by Tom Clancy
“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 into 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 lin
e.”
“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.