by Tom Clancy
“Mr. Vice President?” It was the voice of the USAF communications sergeant aboard the VC-20. Robby turned to see her with a sheaf of papers.
“Yeah, Sarge?”
“Flash traffic just came in on the printer.” She extended her hand, and Robby took the paper.
“Colonel, your airplane for a while,” the VP told the lieutenant colonel in the left seat.
“Pilot’s airplane,” the colonel agreed, while Robby started reading.
It was always the same, even though it was also always different. The cover sheet had the usual classification formatting. It had once impressed Jackson that the act of showing a sheet of paper to the wrong person could land him in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary-at the time, actually, the since-closed Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire-but now as a senior government official in Washington, D.C., he knew he could show damned near anything to a reporter from The Washington Post and not be touched for it. It wasn’t so much that he was above the law as he was one of the people who decided what the law meant. What was so damned secret and sensitive in this case was that CIA didn’t know shit about the possible attempt on the life of Russia’s chief spymaster … which meant nobody else in Washington did, either….
CHAPTER 3 The Problems with Riches
The issue was trade, not exactly the President’s favorite, but then, at this level, every issue took on sufficient twists that even the ones you thought you knew about became strange at best, unknown and alien at worst.
“George?” Ryan said to his Secretary of the Treasury, George Winston.
“Mr. Pres-”
“Goddammit, George!” The President nearly spilled his coffee with the outburst.
“Okay.” SecTreas nodded submission. “It’s hard to make the adjustment … Jack.” Ryan was getting tired of the Presidential trappings, and his rule was that here, in the Oval Office, his name was Jack, at least for his inner circle, of which Winston was one. After all, Ryan had joked a few times, after leaving this marble prison, he might be working for TRADER, as the Secret Service knew him, back in New York on The Street, instead of the other way ’round. After leaving the Presidency, something for which Jack prostrated himself before God every night-or so the stories went-he’d have to find gainful employment somewhere, and the trading business beckoned. Ryan had shown a rare gift for it, Winston reminded himself. His last such effort had been a California company called Silicon Alchemy, just one of many computer outfits, but the only one in which Ryan had taken an interest. So skillfully had he brought that firm to IPO that his own stock holdings in SALC-its symbol on the big board-were now valued at just over eighty million dollars, making Ryan by far the wealthiest American President in history. It was something his politically astute Chief of Staff, Arnold van Damm, did not advertise to the news media, who typically regarded every wealthy man as a robber baron, excepting, of course, the owners of the papers and TV stations themselves, who were, of course, the best of public-spirited citizens. None of this was widely known, even in the tight community of Wall Street big-hitters, which was remarkable enough. Should he ever return to The Street, Ryan’s prestige would be sufficient to earn money while he slept in his bed at home. And that, Winston freely admitted, was something well and truly earned, and be damned to whatever the media hounds thought of it.
“It’s China?” Jack asked.
“That’s right, Boss,” Winston confirmed with a nod. “Boss” was a term Ryan could stomach, as it was also the in-house term the Secret Service-which was part of Winston’s Department of the Treasury-used to identify the man they were sworn to protect. “They’re having a little cash-shortfall problem, and they’re looking to make it up with us.”
“How little?” POTUS asked.
“It looks as though it will annualize out to, oh, seventy billion or so.”
“That is, as we say, real money.”
George Winston nodded. “Anything that starts with a ‘B’ is real enough, and this is a little better than six ‘Bs’ a month.”
“Spending it for what?”
“Not entirely sure, but a lot of it has to be military-related. The French arms industries are tight with them now, since the Brits kiboshed the jet-engine deal from Rolls-Royce.”
The President nodded, looking down at the briefing papers. “Yeah, Basil talked the PM out of it.” That was Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called (erroneously) MI6. Basil was an old friend of Ryan’s, going back to his CIA days. “It was a remarkably stand-up thing to do.”
“Well, our friends in Paris don’t seem to think the same way.”
“They usually don’t,” Ryan agreed. The odd thing was the dichotomy inherent in dealing with the French. In some things, they weren’t so much allies as blood brothers, but in others they were less than mere associates, and Ryan had trouble figuring out the logic by which the French changed their minds. Well, the President thought, that’s what I have a State Department for…. “So, you think the PRC is building up its military again?”
“Big time, but not so much their navy, which makes our friends in Taiwan feel a little better.”
That had been one of President Ryan’s foreign-policy initiatives after concluding hostilities with the defunct United Islamic Republic, now restored to the separate nations of Iran and Iraq, which were at least at peace with each other. The real reasons for the recognition of Taiwan had never been made known to the public. It looked pretty clear to Ryan and his Secretary of State, Scott Adler, that the People’s Republic of China had played a role in the Second Persian Gulf War, and probably in the preceding conflict with Japan, as well. Exactly why? Well, some in CIA thought that China lusted after the mineral riches in eastern Siberia-this was suggested by intercepts and other access to the electronic mail of the Japanese industrialists who’d twisted their nation’s path into a not-quite-open clash with America. They’d referred to Siberia as the “Northern Resource Area,” harkening back to when an earlier generation of Japanese strategists had called South Asia the “Southern Resource Area.” That had been part of another conflict, one known to history as the Second World War. In any case, the complicity of the PRC with America’s enemies had merited a countermove, Ryan and Adler had agreed, and besides, the Republic of China on Taiwan was a democracy, with government officials elected by the people of that nation island-and that was something America was supposed to respect.
“You know, it would be better if they started working their navy and threatening Taiwan. We are in a better position to forestall that than-”
“You really think so?” SecTreas asked, cutting his President off.
“The Russians do,” Jack confirmed.
“Then why are the Russians selling the Chinese so much hardware?” Winston demanded. “That doesn’t make sense!”
“George, there is no rule demanding that the world has to make sense.” That was one of Ryan’s favorite aphorisms. “That’s one of the things you learn in the intelligence business. In 1938, guess who was Germany’s number one trading partner?”
SecTreas saw that sandbag coming before it struck. “France?”
“You got it.” Ryan nodded. “Then, in ‘40 and ’41, they did a lot of trade with the Russians. That didn’t work out so well either, did it?”
“And everyone always told me that trade was a moderating influence,” the Secretary observed.
“Maybe it is among people, but remember that governments don’t have principles so much as interests-at least the primitive ones, the ones who haven’t figured it all out yet…”
“Like the PRC?”
It was Ryan’s turn to nod. “Yeah, George, like those little bastards in Beijing. They rule a nation of a billion people, but they do it as though they were the new coming of Caligula. Nobody ever told them that they have a positive duty to look after the interests of the people they rule-well, maybe that’s not true,” Ryan allowed, feeling a little generous. “They have this big, perfect theor
etical model, promulgated by Karl Marx, refined by Lenin, then applied in their country by a pudgy sexual pervert named Mao.”
“Oh? Pervert?”
“Yeah.” Ryan looked up. “We had the data over at Langley. Mao liked virgins, the younger the better. Maybe he liked to see the fear in their cute little virginal eyes-that’s what one of our pshrink consultants thought, kinda like rape, not so much sex as power. Well, I guess it could have been worse-at least they were girls,” Jack observed rather dryly, “and their culture is historically a little more liberal than ours on that sort of thing.” A shake of the head. “You should see the briefs I get whenever a major foreign dignitary comes over, the stuff we know about their personal habits.”
A chuckle: “Do I really want to know?”
A grimace: “Probably not. Sometimes I wish they didn’t give me the stuff. You sit them down right here in the office, and they’re charming and businesslike, and you can spend the whole fucking meeting looking for horns and hooves.” That could be a distraction, of course, but it was more generally thought that as in playing poker for high stakes, the more you knew about the guy on the other side of the table, the better, even if it might make you want to throw up during the welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn. But that was the business of being President, Ryan reminded himself. And people actually fought like tigers to get there. And would again, when he left, POTUS reminded himself. And so, Jack, is it your job to protect your country from the kind of rat who lusts to be where all the really good cheese is stored? Ryan shook his head again. So many doubts. It wasn’t so much that they never went away. They just kept getting bigger all the time. How strange that he understood and could recount every small step that had led him to this office, and yet he still asked himself several times every hour how the hell he’d come to be in this place … and how the hell he’d ever get out. Well, he had no excuses at all this time. He’d actually run for election to the Presidency. If you could call it that-Arnie van Damm didn’t, as a matter of fact-which you could, since he’d fulfilled the constitutional requirements, a fact on which just about every legal scholar in the nation had agreed, and talked about on every major news network ad nauseam. Well, Jack reminded himself, I wasn’t watching much TV back then, was I? But it all really came down to one thing: The people you dealt with as President were very often people whom you would never willingly invite into your home, and it had nothing to do with any lack of manners or personal charm, which, perversely, they usually displayed in abundance. One of the things Arnie had told Jack early on was that the main requirement to enter the political profession was nothing more nor less than the ability to be pleasant to people whom you despised, and then to do business with them as if they were bosom friends.
“So, what do we know about our heathen Chinese friends?” Winston asked. “The current ones, that is.”
“Not much. We’re working on that. The Agency has a long way to go, though we are started on the road. We still get intercepts. Their phone system is leaky, and they use their cell phones too much without encrypting them. Some of them are men of commendable vigor, George, but nothing too terribly scandalous that we know about. Quite a few of them have secretaries who are very close to their bosses.”
The Secretary of the Treasury managed a chuckle. “Well, a lot of that going around, and not just in Beijing.”
“Even on Wall Street?” Jack inquired, with a theatrically raised eyebrow.
“I can’t say for sure, sir, but I have heard the occasional rumor.” Winston grinned at the diversion.
And even right here in this room, Ryan reminded himself. They’d changed the rug long since, of course, and all the furniture, except for the Presidential desk. One of the problems associated with holding this job was the baggage piled on your back by previous officeholders. They said the public had a short memory, but that wasn’t true, was it? Not when you heard the whispers, followed by chuckles, and accompanied by knowing looks and the occasional gesture that made you feel dirty to be the subject of the chuckles. And all you could do about it was to live your life as best you could, but even then the best you could hope for was for people to think you were smart enough not to get caught, because they all did it, right? One of the problems with living in a free country was that anyone outside this palace/prison could think and say whatever he wished. And Ryan didn’t even have the right that any other citizen might have to punch out whatever twit said something about his character that the twit was unwilling to back up. It hardly seemed fair, but as a practical matter, it would force Ryan to visit a lot of corner bars, and break a lot of knuckles, to little gain. And sending sworn cops or armed Marines out to handle matters wasn’t exactly a proper use of Presidential power, was it?
Jack knew that he was far too thin-skinned to hold this job. Professional politicians typically had hides that made a rhinoceros’s look like rose petals, because they expected to have things hurled at them, some true, some not. By cultivating that thick covering, they attenuated the pain somehow, until eventually people stopped hurling things at them, or such was the theory. Maybe it actually worked for some. Or maybe the bastards just didn’t have consciences. You paid your money and you took your choice.
But Ryan did have a conscience. That was a choice he’d made long before. You still had to look in the mirror once a day, usually at shaving time, and there was no easy fix for not being able to like the face you saw there.
“Okay, back to the PRC’s problems, George,” the President commanded.
“They’re going to juice up their trade-one way, that is. They’re discouraging their own citizens from buying American, but all they can sell, they sell. Including some of Mao’s young virgins, probably.”
“What do we have to prove that?”
“Jack, I pay close attention to results, and I have friends in various businesses who shake the bushes and talk to people over drinks. What they learn frequently gets back to me. You know, a lot of ethnic Chinese have some weird medical condition. You get one drink into them, it’s like four or five for us-and the second drink is like chugging a whole bottle of Jack Daniel‘s, but some of the dummies try to keep up anyway, some hospitality thing, maybe. Anyway, when that happens, well, the talk becomes freer, y’know? It’s been going on quite a while, but lately Mark Gant set up a little program. Senior executives who go to certain special places, well, I do own the Secret Service now, and the Secret Service does specialize in economic crimes, right? And a lot of my old friends know who I am and what I do now, and they cooperate pretty nice, and so I get a lot of good stuff to write up. It mainly goes to my senior people across the street.”
“I’m impressed, George. You cross-deck it to CIA?”
“I suppose I could, but I was afraid they’d get all pissy over turf rights and stuff.”
Ryan rolled his eyes at that bit of information. “Not Ed Foley. He’s a real pro from way back, and the bureaucracy over at Langley hasn’t captured him yet. Have him over to your office for lunch. He won’t mind what you’re doing. Same thing with Mary Pat. She runs the Directorate of Operations. MP’s a real cowgirl, and she wants results, too.”
“Duly noted. You know, Jack, it’s amazing how much people talk, and the things they talk about under the proper circumstances.”
“How’d you make all that money on The Street, George?” Ryan asked.
“Mainly by knowing a little more than the guy across the street,” Winston replied.
“Works the same way for me here. Okay, if our little friends go forward with this, what should we do?”
“Jack-no, now it’s Mr. President-we’ve been financing Chinese industrial expansion for quite a few years now. They sell things to us, we pay cash for them, and then they either keep the money for their own purposes on the international money markets, or they purchase things they want from other countries, often things they could as easily buy from us, but maybe half a percent more expensive from an American manufacturer. The reason it’s called ‘tr
ade’ is that you theoretically exchange something of yours for something of the other guy’s-just like kids with baseball cards, okay? — but they’re not playing the game that way. They’re also dumping some products just to get dollars, selling items here for less than what they sell them to their own citizens. Now, that is technically in violation of a couple federal statues. Okay,” Winston shrugged, “it’s a statute we enforce somewhat selectively, but it is on the books, and it is the law. Toss in the Trade Reform Act that we passed a few years ago because of the games the Japs were playing-”
“I remember, George. It kinda started a little shooting war in which some people got killed,” POTUS observed dryly. Worst of all, perhaps, it had begun the process that had ended up with Ryan in this very room.