by Tom Clancy
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 last 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 recognition 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.”
“So, this document represents the view of their government?” TOMCAT asked.
Foley surprised the Vice President by shaking his head. “No, it represents the view of this Zhang Han San guy. He’s a powerful and influential minister, but he doesn’t speak for their government per se. Note that the text here doesn’t say what their official position is. Zhang probably does represent a view, and a powerful view, inside their Politburo. There are also moderates whose position this document does not address.”
“Okay, great,” Robby said, shifting in his seat, “so why are you taking up our time with this stuff, then?”
“This Zhang guy is tight with their Defense Minister—in fact he has a major voice in their entire national-security establishment. If he’s expanding his influence into trade policy, we have a problem, and our trade negotiations team needs to know that up front,” the DCI informed them.
So?" Ming asked tiredly. She hated getting dressed and leaving, and it meant a night of not-enough sleep.
“So, you should get in early and upload this on Chai’s computer. It’s just a new system file, the new one, six-point-eight-point-one, like the one I uploaded on your computer.” In fact, the newest real system file was 6.3.2, and so there was at least a year until a write-over would actually be necessary.
“Why do you have me do this?”
“Does it matter, Bau-bei?” he asked.
She actually hesitated, thinking it over a bit, and the second or so of uncertainty chilled the American spy. “No, I suppose not.”
“I need to get you some new things,” Nomuri whispered, taking her in his arms.
“Like what?” she asked. All his previous gifts had been noteworthy.
“It will be a surprise, and a good one,” he promised.
Her dark eyes sparkled with anticipation. Nomuri helped her on with her dreadful jacket. Dressing her back up was not nearly as fun as undressing her, but that was to be expected. A moment later, he gave her the final goodbye kiss at the door, and watched her depart, then went back to his computer to tell [email protected] that he’d arranged for a second recipe that he hoped she might find tasty.
CHAPTER 22
The Table and the Recipe
Minister, this is a pleasure," Cliff Rutledge said in his friendliest diplomatic voice, shaking hands. Rutledge was glad the PRC had adopted the Western custom—he’d never learned the exact protocol of bowing.
Carl Hitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic, was there for the opening ceremony. He was a career foreign service officer who’d always preferred working abroad to working at Foggy Bottom. Running day-to-day diplomatic relations wasn’t especially exciting, but in a place like this, it did require a steady hand. Hitch had that, and he was apparently well liked by the rest of the diplomatic community, which didn’t hurt.
It was all new for Mark Gant, however. The room was impressive, like the boardroom of a major corporation—designed to keep the board members happy, like noblemen from medieval Italy. It had high ceilings and fabric-covered walls—Chinese silk, in this case, red, of course, so that the effect was rather like crawling inside the heart of a whale, complete with chandeliers, cut crystal, and polished brass. Everyone had a tiny glass of mao-tai, which really was like drinking flavored lighter fluid, as he’d been warned.
“It is your first time in Beijing?” some minor official asked him.
Gant turned to look down at the little guy. “Yes, it is.”
“Too soon for first impressions, then?”
“Yes, but this room is quite stunning ... but then silk is something with which your people have a long and fruitful history,” he went on, wondering if he sounded diplomatic or mere
ly awkward.
“This is so, yes,” the official agreed with a toothy grin and a nod, neither of which told the visiting American much of anything, except that he didn’t waste much money on toothbrushes.
“I have heard much of the imperial art collection.”
“You will see it,” the official promised. “It is part of the official program.”
“Excellent. In addition to my duties, I would like to play tourist.”
“I hope you will find us acceptable hosts,” the little guy said. For his part, Gant was wondering if this smiling, bowing dwarf would hit his knees and offer a blow job, but diplomacy was an entirely new area for him. These were not investment bankers, who were generally polite sharks, giving you good food and drink before sitting you down and trying to bite your dick off. But they never concealed the fact that they were sharks. These people—he just wasn’t sure. This degree of politeness and solicitude was a new experience for Gant, but given his pre-mission brief, he wondered if the hospitality only presaged an unusually hostile meeting when they got to business. If the two things had to balance out, then the downside of this seesaw was going to be a son of a bitch, he was sure.
“So, you are not from the American State Department?” the Chinese man asked.
“No. I’m in the Department of the Treasury. I work directly for Secretary Winston.”
“Ah, then you are from the trading business?”
So, the little bastard’s been briefed... But that was to be expected. At this level of government you didn’t freelance things. Everyone would be thoroughly briefed. Everyone would have read the book on the Americans. The State Department members of the American crew had done the same. Gant, however, had not, since he wasn’t really a player per se, and had only been told what he needed to know. That gave him an advantage over the Chinese assigned to look after him. He was not State Department, hence should not have been regarded as important—but he was the personal representative of a very senior American official, known to be part of that man’s inner circle, and that made him very important indeed. Perhaps he was even a principal adviser to the Rutledge man—and in a Chinese context, that might even mean that he, Gant, was the man actually running the negotiations rather than the titular chief diplomat, because the Chinese often ran things that way. It occurred to Gant that maybe he could fuck with their minds a little bit ... but how to go about it?