by Tom Clancy
“I will do what I can,” the informant promised.
“And you will do it quickly, Pavel Petrovich. You will also find out for me who takes over Rasputin’s empire.”
“Yes, Comrade Polkovnik Leytnant.” The usual nod of submission.
There was power in being a senior policeman, Shablikov thought. Real human power, which you could impose on other men, and that made it pleasurable. In this case, he’d told a mid-level criminal what he had to do, and it would be done, lest his informant be arrested and find his source of income interrupted. The other side of the coin was protection of a sort. So long as this criminal didn’t stray too far from what the senior cop found to be acceptable violations, he was safe from the law. It was the same over most of the world, Lieutenant Colonel Yefim Konstantinovich Shablikov of the Moscow Militia was sure. How else could the police collect the information they needed on people who did stray too far? No police agency in the world had the time to investigate everything, and thus using criminals against criminals was the easiest and least expensive method of intelligence-gathering.
The one thing to remember was that the informants were criminals, and hence unreliable in many things, too given to lying, exaggeration, to making up what they thought their master wanted to hear. And so Shablikov had to be careful believing anything this criminal said.
For his part, Pavel Petrovich Klusov had his own doubts, dealing as he did with this corrupted police colonel. Shablikov was not a former KGB officer, but rather a career policeman, and therefore not as smart as he believed himself to be, but more accustomed to bribes and informal arrangements with those he pursued. That was probably how he had achieved his fairly high rank. He knew how to get information by making deals with people like himself, Klusov thought. The informant wondered if the colonel had a hard-currency account somewhere. It would be interesting to find out where he lived, what sort of private car he or his wife drove. But he’d do what he was told, because his own “commercial” activities thrived under Shablikov’s protection, and later that night he’d go out drinking with Irina Aganovna, maybe take her to bed later, and along the way find out how deeply mourned Avseyenko was by his … former … employees.
“Yes, Comrade Polkovnik Leytnant,” Klusov agreed. “It will be as you say. I will try to be back with you tomorrow.”
“You will not try. You will do it, Pasha,” Shablikov told him, like a schoolmaster demanding homework from an underachieving child.
It is already under way,” Zhang told his Premier.
“I trust this one will go more smoothly than its two predecessors,” the Premier replied dryly. The risks attached to this operation were incomparably greater. Both previous times, with Japan’s attempt to drastically alter the Pacific Rim equation, and Iran’s effort to create a new nation from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic had not done anything, just … encouraged, behind the scenes. This venture, though, was different. Well, one could not really expect great things to happen on the cheap, could one?
“I-we have been unlucky.”
“Perhaps so.” A casual nod as he switched papers on his desk.
Zhang Han San’s blood went a little cold at that. The Premier of the People’s Republic was a man known for his detachment, but he’d always regarded his Minister Without Portfolio with a certain degree of warmth. Zhang was one of the few whose advice the Premier usually heeded. As indeed today the advice would be heeded, but without any feeling on the part of the senior official.
“We have exposed nothing and we have lost nothing,” Zhang went on.
The head didn’t come up. “Except that there is now an American ambassador in Taipei.” And now there was talk of a mutual-defense treaty whose only purpose was to place the American navy between the two countries, regular port visits, perhaps even a permanent base (to be built entirely, most certainly, from Taiwanese money) whose only purpose, the Americans would innocently say, was merely to be a replacement for Subic Bay in the Philippines. The economy on Taiwan had exploded after the renewal of full U.S. diplomatic recognition, with an influx of massive new capital investments from all over the world. Much of that money would-and should-have come to the PRC, except for the change in America’s outlook.
But the American President Ryan had taken his action entirely on his own, so the intelligence services claimed, contrary to political and diplomatic advice in Washington-though the American Secretary of State, that Adler man, had reportedly supported Ryan’s foolish decision.
Zhang’s blood temperature dropped another degree or so. Both of his plans had gone almost as he’d calculated they should, hadn’t they? In neither case had his country risked anything of consequence-oh, yes, they’d lost a few fighter aircraft the last time around, but those things and their pilots regularly crashed to no purpose anyway. Especially in the case of Taiwan, the People’s Republic had acted responsibly, allowing Secretary Adler to shuttle directly back and forth between Beijing and its wayward province across the Formosa Strait, as though giving them legitimacy-something obviously not intended by the PRC, but rather as a convenience to aid the American in his peacemaking task, so as to appear more reasonable to the Americans … and so, why had Ryan done it? Had he guessed Zhang’s play? That was possible, but it was more likely that there was a leak, an informer, a spy this close to the summit of political power in the People’s Republic. The counterintelligence agencies were examining the possibility. There were few who knew what emerged from his mind and his office, and all of them would be questioned, while technical people checked his telephone lines and the very walls of his office. Had he, Zhang, been in error? Certainly not! Even if his Premier felt that way … Zhang next considered his standing with the Politburo. That could have been better. Too many of them regarded him as an adventurer with too great an access to the wrong ear. It was an easy thing to whisper, since they’d be delighted to reap the profits from his policy successes, and only slightly less delighted to pull away from him if things went awry. Well, such were the hazards of having reached the summit of policy-making in a country such as his.
“Even if we wished to crush Taiwan, unless we opted for nuclear weapons, it would require years and vast amounts of treasure to construct the means to make it possible, and then it would be a vast risk to little profit. Better that the People’s Republic should grow so successful economically that they come begging to us to be let back into the family home. They are not powerful enemies, after all. They are scarcely even a nuisance on the world stage.” But for some reason, they were a specific nuisance to his Premier, Zhang reminded himself, like some sort of personal allergy that marked and itched his sensitive skin.
“We have lost face, Zhang. That is enough for the moment.”
“Face is not blood, Xu, nor is it treasure.”
“They have ample treasure,” the Premier pointed out, still not looking at his guest. And that was true. The small island of Taiwan was immensely rich from the industrious effort of its mainly ethnic-Chinese inhabitants, who traded nearly everything to nearly everywhere, and the restoration of American diplomatic recognition had increased both their commercial prosperity and their standing on the world stage. Try as he might, wish as he might, Zhang could not discount either of those things.
What had gone wrong? he asked himself again. Were not his plays brilliantly subtle ones? Had his country ever overtly threatened Siberia? No. Did even the People’s Liberation Army’s leadership know what the plans were? Well, yes, he had to admit to himself, some did, but only the most trusted people in the operations directorate, and a handful of senior field commanders-the ones who would have to execute the plans if the time ever came. But such people knew how to keep secrets, and if they talked to anyone … but they wouldn’t, because they knew what happened to people who spoke of things best left unspoken in a society such as theirs, and they knew that the very air had ears at their level of “trust.” They hadn’t even commented on the draft plans to anyone, just made the usual adjustm
ents in the technical arrangements, as senior officers always tended to do. And so, perhaps some file clerks had the ability to examine the plans, but that was exceedingly unlikely as well. Security in the PLA was excellent. The soldiers, from private to the lower general ranks, had no more freedom than a machine bolted to the factory floor, and by the time they reached senior rank they’d mainly forgotten how to think independently, except perhaps in some technical matters, like which sort of bridge to build over a particular river. No, to Zhang they might as well have been machines, and were just as trustworthy.
Back to the original question: Why had that Ryan fellow reestablished relations with the “Republic of China”? Had he guessed anything about the Japan and Iran initiatives? The incident with the airliner had certainly looked like the accident it was supposed to simulate, and afterward the PRC had invited the American navy to come to the area and “keep the peace,” as they liked to put it, as though peace were something you could place in a metal box and guard. In reality it was the other way ’round. War was the animal you kept in a cage, and then released when the time suited.
Had this President Ryan guessed the PRC’s intentions to begin the dismemberment of the former Soviet Union, and then decided to punish the People’s Republic with his recognition of the renegades on Taiwan? It was possible. There were those who found Ryan to be unusually perceptive for an American political figure … he was a former intelligence officer, after all, and had probably been a good one, Zhang reminded himself. It was always a serious mistake to underrate an adversary, as the Japanese and the Iranians had learned to their considerable sorrow. This Ryan fellow had responded skillfully to both of Zhang’s plans, and yet he hadn’t so much as whispered his displeasure to the PRC. There had been no American military exercises aimed even indirectly at the People’s Republic, no “leaks” to the American media, and nothing that his country’s own intelligence officers operating out of the embassy in Washington had discovered. And so, he was again back to the original question: Why had Ryan taken that action? He just didn’t know. Not knowing was a great annoyance to a man at his level of government. Soon his Premier might ask a question for which he needed to have the answer. But for now the leader of his government was flipping papers on his desk, ostensibly to tell him, Zhang, that he, the Premier, was displeased, but not at this moment doing anything about his emotions.
Ten meters away through a solid-core wood door, Lian Ming had her own emotions. The secretarial chair she sat in was an expensive one, purchased from Japan, the price of it equal to the wages of a skilled worker for, what? Four months? Five? Certainly more than the price of the new bicycle she could have used.
A university graduate in modern languages, she spoke English and French well enough to make herself understood in any city in the world, and as a result she found herself going over all manner of diplomatic and intelligence documents for her boss, whose language skills were considerably less than her own. The comfortable chair represented her boss’s solicitude for the way in which she organized his work and his day. And a little more.
CHAPTER 2 The Dead Goddess
This was where it had all happened, Chester Nomuri told himself. The vast expanse of Tiananmen Square, the “Square of Heavenly Peace,” with the massive walls to his right, was like … what? On reflection he realized that he had nothing with which to compare it. If there were another place in all the world like this place, he had neither visited nor even heard of it.
And yet the very paving stones seemed to drip with blood. It was almost as if he could smell it here, though that was more than ten years in the past, the massed students, not much younger than he had been at the time in California, rallying here to protest their government. They hadn’t protested the form of their country’s government so much as the corruption of those at its highest levels, and, predictably, such actions had been hugely offensive to the corrupted. Well, that’s how it usually went. Only with discretion did one point out the nature of a powerful man to himself, Eastern or Western, but this was the most dangerous place of all, because of its long history of gross brutality. Here there was an expectation of it …
… but the first time it had been tried right here, the soldiers ordered to clear things up had balked. And that must have frightened the leadership in their plush and comfortable offices, because when the organs of the state refused to do the bidding of the state, that was when something called “Revolution” started (and in a place where there had already been a Revolution, enshrined on this very spot). And so, the initial troop formations had been pulled back and replaced with others, drawn from farther away, young soldiers (all soldiers were young, Nomuri reminded himself). They had not yet been contaminated by the words and thoughts of their contemporaries demonstrating in the Square, not yet sympathetic with them, not yet willing to ask themselves why the government which gave them their weapons and uniforms wished for them to hurt these people instead of listening to what they had to say … and so, they’d acted like the mindless automatons they’d been trained to be.
There, just a few yards away, were some soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army on parade, wearing the strange wax-doll look they tended to have, looking not quite human in their green wool uniforms, almost as though they used makeup, Chet thought, wanting to look more closely at their faces to see if maybe they really did. He turned away with a shake of his head. He hadn’t flown JAL to China for that. Wangling this assignment for Nippon Electric Company had been difficult enough. It was a major drag working two jobs, as an upper-middle account executive for NEC and a field intelligence officer for CIA. To succeed in the second, he had also to succeed in the first, and to succeed in the first he had to simulate a true Japanese salaryman, one who subordinated everything short of his breathing to the good of the company. Well, at least he got to keep both of his salaries, and the Japanese one wasn’t all that bad, was it? Not at the current exchange rate, anyway.
Nomuri supposed that this whole deal was a great sign of confidence in his abilities-he’d established a modestly productive network of agents in Japan who would now report to other CIA case officers-and also of desperation. The Agency had been singularly unsuccessful in getting a spy network operating over here in the PRC. Langley hadn’t recruited many Chinese Americans into the fold … and one of those it had gotten was now in Federal prison after having developed a serious case of divided loyalties. It was a fact that certain federal agencies were allowed to be racist, and today Chinese ethnicity was strongly suspect at CIA headquarters. Well, there wasn’t anything he could do about that-nor could he pretend to be Chinese himself, Nomuri knew. To some half-blind racist European types, everyone with crooked eyes looked the same, but here in Beijing, Nomuri, whose ancestry was a hundred percent Japanese (albeit entirely of the southern California variety), figured he stood out about as much as Michael Jordan would. It wasn’t something to make an intelligence officer without diplomatic cover feel comfortable, especially since the Chinese Ministry of State Security was as active and well-supported as it was. MSS was every bit as powerful in this city as the Soviet KGB had ever been in Moscow, and was probably just as ruthless. China, Nomuri reminded himself, had been in the business of torturing criminals and other unloved ones for thousands of years … and his ethnicity would not be overly helpful. The Chinese did business with the Japanese because it was convenient-necessary was a more accurate term-but there was precisely zero love lost between the countries. Japan had killed far more Chinese in World War II than Hitler had killed Jews, a fact little appreciated anywhere in the world, except, of course, in China, and that set of facts only added to a racial/ethnic antipathy that went back at least as far as Kublai Khan.
He’d gotten too used to fitting in. Nomuri had joined CIA to serve his country, and to have a little fun, he’d thought at the time. Then he’d learned what a deadly serious business field-intelligence was, followed by the challenge of slipping into places he wasn’t supposed to be, of obtaining information he wasn�
�t supposed to get, and then giving it to people who weren’t supposed to know it. It wasn’t just serving his country that kept Nomuri in the business. There was also the thrill, the rush of knowing what others didn’t know, of beating people at their own game, on their own turf.
But in Japan he looked like everyone else. Not here in Beijing. He was also a few inches taller than the average Chinese-that came from his childhood diet and American furniture-and better dressed in Western-style clothes. The clothes he could fix. His face he could not. For starters, he’d have to change his haircut, Chet thought. At least that way he could disappear from behind, and perhaps shake an MSS tail that way. He had a car to drive around, paid for by NEC, but he’d get a bicycle, too, a Chinese make rather than an expensive European one. If asked about it, he’d say it was good exercise-and besides, wasn’t it a perfectly fine socialist bicycle? But such questions would be asked, and notice of his presence would be taken, and in Japan, Nomuri realized, he’d gotten slack and comfortable running his agents. He’d known that he could disappear in a place as intimate as a steaming bathhouse, and there talk about women and sports and many other things, but rarely business. In Japan every business operation was secret at some level or other, and even with the intimate friends with whom he discussed their wives’ shortcomings, a Japanese salaryman would not discuss goings-on in the office until after they were overt and public. And that was good for operational security, wasn’t it?
Looking around like any other tourist, he wondered how he would handle such things here. But most of all he noticed that eyes lingered on him as he walked from one side of this immense square to the other. How had this place sounded when the tanks were here? He stood still for a moment, remembering … it was right there, wasn’t it? … the guy with the briefcase and shopping bag who’d held up a company of tanks, just by standing there … because even the private in the driver’s seat of a Type 80 PRC tank didn’t have the stones to run over the guy, despite whatever his captain might have been screaming at him over the inter-phones from his place on top of the turret. Yeah, it was right about here that had happened. Later on, of course, in about a week, the guy with the briefcase had been arrested by MSS, so said CIA’s sources, and he’d been taken away and interrogated to see what had persuaded him to take so public and so foolish a political stand against both the government and the armed forces of his country. That had probably lasted a while, the CIA officer thought, standing here and looking around from the spot where one brave man had taken his stand … because the MSS interrogators just wouldn’t have believed that it had been one man acting on his own … the concept of acting on one’s own was not something encouraged in a communist regime, and was therefore entirely alien to those who enforced the will of the State on those who broke the State’s rules. Whoever he’d been, the guy with the briefcase was dead now-the sources were pretty clear on that. An MSS official had commented on the matter with satisfaction later on, before someone whose ears were distantly connected to America. He’d taken the bullet in the back of the head, and his family-a wife and an infant son, the source believed-had been billed for the pistol round needed to execute the husband/ father/counterrevolutionary/enemy-of-the-state in question. Such was justice in the People’s Republic of China.