Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (29 page)

The President grumbled and checked his daily schedule for his next appointment. As with everything else, the President of the United States lived a schedule determined by others, his appointments made weeks in advance, the daily briefing pages prepared the day before so that he'd know who the hell was coming in, and what the hell he, she, or they wanted to talk about, and also what his considered position (mainly drafted by others) was. The President's position was usually a friendly one so that the visitor(s) could leave the Oval Office feeling good about the experience, and the rules were that you couldn't change the agenda, lest the Chief Executive say, “What the hell are you asking me for now!” This would alarm both the guest and the Secret Service agents standing right behind them, hands close to their pistols -- just standing there like robots, faces blank but scanning, ears taking everything in. After their shift ended, they probably headed off to whatever cop bar they frequented to chuckle over what the City Council President of Podunk had said in the Oval Office that day -- “Jesus, did you see the Boss's eyes when that dumb bastard...?” -- because they were bright, savvy people who in many ways understood his job better than he did, Ryan reflected. Well they should. They had the double advantage of having seen it all, and not being responsible for any of it. Lucky bastards, Jack thought, standing for his next appointment.

If cigarettes were good for anything, it was for this, Nomuri thought. His left arm was curled around Ming, his body snuggled up against her, staring at the ceiling in the lovely, relaxed, deflationary moment, and puffing gently on his Kool as an accent to the moment, feeling Ming's breathing, and feeling very much like a man. The sky outside the windows was dark. The sun had set.

Nomuri stood, stopping first in the bathroom and then heading to the kitchenette. He returned with two wine glasses. Ming sat up in bed and took a sip from hers. For his part, Nomuri couldn't resist reaching over to touch her. Her skin was just so smooth and inviting.

“My brain is still not working,” she said, after her third sip.

“Darling, there are times when men and women don't need their brains.”

“Well, your sausage doesn't need one,” she responded, reaching down to fondle it.

“Gently, girl! He's run a long hard race!” the CIA officer warned her with an inner smile.

“Oh, so he has.” Ming bent down to deliver a gentle kiss. “And he won the race.”

“No, but he did manage to catch up with you.” Nomuri lit another cigarette. Then he was surprised to see Ming reach into her purse and pull out one of her own. She lit it with grace and took a long puff, finally letting the smoke out her nose.

“Dragon girl!” Nomuri announced with a laugh. “Do flames come next? I didn't know you smoked.”

“At the office, everyone does.”

“Even the minister?”

Another laugh: “Especially the minister.”

“Someone should tell him that smoking is dangerous to the health, and not good for the yang.”

“A smoked sausage is not a firm sausage,” Ming said, with a laugh. “Maybe that's his problem, then.”

“You do not like your minister?”

“He is an old man with what he thinks is a young penis. He uses the office staff as his personal bordello. Well, it could be worse,” Ming admitted. “It's been a long time since I was his favorite. Lately he's fixed on Chai, and she is engaged, and Fang knows it. That is not a civilized act on the part of a senior minister.”

“The laws do not apply to him?”

She snorted with borderline disgust. “The laws apply to none of them. Nomuri-san, these are government ministers. They are the law in this country, and they care little for what others think of them or their habits -- few enough find out in any case. They are corrupt on a scale that shames the emperors of old, and they say they are the guardians of the common people, the peasants and workers they claim to love as their own children. Well, I suppose sometimes I am one of those peasants, eh?”

“And I thought you liked your minister,” Nomuri responded, goading her on. “So, what does he talk about?”

“What do you mean?”

“The late work that kept you away from here,” he answered, waving at the bedclothes with a smile.

“Oh, talk between the ministers. He keeps an extensive personal political diary -- in case the president might want to oust him, that is his defense, you see, something he could present to his peers. Fang doesn't want to lose his official residence and all the privileges that come along with it. So, he keeps records of all he does, and I am his secretary, and I transcribe all his notes. Sometimes it can take forever.”

“On your computer, of course.”

“Yes, the new one, in perfect Mandarin ideographs now that you've given us the new software.”

“You keep it on your computer?”

“On the hard drive, yes. Oh, it's encrypted,” she assured him. “We learned that from the Americans, when we broke into their weapons records. It's called a robust encryption system, whatever that means. I select the file I wish to open and type in the decryption key, and the file opens. Do you want to know what key I use?” She giggled. “YELLOW SUBMARINE. In English because of the keyboard -- it was before your new software -- and it's from a Beatles song I heard on the radio once. 'We all live in a yellow submarine,' something like that. I listened to the radio a lot back then, when I was first studying English. I spent half an hour looking up submarines in the dictionary and then the encyclopedia, trying to find out why a ship was painted yellow. Ahh!” Her hands flew up in the air.

The encryption key! Nomuri tried to hide his excitement. “Well, it must be a lot of folders. You've been his secretary for a lot of time,” he said casually.

“Over four hundred documents. I keep them by number instead of making up new names for them. Today was number four hundred eighty-seven, as a matter of fact.”

Holy shit, Nomuri thought, four hundred eighty-seven computer documents of inside-the-Politburo conversations. This makes a gold mine look like a toxic waste dump.

“What exactly do they talk about? I've never met a senior government functionary,” Nomuri explained.

“Everything!” she answered, finishing her own cigarette. “Who's got ideas in the Politburo, who wants to be nice to America, who wants to hurt them -- everything you can imagine. Defense policy. Economic policy. The big one lately is how to deal with Hong Kong. 'One Country, Two Systems' has developed problems with some industrialists around Beijing and Shanghai. They feel they are treated with less respect than they deserve -- less than they get in Hong Kong, that is -- and they are unhappy about it. Fang's one of the people trying to find a compromise to make them happy. He might. He's very clever at such things.”

“It must be fascinating to see such information -- to really know what's going on in your country!” Nomuri gushed. “In Japan, we never know what the zaibatsu and the MITI people are doing -- ruining the economy, for the most part, the fools. But because nobody knows, no action is ever taken to fix things. Is it the same here?”

“Of course!” She lit another smoke, getting into the conversation, and hardly noticing that it wasn't about love anymore. “Once I studied my Marx and my Mao. Once I believed in it all. Once I even trusted the senior ministers to be men of honor and integrity, and totally believed the things they taught me in school. But then I saw how the army has its own industrial empire, and that empire keeps the generals rich and fat and happy. And I saw how the ministers use women, and how they furnish their apartments. They've become the new emperors. They have too much power. Perhaps a woman could use such power without being corrupted, but not a man.”

Feminism's made it over here, too? Nomuri reflected. Maybe she was too young to remember Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who could have given corruption lessons to the court of Byzantium.

“Well, that is not a problem for people like us. And at least you get to see such things, and at least you get to know it. That makes you even more unique, Ming-chan,” Nomuri suggested, tracing the palm of his hand over her left nipple. She shivered right on command.

“You think so?”

“Of course.” A kiss this time, a nice lingering one, while his hand stroked her body. He was so close. She had told him of all the information she had -- she'd even given him the fucking encryption key! So her 'puter was wired into the phone system -- that meant he could call in to it, and with the right software he could go snooping around her hard drive, and with the encryption key he could lift things right off, and cross-load them right to Mary Pat's desk. Damn, first I get to fuck a Chinese citizen, and then I can fuck their whole country. It didn't get much better than this, the field spook decided, with a smile at the ceiling.

Well, he left the prurient parts out this time, Mary Pat saw when she lit up her computer in the morning. Operation SORGE was moving right along. Whoever this Ming girl was, she talked a little too much. Odd. Hadn't the MSS briefed all the executive secretaries about this sort of thing? Probably -- it would have been a remarkable oversight if they hadn't -- but it also seemed likely that of the well-known reasons for committing treason and espionage (known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego), this one was Ego. Young Miss Ming was being used sexually by her Minister Fang, and she didn't much like it, and that made perfect sense to Mary Patricia Foley. A woman only had so much to give, and to have it taken coercively by a man of power wasn't something calculated to make a woman happy -- though ironically the powerful man in question probably thought he was honoring her with his biological attention. After all, was he not a great man, and was she not a peasant? The thought was good for a snort as she took a sip of morning seventh-floor coffee. It didn't matter what culture or race, men were all the same, weren't they? So many of them thought from the dick instead of the brain. Well, it was going to cost this one dearly, the Deputy Director (Operations) concluded.

Ryan saw and heard the PDB, the President's Daily Brief, every day. It covered intelligence information developed by CIA, was prepared late every night and printed early every morning, and there were less than a hundred copies, almost all of which were shredded and burned later in the day of delivery. A few copies, maybe three or four, were kept as archives, in case the electronic files somehow got corrupted, but even President Ryan didn't know where the secure-storage site was. He hoped it was carefully guarded, preferably by Marines.

The PDB didn't contain everything, of course. Some things were so secret that even the President couldn't be trusted. That was something Ryan accepted with remarkable equanimity. Sources' names had to remain secret, even from him, and methods were often so narrowly technical that he'd have trouble understanding the technology used anyway. But even some of the “take,” the information obtained by the CIA through nameless sources and overly intricate methods, was occasionally hidden from the Chief Executive, because some information had to come from a certain limited number of sources. The intelligence business was one in which the slightest mistake could end the life of a priceless asset, and while such things had happened, nobody had ever felt good about it -- though to some politicians, it had been a matter of infuriating indifference. A good field spook viewed his agents as his own children, whose lives were to be protected against all hazards. Such a point of view was necessary. If you didn't care that much, then people died -- and with their lost lives went lost information, which was the whole point of having a clandestine service in the first place.

“Okay, Ben,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair and flipping through the PDB pages. “What's interesting?”

“Mary Pat has something happening in China. Not sure what it is, though. She's keeping these cards pretty close. The rest of today's document you can get on CNN.”

Which was, depressingly, not infrequently the case. On the other hand, the world was fairly sedate, and penetrating information wasn't all that necessary...or apparently so, Ryan corrected himself. You could never tell. He'd learned that one at Langley, too.

“Maybe I'll call her about it,” POTUS said, flipping the page. “Whoa!”

“The Russian oil and gas?”

“Are these numbers for real?”

“It appears so. They track with what TRADER'S been feeding us from his sources, step for step.”

“Ummhmm,” Ryan breathed, looking over the resulting forecasts for the Russian economy. Then he frowned with some disappointment. “George's people did a better evaluation of results.”

“Think so? CIA's economics troops have a pretty decent track record.”

“George lives in that business. That's better than being an academic observer of events, Ben. Academia is fine, but the real world is the real world, remember.”

Goodley nodded. “Duly noted, sir.”

“Throughout the '80s, CIA overestimated the Soviet economy. Know why?”

“No, I don't. What went wrong?”

Jack smiled wryly. “It wasn't what was wrong. It was what was right. We had an agent back then who fed us the same information the Soviet Politburo got. It just never occurred to us that the system was lying to itself. The Politburo based its decisions on a chimera. Their numbers were almost never right because the underlings were covering their own asses. Oops.”

“Same thing in China, you suppose?” Goodley asked. “They're the last really Marxist country, after all.”

“Good question. Call Langley and ask. You'll get an answer from the same sort of bureaucrat the Chinese have in Beijing, but to the best of my knowledge we don't have a penetration agent in Beijing who can give us the numbers we want.” Ryan paused and looked at the fireplace opposite his desk. He'd have to have the Secret Service put a real fire in it someday... “No, I expect the Chinese have better numbers. They can afford to. Their economy is working, after a fashion They probably deceive themselves in other ways. But they do deceive themselves. It's a universal human characteristic, and Marxism doesn't ameliorate it very much.” Even in America, with its free press and other safeguards, reality often slapped political figures in the face hard enough to loosen some teeth. Everywhere, people had theoretical models based on ideology rather than facts, and those people usually found their way into academia or politics, because real-world professions punished that sort of dreamer more than politics ever did.