false god didn't like them." Patterson stood erect and brushed his hair back.
   "There are those who say that what evil we see in the world is just the absence of good. But we know better than that. There is a devil in creation, and that devil has agents among us, and some of those agents run countries! Some of those agents start wars. Some of those agents take innocent people from their homes and put them in camps and murder them there like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Those are the agents of Satan! Those are the devotees of the Prince of Darkness. They are those among us who take the lives of the innocent, even the lives of innocent little babies ..."
 
   And so, those three men of God went to the hospital. One of them, our friend Skip, went to assist his parishioner in her time of need. The other two, the Catholics, went because they, too, were men of God, and they, too, stood for the same things that we do, because the Word of Jesus is THE SAME FOR ALL OF US!" Hosiah Jackson's voice boomed out.
   "Yes, sir," the same white voice agreed, and there were nods in the congregation.
   "And so those three men of God went to the hospital to save the life of a little baby, a little baby that the government of that heathen land wanted to kill—and why? They wanted to kill it because its mother and father believe in God—and, oh, no, they couldn't allow people like that to bring a child into the world! Oh, no, they couldn't allow people of faith to bring a child into their country, because that was like inviting in a spy. That was a danger to their godless government. And why is it a danger?
   "It's a danger because they know that they are godless pagans! It's a danger because they know that God's Holy Word is the most powerful force in the world! And their only response to that kind of danger is to kill, to take the life that God Himself gives to each of us, because in denying God, they can also deny life, and you know, those pagans, those unbelievers, those killers love to have that kind of power. They love pretending that they are gods. They love their power, and they love using it in the service of Satan! They know they are destined to spend eternity in Hell, and they want to share their Hell with us here on earth, and they want to deny to us the only thing that can liberate us from the destiny they have chosen for themselves. That is why they condemned that innocent little baby to death.
   "And when those three men went to the hospital to preserve the life of that innocent baby, they stood in God's own place. They took God's place, but they did so in humility and in the strength of their faith. They stood in God's place to fulfill God's will, not to get power for themselves, not to be false heroes. They went there to serve, not to rule. To serve, as the Lord Jesus Himself served. As his apostles served. They went there to protect an innocent life. They went there to do the Lord God's work!"
 
   You people probably don't know this, but when I was first ordained I spent three years in the United States Navy, and I served as a chaplain to the Marines. I was assigned to the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. When I was there, I got to know people we call heroes, and for sure a lot of Marines fall into that category. I was there to minister to the dead and dying after a terrible helicopter crash, and it was one of the great honors of my life to be there and to comfort dying young Marines—because I knew they were going to see God. I remember one, a sergeant, the man had just gotten married a month before, and he died while he was saying a prayer to God for his wife. He was a veteran of Vietnam, that sergeant, and he had lots of decorations. He was what we call a tough guy," Patterson told the black congregation, "but the toughest thing about that Marine was that when he knew he was going to die, he prayed not for himself, but for his young wife, that God would comfort her. That Marine died as a Christian man, and he went from this world to stand proud before his God as a man who did his duty in every way he could.
   "Well, so did Skip, and so did Renato. They sacrificed their lives to save a baby. God sent them. God gave those men their orders. And they heard the orders, and they followed them without flinching, without hesitating, without thinking except to be sure that they were doing the right thing.
   "And today, eight thousand miles from here there is a new life, a new little baby, probably asleep now. That baby will never know all the hubbub that came just before she was born, but with parents like that, that baby will know the Word of God. And all that happened because three brave men of God went to that hospital, and two of them died there to do the Lord's Work.
   "Skip was a Baptist. Renato was a Catholic.
   "Skip was yellow. I'm white. You people are black.
   "But Jesus doesn't care about any of that. We have all heard His words. We have all accepted Him as our Savior. So did Skip. So did Renato. Those two brave men sacrificed their lives for The Right. The Catholic's last words—he asked if the baby was okay, and the other Catholic, the German priest, said 'yes,' and Renato said, 'Bene.' That's Italian. It means, 'That's good, that's all right.' He died knowing that he did the right thing, and that's not a bad thing, is it?"
   "That's right!" three voices called out.
 
   There is so much to learn from their example," Hosiah Jackson told his borrowed congregation.
   "We must learn, first of all, that God's Word is the same for all of us. I'm a black man. You folks are white. Skip was Chinese. In that we are all different, but in God's Holy Word we are all the same. Of all the things we have to learn, of all the things we have to keep in our hearts every day we live, that is the most important. Jesus is Savior to us all, if only we accept Him, if only we take Him into our hearts, if only we listen when He talks to us. That is the first lesson we need to learn from the death of those two brave men.
   "The next lesson we need to learn is that Satan is still alive out there, and while we must listen to the words of God, there are those out there who prefer to listen to the words of Lucifer. We need to recognize those people for what they are.
   "Forty years ago, we had some of those people among us. I remember it, and probably you do, too. We got over all that. The reason we got over it is that we have all heard the Word of God. We've all remembered that our God is a God of Mercy. Our God is a God of Justice. If we remember that, we remember a lot more besides. God does not measure us by what we are against. Jesus looks into our hearts and measures us by what we are for.
   "But we cannot be for justice except by being against injustice. We must remember Skip and Renato. We must remember Mr. and Mrs. Yang, and all like them, those people in China who've been denied the chance to hear the Word of God. The sons of Lucifer are afraid of God's Holy Word. The sons of Lucifer are afraid of us. The sons of Satan are afraid of God's Will, because in God's Love and in the Way of the Lord lies their destruction. They may hate God. They may hate God's word– but they fear, they FEAR the consequences of their own actions. They fear the damnation that awaits them. They may deny God, but they know the righteousness of God, and they know that every human soul cries out for knowledge of our Lord.
   "That's why they feared Reverend Yu Fa An. That's why they feared Cardinal DiMilo, and that's why they fear us. Me and you good people. Those sons of Satan are afraid of us because they know that their words and their false beliefs can no more stand up to the Word of God than a house trailer can stand before a springtime tornado! And they know that all men are born with some knowledge of God's Holy Word. That's why they fear us.”
   "Good!" Reverend Hosiah Jackson exclaimed. "Then let's give them another reason to fear us! Let God's faithful show them the power and the conviction of our faith!"
 
   But we can be sure that God was there with Skip, and with Cardinal DiMilo. God directed their brave hands, and through them God saved that innocent little child," Patterson told his black congregation. "And God welcomed to his bosom the two men He sent there to do His work, and today our friend Skip and Cardinal DiMilo stand proudly before the Lord God, those good and faithful servants of His Holy Word.
   "My friends, they did their job. They did the Lord's work that day. They saved the life of an innocent child. They showed the whole world what the power of faith can be.
   "But what of our job?" Patterson asked.
   It is not the job of the faithful to encourage Satan," Hosiah Jackson told the people before him. He'd captured their attention as surely as Lord Olivier on his best day—and why not? These were not the words of Shakespeare. These were the words of one of God's ministers. "When Jesus looks into our hearts, will He see people who support the sons of Lucifer? Will Jesus see people who give their money to support the godless killers of the innocent? Will Jesus see people who give their money to the new Hitler?"
   "No!" A female voice shouted in reply. "No!" "What is it that we, we the people of God, the people of faith– what is it that we stand for? When the sons of Lucifer kill the faithful, where do you stand? Will you stand for justice? Will you stand for your faith? Will you stand with the holy martyrs? Will you stand with Jesus?" Jackson demanded of his borrowed white congregation. And as one voice, they answered him: "Yes!"
 
   Jesus H. Christ," Ryan said. He'd walked over to the Vice President's office to catch the TV coverage.
   "Told you my Pap was good at this stuff. Hell, I grew up with it over the dinner table, and he still gets inside my head," said Robby Jackson, wondering if he'd allow himself a drink tonight. "Patterson is probably doing okay, too. Pap says he's an okay guy, but my Pap is the champ."
   "Did he ever think of becoming a Jesuit?" Jack asked with a grin.
   "Pap's a preacherman, but he ain't quite a saint. The celibacy would be kinda hard on him," Robby answered.
   Then the scene changed to Leonardo di Vinci International Airport outside Rome, where the Alitalia 747 had just landed and was now pulling up to the jetway. Below it was a truck, and next to the truck some cars belonging to the Vatican. It had already been announced that Renato Cardinal DiMilo would be getting his own full state funeral at St. Peter's Basilica, and CNN would be there to cover all of it, joined by SkyNews, Fox, and all the major networks. They'd been late getting onto the story at the beginning, but that only made this part of the coverage more full.
 
   Back in Mississippi, Hosiah Jackson walked slowly down from the pulpit as the last hymn ended. He walked with grace and dignity to the front door, so as to greet all of the congregation members on the way out.
   That took much longer than he'd expected. It seemed that every single one of them wanted to take his hand and thank him for coming– the degree of hospitality was well in excess of his most optimistic expectations. And there was no doubting their sincerity. Some insisted on talking for a few moments, until the press of the departing crowd forced them down the steps and onto the parking lot. Hosiah counted six invitations to dinner, and ten inquiries about his church, and if it needed any special work. Finally, there was just one man left, pushing seventy, with scraggly gray hair and a hooked nose that had seen its share of whiskey bottles. He looked like a man who'd topped out as assistant foreman at the sawmill.
   "Hello," Jackson said agreeably.
   "Pastor," the man replied, uneasily, as though wanting to say more.
   It was a look Hosiah had seen often enough. "Can I help you, sir?"
   "Pastor ... years ago ..." And his voice choked up again. "Pastor," he began again. "Pastor, I sinned."
   "My friend, we all sin. God knows that. That's why he sent His Son to be with us and conquer our sins." The minister grabbed the man's shoulder to steady him.
   "I was in the Klan, Pastor, I did . . . sinful things ... I... hurt nigras just cuz I hated them, and I—"
   "What's your name?" Hosiah asked gently.
   "Charlie Picket," the man replied. And then Hosiah knew. He had a good memory for names. Charles Worthington Picket had been the Grand Kleegle of the local Klavern. He'd never been convicted of a major crime, but his name was one that came up much of the time.
   "Mr. Picket, those things all happened many years ago," he reminded the man.
   "I ain't never—I mean, I ain't never killed nobody. Honest, Pastor, I ain't never done that," Picket insisted, with real desperation in his voice. "But I know'd thems that did, and I never told the cops. I never told them not to do it ... sweet Jesus, I don't know what I was back then, Pastor. I was ... it was ..."
   "Mr. Picket, are you sorry for your sins?"
   "Oh, yes, oh Jesus, yes, Pastor. I've prayed for forgiveness, but—"
   "There is no 'but,' Mr. Picket. God has forgiven you your sins," Jackson told him in his gentlest voice.
   "Are you sure?"
   A smile and a nod. "Yes, I'm sure."
   "Pastor, you need help at your church, roofing and stuff, you call me, y'hear? That's the house of God, too. Maybe I didn't always know it, but by damn I know it now, sir."
   He'd probably never called a black man "sir" in his life, unless there'd been a gun to his head. So, the minister thought, at least one person had listened to his sermon, and learned something from it. And that wasn't bad for a man in his line of work.
   "Pastor, I gots to apologize for all the evil words and thoughts I had. Ain't never done that, but I gots to do it now." He seized Hosiah's hand. "Pastor, I am sorry, sorry as a man can be for all the things I done back then, and I beg your forgiveness."
   "And the Lord Jesus said, 'Go forth and sin no more.' Mr. Picket, that's all of scripture in one sentence. God came to forgive our sins. God has already forgiven you."
   Finally, their eyes met. "Thank you, Pastor. And God bless you, sir."
   "And may the Lord bless you, too." Hosiah Jackson watched the man walk off to his pickup truck, wondering if a soul had just been saved. If so, Skip would be pleased with the black friend he'd never met.

CHAPTER 32

Coalition Collision
   
It was a long drive from the airport to the Vatican, every yard of it covered by cameras in the high-speed motorcade, until finally the vehicles entered the Piazza San Pietro, St. Peter's Square. There, waiting, was a squad of Swiss Guards wearing the purple-and-gold uniforms designed by Michelangelo. Some of the Guards pulled the casket containing a Prince of the Church, martyred far away, and carried it through the towering bronze doors into the cavernous interior of the church, where the next day a Requiem Mass would be celebrated by the Pope himself.
   But it wasn't about religion now, except to the public. For the President of the United States, it was about matters of state. It turned out that Tom Jefferson had been right after all. The power of government devolved directly from the people, and Ryan had to act now, in a way that the people would approve, because when you got down to it, the nation wasn't his. It was theirs.
   And one thing made it worse. SORGE had coughed up another report that morning, and it was late coming in only because Mary Patricia Foley wanted to be doubly sure that the translation was right.
   Also in the Oval Office were Ben Goodley, Arnie van Damm, and the Vice President. "Well?" Ryan asked them.
   "Cocksuckers," Robby said, first of all. "If they really think this way, we shouldn't sell them shit in a paper bag. Even at Top Gun after a long night of boilermakers, even Navy fighter pilots don't talk like this."
   "It is callous," Ben Goodley agreed.
   "They don't issue consciences to the political leaders, I guess," van Damm said, making it unanimous.
   "How would your father react to information like this, Robby?" Ryan asked.
   "His immediate response will be the same as mine: Nuke the bastards. Then he'll remember what happens in a real war and settle down some. Jack, we have to punish them."
   Ryan nodded. "Okay, but if we shut down trade to the PRC, the first people hurt are the poor schlubs in the factories, aren't they?"
   "Sure, Jack, but who's holding them hostage, the good guys or the bad guys? Somebody can always say that, and if fear of hurting them prevents you from taking any action, then you're only making sure that things never get better for them. So, you can't allow yourself to be limited that way," TOMCAT concluded, "or you become the hostage."
   Then the phone rang. Ryan got it, grumbling at the interruption.
   "Secretary Adler for you, Mr. President. He says it's important."
   Jack leaned across his desk and punched the blinking button. "Yeah, Scott."
   "I got the download. It's not unexpected, and people talk differently inside the office than outside, remember."
   "That's great to hear, Scott, and if they talk about taking a few thousand Jews on a train excursion to Auschwitz, is that supposed to be funny, too?"
   "Jack, I'm the Jew here, remember?"
   Ryan let out a long breath and pushed another button. "Okay, Scott, you're on speaker now. Talk," POTUS ordered.
   "This is just the way the bastards talk. Yes, they're arrogant, but we already knew that. Jack, if other countries knew how we talk inside the White House, we'd have a lot fewer allies and a lot more wars. Sometimes intelligence can be too good."
   Adler really was a good SecState, Ryan thought. His job was to look for simple and safe ways out of problems, and he worked damned hard at it.
   "Okay, suggestions?"
   "I have Carl Hitch lay a note on them. We demand a statement of apology for this fuckup."
   "And if they tell us to shove it?"
   "Then we pull Rutledge and Hitch back for 'consultations,' and let them simmer for a while."
   "The note, Scott?"
   "Yes, Mr. President."
   "Write it on asbestos paper and sign it in blood," Jack told him coldly.
   "Yes, sir," SecState acknowledged, and the line went dead.
 
   It was a lot later in the day in Moscow when Pavel Yefremov and Oleg Provalov came into Sergey Golovko's office.
   "I'm sorry I couldn't have you in sooner," the SVR chairman told his guests. "We've been busy with problems—the Chinese and that shooting in Beijing." He'd been looking into it just like every other person in the world.
   "Then you have another problem with them, Comrade Chairman."
   "Oh?"
   Yefremov handed over the decrypt. Golovko took it, thanking the man with his accustomed good manners, then settled back in his chair and started reading. In less than five seconds, his eyes widened.
   "This is not possible," his voice whispered.
   "Perhaps so, but it is difficult to explain otherwise."
   "I was the target?"
   "So it would appear," Provalov answered.
   "But why?"
   "That we do not know," Yefremov said, "and probably nobody in the city of Moscow knows. If the order was given through a Chinese intelligence officer, the order originated in Beijing, and the man who forwarded it probably doesn't know the reasoning behind it. Moreover, the operation is set up to be somewhat deniable, since we cannot even prove that this man is an intelligence officer, and not an assistant or what the Americans call a 'stringer.' In fact, their man was identified for us by an American," the FSS officer concluded.
   Golovko's eyes came up. "How the hell did that happen?"
   Provalov explained. "A Chinese intelligence officer in Moscow is unlikely to be concerned by the presence of an American national, whereas any Russian citizen is a potential counter-intelligence officer.
   Mishka was there and offered to help, and I permitted it. Which leads me to a question."
   "What do you tell this American?" Golovko asked for him.
   The lieutenant nodded. "Yes, Comrade Chairman. He knows a good deal about the murder investigation because I confided in him and he offered some helpful suggestions. He is a gifted police investigator. And he is no fool. When he asks how this case is going, what can I say?"
   Golovko's initial response was as predictable as it was automatic: Say nothing. But he restrained himself. If Provalov said nothing, then the American would have to be a fool not to see the lie, and, as he said, the American was no fool. On the other hand, did it serve Golovko's—or Russia's—purposes for America to know that his life was in danger? That question was deep and confusing. While he pondered it, he'd have his bodyguard come in. He beeped his secretary.
   "Yes, Comrade Chairman," Major Shelepin said, coming in the door.
   "Something new for you to worry about, Anatoliy Ivan'ch," Golovko told him. It was more than that. The first sentence turned Shelepin pale.
 
   It started in America with the unions. These affiliations of working people, which had lost power in the preceding decades, were in their way the most conservative organizations in America, for the simple reason that their loss of power had made them mindful of the importance of what power they retained. To hold on to that, they resisted any change that threatened the smallest entitlement of their humblest member.
   China had long been a bete noir for the labor movement, for the simple reason that Chinese workers made less in a day than American union automobile workers made during their morning coffee break. That tilted the playing field in favor of the Asians, and that was something the AFL/CIO was not prepared to approve.
   So much the better that the government that ruled those underpaid workers disregarded human rights. That just made them easier to oppose.
   American labor unions are nothing if not organized, and so every single member of Congress started getting telephone calls. Most of them were taken by staffers, but those from senior union officials in a member's state or district usually made it all the way through, regardless of which side the individual member stood on. Attention was called to the barbaric action of that godless state which also, by the way, shit on its workers and took American jobs through its unfair labor practices. The size of the trade surplus came up in every single telephone call, which would have made the members of Congress think that it was a carefully orchestrated phone campaign (which it was) had they compared notes on the telephone calls with one another (which they didn't).
   Later in the day, demonstrations were held, and though they were about as spontaneous as those held in the People's Republic of China, they were covered by the local and/or national media, because it was a place to send cameras, and the newsies belonged to a union, too.
   Behind the telephone calls and in front of the TV coverage of the demonstrations came the letters and e-mails, all of which were counted and cataloged by the members' staffers.
   Some of them called the White House to let the President know what was happening on the Hill. Those calls all went to the office of Arnold van Damm, whose own staff kept a careful count of the calls, their position, and their degree of passion, which was running pretty high.
   On top of that came the notices from the religious communities, virtually all of which China had managed to offend at once.
   The one unexpected but shrewd development of the day didn't involve a call or letter to anyone in the government. Chinese manufacturers located on the island of Taiwan all had lobbying and public-relations agencies in America. One of these came up with an idea that caught on as rapidly as the powder inside a rifle cartridge. By midday, three separate printers were turning out peel-off stickers with the flag of the Republic of China and the caption "We're the good guys." By the following morning, clerks at retail outlets all over America were affixing them to items of Taiwanese manufacture. The news media found out about it even before the process had begun, and thus aided the Republic of China industrialists by letting the public know of their "them not us" campaign even before it had properly begun.
   The result was that the American public was reacquainted with the fact that there were indeed two countries called China, and that only one of them killed people of the clergy and then beat up on those who tried to say a few prayers on a public street. The other one even played Little League baseball.
   It wasn't often that union leaders and the clergy both cried out so vociferously, and together they were being heard. Polling organizations scrambled to catch up, and were soon framing their questions in such a way that the answers were defined even before they were given.
 
   The draft note arrived in the Beijing embassy early in the morning. When decrypted by an NS employee, it was shown to the embassy's senior watch officer, who managed not to throw up and decided to awaken Ambassador Hitch at once. Half an hour later, Hitch was in the office, sleepy and crabby at being awakened two hours before his accustomed time. The content of the note wasn't contrived to brighten his day. He was soon on the phone to Foggy Bottom.
   "Yes, that's what we want you to say," Scott Adler told him on the secure phone.
   "They're not going to like it."
   "That doesn't surprise me, Carl."
   "Okay, just so you know," Hitch told the SecState.
   "Carl, we do think about these things, but the President is seriously pissed about—"
   "Scott, I live here, y'know? I know what happened."
   "What are they going to do?" EAGLE asked.
   "Before or after they take my head off?" Hitch asked in return. "They'll tell me where to stick this note—a little more formally, of course."
   "Well, make it clear to them that the American people demand some sort of amends. And that killing diplomats cannot be done with impunity."
   "Okay, Scott. I know how to handle it. I'll get back to you later."
   "I'll be awake," Adler promised, thinking of the long day in the office he was stuck with.
   "See ya." Hitch broke the connection.

CHAPTER 33

Square One
   
"You may not talk to us this way," Shen Tans observed.
   "Minister, my country has principles which we do not violate. Some of those are respect for human rights, the right of free assembly, the right to worship God as one wishes, the right to speak freely. The government of the People's Republic has seen fit to violate those principles, hence America's response. Every other great power in the world recognizes those rights. China must as well."
   "Must? You tell us what we must do?"
   "Minister, if China wishes to be a member of the community of nations, then, yes."
   "America will not dictate to us. You are not the rulers of the world!"
   "We do not claim to be. But we can choose those nations with whom we have normal relations, and we would prefer them to recognize human rights as do all other civilized nations."
   "Now you say we are uncivilized?" Shen demanded.
   "I did not say that, Minister," Hitch responded, wishing he'd not let his tongue slip.
   "America does not have the right to impose its wishes on us or any other nation. You come here and dictate trade terms to us, and now also you demand that we conduct our internal affairs so as to suit you. Enough! We will not kowtow to you. We are not your servants. I reject this note." Shen even tossed it back in Hitch's direction to give further emphasis to his words.
   "That is your reply, then?" Hitch asked.
   "That is the reply of the Peoples Republic of China," Shen answered imperiously.
   "Very well, Minister. Thank you for the audience." Hitch bowed politely and withdrew. Remarkable, he thought, that normal—if not exactly friendly—relations could come unglued this fast. Only six weeks before, Shen had been over to the embassy for a cordial working dinner, and they'd toasted each other's country in the friendliest manner possible. But Kissinger had said it: Countries do not have friends; they have interests. And the PRC had just shit on some of America's most closely felt principles. And that was that. He walked back out to his car for the drive to the embassy.
   Cliff Rutledge was waiting there. Hitch waved him into his private office.
   "Well?"
   "Well, he told me to shove it up my ass—in diplo-speak," Hitch told his visitor. "You might have a lively session this morning."
   Rutledge had seen the note already, of course. "I'm surprised Scott let it go out that way."
   "I gather things at home have gotten a little firm. We've seen CNN and all, but maybe it's even worse than it appears."
   "Look, I don't condone anything the Chinese did, but all this over a couple of shot clergymen ..."
   "One was a diplomat, Cliff," Hitch reminded him. "If you got your ass shot off, you'd want them to take it seriously in Washington, wouldn't you?"
   The reprimand made Rutledge's eyes flare a little. "It's President Ryan who's driving this. He just doesn't understand how diplomacy works."
   "Maybe, maybe not, but he is the President, and it's our job to represent him, remember?"
   "Hard to forget it," Rutledge groused. He'd never be Undersecretary of State while that yahoo sat in the White House, and Undersecretary was the job he'd had his eye on for the last fifteen years. But neither would he get the job if he allowed his private feelings, however justified, to cloud his professional judgment. "We're going to be called home or sent home," he estimated.
   "Probably," Hitch agreed. "Be nice to catch some baseball. How do the Sox look this season?"
   "Forget it. A rebuilding year. Once again."
   "Sorry about that." Hitch shook his head and checked his desk for new dispatches, but there were none. Now he had to let Washington know what the Chinese Foreign Minister had said. Scott Adler was probably sitting in his seventh-floor office waiting for the secure direct line to ring.
   "Good luck, Cliff."
   "Thanks a bunch," Rutledge said on his way out the door.
   Hitch wondered if he should call home and tell his wife to start packing for home, but no, not yet. First he had to call Foggy Bottom.
 
   So, what's going to happen?" Ryan asked Adler from his bed. He'd left orders to be called as soon as they got word. Now, listening to Adler's reply, he was surprised. He'd thought the wording of the note rather wimpy, but evidently diplomatic exchange had even stricter rules than he'd appreciated. "Okay, now what, Scott?"
   "Well, we'll wait and see what happens with the trade delegation, but even money we call them and Carl Hitch home for consultations."
   "Don't the Chinese realize they could take a trade hit from all this?"
   "They don't expect that to happen. Maybe if it does, it'll make them think over the error of their ways."
   "I wouldn't bet much on that card, Scott."
   "Sooner or later, common sense has to break out. A hit in the wallet usually gets a guy's attention," SecState said.
   "I'll believe that when I see it," POTUS replied. "'Night, Scott."
   "'Night, Jack."
   "So what did they say?" Cathy Ryan asked.
   "They told us to stick it up our ass."
   "Really?"
   "Really," Jack replied, flipping the light off.
   The Chinese thought they were invincible. It must be nice to believe that. Nice, but dangerous.
 
   The 265th Motor Rifle Division was composed of three regiments of conscripts—Russians who hadn't chosen to avoid military service, which made them patriotic, or stupid, or apathetic, or sufficiently bored with life that the prospect of two years in uniform, poorly fed and largely unpaid, didn't seem that much of a sacrifice. Each regiment was composed of about fifteen hundred soldiers, about five hundred fewer than full authorized strength. The good news was that each regiment had an organic tank battalion, and that all of the mechanized equipment was, if not new, then at least recently manufactured, and reasonably well maintained. The division lacked its organic tank regiment, however, the fist which gave a motor-rifle division its offensive capabilities. Also missing was the divisional antitank battalion, with its Rapier antitank cannons. These were anachronistic weapons which Bondarenko nonetheless liked because he'd played with them as an officer cadet nearly forty years before. The new model of the BMP infantry carrier had been modified to carry the AT-6 antitank missile, the one NATO called "Spiral," actually a Russian version of the NATO Milan, courtesy of some nameless KGB spy of the 1980s. The Russian troops called it the Hammer for its ease of use, despite a relatively small warhead. Every BMP had ten of these, which more than made up for the missing battalion of towed guns.
   What worried Bondarenko and Aliyev most was the lack of artillery. Historically the best trained and best drilled part of the Russian army, the artillery was only half present in the Far East's maneuver forces, battalions taking the place of regiments. The rationale for this was the fixed defense line on the Chinese border, which had a goodly supply of fixed and fortified artillery positions, albeit of obsolete designs, though with trained crews and massive stocks of shells to pour into predetermined positions.
   The general scowled in the confines of his staff car. It was what he got for being smart and energetic. A properly prepared and trained military district didn't need a man like him, did it? No, his talents were needed by a shithole like this one. Just once, he thought, might a good officer get a reward for good performance instead of another "challenge," as they called it? He grunted. Not in this lifetime. The dunces and dolts drew the comfortable districts with no threats and lots of equipment to deal with them.
   His worst worry was the air situation. Of all the Russian military arms, the air forces had suffered the most from the fall of the Soviet Union. Once Far East had had its own fleets of tactical fighters, poised to deal with a threat from American aircraft based in Japan or on aircraft carriers of their Pacific Fleet, that plus what was needed to face off the Chinese. No more. Now he had perhaps fifty usable aircraft in theater, and the pilots for those got perhaps seventy flight hours per year, barely enough to make sure they could take off and land safely. Fifty modern fighter-class aircraft, mainly for air-to-air combat, not air-to-ground. There were several hundred more, rotting at their bases, mainly in hardened shelters to keep them dry, their tires dry-rotted and internal seals cracked from lack of use because of the spare-parts shortage that grounded nearly the entire Russian air force.
   "You know, Andrey, I can remember when the world shook with fear of our country's army. Now, they shake with laughter, those who bother to take note of us." Bondarenko took a sip of vodka from a flask. It had been a long time since he'd drunk alcohol on duty, but it was cold—the heater in the car was broken—and he needed the solace.
   "Gennady Iosifovich, it is not as bad as it appears—"
   "I agree! It is worse!" CINC-FAR EAST growled. "If the Chinks come north, I shall learn to eat with chopsticks. I've always wondered how they do that," he added with a wry smile. Bondarenko was always one to see the humor in a situation.
   "But to others we appear strong. We have thousands of tanks, Comrade General."
   Which was true. They'd spent the morning inspecting monstrous sheds containing of all things T-34/85 tanks manufactured at Chelyabinsk in 1946. Some had virgin guns, never fired. The Germans had shaken in their jackboots to see these tanks storm over the horizon, but that's what they were, World War II tanks, over nine hundred of them, three complete division sets. And there were even troops to maintain them! The engines still turned over, serviced as they were by the grandchildren of the men who'd used them in combat operations against the fascisti. And in the same sheds were shells, some made as recently as 1986, for the 85-mm guns. The world was mad, and surely the Soviet Union had been mad, first to store such antiques, then to spend money and effort maintaining them. And even now, more than ten years after the demise of that nation-state, the sheer force of bureaucratic inertia still sent conscripts into the sheds to maintain the antique collection. For what purpose? No one knew. It would take an archivist to find the documents, and while that might be of interest to some historian of a humorous bent, Bondarenko had better things to do.
   "Andrey, I appreciate your willingness to see the lighter side of every situation, but we do face a practical reality here."
   "Comrade General, it will take months to get permission to terminate this operation."
   "That is probably true, Andruska, but I remember a story about Napoleon. He wished to plant trees by the side of the French roads to shade his marching troops. A staff officer said, but, Marshal, it will take twenty years for the trees to grow enough to accomplish that. And Napoleon said, yes, indeed, so we must start at once! And so, Colonel, we will start with that at once."
   "As you say, Comrade General." Colonel Aliyev knew that it was a worthwhile idea. He only wondered if he would have enough time to pursue all of the ideas that needed accomplishing. Besides, the troops at the tank sheds seemed happy enough. Some even took the tanks out into the open to play with them, drive them about the nearby test range, and even shoot the guns occasionally. One young sergeant had commented to him that it was good to use them, because it made the war movies he'd seen as a child seem even more real. Now that, Colonel Aliyev thought, was something to hear from a soldier. It made the movies better. Damn.
 
   Who does that slant-eyed motherfucker think he is?" Gant demanded out in the garden.
   "Mark, we laid a rather firm note on them this morning, and they're just reacting to it."
   "Cliff, explain to me why it's okay for other people to talk like that to us, but it's not okay for us to talk that way to them, will you?"
   "It's called diplomacy," Rutledge explained.
   "It's called horseshit, Cliff," Gant hissed back. "Where I come from, if somebody disses you like that, you punch him right in the face."
   "But we don't do that."
   "Why not?"
   "Because we're above it, Mark," Rutledge tried to explain. "It's the little dogs that yap at you. The big powerful dogs don't bother. They know they can rip your head off. And we know we can handle these people if we have to."
   "Somebody needs to tell them that, Cliffy," Gant observed. "Because I don't think they got the word yet. They're talking like they own the world, and they think they can play tough-guy with us, Cliff, and until they find out they can't, we're going to have a lot more of their shit to deal with."
   "Mark, this is how it's done, that's all. It's just how the game is played at this level."
   "Oh, yeah?" Gant countered. "Cliff, it's not a game to them. I see that, but you don't. After this break, we're going back in there, and they're going to threaten us. What do we do then?"
   "We brush it off. How can they threaten us?"
   "The Boeing order."
   "Well, Boeing will have to sell its airplanes to somebody else this year," Rutledge said.
   "Really? What about the interests of all those workers we're supposed to represent?"
   "Mark, at this level, we deal with the big picture, not the little one, okay?" Rutledge was actually getting angry with this stock TRADER.
   "Cliffy, the big picture is made up of a lot of little ones. You ought to go back in there and ask if they like selling things to us. Because if they do, then they have to play ball. Because they need us a fucking lots more than we need them."
   "You don't talk that way to a great power."
   "Are we a great power?"
   "The biggest," Rutledge confirmed.
   "Then how come they talk that way to us?"
   "Mark, this is my job. You're here to advise me, but this is your first time to this sort of ball game, okay? I know how to play the game. It's my job."
   "Fine." Gant let out a long breath. "But when we play by the rules and they don't, the game gets a little tedious." Gant wandered off on his own for a moment. The garden was pretty enough. He hadn't done this sort of thing enough to know that there was usually a garden of some sort for diplomats to wander in after two or three hours of talking at each other in a conference room, but he had learned that the garden was where a lot of the real work got done.
   "Mr. Gant?" He turned to see Xue Ma, the diplomat/spook he'd chatted with before.
   "Mr. Xue," TELESCOPE said in his own greeting.
   "What do you think of the progress of the talks?" the Chinese diplomat asked.
   Mark was still trying to understand this guy's use of language. "If this is progress, I'd hate to see what you call an adverse development."
   Xue smiled. "A lively exchange is often more interesting than a dull one."
   "Really? I'm surprised by all this. I always thought that diplomatic exchange was more polite."
   "You think this impolite?"
   Gant again wondered if he was being baited or not, but decided the hell with it. He didn't really need his government job anyway, did he? And taking it had involved a considerable personal sacrifice, hadn't it? Like a few million bucks. Didn't that entitle him to say what the hell he thought?
   "Xue, you accuse us of threatening your national identity because we object to the murders your government—or its agents, I suppose– committed in front of cameras. Americans don't like it when people commit murder."
   "Those people were breaking our laws," Xue reminded him.
   "Maybe so," Gant conceded. "But in America when people break the law, we arrest them and give them a trial in front of a judge and jury, with a defense lawyer to make sure the trial is fair, and we damned sure don't shoot people in the head when they're holding a goddamned newborn infant!"
   "That was unfortunate," Xue almost admitted, "but as I said, those men were breaking the law."
   "And so your cops did the judge/jury/executioner number on them. Xue, to Americans that was the act of a barbarian."
   The "B" word finally got through. "America cannot talk to China in that way, Mr. Gant."
   "Look, Mr. Xue, it's your country, and you can run your country as you wish. We're not going to declare war on you for what you do inside your own borders. But there's no law that says we have to do business with you either, and so we can stop buying your goods—and I have news for you: The American people will stop buying your stuff if you continue to do stuff like that."
   "Your people? Or your government?" Xue asked, with a knowing smile.
   "Are you really that stupid, Mr. Xue?" Gant fired back.
   "What do you mean?" The last insult had actually cracked through the shell, Gant saw.
   "I mean America is a democracy. Americans make a lot of decisions entirely on their own, and one of them is what they spend their money on, and the average American will not buy something from a fucking barbarian." Gant paused. "Look, I'm a Jew, okay? Sixty-some years ago, America fucked up. We saw what Hitler and the Nazis were doing in Germany, and we didn't act in time to stop it. We really blew the call and a lot of people got killed unnecessarily, and we've been seeing things on TV about that since I was in short pants, and it ain't never going to happen again on our watch, and when people like you do stuff like what we just saw, it just sets off the Holocaust light in American heads. Do you get it now?"
   "You cannot talk to us in that way."
   Again with the broken record! The doors were opening. It was time to head back inside for the next round of confrontational diplo-speak.
   "And if you persist in attacking our national sovereignty, we will buy elsewhere," Xue told him with some satisfaction.
   "Fine, and we can do the same. And you need our cash a lot more than we need your trade goods, Mr. Xue." He must have finally understood, Gant thought. His face actually showed some emotion now. So did his words:
   "We will never kowtow to American attacks on our country."
   "We're not attacking your country, Xue."
   "But you threaten our economy," Xue said, as they got to the door.
   "We threaten nothing. I am telling you that my fellow citizens will not buy goods from a country that commits barbarities. That is not a threat. It is a statement of fact." Which was an even greater insult, Gant did not fully appreciate.
   "If America punishes us, we will punish America."
   Enough was goddamned enough. Gant pulled the door open halfway and stopped to face the diplomat/spook:
   "Xue, your dicks aren't big enough to get in a pissing contest with us." And with that, he walked on inside. A half-hour later, he was on his way out again. The words had been sharp and heated, and neither side had seen any purpose in continuing that day—though Gant strongly suspected that once Washington heard about that morning's exchanges, there wouldn't be any other day.
   In two days, he'd be totally jet-lagged but back at his office on 15th Street. He was surprised that he was looking forward to that.
   Anything from WestPac?" Mancuso asked. "They just put three submarines to sea, a Song and two of the Kilos the Russians sold them," BG Lahr answered. "We're keeping an eye on them. La Jolla and Helena are close by. Tennessee is heading back to Pearl as of midday." The former boomer had been on patrol for fifty days, and that was about enough. "Our surface assets are all back to sea. Nobody's scheduled to get back into Taipei for twelve days."
   "So, the Taipei hookers get two weeks off?" CINCPAC asked with a chuckle.
   "And the bartenders. If your sailors are like my soldiers, they may need the relaxation," the J-2 replied, with a smile of his own.
   "Oh, to be young and single again," Bart observed. "Anything else out there?"
   "Routine training on their side, some combined air and ground stuff, but that's up north by the Russian border."
   "How good do they look?"
   Lahr shrugged. "Good enough to give the Russians something to think about, sir. On the whole, the PLA is trained up as good as I've ever known them to be, but they've been working hard for the past three or four years."
   "How many of them?" Bart asked, looking at his wall map, which was a lot more useful for a sailor than a soldier. China was just a beige shape on the left border.
   "Depends on where. Like, if they go north into Russia, it'd be like cockroaches in some ghetto apartment in New York. You'd need a lot o' Raid to deal with it."
   "And you said the Russians are thin in their East?"
   Lahr nodded. "Yep. Admiral, if I was that Bondarenko guy, I'd sweat it some. I mean, it's all theoretical as a threat and all, but as theoretical threats go, that's one that might keep me awake at night."
   "And what about reports of gold and oil in eastern Siberia?"
   Lahr nodded. "Makes the threat less theoretical. China's a net importer of oil, and they're going to need a lot more to expand their economy the way they plan to—and on the gold side, hell, everybody's wanted that for the last three thousand years. It's negotiable and fungible."
   "Fungible?" That was a new word for Mancuso.
   "Your wedding band might have been part of Pharaoh Ramses II's double-crown once," Lahr explained. "Or Caligula's necklace, or Napoleon's royal scepter. You take it, hammer it, and it's just raw material again, and it's valuable raw material. If the Russian strike's as big as our intel says, it'll be sold all over the world. Everybody'll use it for all sorts of purposes, from jewelry to electronics."
   "How big's the strike supposed to be?"
   Lahr shrugged. "Enough to buy you a new Pacific Fleet, and then some."
   Mancuso whistled. That was real money.
 
   It was late in Washington, and Adler was up late, again, working in his office. SecState was usually a busy post, and lately it had been busier than usual, and Scott Adler was getting accustomed to fourteen-hour days. He was reading over post reports at the moment, waiting for the other shoe to drop in Beijing. On his desk was a STU-6 secure telephone. The "secure telephone unit" was a sophisticated encryption device grafted onto an AT&T-made digital telephone. This one worked on a satellite-communications channel, and though its signal therefore sprinkled down all over the world from its Defense Department communications satellite, all the casual listener would get was raspy static, like the sound of water running out of a bathroom faucet. It had a randomized 512-bit scrambling system that the best computers at Fort Meade could break about a third of the time after several days of directed effort. And that was about as secure as things got. They were trying to make the tapdance encryption system link into the STU units to generate a totally random and hence unbreakable signal, but that was proving difficult, for technical reasons that nobody had explained to the Secretary of State, and that was just as well. He was a diplomat, not a mathematician. Finally, the STU rang in its odd trilling warble. It took eleven seconds for the two STU units on opposite sides of the world to synchronize.
   "Adler."
   "Rutledge here, Scott," the voice said on the other side of the world. "It didn't go well," he informed SecState at once. "And they're canceling the 777 order with Boeing, as we thought they would."
   Adler frowned powerfully into the phone. "Super. No concessions at all on the shootings?"
   "Zip."
   "Anything to be optimistic about?"
   "Nothing, Scott, not a damned thing. They're stonewalling like we're the Mongols and they're the Chin Dynasty."
   Somebody needs to remind them that the Great Wall ultimately turned out to be a waste of bricks, EAGLE didn't bother saying aloud. "Okay, I need to discuss this with the President, but you're probably going to be flying home soon. Maybe Carl Hitch, too."
   "I'll tell him. Any chance that we can make some concession, just to get things going?"
   "Cliff, the likelihood that Congress will roll over on the trade issue is right up there with Tufts making the Final Four. Maybe less." Tufts University did have a basketball team, after all. "There's nothing we can give them that they would accept. If there's going to be a break, they're the ones who'll have to bend this time. Any chance of that?"
   "Zero" was the reply from Beijing.
   "Well, then, they'll just have to learn the hard way." The good news, Adler thought, was that the hard lessons were the ones that really did teach you something. Maybe even the Chinese.
 
   What did that capitalist diao ren say?" Zhang asked. Shen told him what Xue had relayed, word-for-word. "And what does he represent?"
   "He is personal assistant to the American Treasury Minister. Therefore we think he has the ear of both his minister and the American president," Shen explained. "He has not taken an active part in the talks, but after every session he speaks privately with Vice Minister Rutledge. Exactly what their relationship is, we do not know for certain, and clearly he is not an experienced diplomat. He talks like an arrogant capitalist, to insult us in so crude a way, but I fear he represents the American position more forthrightly than Rutledge does. I think he gives Rutledge the policy he must follow. Rutledge is an experienced diplomat, and the positions he takes are not his own, obviously. He wants to give us some concessions. I am sure of that, but Washington is dictating his words, and this Gant fellow is probably the conduit to Washington."
   "Then you were right to adjourn the talks. We will give them a chance to reconsider their position. If they think they can dictate to us, then they are mistaken. You canceled the airplane order?"
   "Of course, as we agreed last week."
   "Then that will give them something to think about," Zhang observed smugly.
   "If they do not walk out of the talks."
   "They wouldn't dare." Walk away from the Middle Kingdom? Absurd.
   "There is one other thing that Gant man said. He said, not in so many words, that we need them—their money, that is—more than they need us. And he is not entirely wrong in that, is he?"
   "We do not need their dollars more than we need our sovereignty. Do they really think they can dictate our domestic laws to us?"
   "Yes, Zhang, they do. They apply an astounding degree of importance to this incident."
   "Those two policemen ought to be shot for what they did, but we cannot allow the Americans to dictate that sort of thing to us." The embarrassment of the incident was one thing—and embarrassing the state was often a capital offense in the People's Republic—but China had to make such a decision on its own, not at the order of an outsider.
   "They call it barbaric," Shen added.
   "Barbaric? They say that to us?"
   "You know that Americans have tender sensibilities. We often forget that. And their religious leaders have some influence in their country.
   Our ambassador in Washington has cabled some warnings to us about this. It would be better if we had some time to let things settle down, and truly it would be better to punish those two policemen just to assuage American sensibilities, but I agree we cannot allow them to dictate domestic policy to us."
   "And this Gant man says his ji is bigger than ours, does he?"
   "So Xue tells me. Our file on him says that he's a stock TRADER, that he's worked closely with Minister Winston for many years. He's a Jew, like lots of them are—"
   "Their Foreign Minister is also a Jew, isn't he?"
   "Minister Adler? Yes, he is," Shen confirmed after a moment's thought.
   "So, this Gant really does tell us their position, then?"
   "Probably," Foreign Minister Shen said.
   Zhang leaned forward in his chair. "Then you will make them clear on ours. The next time you see this Gant, tell him chou ni ma de bi." Which was rather a strong imprecation, best said to someone in China if you had a gun already in your hand.
   "I understand," Shen replied, knowing that he'd never say anything like that except to a particularly humble underling in his own office.
   Zhang left. He had to talk this one over with his friend Fang Gan.

CHAPTER 34

Hits
   
Over the last week Ryan had come to expect bad news upon waking up, and as a result so had his family. He knew that he was taking it too seriously when his children started asking him about it over breakfast.
   "What's happening with China, Dad?" Sally asked, giving Ryan one more thing to lament. Sally didn't say "daddy" anymore, and that was a title far more precious to Jack than "Mr. President." You expected it from your sons, but not from your daughter. He'd discussed it with Cathy, but she'd told him that he just had to roll with the punch.
   "We don't know, Sally."
   "But you're supposed to know everything!" And besides, her friends asked her about it at school.
   "Sally, the President doesn't know everything. At least I don't," he explained, looking up from the morning Early Bird. "And if you never noticed, the TVs in my office are tuned to CNN and the other news networks because they frequently tell me more than CIA does."
   "Really?” Sally observed. She watched too many movies. In Hollywood, CIA was a dangerous, lawbreaking, antidemocratic, fascist, and thoroughly evil government agency that nonetheless knew everything about everybody, and had really killed President Kennedy for its own purposes, whatever they were (Hollywood never quite got around to that). But it didn't matter, because whoever the star was always managed to thwart the nasty old CIA before the credits, or the last commercial, depending on the format.
   "Really, honey. CIA has some good people in it, but basically it's just one more government agency."
   "What about the FBI and Secret Service?" she asked.
   "They're cops. Cops are different. My dad was a cop, remember?"
   "Oh, yeah," and then she went back to the "Style" section of The Washington Post, which had both the comics and the stories that interested her, mainly ones having to do with the sort of music that her father put quotation marks around.
   Then there was a discreet knock at the door, and Andrea came in. At this time of day, she also acted as his private secretary, in this case delivering a dispatch from the State Department. Ryan took it, looked at it, and managed not to pound on the table, because his children were present.
   "Thanks, Andrea," he told her.
   "Yes, Mr. President." And Special Agent Price-O'Day went back out to the corridor.
   Jack saw his wife looking at him. The kids couldn't read all his facial expressions, but his wife could. To Cathy, Ryan couldn't lie worth a damn, which was also why she didn't worry about his fidelity. Jack had the dissimulation ability of a two-year-old, despite all the help and training he got from Arnie. Jack caught the look and nodded. Yeah, it was China again. Ten minutes later, breakfast was fully consumed and the TV was turned off, and the Ryan family headed downstairs to work, to school, or to the day-care center at Johns Hopkins, depending on age, with the requisite contingent of Secret Service bodyguards. Jack kissed them all in their turn, except for little Jack—SHORTSTOP to the Secret Service—because John Patrick Ryan, Jr., didn't go in for that sissy stuff. There was something to be said for having daughters, Ryan thought, as he headed for the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was there, waiting with the President's Daily Brief.
   "You have the one from SecState?" CARDSHARP asked.
   "Yeah, Andrea delivered it." Ryan fell into his swivel chair and lifted the phone, punching the proper speed-dial button.
   "Good morning, Jack," SecState said in greeting, despite a short night's sleep gotten on the convertible sofa in his own office. Fortunately, his private bathroom also had a shower.
   "Approved. Bring them all back," SWORDSMAN told EAGLE.
   "Who handles the announcement?" Secretary Adler asked.
   "You do it. We'll try to low-key it," the president said, with forlorn hope in his voice.
   "Right," Adler thought. "Anything else?"
   "That's it for now."
   "Okay, see ya, Scott." Ryan replaced the phone. "What about China?" he asked Goodley. "Are they doing anything unusual?"
   "No. Their military is active, but it's routine training activity only. Their most active sectors are up in their northeast and opposite Taiwan. Lesser activity in their southwest, north of India."
   "With all the good luck the Russians are having with oil and gold, are the Chinese looking north with envy?"
   "It's not bad speculation, but we have no positive indications of that from any of our sources." Everybody envied rich neighbors, after all. That's what had encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, despite having lots of oil under his own sand.
   "Any of our sources" includes SORGE, the President reminded himself. He pondered that for a second. "Tell Ed I want a SNIE on Russia and China."
   "Quick?" Goodley asked. A Special National Intelligence Estimate could take months to prepare.
   "Three or four weeks. And I want to be able to hang my hat on it."
   "I'll tell the DCI," Goodley promised.
   "Anything else?" Ryan asked.
   "That's it for now, sir."
   Jack nodded and checked his calendar. He had a fairly routine day, but the next one would largely be spent on Air Force One flying hither and yon across America, and he was overnighting in—he flipped the page on the printout—Seattle, before flying home to Washington and another full day. It was just as easy for him to use the VC-25A as a red-eye ... oh, yeah, he had a breakfast speech in Seattle to the local Jaycees. He'd be talking about school reform. That generated a grunt. There just weren't enough nuns to go around. The School Sisters of Notre Dame had taught him at St. Matthew's Elementary School in northeast Baltimore back forty-plus years earlier—and taught him well, because the penalty for not learning or for misbehaving did not bear contemplation for a seven-year-old. But the truth of the matter was that he'd been a good, and fairly obedient—dull, Jack admitted to himself with a wry smile—child who'd gotten good marks because he'd had a good mom and a good dad, which was a lot more than too many contemporary American kids could say—and how the hell was he supposed to fix that? Jack asked himself. How could he bring back the ethos of his parents' generation, the importance of religion, and a world in which engaged people went to the altar as virgins? Now they were talking about telling kids that homosexual and lesbian sex was okay. What would Sister Frances Mary have said about that? Jack wondered. A pity she wasn't around to crack some senators and representatives over the knuckles with her ruler. It had worked on him and his classmates at St. Matthew's. . .
   The desk speaker buzzed. "Senator Smithers just arrived at the West Entrance." Ryan stood and went to his right, the door that came in from the secretaries' anteroom. For some reason, people preferred that one to the door off the corridor opposite the Roosevelt Room. Maybe it was more businesslike. But mainly they liked to see the President standing when the door opened, his hand extended and a smile on his face, as though he really was glad to see them. Sure, Wilbur.
   Mary Smithers from Iowa, matronly, three kids and seven grandkids, he thought, more talk about the Farm Bill. What the hell was he supposed to know about farms? the President wondered. On those rare occasions that he purchased food, he did it at the supermarket—because that's where it all came from, wasn't it? One of the things on the briefing pages for his political appearances was always the local price for bread and milk in case some local reporter tested him. And chocolate milk came from brown cows.
 
   Accordingly, Ambassador Hitch and Assistant Secretary Rutledge will be flying back to Washington for consultations," the spokesman told the audience.
   "Does this signal a break in relations with China?" a reporter asked at once.
   "Not at all. 'Consultations' means just that. We will discuss the recent developments with our representatives so that our relations with China can more speedily be brought back to what they ought to be," the spokesman replied smoothly.
   The assembled reporters didn't know what to make of that and so three more questions of virtually identical content were immediately asked, and answers of virtually identical content repeated for them.
   "He's good," Ryan said, watching the TV, which was pirating the CNN (and other) coverage off the satellites. It wasn't going out live, oddly enough, despite the importance of the news being generated.
   "Not good enough," Arnie van Damm observed. "You're going to get hit with this, too."
   "I figured. When?"
   "The next time they catch you in front of a camera, Jack."
   And he had as much chance of ducking a camera as the leadoff hitter at opening day at Yankee Stadium, the President knew. Cameras at the White House were as numerous as shotguns during duck season, and there was no bag limit here.
 
   Christ, Oleg!" It took a lot to make Reilly gasp, but this one crossed the threshold. "Are you serious?"
   "So it would appear, Mishka," Provalov answered.
   "And why are you telling me?" the American asked. Information like this was a state secret equivalent to the inner thoughts of President Grushavoy.
   "There is no hiding it from you. I assume you tell everything we do together to Washington, and it was you who identified the Chinese diplomat, for which I and my country are in your debt."
   The amusing part of that was that Reilly had darted off to track Suvorov/Koniev without a thought, just as a cop thing, to help out a brother cop. Only afterward—about a nanosecond afterward, of course—had he thought of the political implications. And he'd thought this far ahead, but only as speculation, not quite believing that it could possibly have gone this far forward.
   "Well, yes, I have to keep the Bureau informed of my operations here," the legal attache admitted, not that it was an earthshaking revelation.
   "I know that, Mishka."
   "The Chinese wanted to kill Golovko," Reilly whispered into his vodka. "Fuck."
   "My word exactly," Provalov told his American friend. "The question is—"
   "Two questions, Oleg. First, why? Second, now what?"
   "Third, who is Suvorov, and what is he up to?"
   Which was obvious, Reilly thought. Was Suvorov merely a paid agent of a foreign country? Or was he part of the KGB wing of the Russian Mafia being paid by the Chinese to do something—but what, and to what purpose?
   "You know, I've been hunting OC guys for a long time, but it never got anywhere near this big. This is right up there with all those bullshit stories about who 'really' killed Kennedy."
   Provalov's eyes looked up. "You're not saying ..."
   "No, Oleg. The Mafia isn't that crazy. You don't go around looking to make enemies that big. You can't predict the consequences, and it isn't good for business. The Mafia is a business, Oleg. They try to make money for themselves. Even their political protection is aimed only at that, and that has limits, and they know what the limits are."
   "So, if Suvorov is Mafia, then he is only trying to make money?"
   "Here it's a little different," Reilly said slowly, trying to help his brain keep up with his mouth. "Here your OC guys think more politically than they do in New York." And the reason for that was that the KGB types had all grown up in an intensely political environment. Here politics really was power in a more direct sense than it had ever been in America, where politics and commerce had always been somewhat separate, the former protecting the latter (for a fee) but also controlled by it. Here it had always been, and still remained, the other way around. Business needed to rule politics because business was the source of prosperity, from which the citizens of a country derived their comforts. Russia had never prospered, because the cart kept trying to pull the horse. The recipient of the wealth had always tried to generate that wealth– and political figures are always pretty hopeless in that department. They are only good at squandering it. Politicians live by their political theories. Businessmen use reality and have to perform in a world defined by reality, not theory. That was why even in America they understood one another poorly, and never really trusted one another.
   "What makes Golovko a target? What's the profit in killing him?" Reilly asked aloud.
   "He is the chief adviser to President Grushavoy. He's never wanted to be an elected official, and therefore cannot be a minister per se, but he has the president's ear because he is both intelligent and honest—and he's a patriot in the true sense."
   Despite his background, Reilly didn't add. Golovko was KGB, formerly a deadly enemy to the West, and an enemy to President Ryan, but somewhere along the line they'd met each other and they'd come to respect each other—even like each other, so the stories in Washington went. Reilly finished off his second vodka and waved for another. He was turning into a Russian, the FBI agent thought. It was getting to the point that he couldn't hold an intelligent conversation without a drink or two.
   "So, get him and thereby hurt your president, and thereby hurt your entire country. Still, it's one hell of a dangerous play, Oleg Gregoriyevich."
   "A very dangerous play, Mishka," Provalov agreed. "Who would do such a thing?"
   Reilly let out a long and speculative breath. "One very ambitious motherfucker." He had to get back to the embassy and light up his STU-6 in one big fucking hurry. He'd tell Director Murray, and Murray would tell President Ryan in half a New York minute. Then what? It was way the hell over his head, Mike Reilly thought.
   "Okay, you're covering this Suvorov guy."
   "We and the Federal Security Service now," Provalov confirmed.
   "They good?"
   "Very," the militia lieutenant admitted. "Suvorov can't fart without us knowing what he had to eat."
   "And you have his communications penetrated." Oleg nodded. "The written kind. He has a cell phone—maybe more than one, and covering them can be troublesome."
   "Especially if he has an encryption system on it. There's stuff commercially available now that our people have a problem with."
   "Oh?" Provalov's head came around. He was surprised for two reasons: first, that there was a reliable encryption system available for cell phones, and second, that the Americans had trouble cracking it.
   Reilly nodded. "Fortunately, the bad guys haven't found out yet." Contrary to popular belief, the Mafia wasn't all that adept at using technology. Microwaving their food was about as far as they went. One Mafia don had thought his cell phone secure because of its frequency hopping abilities, and then had entirely canceled that supposed advantage out by standing still while using it! The dunce-don had never figured that out, even after the intercept had been played aloud in Federal District Court.
   "We haven't noticed any of that yet."
   "Keep it that way," Reilly advised. "Anyway, you have a national-security investigation."
   "It's still murder and conspiracy to commit murder," Provalov said, meaning it was still his case.
   "Anything I can do?"
   "Think it over. You have good instincts for Mafia cases, and that is probably what it is."
   Reilly tossed off his last drink. "Okay. I'll see you tomorrow, right here?"
   Oleg nodded. "That is good."
   The FBI agent walked back outside and got into his car. Ten minutes later, he was at his desk. He took the plastic key from his desk drawer and inserted it into the STU, then dialed Washington.
 
   All manner of people with STU phones had access to Murray's private secure number, and so when the large system behind his desk started chirping, he just picked it up and listened to the hiss of static for thirty seconds until the robotic voice announced, "Line is secure."
   "Murray," he said.
   "Reilly in Moscow," the other voice said.
   The FBI Director checked his desk clock. It was pretty damned late there. "What's happening, Mike?" he asked, then got the word in three fast-spoken minutes.
 
   “Yeah, Ellen?" Ryan said when the buzzer went off. "The AG and the FBI Director want to come over, on something important, they said. You have an opening in forty minutes."
   "Fair enough." Ryan didn't wonder what it was about. He'd find out quickly enough. When he realized what he'd just thought, he cursed the Presidency once more. He was becoming jaded. In this job?
 
   "What the hell?" Ed Foley observed. "Seems to be solid information, too," Murray told the DCI.
   "What else do you know?"
   "The fax just came in, only two pages, and nothing much more than what I just told you, but I'll send it over to you. I've told Reilly to offer total cooperation. Anything to offer from your side?" Dan asked.
   "Nothing comes to mind. This is all news to us, Dan. My congrats to your man Reilly for turning it." Foley was an information whore, after all. He'd take from anybody.
   . "Good kid. His father was a good agent, too." Murray knew better than to be smug about it, and Foley didn't deserve the abuse. Things like this were not, actually, within CIA's purview, and not likely to be tumbled to by one of their operations.
   For his part, Foley wondered if he'd have to tell Murray about SORGE. If this was for real, it had to be known at the very highest levels of the Chinese government. It wasn't a free-lance operation by their Moscow station. People got shot for fucking around at this level, and such an operation would not even occur to communist bureaucrats, who were not the most inventive people in the world.
   "Anyway, I'm taking Pat Martin over with me. He knows espionage operations from the defensive side, and I figure I'll need the backup."
   "Okay, thanks. Let me go over the fax and I'll be back to you later today."
   He could hear the nod at the other end. "Right, Ed. See ya."
   His secretary came in thirty seconds later with a fax in a folder. Ed Foley checked the cover sheet and called his wife in from her office.