by Tom Clancy
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 las
t 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 counterterrorist officer, had ail 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. “Bau-bei,” 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 recogni
tion 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.”