by Tom Clancy
Back at FSS headquarters, the decryption team typed the message into a computer into which the one-time-pad had already been inputted. After that, it was a matter of mere seconds before the computer performed a function not unlike sliding a document over a printed template. The clear-text message was, agreeably, in Russian. The content of the message was something else.
“Yob tvoyu maht!” the technician breathed, in one of his language’s more repulsive imprecations: Fuck your mother. Then he handed the page to one of the supervising inspectors, whose reaction was little different. Then he walked to the phone and dialed Yefremov’s number.
“Pavel Georgeyevich, you need to see this.”
Provalov was there when the chief of the decryption section walked in. The printout was in a manila folder, which the head cryppie handed over without a word.
“Well, Pasha?” the homicide investigator asked.
“Well, we have answered our first question.”
The motorcar was even purchased at the same dealership in central Moscow, the sheet read. There is no fault to be found here. The men who performed the mission are both dead in St. P. Before I can make another attempt, I need an indication from you on the time line, and also on the payment to my contractors.
“Golovko was the target, then,” Provalov observed. And the head of our country’s intelligence service owes his life to a pimp.
“So it would appear,” Yefremov agreed. “Note that he doesn’t ask payment for himself. I would imagine he’s somewhat embarrassed at having missed his target on the first attempt.”
“But he’s working for the Chinese?”
“So that would appear as well,” the FSS man observed, with an inward chill. Why, he asked himself, would the Chinese wish to do such a thing? Isn’t that nearly an act of war? He sat back in his chair and lit up a smoke, looking into the eyes of his police colleague. Neither man knew what to say at the moment, and both kept silent. It would all soon be out of and far beyond their hands. With that decided, both men headed home for dinner.
The morning broke more brightly than usual in Beijing. Mrs. Yu had slept deeply and well, and though she awoke with a slight headache, she was grateful for Wen’s insistence on a couple of drinks before retiring. Then she remembered why she was in Beijing, and any good feelings departed from her mind. Breakfast was mainly green tea and was spent looking down, remembering the sound of her husband’s voice in the bleak acceptance of the fact that she’d never hear it again. He’d always been in a good mood over breakfast, never forgetting, as she had just done, to say grace over the morning meal and thank God for another day in which to serve Him. No more. No more would he do that, she reminded herself. But she had duties of her own to perform.
“What can we do, Zhong?” she asked, when her host appeared.
“I will go with you to the police post and we will ask for Fa An’s body, and then I will help you fly our friend home, and we will have a memorial prayer service at the—”
“No, you can’t, Zhong. There are police there to keep everyone out. They wouldn’t even let me in, even though I had my papers in order.”
“Then we will have it outside, and they will watch us pray for our friend,” the restaurateur told his guest with gentle resolve.
Ten minutes later, she’d cleaned up and was ready to leave. The police station was only four blocks away, a simple building, ordinary in all respects except for the sign over the door.
“Yes?” the desk officer said when his peripheral vision noted the presence of people by his desk. He looked up from the paper forms that had occupied his attention for the past few minutes to see a woman and a man of about the same age.
“I am Yu Chun,” Mrs. Yu answered, seeing some recognition in the desk officer’s eyes result from her words.
“You are the wife of Yu Fa An?” he asked.
“That is correct.”
“Your husband was an enemy of the people,” the cop said next, sure of that but not sure of much else in this awkward case.
“I believe he was not, but all I ask is for his body, so that I might fly it home for burial with his family.”
“I do not know where his body is,” the cop said.
“But he was shot by a policeman,” Wen put in, “and the disposal of his body is therefore a police matter. So, might you be so kind, comrade, as to call the proper number so that we can remove our friend’s body?” His manners did not allow anger on the part of the desk officer.
But the desk cop really didn’t know what number to call, and so he called someone inside the building, in the large administration division. He found this embarrassing to do with two citizens standing by his desk, but there was no avoiding that.
“Yes?” a voice answered on his third internal call.
“This is Sergeant Jiang at the desk in the public lobby. I have Yu Chun here, seeking the body of her husband, Yu Fa An. I need to tell her where to go.”
The reply took a few seconds for the man on the other end of the phone, who had to remember.... “Ah, yes, tell her she can go to the Da Yunhe River. His body was cremated and the ashes dumped in the water last evening.”
And, enemy of the people or not, it would not be a pleasant thing to tell his widow, who’d probably had feelings for him. Sergeant Jiang set the phone down and decided to give her the news.
“The body of Yu Fa An was cremated and the ashes scattered in the river, comrade.”
“That is cruel!” Wen said at once. Chun was too stunned to say anything at the moment.
“I cannot help you more than that,” Jiang told his visitors and looked back down at his paperwork to dismiss them.
“Where is my husband?” Yu Chun managed to blurt, after thirty seconds or so of silence.
“Your husband’s body was cremated and the ashes scattered,” Jiang said, without looking up, because he really didn’t wish to see her eyes under these circumstances. “I cannot help you further. You may leave now.”
“I want my husband back!” she insisted.
“Your husband is dead and his body has been cremated. Be gone now!” Sergeant Jiang insisted in return, wishing she’d just go away and allow him to get back to his paperwork.
“I want my husband,” she said louder now, causing a few eyes to turn her way in the lobby.
“He is gone, Chun,” Wen Zhong told her, taking her arm and steering her to the door. “Come, we will pray for him outside.”
“But why did they—I mean, why is he—and why did they—” It had just been too much for one twenty-four-hour period. Despite the night’s sleep, Yu Chun was still too disoriented. Her husband of over twenty years had vanished, and now she could not even see the urn containing his ashes? It was a lot to absorb for a woman who’d never so much as bumped into a policeman on the street, who’d never done a single thing to offend the state—except, perhaps, to marry a Christian—but what did that hurt, anyway? Had either of them, had any of their congregation ever plotted treason against the state? No. Had any of them so much as violated the criminal or civil law? No. And so why had this misfortune fallen upon her? She felt as though she’d been struck by an invisible truck while crossing the street, then had it decided that her injuries were all her fault. Behind one invisible truck was just another, and all the more merciless at that.
There was nothing left for her to do, no recourse, legal or otherwise. They couldn’t even go into her home, whose living room had so often served as their church, there to pray for Yu’s soul and entreat God for mercy and help. Instead they’d pray ... where? she wondered. One thing at a time. She and Wen walked outside, escaping the eyes of the lobby, which had zoomed in on them with almost physical impact. The eyes and the weight they’d carried were soon left behind, but the sun outside was just one more thing that intruded on what ought to have been, and what needed to be, a day of peace and lonely prayer to a God whose mercy was not very evident at the moment. Instead, the brightness of the sun defeated her eyelids, bringing unwanted brilliance
into the darkness that might have simulated, if not exactly granted, peace. She had a flight booked back to Hong Kong, and from there back to Taipei, where she could at least weep in the presence of her mother, who was awaiting her death as well, for the woman was over ninety and frail.
For Barry Wise, the day had long since begun. His colleagues in Atlanta had praised him to the heavens in an e-mail about his earlier story. Maybe another Emmy, they said. Wise liked getting the awards, but they weren’t the reason for his work. It was just what he did. He wouldn’t even say he enjoyed it, because the news he reported was rarely pretty or pleasant. It was just his job, the work he’d chosen to do. If there was an aspect of it that he actually liked, it was the newness of it. Just as people awoke wondering what they’d see on CNN every day, from baseball scores to executions, so he awoke every day wondering what he’d report. He often had some idea of where the story would be and roughly what it would contain, but you were never really sure, and in the newness was the adventure of his job. He’d learned to trust his instincts, though he never really understood where they came from or how they seemed to know what they did, and today his instincts reminded him that one of the people he’d seen shot the other day had said he was married, and that his wife was on Taiwan. Maybe she’d be back now? It was worth trying out. He’d tried to get Atlanta to check with the Vatican, but that story would be handled by the Rome bureau. The aircraft containing Cardinal DiMilo’s body was on its way back to Italy, where somebody would be making a big deal about it for CNN to cover live and on tape to show to the entire world ten times at least.
The hotel room had a coffeemaker, and he brewed his own from beans stolen from the CNN Beijing bureau office. Sipping coffee, for him as for so many others, helped him think.
Okay, he thought, the Italian guy, the Cardinal, his body was gone, boxed and shipped out on an Alitalia 747, probably somewhere over Afghanistan right now. But what about the Chinese guy, the Baptist minister who took the round in the head? He had to have left a body behind, too, and he had a congregation and—he said he was married, didn’t he? Okay, if so, he had a wife somewhere, and she’d want the body back to bury. So, at the least he could try to interview her ... it would be a good follow-up, and would allow Atlanta to play the tape of the killings again. He was sure the Beijing government had written him onto their official shitlist, but fuck ’em, Wise thought with a sip of the Starbucks, it was hardly a disgrace to be there, was it? These people were racist as hell. Even folks on the street cringed to see him pass, with his dark skin. Even Birmingham under Bull Connor hadn’t treated black Americans like aliens from another goddamned planet. Here, everyone looked the same, dressed the same, talked the same. Hell, they needed some black people just to liven up the mix some. Toss in a few blond Swedes and maybe a few Italians to set up a decent restaurant....
But it wasn’t his job to civilize the world, just to tell people what was going on in it. The trade talks were not where it was happening, not today, Wise thought. Today he and his satellite truck would head back to the home of Reverend Yu Fa An. Wise was playing a hunch. No more than that. But they’d rarely failed him before.
Ryan was enjoying another night off. The following night would be different. He had to give another goddamned speech on foreign policy. Why he couldn’t simply announce policy in the press room and be done with it, nobody had yet told him—and he hadn’t asked, for fear of looking the fool (again) before Arnie. This was just how it was done. The speech and the subject had nothing to do with the identity of the group he was addressing. Surely there had to be an easier way to tell the world what he thought. This way, too, Cathy had to come with him, and she hated these things even more than he did, because it took her away from her patient notes, which she guarded about as forcefully as a lion over the wildebeests he’d just killed for lunch. Cathy often complained that this First Lady stuff was hurting her performance as a surgeon. Jack didn’t believe that. It was more likely that like most women, Cathy needed something to bitch about, and this subject was worthier than her more pedestrian complaints, like being unable to cook dinner once in a while, which she missed a lot more than the women’s lib people would have cared to learn. Cathy had spent over twenty years learning to be a gourmet cook, and when time allowed (rarely) she’d sneak down to the capacious White House kitchen to trade ideas and recipes with the head chef. For the moment, however, she was curled up in a comfortable chair making notes on her patient files and sipping at her wineglass, while Jack watched TV, for a change not under the eyes of the Secret Service detail and the domestic staff.
But the President wasn’t really watching TV. His eyes were pointed in that direction, but his mind was looking at something else. It was a look his wife had learned to understand in the past year, almost like open-eyed sleep while his brain churned over a problem. In fact, it was something she did herself often enough, thinking about the best way to treat a patient’s problem while eating lunch at the Hopkins doctors’ cafeteria, her brain creating a picture as though in a Disney cartoon, simulating the problem and then trying out theoretical fixes. It didn’t happen all that much anymore. The laser applications she’d helped to develop were approaching the point that an auto mechanic could perform them—which was not something she or her colleagues advertised, of course. There had to be a mystique with medicine, or else you lost your power to tell your patients what to do in a way that ensured that they might actually do it.
For some reason, that didn’t translate to the Presidency, Cathy thought. With Congress, well, most of the time they went along with him—as well they ought, since Jack’s requests were usually as reasonable as they could be—but not always, and often for the dumbest reasons. “It may be good for the country, but it’s not so good for my district, and ...” And they all forgot the fact that when they had arrived in Washington, they’d sworn an oath to the country, not to their stupid little districts. When she’d said that to Arnie, he’d had a good laugh and lectured her on how the real world worked—as though a physician didn’t know that! she fumed. And so Jack had to balance what was real with what wasn’t but ought to be—as opposed to what wasn’t and never would be. Like foreign affairs. It made a lot more sense for a married man to have an affair with some floozy than it did to try to reason with some foreign countries. At least you could tell the floozy that it was all over after three or four times, but these damned foreign chiefs of state would stay around forever with their stupidity.
That was one nice thing about medicine, Professor Ryan thought. Doctors all over the world treated patients pretty much the same way because the human body was the same everywhere, and a treatment regimen that worked at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore worked just as well in Berlin or Moscow or Tokyo, even if the people looked and talked different—and if that was true, why couldn’t people all over the world think the same way? Their damned brains were the same, weren’t they? Now it was her turn to grumble, as her husband did often enough.
“Jack?” she said, as she put her notebook down.
“Yeah, Cathy?”
“What are you thinking about now?”
Mainly how I wish Ellen Sumter was here with a cigarette, he couldn’t say. If Cathy knew he was sneaking smokes in the Oval Office, she didn’t let on, which was probably the case, since she didn’t go around looking for things to fight over, and he never ever smoked in front of her or the kids anymore. Cathy allowed him to indulge his weaknesses, as long as he did so in the utmost moderation. But her question was about the cause for his yearning for some nicotine.
“China, babe. They really stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes this time, but they don’t seem to know how bad it looked.”
“Killing those two people—how could it not look bad?” SURGEON asked.
“Not everybody values human life in the same way that we do, Cath.”
“The Chinese doctors I’ve met are—well, they’re doctors, and we talk to each other like doctors.”
“I suppose.�
�� Ryan saw a commercial start on the TV show he was pretending to watch, and stood to walk off to the upstairs kitchen for another whiskey. “Refill, babe?”
“Yes, thank you.” With her Christmas-tree smile.
Jack lifted his wife’s wineglass. So, she had no procedures scheduled for the next day. She’d come to love the Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay they’d first sampled at Camp David. For him tonight, it was Wild Turkey bourbon over ice. He loved the pungent smell of the corn and rye grains, and tonight he’d dismissed the upstairs staff and could enjoy the relative luxury of fixing his own—he could even have made a peanut butter sandwich, had he been of such a mind. He walked the drinks back, touching his wife’s neck on the way, and getting the cute little shiver she always made when he did so.
“So, what’s going to happen in China?”
“We’ll find out the same way as everybody else, watching CNN. They’re a lot faster than our intelligence people on some things. And our spooks can’t predict the future any better than the traders on Wall Street.” You’d be able to identify such a man at Merrill Lynch easily if he existed, Jack didn’t bother saying aloud. He’d be the guy with all the millionaires lined up outside his office.
“So, what do you think?”
“I’m worried, Cath,” Ryan admitted, sitting back down.
“About what?”
“About what we’ll have to do if they screw things up again. But we can’t warn them. That only makes it certain that bad things are going to happen, because then they’ll do something really dumb just to show us how powerful they are. That’s how nation-states are. You can’t talk to them like real people. The people who make the decisions over there think with their ...”
“... dicks?” Cathy offered with a half giggle.
“Yep,” Jack confirmed with a nod. “A lot of them follow their dicks everywhere they go, too. We know about some foreign leaders who have habits that would get them tossed out of any decent whorehouse in the world. They just love to show everybody how tough and manly they are, and to do that, they act like animals in a goddamned barnyard.”