CHAPTER 15

Exploitation
   
“What's this mean, Ben?” Ryan asked, seeing a change in his morning schedule.
   “Ed and Mary Pat want to talk something over with you. They didn’t say what it was,” Goodley replied. “The Vice President can be here, too, and me, but that’s it, they requested.”
   “Some new kind of toilet paper in the Kremlin, I suppose,” POTUS said. It was a long-standing CIA joke from Ryan’s time in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. He stirred his coffee and leaned back in his comfortable chair. “Okay, what else is happening in the world, Ben?”
 
   “So, this is mao-tai?” Cardinal DiMilo asked. He didn’t add that he’d been given to understand that Baptists didn’t drink alcoholic beverages. Odd, considering that Jesus’ first public miracle had been to change water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. But Christianity had many faces. In any case, the mao-tai was vile, worse than the cheapest grappa. With advancing years, the Cardinal preferred gentler drinks. It was much easier on the stomach.
   “I should not drink this,” Yu admitted, “but it is part of my heritage.”
   “I know of no passage in Holy Scripture that prohibits this particular human weakness,” the Catholic said. And besides, wine was part of the Catholic liturgy. He saw that his Chinese host barely sipped at his tiny cup. Probably better for his stomach, too, the Italian reasoned.
   He’d have to get used to the food, too. A gourmet like many Italians, Renato Cardinal DiMilo found that the food in Beijing was not as good as he’d experienced in Rome’s numerous Chinese restaurants. The problem, he thought, was the quality of the ingredients rather than the cook. In this case, the Reverand Yu’s wife was away in Taiwan to see her sick mother, he’d said, apologizing on the Catholic’s arrival. Monsignor Schepke had taken over the serving, rather like a young lieutenant-aide serving the needs of his general, Yu had thought, watching ‘the drama play out with some amusement. The Catholics certainly had their bureaucratic ways. But this Renato fellow was a decent sort, clearly an educated man, and a trained diplomat from whom Yu realized he might learn much.
   “So, you cook for yourself. How did you learn?”
   “Most Chinese men know how. We learn from our parents as children.”
   DiMilo smiled. “I, as well, but I have not cooked for myself in years. The older I get the less they allow me to do for myself, eh, Franz?”
   “I have my duties also, Eminence,” the German answered. He was drinking the mao-tai with a little more gusto. Must be nice to have a young stomach lining, both the older men thought.
   “So, how do you find Beijing?” Yu asked.
   “Truly fascinating. We Romans think that our city is ancient and redolent with history, but Chinese culture was old before the Romans set one stone upon another. And the art we saw yesterday..
   “The jade mountain,” Schepke explained. “I spoke with the guide, but she didn’t know about the artists involved, or the time required to carve it.”
   “The names of artisans and the time they needed—these were not matters of importance to the emperors of old. There was much beauty then, yes, but much cruelty as well.”
   “And today?” Renato asked.
   “Today as well, as you know, Eminence,” Yu confirmed with a long sigh. They spoke in English, and Yu’s Oklahoma accent fascinated his visitors. “The government lacks the respect for human life, which you and I would prefer.”
   “Changing that will not be simple,” Monsignor Schepke added. The problem wasn’t limited to the communist PRC government. Cruelty had long been part of Chinese culture, to the point that someone had once said that China was too vast to be governed with kindness, an aphorism picked up with indecent haste by the left wings of the world, ignoring the explicit racism in such a statement. Perhaps the problem was that China had always been crowded, and in crowds came anger, and in anger came a callous disregard for others. Nor had religion helped. Confucius, the closest thing China had developed to a great religious leader, preached conformity as a person’s best action. While the Judeo-Christian tradition talked of transcendent values of right and wrong, and the human rights that devolved from them, China saw authority as Society, not God. For that reason, Cardinal DiMilo thought, communism had taken root here. Both societal models were alike in their absence of an absolute rule of right and wrong. And that was dangerous. In relativism lay man’s downfall, because, ultimately, if there were no absolute values, what difference was there between a man and a dog? And if there were no such difference, where was man’s fundamental dignity? Even a thinking atheist could mark religion’s greatest gift to human society: human dignity, the value placed on a single human life, the simple idea that man was more than an animal. That was the foundation of all human progress, because without it, human life was doomed to Thomas Hobbes’s model, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
   Christianity—and Judaism, and Islam, which were also religions of The Book—required merely that man believe in that which was self-evident: There was order in the universe, and that order came from a source, and that source was called God. Christianity didn’t even require that a man believe in that idea—not anymore, anyway—just that he accept the sense of it, and the result of it, which was human dignity and human progress. Was that so hard?
   It was for some. Marxism, in condemning religion as “the opiate of the people,” merely prescribed another, less effective drug—”the radiant future,” the Russians had called it, but it was a future they’d never been able to deliver. In China, the Marxists had shown the good sense to adopt some of the forms of capitalism to save their country s economy, but not to adopt the principle of human freedom that usually came along with it. That had worked to this point, DiMilo thought, only because Chinese culture had a preexisting model of conformity and acceptance of authority from above. But how long would that last? And how long could China prosper without some idea of the difference between what was right and what was wrong? Without that information, China and the Chinese were doomed to perdition. Someone had to bring the Good News of Jesus to the Chinese, because with that came not only eternal salvation, but temporal happiness as well. Such a fine bargain, and yet there were those too stupid and too blind to accept it. Mao had been one. He’d rejected all forms of religion, even Confucius and the Lord Buddha. But when he’d lain dying in his bed, what had Chairman Mao thought? To what Radiant Future had he looked forward then? What did a communist think on his deathbed? The answer to that question was something none of the three clergymen wanted to know, or to face.
   “I was disappointed to see the small number of Catholics here—not counting foreigners and diplomats, of course. How bad is the persecution?”
   Yu shrugged. “It depends on where you are, and the political climate, and the personality of the local party leadership. Sometimes they leave us alone—especially when foreigners are here, with their TV cameras. Sometimes they can become very strict, and sometimes they can harass us directly. I have been questioned many times, and been subjected to political counseling.” He looked up and smiled. “It’s like having a dog bark at you, Eminence. You need not answer back. Of course, you will be spared any of that,” the Baptist pointed out, noting DiMilo’s diplomatic status, and his resulting personal inviolability.
   The cardinal caught that reference, somewhat to his discomfort. He didn’t see his life as any more valuable than anyone else’s. Nor did he wish his faith to appear less sincere than this Chinese Protestant’s, who’d been educated at some pretentious pseudo-university in the American prairie, whereas he had acquired his knowledge in some of the most ancient and honored institutions of higher learning on the planet, whose antecedents went back to the Roman empire, and beyond that, to the chambers of Aristotle himself. If there was one vanity Renato Cardinal DiMilo possessed, it was in his education. He’d been superbly educated, and he knew it. He could discuss Plato’s Republic in Attic Greek, or the law cases of Marcus Tullius Cicero in Imperial Latin. He could debate a committed Marxist on the attributes of that political philosophy in the same language the German Marx himself had spoken—and win, because Marx had left a lot of unfilled holes in the walls of his political theories. He’d forgotten more about human nature than some psychologists knew. He was in the Vatican’s diplomatic service because he could read minds—better than that, he could read the minds of politicians and diplomats highly skilled in concealing their thoughts. He could have been a gambler of talent and riches with these skills, but instead he applied them for the Greater Glory of God.
   His only failing was that, like all men, he could not predict the future, and thus could not see the world war that this meeting would ultimately bring about.
   “So, does the government harass you?” the Cardinal asked his host.
   A shrug. “Occasionally. I propose to hold a prayer service in public to test their willingness to interfere with my human rights. There is some danger involved, of course.”
   It was a challenge skillfully delivered, and the elderly Catholic cleric rose to it: “Keep Franz and me informed, if you would.”
 
   “SONGBIRD?” Ryan asked. “What can you tell me about him?”
   “Do you really want to know, Jack?” Ed Foley asked, somewhat pointedly.
   “You telling me I ought not to know?” Ryan responded. Then he realized that Robby Jackson and Ben Goodley were here as well, and he could know things which they could not. Even at this level, there were rules of classification. The President nodded. “Okay, we’ll let that one go for now.”
 
   “The overall operation is called SORGE. That’ll change periodically,” Mary Pat told the assembled audience. Unusually, the Secret Service had been hustled out of the Oval Office for this briefing—which told the USSS a lot more than CIA would have liked—and also a special jamming system had been switched on. It would interfere with any electronic device in the room. You could see that from the TV set to the left of the President’s desk, tuned to CNN. The screen was now full of snow, but with the sound turned all the way down, there was no annoying noise to disturb the meeting. The possibility of a bug in this most secure of rooms was slight, but so great was the value of SORGE that this card was being played as well. The briefing folders had already been passed out. Robby looked up from his.
   “Notes from the Chinese Politburo? Lordy,” Vice President Jackson breathed. “Okay, no sources and methods. That’s cool with me, guys. Now, how reliable is it?”
   “For the moment, reliability is graded ‘B+’ “Mary Pat answered. “We expect to upgrade that later on. The problem is that we don’t grade ‘A’ or higher without outside confirmation, and this stuff is so deep inside that we have no other asset to verify what we have here.”
   “Oops,” Jackson observed. “So it could all be a false flag. Pretty one, I admit, but false even so.”
   “Perhaps, but unlikely. There’s stuff here that is awfully sensitive to let out voluntarily, even for a major sting operation.”
   “So I see,” Ryan partially agreed. “But I remember what Jim Greer used to say: Ain’t nothing too crazy to be true. Our fundamental problem with these guys is that their culture is so different in so many ways that they might as well be Klingons.”
   “Well, they don’t display much love for us in this,” Ben Goodley observed, flipping halfway through the briefing folder. “Jesus, this is interesting material. We going to show it to Scott Adler?”
   “That’s our recommendation,” the DCI agreed. “Adler is pretty good at figuring people out and his take on some of this—especially page five—will be very interesting. Tony Bretano, too.”
   “Okay, that’s EAGLE and THUNDER. Who else?” Ryan asked.
   “That’s all for now,” Ed Foley said, with a nod from his wife. “Mr. Pres—”
   Ryan’s eyes flared a little. “My name is...
   The DCI held up his hand. “Okay. Jack, let’s keep this one real close for a while. We’ll figure a way to launder the information so that some others can know what we’ve learned. But not how. Not ever that. SONGBIRD’S too precious an asset to lose.”
   “This is potentially right up there with CARDINAL, isn’t it?”
   “Maybe even better, Jack,” Mary Pat said. “This is like having a bug in the boardroom, and we’ve streamlined our methods on this one. We’re being very, very careful with this source."
   “Okay, what about analysts?” Ben Goodley asked. “Our best guy with the PRC is Professor Weaver up at Brown University. You know him, Ed.”
   Foley nodded. “Yeah, I know him, but let’s hold off for a while. We have a pretty good guy in-house. Let me see what he can develop for us before we start farming things out. By the way, we’re looking at something like a total of fifteen hundred printed pages from this source, plus daily information from now on.”
   Ryan looked up at that one. Daily information. How the hell had they arranged that? Back to business, he told himself. “Okay, for one thing, I want an evaluation of the Zhang Han San character,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen this bastard’s name before. He started two wars we got pulled into. What the hell is he all about?”
   “We have a psychiatrist on staff to work on that,” Mary Foley replied. After she didn’t say, we scrub this information clean of source-related material. “He does our profiling.”
   “Okay, yeah, I remember him.” Ryan nodded agreement on this point. “Anything else?”
 
   “Just the usual,” Ed Foley said as he stood. “Don’t leave these documents on your desk, okay?”
   They all nodded agreement. They all had personal safes for that purpose, and every one was wired into the Secret Service command center, and was on round-the-clock TV surveillance. The White House was a good place to store documents, and besides, the secretaries were cleared higher than God. Mary Pat left the office with a special spring in her step. Ryan waved for his Vice President to stay as the rest walked toward the West Entrance.
   “What do you think?” SWORDSMAN asked TOMCAT.
   “This looks pretty damned hot, Jack. Jesus, boy, how the hell do they get stuff like this?”
   “If they ever get around to telling me, I can’t tell you, Rob, and I’m not sure I want to know. It isn’t always pretty.”
   The retired fighter pilot agreed. “I believe it. Not quite the same as catapulting off the boat and shooting the bastard in the lips, is it?”
   “But just as important.”
   “Hey, Jack, I know. Battle of Midway, like. Joe Rochefort and his band of merry men at FRUPAC back in ‘42 saved our country a lot of hassles with our little yellow friends in WestPac when they told Nimitz what was coming.”
   “Yeah, Robby, well, looks like we have more of the same sort of friends. If there’s operational stuff in here, I want your opinion of it.”
   “I can do that already. Their army and what passes for a navy are talking in the open about how they take us on, how to counter carriers and stuff like that. It’s mostly pipe dreams and self-delusion, but my question is, why the hell are they putting this in the open? Maybe to impress the unwashed of the world—reporters and the other idiots who don’t know shit about war at sea—and maybe to impress their own people with how smart and how tough they are. Maybe to put more heat on the ROC government on Taiwan, but if they want to invade, they have something to do first, like building a real navy with real amphibious capability. But that would take ten years, and we’d probably notice all the big gray canoes in the water. They’ve got some submarines, and the Russians, of all people, are selling them hardware—just forked over a Sovremenny-class DDG, complete with Sunburn missiles, supposedly. Exactly what they want to do with them, I have no idea. It’s not the way I’d build up a navy, but they didn’t ask me for advice. What freaks me is, the Russians sold them the hardware, and they’re selling some other stuff, too. Crazy,” the Vice President concluded.
   “Tell me why,” POTUS commanded.
   “Because once upon a time a guy named Genghis Khan rode all the way to the Baltic Sea—like, all the way across Russia. The Russkies have a good sense of history, Jack. They ain’t forgot that. If I’m a Russian, what enemies do I have to worry about? NATO? The Poles? Romania? I don’t think so. But off to my southeast is a great big country with a shitload of people, a nice large collection of weapons, and a long history of killing Russians. But I was just an operations guy, and sometimes I get a little paranoid about what my counterparts in other countries might be thinking.” Robby didn’t have to add that the Russians had invented paranoia once upon a time.
 
   “This is madness!” Bondarenko swore. “There are many ways to prove Lenin was right, but this is not the one I would choose!” Vladimir Il’ych Ulyanov had once said that the time would come when the capitalist countries would bid among themselves to sell to the Soviet Union the rope with which the Soviet Union would later hang them. He hadn’t anticipated the death of the country he’d founded, and certainly not that the next Russia might be the one doing what he had predicted.
   Golovko could not disagree with his guest. He’d made a similar argument, though with fewer decibels, in the office of President Grushavoy. “Our country needs the hard currency, Gennady Iosifovich.”
   “Indeed. And perhaps someday we will also need the oil fields and the gold mines of Siberia. What will we do when the Chinks take those away from us?” Bondarenko demanded.
   “The Foreign Ministry discounts that possibility’ Sergey Nikolay’ch replied.
   “Fine. Will those foreign-service pansies take up arms if they are proven wrong, or will they wring their hands and say it isn’t their fault? I am spread too thin for this. I cannot stop a Chinese attack, and so now we sell them the T-99 tank design...
   “It will take them five years to bring about series production, and by that time we will have the T-10 in production at Chelyabinsk, will we not?”
   That the People’s Liberation Army had four thousand of the Russian-designed T-80/90 tanks was not discussed. That had happened years earlier. But the Chinese had not used the Russian-designed 115-mm gun, opting instead for the 105-mm rifled gun sold to them by Israel Defense Industries, known to America as the M-68. They came complete with three million rounds of ammunition made to American specifications, down to the depleted uranium projectiles, probably made with uranium depleted by the same reactors that made plutonium for their nuclear devices. What was it about politicians? Bondarenko wondered. You could talk and talk and talk to them, but they never listened! It had to be a Russian phenomenon, the general thought, rather than a political one. Stalin had executed the intelligence officer who’d predicted—correctly, as it turned out—the German attack of June 1941 on the Soviet Union. And that one had come within sight of Moscow. Executed him, why? Because his prediction was less pleasing than that of Levrenti Beriya, who’d had the good sense to say what Stalin had wanted to hear. And Beriya had survived being completely wrong. So much for the rewards of patriotism.
   “If we have the money for it, and if Chelyabinsk hasn’t been retooled to make fucking washing machines!” Russia had cannibalized its defense infrastructure even more quickly than America had. Now there was talk of converting the MiG airplane plants to automobile production.
 
   Would this never stop? Bondarenko thought. He had a potentially hostile nation next door, and he was years away from rebuilding the Russian Army into the shape he wished. But to do that meant asking President Grushavoy for something that he knew he couldn’t have. To build a proper army, he had to pay the soldiers a living wage, enough to attract the patriotic and adventurous boys who wanted to wear their country’s uniform for a few years, and most particularly those who found that they enjoyed uniformed life enough to make a career of it, to become sergeants, the middle-level professional soldiers without whom an army simply could not function, the sinews that held the muscles to the bone. To make that happen, a good platoon sergeant had to make almost as much money as a skilled factory worker, which was only fair, since the demands of such a man were on the same intellectual level. The rewards of a uniformed career could not be duplicated in a television plant. The comradeship, and the sheer joy of soldiering, was something to which a special sort of man responded. The Americans had such men, as did the British and the Germans, but these priceless professionals had been denied the Russian Army since the time of Lenin, the first of many Soviet leaders who’d sacrificed military efficiency in favor of the political purity the Soviet Union had insisted upon. Or something like that, Bondarenko thought. It all seemed so distant now, even to one who’d grown up within the misbegotten system.
   “General, please remember that I am your friend in the government,” Golovko reminded him. Which was just as well. The Defense Minister was—well, he spoke the right words, but he wasn’t really able to think the right thoughts. He could repeat what others told him, and that was about it. In that sense, he was the perfect politician.
   “Thank you, Sergey Nikolay’ch.” The general inclined his head with the proper respect. “Does that mean that I can count upon some of these riches that Fate has dropped into our lap?”
   “At the proper time I will make the proper recommendation to the president.”
 
   By that time, I will be retired, writing my memoirs, or whatever the hell a Russian general is supposed to do, Bondarenko told himself. But at least I can try to get the necessary programs drafted for my successors, and perhaps help choose the right man to follow me into the operations directorate. He didn’t expect to go any further than he already had. He was chief of operations (which included training) for his army, and that was as fine a goal as any man could ask for his career.
   “Thank you, Comrade Minister. I know your job is also difficult. So, is there anything I need to know about the Chinese?”
   Minister Golovko wished he could tell this general that SVR didn’t have a decent pipeline into the PRC anymore. Their man, a second-deputy minister, long in the employ of the KGB, had retired on grounds of ill health.
   But he could not make the admission that the last Russian source inside the Forbidden City was no longer operational, and with him had gone all the insights they needed to evaluate the PRC’s long-term plans and intentions. Well, there was still the Russian ambassador in Beijing, and he was no one’s fool, but a diplomat saw mainly what the host government wanted him to see. The same was true of the military, naval, and air attaches, trained intelligence officers all, but also limited to what the Chinese military wished them to see, and even that had to be reciprocated every step of the way in Moscow, as though in some elegant international waltz. No, there was no substitute for a trained intelligence officer running agents who looked inside the other government, so that he, Golovko, could know exactly what was going on and report on it to his president. It wasn’t often that Golovko had to report that he did not know enough, but it had happened in this ease, and he would not confess his shortcomings to this soldier, senior one or not.
   “No, Gennady Iosifovich, I have nothing to indicate that the Chinese seek to threaten us.”
   “Comrade Minister, the discoveries in Siberia are too vast for them not to consider the advantage to be had from seizing them. In their place, I would draw up the necessary plans. They import oil, and these new fields would obviate that necessity, and make them rich in the foreign exchange they seek. And the gold, Comrade, speaks for itself, does it not?”
   “Perhaps.” Golovko nodded. “But their economy seems healthy at the moment, and wars are not begun by those already rich.”
   “Hitler was prosperous enough in 1941. That did not prevent him from driving his army to within sight of this building,” the chief of operations for the Russian army pointed out. “If your neighbor has an apple tree, sometimes you will pick an apple even if your belly is full. Just for the taste, perhaps,” Bondarenko suggested.
   Golovko couldn’t deny the logic of that. “Gennady Josifovich, we are of a kind. We both look out for dangers even when they are not obvious. You would have made a fine intelligence officer.”
   “Thank you, Comrade Minister.” The three-star toasted his host with his almost empty vodka glass. “Before I leave my office, it is my hope to lay before my successor a plan, the accomplishment of which will make our country invulnerable to attack from any country. I know I will not be able myself to make that happen, but I will be grateful for the ability to set a firm plan in place, if our political leadership can see the merit of our ideas.” And that was the real problem, wasn’t it? The Russian army might be able to deal with external enemies. It was the internal ones which formed the really intractable problem. You usually knew where your enemy stood, because you faced them. Where your friends stood was more difficult, because they were usually behind you.
   “I will make sure you present the case yourself to the cabinet. But”—Golovko held up his hand—”you must wait for the right moment.”
   “I understand, and let us hope the Chinese allow us the time for that moment.” Golovko tossed off the last of his drink and rose. “Thanks for letting me come in to bare my heart to you, Comrade Chairman.”
 
   “So, where is he?” Provalov demanded.
   “I do not know,” Abramov replied tiredly. “We’ve identified one person who claims to know him, but our informant has no idea where he lives.”
   “Very well. What do you know?” Moscow asked St. Petersburg.
   “Our informant says that Suvorov is former KGB, RIF’d in 1996 or so, that he lives, probably, in St. Petersburg—but if that is true, he does so under an assumed name and false documents, or ‘Suvorov’ is itself a false name. I have a description. Male, fifty or so, average height and build. Thinning blond hair. Regular features. Blue eyes. Physically fit. Unmarried. Thought to frequent prostitutes. I have some people asking around those women for more information. Nothing yet,” the St. Petersburg investigator replied.
   This is amazing, Lieutenant Provalov thought. All the resources we have, and we can‘t develop a single reliable piece of information. Was he chasing ghosts? Well, he had five of those already. Avseyenko, Maria Ivanovna Sablin, a driver whose name he couldn’t remember at the moment, and the two putative Spetsnaz killers, Pyotr Alekseyevich Amalrik and Pavel Borissovich Zimyanin. Three blown up spectacularly during a morning rush hour, and two murdered in St. Petersburg after having done the job—but killed for succeeding or failing?
   “Well, let me know when you develop anything.”
   “I will do that, Oleg Gregoriyevich,” Abramov promised.
   The militia lieutenant hung up his phone and cleared his desk, putting all his “hot” files into the locked drawer, then he walked downstairs to his official car and drove to his favorite bar. Reilly was inside, and waved when he came through the door. Provalov hung up his coat on a hook and walked over to shake hands. He saw that a drink was waiting for him.
   “You are a true comrade, Mishka,” the Russian said to his American friend as he took his first slug.
   “Hey, I know the problem, pal,” the FBI agent said sympathetically.
 
   “It is this way for you as well.”
   “Hell, when I was a brand-new brick agent, I started working the Gotti case. We busted our asses bagging that lowlife. Took three juries to put him in Marion. He’s never coming back. Marion is a particularly nasty prison.” Though “nasty” in American terms was different from the Russian. Russian prisons didn’t really bear thinking about, though Reilly didn’t worry much about that. People who broke the law in any society knew about the possible consequences going in, and what happened when they got caught was their problem, not his. “So, what’s the story?”
   “This Suvorov. We can’t find him. Mishka, it is as if he doesn’t exist.”
   “Really?” It both was and was not a surprise to Reilly. The former, because Russia, like many European societies, kept track of people in ways that would have started a Second American Revolution. The cops here were supposed to know where everybody lived, a carryover from the Bad Old Days when KGB had kept a third of the population as informers on the other two-thirds. It was an uncommon situation for the local cops not to be able to find someone.
   The situation was not surprising, however, because if this Suvorov mutt really was a former KGB officer, then he’d been expertly trained to disappear, and that sort of adversary didn’t just die of the dumbs, like most American and Russian hoods did. Nor would he die from talking too much. Your average criminals acted—well, like criminals. They bragged too much, and to the wrong people, other criminals for the most part, who had the loyalty of rattlesnakes and would sell out a “friend” as readily as taking a piss. No, this Suvorov guy, if he was who and what the informants said he was, was a pro, and they made interesting game for interesting hunts, and usually long hunts at that.
   But you always got them in the end, because the cops never stopped looking, and sooner or later, he’d make a mistake, maybe not a big one, but big enough. He wouldn’t be hanging with his former buds in KGB, people who would help keep him hidden, and would only talk among themselves and then not much. No, he was in a different milieu now, not a friendly one, not a safe one, and that was just too damned bad. Reilly had occasionally felt a certain sympathy for a criminal, but never for a killer. There were some lines you just couldn’t cross.
   “He has dived into a hole and then covered it up from inside,” the Russian said, with some frustration.
   “Okay, what do we know about him?”
   Provalov related what he’d just learned. “They say they will be asking whores if they might know him.”
   “Good call.” Reilly nodded. “I bet he likes the high-end ones. Like our Miss Tanya, maybe. You know, Oleg, maybe he knew Avseyenko. Maybe he knows some of his girls.”
   “That is possible. I can have my men check them out as well.”
   “Can’t hurt,” the FBI agent agreed, waving to the bartender for a couple of refills. “You know, buddy, you’ve got yourself a real investigation happening here. I kinda' wish I was on your force to help out.”
   “You enjoy this?”
   “Bet your ass, Oleg. The harder the case, the more thrilling the chase. And it feels real good at the end when you bag the bastards. When we convicted Gotti, damn if we didn’t have one big party in Manhattan. The Teflon Don,” Reilly said, hoisting his glass, and telling the air, “Hope you like it in Marion, boy.”
   “This Gotti, he killed people, yes?” Provalov asked.
   “Oh, yeah, some himself, and others he gave the orders. His number one boy, Salvatore Gravano—Sammy the Bull, they called him—turned government witness and helped make the case for us. So then we put Sammy in the witness-protection program, and the mutt starts dealing drugs again down in Arizona. So, Sammy’s back inside. The dummy.”
   “They all are, as you say, criminals,” Provalov pointed out.
   “Yeah, Oleg, they are. They’re too stupid to go straight. They think they can outsmart us. And y’know, for a while they do. But sooner or later.. .“ Reilly took a sip and shook his head.
   “Even this Suvorov, you think?”
 
   Reilly smiled for his new friend. “Oleg, do you ever make a mistake?”
   The Russian grunted. “At least once a day.”
   “So, why do you think they’re any smarter than you are?” the FBI agent asked. “Everybody makes mistakes. I don’t care if he’s driving a garbage truck or President of the fucking United States. We all fuck up every so often. It’s just part of being human. Thing is, if you recognize that fact, you can make it a lot further. Maybe this guy’s been well trained, but we all have weaknesses, and we’re not all smart enough to acknowledge them, and the smarter we are, the less likely we are to acknowledge them.”
   “You are a philosopher,” Provalov said with a grin. He liked this American. They were of a kind, as though the gypsies had switched babies at birth or something.
   “Maybe, but you know the difference between a wise man and a fool?”
   “I am sure you will tell me.” Provalov knew how to spot pontification half a block away, and the one approaching had flashing red lights on the roof.
   “The difference between a wise man and a fool is the magnitude of his mistakes. You don’t trust a fool with anything important.” The vodka was making him wax rhapsodic, Reilly thought. “But a wise man you do, and so the fool doesn’t have the chance to make a big screw up, while a wise man does. Oleg, a private can’t lose a battle, but a general can. Generals are smart, right? You have to be real smart to be a doc, but docs kill people by accident all the time. It is the nature of man to make mistakes, and brains and training don’t matter a rat-fuck. I make ‘em. You make ‘em.” Reilly hoisted his glass again. “And so does Comrade Suvorov.” It’ll be his dick, Reilly thought. If he likes to play with hookers, it’ll be his dick that does him in. Tough luck, bro. But he wouldn’t be the first to follow his dick into trouble, Reilly knew. He probably wouldn’t be the last, either.
 
   “So did it all work?” Ming asked.
 
   “Hhhhhh?” Nomuri responded. This was strange. She was supposed to be in the afterglow period, his arm still around her, while they both smoked the usual after-sex cigarette.
   “I did what you wished with my computer. Did it work?”
   “I’m not sure,” Nomuri tried as a reply. “I haven’t checked.”
   “I do not believe that!” Ming responded, laughing. “I have thought about this. You have made me a spy!” she said, followed by a giggle.
   “I did what?”
   “You want me to make my computer accessible to you, so you can read all my notes, yes?”
   “Do you care?” He’d asked her that once before, and gotten the right answer. Would it be true now? She’d sure as hell seen through his cover story. Well, that was no particular surprise, was it? If she weren’t smart, she’d be useless as a penetration agent. But knowing what she was.., how patriotic was she? Had he read her character right? He didn’t let his body tense next to hers, remarkably enough. Nomuri congratulated himself for mastering another lesson in the duplicity business.
   A moment’s contemplation, then: “No.”
   Nomuri tried not to let his breath out in too obvious an expression of relief.
   “Well, then you need not concern yourself. From now on, you will do nothing at all.”
   “Except this?” she asked with yet another giggle.
   “As long as I continue to please you, I suppose!”
   “Master Sausage!”
   “Huh?”
   “Your sausage pleases me greatly,” Ming explained, resting her head on his chest.
   And that, Chester Nomuri thought, was sufficient to the moment.

CHAPTER 16

The Smelting of Gold
 
 Pavel Petrovich Gogol could believe his eyes, but only because he’d seen the whole Red Army armored corps on the move in the Western Ukraine and Poland, when he was a younger man. The tracked vehicles he saw now were even bigger and knocked down most of the trees, those that weren’t blown down by engineers with explosives. The short season didn’t allow the niceties of tree-felling and road-laying they used in the effete West. The survey team had found the source of the gold dust with surprising ease, and now a team of civil and military engineers was pushing a road to the site, slashing a path across the tundra and through the trees, dropping tons of gravel on the path which might someday be properly paved, though such roads were a problem in these weather conditions. Over the roads would come heavy mining equipment, and building materials for the workers who would soon make their homes in what had been “his” woods. They told him that the mine would be named in his honor. That hadn’t been worth much more than a spit. And they’d taken most of his golden wolf pelts—after paying for them and probably paying most generously, he allowed. The one thing they’d given him that he liked was a new rifle, an Austrian Steyr with a Zeiss scope in the American .338 Winchester Magnum caliber, more than ample for local game. The rifle was brand-new—he’d fired only fifteen rounds through it to make sure it was properly sighted in. The blued steel was immaculate, and the walnut stock was positively sensuous in its honeyed purity. How many Germans might he have killed with this! Gogol thought. And how many wolves and bear might he take now.
   They wanted him to leave his river and his woods. They promised him weeks on the beaches at Sochi, comfortable apartments anywhere in the country. Gogol snorted. Was he some city pansy? No, he was a man of the woods, a man of the mountains, a man feared by the wolves and the bear, and even the tigers to the south had probably heard of him. This land was his land. And truth be told, he knew no other way to live, and was too old to learn one in any case. What other men called comforts he would call annoyances, and when his time came to die, he would be content to die in the woods and let a wolf or a bear pick over his corpse. It was only fair. He’d killed and skinned enough of them, after all, and good sport was good sport.
   Well, the food they’d brought in—flown in, they’d told him—was pretty good, especially the beef, which was richer than his usual reindeer, and he had fresh tobacco for his pipe. The television reporters loved the pipe, and encouraged him to tell his story of life in the Siberian forests, and his best bear and wolf stories. But he’d never see the TV story they were doing on him; he was too far away from what they occasionally called “civilization” to have his own TV set. Still, he was careful to tell his stories carefully and clearly, so that the children and grandchildren he’d never had would see what a great man he’d been. Like all men, Gogol had a proper sense of self-worth, and he would have made a fine storyteller for any children’s school, which hadn’t occurred to any of the bureaucrats and functionaries who’d come to disturb his existence. Rather, they saw him as a TV personality, and an example of the rugged individualist whom the Russians had always worshipped on the one hand and brutally suppressed on the other.
   But the real subject of the forty-minute story that was being put together by Russian national television wasn’t really here. It was seventeen kilometers away, where a geologist tossed a gold nugget the size of his fist up and down like a baseball, though it weighed far more than the equivalent volume of iron. That was merely the biggest nugget they’d found. This deposit, the geology team explained to the cameras, was worthy of a tale from mythology, the garden, perhaps, of Midas himself. Exactly how rich it was they’d learn only from tunneling into the ground, but the chief of the geology team was willing to wager his professional reputation that it would beggar the South African mine, by far the richest found to date on the planet. Every day the tapes the cameras made were uploaded to the Russian communications satellite that spent most of its time hanging over the North Pole—much of the country is too far north to make proper use of the geosynchronous birds used by the rest of the world.
   This was not a problem for the National Security Agency. NSA has stations worldwide, and the one located at Chicksands in England took the feed of the Russian satellite and instantly cross-loaded it to an American military-communications satellite, which dispatched the signal to Fort Meade, Maryland. Agreeably, the signal was not encrypted and so could be immediately forwarded to Russian linguists for translation, and then off it went to CIA and other national assets for evaluation. As it played out, the President of the United States would see the footage a week before the average Russian citizen.
   “Damn, who is that guy, Jim Bridger?” Jack asked.
   “His name is Pavel Petrovich Gogol. He’s the guy credited with discovering the gold deposit. See,” Ben Goodley said. The camera took in the row of gilded wolf pelts.
   “Damn, those could be hung in the Smithsonian... like something out of a George Lucas movie... SWORDSMAN observed.
   “Or you could buy one for your wife,” Goodley suggested.
   POTUS shook his head. “Nah... but.., maybe if it was a gilded sable coat.., you think the voters could handle it?”
   “I think I defer on such questions to Mr. van Damm,” the National Security Adviser said after a moment’s consideration.
   “Yeah, might be fun to see him have a cow right here in the Oval Office. This tape isn’t classified, is it?”
   “Yes, it is, but only ‘confidential.’”
   “Okay, I want to show this one to Cathy tonight.” That level of classification wouldn’t faze anybody, not even a major city newspaper.
 
   “You want one with subtitles or a voice-over translation?”
   “We both hate subtitles,” Jack informed his aide, with a look.
   “I’ll have Langley get it done for you, then,” Goodley promised.
   “She’ll flip out when she sees that pelt.” With the money from his investment portfolio, Ryan had become a connoisseur of fine jewelry and furs. For the former, he had an arrangement with Blickman’s, a very special firm in Rockefeller Center. Two weeks before the previous Christmas, one of their salespeople had come by train to Washington, accompanied by two armed guards, who hadn’t been allowed into the White House proper—the outside guards had gone slightly nuts on learning that armed men were on campus, but Andrea Price-O’Day had smoothed that over—and shown the President about five million dollars’ worth of estate jewelry, and some pieces newly made just across the street from their office, some of which Ryan had purchased. His reward had been to see Cathy’s eyes pop nearly out of her head under the Christmas tree, and lament the fact that all she’d gotten him was a nice set of Taylor golf clubs. But that was fine with SWORDSMAN. To see his wife smile on Christmas morning was as fine a prize as he expected in life. Besides, it was proof that he had taste in jewelry, one of the better things for a man to have—at least in his woman’s eyes. But damn, if he could have gotten her one of those wolf-fur coats... could he cut a deal with Sergey Golovko? Jack wondered briefly. But where the hell could you wear such a thing? He had to be practical.
   “Would look nice in the closet,” Goodley agreed, seeing the distant look in his boss’s eyes.
   Color would go so nice with her butter-blond hair Ryan mused on for a few more seconds, then shook his head to dismiss the thought.
   “What else today?”
   “SORGE has developed new information. It’s being couriered down even as we speak.”
 
   “Important?”
   “Mrs. Foley didn’t say so, but you know how it works.”
   “Oh, yeah, even the minor stuff fits together into a real pretty picture when you need it.” The major download still sat in his private safe. The sad truth was that while he did, technically, have the time to read it, that would have entailed taking time away from his family, and it would have had to have been really important for the President to do that.
 
   “So, what will the Americans do?” Fang asked Zhang.
   “On the trade issue? They will, finally, bow to the inevitable, and grant us most-favored-nation status and remove their objection to our full entry into the World Trade Organization,” the minister replied.
   “None too soon,” Fang Gan observed.
   “That is true,” Zhang Han San agreed. The financial conditions in the PRC had been well concealed to this point, which was one advantage of the communist form of government, both ministers would have agreed, if they had ever considered another form of government. The cold truth of the matter was that the PRC was nearly out of foreign exchange, having spent it mainly on armaments and arms-related technology all over the world. Only incidental goods had come from America—mainly computer chips, which could be used in nearly any sort of mechanical contrivance. The overtly military material they’d purchased came most often from Western Europe, and sometimes from Israel. America sold what arms it released to this part of the world to the renegades on Taiwan, who paid cash, of course. That was like a mosquito bite to the mainland regime, not large, not life-threatening, but an annoyance that they continuously scratched at, in the process making it worse instead of better. There were over a billion—a thousand million—people in mainland China, and less than thirty million on the island across the strait. The misnamed Republic of China used its people well, producing more than a quarter of the goods and services the PRC turned out in a given year with forty times as many workers and peasants. However, while the mainland coveted the goods and services and the riches that resulted, they did not covet the political and economic system that made it possible. Their system was far superior, of course, because theirs was the better ideology. Mao himself had said so.
   Neither of these two Politburo members, nor any of the others, reflected much on the objective realities at hand. They were as certain in their beliefs as any Western clergyman was in his. They even ignored the self-evident fact that what prosperity the People’s Republic possessed came from capitalist enterprise allowed by previous rulers, often over the screams and howls of other ministerial-rank politicians. The latter contented themselves by denying political influence to the people who were enriching their country, confident that this situation would go on forever, and that those businessmen and industrialists would be satisfied to make their money and live in relative luxury while they, the political theorists, continued to manage the nation’s affairs. After all, the weapons and the soldiers belonged to them, didn’t-they? And power still grew out of the barrel of a gun.
   “You are certain of this?” Fang Gan asked.
   “Yes, Comrade, I am quite certain. We have been ‘good’ for the Yankees, haven’t we? We have not rattled our saber at the Taiwanese bandits lately, have we?”
   “What of American trade complaints?”
   “Do they not understand business?” Zhang asked grandly. “We sell goods to them because of their quality and price. We shop the same way. Yes, I admit, their Boeing airplane company makes fine airplanes, but so does Airbus in Europe, and the Europeans have been more... accommodating to us politically. America rants on about opening our markets to their goods, and we do this—slowly, of course. We need to keep the surplus they so kindly give us, and spend it on items of importance to us. Next, we will expand our automobile production and enter their auto market, as the Japanese once did. In five years, Fang, we will be taking another ten billion dollars from America annually– and that, my friend, is a very conservative estimate.”
   “You think so?”
 
   An emphatic nod. “Yes! We will not make the mistake the Japanese made early on, selling ugly little cars. We are already looking for American styling engineers who will help us design automobiles which are aesthetically pleasing to the white devils.”
   “If you say so.”
   “When we have the money we need to build up our military, we will be the world’s leading power in every respect. Industrially, we will lead the world. Militarily, we are at the center of the world.”
   “I fear these plans are too ambitious,” Fang said cautiously. “They will take more years than we have to implement in any case, but what legacy will we leave to our country if we point her on a erroneous path?”
   “What error is this, Fang?” Zhang asked. “Do you doubt our ideas?”
   Always that question, Fang thought with an inward sigh. “I remember when Deng said, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.’ To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: ‘What emperor said that?”’
   “But it does matter, my old friend, and well you know it.”
   “That is true,” Fang agreed with a submissive nod, not wanting a confrontation this late in the day, not when he had a headache. Age had made Zhang even more ideologically pure than he’d been in his youth, and it hadn’t tempered his imperial ambition. Fang sighed once more. He was of a mind to set the issue aside. It wasn’t worth the trouble. Though he’d mention it just once more, to cover his political backside.
   “What if they don’t?” Fang asked finally.
   “What?”
   “What if they don’t go along? What if the Americans are troublesome on the trade issue?”
   “They will not be,” Zhang assured his old friend.
   “But if they are, Comrade, what then will we do? What are our options?”
   “Oh, I suppose we could punish with one hand and encourage with the other, cancel some purchases from America and then inquire about making some other ones. It’s worked before many times,” Zhang assured his guest. “This President Ryan is predictable. We need merely control the news. We will give him nothing to use against us.”
   Fang and Zhang continued their discussion into other issues, until the latter returned to his office, where, again, he dictated his notes of the discussion to Ming, who then typed them into her computer. The minister considered inviting her to his apartment, but decided against it. Though she’d become somewhat more attractive in the preceding weeks, catching his eye with her gentle smiles in the outer office, it had been a long day for him, and he was too tired for it, enjoyable though it often was with Ming. Minister Fang had no idea that his dictation would be in Washington, D.C., in less than three hours.
 
   “What do you think, George?”
   “Jack,” TRADER began, “what the hell is this, and how the hell did we get it?”
   “George, this is an internal memorandum—well, of sorts—from the government of the People’s Republic of China. How we got it, you do not, repeat, not need to know.”
   The document had been laundered—scrubbed—better than Mafia income. All the surnames had been changed, as had the syntax and adjectives, to disguise patterns of speech. It was thought—hoped would be a better term– that even those whose discourse was being reported would not have recognized their own words. But the content had been protected—even improved, in fact, since the nuances of Mandarin had been fully translated in to American English idiom. That had been the hardest part. Languages do not really translate into one another easily or well. The denotations of words were one thing. The connotations were another, and these never really paralleled from one tongue to another. The linguists employed by the intelligence services were among the best in the country, people who regularly read poetry, and sometimes published journal pieces, under their own names, so that they could communicate their expertise in—and indeed, love of—their chosen foreign language with others of a similar mind. What resulted were pretty good translations, Ryan thought, but he was always a little wary of them.
   “These cocksuckers! They’re talking about how they plan to fuck us over.” For all his money, George Winston retained the patois of his working-class origins.
   “George, it’s business, not personal,” the President tried as a tension-release gambit.
   The Secretary of the Treasury looked up from the briefing document. “Jack, when I ran Columbus Group, I had to regard all of my investors as my family, okay? Their money had to be as important to me as my money. That was my professional obligation as an investment counselor.”
   Jack nodded. “Okay, George. That’s why I asked you into the cabinet. You’re honest.”
   “Okay, but now, I’m Sec-fucking-Treas, okay? That means that every citizen in our country is part of my family, and these Chink bastards are planning to fuck with my country—all those people out there”—Secretary Winston waved toward the thick windows of the Oval Office—”the ones who trust us to keep the economy leveled out. So, they want MFN, do they? They want into the WTO, do they? Well ,fuck them!”
   President Ryan allowed himself an early-morning laugh, wondering if the Secret Service detail had heard George’s voice, and might now be looking through the spy holes in the door to see what the commotion was. “Coffee and croissants, George. The grape jelly is Smuckers, even.”
   TRADER stood and walked around the couch, tossing his head forcefully like a stallion circling a mare in heat. “Okay, Jack, I’ll cool down, but you’re used to this shit, and I’m not.” He paused and sat back down. “Oh, okay, up on The Street we trade jokes and stories, and we even plot a little bit, but deliberately fucking people over—no! I’ve never done that! And you know what’s worst?”
   “What’s that, George?”
 
   “They’re stupid, Jack. They think they can mess with the marketplace according to their little political theories, and it’ll fall into line like a bunch of soldiers right out of boot camp. These little bastards couldn’t run a Kmart and show a profit, but they let them dick around with a whole national economy—and then they want to dick with ours, too.”
   “Got it all out of your system?”
   “Think this is funny?” Winston asked crossly.
   “George, I’ve never seen you get this worked up. I’m surprised by your passion.
   “Who do you think I am, Jay Gould?”
   “No,” Ryan said judiciously. “I was thinking more of J. P. Morgan.” The remark had the desired effect. SecTreas laughed.
   “Okay, you got me there. Morgan was the first actual Chairman of the Fed, and he did it as a private citizen, and did it pretty well, but that’s probably an institutional function, ‘cuz there ain’t that many J. P. Morgans waiting around on deck. Okay, Mr. President, sir, I am calmed down. Yes, this is business, not personal. And our reply to this miserable business attitude will be business, too. The PRC will not get MFN. They will not get into the WTO—as a practical matter, they don’t deserve it yet anyway, based on the size of their economy. And, I think we rattle the Trade Reform Act at them nice and hard. Oh, there’s one other thing, and I’m surprised it’s not in here,” Winston said, pointing down at the briefing sheet.
   “What’s that?”
   “We can get ‘em by the short hairs pretty easy, I think. CIA doesn’t agree, but Mark Gant thinks their foreign exchange account’s a little thin.”
   “Oh?” the President asked, stirring his coffee.
   Winston nodded emphatically. “Mark’s my tech-weenie, remember. He’s very good at modeling stuff on the computers. I’ve set him up with his own little section to keep an eye on various things. Pulled the professor of economics out of Boston University to work there, Morton Silber, another good man with the microchips. Anyway, Mark’s been looking at the PRC, and he thinks they’re driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon because they’ve been pissing away their money, mainly on military hardware and heavy-manufacturing equipment, like to make tanks and things. It’s a repeat of the old communist stuff, they have a fixation on heavy industry. They are really missing the boat on electronics. They have little companies manufacturing computer games and stuff, but they’re not applying it at home, except for that new computer factory they set up that’s ripping off Dell.”
   “So you think we ought to shove that up their ass at the trade negotiations?”
   “I’m going to recommend it to Scott Adler at lunch this afternoon, as a matter of fact,” SecTreas agreed. “They’ve been warned, but this time we’re going to press it hard.”
   “Back to their foreign exchange account. How bad is it?”
   “Mark thinks they’re down to negative reserves.”
   “In the hole? For how much?” POTUS asked.
   “He says at least fifteen billion, floated with paper out of German banks for the most part, but the Germans have kept it quiet—and we’re not sure why. It could be a normal transaction, but either the Germans or the PRC wants to keep it under wraps.”
   “Wouldn’t be the Germans, would it?” Ryan asked next.
   “Probably not. It makes their banks look good. And, yeah, that leaves the Chinese covering it up.”
   “Any way to confirm that?”
   “I have some friends in Germany. I can ask around, or have a friend do it for me. Better that way, I guess. Everybody knows I’m a government employee now, and that makes me sinister,” Winston observed with a sly grin. “Anyway, I am having lunch with Scott today. What do I tell him about the trade negotiations?’
   Ryan thought about that for several seconds. This was one of those moments—the frightening ones, as he thought of them—when his words would shape the policy of his own country, and, possibly, others as well. It was easy to be glib or flip, to say the first thing that popped into his mind, but, no, he couldn’t do that. Moments like this were too important, too vast in their potential consequences, and he couldn’t allow himself to make government policy on a whim, could he? He had to think the matter through, quickly perhaps, but through.
   “We need China to know that we want the same access to their markets that we’ve given them to ours, and that we won’t tolerate their stealing products from American companies without proper compensation. George, I want the playing field level and fair for everyone. If they don’t want to play that way, we start hurting them.”
   “Fair enough, Mr. President. I will pass that message along to your Secretary of State. Want I should deliver this, too?” Winston asked, holding up his SORGE briefing sheet.
   “No, Scott gets his own version of it. And, George, be very, very careful with that. If the information leaks, a human being will lose his life,” SWORDSMAN told TRADER, deliberately disguising the source as a man, and therefore deliberately misleading his Secretary of the Treasury. But that, too, was business, and not personal.
   “It goes into my confidential files.” Which was a pretty secure place, they both knew. “Nice reading the other guy’s mail, isn’t it?”
   “Just about the best intelligence there is,” Ryan agreed.
   “The guys at Fort Meade, eh? Tapping into somebody’s cell phone via satellite?”
   “Sources and methods—you really don’t want to know that, George. There’s always the chance that you’ll spill it to the wrong person by mistake, and then you have some guy’s life on your conscience. Something to be avoided, trust me.”
   “I hear you, Jack. Well, I have a day to start. Thanks for the coffee and the pastry, boss.”
   “Any time, George. Later.” Ryan turned to his appointment calendar as the Secretary walked out the corridor door, from which he’d go downstairs, cross outside because the West Wing wasn’t directly connected to the White House proper, dart back inside, and head off into the tunnel leading to Treasury.
 
   Outside Ryan’s office, the Secret Service detail went over the appointment list also, but their copy also included the results of a National Crime Information Computer check, to make sure that no convicted murderer was being admitted into the Sanctum Sanctorum of the United States of America.

CHAPTER 17

The Coinage of Gold
   
Scott Adler was regarded as too young and inexperienced for the job, but that judgment came from would-be political appointees who’d schemed their way to near-the-top, whereas Adler had been a career foreign-service officer since his graduation from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy twenty-six years earlier. Those who’d seen him work regarded him as a very astute diplomatic technician. Those who played cards with him—Adler liked to play poker before a major meeting or negotiation—thought he was one very lucky son of a bitch.
   His seventh-floor office at the State Department building was capacious and comfortable. Behind his desk was a credenza covered with the usual framed photographs of spouse, children, and parents. He didn’t like wearing his suit jacket at his desk, as he found it too confining for comfort. In this he’d outraged some of the senior State Department bureaucrats, who thought this an entirely inappropriate informality. He did, of course, don the jacket for important meetings with foreign dignitaries, but he didn’t think internal meetings were important enough to be uncomfortable for.
   That suited George Winston, who tossed his coat over a chair when he came in. Like himself, Scott Adler was a working guy, and those were the people with whom
   Winston was most comfortable. He might be a career government puke, but the son of a bitch had a work ethic, which was more than he could say for too many of the people in his own department. He was doing his best to weed the drones out, but it was no easy task, and civil-service rules made firing unproductive people a non-trivial exercise.
   “Have you read the Chinese stuff?” Adler asked, as soon as the lunch tray was on the table.
   “Yeah, Scott. I mean, holy shit, fella,” TRADER observed to EAGLE.
   “Welcome to the club. The intelligence stuff we get can be very interesting.” The State Department had its own spook service, called Intelligence and Research, or I&R, which, while it didn’t exactly compete with CIA and the other services, occasionally turned up its own rough little diamonds from the thick diplomatic mud. “So, what do you think of our little yellow brothers?”
   Winston managed not to growl. “Buddy, I might not even eat their goddamned food anymore.”
   “They make our worst robber barons look like Mother Teresa. They’re conscienceless motherfuckers, George, and that’s a fact.” Winston immediately started liking Adler more. A guy who talked like this had real possibilities. Now it was his turn to be coldly professional to counterpoint Adler’s working-class patois.
   “They’re ideologically driven, then?”
   “Totally—well, maybe with a little corruption thrown in, but remember, they figure that their political astuteness entitles them to live high on the hog, and so to them it’s not corruption at all. They just collect tribute from the peasants, and ‘peasant’ is a word they still use over there.”
   “In other words, we’re dealing with dukes and earls?”
   The Secretary of State nodded. “Essentially, yes. They have an enormous sense of personal entitlement. They are not used to hearing the word ‘no’ in any form, and as a result they don’t always know what to do when they do hear it from people like me. That’s why they’re often at a disadvantage in negotiations—at least, when we play hardball with them. We haven’t done much of that, but last year after the Airbus shoot-down I came on a little strong, and then we followed up with official diplomatic recognition of the ROC government on Taiwan. That really put the PRC noses seriously out of joint, even though the ROC government hasn’t officially declared its independence.”
   “What?” Somehow SecTreas had missed that.
   “Yeah, the people on Taiwan play a pretty steady and reasonable game. They’ve never really gone out of their way to offend the mainland. Even though they have embassies all over the world, they’ve never actually proclaimed the fact that they’re an independent nation. That would flip the Beijing Chinese out. Maybe the guys in Taipei think it would be bad manners or something. At the same time, we have an understanding that Beijing knows about. If somebody messes with Taiwan, Seventh Fleet comes over to keep an eye on things, and we will not permit a direct military threat to the Republic of China government. The PRC doesn’t have enough of a navy to worry our guys that much, and so all that flies back and forth, really, is words.” Adler looked up from his sandwich. “Sticks and stones, y’know?”
   “Well, I had breakfast with Jack this morning, and we talked about the trade talks.”
   “And Jack wants to play a little rougher?” SecState asked. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Ryan had always preferred fair play, and that was often a rare commodity in the intercourse among nation-states.
   “You got it’ Winston confirmed around a bite of his sandwich. One thing about working-class people like Adler, the SecTreas thought, they knew what a proper lunch was. He was so tired of fairyfied French food for lunch. Lunch was supposed to be a piece of meat with bread wrapped around it. French cuisine was just fine, but for dinner, not for lunch.
   “How rough?”
   “We get what we want. We need them to get accustomed to the idea that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them.”
   “That’s a tall order, George. If they don’t want to listen?”
   “Knock louder on the door, or on their heads. Scott, you read the same document this morning I did, right?”
   “Yeah,” SecState confirmed.
   “The people they’re cheating out of their jobs are American citizens.”
   “I know that. But what you have to remember is that we can’t dictate to a sovereign country. The world doesn’t work that way.”
   “Okay, fine, but we can tell them that they can’t dictate trade practices to us, either.”
   “George, for a long time America has taken a very soft line on these issues.”
   “Maybe, but the Trade Reform Act is now law—”
   “Yeah, I remember. I also remember how it got us into a shooting war,” Adler reminded his guest.
   “We won. I remember that, too. Maybe other people will as well. Scott, we’re running a huge trade deficit with the Chinese. The President says that has to stop. I happen to agree. If we can buy from them, then they damned well have to buy from us, or we buy our chopsticks and teddy bears elsewhere.”
   “There are jobs involved,” Adler warned. “They know how to play that card. They cancel contracts and stop buying our finished goods, and then some of our people lose their jobs, too.”
   “Or, if we succeed, then we sell more finished goods to them, and our factories have to hire people to make them. Play to win, Scott,” Winston advised.
   “I always do, but this isn’t a baseball game with rules and fences. It’s like racing a sailboat in the fog. You can’t always see your adversary, and you can damned near never see the finish line.”
   “I can buy you some radar, then. How about I give you one of my people to help out?”
   “Who?”
   “Mark Gant. He’s my computer whiz. He really knows the issues from a technical, monetary point of view.”
   Adler thought about that. State Department had always been weak in that area. Not too many business-savvy people ended up in the Foreign Service, and learning it from books wasn’t the same as living it out in the real world, a fact that too many State Department “professionals” didn’t always appreciate as fully as they should.
   “Okay, send him over. Now, just how rough are we supposed to play this?”
   “Well, I guess you’ll need to talk that one over with Jack, but from what he told me this morning, we want the playing field leveled out.”
   An easy thing to say, Adler thought, but less easy to accomplish. He liked and admired President Ryan, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that SWORDSMAN was not the most patient guy in the world, and in diplomacy, patience was everything—hell, patience was just about the only thing. “Okay,” he said, after a moment’s reflection. “I’ll talk it over with him before I tell my people what to say. This could get nasty. The Chinese play rough.”
   “Life’s a bitch, Scott,” Winston advised.
   SecState smiled. “Okay, duly noted. Let me see what Jack says. So, how’s the market doing?”
   “Still pretty healthy. Price/earnings ratios are still a little outrageous, but profits are generally up, inflation is under control, and the investment community is nice and comfy. The Fed Chairman is keeping a nice, even strain on monetary policy. We’re going to get the changes we want in the tax code. So, things look pretty good. It’s always easier to steer the ship in calm seas, y’know?”
   Adler grimaced. “Yeah, I’ll have to try that sometime.” But he had marching orders to lay on a typhoon. This would get interesting.
 
   “So, how’s readiness?” General Diggs asked his assembled officers.
   “Could be better,” the colonel commanding 1st Brigade admitted. “We’ve been short lately on funds for training. We have the hardware, and we have the soldiers, and we spend a lot of time in the simulators, but that’s not the same as going out in the dirt with our tracks.” There was general nodding on that point.
   “It’s a problem for me, sir,” said Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Giusti, who commanded 1st Squadron, 4th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Known within the Army as the Quarter Horse for the lst/4th unit designator, it was the division reconnaissance screen, and its commander reported directly to the commanding general of First Tanks instead of through a brigade commander. “I can’t get my people out, and it’s hard to train for reconnaissance in the kazerne. The local farmers get kinda irate when we crunch through their fields, and so we have to pretend we can do recon from hard-surface roads. Well, sir, we can’t, and that bothers me some.”
   There was no denying the fact that driving armored vehicles across a cornfield was tough on the corn, and while the U.S. Army trailed every tactical formation with a Hummer whose passengers came with a big checkbook to pay for the damage, the Germans were a tidy people, and Yankee dollars didn’t always compensate for the suddenly untidy fields. It had been easier when the Red Army had been right on the other side of the fence, threatening death and destruction on West Germany, but Germany was now one sovereign country, and the Russians were now on the far side of Poland, and a lot less threatening than they’d once been. There were a few places where large formations could exercise, but those were as fully booked as the prettiest debutante’s dance card at the cotillion, and so the Quarter Horse spent too much time in simulators, too.
   “Okay,” Diggs said. “The good news is that we’re going to profit from the new federal budget. We have lots more funds to train with, and we can start using them in twelve days. Colonel Masterman, do you have some ways for us to spend it?”
   “Well, General, I think I might come up with something. Can we pretend that it’s nineteen-eighty-three again?” At the height of the Cold War, Seventh Army had trained to as fine an edge as any army in history, a fact ultimately demonstrated in Iraq rather than in Germany, but with spectacular effect. Nineteen eighty-three had been the year the increased funding had first taken real effect, a fact noted fully by the KGB and GRU intelligence officers, who’d thought until that time that the Red Army might have had a chance to defeat NATO. By 1984, even the most optimistic Russian officers fell off that bandwagon for all time. If they could reestablish that training regimen, the assembled officers all knew they’d have a bunch of happy soldiers, because, though training is hard work, it is what the troops had signed up for. A soldier in the field is most often a happy soldier.
   “Colonel Masterman, the answer to your question is, Yes. Back to my original question. How’s readiness?”
   “We’re at about eighty-five percent,” 2nd Brigade estimated. “Probably ninety or so for the artillery—”
   “Thank you, Colonel, and I agree,” the colonel commanding divisional artillery interjected.
   “But we all know how easy life is for the cannoncockers,” 2nd Brigade added as a barb.
   “Aviation?” Diggs asked next.
   “Sir, my people are within three weeks of being at a hundred percent. Fortunately, we don’t squash anybody’s corn when we’re up practicing. My only complaint is that it’s too easy for my people to track tanks on the ground if they’re road-bound, and a little more realistic practice wouldn’t hurt, but, sir, I’ll put my aviators up against anyone in this man’s army, especially my Apache drivers.” The “snake” drivers enjoyed a diet of raw meat and human babies. The problems they’d had in Yugoslavia a few years earlier had alarmed a lot of people, and the aviation community had cleaned up its act with alacrity.
   “Okay, so you’re all in pretty good shape, but you won’t mind sharpening the edge up a little, eh?” Diggs asked, and got the nods he expected. He’d read up on all his senior officers on the flight across the pond. There was little in the way of dead wood here. The Army had less trouble than the other services in holding on to good people. The airlines didn’t try to hire tank commanders away from 1st Armored, though they were always trying to steal fighter and other pilots from the Air Force, and while police forces loved to hire experienced infantrymen, his division had only about fifteen hundred of them, which was the one structural weakness in an armored division: not enough people with rifles and bayonets. An American tank division was superbly organized to take ground—to immolate everyone who happened to be on real estate they wanted—but not so well equipped to hold the ground they overran. The United States Army had never been an army of conquest. Indeed, its ethos has always been liberation, and part and parcel of that was the expectation that the people who lived there would be of assistance, or at least show gratitude for their deliverance, rather than hostility. It was so much a part of the American military’s history that its senior members rarely, if ever, thought about other possibilities. Vietnam was too far in the past now. Even Diggs had been too young for that conflict, and though he’d been told how lucky he was to have missed it, it was something he almost never thought about. Vietnam had not been his war, and he didn’t really want to know about light infantry in the jungle. He was a cavalryman, and his idea of combat was tanks and Bradleys on open ground.
   “Okay, gentlemen. I’ll want to meet with all of you individually in the next few days. Then I need to come out and see your outfits. You will find that I’m a fairly easy guy to work for”—by which he meant that he wasn’t a screamer, as some general officers were; he demanded excellence as much as anyone else, but he didn’t think ripping a man’s head off in public was a good way to achieve it—”and I know you’re all pretty good. In six months or less, I want this division ready to deal with anything that might come down the road. I mean anything at all.”
   Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments who’d fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as “poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches” who’d been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.
   It wasn’t so much that soldiers lusted for combat, just that they often felt like football players who practiced hard but never actually got to play for points. Intellectually, they knew that combat was the game of death, not football, but that was too theoretical for most of them. The tankers fired their practice rounds, and if the pop-up targets were steel, there was the satisfaction of seeing sparks from the impact, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing the turret pop off the target atop a column of flame and smoke.., and knowing that the lives of three or four people had been extinguished like a birthday-cake candle in front of a five-year-old. The veterans of the Second Persian Gulf War did occasionally talk about what it was like to see the results of their handiwork, usually with a “Jesus, it was really something awful to see, bro,” but that was as far as it went. For soldiers, killing wasn’t really murder once you stepped back from it; they’d been the enemy, and both had played the game of death on the same playing field, and one side had won, and the other side had lost, and if you weren’t willing to run that risk, well, don’t put the uniform on, y’know? Or, “Train better, asshole, cuz we be serious out here.” And that was the other reason soldiers liked to train. It wasn’t just interesting and fairly enjoyable hard work. It was life insurance if the game ever started for real, and soldiers, like gamblers, like to hold good cards.
   Diggs adjourned the meeting, waving for Colonel Masterman to stay behind.
   “Well, Duke?”
   “I’ve been nosing around. What I’ve seen is pretty good, sir. Giusti is especially good, and he’s always bitching about training time. I like that.”
   “So do I,” Diggs agreed at once. “What else?”
   “Like the man said, artillery is in very good shape, and your maneuver brigades are doing okay, considering the lack of field time. They might not like using the sims all that much, but they are making good use of them. They’re about twenty percent off where we were in the Tenth Cay down in the Negev playing with the Israelis, and that isn’t bad at all. Sir, you give me three or four months in the field, and they’ll be ready to take on the world.”
   “Well, Duke, I’ll write you the check next week. Got your plans ready?”
   “Day after tomorrow. I’m taking some helicopter rides to scout out the ground we can use and what we can’t. There’s a German brigade says they’re eager to play aggressor for us.”
   “They any good?”
   “They claim to be. I guess we’ll just have to see. I recommend we send Second Brigade out first. They’re a little sharper than the other two. Colonel Lisle is our kind of colonel.”
   “His package looks pretty good. He’ll get his star next go-round.”
   “About right,” Masterman agreed. And what about my star? he couldn’t ask. He figured himself a pretty good bet, but you never really knew. Oh, well, at least he was working for a fellow cavalryman.
   “Okay, show me your plans for Second Brigade’s next adventure in the farmland.., tomorrow?”
   “The broad strokes, yes, sir.” Masterman bobbed his head and walked off toward his office.
 
   “How rough?” Cliff Rutledge asked.
   “Well,” Adler replied, “I just got off the phone with the President, and he says he wants what he wants and it’s our job to get it for him.”
   “That’s a mistake, Scott,” the Assistant Secretary of State warned.
   “Mistake or not, we work for the President.”
   “I suppose so, but Beijing’s been pretty good about not tearing us a new asshole over Taiwan. This might not be the right time for us to press on them so hard.”
   “Even as we speak, American jobs are being lost because of their trade policy,” Adler pointed out. “When does enough become too much?”
   “I guess Ryan decides that, eh?”
   “That’s what the Constitution says.-
   “And you want me to meet with them, then?”
   SecState nodded. “Correct. Four days from now. Put your position paper together and run it past me before we deliver it, but I want them to know we’re not kidding. The trade deficit has to come down, and it has to come down soon. They can’t make that much money off us and spend it somewhere else.”
   “But they can’t buy military hardware from us,” Rutledge observed.
   “What do they need all that hardware for?” Scott Adler asked rhetorically. “What external enemies do they have?”
   “They’ll say that their national security is their affair.”
   “And we reply that our economic security is our affair, and they’re not helping.” That meant observing to the PRC that it looked as though they were preparing to fight a war—but against whom, and was that a good thing for the world? Rutledge would ask with studied sangfroid.
   Rutledge stood. “Okay, I can present our case. I’m not fully comfortable with it, but, well, I suppose I don’t have to be, do I?”
   “Also correct.” Adler didn’t really like Rutledge all that much. His background and advancement had been more political than properly earned. He’d been very tight with former Vice President Kealty, for example, but after that incident had settled out, Cliff had dusted off his coattails with admirable speed. He would probably not get another promotion. He’d gone as far as one could go without really serious political ties—say a teaching position at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where one taught and became a talking head on the PBS evening news hour and waited to be noticed by the right political hopeful. But that was pure luck. Rutledge had come further than actual merit could justify, but with it came a comfortable salary and a lot of prestige on the Washington cocktail-party circuit, where he was on most of the A lists. And that meant that when he left government service, he’d increase his income by an order of magnitude or so with some consulting firm or other. Adler knew he could do the same, but probably wouldn’t. He’d probably take over the Fletcher School at Tufts and try to pass along what he’d learned to a new generation of would-be diplomats. He was too young for real retirement, though there was little in the way of a government afterlife from being Secretary of State, and academia wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, he’d get to do the odd consulting job, and do op-ed pieces for the newspapers, where he would assume the role of elder-statesman sage.
   “Okay, let me get to work.” Rutledge walked out and turned left to head to his seventh-floor office.
   Well, this was a plum, the Assistant Secretary thought, even if it was the wrong plum. The Ryan guy was not what he thought a president should be. He thought international discourse was about pointing guns at people’s heads and making demands, instead of reasoning with them. Rutledge’s way took longer, but was a lot safer. You had to give something to get something. Well, sure, there wasn’t much left to give the PRC, except maybe renouncing America’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. It wasn’t hard to understand the reason they’d done it, but it had still been a mistake. It made the PRC unhappy, and you couldn’t let some damned-fool “principle” get in the way of international reality. Diplomacy, like politics—another area in which Ryan was sadly lacking—was a practical business. There were a billion people in the People’s Republic, and you had to respect that. Sure, Taiwan had a democratically elected government and all that, but it was still a breakaway province of China, and that made it an internal matter. Their civil war was a fifty-plus-year affair, but Asia was a place where people took the long-term view.
   Hmm, he thought, sitting down at his desk. We want what we want, and we ‘re going to get what we want... Rutledge took out a legal pad and leaned back in his chair to make some notes. It might be the wrong policy. It might be dumb policy. It might be policy he disagreed with. But it was policy, and if he ever wanted to be kicked upstairs—actually to a different office on the same floor—to Undersecretary of State, he had to present the policy as though it were his own personal passion. It was like being a lawyer, Rutledge thought. They had to argue dumb cases all the time, didn’t they? That didn’t make them mercenaries. It made them professionals, and he was a professional.
   And besides, he’d never been caught. One thing about Ed Kealty, he’d never told anybody how Rutledge had tried to help him be President. Duplicitous he might have been toward the President, but he’d been loyal to his own people about it, as a politician was supposed to be. And that Ryan guy, smart as he might have been, he’d never caught on. So there, Mr. President, Rutledge thought. You may be smart, you think, but you need me to formulate your policy for you. Ha! This is a pleasant change, Comrade Minister,” on arenko observed on coming in. Golovko waved him to a chair, and poured him a small glass of vodka, the fuel of a Russian business meeting. The visiting general-lieutenant took the obligatory sip and expressed his thanks for the formal hospitality. He most often came here after normal working hours, but this time he’d been summoned officially, and right after lunch. It would have made him uneasy—once upon a time, such an invitation to KGB headquarters would involve a quick trip to the men’s room—except for his cordial relationship with Russia’s chief spy.
   “Well, Gennady Ilosifovich, I’ve talked you and your ideas over with President Grushavoy, and you’ve had three stars for a long time. It is time, the president and I agreed, for you to have another, and a new assignment.”
   “Indeed?” Bondarenko wasn’t taken aback, but he became instantly wary. It wasn’t always pleasant to have one’s career in others’ hands, even others one liked.
   “Yes. As of Monday next, you will be General-Colonel Bondarenko, and soon after that you will travel to become commander-in-chief of the Far East Military District.”
   That got his eyebrows jolting upward. This was the award of a dream he’d held in his own mind for some time. “Oh. May I ask, why there?”
   “I happen to agree with your concerns regarding our yellow neighbors. I’ve seen some reports from the GRU about the Chinese army’s continuing field exercises, and to be truthful, our intelligence information from Beijing is not all we would wish. Therefore, Eduard Petrovich and I feel that our eastern defenses might need some firming up. That becomes your job, Gennady. Do it well, and some additional good things might happen for you.”
   And that could only mean one thing, Bondarenko thought, behind an admirable poker face. Beyond the four stars of a general-colonel lay only the single large star of a marshal, and that was as high as any Russian soldier could go. After that, one could be commander-in-chief of the entire army, or defense minister, or one could retire to write memoirs.
   “There are some people I’d like to take out to Chabarsovil with me, some colonels from my operations office,” the general said contemplatively.
   “That is your prerogative, of course. Tell me, what will you wish to do out there?”
   “Do you really want to know?” the newly frocked four-star asked.
   Golovko smiled broadly at that. “I see. Gennady, you wish to remake the Russian army in your image?”
   “Not my image, Comrade Minister. A winning image, such as we had in 1945. There are images one wishes to deface, and there are images one dares not touch. Which, do you think, ought we to have?”
   “What will the costs be?”
   “Sergey Nikolay’ch, I am not an economist, nor am I an accountant, but I can tell you that the cost of doing this will be far less than the cost of not doing it.” And now, Bondarenko thought, he’d get wider access to whatever intelligence his country possessed. It’d have been better if Russia had spent the same resources on what the Americans delicately called National Technical Means—strategic reconnaissance satellites—that the Soviet Union had once done. But he’d get such as there was, and maybe he could talk the air force into making a few special flights...
   “I will tell that to President Grushavoy.” Not that it would do all that much good. The cupboard was still bare of funding, though that could change in a few years.
   “Will these new mineral discoveries in Siberia give us a little more money to spend?”
   Golovko nodded. “Yes, but not for some years. Patience, Gennady.”
   The general took a final shot of the vodka. “I can be patient, but will the Chinese?”
   Golovko had to grant his visitor’s concern. “Yes, they are exercising their military forces more than they used to.” What had once been a cause for concern had become, with its continuance, a matter of routine, and Golovko, like many, tended to lose such information in the seemingly random noise of daily life. “But there are no diplomatic reasons for concern. Relations between our countries are cordial.”
   “Comrade Minister, I am not a diplomat, nor am I an intelligence officer, but I do study history. I recall that the Soviet Union’s relations with Hitler’s Germany were cordial right up until June 23, 1941. The leading German elements passed Soviet trains running westbound with oil and grain to the fascisti. I conclude from this that diplomatic discourse is not always an indicator of a nation’s intentions.”
   “That is true, and that is why we have an intelligence service.”
   “And then you will also recall that the People’s Republic has in the past looked with envy on the mineral riches of Siberia. That envy has probably grown with the discoveries we have made. We have not publicized them, but we may assume that the Chinese have intelligence sources right here in Moscow, yes?”
   “It is a possibility not to be discounted,” Golovko admitted. He didn’t add that those sources would most probably be true-believing communists from Russia’s past, people who lamented the fall of their nation’s previous political system, and saw in China the means, perhaps, to restore Russia to the true faith of Marxism-Leninism, albeit with a little Mao tossed in. Both men had been Communist Party members in their day: Bondarenko because advancement in the Soviet Army had absolutely demanded it, and Golovko because he would never have been entrusted with a post in KGB without it. Both had mouthed the words, and kept their eyes mostly open during party meetings, in both cases while checking out the women in the meetings or just daydreaming about things of more immediate interest. But there were those who had listened and thought about it, who had actually believed all that political rubbish. Both Bondarenko and Golovko were pragmatists, interested mainly in a reality they could touch and feel rather than some model of words that might or might not come to pass someday. Fortunately for both, they’d found their way into professions more concerned with reality than theory, where their intellectual explorations were more easily tolerated, because men of vision were always needed, even in a nation where vision was supposed to be controlled. “But you will have ample assets to act upon your concerns.
   Not really, the general thought. He’d have—what? Six motor-rifle divisions, a tank division, and a divisional formation of artillery, all regular-army formations at about seventy percent nominal strength and dubious training– that would be his first task, and not a minor one, to crack those uniformed boys into Red Army soldiers of the sort who had crushed the Germans at Kursk, and moved on to capture Berlin. That would be a major feat to accomplish, but who was better suited to this task? Bondarenko asked himself. There were some promising young generals he knew of, and maybe he’d steal one, but for his own age group Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko felt himself to be the best brain in his nation’s armed forces. Well, then, he’d have an active command and a chance to prove it. The chance of failure was always there, but men such as he are the kind who see opportunities where others see dangers.
   “I presume I will have a free hand?” he asked, after some final contemplation.
   “Within reason.” Golovko nodded. “We’d prefer that you did not start a war out there.”
   “I have no desire to drive to Beijing. I have never enjoyed their cooking,” Bondarenko replied lightly. And Russians should be better soldiers. The fighting ability of the Russian male had never been an issue for doubt. He just needed good training, good equipment, and proper leadership. Bondarenko thought he could supply two of those needs, and that would have to do. Already, his mind was racing east, thinking about his headquarters, what sort of staff officer he would find, whom he’d have to replace, and where the replacements would come from. There’d be drones out there, careerist officers just serving their time and filling out their forms, as if that were what it meant to be a field-grade officer. Those men would see their careers aborted—well, he’d give everyone thirty days to straighten up, and if he knew himself, he’d inspire some to rediscover their vocations. His best hope was in the individual soldiers, the young boys wearing their country’s uniform indifferently because no one had told them exactly what they were and how important that thing was. But he’d fix that. They were soldiers, those boys. Guardians of their country, and they deserved to be proud guardians. With proper training, in nine months they’d wear the uniforms better, stand straighter, and swagger a bit on leave, as soldiers were supposed to do. He’d show them how to do it, and he’d become their surrogate father, pushing and cajoling his new crop of sons toward manhood. It was as worthy a goal as any man could wish, and as Commander-in-Chief Far East, he just might set a standard for his country’s armed forces to emulate.
   “So, Gennady Iosifovich, what do I tell Eduard Petrovich?” Golovko asked, as he leaned across the desk to give his guest a little more of the fine Starka vodka,
   Bondarenko lifted the glass to salute his host. “Comrade Minister, you will please tell our president that he has a new CINC—Far East.”

CHAPTER 18

Evolutions
   
The interesting part for Mancuso in his new job was that he now commanded aircraft, which he could fairly well understand, but also ground troops, which he hardly understood at all. This latter contingent included the 3rd Marine Division based on Okinawa, and the Army’s 25th Light Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks on Oahu. Mancuso had never directly commanded more than one hundred fifty or so men, all of whom had been aboard his first and last real—as he thought of it—command, USS Dallas. That was a good number, large enough that it felt larger than even an extended family, and small enough that you knew every face and name. Pacific Command wasn’t anything like that. The square of Dallas’s crew didn’t begin to comprise the manpower which he could direct from his desk.
   He’d been through the Capstone course. That was a program designed to introduce new flag officers to the other branches of the service. He’d walked in the woods with Army soldiers, crawled in the mud with Marines, even watched an aerial refueling from the jump seat of a C-SB transport (the most unnatural act he ever expected to see, two airplanes mating in midair at three hundred knots), and played with the Army’s heavy troops at Fort Irwin, California, where he’d tried his hand at driving and shooting tanks and Bradleys. But seeing it all and playing with the kids, and getting mud on his clothing, wasn’t really the same as knowing it. He had some very rough ideas of what it looked and sounded and smelled like. He’d seen the confident look on the faces of men who wore uniforms of different color, and told himself about a hundred times that they were, really, all the same. The sergeant commanding an Abrams tank was little different in spirit from a leading torpedoman on a fast-attack boat, just not recently showered, and a Green Beret was little different from a fighter pilot in his godlike self-confidence. But to command such people effectively, he ought to know more, CINCPAC told himself. He ought to have had more ‘joint” training. But then he told himself that he could take the best fighter jock in the Air Force or the Navy, and even then it would take months for them to understand what he’d done on Dallas. Hell, just getting them to understand the importance of reactor safety would take a year—about what it had taken him to learn all those things once upon a time, and Mancuso wasn’t a “nuc” by training. He’d always been a front-end guy. The services were all different in their feel for the mission, and that was because the missions were all as different in nature as a sheepdog was from a pit bull.
   But he had to command them all, and do so effectively, lest he make a mistake that resulted in a telegram coming to Mrs. Smith’s home to announce the untimely death of her son or husband because some senior officer had fucked up. Well, Admiral Bart Mancuso told himself, that was why he had such a wide collection of staff officers, including a surface guy to explain what that sort of target did (to Mancuso any sort of surface ship was a target), an Airedale to explain what naval aircraft did, a Marine and some soldiers to explain life in the mud, and some Air Force wing-wipers to tell him what their birds were capable of. All of them offered advice, which, as soon as he took it, became his idea alone, because he was in command, and command meant being responsible for everything that happened in or near the Pacific Ocean, including when some newly promoted B-4 petty officer commented lustily on the tits of another E-4 who happened to have them—a recent development in the Navy, and one which Mancuso would just as soon have put off for another decade. They were even letting women on submarines now, and the admiral didn’t regret having missed that one little bit. What the hell would Mush Morton and his crop of WWII submarines have made of that?
   He figured he knew how to set up a naval exercise, one of those grand training evolutions in which half of 7th Fleet would administratively attack and destroy the other half, followed by the simulated forced-entry landing of a Marine battalion. Navy fighters would tangle with Air Force ones, and after it was all over, computer records would show who’d won and who’d lost, and bets of various sorts would be paid off in various bars—and there’d be some hard feelings, because fitness reports (and with them, careers) could ride on outcomes of simulated engagements.
   Of all his services, Mancuso figured his submarine force was in the best shape, which made sense, since his previous job had been COMSUBPAC, and he’d ruthlessly whipped his boats into shape. And, besides, the little shooting war they’d engaged in two years before had given everyone the proper sense of mission, to the point that the crews of the boomers who’d laid on a submarine ambush worthy of Charlie Lockwood’s best day still swaggered around when on the beach. The boomers remained in service as auxiliary fast-attacks because Mancuso had made his case to the CNO, who was his friend, Dave Seaton, and Seaton had made his case to Congress to get some additional funding, and Congress was nice and tame, what with two recent conflicts to show them that people in uniform did have more purposes than opening and closing doors for the people’s elected representatives. Besides, the Ohio-class boats were just too expensive to throw away, and they were mainly off doing valuable oceanographic missions in the North Pacific, which appealed to the tree– (actually fish– and dolphin– in this case) huggers, who had far too much political power in the eyes of this white-suited warrior.
   With every new day came his official morning briefing, usually run by Brigadier General Mike Lahr, his J-2 Intelligence Officer. This was particularly good news. On the morning of 7 December, 1941, the United States had learned the advantage of providing senior area commanders with the intelligence they might need, and so this CINCPAC, unlike Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, got to hear a lot.
   “Morning, Mike,” Mancuso said in greeting, while a chief steward’s mate set up morning coffee.
   “Good morning, sir,” the one-star replied.
   “What’s new in the Pacific?”
   “Well, top of the news this morning, the Russians have appointed a new guy to head their Far Eastern Military District. His name is Gennady Bondarenko. His last job was J-3 operations officer for the Russian army. His background’s pretty interesting. He started off in signals, not a combat arm, but he distinguished himself in Afghanistan toward the end of that adventure on their part. He’s got the Order of the Red Banner and he’s a Hero of the Soviet Union—got both of those as a colonel. He moved rapidly up from there. Good political connections. He’s worked closely with a guy named Golovko—he’s a former KGB officer who’s still in the spook business and is personally known to the President—ours, that is. Golovko is essentially the operational XO for the Russian President Grushavoy—like a chief minister or something. Grushavoy listens to him on a lot of issues, and he’s a pipeline into the White House on matters ‘of mutual interest.’”
   “Great. So the Russians have Jack Ryan’s ear via this guy. What sort of mensch is he?” CINCPAC asked.
   “Very smart and very capable, our friends at Langley say. Anyway, back to Bondarenko. The book on the guy says he’s also very smart and also very capable, a contender for further advancement. Brains and personal bravery can be career—enhancing in their military, just like ours.”
   “What sort of shape is his new command in?”
   “Not very good at all, sir. We see eight division-sized formations, six motor-rifle divisions, one tank, and one artillery division. All appear to be under strength on our overheads, and they don’t spend much time in the field. Bondarenko will change that, if he goes according to the form card.”
   “Think so?”
   “As their J-3, he agitated for higher training standards– and he’s a bit of an intellectual. He published a lengthy essay last year on the Roman legions. It was called ‘Soldiers of the Caesars.’ It had that great quote from Josephus, ‘Their drills are bloodless battles and their battles are bloody drills.’ Anyway, it was a straight historical piece, sources like Josephus and Vegetius, but the implication was clear. He was crying out for better training in the Russian army, and also for career NCOs. He spent a lot of time with Vegetsius’s discussion of how you build centurions. The Soviet army didn’t really have sergeants as we understand the term, and Bondarenko is one of the new crop of senior officers who’s saying that the new Russian army should reintroduce that institution. Which makes good sense,” Lahr thought.
   “So, you think he’s going to whip his people into shape. What about the Russian navy?”
   “They don’t belong to him. He’s got Frontal Aviation tactical aircraft and ground troops, but that’s all.”
   “Well, their navy’s so far down the shitter they can’t see where the paper roll is,” Mancuso observed. “What else?”
   “A bunch of political stuff you can read up on at your leisure. The Chinese are still active in the field. They’re running a four-division exercise now south of the Amur River.”
   “That big?”
   “Admiral, they’ve been on an increased training regimen for almost three years now. Nothing frantic or anything, but they’ve been spending money to get the PLA up to speed. This one’s heavy with tanks and APCs. Lots of artillery live-fire exercises. That’s a good training area for them, not much in the way of civilians, kinda like Nevada but not as flat. At first when they started this we kept a close eye on it, but it’s fairly routine now.”
   “Oh, yeah? What do the Russians think about it?”
   Lahr stretched in his chair. “Sir, that’s probably why Bondarenko drew this assignment. This is backward from how the Russians trained to fight. The Chinese have them heavily outnumbered in theater, but nobody sees hostilities happening. The politics are pretty smooth at the moment.”
   “Uh-huh,” CINCPAC grunted behind his desk. “And Taiwan?”
   “Some increased training near the strait, but those are mainly infantry formations, and nothing even vaguely like amphibious exercises. We keep a close eye on that, with help from our ROC friends.”
   Mancuso nodded. He had a filing cabinet full of plans to send 7th Fleet west, and there was almost always one of his surface ships making a “courtesy call” to that island. For his sailors, the Republic of China was one hell of a good liberty port, with lots of women whose services were subject to commercial negotiations. And having a gray U.S. Navy warship tied alongside pretty well put that city off-limits for a missile attack. Even scratching an American warship was classified delicately as a casus belli, a reason for war. And nobody thought the ChiComms were ready for that sort of thing yet. To keep things that way, Mancuso had his carriers doing constant workups, exercising their interceptor and strike-fighter forces in the manner of the 1980s. He always had at least one fast-attack or boomer slow-attack submarine in the Formosa Strait, too, something that was advertised only by casual references allowed to leak to the media from time to time. Only very rarely would a submarine make a local port call, however. They were more effective when not seen. But in another filing cabinet he had lots of periscope photos of Chinese warships, and some “hull shots,” photos made from directly underneath, which was mainly good for testing the nerve of his submarine drivers.
   He also occasionally had his people track ChiComm submarines, much as he’d done in Dallas against the former Soviet navy. But this was much easier. The Chinese nuclear-power plants were so noisy that fish avoided them to prevent damage to their ears, or so his sonarmen joked. As much as the PRC had rattled its saber at Taiwan, an actual attack, if opposed by his 7th Fleet, would rapidly turn into a bloody shambles, and he hoped Beijing knew that. If they didn’t, finding out would be a messy and expensive exercise. But the ChiComms didn’t have much in the way of amphibious capability yet, and showed no signs of building it.
   “So, looks like a routine day in theater?” Mancuso asked, as the briefing wound down.
   “Pretty much,” General Lahr confirmed.
   “What sort of assets do we have tasked to keep an eye on our Chinese friends?”
   “Mainly overheads,” the J-2 replied. “We’ve never had much in the way of human intelligence in the PRC—at least not that I ever heard about.”
   “Why is that?”
   “Well, in simplest terms it would be kind of hard for you or me to disappear into their society, and most of our Asian citizens work for computer-software companies, last time I checked.”
   “Not many of them in the Navy. How about the Army?”
   “Not many, sir. They’re pretty underrepresented.”
   “I wonder why.”
   “Sir, I’m an intelligence officer, not a demographer,” Lahr pointed out.
   “I guess that job is hard enough, Mike. Okay, if anything interesting happens, let me know.”
   “You bet, sir.” Lahr headed out the door, to be replaced by Mancuso’s J-3 operations officer, who would tell him what all his theater assets were up to this fine day, plus which ships and airplanes were broken and needed fixing.
   She hadn’t gotten any less attractive, though getting her here had proven difficult. Tanya Bogdanova hadn’t avoided anything, but she’d been unreachable for several days.
   “You’ve been busy?” Provalov asked.
   “Da, a special client,” she said with a nod. “We spent time together in St. Petersburg. I didn’t bring my beeper. He dislikes interruptions,” she explained, without showing much in the way of remorse.
   Provalov could have asked the cost of several days in this woman’s company, and she would probably have told him, but he decided that he didn’t need to know all that badly. She remained a vision, lacking only the white feathery wings to be an angel. Except for the eyes and the heart, of course. The former cold, and the latter nonexistent.
   “I have a question,” the police lieutenant told her.
   “Yes?”
   ‘A name. Do you know it? Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov.”
   Her eyes showed some amusement. “Oh, yes. I know him well.” She didn’t have to elaborate on what “well” meant.
   “What can you tell me about him?”
   “What do you wish to know?”
   “His address, for starters.”
   “He lives outside Moscow.”
   “Under what name?”
   “He does not know that I know, but I saw his papers once. Ivan Yurievich Koniev.”
   “How do you know this?” Provalov asked.
   “He was asleep, of course, and I went through his clothes,” she replied, as matter-of-factly as if she’d told the militia lieutenant where she shopped for bread.
   So, he fucked you, and you, in turn, fucked him, Provalov didn’t say. “Do you remember his address?”
   She shook her head. “No, but it’s one of the new communities off the outer ring road.”
   “When did you last see him?”
   “It was a week before Gregoriy Filipovich died,” she answered at once.
   It was then that Provalov had a flash: “Tanya, the night before Gregoriy died, whom did you see?”
   “He was a former soldier or something, let me think. Pyotr Alekseyevich... something..
   “Amalrik?” Provalov asked, almost coming off his seat.
   “Yes, something like that. He had a tattoo on his arm, the Spetsnaz tattoo a lot of them got in Afghanistan. He thought very highly of himself, but he wasn’t a very good lover,” Tanya added dismissively.
   And he never will be, Provalov could have said then, but didn’t. “Who set up that, ah, appointment?”
   “Oh, that was Klementi Ivan’ch. He had an arrangement with Gregoriy. They knew each other, evidently for a long time. Gregoriy often made special appointments for Kiementi’s friends.”
   Suvorov had one or both of his killers fuck the whores belonging to the man they would kill the next day. . . Whoever Suvorov was, he had an active sense of humor.., or the real target actually had been Sergey Nikolay’ch. Provalov had just turned up an important piece of information, but it didn’t seem to illuminate his criminal case at all. Another fact which only made his job harder, not easier. He was back to the same two possibilities: This Suvorov had contracted the two Spetsnaz soldiers to kill Rasputin, and then had them killed as “insurance” to avoid repercussions. Or he’d contracted them to eliminate Golovko, and then killed them for making a serious error. Which? He’d have to find this Suvorov to find out. But now he had a name and a probable location. And that was something he could work on.

CHAPTER 19

Manhunting
   
Things had quieted down at RAINBOW headquarters in Hereford, England, to the point that both John Clark and Ding Chavez were starting to show the symptoms of restlessness. The training regimen was as demanding as ever, but nobody had ever drowned in sweat, and the targets, paper and electronic were—well, if not as satisfying as a real human miscreant wasn’t the best way to put it, then maybe not as exciting was the right phrase. But the RAINBOW team members didn’t say that, even among themselves, for fear of appearing bloodthirsty and unprofessional. To them the studied mental posture was that it was all the same. Practice was bloodless battle, and battle was bloody drill. And certainly by taking their training so seriously, they were still holding a very fine edge. Fine enough to shave the fuzz off a baby’s face.
   The team had never gone public, at least not per se. But the word had leaked out somehow. Not in Washington, and not in London, but somewhere on the continent, the word had gotten out that NATO now had a very special and very capable counterterrorist team that had raped and pillaged its way through several high-profile missions, and only once taken any lumps, at the hands of Irish terrorists who had, however, paid a bitter price for their misjudgment. The European papers called them the “Men of Black” for their assault uniforms, and in their relative ignorance the European newsies had somehow made RAINBOW even more fierce than reality justified. Enough so that the team had deployed to the Netherlands for a mission seven months before, a few weeks after the first news coverage had broken, and when the bad guys at the grammar school had found there were new folks in the neighborhood, they’d stumbled through a negotiating session with Dr. Paul Bellow and cut a deal before hostilities had to be initiated, which was pleasing for everyone. The idea of a shoot-out in a school full of kids hadn’t even appealed to the Men of Black.
   Over the last several months, some members had been hurt or rotated back to their parent services, and new members had replaced them. One of these was Ettore Falcone, a former member of the Carabinieri sent to Hereford as much for his own protection as to assist the NATO team. Falcone had been walking the streets of Palermo in Sicily with his wife and infant son one pleasant spring evening when a shoot-out had erupted right before his eyes. Three criminals were hosing a pedestrian, his wife, and their police bodyguard with submachine guns, and in an instant Falcone had pulled out his Beretta and dropped all three with head shots from ten meters away. His action had been too late to save the victims, but not too late to incur the wrath of a capo mafioso, two of whose sons had been involved in the hit. Falcone had publicly spat upon the threat, but cooler heads had prevailed in Rome—the Italian government did not want a blood feud to erupt between the Mafia and its own federal police agency—and Falcone had been dispatched to Hereford to be the first Italian member of RAINBOW. He had quickly proven himself to be the best pistol shot anyone had ever seen.
   “Damn John Clark breathed, after finishing his fifth string of ten shots. This guy had beaten him again! They called him Big Bird. Ettore—Hector—was about six-three and lean like a basketball player, the wrong size and shape for a counterterror trooper, but, Jesus, could this son of a bitch shoot!
   “Grazie, General,” the Italian said, collecting the five-pound note that had accompanied this blood feud.
   And John couldn’t even bitch that he’d done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big brass ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.
   “Ettore, where the hell did you learn to shoot?” RAINBOW SIX demanded.
   “At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well,” the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn’t the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.
   “Yeah, I suppose.” Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.
   “You, too, sir?” Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.
   “So I’m not the only one?” RAINBOW SIX asked.
   Woods looked up from his sandwich. “Bloody hell, that lad’s got a fookin’ letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!” he announced. And Sergeant-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/RAINBOW pub he’d probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn’t much room to take a guy who often as not shot a “possible,” or perfect score.
   “Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I’m in good company.” Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn’t like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.
   Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn’t running as fast as the younger troops at RAINBOW, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn’t ready to be old yet. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn’t exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.
   “Well, how did it go, John?” Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.
   “The kid’s real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.
   “Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”
   A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he’d become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”
   “Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.
 
   “They want what?” Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.
   “They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.
   “Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.
   “Sergey Nikolay’ch thinks we owe him one. And you know…”
   He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”
   “It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.
 
   Shit,” Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. “Oh, excuse me, Ellen.”
   She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”
   “Got one I can...
   Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.
   “Well, ain’t this something?”
   “You know this man, don’t you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.
   “Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC– 137 THUNDERed down the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn’t seemed all that funny. “Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends.”
   As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan bummed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn’t and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.
   “If you say so, Mr. President.”
   “Thanks, Ellen.” Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these damned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn't a smoker not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay’ch to Langley—unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat’s direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact—and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.
   For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn’t even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had assisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial button.
   “Foley,” the male voice at the other end said.
   “Ryan,” Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. “Got the fax.”
   “And?” the DCI asked.
   “And what the hell else can we do?”
   “I agree.” Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn’t about like or don’t-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. “You handle it or do I?”
   “The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don’t want to compromise RAINBOW, do we?”
   “No, Jack, but there’s not much chance of that. Europe’s quieted down quite a bit. The RAINBOW troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran—well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it.” The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made RAINBOW appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who’d just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can’t resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.
   “I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it.”
   “I think we can depend on that, Jack,” Ed Foley agreed.
   “Any reason not to do it?”
   Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. “I never have been keen on giving ‘methods’ away to anybody, but this isn’t an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it.”
 
   “Approved,” the President said.
   Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end.
   “Okay, the reply will go out today.”
 
   With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John’s desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.
   “I suppose we’re becoming famous, John.”
   “Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?” Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.
   “I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”
   “Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We’ve both met Sergey Nikolay’ch. At least this way he doesn’t see all that many new faces.”
   “Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”
   “The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.
   “How long do you expect to be gone?”
   Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not more than... three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren’t bad. We’ll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can’t we?”
   Stanley didn’t have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they’d have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.
   “I suppose we’ll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.
   Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”
 
   “His Russian is also good, as I recall.”
   “We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”
   “And yours?”
   “Leningrad—well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
   Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
   Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
   “Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
   “Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
   Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
   “Moscow?” he asked.
   “Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”
   “Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it’s been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka’s still good.”
   “It’s one of the things they do well,” John agreed.
   “And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”
   “Looks that way.”
   “Take the wives with us?”
   “No.” Clark shook his head. “This one’s all business.”
   “When?”
   “Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”
   “Fair enough.”
   “How’s the little guy?”
   A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he’ll start walking in a few days".
   “Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.
   “Hey, pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y’know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.
   Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.
   “The whole team?” Chavez asked.
   “Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.
   “Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.
   “Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he’s a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn’t like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.
   “Mr. C, Ettore just isn’t human. With the MP, he’s good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he’s like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays ‘emdead.”
   “I didn’t believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”
   “I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law’s waist. “Hey, I’m pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”
   “The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I’ve lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He’d lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.
 
   “Is that him?” Provalov asked.
   “We don’t have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.
   They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.
   The guy looked about right. He’d come off the building’s elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov’s neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.
   The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he’d have more of those, and they’d all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.
   The sergeant in the driver’s seat started up the van’s motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.
   “Our friend is moving. The blue rental car,” Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.
   The rental car was a Fiat—a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail in front of himself. A little more time and they might have placed a tracking device on the Fiat, but they hadn’t had it, nor the darkness required. If he returned to his apartment, they’d do it late tonight, say about four in the morning. A radio beeper with a magnet to hold it onto the inside of the rear bumper; its antenna would hang down like a mouse’s tail, virtually invisible. Some of the available technology Provalov was using had originally been used to track suspected foreign spies around Moscow, and that meant it was pretty good, at least by Russian standards.
   Following the car was easier than he’d expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his identity, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck—but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn’t. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn’t spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a huffy.
   The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary would look for at night. Switch them once or twice when out of sight of his rearview mirror, and he’d have to be a genius to catch on. The most difficult job went with the car doing the front-tail, since it was hard to read Koniev/Suvorov’s mind, and when he made an unexpected turn, the lead car then had to scurry about under the guidance of the trailing shadow cars to regain its leading position. All of the militiamen on this detail, however, were experienced homicide investigators who’d learned how to track the most dangerous game on the planet: human beings who’d displayed the willingness to take another life. Even the stupid murderers could have animal cunning, and they learned a lot about police operations just from watching television. That made some of his investigations more difficult than they ought to have been, but in a case like this, the additional difficulty had served to train his men more thoroughly than any academy training would have done.
   “Turning right,” his driver said into his radio. “Van takes the lead.” The leading trail car would proceed to the next right turn, make it, and then race to resume its leading position. The trailing car would drop behind the van, falling off the table for a few minutes before resuming its position. The trail car was a Fiat-clone from Togliattistad, by far the most common private-passenger auto in Russia, and therefore fairly anonymous, with its dirty off-white paint job.
   “If that’s his only attempt at throwing us off, he’s very confident of himself.”
   “True,” Provalov agreed. “Let’s see what else he does.”
   The “what else” took place four minutes later. The Fiat took another right turn, this one not onto a cross-street, but into the underpass of another apartment building, one that straddled an entire block. Fortunately, the lead trail car was already on the far side of the building, trying to catch up with the Fiat, and had the good fortune to see Koniev/Suvorov appear thirty meters in front.
   “We have him,” the radio crackled. “We’ll back off somewhat.”
   “Go!” Provalov told his driver, who accelerated the van to the next corner. Along the way, he toggled the switch to flip the license plates and change the headlight pattern, converting the van into what at night would seem a new vehicle entirely.
   “He is confident,” Provalov observed five minutes later. The van was now in close-trail, with the lead trail car behind the van, and the other surveillance vehicle close behind that one. Wherever he was going, they were on him. He’d run his evasion maneuver, and a clever one it had been, but only one. Perhaps he thought that one such SDR—surveillance-detection run—was enough, that if he were being trailed it would only be a single vehicle, and so had run that underpass, eyes on the rearview mirror, and spotted nothing. Very good, the militia lieutenant thought. It was a pity he didn’t have his American FBI friend along. The FBI could scarcely have done this better, even with its vast resources. It didn’t hurt that his men knew the streets of Moscow and its suburbs as well as any taxi driver.
   “He’s getting dinner and a drink somewhere,” Provalov’s driver observed. “He’ll pull over in the next kilometer.”
   “We shall see,” the lieutenant said, thinking his driver right. This area had ten or eleven upscale eateries. Which would his quarry choose...?
   It turned out to be the Prince Michael of Kiev, a Ukrainian establishment specializing in chicken and fish, known also for its fine bar. Koniev/Suvorov pulled over and allowed the restaurant’s valet to park his vehicle, then walked in.
   “Who’s the best dressed among us?” Provalov asked over the radio.
   “You are, Comrade Lieutenant.” His other two teams were attired as working-class people, and that wouldn’t fly here. Half of the Prince Michael of Kiev’s clientele were foreigners, and you had to dress well around such people– the restaurant saw to that. Provalov jumped out half a block away and walked briskly to the canopied entrance. The doorman admitted him after a look—in the new Russia, clothing made the man more than in most European nations. He could have flashed his police ID, but that might not be a good move. Koniev/Suvorov might well have some of the restaurant staff reporting to him. That was when he had a flash of imagination. Provalov immediately entered the men’s lavatory and pulled out his cellular phone.
   “Hello?” a familiar voice said on picking up the receiver.
   “Mishka?”
   “Oleg?” Reilly asked. “What can I do for you?”
 
   “Do you know a restaurant called the Prince Michael of Kiev?”
   “Yeah, sure. Why?”
   “I need your help. How quickly can you get here?” Provalov asked, knowing that Reilly lived only two kilometers away.
   “Ten or fifteen minutes.”
   “Quickly, then. I’ll be at the bar. Dress presentably,” the militiaman added.
   “Right,” Reilly agreed, wondering how he’d explain it to his wife, and wondering why he’d had his quiet evening in front of the TV interrupted.
   Provalov headed back to the bar, ordered a pepper vodka, and lit a cigarette. His quarry was seven seats away, also having a solitary drink, perhaps waiting for his table to become available. The restaurant was full. A string quartet was playing some Rimsky-Korsakov on the far side of the dining room. The restaurant was far above anything Provalov could afford as a regular part of his life. So, Koniev/Suvorov was well set financially. That was no particular surprise. A lot of ex—KGB officers were doing very well indeed in the economic system of the new Russia. They had worldly ways and knowledge that few of their fellow citizens could match. In a society known for its burgeoning corruption, they had a corner on the market, and a network of fellow-travelers to call upon, with whom they could, for various considerations, share their gains, ill-gotten or not.
   Provalov had finished his first drink, and had motioned to the bartender for another when Reilly appeared.
   “Oleg Gregoriyevich,” the American said in greeting. He was no fool, the Russian militia lieutenant realized. The American’s Russian was manifestly American and overloud, a fine backward stealth for this environment. He was well dressed also, proclaiming his foreign origin to all who saw him.
   “Mishka!” Provalov said in response, taking the American’s hand warmly and waving to the bartender.
   “Okay, who we looking for?” the FBI agent asked more quietly.
 
   “The gray suit, seven seats to my left.”
   “Got him,” Reilly said at once. “Who is he?”
   “He is currently under the name Koniev, Ivan Yurievich. In fact we believe him to be Suvorov, Klementi Ivan’ ch.”
   “Aha,” Reilly observed. “What else can you tell me?”
   “We trailed him here. He used a simple but effective evasion method, but we have three cars tracking him, and we picked him right back up.”
   “Good one, Oleg,” the FBI agent said. Inadequately trained and poorly equipped or not, Provalov was a no-shit copper. In the Bureau, he’d be at least a supervisory special agent. Oleg had fine cop instincts. Tracking a KGB type around Moscow was no trivial exercise, like following a paranoid button-man in Queens. Reilly sipped his pepper vodka and turned sideways in his seat. On the far side of the subject was a dark-haired beauty wearing a slinky black dress. She looked like another of those expensive hookers to Reilly, and her shingle was out. Her dark eyes were surveying the room as thoroughly as his. The difference was that Reilly was a guy, and looking at a pretty girl—or seeming to—was not the least bit unusual. In fact, his eyes were locked not on the woman, but the man. Fiftyish, well turned out, nondescript in overall appearance, just as a spy was supposed to be, looked to be waiting for a table, nursing his drink and looking studiously in the bar’s mirror, which was a fine way to see if he were being watched. The American and his Russian friend he dismissed, of course. What interest could an American businessman have in him, after all? And besides, the American was eyeing the whore to his left. For that reason, the subject’s eyes did not linger on the men to his right, either directly or in the mirror. Oleg was smart, Reilly thought, using him as camouflage for his discreet surveillance.
   “Anything else turn lately?” the FBI agent asked. Provalov filled in what he’d learned about the hooker and what had happened the night before the murders. “Damn, that is swashbuckling. But you still don’t know who the target was, do you?”
   “No,” Provalov admitted, with a sip of his second drink.
 
   He’d have to go easy on the alcohol, he knew, lest he make a mistake. His quarry was too slick and dangerous to take any sort of risk at all. He could always bring the guy in for questioning, but he knew that would be a fruitless exercise. Criminals like this one had to be handled as gently as a cabinet minister. Provalov allowed his eyes to look into the mirror, where he got a good look at the profile of a probable multiple murderer. Why was it that there was no black halo around such? people? Why did they look normal?
   “Anything else we know about the mutt?”
   The Russian had come to like that American term. He shook his head. “No, Mishka. We haven’t checked with SVR yet.”
   “Worried that he might have a source inside the building?” the American asked. Oleg nodded.
   “That is a consideration.” And an obvious one. The fraternity of former KGB officers was probably a tight one. There might well be someone inside the old headquarters building, say someone in personnel records, who’d let people know if the police showed interest in any particular file.
   “Damn,” the American noted, thinking, You son of a bitch, fucking the guy’s hookers before you waste him. There was a disagreeable coldness to it, like something from a Mafia movie. But in real life, La Cosa Nostra members didn’t have the stones for such a thing. Formidable as they might be, Mafia button-men didn’t have the training of a professional intelligence officer, and were tabby cats next to panthers in this particular jungle. Further scrutiny of the subject. The girl beyond him was a distraction, but not that much.
   “Oleg?”
   “Yes, Mikhail?”
   “He’s looking at somebody over by the musicians. His eyes keep coming back to the same spot. He isn’t scanning the room like he was at first.” The subject did check out everyone who came into the restaurant, but his eyes kept coming back to one part of the mirror, and he’d probably determined that nobody in the place was a danger to him. Oops. Well, Reilly thought, even training has its limitations, and sooner or later your own expertise could work against you. You fell into patterns, and you made assumptions that could get you caught. In this case, Suvorov assumed that no American could be watching him. After all, he’d done nothing to any Americans in Moscow, and maybe not in his entire career, and he was on friendly, not foreign ground, and he’d dusted off his tail on the way over in the way he always did, looking for a single tail car. Well, the smart ones knew their limitations. How did it go? The difference between genius and stupidity was that genius knew that it had limits. This Suvorov guy thought himself a genius.. . but whom was he looking at? Reilly turned a little more on his bar stool and scanned that part of the room.
   “What do you see, Mishka?”
   “A lot of people, Oleg Gregoriyevich, mainly Russians, some foreigners, all well-dressed. Some Chinese, look like two diplomats dining with two Russians—they look like official types. Looks cordial enough,” Reilly thought. He’d eaten here with his wife three or four times. The food was pretty good, especially the fish. And they had a good source of caviar at the Prince Michael of Kiev, which was one of the best things you could get over here. His wife loved it, and would have to learn that getting it at home would be a lot more expensive than it was here. . . . Reilly’d done discreet surveillance for so many years that he had trained himself to be invisible. He could fit in just about anyplace but Harlem, and the Bureau had black agents to handle that.
   Sure as hell, that Suvorov guy was looking in the same place. Casually, perhaps, and using the bar’s mirror to do it. He even sat so that his eyes naturally looked at the same place as he sat on his bar stool. But people like this subject didn’t do anything by accident or coincidence. They were trained to think through everything, even taking a leak.., it was remarkable, then, that he’d been turned so stupidly. By a hooker who’d gone through his things while he was sleeping off an orgasm. Well, some men, no matter how smart, thought with their dicks.... Reilly turned again..., one of the Chinese men at the distant table excused himself and stood, heading for the men’s room. Reilly thought to do the same at once, but.., no. If it were prearranged, such a thing could spook it... Patience, Mishka, he told himself, turning back to look at the principal subject. Koniev/Suvorov set down his drink and stood.
   “Oleg. I want you to point me toward the men’s room,” the FBI agent said. “In fifteen seconds.”
   Provalov counted out the time, then extended his arm toward the main entrance. Reilly patted him on the shoulder and headed that way.
   The Prince Michael of Kiev restaurant was nice, but it didn’t have a bathroom attendant, as many European places did, perhaps because Americans were uneasy with the custom, or maybe because the management thought it an unnecessary expense. Reilly entered and saw three urinals, two of them being used. He unzipped and urinated, then rezipped and turned to wash his hands, looking down as he did so . . . and just out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other two men share a sideways look. The Russian was taller. The men’s room had the sort of pull-down roller towel that America had largely done away with. Reilly pulled it down and dried his hands, unable to wait too much longer. Heading toward the door, he reached in his pocket and pulled his car keys part of the way out. These he dropped just as he pulled the door open, with a muttered, “Damn,” as he bent down to pick them up, shielded from their view by the steel divider. Reilly picked them off the tile floor and stood back up.
   Then he saw it. It was well done. They could have been more patient, but they probably both discounted the importance of the American, and both were trained professionals. They scarcely touched each other, and what touching and bumping there was happened below the waist and out of sight to the casual observer. Reilly wasn’t a casual observer, however, and even out of the corner of his eyes, it was obvious to the initiated. It was a classic brush-pass, so well done that even Reilly’s experience couldn’t determine who had passed what to whom. The FBI agent continued out, heading back to his seat at the bar, where he waved to the barkeep for the drink he figured he’d just earned.
 
   “Yes?”
   “You want to identify that Chinaman. He and our friend traded something in the shitter. Brush-pass, and nicely done,” Reilly said, with a smile and a gesture at the brunette down the bar. Good enough, in fact, that had Reilly been forced to sit in a witness stand and describe it to a jury, a week-old law-school graduate could make him admit that he hadn’t actually seen anything at all. But that told him much. That degree of skill was either the result of a totally chance encounter between two entirely innocent people– the purest of coincidences—or it had been the effort of two trained intelligence officers applying their craft at a perfect place in a perfect way. Provalov was turned the right way to see the two individuals leave the men’s room. They didn’t even notice each other, or didn’t appear to acknowledge the presence of the other any more than they would have greeted a stray dog—exactly as two unrelated people would act after a happenstance encounter with a total stranger in any men’s room anywhere. But this time as Koniev/Suvorov resumed his seat at the bar, he tended to his drink and didn’t have his eyes interrogate the mirror regularly. In fact, he turned and greeted the girl to his left, then waved for the bartender to get her another drink, which she accepted with a warm, commercial smile. Her face proclaimed the fact that she’d found her trick for the night. The girl could act, Reilly thought.
   “Well, our friend’s going to get laid tonight,” he told his Russian colleague.
   “She is pretty,” Provalov agreed. “Twenty-three, you think?”
   “Thereabouts, maybe a little younger. Nice hooters.”
   “Hooters?” the Russian asked.
   “Tits, Oleg, tits,” the FBI agent clarified. “That Chinaman’s a spook. See any coverage on him around?”
   “No one I know,” the lieutenant replied. “Perhaps he is not known to be an intelligence officer.”
   “Yeah, sure, your counterintelligence people have all retired to Sochi, right? Hell, guy, they trail me every so often.”
   “That means I am one of your agents, then?” Provalov asked.
   A chuckle. “Let me know if you want to defect, Oleg Gregoriyevich.”
   “The Chinese in the light blue suit?”
   “That’s the one. Short, about five-four, one fifty-five, pudgy, short hair, about forty-five or so.”
   Provalov translated that to about 163 centimeters and seventy kilos, and made a mental note as he turned to look at the face, about thirty meters away. He looked entirely ordinary, as most spies did. With that done, he headed back to the men’s room to make a phone call to his agents outside.
   And that pretty much ended the evening. Koniev/Suvorov left the restaurant about twenty minutes later with the girl on his arm, and drove straight back to his apartment. One of the men who’d stayed behind walked with the Chinese to his car, which had diplomatic plates. Notes were written down, and the cops all headed home after an overtime day, wondering what they’d turned up and how important it might be.

CHAPTER 20

Diplomacy
   
Well?” Rutledge took his notes back from Secretary Adler.
   “It looks okay, Cliff, assuming that you can deliver the message in an appropriate way’ SecState told his subordinate.
   “Process is something I understand.” Then he paused. “The President wants this message delivered in unequivocal terms, correct?”
   Secretary Adler nodded. “Yep.”
   “You know, Scott, I’ve never really landed on people this hard before.”
   “Ever want to?”
   “The Israelis a few times. South Africa,” he added thoughtfully.
   “But never the Chinese or Japanese?”
   “Scott, I’ve never been a trade guy before, remember?” But he was this time, because the mission to Beijing was supposed to be high-profile, requiring a higher-level diplomat instead of someone of mere ambassadorial rank. The Chinese knew this already. In their case negotiations would be handled publicly by their Foreign Minister, though they would actually be run by a lesser-ranked diplomat who was a foreign-trade specialist, and who had experienced a good run of luck dealing with America. Secretary Adler, with President Ryan’s permission, was slowly leaking to the press that the times and the rules might have changed a little bit. He worried that Cliff Rutledge wasn’t exactly the right guy to deliver the message, but Cliff was the on-deck batter.
   “How are you working out with this Gant guy from Treasury?”
   “If he were a diplomat, we’d be at war with the whole damned world, but I suppose he does know numbers and computers, probably,” Rutledge allowed, not troubling to hide his distaste for the Chicago-born Jew with his nouveau-riche ways. That Rutledge had been of modest origins himself was long forgotten. A Harvard education and a diplomatic passport help one forget such distasteful things as having grown up in a row house, eating leftovers.
   “Remember that Winston likes him, and Ryan likes Winston, okay?” Adler warned his subordinate gently. He decided not to concern himself with Cliff’s WASP-ish anti-Semitism. Life was too short for trivialities, and Rutledge knew that his career rested in Scott Adler’s hands. He might make more money as a consultant after leaving the State Department, but being fired out of Foggy Bottom would not enhance his value on the free-agent market.
   “Okay, Scott, and, yeah, I need backup on the monetary aspects of this trade stuff.” The accompanying nod was almost respectful. Good. He did know how to grovel when required. Adler didn’t even consider telling Rutledge about the intelligence source in his pocket, courtesy of POTUS. There was something about the career diplomat that failed to inspire trust in his superior.
   “What about communications?”
   “The Embassy in Beijing has TAPDANCE capability. Even the new phone kind, same as the airplane.” But there were problems with it, recently fielded by Fort Meade. The instruments had trouble linking up with each other, and using a satellite lash-up didn’t help at all. Like most diplomats, Rutledge rarely troubled himself with such trivialities. He often expected the intelligence to appear as if by MAGIC, rarely wondering how it had been obtained, but always questioning the motives of the source, whoever that might be. All in all, Clifford Rutledge II was the perfect diplomat. He believed in little beyond his own career, some vague notions of international amity, and his personal ability to make it come about and to avoid war through the sheer force of his brilliance.
   But on the plus side, Adler admitted to himself, Rutledge was a competent diplomatic technician who knew how the banter worked, and how to present a position in the gentlest possible but still firm terms. The State Department never had enough of those. As someone had once remarked of Theodore Roosevelt, “The nicest gentleman who ever slit a throat.” But Cliff would never do that, even to advance his own career. He probably shaved with an electric razor, not for fear of cutting himself so much as fear of actually seeing blood.
   “When’s your plane leave?” EAGLE asked his subordinate.
 
   Barry Wise was already packed. He was an expert at it, as well he might be, because he traveled about as much as an international airline pilot. At fifty-four, the black exMarine had worked for CNN since its beginnings more than twenty years before, and he’d seen it all. He’d covered the contras in Nicaragua, and the first bombing missions in Baghdad. He’d been there when mass graves were excavated in Yugoslavia, and done live commentary over Rwanda’s roads of death, simultaneously wishing that he could and thanking God that he could not broadcast the ghastly smells that still haunted his dreams. A news professional, Wise regarded his mission in life to be this: to transmit the truth from where it happened to where people were interested in it—and helping them to become interested if they were not. He didn’t have much of a personal ideology, though he was a great believer in justice, and one of the ways to make justice happen was to give the correct information to the jury—in his case, the television-watching public. He and people like him had changed South Africa from a racist state into a functioning democracy, and he’d also played a role in destroying world communism. The truth, he figured, was about the most powerful weapon in the world, if you had a way of getting it to the average Joe. Unlike most members of his business, Wise respected Joe Citizen, at least the ones who were smart enough to watch him. They wanted the truth, and it was his job to deliver it to them to the best of his abilities, which he often doubted, as he constantly asked himself how well he was doing.
   He kissed his wife on the way out the door, promising to bring back things for the kids, as he always did, and lugging his travel bag out to his one personal indulgence, a red Mercedes two-seater, which he then drove south to the D.C. Beltway and south again toward Andrews Air Force Base. He had to arrive early, because the Air Force had gotten overly security-conscious. Maybe it was from that dumb-ass movie that had had terrorists getting past all the armed guards—even though they were merely Air Force, not Marines, they did carry rifles, and they did at least appear to be competent—and aboard one of the 89th Military Airlift Wing’s aircraft, which, Wise figured, was about as likely as having a pickpocket walk into the Oval Office and lift the President’s wallet. But the military followed its own rules, senseless though they might be—that was something he remembered well from his time in the Corps. So, he’d drive down, pass through all the checkpoints, whose guards knew him better than they knew their own CO, and wait in the plush Distinguished Visitors’ lounge at the end of Andrews’ Runway Zero-One Left for the official party to arrive. Then they’d board the venerable VC– 137 for the endless flight to Beijing. The seats were as comfortable as they could be on an airplane, and the service was as good as any airline’s first class, but flights this long were never fun.
 
   “Never been there before,” Mark Gant said, answering George Winston’s question. “So—what’s the score on this Rutledge guy?”
   The SecTreas shrugged. “Career State Department puke, worked his way pretty far up the ladder. Used to have good political connections—he was tight with Ed Kealty once upon a time.”
   The former stock TRADER looked up. “Oh? Why hasn’t Ryan fired his ass?”
   “Jack doesn’t play that sort of game,” Winston replied, wondering if in this case principle was getting in the way of common sense.
   “George, he’s still pretty naive, isn’t he?”
   “Maybe so, but he’s a straight shooter, and I can live with that. He sure as hell backed us up on tax policy, and that’s going to pass through Congress in another few weeks.”
   Cant wouldn’t believe that until he saw it. “Assuming every lobbyist in town doesn’t jump in front of the train.”
   That engendered an amused grunt. “So, the wheels get greased a little better. You know, wouldn’t it be nice to close all those bastards down...
   George, Cant couldn’t say in this office, if you believe that, you’ve been hanging out with the President too long. But idealism wasn’t all that bad a thing, was it?
   “I’ll settle for squeezing those Chinese bastards on the trade balance. Ryan’s going to back us up?”
   “All the way, he says. And I believe him, Mark.”
   “I guess we’ll see. I hope this Rutledge guy can read numbers.”
   “He went to Harvard,” Secretary Winston observed.
   “I know’ Cant said back. He had his own academic prejudice, having graduated from the University of Chicago twenty years earlier. What the hell was Harvard except a name and an endowment?
   Winston chuckled. “They’re not all dumb.”
   “I suppose we’ll see, boss. Anyway”—he lifted his suitcase up on its rollers; his computer bag went over his shoulder—”my car’s waiting downstairs.”
   “Good trip, Mark.”
 
   Her name was Yang Lien-Hua. She was thirty-four, nine months pregnant, and very frightened. It was her second pregnancy. Her first had been a son whom they had named Ju-Long, a particularly auspicious given name, which translated roughly as Large Dragon. But the youngster had died at the age of four, bumped by a bicycle off the sidewalk into the path of a passenger bus. His death had devastated his parents, and even saddened the local Communist Party officials who’d officiated at the inquest, which had absolved the bus driver of guilt and never identified the careless bicyclist. The loss has been sufficiently hard on Mrs. Yang that she’d sought comfort in a way that this country’s government did not especially approve.
   That way was Christianity, the foreign religion despised in fact if not exactly in law. In another age she might have found solace in the teachings of Buddha or Confucius, but these, too, had been largely erased from the public consciousness by the Marxist government, which still regarded all religion as a public narcotic. A co-worker had quietly suggested that she meet a “friend” of hers, a man named Yu Fa An. Mrs. Yang had sought him out, and so had begun her first adventure in treason.
   Reverend Yu, she found, was a well-educated and -traveled man, which added to his stature in her eyes. He was also a fine listener, who attended to her every word, occasionally pouring her some sympathetic tea, and gently touching her hand when tears streamed down her face. Only when she had finished her tale of woe had he begun his own lessons.
   Ju-Long, he told her, was with God, because God was especially solicitous to the needs of innocent children. While she could not see her son at this moment, her son could see her, looking down from Heaven, and while her sorrow was completely understandable, she should believe that the God of the Earth was a God of Mercy and Love who had sent his Only Begotten Son to earth to show mankind the right path, and to give His own life for the sins of humanity. He handed her a Bible printed in the Gouyu, the national language of the PRC (also called Mandarin), and helped her find appropriate passages.
   It had not been easy for Mrs. Yang, but so deep was her grief that she kept returning for private counseling, finally bringing along her husband, Quon. Mr. Yang proved a harder sell on any religion. He’d served his time in the People’s Liberation Army, where he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of his nation, and done sufficiently well in his test answers to be sent off to sergeant school, for which political reliability was required. But Quon had been a good father to his little Large Dragon, and he, too, found the void in his belief system too large to bridge easily. This bridge the Reverend Yu provided, and soon both of the Yangs came to his discreet church services, and gradually they’d come to accept their loss with confidence in the continued life of Ju-Long, and the belief that they would someday see him again in the presence of an Almighty God, whose existence became increasingly real to both of them.
   Until then, life had to go on. Both worked at their jobs, as factory workers in the same factory, with a working-class apartment in the Di’Anmen district of Beijing near Jingshan—Coal Hill—Park. They labored at their factory during the day, watched state-run television at night, and in due course, Lien-Hua became pregnant again.
   And ran afoul of the government’s population-control policy that was well to the left of draconian. It had long since been decreed that any married couple could have but one child. A second pregnancy required official government permission. Though this was not generally denied to those whose first child had died, pro forma permission had to be obtained, and in the case of politically unacceptable parents, this permission was generally withheld as a method of controlling the living population, as well. That meant that an unauthorized pregnancy had to be terminated. Safely, and at state expense in a state hospital—but terminated.
   Christianity translated exactly into political unreliability for the communist government, and unsurprisingly the Ministry of State Security had inserted intelligence officers into Reverend Yu’s congregation. This individual—actually there were three, lest one be corrupted by religion and become unreliable himself—had entered the names of the Yangs on a master list of political unreliables. For that reason, when Mrs. Yang Lien-Hua had duly registered her pregnancy, an official letter had appeared in her box, instructing her to go to the Longfu Hospital located on Meishuguan Street for a therapeutic abortion.
   This Lien-Hua was unwilling to do. Her given name translated as “Lotus Flower,” but inside she was made of much sterner stuff. She wrote a week later to the appropriate government agency, telling them that her pregnancy had miscarried. Given the nature of bureaucracies, her lie was never checked out.
   That lie had merely won Lotus Flower six months of ever-increasing stress. She never saw a physician, not even one of the “barefoot medics” that the PRC had invented a generation earlier, much to the admiration of political leftists all over the world. Lien-Hua was healthy and strong, and the human body had been designed by Nature to produce healthy offspring long before the advent of obstetricians. Her swelling belly she was able to hide, mostly, in her ill-fitting clothing. What she could not hide—at least from herself—was her inward fear. She carried a new baby in her belly. She wanted it. She wanted to have another chance at motherhood. She wanted to feel her child suckling at her breast. She wanted to love it and pamper it, watch it learn to crawl and stand and walk and talk, to see it grow beyond four years, enter school, learn and grow into a good adult of whom she could be proud.
   The problem was politics. The state enforced its will with ruthlessness. She knew what could happen, the syringe filled with formaldehyde stabbed into the baby’s head at the very moment of birth. In China, it was state policy. For the Yangs, it was premeditated, cold-blooded murder, and they were determined not to lose a second child, who, the Reverend Yu had told them, was a gift from God Himself.
   And there was a way. If you delivered the baby at home without medical assistance, and if the baby took its first breath, then the state would not kill it. There were some things even the government of the People’s Republic quailed at, and the killing of a living, breathing human infant was one of them. But until it took that breath, it was of no more consequence than a piece of meat in a market. There were even rumors that the Chinese government was selling organs from the aborted newborns on the world’s tissue market, to be used for medical purposes, and that was something the Yangs were able to believe.
 
   So, their plan was for Lien-Hua to deliver the child at home, after which they would present their state with afait accompli—and eventually have it baptized by Reverend Yu. To this end, Mrs. Yang had kept herself in good physical shape, walking two kilometers every day, eating sensibly, and generally doing all the things the government-published booklets told expectant mothers to do. And if anything went badly wrong, they’d go to Reverend Yu for counsel and advice. The plan enabled Lien-Hua to deal with the stress—in fact it was a heart-rending terror-of her unauthorized condition.
   "Well ?" Ryan asked.
   “Rutledge has all the right talents, and we’ve given him the instructions he needs. He ought to carry them out properly. Question is, will the Chinese play ball.”
   “If they don’t, things become harder for them,” the President said, if not coldly, then with some degree of determination. “If they think they can bully us, Scott, it’s time they found out who the big kid in the playground is.”
   “They’ll fight back. They’ve taken out options on fourteen Boeing 777s—just did that four days ago, remember?
   That’s the first thing they’ll chop if they don’t like us.
   That’s a lot of money and a lot of jobs for Boeing in
   Seattle,” SecState warned.
   “I never have been real big on blackmail, Scott. Besides, that’s a classic case of penny-wise, pound-foolish. If we cave because of that, then we lose ten times the money and ten times the jobs elsewhere—okay, they won’t be all in one place, and so the TV news guys won’t be able to point their cameras, and so they won’t do the real story, just the one that can fit on half-inch tape. But I’m not in here to keep the goddamned media happy. I’m here to serve the people to the best of my ability, Scott. And that’s by-God going to happen,” POTUS promised his guest.
   “I don’t doubt it, Jack,” Adler responded. “Just remember that it won’t play out quite the way you want it to.”
   “It never does, but if they play rough, it’s going to cost them seventy billion dollars a year. We can afford to do without their products. Can they afford to do without our money?” Ryan asked.
   Secretary Adler was not totally comfortable with the way the question was posed. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”

CHAPTER 21

Simmering
 
 “So, what did you develop last night?” Reilly asked. He’d be late to his embassy office, but his gut told him that things were breaking loose in the RPG Case—that was how he thought of it—and Director Murray had a personal interest in the case, because the President did, and that made it more important than the routine bullshit on Reilly’s desk.
   “Our Chinese friend—the one in the men’s room, that is—is the Third Secretary at their mission. Our friends across town at SVR have suspected that he is a member of their Ministry for State Security. He’s not regarded as a particularly bright diplomat by the Foreign Ministry—ours, that is.”
   “That’s how you cover a spook,” Reilly agreed. “A dumb cookie-pusher. Okay, so he’s a player”
   “I agree, Mishka,” Provalov said. “Now, it would be nice to know who passed what to whom.”
   “Oleg Gregoriyevich”—Reilly liked the semiformal Russian form of address—”if I’d been standing right there and staring, I might not have been able to tell.” That was the problem dealing with real professionals. They were as good at that maneuver as a Vegas dealer was with a deck of Bicycles. You needed a good lens and a slow-motion camera to be sure, and that was a little bulky for work in the field. But they’d just proved, to their satisfaction at least, that both men were active in the spook business, and that was a break in the case any way you sliced it. “ID the girl?”
   “Yelena Ivanova Dimitrova.” Provalov handed the folder across. “Just a whore, but, of course, a very expensive one.
   Reilly flipped it open and scanned the notes. Known prostitute specializing in foreigners. The photo of her was unusually flattering.
   “You came in early this morning?” Reilly asked. He must have, to have all this work done already.
   “Before six,” Oleg confirmed. The case was becoming more exciting for him as well. “In any case, Klementi Ivan’ch kept her all night. She left his apartment and caught a taxi home at seven-forty this morning. She looked happy and satisfied, according to my people.”
   That was good for a chuckle. She didn’t leave her trick until after Oleg hit the office? That must have affected his attitude somewhat, Reilly thought, with an inward grin. It sure as hell would have affected his. “Well, good for our subject. I expect he won’t be getting too much of that in a few months,” the FBI agent thought aloud, hoping it would make his Russian colleague a little happier about life.
   “One can hope,” Provalov agreed coldly. “I have four men watching his apartment. If he leaves and appears to be heading away for a while, I will try to get a team into his apartment to plant some electronic surveillance.”
   “They know how to be careful?” Reilly asked. If this Suvorov mutt was as trained as they thought, he’d leave telltales in his apartment that could make breaking in dicey.
   “They are KGB-trained also. One of them helped catch a French intelligence officer back in the old times. Now, I have a question for you,” the Russian cop said.
   “Shoot.”
   “What do you know of a special counterterrorist group based in England?”
   “The ‘Men of Black,’ you mean?”
   Provalov nodded. “Yes. Do you know anything about them?”
   Reilly knew he had to watch his words, even though he knew damned little. “Really, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve seen in the papers. It’s some sort of multinational NATO group, part military and part police, I think. They had a good run of luck last year. Why do you ask?”
   “A request from on high, because I know you. I’ve been told that they are coming to Moscow to assist in training our people—Spetsnaz groups with similar tasks,” Oleg explained.
   “Really? Well, I’ve never been in the muscle end of the Bureau, just in a local SWAT team once. Gus Werner probably knows a lot about them. Gus runs the new Counter-Terrorism Division at Headquarters. Before that, Gus ran HRT and had a field command—a field division, that is, a big-city field office. I’ve met him once, just to say hello. Gus has a very good service rep.”
   “Rep?”
   “Reputation, Oleg. He’s well regarded by the field agents. But like I said, that’s the muscle end of the Bureau. I’ve always been with the chess players."
   “Investigations, you mean.”
   Reilly nodded. “That’s right. It’s what the FBI is supposed to be all about, but the outfit’s mutated a bit over the years.” The American paused. “So, you’re covering this Suvorov/Koniev guy real tight?” Reilly asked, to recenter the discussion.
   “My men have orders to be discreet, but yes, we will keep a close eye on him, as you say.”
   “You know, if he really is working with the Chinese spooks . . . do you think they might want to kill that Golovko guy?”
   “I do not know, but we must regard that as a real possibility.”
   Reilly nodded, thinking this would make an interesting report to send to Washington, and maybe discuss with the CIA station chief as well.
 
   “I want the files for everyone who ever worked with him,” Sergey Nikolay’ch ordered. “And I want you to get me his personal file.”
   “Yes, Comrade Chairman,” Major Shelepin replied, with a bob of the head.
   The morning briefing, delivered by a colonel of the militia, had pleased neither the SVR Chairman nor his principal bodyguard. In this case, for a change, the legendarily slow Russian bureaucracy had been circumvented, and the information fast-tracked to those interested in it. That included the man whose life might have been spared accidentally after all.
   “And we will set up a special-action group to work with this Provalov child.”
   “Of course, Comrade Chairman.”
   It was strange, Sergey Nikolay’ch thought, how rapidly the world could change. He vividly remembered the morning of the murder—it was not the sort of thing a man could forget. But after the first few days of shock and attendant fear, he’d allowed himself to relax, to believe that this Avseyenko had been the real target of an underworld rub out—an archaic American term he liked—and that his own life had never been directly threatened. With the acceptance of that belief, the entire thing had become like driving past an ordinary traffic accident. Even if some unfortunate motorist had been killed there at the side of the road, you just dismissed it as an irrelevance, because that sort of thing couldn’t happen to you in your own expensive official car, not with Anatoliy driving. But now he’d begun to wonder if perhaps his life had been spared by accident. Such things were not supposed to occur—there shouldn’t have been any need for them.
   Now he was more frightened than he’d been that bright Moscow morning, looking down from his window at the smoking wreck on the pavement. It meant that he might be in danger still, and he dreaded that prospect as much as the next man.
   Worse still, his hunter might well be one of his own, a former KGB officer with connections to Spetsnaz, and if he were in contact with the Chinese...
   ... But why would the Chinese wish to end his life? For that matter, why would the Chinese wish to perform any such crime in a foreign land? It was beyond imprudent.
   None of this made any sense, but as a career intelligence officer, Golovko had long since shed the illusion that the world was supposed to make sense. What he did know was that he needed more information, and at least he was in a very good place to seek it out. If he wasn’t as powerful as he might once have been, he was still powerful enough for his own purposes, Golovko told himself.
   Probably.
 
   He didn’t try to come to the ministry very often. It was just a routine security measure, but a sensible one. Once you recruited an agent, you didn’t want to hang out with him or her for fear of compromise. That was one of the things they taught you at The Farm. If you compromised one of your agents, you might have trouble sleeping at night, because CIA was usually active in countries where the Miranda warning was delivered by a gun or knife or fist, or something just as bad—as unpleasant as a police state could make it, and that, the instructors had told his class, could be pretty fuckin’ unpleasant. Especially in a case like this, he was intimate with this agent, and breaking away from her could cause her to stop her cooperation, which, Langley had told him, was pretty damned good, and they wanted more of it. Erasing the program he’d had her input on her machine would be difficult for a CalTech-trained genius, but you could accomplish the same thing by clobbering the whole hard drive and reinstalling new files over the old ones, because the valuable little gopher file was hidden in the system software, and a write-over would destroy it as surely as the San Francisco Earthquake.
   So, he didn’t want to be here, exactly, but he was a businessman, in addition to being a spook, and the client had called him in. The girl two desks away from Ming had a computer problem, and he was the NEC rep for the ministry offices.
   It turned out to be a minor problem—you just couldn’t turn some women loose on computers. It was like loosing a four-year-old in a gun shop, he thought, but didn’t dare say such things aloud in these liberated times, even here. Happily, Ming hadn’t been in sight when he’d come in. He’d walked over to the desk with the problem and fixed it in about three minutes, explaining the error to the secretary in simple terms she was sure to understand, and which would now make her the office expert for an easily replicated problem. With a smile and a polite Japanese bow, he’d made his way to the door, when the door to the inner office opened, and Ming came out with her Minister Fang behind her, looking down at some papers.
   “Oh, hello, Nomuri-san,” Ming said in surprise, as Fang called the name “Chai,” and waved to another of the girls to follow him in. If Fang saw Nomuri there, he didn’t acknowledge it, simply disappeared back into his private office.
   “Hello, Comrade Ming,” the American said, speaking in English. “Your computer operates properly?” he asked formally.
   “Yes, it does, thank you.”
   “Good. Well, if you experience a problem, you have my card.”
   “Oh, yes. You are well settled in to Beijing now?” she asked politely.
   “Yes, thank you, I am.”
   “You should try Chinese food instead of sticking to the food of your homeland, though, I admit, I have developed a taste lately for Japanese sausage,” she told him, and everyone else in the room, with a face that would have done Amarillo Slim proud.
   For his part, Chester Nomuri felt his heart not so much skip a beat as stop entirely for about ten seconds, or so it seemed. “Ah, yes,” he had to say in reply, as soon as he got breath back in his lungs. “It can be very tasty.”
   Ming just nodded and went to her desk and back to work. Nomuri nodded and bowed politely to the office and made his departure as well, then headed down the corridor immediately for a men’s room, the need to urinate urgent. Sweet Jesus. But that was one of the problems with agents They sometimes got off on their work the way a drug addict got off on the immediate rush when the chemical hit his system, and they’d tickle the dragon with their new and playful enthusiasm just to experience a little more of the rush, forgetting that the dragon’s tail was a lot closer to its mouth than it appeared. It was foolish to enjoy danger. Zipping himself back up, he told himself that he hadn’t broken training, hadn’t stumbled on his reply to her playful observation. But he had to warn her about dancing in a minefield. You never really knew where to put your feet, and discovering the wrong places was usually painful.
   That’s when he realized why it had happened, and the thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Ming loved him. She was playful because.., well, why else would she have said that? As a game? Did she regard the whole thing as a game? No, she wasn’t the right personality type to be a hooker. The sex had been good, maybe too good—if such a thing were possible, Nomuri thought as he resumed walking toward the elevator. She’d surely be over tonight after saying that. He’d have to stop by the liquor store on the way home and get some more of that awful Japanese scotch for thirty bucks a liter. A working man couldn’t afford to get drunk here unless he drank the local stuff, and that was too vile to contemplate.
   But Ming had just consecrated their relationship by risking her life in front of her minister and her co-workers, and that was far more frightening to Nomuri than her ill-considered remark about his dick and her fondness for it. Jesus, he thought, this is getting too serious. But what could he do now? He’d seduced her and made a spy of her, and she’d fallen for him for no better reason, probably, than that he was younger than the old fucker she worked for, and was far nicer to her. Okay, so he was pretty good in the sack, and that was excellent for his male ego, and he was a stranger in a strange land and he had to get his rocks off, too, and doing it with her was probably safer to his cover than picking up some hooker in a bar—and he didn’t even want to consider getting seriously involved with a real girl in his real life– __but how was this so different from that? he asked himself. Aside from the fact that while she was loving him, her computer was sending her transcribed notes off into the etherworld....
 
   It was doing it again soon after the close of regular business hours, and the eleven-hour differential pretty much guaranteed that it arrived on the desks of American officials soon after their breakfasts. In the case of Mary Patricia Foley, mornings were far less hectic than they’d once been. Her youngest was not yet in college, but preferred to fix her own oatmeal from the Quaker envelopes, and now drove herself to school, which allowed her mother an extra twenty-five minutes or so of additional sleep every morning. Twenty years of being a field spook and mother should have been enough to drive her to distracted insanity, but it was, actually, a life she’d enjoyed, especially her years in Moscow, doing her business right there in the belly of the beast, and giving the bastard quite an ulcer at the time, she remembered with a smile.
   Her husband could say much the same. The first husband-wife team to rise so high at Langley, they drove together to work every morning—in their own car rather than the “company” one to which they were entitled, but with lead and chase cars full of people with guns, because any terrorist with half a brain would regard them as targets more valuable than rubies. This way they could talk on the way in—and the car was swept for bugs on a weekly basis.
   They took their usual reserved and oversized place in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building, then rode up in the executive elevator, which somehow was always waiting for them, to their seventh-floor offices.
   Mrs. Foley’s desk was always arrayed just so. The overnight crew had all her important papers arranged just so, also. But today, as she had for the last week, instead of looking over the striped-border folders full of Top SECRET CODEWORDED material, she first of all flipped on her desktop computer and checked her special e-mail. This morning was no disappointment. She copied the file electronically to her hard drive, printed up a hard copy, and when that was off her printer, deleted the e-mail from her system, effectively erasing it from electronic existence. Then she reread the paper copy and lifted the phone for her husband’s office.
   “Yeah, baby?”
   “Some egg-drop soup,” she told the Director of Central Intelligence. It was a Chinese dish he found especially vile, and she enjoyed teasing her husband.
   “Okay, honey. Come on in.” It had to be pretty good if she was trying to turn his stomach over this early in the friggin’ morning, the DCI knew.
 
   “More SORGE?” the President asked, seventy-five minutes later.
   “Yes, sir,” Ben Goodley replied, handing the sheet over. It wasn’t long, but it was interesting.
   Ryan skimmed through it. “Analysis?”
   “Mrs. Foley wants to go over it with you this afternoon. You have a slot at two-fifteen.”
   “Okay. Who else?”
   “The Vice President, since he’s around.” Goodley knew that Ryan liked to have Robby Jackson in for strategically interesting material. “He’s fairly free this afternoon as well.”
   “Good. Set it up,” POTUS ordered.
 
   Six blocks away, Dan Murray was just arriving at his capacious office (considerably larger than the President’s, as a matter of fact) with his own security detail, because he, as the country’s principal counterintelligence and counter-terrorist officer, had all manner of information that others were interested in. This morning only brought in some more.
   “Morning, Director,” one of the staff said—she was a sworn agent carrying a side arm, not just a secretary.
   “Hey, Toni,” Murray responded. This agent had very nice wheels, but the FBI Director realized that he’d just proven to himself that his wife, Liz, was right: He was turning into a dirty old man.
   The piles on the desk were arranged by the overnight staff, and there was a routine for this. The rightward-most pile was for intelligence-related material, the leftward-most for counterintelligence operations, and the big one in the middle was for ongoing criminal investigations requiring his personal attention or notification. That tradition went back to “Mr. Hoover,” as he was remembered at the FBI, who seemingly went over every field case bigger than the theft of used cars off the government parking lot.
   But Murray had long worked the “black” side of the Bureau, and that meant he attacked the rightward pile first. There wasn’t much there. The FBI was running some of its own pure intelligence operations at the moment, somewhat to the discomfort of CIA—but those two government agencies had never gotten along terribly well, even though Murray rather liked the Foleys. What the hell, he thought, a little competition was good for everybody, so long as CIA didn’t mess with a criminal investigation, which would be a very different kettle of fish. The top report was from Mike Reilly in Moscow....
   “Damn .. .“ Murray breathed. Then an inward smile. Murray had personally selected Reilly for the Moscow slot, over the objections of some of his senior people, who had all wanted Paul Landau out of the Intelligence Division. But no, Murray had decided, Moscow needed help with cop work, not spy-chasing, at which they had lots of good experience, and so he’d sent Mike, a second-generation agent who, like his father, Pat Reilly, had given the Mafia in New York City a serious case of indigestion. Landau was now in Berlin, playing with the German Bundeskriminalamt, the BKA, doing regular crime liaison stuff, and doing it pretty well. But Reilly was a potential star. His dad had retired an ASAC. Mike would do better than that.
   And the way he’d bonded with this Russian detective, Provalov, wouldn’t hurt his career one bit. So. They’d uncovered a link between a former KGB officer and the Chinese MSS, eh? And this was part of the investigation into the big ka—boom in Moscow...? Jesus, could the Chinese have had a part in that? If so, what the hell did that mean? Now, this was something the Foleys had to see.
   To that end, Director Murray lifted his phone. Ten minutes later, the Moscow document slid into his secure fax machine to Langley—and just to make sure that CIA didn’t take credit for an FBI job, a hard copy was hand-carried to the White House, where it was handed to Dr. Benjamin Goodley, who’d surely show it to the President before lunch.
 
   It had gotten to the point that he recognized her knock at the door. Nomuri set his drink down and jumped to answer, pulling it open less than five seconds after the first sexy tap tap.
   “Ming,” Chet said.
   “Nomuri-san,” she greeted in turn.
   He pulled her in the door, closed, and locked it. Then he lifted her off the floor with a passionate hug that was less than three percent feigned.
   “So, you have a taste for Japanese sausage, eh?” he demanded, with a smile and a kiss.
   “You didn’t even smile when I said it. Wasn’t it funny?” she asked, as he undid a few of her buttons.
   “Ming—” Then he hesitated and tried something he’d learned earlier in the day. “Baubei,” he said instead. It translated to “beloved one.”
   Ming smiled at the words and made her own reply: “Shing-gan,” which literally meant “heart and liver,” but in context meant “heart and soul.”
   “Beloved one,” Nomuri said, after a kiss, “do you advertise our relationship at your office?”
   “No, Minister Fang might not approve, but the other girls in the office probably would not object if they found out,” she explained, with a coquettish smile. “But you never know.”
   “Then why risk exposing yourself by making such a joke, unless you wish me to betray you?”
   “You have no sense of humor,” Ming observed. But then she ran her hands under his shirt and up his chest. “But that is all right. You have the other things I need.”
   Afterward, it was time to do business.
   “Bau-bei?”
   “Yes?”
   “Your computer still works properly?”
   “Oh, yes,” she assured him in a sleepy voice.
   His left hand stroked her body gently. “Do any of the other girls in the office use their computers to surf the ‘Net?”
   “Only Chai. Fang uses her as he uses me. In fact, he likes her better. He thinks she has a better mouth.”
   “Oh?” Nomuri asked, softening the question with a smile.
   “I told you, Minister Fang is an old man. Sometimes he needs special encouragement, and Chai doesn’t mind so much. Fang reminds her of her grandfather, she says,” Ming told him.
   Which was good in the American’s mind for a Yuck! and little else. “So, all the girls in the office trade notes on your minister?”
   Ming laughed. It was pretty funny. “Of course. We all do.”
   Damn, Nomuri thought. He’d always thought that women would be more.., discreet, that it was just the men who bragged in the locker room over their sweat socks.
   “The first time he did me,” she went on, “I didn’t know what to do, so I talked with Chai for advice. She’s been there the longest, you see. She just said to enjoy it, and try to make him happy, and I might get a nice office chair out of it, like she did. Chai must be very good to him. She got a new bicycle last November. Me, well, I think he only likes me because I’m a little different to look at. Chai has bigger breasts than I do, and I think I’m prettier, but she has a sweet disposition, and she likes the old man. More than I do, anyway.” She paused. “I don’t want a new bicycle enough for that.”
 
   “What does this mean?” Robby Jackson asked.
   “Well, we’re not sure,” the DCI admitted. “This Fang guy had a long talk with our old friend Zhang Han San. They’re talking about the meeting with our trade team that starts tomorrow. Hell”—Ed Foley looked at his watch—”call that fourteen hours from now. And it looks as though they want concessions from us instead of offering any to us. They’re even angrier over our recognition of Taiwan than we’d anticipated.”
   “Tough shit" Ryan observed.
   “Jack, I agree with your sentiment, but let’s try not to be over-cavalier about their opinions, shall we?” Foley suggested.
   “You’re starting to sound like Scott,” the President said.
   “So? You want a yes-man handling Langley, you got the wrong guy,” the DCI countered.
   “Fair enough, Ed,” Jack conceded. “Go on.”
   “Jack, we need to warn Rutledge that the PRC isn’t going to like what he has to say. They may not be in a mood to make many trade concessions.”
   “Well, neither is the United States of America,” Ryan told his Director of Central Intelligence. “And we come back to the fact that they need our money more than we need their trade goods.”
   “What’s the chance that this is a setup, this information I mean?” Vice President Jackson asked.
   “You mean that they’re using this source as a conduit to get back-channel information to us?” Mary Patricia Foley asked. “I evaluate that chance as practically zero. As close to zero as something in the real world can be.”
   “MP, how can you be that confident?” President Ryan asked.
   “Not here, Jack, but I am that confident,” Mary Pat said, somewhat to the discomfort of her husband, Ryan saw. It was rare in the intelligence community for anyone to feel that confident about anything, but Ed had always been the careful one, and Mary Pat had always been the cowgirl. She was as loyal to her people as a mother was to her infant, and Ryan admired that, even though he also had to remind himself that it wasn’t always realistic.
   “Ed?” Ryan asked, just to see.
   “I back Mary up on this one. This source appears to be gold-plated and copper-bottomed.”
   “So, this document represents the view of their government?” TOMCAT asked.
   Foley surprised the Vice President by shaking his head. “No, it represents the view of this Zhang Han San guy. He’s a powerful and influential minister, but he doesn’t speak for their government per se. Note that the text here doesn’t say what their official position is. Zhang probably does represent a view, and a powerful view, inside their Politburo. There are also moderates whose position this document does not address.”
   “Okay, great,” Robby said, shifting in his seat, “so why are you taking up our time with this stuff, then?”
   “This Zhang guy is tight with their Defense Minister– in fact he has a major voice in their entire national-security establishment. If he’s expanding his influence into trade policy, we have a problem, and our trade negotiations team needs to know that up front,” the DCI informed them.
 
   “So?” Ming asked tiredly. She hated getting dressed and leaving, and it meant a night of not-enough sleep.
   “So, you should get in early and upload this on Chai’s computer. It’s just a new system file, the new one, six-point-eight-point-one, like the one I uploaded on your computer.” In fact, the newest real system file was 6.3.2, and so there was at least a year until a write-over would actually be necessary.
   “Why do you have me do this?”
   “Does it matter, Bau-bei?” he asked.
   She actually hesitated, thinking it over a bit, and the second or so of uncertainty chilled the American spy. “No, I suppose not.”
   “I need to get you some new things,” Nomuri whispered, taking her in his arms.
   “Like what?” she asked. All his previous gifts had been noteworthy.
   “It will be a surprise, and a good one,” he promised.
   Her dark eyes sparkled with anticipation. Nomuri helped her on with her dreadful jacket. Dressing her back up was not nearly as fun as undressing her, but that was to be expected. A moment later, he gave her the final goodbye kiss at the door, and watched her depart, then went back to his computer to tell patsbakery@brownienet.com that he’d arranged for a second recipe that he hoped she might find tasty.

CHAPTER 22

The Table and the Recipe
 
 Minister this is a pleasure,” Cliff Rutledge said in his friendliest diplomatic voice, shaking hands. Rutledge was glad the PRC had adopted the Western custom—he’d never learned the exact protocol of bowing.
   Carl Hitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic, was there for the opening ceremony. He was a career foreign service officer who’d always preferred working abroad to working at Foggy Bottom. Running day-to-day diplomatic relations wasn’t especially exciting, but in a place like this, it did require a steady hand. Hitch had that, and he was apparently well liked by the rest of the diplomatic community, which didn’t hurt.
   It was all new for Mark Gant, however. The room was impressive, like the boardroom of a major corporation—designed to keep the board members happy, like noblemen from medieval Italy. It had high ceilings and fabric-covered walls—Chinese silk, in this case, red, of course, so that the effect was rather like crawling inside the heart of a whale, complete with chandeliers, cut crystal, and polished brass. Everyone had a tiny glass of mao-tai, which really was like drinking flavored lighter fluid, as he’d been warned.
   “It is your first time in Beijing?” some minor official asked him.
   Gant turned to look down at the little guy. “Yes, it is.”
   “Too soon for first impressions, then?”
   “Yes, but this room is quite stunning.., but then silk is something with which your people have a long and fruitful history,” he went on, wondering if he sounded diplomatic or merely awkward.
   “This is so, yes,” the official agreed with a toothy grin and a nod, neither of which told the visiting American much of anything, except that he didn’t waste much money on toothbrushes.
   “I have heard much of the imperial art collection.”
   “You will see it’ the official promised. “It is part of the official program."
   “Excellent. In addition to my duties, I would like to play tourist.”
   “I hope you will find us acceptable hosts,” the little guy said. For his part, Gant was wondering if this smiling, bowing dwarf would hit his knees and offer a blow job, but diplomacy was an entirely new area for him. These were not investment bankers, who were generally polite sharks, giving you good food and drink before sitting you down and trying to bite your dick off. But they never concealed the fact that they were sharks. These people—he just wasn’t sure. This degree of politeness and solicitude was a new experience for Gant, but given his pre-mission brief, he wondered if the hospitality only presaged an unusually hostile meeting when they got to business. If the two things had to balance out, then the downside of this seesaw was going to be a son of a bitch, he was sure.
   “So, you are not from the American State Department?” the Chinese man asked.
   “No. I’m in the Department of the Treasury. I work directly for Secretary Winston.”
   “Ah, then you are from the trading business?”
   So, the little bastard’s been briefed... But that was to be expected. At this level of government you didn’t freelance things. Everyone would be thoroughly briefed. Everyone would have read the book on the Americans. The State Department members of the American crew had done the same. Gant, however, had not, since he wasn’t really a player per Se, and had only been told what he needed to know. That gave him an advantage over the Chinese assigned to look after him. He was not State Department, hence should not have been regarded as important—but he was the personal representative of a very senior American official, known to be part of that man’s inner circle, and that made him very important indeed. Perhaps he was even a principal adviser to the Rutledge man—and in a Chinese context, that might even mean that he, Gant, was the man actually running the negotiations rather than the titular chief diplomat, because the Chinese often ran things that way. It occurred to Gant that maybe he could fuck with their minds a little bit.., but how to go about it?
   “Oh, yes, I’ve been a capitalist all my life,” Gant said, deciding to play it cool and just talk to the guy as though he were a human being and not a fucking communist diplomat. “So has Secretary Winston, and so has our President, you know.”
   “But he was mainly an intelligence officer, or so I have been told.”
   Time to stick the needle: “I suppose that’s partly true, but his heart is in business, I think. After he leaves government service, he and George will probably go into business together and really take the world over.” Which was almost true, Gant thought, remembering that the best lies usually were.
   “And you have worked some years with Secretary Winston.” A statement rather than a question, Gant noted. How to answer it? How much did they really know about him.., or was he a man of mystery to the ChiComms? If so, could he make that work for him...?
   A gentle, knowing smile. “Well, yeah, George and I made a little money together. When Jack brought him into the cabinet, George decided that he wanted me to come down with him and help make a little government policy. Especially tax policy. That’s been a real mess, and George turned me loose on it. And you know? We just might get all of that changed. It looks as though Congress is going to do what we told them to do, and that’s not bad, making those idiots do what we want them to do,” Gant observed, looking rather deliberately at the carved ivory fixture on the wooden display cabinet. Some craftsman with a sharp knife had spent a lot of time to get that thing just right. . . So, Mr. Chinaman, do I look important now? One thing about this guy. He would have been a pretty good poker player. His eyes told you nothing at all. Not a fucking thing. Gant looked down at the guy again. “Excuse me. I talk too much.”
   The official smiled. “There is much of that at times like this. Why do you suppose everyone gets something to drink?” Amusement in his voice, letting Gant know, perhaps, who was really running this affair...?
   “I suppose,” Gant observed diffidently and wandered off with the junior—or was he?—official in tow.
   For his part, Rutledge was trying to decide if the opposition knew what his instructions were. There had been a few leaked hints in the media, but Adler had arranged the leaks with skill, so that even a careful observer—and the PRC ambassador in Washington was one of those—might have trouble deciding who was leaking what, and to what purpose. The Ryan administration had utilized the press with a fair degree of skill, probably, Rutledge thought, because the cabinet officers mainly took their lead from Ryan’s chief of staff, Arnie van Damm, who was a very skillful political operator. The new cabinet didn’t have the usual collection of in-and-out political figures who needed to stroke the press to further their own agendas. Ryan had chiefly selected people with no real agenda at all, which was no small feat—especially since most of them seemed to be competent technicians who, like Ryan, only seemed to want to escape Washington with their virtue intact and return to their real lives as soon as they finished serving their country for a short period of time. The career diplomat had not thought it possible that his country’s government could be so transformed. He assigned credit for all this to that madman Japanese pilot who’d killed so much of official Washington in that one lunatic gesture.
   It was then that Xu Kun Piao showed up, sweeping in to the greeting room with his official entourage. Xu was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Chinese Politburo, though referred to in the media as the country’s “Premier,” which was something of a misnomer, but one adopted even in the diplomatic community. He was a man of seventy-one years, one of the second generation of Chinese leaders. The Long March survivors had long since died out—there were some senior officials who claimed to have been there, but a check of the numbers showed that if they had, they’d been sucking their mothers’ nipples at the time, and those men were not taken seriously. No, the current crop of Chinese political leaders were mainly the sons or nephews of the original set, raised in privilege and relative comfort, but always mindful of the fact that their place in life was a precarious one. On one side were the other political children who craved advancement beyond their parents’ places, and to achieve that they’d been more Catholic than the local communist pope. They’d carried their Little Red Books high as adults during the Cultural Revolution, and before that they’d kept their mouths shut and ears open during the abortive and predatory “Hundred Flowers” campaign of the late ‘50s, which had trapped a lot of intellectuals who’d thought to keep hidden for the first decade of Maoist rule. They’d been enticed into the open by Mao’s own solicitation for their ideas, which they’d foolishly given out, and in the process only extended their necks over the broad block for the axe that fell a few years later in the brutal, cannibalistic Cultural Revolution.
   The current Politburo members had survived in two ways. First, they’d been secured by their fathers and the rank that attached to such lofty parentage. Second, they’d been carefully warned about what they could say and what they could not say, and so all along they’d observed cautiously, always saying out loud that Chairman Mao’s ideas were those which China really needed, and that the others, while interesting, perhaps, in a narrow intellectual sense, were dangerous insofar as they distracted the workers and peasants from The True Way of Mao. And so when the axe had fallen, borne as it had been by the Little Red Book, they’d been among the first to carry and show that book to others, and so escaped the destruction for the most part—a few of their number had been sacrificed, of course, but none of the really smart ones who now shared the seats on the Politburo. It had been a brutal Darwinian process that they had all gotten through by being a little smarter than those around them, and now, at the peak of the power won for them by brains and caution, it was time for them to enjoy that which they’d earned.
   The new crop of leaders accepted communism as truly as other men believed in God, because they’d learned nothing else, and had not exercised their intellectual agility to seek another faith, or even to seek solutions to the questions that Marxism could not answer. Theirs was a faith of resignation rather than enthusiasm. Raised within a circumscribed intellectual box, they never ventured out of it, for they feared what they might find out there. In the past twenty years, they’d been forced to allow capitalism to blossom within the borders of their country, because that country needed money to grow into something more powerful than the failed experiment in the Democratic Republic of Korea. China had experienced its own killer famine around 1960, and slowly learned from it and the Chinese also used it as a launching point for the Cultural Revolution, thus gaining political capital from a self-imposed disaster.
   They wanted their nation to be great. In fact, they already regarded it as such, but recognized the fact that other nations lacked this appreciation, and so they had to seek out the means to correct the misimpression foolishly held by the rest of the world. That had meant money, and money had meant industry, and industry required capitalists. It was something they had figured out before the foolish Soviets to their north and west. And so the Soviet Union had fallen, but the People’s Republic of China remained.
   Or so they all believed. They looked out, when they bothered themselves to do so, at a world that they pretended to understand and to which they felt superior for no better reason than their skin and their language—ideology came second in their self-reckoning; amour propre starts from within. They expected people to defer to them, and the previous years of interactive diplomacy with the surrounding world had not altered their outlook very much.
   But in this, they suffered from their own illusions. Henry Kissinger had come to China in 1971 at the behest of President Richard Nixon not so much from his perceived need to establish normal relations with the world’s most populous nation as to use the PRC as a stick with which to beat the Soviet Union into submission. In fact Nixon had begun a process so lengthy as to be considered beyond Western capabilities—it was more the sort of thing that Westerners thought the Chinese themselves capable of conceiving. With such ideas, people merely show ethnic prejudices of one sort or another. The typical chief of a totalitarian government is far too self-centered to think much beyond his own lifetime, and men all over the world live roughly the same number of years. For that simple reason, they all think in terms of programs that can be completed in their own living sight, and little beyond, because they were all men who’d torn down the statues of others, and such men had few illusions over the fate of their own monuments. It was only as they faced death that they considered what they had done, and Mao had conceded bleakly to Henry Kissinger that all he’d accomplished had been to change the lives of peasants within a few miles of Beijing.
   But the men in this ceremonial room were not yet close enough to death to think in such terms. They were the magisters of their land. They made the rules that others followed. Their words were law. Their whims were granted with alacrity. People looked upon them as they once looked upon the emperors and princes of old. All a man could wish to have, they had. Most of all, they had the power. It was their wishes that ruled their vast and ancient land. Their communist ideology was merely the MAGIC that defined the form their wishes took, the rules of the game they had all agreed to play all those years before. The power was the thing. They could grant life or take it with the stroke of a pen—or more realistically, a dictated word, taken down by a personal secretary, for transmission to the underling who squeezed the trigger.
   Xu was a man of average everything—height, weight, eyes, and face ... and intellect, some said. Rutledge had read all this in his briefing documents. The real power was elsewhere. Xu was a figurehead of sorts, chosen for his looks, partially; his ability to give a speech, certainly; and his ability to front the occasional idea of others on the Politburo, to simulate conviction. Like a Hollywood actor, he didn’t so much have to be smart as to play smart.
   “Comrade Premier,” Rutledge said in greeting, holding out his hand, which the Chinese man took.
   “Mr. Rutledge,” Xu replied in passable English. There was an interpreter there, too, for the more complex thoughts. “Welcome to Beijing.”
   “It is my pleasure, and my honor, to visit your ancient country again,” the American diplomat said, showing proper respect and subservience, the Chinese leader thought.
   “It is always a pleasure to welcome a friend,” Xu went on, as he’d been briefed to do. Rutledge had been to China before in his official capacity, but never before as a delegation leader. He was known to the Chinese Foreign Ministry as a diplomat who’d climbed his way up the ladder of his bureaucracy, much as they did in their own—a mere technician, but a high-ranking one. The Politburo chief raised his glass. “I drink to successful and cordial negotiations.”
   Rutledge smiled and hoisted his glass as well. “As do I, sir.”
   The cameras got it. The news media people were circulating around, too. The cameramen were doing mainly what they called “locator” shots, like any amateur would do with his less expensive mini-cam. They showed the room at an artificial distance, so that the viewers could see the colors, with a few close-ups of the furniture on which no one was supposed to sit, with somewhat closer shots of the major participants drinking their drinks and looking pleasant to one another—this was called “B-roll,” intended to show viewers what it was like to be at a large, formal, and not overly pleasant cocktail party. The real news coverage for the event would be by people like Barry Wise and the other talking heads, who would tell the viewer what the visuals could not.
   Then the coverage would shift back to CNN’s Washington studio, down the hill from Union Station, where other talking heads would discuss what had been leaked or not leaked to them, then discuss what they in their personal sagacious wisdom thought the proper course for the United States of America ought to be. President Ryan would see all this over breakfast, as he read the papers and the government-produced Early Bird clipping service. Over breakfast, Jack Ryan would make his own terse comments to be noted by his wife, who might discuss it over lunch with her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, who might discuss it with their spouses, from whom it would go no further. In this way, the President’s thoughts often remained a mystery.
   The party broke up at the predetermined hour, and the Americans headed back to the embassy in their official cars.
   “So, what can you tell us off the record?” Barry asked Rutledge, in the sanctity of the stretch Lincoln’s backseat.
   “Not much, really,” the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy replied. “We’ll listen to what they have to say, and they’ll listen to what we have to say, and it’ll go from there.”
   “They want MFN. Will they get it?”
   “That’s not for me to decide, Barry, and you know that.” Rutledge was too tired and jet-lagged for intelligent conversation at the moment. He didn’t trust himself to speak under these circumstances, and figured Wise knew that. The reporter was leaning on him for just that reason.
   “So, what are you going to talk about?”
   “Obviously, we’d like the Chinese to open their markets more, and also to take a closer look at some issues we have, like patent and copyright violations that American business has complained about.”
   “The Dell Computer issue?”
   Rutledge nodded. “Yes, that’s one.” Then he yawned.
   “Excuse me. The long flight. you know how it is.”
   “I was on the same airplane,” Barry Wise pointed out.
   “Well, maybe you’re just better at this than I am,” Rutledge offered. “Can we postpone this discussion a day or so?”
   “If you say so,” the CNN reporter agreed. He didn’t much like this preppy asshole, but he was a source of information, and Wise was in the information business. The ride was a brief one in any case. The official delegation hopped out at the embassy, and the embassy cars took the newsies back to their hotels.
   The embassy had sleeping accommodations for the entire official party, mainly to ensure that anything they said wouldn’t be recorded by the MSS bugs in every hotel room in the city. This was not to say that the accommodations were palatial, though Rutledge had a comfortable room. Here protocol failed Mark Gant, but he did have a comfortable single bed in his small private room and a shared bathroom with a shower. He opted instead for a hot bath and one of the sleeping pills the physician who accompanied the official party had issued him. It was supposed to give him a solid eight hours or so, which would just about synchronize him with local time by the morning. There would then be a big working breakfast, much like the astronauts got before a shuttle launch, and as much of an American tradition as the Stars and Stripes over Fort McHenry.
 
   Nomuri caught the arrival of the trade delegation on Chinese TV, which he watched mainly to hone his language skills. These were improving, though the tonal nature of Mandarin drove him slightly nuts. He’d once thought Japanese was hard, but it was a walk in the park compared to Guoyu. He looked at the faces, wondering who they were. The Chinese narrator helped, stumbling badly over “Rutledge,” however. Well, Americans murdered Chinese names, too, except for simple ones like Ming and Wang, and listening to an American businessman try to make himself understood to a local was enough to make Nomuri gag. The commentator went on to talk about the Chinese position on the trade talks, how America owed the PRC all manner of concessions—after all, was not China generous in allowing Americans to spend their worthless dollars for the valuable products of the People’s Republic? In this, China sounded a lot like Japan had once done, but the new Japanese government had opened up their markets. While there was still a trade deficit in Japan’s favor, fair competition on the playing field had muted American criticism, though Japanese cars were still less welcome in America than they had been. But that would pass, Nomuri was sure. If America had a weakness it was in forgiving and forgetting too rapidly. In this, he greatly admired the Jews. They still hadn’t forgotten Germany and Hitler. As well they shouldn’t, he thought. His last thought before retiring was to wonder how the new software was working on Chai’s computer, and if Ming had actually installed it or not. Then he decided to check.
   Rising from bed, he switched his laptop on and.., yes! Chai’s system lacked Ming’s transcription software, but it. was transmitting what it had. Okay, fine, they had linguists at Langley to fiddle with that. He didn’t have the desire to do so, and just uploaded it and headed back to bed.
 
   “Damn!” Mary Pat observed. Nearly all of it was unreadable but this was a second SORGE source. That was evident from the pathway it had taken through the ‘Net. She wondered if Nomuri was showing off, or had somehow managed to get in the pants of a second high-ranking Chinese government secretary. It wouldn’t exactly be a first for a field officer to have that active a sex life, but it wasn’t all that common, either. She printed it up, saved it to disk, and called for a linguist to come up and translate. Then she downloaded SONGBIRD’S current take. It was becoming as regular as The Washington Post, and a lot more interesting. She settled back in her chair and started reading the translation of Ming’s latest notes from Minister Fang Gan. He’d be talking about the trade negotiations, she hoped, then to see that, sure enough, he was... This would be important, the DDO thought. She’d soon be surprised to find out how wrong that impression was.

CHAPTER 23

Down to Business
   
Bacon and eggs, toast and hash-brown potatoes, plus some Colombian -bean coffee. Gant was Jewish but not observant, and he loved his bacon. Everyone was up and looking pretty good, he thought. The government-issued black capsule (they all called it that, evidently some sort of tradition that he didn’t know about) had worked for all of them, and the cookie-pushers were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Most of the talk, he noted, was about the NBA. The Lakers were looking tough again. Rutledge, Gant saw, was at the head of the table chatting amiably with Ambassador Hitch, who seemed a solid citizen. Then a more ruffled employee of the embassy came in with a manila folder whose borders were lined with striped red-and-white tape. This he handed to Ambassador Hitch, who opened it at once.
   Gant realized at once that it was classified material. There wasn’t much of that to be seen at Treasury, but there was some, and he’d been screened for a Top Secret/Special Access clearance as part of his employment on Secretary Winston’s personal staff. So, there was intel coming in from Washington for the negotiations. Exactly what it was about, he couldn’t see, and didn’t know if he would see it. He wondered if he could flex his institutional muscles on this one, but Rutledge would be the one who decided if he got to see it or not, and he didn’t want to give the State Department puke the excuse to show who was the he-bull in this herd. Patience was a virtue he’d long had, and this was just one more chance to exercise it. He returned to his breakfast, then decided to stand and get more off the buffet. Lunch in Beijing probably wouldn’t be very appealing, even at their Foreign Ministry Building, where they would feel constrained to show off their most exotic national dishes, and Fried Panda Penis with candied bamboo roots wasn’t exactly to his taste. At least the tea they served was acceptable, but even at its best, tea wasn’t coffee.
   “Mark?” Rutledge looked up from his seat and waved the Treasury guy over. Gant walked over with his refilled plate of eggs and bacon.
   “Yeah, Cliff?”
   Ambassador Hitch made room for Gant to sit down, and a steward arrived with fresh silverware. The government could make one comfortable when it wanted. He asked the guy for more hash browns and toast. Fresh coffee arrived seemingly of its own volition.
   “Mark, this just came in from Washington. This is codeword material—”
   “Yeah, I know. I can’t even see it now, and I am not allowed to have any memory of it. So, can I see it now?”
   Rutledge nodded and slipped the papers across. “What do you make of these foreign-exchange figures?”
   Gant took a bite of bacon and stopped chewing almost at once. “Damn, they’re that low? What have they been pissing their money away on?”
   “What does this mean?”
   “Cliff, once upon a time, Dr. Samuel Johnson put it this way: ‘Whatever you have, spend less.’ Well, the Chinese didn’t listen to that advice.” Gant flipped the pages. “It doesn’t say what they’ve been spending it on.”
   “Mainly military stuff, so I am told,” Ambassador Hitch replied. “Or things that can be applied to military applications, especially electronics. Both finished goods and the machinery with which to make electronic stuff. I gather it’s expensive to invest in such things.”
   “It can be,” Gant agreed. He turned the pages back to start from the beginning. He saw it was transmitted with the TAPDANCE encryption system. That made it hot. TAPDANCE was only used for the most sensitive material because of some technical inconveniences in its use . . . so this was some really hot intelligence, TELESCOPE thought. Then he saw why. Somebody must have bugged the offices of some very senior Chinese officials to get this stuff... “Jesus.”
   “What does this mean, Mark?”
   “It means they’ve been spending money faster than it’s coming in, and investing it in noncommercial areas for the most part. Hell, it means they’re acting like some of the idiots we have in our government. They think money is just something that appears when you snap your fingers, and then you can spend it as fast as you want and just snap your fingers to get some more. . . These people don’t live in the real world, Cliff. They have no idea how and why the money appears.” He paused. He’d gone too far. A Wall Street person would understand his language, but this Rutledge guy probably didn’t. “Let me rephrase. They know that the money comes from their trade imbalance with the United States, and it appears that they believe the imbalance to be a natural phenomenon, something they can essentially dictate because of who they are. They think the rest of the world owes it to them. In other words, if they believe that, negotiating with them is going to be hard.”
   “Why?” Rutledge asked. Ambassador Hitch, he saw, was already nodding. He must have understood these Chinese barbarians better.
   “People who think this way do not understand that negotiations mean give and take. Whoever’s talking here thinks that he just gets whatever the hell he wants because everybody owes it to him. It’s like what Hitler must have thought at Munich. I want, you give, and then I am happy. We’re not going to cave for these bastards, are we?”
   “Those are not my instructions,” Rutledge replied.
   “Well, guess what? Those are the instructions your Chinese counterpart has. Moreover, their economic position is evidently a lot more precarious than what we’ve been given to expect. Tell CIA they need better people in their financial-intelligence department,” Gant observed. Then Hitch shifted his glance across the table to the guy who must have run the local CIA office.
   “Do they appreciate how serious their position is?” Rutledge asked.
   “Yes and no. Yes, they know they need the hard currency to do the business they want to do. No, they think they can continue this way indefinitely, that an imbalance is natural in their case because—because why? Because they think they’re the fucking master race?” Gant asked.
   Again it was Ambassador Hitch who nodded. “It’s called the Middle Kingdom Complex. Yes, Mr. Gant, they really do think of themselves in those terms, and they expect people to come to them and give, not for themselves to go to other people as supplicants. Someday that will be their downfall. There’s an institutional.., maybe a racial arrogance here that’s hard to describe and harder to quantify.” Then Hitch looked over to Rutledge. “Cliff, you’re going to have an interesting day.”
   Gant realized at once that this was not a blessing for the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy.
 
   “They should be eating breakfast right about now,”
   Secretary Adler said over his Hennessey in the East Room.
   The reception had gone well—actually Jack and Cathy Ryan found these things about as boring as reruns of Gilligan‘s Island, but they were as much a part of the Presidency as the State of the Union speech. At least the dinner had been good—one thing you could depend on at the White House was the quality of the food—but the people had been Washington people. Even that, Ryan did not appreciate, had been greatly improved from previous years. Once Congress had largely been populated with people whose life’s ambition was “public service,” a phrase whose noble intent had been usurped by those who viewed $130,000 per year as a princely salary (it was far less than a college dropout could earn doing software for a computer-game company, and a hell of a lot less than one could make working on Wall Street), and whose real ambition was to apply their will to the laws of their nation. Many of them now, mainly because of speeches the President had made all over the country, were people who actually had served the public by doing useful work until, fed up with the machinations of government, they had decided to take a few years off to repair the train wreck Washington had become, before escaping back to the real world of productive work. The First Lady had spent much of the evening talking with the junior senator from Indiana, who in real life was a pediatric SURGEON of good reputation and whose current efforts were centered on straightening out government health-care programs before they killed too many of the citizens they supposedly wanted to assist. His greatest task was to persuade the media that a physician might know as much about making sick people well as Washington lobbyists did, something he’d been bending SURGEON’S ear about most of the night.
   “That stuff we got from Mary Pat ought to help Rutledge.”
   “I’m glad that Gant guy is there to translate it for him. Cliff is going to have a lively day while we sleep off the food and the booze, Jack.”
   “Is he good enough for the job? I know he was tight with Ed Kealty. That does not speak well for the guy’s character.”
   “Cliff’s a fine technician,” Adler said, after another sip of brandy. “And he has clear instructions to carry out, and some awfully good intelligence to help him along. This is like the stuff Jonathan Yardley gave our guys during the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations. We’re not exactly reading their cards, but we are seeing how they think, and that’s damned near as good. So, yes, I think he’s good enough for this job, or I wouldn’t have sent him out.”
   “How’s the ambassador we have there?” POTUS asked.
   “Carl Hitch? Super guy. Career pro, Jack, ready to retire soon, but he’s like a good cabinetmaker. Maybe he can’t design the house for you, but the kitchen will be just fine when he’s done—and you know, I’ll settle for that in a diplomat. Besides, designing the house is your job, Mr. President.” -
   “Yeah,” Ryan observed. He waved to an usher, who brought over some ice water. He’d pushed the booze enough for one night, and Cathy was starting to razz him about it again. Damn, being married to a doctor Jack thought. “Yeah, Scott, but who the hell do I go to for advice when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?”
   “Hell, I don’t know,” EAGLE replied. Maybe some humor, he thought: “Try doing a seance and call up Tom Jefferson and George Washington.” He turned with a chuckle and finished his Hennessey. “Jack, just take it easy on yourself and do the fuckin’ job. You’re doing just fine. Trust me.”
   “I hate this job,” SWORDSMAN observed with a friendly smile at his Secretary of State.
   “I know. That’s probably why you’re doing it pretty well. God protect us all from somebody who wants to hold high public office. Hell, look at me. Think I ever wanted to be SecState? It was a lot more fun to eat lunch in the cafeteria with my pals and bitch about the dumb son of a bitch who was. But now—shit, they’re down there saying that about me! It ain’t fair, Jack. I’m a working guy.”
   “Tell me about it.”
   “Well, look at it this way: When you do your memoirs, you’ll get a great advance from your publisher. The Accidental President?” Adler speculated for the title.
   “Scott, you get funny when you’re drunk. I’ll settle for working on my golf game.”
   “Who spoke the MAGIC word?” Vice President Jackson asked as he joined the conversation.
   “This guy whips my ass so bad out there,” Ryan complained to Secretary Adler, “that sometimes I wish I had a sword to fall on. What’s your handicap now?”
   “Not playing much, Jack, it’s slipped to six, maybe seven.”
   “He’s going to turn pro—Senior Tour,” Jack advised.
   “Anyway, Jack, this is my father. His plane was late and he missed the receiving line,” Robby explained.
   “Reverend Jackson, we finally meet.” Jack took the hand of the elderly black minister. For the inauguration he’d been in the hospital with kidney stones, which probably had been even less fun than the inauguration.
   “Robby’s told me a lot of good things about you.”
   “Your son is a fighter pilot, sir, and they exaggerate a lot.”
   The minister had a good laugh at that. “Oh, that I know, Mr. President. That I know.”
   “How was the food?” Ryan asked. Hosiah Jackson was a man on the far side of seventy, short like his son, and rotund with increasing years, but he was a man possessed of the immense dignity that somehow attached to black men of the cloth.
   “Much too rich for an old man, Mr. President, but I ate it anyway.”
   “Don’t worry, Jack. Pap doesn’t drink’ TOMCAT advised. On the lapel of his tuxedo jacket was a miniature of his Navy Wings of Gold. Robby would never stop being a fighter pilot.
   “And you shouldn’t either, boy! That Navy taught you lots of bad habits, like braggin’ on yourself too much.”
   Jack had to jump to his friend’s defense. “Sir, a fighter pilot who doesn’t brag isn’t allowed to fly. And besides, Dizzy Dean said it best—if you can do it, it isn’t bragging. Robby can do it... or so he claims.”
   “They started talking over in Beijing yet?” Robby asked, checking his watch.
   “Another half hour or so,” Adler replied. “It’s going to be interesting,” he added, referring to the SORGE material.
   “I believe it,” Vice President Jackson agreed, catching the message. “You know, it’s hard to love those people.”
   “Robby, you are not allowed to say such things,” his father retorted. “I have a friend in Beijing.”
   “Oh?” His son didn’t know about that. The answer came rather as a papal pronouncement.
   “Yes, Reverend Yu Fa An, a fine Baptist preacher, educated at Oral Roberts University. My friend Gerry Patterson went to school with him.”
   “Tough place to be a priest—or minister, I guess,” Ryan observed.
   It was as though Jack had turned the key in the minister’s dignity switch. “Mr. President, I envy him. To preach the Gospel of the Lord anywhere is a privilege, but to preach it in the land of the heathen is a rare blessing.”
   “Coffee?” a passing usher asked. Hosiah took a cup and added cream and sugar.
   “This is fine,” he observed at once.
   “One of the fringe bennies here, Pap,” Jackson told his dad with considerable affection. “This is even better than Navy coffee—well, we have navy stewards serving it. Jamaica Blue Mountain, costs like forty bucks a pound,” he explained.
   “Jesus, Robby, don’t say that too loud. The media hasn’t figured that one out yet!” POTUS warned. “Besides, I asked. We get it wholesale, thirty-two bucks a pound if you buy it by the barrel.”
   “Gee, that’s a real bargain,” the VP agreed with a chuckle.
 
   With the welcoming ceremony done, the plenary session began without much in the way of fanfare. Assistant Secretary Rutledge took his seat, greeted the Chinese diplomats across the table, and began. His statement started off with the usual pleasantries that were about as predictable as the lead credits for a feature film.
   “The United States,” he went on, getting to the meat of the issue, “has concerns about several disturbing aspects of our mutual trading relationship. The first is the seeming inability of the People’s Republic to abide by previous agreements to recognize international treaties and conventions on trademarks, copyrights, and patents. All of these items have been discussed and negotiated at length in previous meetings like this one, and we had thought that the areas of disagreement were successfully resolved. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case.” He went on to cite several specific items, which he described as being illustrative but in no way a comprehensive listing of his areas of “concern.”
   “Similarly,” Rutledge continued, “commitments to open the Chinese market to American goods have not been honored. This has resulted in an imbalance in the mercantile exchange which ill serves our overall relationship. The current imbalance is approaching seventy billion U.S. dollars, and that is something the United States of America is not prepared to accept.
   “To summarize, the People’s Republic’s commitment to honor international treaty obligations and private agreements with the United States has not been carried out. It is a fact of American law that our country has the right to adopt the trade practices of other nations in its own law. This is the well-known Trade Reform Act, enacted by the American government several years ago. It is my unpleasant obligation, therefore, to inform the government of the People’s Republic that America will enforce this law with respect to trade with the People’s Republic forthwith, unless these previously agreed-upon commitments are met immediately,” Rutledge concluded. Immediately is a word not often used in international discourse. “That concludes my opening statement.”
   For his part, Mark Gant halfway wondered if the other side might leap across the polished oak table with swords and daggers at the end of Rutledge’s opening speech. The gauntlet had been cast down in forceful terms not calculated to make the Chinese happy. But the diplomat handling the other side of the table—it was Foreign Minister Shen Tang—reacted no more than he might on getting the check in a restaurant and finding that he’d been overcharged about five bucks’ worth. Not even a look up. Instead the Chinese minister continued to look down at his own notes, before finally lifting his eyes as he felt the end of Rutledge’s opening imminent, with no more feeling or emotion than that of a man in an art gallery looking over some painting or other that his wife wanted him to purchase to cover a crack in the dining room wall.
   “Secretary Rutledge, thank you for your statement,” he began in his turn.
   “The People’s Republic first of all welcomes you to our country and wishes to state for the record its desire for a continued friendly relationship with America and the American people.
   “We cannot, however, reconcile America’s stated desire for friendly relations with her action to recognize the breakaway province on the island of Taiwan as the independent nation it is not. Such action was calculated to inflame our relationship—to fan the flames instead of helping to extinguish them. The people of our country will not accept this unconscionable interference with Chinese internal affairs and—” The diplomat looked up in surprise to see Rutledge’s hand raised in interruption. He was sufficiently shocked by this early breach of protocol that he actually stopped talking.
   “Minister,” Rutledge intoned, “the purpose of this meeting is to discuss trade. The issue of America’s diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China is one best left to another venue. The American delegation has no desire to detour into that area today.” Which was diplo-speak for “Take that issue and shove it.”
   “Mr. Rutledge, you cannot dictate to the People’s Republic what our concerns and issues are,” Minister Shen observed, in a voice as even as one discussing the price of lettuce in the street market. The rules of a meeting like this were simple: The first side to show anger lost.
   “Do go on, then, if you must,” Rutledge responded tiredly. You’re wasting my time, but I get paid whether I work or not, his demeanor proclaimed.
   Gant saw that the dynamic for the opening was that both countries had their agendas, and each was trying to ignore that of the other in order to take control of the session. This was so unlike a proper business meeting as to be unrecognizable as a form of verbal intercourse—and in terms of other intercourse, it was like two naked people in bed, purportedly for the purpose of sex, starting off their foreplay by fighting over the TV remote. Gant had seen all manner of negotiations before, or so he thought. This was something entirely new and, to him, utterly bizarre.
   “The renegade bandits on Taiwan are part of China in their history and heritage, and the People’s Republic cannot ignore this deliberate insult to our nationhood by the Ryan Regime.”
   “Minister Shen, the government of the United States of America has a long history of supporting democratically elected governments throughout the world. That has been part of our nation’s ethos for over two hundred years. I would remind the People’s Republic that the United States of America has the longest-lived government in the world.
   We have lived under our constitutional form of government for well over two hundred years. That is a small number in terms of Chinese history, but I would remind you further that when America elected her first President and first Congress, China was ruled by a hereditary monarch. The government of your country has changed many times since then, but the government of the United States of America has not. Thus it is well within our power both as an independent nation under recognized international law, and also as a moral right as a long-lived and therefore legitimate form of government, both to act as we choose and to foster governments like our own. The government of the Republic of China is democratically elected, and therefore it commands the respect of similarly chosen governments of the people, like our own. In any case, Minister, the purpose of this meeting is to discuss trade. Shall we do that, or shall we fritter away our time discussing irrelevancies?”
   “Nothing could be more relevant to this discussion than the fundamental lack of respect shown by your government—by the Ryan Regime, shall I say?—for the government of our country. The Taiwan issue is one of fundamental importance to...” He droned on for another four minutes.
   “Minister Shen, the United States of America is not a ‘regime’ of any sort. It is an independent nation with a freely elected government chosen by its people. That experiment in government which we undertook when your country was ruled by the Manchu Dynasty is one which you might consider imitating at some future date, for the benefit of your own people. Now, shall we return to the issue at hand, or do you wish to continue wasting your own time and mine by discussing a topic for which I have neither instructions nor much in the way of interest?”
   “We will not be brushed aside so cavalierly as that,” Shen responded, earning Rutledge’s brief and irrelevant respect for his unexpected command of the English language.
   The American chief diplomat settled back in his chair and looked politely across the table while he thought over his wife’s plans for redecorating the kitchen of their Georgetown town house. Was green and blue the right color scheme? He preferred earth tones, but he was far more likely to win this argument in Beijing than that one in Georgetown. A lifetime spent in diplomacy didn’t enable him to win arguments with Mrs. Rutledge over items like decorating...
   So it went for the first ninety minutes, when there came time for the first break. Tea and finger food was served and people wandered out the French doors—a strange place to find those, Gant thought—into the garden. It was Gant’s first adventure in diplomacy, and he was about to learn how these things really worked. People paired off, American and Chinese. You could tell who was who from a distance. Every single one of the Chinese smoked, a vice shared by only two of the American delegation, both of whom looked grateful for the chance to enjoy their habit indoors in this country. They might be trade Nazis, the Treasury Department official reflected, but they weren’t health Nazis.
   “What do you think?" a voice asked. Gant turned to see the same little guy who’d bugged him at the reception. His name was Xue Ma, Gant remembered, all of five-foot-nothing, with poker-player’s eyes and some acting ability. Smarter than he appeared to be, the American reminded himself. So, how was he supposed to handle this? When in doubt, Gant decided, fall back on the truth.
   “It’s my first time observing diplomatic negotiations. It’s intensely boring,” Gant replied, sipping his (dreadful) coffee.
   “Well, this is normal,” Xue answered.
   “Really? It’s not that way in business. How do you get anything done?”
   “Every endeavor has its process,” the Chinese man told him.
   “I suppose. Can you tell me something?” TELESCOPE asked.
   “I can try.”
   “What’s the big deal about Taiwan?”
   “What was the big deal when your Civil War began?” Xue replied, with a clever question of his own.
   “Well, okay, but after fifty years, why not call it even and start over?”
   “We do not think in such short terms,” Xue answered with a superior smile.
   “Okay, but in America we call that living in the past.” Take that, you little Chink!
   “They are our countrymen,” Xue persisted.
   “But they have chosen not to be. If you want them back, then make it advantageous for them. You know, by achieving the same prosperity here that they’ve achieved there.” You backward commie.
   “If one of your children ran away from home, would you not work for his return?”
   “Probably, but I would entice him, not threaten him, especially if I didn’t have the ability to threaten him effectively.” And your military is for shit, too. So the briefings had told them before flying over.
   “But when others encourage our child to abscond and defy their father, are we not to object?”
   “Look, pal,” Gant responded, not quite showing the inward heat he felt—or so he thought. “If you want to do business, then do business. If you want to chat, we can chat. But my time is valuable, and so is the time of our country, and we can save the chat for another time.” And then Gant realized that, no, he wasn’t a diplomat, and this was not a game he could play and win. “As you see, I am not gifted at this sort of exchange. We have people who are, but I am not one of them. I am the kind of American who does real work and earns real money. If you enjoy this game, that’s fine, but it’s not my game. Patience is a good thing, I suppose, but not when it impedes the objective, and I think your minister is missing something.”
   “What is that, Mr. Gant?”
   “It is we who will have what we wish to have out of these meetings,” Gant told the little Chinese man, and realized instantly that he’d stuck his own foot into his mouth about to the knee. He finished his coffee and excused himself, then headed unnecessarily for the bathroom, where he washed his hands before heading back outside. He found Rutledge standing alone, examining some spring flowers.
   “Cliff, I think I fucked something up,” Gant confessed quietly.
   “What’s that?” the Assistant Secretary asked, then listened to the confession. “Don’t sweat it. You didn’t tell them anything I haven’t already told them. You just don’t understand the language.”
   “But they’ll think we’re impatient, and that makes us vulnerable, doesn’t it?”
   “Not with me doing the talking inside,” Rutledge answered, with a gentle smile. “Here I am Jimmy Connors at the U.S. Open, Mark. This is what I do.”
   “The other side thinks so, too.”
   “True, but we have the advantage. They need us more than we need them.”
   “I thought you didn’t like taking this sort of line with people,” Gant observed, puzzled by Rutledge’s attitude.
   “I don’t have to like it. I just have to do it, and winning is always fun.” He didn’t add that he’d never met Minister Shen before, and therefore had no personal baggage to trip over, as often happened with diplomats who had been known to put personal friendship before the interest of their countries. They usually justified it by telling themselves that the bastard would owe them one next time, which would serve their country’s interest. Diplomacy had always been a personal business, a fact often lost on observers, who thought of these verbose technicians as robots.
   Gant found all of this puzzling, but he would play along with Rutledge because he had to, and because the guy at least acted as though he knew what the hell he was doing. Whether he did or not... Gant wondered how he’d be able to tell. Then it was time to go back indoors.
   The ashtrays had been cleaned and the water bottles replenished by the domestic help, who were probably all politically reliable functionaries of one sort or another, or more likely professional intelligence officers, who were here because their government took no chances with anything, or at least tried not to. It was, in fact, a waste of trained personnel, but communists had never been overly concerned with utilizing manpower in an efficient way.
   Minister Shen lit a smoke and motioned for Rutledge to lead off. For his part, the American remembered that Bismarck had counseled the use of a cigar in negotiations, because some found the thick tobacco smoke irritating and that gave the smoker the advantage.
   “Minister, the trade policies of the People’s Republic are set in place by a small number of people, and those policies are set in place for political reasons. We in America understand that. What you fail to understand is that ours truly is a government of the people, and our people demand that we address the trade imbalance. The People’s Republic’s inability to open markets to American goods costs the jobs of American citizens. Now, in our country it is the business of the government to serve the people, not to rule them, and for that reason, we must address the trade imbalance in an effective way.
   “I fully agree that it is the business of government to serve the interests of the people, and for that reason, we must consider also the agony that the Taiwan issue imposes on the citizens of my country. Those who should be our countrymen have been separated from us, and the United States has assisted in the estrangement of our kinsmen..
   The remarkable thing, Rutledge thought, was that this droning old fart hadn’t died from smoking those damned things. They looked and smelled like the Lucky Strikes his grandfather had died of, at age eighty. It had not been a death to please a physician, however. Grandpa Owens had been driving his great-grandson to South Station in Boston when, lighting one, he’d dropped it into his lap and, in retrieving it, strayed onto the wrong side of the road. Grandpa hadn’t believed in seat belts, either.., the bastard actually chain-smoked, lighting a new one with the butt of the previous one, like Bogie in a ‘30s movie. Well, maybe it was a way for the Chinese to pursue their population-control policy... but in rather an ugly way...
   “Mr. Foreign Minister,” Rutledge started off, when it was next his turn, “the government of the Republic of China is one elected in free and fair elections by the people who live in that country. In America’s eyes, that makes the government of the Republic of China legitimate”—he didn’t say that the government of the People’s Republic was, therefore, illegitimate, but the thought hung in the room like a dark cloud—”and that makes the government in question worthy of international recognition, as you may have noticed has been the case in the last year.
   “It is the policy of our government to recognize such governments. We will not change policies based upon firm principles to suit the wishes of other countries which do not share those principles. We can talk until you run out of cigarettes, but my government’s position in this case is set in stone. So, you can recognize this fact and allow the meeting to move on to productive areas, or you can beat this dead horse until nothing is left of it. The choice is yours, of course, but is it not better to be productive than not?”
   “America cannot dictate to the People’s Republic that which concerns us. You claim to have your principles, and surely we have our own, and one of ours is the importance of our country’s territorial integrity.”
   For Mark Gant, the hard part was keeping an impassive face. He had to pretend that this all made sense and was important, when he’d much prefer to set up his computer to review stock prices, or for that matter read a paperback book under the rim of the table. But he couldn’t do that. He had to pretend that this was all interesting, which, if successfully done, could get him nominated for the next Academy Award ceremonies for Best Actor in a Supporting Role: “For keeping awake during the most boring contest since the Iowa grass-growing championships, the winner is...” He concentrated on not shifting in his seat, but that just made his ass tired, and these seats hadn’t been designed to fit his ass. Maybe one of those skinny Chinese ones, but not that of a Chicago-raised professional who liked having a beer and a corned-beef sandwich for lunch at least once a week and didn’t work out enough. His ass required a broader and softer seat for comfort, but he didn’t have one. He tried to find something interesting. He decided that Foreign Minister Shen had terrible skin, as though his face had once been on fire and a friend had tried to extinguish the flames with an ice pick. Gant tried to conjure up the image of that supposed event without smiling. Then came the fact that Shen was smoking so much, lighting his smokes from cheap paper matches instead of a proper lighter. Perhaps he was one of those people who set things down and forgot where they were, which would also explain why he used cheap throwaway pens instead of something in keeping with his rank and status. So, this important son of a bitch had suffered from terminal acne as a kid and was a butterfingers....? It was something worthy of an inward smile as the minister droned on in passable English. That engendered a new thought. He had access to an earphone for simultaneous translation.., could he get one tuned to a local station? They had to have a radio station in Beijing that played music of some sort or other, didn’t they?
   When Rutledge’s turn came, it was almost as bad. The stated American position was as repetitive as the Chinese one, perhaps more reasonable but no less boring. Gant imagined that lawyers talking over a divorce settlement probably went through bullshit like this. Like diplomats, they were paid by the hour and not by the product. Diplomats and lawyers. What a pair, Gant thought. He was unable even to look at his watch. The American delegation had to present a united front of solid stone, Gant thought, to show the Heathen Chinese that the Forces of Truth and Beauty were firm in their resolve. Or something like that. He wondered if it would feel different negotiating with the British, for example, everyone speaking much the same language, but those negotiations were probably handled with phone calls or e-mails rather than this formalistic crap....
   Lunch came at the expected hour, about ten minutes late because the Shen guy ran over, which was hardly unexpected. The American team all headed to the men’s room, where no talking was done for fear of bugs. Then they went back outside, and Gant went to Rutledge.
   “This is how you earn your living?” the stock TRADER asked with no small degree of incredulity.
   “I try to. These talks are going pretty well,” the Assistant Secretary of State observed.
   “What?” Gant inquired with total amazement.
   “Yeah, well, their Foreign Minister is doing the negotiating, so we’re playing with their varsity,” Rutledge explained. “That means that we’ll be able to reach a real agreement instead of a lot of back-and-forth between lower-level people and the Politburo—the additional layer of people can really mess things up. There’ll be some of that, of course. Shen will have to talk over his positions with them every evening, maybe even right now—he’s nowhere to be seen. I wonder who he reports to, exactly. We don’t think he really has plenipotentiary powers, that the rest of the big boys second-guess him a lot. Like the Russians used to be. That’s the problem with their system. Nobody really trusts anybody else.”
   “You serious?” TELESCOPE asked.
   “Oh, yeah, it’s how their system works.”
   “That’s a clusterfuck,” Gant observed.
   “Why do you think the Soviet Union went belly-up?” Rutledge asked with amusement. “They never had their act together on any level because they fundamentally didn’t know how properly to exercise the power they had. It was rather sad, really. But they’re doing a lot better now.”
   “But how are the talks going, well?”
   “If all they have to throw at us is Taiwan, their counter-arguments on trade won’t be all that impressive. Taiwan’s a settled issue, and they know it. We may have a mutual-defense treaty with them in ten or eleven months, and they probably know that. They have good intelligence sources in Taipei.”
   “How do we know that?” Gant demanded.
   “Because our friends in Taipei make sure they do. You want your adversaries to know a lot of things. It makes for better understandings, cuts down on mistakes and stuff.” Rutledge paused. “I wonder what’s for lunch...
   Jesus, Gant thought. Then he thanked God that he was just here to offer economic backup for this diplomat. They were playing a game so different from anything he’d ever encountered before that he felt like a truck driver doing some day-trading on his laptop at a highway phone booth.
 
   The newsies showed up for lunch so that they could get more B-roll tape of diplomats chatting amiably about such things as the weather and the food—the viewers would think they were handling matters of state, of course, when in fact at least half of the talks between diplomats at such affairs were limited to the problems of raising children or killing the crabgrass in your lawn. It was all, in fact, a kind of gamesmanship with few parallels in other forms of endeavor, Gant was only beginning to understand. He saw Barry Wise approach Rutledge without a microphone or camera in attendance.
   “So, how’s it going, Mr. Secretary?” the reporter asked.
   “Pretty well. In fact, we had a fine opening session,” Rutledge replied in Gant’s earshot. It was a shame, TELESCOPE decided, that the people couldn’t see what really happened. It would be the funniest thing this side of Chris Rock. It made Laverne & Shirley look like King Lear in its lunacy, and the world chess championship look like a heavyweight-championship fight in its torpor. But every field of human endeavor had its rules, and these were just different ones.
 
   “There’s our friend,” the cop observed, as the car pulled out. It was Suvorov/Koniev in his Mercedes C-class. The license tag number checked, as did the face in the binoculars.
   Provalov had gotten the local varsity to handle this case, with even some help now from the Federal Security Service, formerly the Second Chief Directorate of the former KGB, the professional spy-chasers who’d made life in Moscow difficult for foreign intelligence operations. They remained superbly equipped, and though not so well funded as in the past, there was little to criticize in their training. The problem, of course, was that they knew all that themselves, and took on a degree of institutional arrogance that had gotten the noses of his homicide investigators severely out of joint. Despite all that, they were useful allies. There were a total of seven vehicles to handle the surveillance. In America, the FBI would have arranged a helicopter as well, but Michael Reilly wasn’t here to make that condescending observation, somewhat to Provalov’s relief. The man had become a friend, and a gifted mentor in the business of investigation, but enough was sometimes enough. There were trucks containing TV cameras to tape the business of the morning, and every automobile had two people in it so that driving wouldn’t interfere with watching. They followed Suvorov/Koniev into central Moscow.
 
   Back at his apartment, another team had already defeated his lock and was inside his flat. What happened there was as graceful as any performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. Once inside, the investigative team stood still at first, scanning for telltales, left-behind items as innocuous as a human hair stuck in place across a closet door to show if someone had opened it. Suvorov’s KGB file was finally in Provalov’s possession now, and he knew all the things the man had been trained in—it turned out that his training had been quite thorough, and Suvorov’s grades had been, well, “C” class most of the time: not outstanding enough to earn him the chance to operate in the field as an “illegal” officer on the home ground of the “Main Enemy,” meaning the United States, but good enough that he’d become a diplomatic-intelligence specialist, mainly going over information brought in by others, but spending some time in the field, trying to recruit and “run” agents. Along the way, he’d established contact with various foreign diplomats, including three from China—those three he’d used to gather low-level diplomatic information, mainly chitchat-level stuff, but it was all regarded as useful. Suvorov’s last field assignment had been from 1989 to ‘91 in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing, where he’d again tried to gather diplomatic intelligence, and, they saw, with some success this time. The accomplishments had not been questioned at the time, Provalov saw, probably because he’d had some minor victories against the same country’s diplomatic service while in Moscow. His file said that he could both speak and write Chinese, skills learned at the KGB Academy that had militated in favor of making him a China specialist.
   One of the problems with intelligence operations was that what looked suspicious was often innocuous, and what looked innocuous could well be suspicious. An intelligence officer was supposed to establish contact with foreign nationals, often foreign intelligence officers, and then the foreign spy could execute a maneuver that the Americans called a “flip,” turning an enemy into an asset. The KGB had done the same thing many times, and part of the price of doing such business was that it could happen to your own people, not so much while you were not looking as when you were. Nineteen eighty-nine to ‘91 had been the time of glasnost, the “openness” that had destroyed the Soviet Union as surely as smallpox had annihilated primitive tribesmen. At that time, KGB was having problems of its own, Provalov reminded himself, and what if the Chinese had recruited Suvorov? The Chinese economy had just been starting to grow back then, and so they’d had the money to toss around, not as much as the Americans always seemed to have, but enough to entice a Soviet civil servant looking at the prospect of losing his job soon.
   But what had Suvorov been doing since then? He was now driving a Mercedes-Benz automobile, and those didn’t appear in your mailbox. The truth was that they didn’t know, and finding out would not be very easy. They knew that neither Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov nor Ivan Yurievich Koniev had paid his income taxes, but that merely put him at the same level as most Russian citizens, who didn’t want to be bothered with such irrelevancies. And, again, they hadn’t wanted to question his neighbors. Those names were now being checked to see if any were former KGB, and perhaps, therefore, allies of their suspect. No, they didn’t want to alert him in any way.
   The apartment looked “clean” in the police sense. With that, they began looking around. The bed was mussed up. Suvorov/Koniev was a man and therefore not terribly neat. The contents of the apartment were, however, expensive, much of them of foreign manufacture. West German appliances, a common affectation of the Russian well-to-do. The searchers wore latex surgical gloves as they opened the refrigerator door (refrigerator-freezers are well-regarded hiding places) for a visual examination. Nothing obvious. Then dresser drawers. The problem was that their time was limited and any residence just had too many places to hide things, whether rolled up in a pair of socks or inside the toilet-paper tube. They didn’t really expect to find much, but making the effort was de rigueur—it was too hard to explain to one’s superiors why one didn’t do it than it was to send the search team in to waste their expensively trained time. Elsewhere, people were tapping the apartment’s phone. They’d thought about installing some pinhole-lens cameras. These were so easy to hide that only a paranoid genius was likely to find them, but putting them in took time—the hard part was running the wires to the central monitoring station—and time was an asset they didn’t have. As it was, their leader had a cell phone in his shirt pocket, waiting for it to vibrate with the word that their quarry was driving back home, in which case they’d tidy up and leave in a hurry.
 
   He was twelve kilometers away. Behind him, the trail cars were switching in and out of visual coverage as deftly as the Russian national football team advancing the soccer ball into tied-game opposition. Provalov was in the command vehicle, watching and listening as the KGB/FSS team leader used a radio and a map to guide his people in and out. The vehicles were all dirty, middle-aged, nondescript types that could be owned by the Moscow city government or gypsy-cab operators, expected to dart around, concealing themselves among the numerous twins they all had. In most cases, the second vehicle occupant was in the back seat, not the front, to simulate a taxi’s passenger, and they even had cell phones to complete the disguise, which allowed them to communicate with their base station without looking suspicious. That, the FSS leader remarked to the cop, was one advantage of new technology.
   Then came the call that the subject had pulled over, stopped, and parked his car. The two surveillance vehicles in visual contact continued past, allowing new ones to close in and stop.
   “He’s getting out’ a Federal Security Service major reported. “I’m getting out to follow on foot.” The major was young for his rank, usually a sign of a precocious and promising young officer on the way up, and so it was in this case. He was also handsome with his twenty-eight years, and dressed in expensive clothing like one of the new crop of Moscovite business entrepreneurs. He was talking into his phone in a highly animated fashion, the very opposite of what someone conducting a surveillance would do. That enabled him to get within thirty meters of the subject, and to watch his every move with hawk’s eyes. Those eyes were needed to catch the most elegant of maneuvers. Suvorov/Koniev sat on a bench, his right hand already in his overcoat pocket while his left fiddled with the morning paper he’d brought out from the car—and that is what tipped the FSS major that he was up to no good. A newspaper was the main disguise used by a spy, something to cover the actions of the working hand, just as a stage MAGICian kept one hand ostentatiously busy while the other performed the actual illusion. And so it was here, so beautifully done that had he been an untrained man, he would never have caught it. The major took a seat on another bench and dialed up another false number on his cell phone and started talking to a fictitious business associate, then watched his surveillance subject stand and walk with studied casualness back to his parked Mercedes.
   Major Yefremov called a real number when his subject was a hundred meters away. “This is Pavel Georgiyevich. I am staying here to see what he left behind,” he told his base station. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, watching the figure get back into his car and drive off. When he was well out of sight, Yefremov walked over to the other bench and reached under. Oh, yes. A magnetic holder. Suvorov had been using this one for some time. He’d glued a metal plate to the bottom of the green-painted wood, and to this he could affix a magnetic holder . . . about a centimeter in thickness, his hand told him. Their subject was a “player” after all. He’d just executed a dead-drop.
   On hearing it, Provalov experienced the thrill of seeing a crime committed before his very eyes. Now they had their man committing a crime against the state. Now he was theirs. Now they could arrest him at any time. But they wouldn’t, of course. The operation’s commander next to him ordered Yefremov to retrieve the container for examination. That would be done very speedily,, because the container would have to be returned. They only had half of the spy team. The other half would come to pick it up.
 
   It was the computer. It had to be. On turning it on, they found a maze of folders, but one of them, they quickly saw, had encrypted contents. The encryption program was one they hadn’t come across before. It was American, and its name was written down. They could do no more now. They lacked the proper disks to copy the covert file. That they could fix, and they could also copy the encryption program. Next, they’d have to plant a bugging device on the keyboard. In that way, they could use Sovorov’s own password code to crack the encrypted file. With that decision made, the burglary team left the premises.
 
   The next part was virtually preordained. They followed I the Mercedes using the same multi-car drill, but the break came when a dump truck—still the dominant form of life on the Moscow streets—was closest. The subject parked the German sedan and jumped out, took just enough time to affix a strip of paper tape to a lamppost, and hopped back into his car. He didn’t even bother to look around, as though he’d only done something routine.
   But he hadn’t. He’d just posted a flag, a notice to someone unknown that the dead-drop had something in it. That someone would walk or drive past and see the tape and know where to go. So, they had to examine the capsule quickly and replace it, lest they warn the enemy spy that their little operation had been compromised. No, you didn’t do that until you had to, because things like this were like an unraveling sweater on a pretty woman. You didn’t stop pulling the yarn until the tits were exposed, the FSS commander told Provalov.

CHAPTER 25

Fence Rending
   
The speed of modern communications makes for curious disconnects. In this case, the American government knew what had happened in Beijing long before the government of the People’s Republic did. What appeared in the White House Office of Signals appeared also in the State Department’s Operations Center, and there the senior officer present had decided, naturally enough, to get the information immediately to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. There Ambassador Carl Hitch took the call at his desk on the encrypted line. He forced the caller from Foggy Bottom to confirm the news twice before making his first reaction, a whistle. It wasn’t often that an accredited ambassador of any sort got killed in a host country, much less by a host country. What the hell, he wondered, was Washington going to do about this?
   “Damn,” Hitch whispered. He hadn’t even met Cardinal DiMilo yet. The official reception had been planned for two weeks from now in a future that would never come. What was he supposed to do? First, he figured, get off a message of condolence to the Vatican mission. (Foggy Bottom would so notify the Vatican through the Nuncio in Washington, probably. Maybe even Secretary Adler would drive over himself to offer official condolences. Hell, President Ryan was Catholic, and maybe he would go himself, Hitch speculated.) Okay, Hitch told himself, things to do here. He had his secretary call the Nuncio’s residence, but all he got there was a Chinese national answering the phone, and that wasn’t worth a damn. That would have to go on the back burner.., what about the Italian Embassy? he thought next. The Nuncio was an Italian citizen, wasn't he? Probably. Okay. He checked his card file and dialed up the Italian ambassador's private line.
   "Paulo? This is Carl Hitch. Thanks, and you? I have some bad news, I'm afraid . . . the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal DiMilo, he's been shot and killed in some Beijing hospital by a Chinese policeman . . . it's going to be on CNN soon, not sure how soon . . . we're pretty certain of it, I'm afraid . . . I'm not entirely sure, but what I've been told is that he was there trying to prevent the death of a child, or one of those late-term abortions they do here . . . yeah . . . say, doesn't he come from a prominent family?" Then Hitch started taking notes. "Vincenzo, you said? I see . . . Minister of Justice two years ago? I tried to call over there, but all I got was some local answering the phone. German? Schepke?" More notes. "I see. Thank you, Paulo. Hey, if there's anything we can help you with over here . . . right. Okay. Bye." He hung up. "Damn. Now what?" he asked the desk. He could spread the bad news to the German Embassy, but, no, he'd let someone else do that. For now ... he checked his watch. It was still short of sunrise in Washington, and the people there would wake up to find a firestorm. His job, he figured, was to verify what had happened so that he could make sure Washington had good information. But how the hell to do that? His best potential source of information was this Monsignor Schepke, but the only way to get him was to stake out the Vatican Embassy and wait for him to come home. Hmm, would the Chinese be holding him somewhere? No, probably not. Once their Foreign Ministry found out about this, they'd probably fall all over themselves trying to apologize. So, they'd put extra security on the Nuncio's place, and that would keep newsies away, but they're not going to mess with accredited diplomats, not after killing one. This was just so bizarre. Carl Hitch had been a foreign-service officer since his early twenties. He'd never come across anything like this before, at least not since Spike Dobbs had been held hostage in Afghanistan by guerrillas, and the Russians had screwed up the rescue mission and gotten him killed. Some said that had been deliberate, but even the Soviets weren't that dumb, Hitch thought. Similarly, this hadn't been a deliberate act either. The Chinese were communists, and communists didn't gamble that way. It just wasn't part of their nature or their training.
   So, how had this happened? And what, exactly, had happened?
   And when would he tell Cliff Rutledge about it? And what effect might this have on the trade talks? Carl Hitch figured he'd have a full evening.
 
   The People's Republic will not be dictated to," Foreign Minister Shen Tang concluded.
   "Minister," Rutledge replied, "it is not the intention of the United States to dictate to anyone. You make your national policy to suit your nation's needs. We understand and respect that. We require, however, that you understand and respect our right to make our national policy as well, to suit our country's needs. In this case, that means invoking the provisions of the Trade Reform Act."
   That was a big, sharp sword to wave, and everyone in the room knew it, Mark Gant thought. The TRA enabled the Executive Branch to replicate any nation's trade laws as applied to American goods, and mirror-image them against that nation's own goods. It was international proof of the adage that the shoe could sure pinch if it was on the other foot. In this case, everything China did to exclude American manufactured goods from the Chinese marketplace would simply be invoked in order to do the same to Chinese goods, and with a trade surplus of seventy billion dollars per year, that could well mean seventy billion dollars—all of it hard currency. The money to buy the things the PRC government wanted from America or elsewhere wouldn't be there anymore. Trade would become trade, one of mine for one of yours, which was the theory that somehow never became reality.
   "If America embargoes Chinese trade, China can and will do the same to America," Shen shot back.
   "Which serves neither your purposes nor our own," Rutledge responded. And that dog ain't gonna hunt, he didn't have to say. The Chinese knew that well enough without being told.
   "And what of most-favored-nation status for our country? What of entry into the World Trade Organization?" the Chinese foreign minister demanded.
   "Mr. Minister, America cannot look favorably upon either so long as your country expects open export markets while closing your import markets. Trade, sir, means trade, the even exchange of your goods for ours," Rutledge pointed out again—about the twelfth time since lunch, he reckoned. Maybe the guy would get it this time. But that was unfair. He already got it. He just wasn't acknowledging the fact. It was just domestic Chinese politics projected into the international arena.
   "And again you dictate to the People's Republic!" Shen replied, with enough anger, real or feigned, to suggest that Rutledge had usurped his parking place.
   "No, Minister, we do no such thing. It is you, sir, who tried to dictate to the United States of America. You say that we must accept your trade terms. In that, sir, you are mistaken. We see no more need to buy your goods than you do to buy ours." Just that you need our hard cash a damned sight more than we need your chew toys for our fucking dogs!
   "We can buy our airliners from Airbus just as easily as from Boeing.
   This really was getting tiresome. Rutledge wanted to respond: But without our dollars, what will you pay for them with, Charlie? But Airbus had excellent credit terms for its customers, one more way in which a European government-subsidized enterprise played "fair" in the marketplace with a private American corporation. So, instead he said:
   "Yes, Mr. Minister, you can do that, and we can buy trade goods from Taiwan, or Korea, or Thailand, or Singapore, just as easily as we can buy them here." And they'll fucking well buy their airplanes from Boeing! "But that does not serve the needs of your people, or of ours," he concluded reasonably.
   "We are a sovereign nation and a sovereign people," Shen retorted, continuing on as he had before, and Rutledge figured that the rhetoric was all about taking command of the verbiage. It was a strategy that had worked many times before, but Rutledge had instructions to disregard all the diplomatic theatrics, and the Chinese just hadn't caught on yet. Maybe in a few more days, he thought.
   "As are we, Minister," Rutledge said, when Shen concluded. Then he ostentatiously checked his watch, and here Shen took the cue.
   "I suggest we adjourn until tomorrow," the PRC foreign minister said.
   "Good. I look forward to seeing you in the morning, Minister," Rutledge responded, rising and leaning across the table to shake hands. The rest of the party did the same, though Mark Gant didn't have a counterpart to be nice to at the moment. The American party shuffled out, downstairs toward their waiting cars.
   "Well, that was lively," Gant observed, as soon as they were outside.
   Rutledge actually had himself a nice grin. "Yeah, it was kind of diverting, wasn't it?" A pause. "I think they're exploring how far bluster can take them. Shen is actually rather a sedate kind of guy. He likes it nice and gentle most of the time."
   "So, he has his instructions, too?" Gant wondered.
   "Of course, but he reports to a committee, their Politburo, whereas we report to Scott Adler, and he reports to President Ryan. You know, I was a little mad about the instructions I had coming over here, but this is actually turning into fun. We don't get to snarl back at people very often. We're the U.S. of A., and we're supposed to be nice and calm and accommodating to everybody. That's what I'm used to doing. But this– this feels good." That didn't mean that he approved of President Ryan, of course, but switching over from canasta to poker made an interesting change. Scott Adler liked poker, didn't he? Maybe that explained why he got along so well with that yahoo in the White House.
   It was a short drive back to the embassy. The Americans in the delegation rode mainly in silence, blessing the few minutes of quiet. The hours of precise diplomatic exchange had had to be attended to in the same way a lawyer read a contract, word by goddamned word, seeking meaning and nuance, like searching for a lost diamond in a cesspool. Now they sat back in their seats and closed their eyes or looked mutely at the passing drab scenery with no more than an unstifled yawn, until they pulled through the embassy gate.
   About the only thing to complain about was the fact that the limousines here, like those everywhere, were hard to get in and out of, unless you were six years old. But as soon as they alighted from their official transport, they could see that something was wrong. Ambassador Hitch was right there, and he hadn't bothered with that before. Ambassadors have high diplomatic rank and importance. They do not usually act as doormen for their own countrymen.
   "What's the matter, Carl?" Rutledge asked.
   "A major bump in the road," Hitch answered.
   "Somebody die?" the Deputy Secretary of State asked lightly.
   "Yeah," was the unexpected answer. Then the ambassador waved them inside. "Come on."
   The senior delegation members followed Rutledge into the ambassador's conference room. Already there, they saw, were the DCM– the Deputy Chief of Mission, the ambassador's XO, who in many embassies was the real boss—and the rest of the senior staff, including the guy Gant had figured was the CIA station chief. What the hell? TELESCOPE thought. They all took their seats, and then Hitch broke the news.
   "Oh, shit," Rutledge said for them all. "Why did this happen?"
   "We're not sure. We have our press attache trying to track this Wise guy down, but until we get more information, we really don't know the cause of the incident." Hitch shrugged.
   "Does the PRC know?" Rutledge asked next.
   "Probably they're just finding out," the putative CIA officer opined. "You have to assume the news took a while to percolate through their bureaucracy."
   "How do we expect them to react?" one of Rutledge's underlings asked, sparing his boss the necessity of asking the obvious and fairly dumb question.
   The answer was just as dumb: "Your guess is as good as mine," Hitch said.
   "So, this could be a minor embarrassment or a major whoopsie," Rutledge observed. "Whoopsie" is a term of art in the United States Department of State, usually meaning a massive fuckup.
   "I'd lean more toward the latter," Ambassador Hitch thought. He couldn't come up with a rational explanation for why this was so, but his instincts were flashing a lot of bright red lights, and Carl Hitch was a man who trusted his instincts.
   "Any guidance from Washington?" Cliff asked.
   "They haven't woken up yet, have they?" And as one, every member of the delegation checked his watch. The embassy people already had, of course. The sun had not yet risen on their national capital. What decisions would be made would happen in the next four hours. Nobody here would be getting much sleep for a while, because once the decisions were made, then they'd have to decide how to implement them, how to present the position of their country to the People's Republic.
   "Ideas?" Rutledge asked.
   "The President won't like this very much," Gant observed, figuring he knew about as much as anyone else in the room. "His initial reaction will be one of disgust. Question is, will that spill over into what we're here for? I think it might, depending on how our Chinese friends react to the news."
   "How will the Chinese react?" Rutledge asked Hitch.
   "Not sure, Cliff, but I doubt we'll like it. They will regard the entire incident as an intrusion—an interference with their internal affairs—and their reaction will be somewhat crass, I think. Essentially they're going to say, 'Too damned bad.' If they do, there's going to be a visceral reaction in America and in Washington. They don't understand us as well as they'd like to think they do. They misread our public opinion at every turn, and they haven't showed me much sign of learning. I'm worried," Hitch concluded.
   "Well, then it's our job to walk them through this. You know," Rutledge thought aloud, "this could work in favor of our overall mission here."
   Hitch bristled at that. "Cliff, it would be a serious mistake to try to play this one that way. Better to let them think it through for themselves. The death of an ambassador is a big deal," the American ambassador told the people in the room, in case they didn't know. "All the more so if the guy was killed by an agent of their government. But, Cliff, if you try to shove this down their throats, they're going to choke, and I don't think we want that to happen either. I think our best play is to ask for a break of a day or two in the talks, to let them get their act together."
   "That's a sign of weakness for our side, Carl," Rutledge replied, with a shake of the head. "I think you're wrong on that. I think we press forward and let them know that the civilized world has rules, and we expect them to abide by them."
 
   "What lunacy is this?" Fang Gan asked the ceiling. "We're not sure," Zhang Han San replied. "Some troublesome churchman, it sounds like."
   "And some foolish policeman with more gun than brains. He'll be punished, of course," Fang suggested.
   "Punished? For what? For enforcing our population-control laws, for protecting a doctor against an attack by some gwai?" Zhang shook his head. "Do we allow foreigners to spit upon our laws in this way? No, Fang, we do not. I will not see us lose face in such a way."
   "Zhang, what is the life of one insignificant police officer next to our country's place in the world?" Fang demanded. "The man he killed was an ambassador, Zhang, a foreigner accredited to our country by another—"
   "Country?" Zhang spat. "A city, my friend, no, not even that—a district in Rome, smaller than Qiong Dao!" He referred to Jade Island, home of one of the many temples built by the emperors, and not much larger than the building itself. Then he remembered a quote from Iosef Stalin. "How big an army does that Pope have, anyway? Ahh!" A dismissive wave of the hand.
   "He does have a country, whose ambassador we accredited, in the hope of improving our position in the diplomatic world," Fang reminded his friend. "His death is to be regretted, at the least. Perhaps he was merely one more troublesome foreign devil, Zhang, but for the purposes of diplomacy we must appear to regret his passing." And if that meant executing some nameless policeman, they had plenty of policemen, Fang didn't add.
   "For what? For interfering with our laws? An ambassador may not do such a thing. That violates diplomatic protocol, does it not? Fang, you have become overly solicitous to the foreign devils," Zhang concluded, using the term from history to identify the lesser people from those lesser lands.
   "If we want their goods in trade, and we want them to pay for our goods so that we might have their hard currency, then we must treat them like guests in our home."
   "A guest in your home does not spit on the floor, Fang."
   "And if the Americans do not react kindly to this incident?"
   "Then Shen will tell them to mind their own affairs," Zhang replied, with the finality of one who had long since made up his mind.
   "When does the Politburo meet?"
   "To discuss this?" Zhang asked in surprise. "Why? The death of some foreign troublemaker and a Chinese ... churchman? Fang, you are too cautious. I have already discussed the incident with Shen. There will be no full meeting of the Politburo for this trivial incident. We will meet the day after tomorrow, as usual."
   "As you say," Fang responded, with a nod of submission. Zhang had him ranked on the Politburo. He had much influence with the foreign and defense ministries, and the ear of Xu Kun Piao. Fang had his own political capital—mainly for internal matters—but less such capital than Zhang, and so he had to spend it carefully, when it could profit himself. This was not such a case, he thought. With that, he went back to his office and called Ming to transcribe his notes. Then, later, he thought, he'd have Chai come in. She was so useful in easing the tension of his day.
 
   He felt better on waking this morning than was usually the case, probably because he'd gotten to sleep at a decent hour, Jack told himself, on the way to the bathroom for the usual morning routine. You never got a day off here, at least not in the sense that most people understood the term. You never really got to sleep late—8:25 was the current record dating all the way back to that terrible winter day when this had begun—and every day you had to have the same routine, including the dreaded national security briefing, which told you that some people really did believe that the world couldn't get on without you. The usual look in the mirror. He needed a haircut, Jack saw, but for that the barber came here, which wasn't a bad deal, really, except that you lost the fellowship of sitting in a male place and discussing male things. Being the most powerful man in the world insulated you from so many of the things that mattered. The food was good, and the booze was just fine, and if you didn't like the sheets they were changed at the speed of light, and people jumped to the sound of your voice. Henry VIII never had it so good . . . but Jack Ryan had never thought to become a crowned monarch. That whole idea of kingship had died across the world except in a few distant places, and Ryan didn't live in one of them. But the entire routine at the White House seemed designed to make him feel like a king, and that was disturbing on a level that was like grasping a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was there, but every time you tried to hold it, the damned stuff just vanished. The staff was just so eager to serve, grimly– but pleasantly—determined to make everything easy for them. The real worry was the effect this might have on his kids. If they started thinking they were princes and princesses, sooner or later their lives would go to hell in one big hurry. But that was his problem to worry about, Jack thought as he shaved. His and Cathy's. Nobody else could raise their kids for them. That was their job. Just that all of this White House crap got in the way practically all the time.
   The worst part of all, however, was that he had to be dressed all the time. Except in bed or in the bathroom, the President had to be properly dressed—or what would the staff think? So, Ryan couldn't walk out into the corridor without pants and at least some kind of shirt. At home, a normal person would have padded around barefoot in his shorts, but while a truck driver might have that freedom in his own home, the President of the United States did not have that freedom in his.
   Then he had to smile wryly at the mirror. He bitched to himself about the same things every morning, and if he really wanted to change them, he could. But he was afraid to, afraid to take action that would cause people to lose their jobs. Aside from the fact that it would really look shitty in the papers—and practically everything he did made it into the news—it would feel bad to him, here, shaving every morning. And he didn't really need to walk out to the box and get the paper in the morning, did he?
   And if you factored out the dress code, it wasn't all that bad. The breakfast buffet was actually quite nice, though it wasted at least five times the food it actually served. His cholesterol was still in the normal range, and so Ryan enjoyed eggs for his morning meal two or even three times a week, somewhat to his wife's distaste. The kids opted mainly for cereal or muffins. These were still warm from the downstairs kitchen and came in all sorts of healthy—and tasty—varieties.
   The Early Bird was the clipping service the government provided for senior officials, but for breakfast SWORDSMAN preferred the real paper, complete with cartoons. Like many, Ryan lamented the retirement of Gary Larson and the attendant loss of the morning Far Side, but Jack understood the pressure of enforced daily output. There was also a sports page to be read, something the Early Bird left out completely. And there was CNN, which started in the White House breakfast room promptly at seven.
   Ryan looked up when he heard the warning that kids should not see what they were about to show. His kids, like all other kids, stopped what they were doing to look.
   "Eww, gross!" Sally Ryan observed, when some Chinese guy got shot in the head.
   "Head wounds do that," her mother told her, wincing even so. Cathy did surgery, but not that sort. "Jack, what's this all about?"
   "You know as much as I do, honey," the President told the First Lady.
   Then the screen changed to some file tape showing a Catholic Cardinal. Then Jack caught "Papal Nuncio" off the audio, leaning to reach for the controller to turn the sound up.
   "Chuck?" Ryan said, to the nearest Secret Service agent. "Get me Ben Goodley on the phone, if you could."
   "Yes, Mr. President." It took about thirty seconds, then Ryan was handed the portable phone. "Ben, what the hell's this thing out of Beijing?"