by Tom Clancy
Then came the hard part for the CIA station chief. On command, he printed two copies of the same report, one of which went to the RVS officer. Was Mary Pat going through change-of-life or something?
“His Russian is very literary, even classical. Who taught him my language?”
“I honestly don’t know,” the station chief lied, successfully as it turned out. The hell of it was, the Russian was right. That occasioned a frown.
“Want me to help with the translation?”
Shit. He smiled. “Sure, why not?”
“Ryan.” A whole five hours of sleep, Jack grumped, lifting the secure carphone. Well, at least he wasn’t doing the driving.
“Mary Pat here. We have something. It’ll be on your desk when you get there.”
“How good?”
“It’s a start,” the DDO said. She was very economical in her use of words. Nobody really trusted radiophones, secure or not.
“Hello, Dr. Ryan. I’m Andrea Price.” The agent was already dressed in a lab coat, complete with picture-pass clipped to the lapel, which she held up. “My uncle is a doctor, GP in Wisconsin. I think he’d like this.” She smiled.
“Do I have anything to worry about?”
“I really don’t think so,” Agent Price said, still smiling. Protectees didn’t like to see worried security personnel, she knew.
“What about my children?”
“There are two agents outside their school, and one more is in the house across from the day-care center for your little one,” the agent explained. “Please don’t worry. They pay us to be paranoid, and we’re almost always wrong, but it’s like in your business. You always want to be wrong on the safe side, right?”
“And my visitors?” Cathy asked.
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“Get them all Hopkins lab coats, souvenirs, like. I’ll eyeball them all when they change.” That was pretty clever, Cathy Ryan thought.
“You’re carrying a gun?”
“Always,” Andrea Price confirmed. “But I’ve never had to use it, never even took it out for an arrest. Just think of me as a fly on the wall,” she said.
More like a falcon, Professor Ryan thought, but at least a tame one.
“How are we supposed to do that, John?” Chavez asked in English. The shower was running. Ding was sitting on the floor, and John on the toilet.
“Well, we seen ’em already, haven’t we?” the senior officer pointed out.
“Yeah, in the fuckin’ factory!”
“Well, we just have to find out where they went.” On the face of it, the statement was reasonable enough. They just had to determine how many and where, and oh, by the way, whether or not there were really nukes riding on the nose. No big deal. All they knew was that they were SS-19-type launchers, the new improved version thereof, and that they’d left the factory by rail. Of course, the country had over twenty-eight thousand kilometers of rail lines. It would have to wait. Intelligence officers often worked banker’s hours, and this was one of those cases. Clark decided to get into the shower to clean off before heading for bed. He didn’t know what to do, yet, or how to go about it, but worrying himself to death would not improve his chances, and he’d long since learned that he worked better with a full eight hours under his belt, and occasionally had a creative thought while showering. Sooner or later Ding might learn those tricks as well, he thought, seeing the expression on the kid’s face.
“Hi, Betsy,” Jack said to the lady waiting in his office’s anteroom. “You’re up early. And who are you?”
“Chris Scott. Betsy and I work together.”
Jack waved them into his office, first checking his fax machine to see if Mary Pat had transmitted the information from Clark and Chavez, and, seeing it there, decided it could wait. He knew Betsy Fleming from his CIA days as a self-taught expert on strategic weapons. He supposed Chris Scott was one of the kids recruited from some university with a degree in what Betsy had learned the hard way. At least the younger one was polite about it, saying that he worked with Betsy. So had Ryan, once, years ago, while concerned with arms-control negotiations. “Okay, what do we have?”
“Here’s what they call the H-11 space booster.” Scott opened his case and pulled out some photos. Good ones, Ryan saw at once, made with real film at close range, not the electronic sort shot through a hole in someone’s pocket. It wasn’t hard to tell the difference, and Ryan immediately recognized an old friend he’d thought dead and decently buried less than a week before.
“Sure as hell, the SS-19. A lot prettier this way, too.” Another photo showed a string of them on the assembly building’s floor. Jack counted them and grimaced. “What else do I need to know?”
“Here,” Betsy said. “Check out the business end.”
“Looks normal,” Ryan observed.
“That’s the point. The nose assembly is normal,” Scott pointed out. “Normal for supporting a warhead bus, not for a commo-sat payload. We wrote that up a while back, but nobody paid any attention to it,” the technical analyst added. “The rest of the bird’s been fully re-engineered. We have estimates for the performance enhancements.”
“Short version?”
“Six or seven MIRVs each and a range of just over ten thousand kilometers,” Mrs. Fleming replied. “Worst-case, but realistic.”
“That’s a lot. Has the missile been certified, tested? Have they tested a bus that we know of?” the National Security Advisor asked.
“No data. We have partial stuff on flight tests of the launcher from surveillance in the Pacific, stuff AMBER BALL caught, but it’s equivocal on several issues,” Scott told him.
“Total birds turned out?”
“Twenty-five we know about. Of those, three have been used up in flight tests, and two are at their launch facility being mated up with orbital payloads. That leaves twenty.”
“What payloads?” Ryan asked almost on a whim.
“The NASA guys think they are survey satellites. Real-time-capable photo-sats. So probably they are,” Betsy said darkly.
“And so probably they’ve decided to enter the overhead-intelligence business. Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?” Ryan made a couple of notes. “Okay, the downside, worst-case threat is twenty launchers with seven MIRVs each, for a total of one hundred forty?”
“Correct, Dr. Ryan.” Both were professional enough that they didn’t editorialize on how bad that threat was. Japan had the theoretical capacity to cut the hearts out of one hundred forty American cities. America could quickly reconstitute the ability to turn their Home Islands into smoke and fire as well, but that wasn’t a hell of a lot of consolation, was it? Forty-plus years of MAD, thought to be ended less than seven days before, and now it was back again, Ryan thought. Wasn’t that just wonderful?
“Do you know anything about the assets that produced these photos?”
“Jack,” Betsy said in her normal June Cleaver voice, “you know I never ask. But whoever it was, was overt. You can tell that from the photos. These weren’t done with a Minox. Somebody covered as a reporter, I bet. Don’t worry. I won’t tell.” Her usual impish smile. She had been around long enough that she knew all the tricks.
“They’re obviously high-quality photos,” Chris Scott went on, wondering how the hell Betsy had the clout to call this man by his first name. “Slow, small-grain film, like what a reporter uses. They let NASA guys into the factory, too. They wanted us to know.”
“Sure as hell.” Mrs. Fleming nodded agreement.
And the Russians, Ryan reminded himself. Why them? “Anything else?”
“Yeah, this.” Scott handed over two more photos. It showed a pair of modified railroad flatcars. One had a crane on it. The other showed the hardpoints for installing another. “They evidently transport by rail instead of truck. I had a guy look at the railcar. It’s apparently standard gauge.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“The width between the ra
ils. Standard gauge is what we use and most of the rest of the world. Most of the railways in Japan are narrow gauge. Funny they didn’t copy the road transporters the Russians made for the beast,” Scott said. “Maybe their roads are too narrow or maybe they just prefer to do it this way. There’s a standard-gauge line from here to Yoshinobu. 1 was a little surprised by the rigging gear. The cradles in the railcar seem to roughly match the dimensions of the transport cocoon that the Russians designed for the beast. So they copied everything but the transporter. That’s all we have, sir.”
“Where are you off to next?”
“We’re huddling across the river with the guys at NRO,” Chris Scott answered.
“Good,” Ryan said. He pointed at both of them. “You tell them this one’s hotter ’n’ hell. I want these things found and found yesterday.”
“You know they’ll try, Jack. And they may have done us a favor by rolling these things out on rails,” Betsy Fleming said as she stood.
Jack organized the photos and asked for another complete set before he dismissed his visitors. Then he checked his watch and called Moscow. Ryan supposed that Sergey was working long hours, too.
“Why the hell,” he began, “did you sell them the SS- 19 design?”
The reply was harsh. Perhaps Golovko was sleep-deprived as well. “For money, of course. The same reason you sold them Aegis, the F-15, and all—”
Ryan grimaced, mainly at the justice in the retort. “Thanks, pal. I guess I deserved that. We estimate they have twenty available.”
“That would be about right, but we haven’t had people visit their factory yet.”
“We have,” Ryan told him. “Want some pictures?”
“Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.”
“They’ll be on your desk tomorrow,” Jack promised. “I have our estimate. I’d like to hear what your people think.” He paused and then went on. “We are worst-casing at seven RVs per missile, for a total of one-forty.”
“Enough for both of us,” Golovko observed. “Remember when we first met, negotiating to remove those fucking things?” He heard Ryan’s snort over the phone. He didn’t hear what his colleague was thinking.
The first time I was close to those things, aboard your missile submarine, Red October, yeah, I remember that. I remember feeling my skin crawl like I was in the presence of Lucifer himself. He’d never had the least bit of affection for ballistic weapons. Oh, sure, maybe they’d kept the peace for forty years, maybe the thought of them had deterred their owners from the intemperate thoughts that had plagued chiefs of state for all of human history. Or just as likely, mankind had just been lucky, for once.
“Jack, this is getting rather serious,” Golovko said. “By the way, our officer met with your officers. He reports favorably on them—and thank you, by the way, for the copy of their report. It included data we did not have. Not vitally important, but interesting even so. So tell me, do they know to seek out these rockets?”
“The order went out,” Ryan assured him.
“To my people as well, Ivan Emmetovich. We will find them, never fear,” Golovko felt the need to add. He had to be thinking the same thing: the only reason the missiles had not been used was that both sides had possessed them, because it was like threatening a mirror. That was no longer true, was it? And so came Ryan’s question:
“And then what?” he asked darkly. “What do we do then?”
“Do you not say in your language, ‘One thing at a time’?”
Isn’t this just great? Now I have a friggin’ Russian trying to cheer me up!
“Thank you, Sergey Nikolay’ch. Perhaps I deserved that as well.”
“So why did we sell Citibank?” George Winston asked.
“Well, he said to look out for banks that were vulnerable to currency fluctuations,” Gant replied. “He was right. We got out just in time. Look, see for yourself.” The trader typed another instruction into his terminal and was rewarded with a graphic depiction of what First National City Bank stock had done on Friday, and sure enough it had dropped off the table in one big hurry, largely because Columbus, which had purchased the issue in large quantities over the preceding five weeks, had held quite a bit, and in selling it had shaken faith in the stock badly. “Anyway, that set off an alarm in our program—”
“Mark, Citibank is one of the benchmark stocks in the model, isn’t it?” Winston asked calmly. There was nothing to be gained by leaning on Mark too hard.
“Oh.” His eyes opened a little wider. “Well, yes, it is, isn’t it?”
That was when a very bright light blinked on in Winston’s mind. It was not widely known how the “expert systems” kept track of the market. They worked in several interactive ways, monitoring both the market as a whole and also modeling benchmark stocks more closely, as general indicators of developing market trends. Those were stocks which over time had tracked closely with what everything else was doing, with a bias toward general stability, those that both dropped and rose more slowly than more speculative issues, steady performers. There were two reasons for it, and one glaring mistake. The reasons were that while the market fluctuated every day, even in the most favorable of circumstances, the idea was to not only bag an occasional killing on a high-flyer, but also to hedge your money on safe stocks—not that any stock was truly safe, as Friday had proven—when everything else became unsettled. For those reasons, the benchmark stocks were those that over time had provided safe havens. The mistake was a common one: dice have no memory. Those benchmark stocks were such because the companies they represented had historically good management. Management could change over time. So it was not the stocks that were stable. It was the management, and that was only something from the past, whose currency had to be examined periodically—despite which, those stocks were used to grade trends. And a trend was a trend only because people thought it was, and in thinking so, they made it so. Winston had regarded benchmark stocks only as predictors of what the people in the market would do, and for him trends were always psychological, predictors of how people would follow an artificial model, not the performance of the model itself. Gant, he realized, didn’t quite see it that way, like so many of the technical traders.
And in selling off Citibank, Columbus had activated a little alarm in its own computer-trading system. And even someone as bright as Mark had forgotten that Citibank was part of the goddamned model!
“Show me other bank stocks,” Winston ordered.
“Well, Chemical went next,” Gant told him, pulling up that track as well. “Then Manny-Hanny, and then others, too. Anyway, we saw it coming, and we jumped into metals and the gold stocks. You know, when the dust settles, it’s going to turn out that we did okay. Not great, but pretty okay,” Gant said, calling up his executive program for overall transactions, wanting to show something he’d done right. “I took the money from a quick flip on Silicon Alchemy and laid this put on GM and—”
Winston patted him on the shoulder. “Save that for later, Mark. I can see it was a good play.”
“Anyway, we were ahead of the trends all the way. Yeah, we got a little hurt when the calls came in and we had to dump a lot of solid things, but that happened to everybody—”
“You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what, George?”
“We were the trend.”
Mark Gant blinked his eyes, and Winston could tell.
He didn’t see it.
29
Written Records
The presentation went very well, and at the end of it Cathy Ryan was handed an exquisitely wrapped box by the Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery from Chiba University, who led the Japanese delegation. Unwrapping it, she found a scarf of watered blue silk, embroidered with gold thread. It looked to be more than a hundred years old.
“The blue goes so well with your eyes, Professor Ryan,” her colleague said with a smile of genuine admiration. “I fear it is not a sufficiently valuable gift for what I have learned from you today. I have hundreds of d
iabetic patients at my hospital. With this technique we can hope to restore sight for most of them. A magnificent breakthrough, Professor.” He bowed, formally and with clear respect.
“Well, the lasers come from your country,” Cathy replied. She wasn’t sure what emotion she was supposed to have. The gift was stunning. The man was as sincere as he could be, and his country might be at war with hers. But why wasn’t it on the news? If there were a war, why was this foreigner not under arrest? Was she supposed to be gracious to him as a learned colleague or hostile to him as an enemy? What the hell was going on? She looked over at Andrea Price, who just leaned against the back wall and smiled, her arms crossed across her chest.
“And you have taught us how to use them more efficiently. A stunning piece of applied research.” The Japanese professor turned to the others and raised his hands. The assembled multitude applauded, and a blushing Caroline Ryan started thinking that she just might get the Lasker statuette for her mantelpiece after all. Everyone shook her hand before leaving for the bus that waited to take them back to the Stouffer’s on Pratt Street.
“Can I see it?” Special Agent Price asked after all were gone and the door safely closed. Cathy handed the scarf over. “Lovely. You’ll have to buy a new dress to go with it.”
“So there never was anything to worry about,” Dr. Ryan observed. Interestingly, once she’d gotten fifteen seconds into her lecture, she’d forgotten about it anyway. Wasn’t that interesting?
“No, like I told you, I didn’t expect anything.” Price handed the scarf back, not without some reluctance. The little professor was right, she thought. It did go nicely with her eyes. “Jack Ryan’s wife” was all she’d heard, and then some. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Retinal surgery?” Cathy closed her notebook. “I started off working the front end of the eye, right up to the time little Jack was born. Then I had an idea about how the retina is attached naturally and how we might reattach bad ones. Then we started looking at how to fix blood vessels. Bernie let me run with it, and I got a research grant from NIH to play with, and one thing led to another ...”