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

How did I forget that? he saw her ask herself, blinking rather hard in a mild self-rebuke. Better to set the hook all the way.

“Do you have the authority for that, or must you consult someone more senior?” The most vulnerable point in any communist bureaucrat was their sense of importance-of-place.

A knowing smile: “Oh, yes, I can authorize that on my own authority.”

A smile of his own: “Excellent. I can be here with my equipment at, say, ten in the morning.”

“Good, the main entrance. They will be awaiting you.”

“Thank you, Comrade Ming,” Nomuri said with his best officious (short) bow to the young secretary -- and, probably, mistress to her minister, the field officer thought. This one had possibilities, but he'd have to be careful with her both for himself and for her, he thought to himself while waiting for the elevator. That's why Langley paid him so much, not counting the princely salary from Nippon Electric Company that was his to keep. He needed it to survive here. The price of living was bad enough for a Chinese. For a foreigner, it was worse, because for foreigners everything was -- had to be -- special. The apartments were special -- and almost certainly bugged. The food he bought in a special shop was more expensive -- and Nomuri didn't object to that, since it was also almost certainly healthier.

China was what Nomuri called a thirty-foot country. Everything looked okay, even impressive, until you got within thirty feet of it. Then you saw that the parts didn't fit terribly well. He'd found it could be especially troublesome getting into an elevator, of all things. Dressed as he was in Western-made clothing (the Chinese thought of Japan as a Western country, which would have amused a lot of people, both in Japan and the West), he was immediately spotted as a qwai -- a foreign devil -- even before people saw his face. When that happened, the looks changed, sometimes to mere curiosity, sometimes to outright hostility, because the Chinese weren't like the Japanese; they weren't trained as thoroughly to conceal their feelings, or maybe they just didn't give a damn, the CIA officer thought behind his own blanked-out poker face. He'd learned the practice from his time in Tokyo, and learned it well, which explained both why he had a good job with NEC and why he'd never been burned in the field.

The elevator ran smoothly enough, but somehow it just didn't feel right. Maybe it was, again, because the pieces didn't quite seem to fit together. Nomuri hadn't had that feeling in Japan. For all their faults, the Japanese were competent engineers. The same was doubtless true of Taiwan, but Taiwan, like Japan, had a capitalist system which rewarded performance by giving it business and profits and comfortable salaries for the workers who turned out good work. The PRC was still learning how to do that. They exported a lot, but to this point the things exported were either fairly simple in design (like tennis shoes), or were manufactured mostly in strict accordance to standards established elsewhere and then slavishly copied here in China (like electronic gadgets). This was already changing, of course. The Chinese people were as clever as any, and even communism could keep them down only so long. Yet the industrialists who were beginning to innovate and offer the world genuinely new products were treated by their government masters as...well, as unusually productive peasants at best. That was not a happy thought for the useful men who occasionally wondered over drinks why it was that they, the ones who brought wealth into their nation, were treated as...unusually productive peasants, by the ones who deemed themselves the masters of their country and their culture. Nomuri walked outside, toward his parked automobile, wondering how long that could last.

This whole political and economic policy was schizophrenic, Nomuri knew. Sooner or later, the industrialists would rise up and demand that they be given a voice in the political operation of their country. Perhaps -- doubtless -- such whispers had happened already. If so, word had gotten back to the whisperers that the tallest tree is quickly cut for lumber, and the well with the sweetest water is first to be drunk dry, and he who shouts too loudly is first to be silenced. So, maybe the Chinese industrial leaders were just biding their time and looking around the rooms where they gathered, wondering which of their number would be the first to take the risk, and maybe he would be rewarded with fame and honor and later memories of heroism -- or maybe, more likely, his family would be billed for the 7.62x39 cartridge needed to send him into the next life, which Buddha had promised but which the government contemptuously denied.

“So, they haven't made it public yet. That's a little odd,” Ryan thought.

“It is,” Ben Goodley agreed with a nod.

“Any idea why they're sitting on the news?”

“No, sir...unless somebody is hoping to cash in on it somehow, but exactly how...” CARDSHARP shrugged.

“Buy stock in Atlantic Richfield? Some mine-machine builder -- ”

“Or just buy options in some land in eastern Siberia,” George Winston suggested. “Not that such a thing is ever done by the honorable servants of the people.” The President laughed hard enough that he had to set his coffee down.

“Certainly not in this administration,” POTUS pointed out. One of the benefits the media had with Ryan's team was that so many of them were plutocrats of one magnitude or another, not “working” men. It was as if the media thought that money just appeared in the hands of some fortunate souls by way of miracle...or some unspoken and undiscovered criminal activity. But never by work. It was the oddest of political prejudices that wealth didn't come from work, but rather from something else, a something never really described, but always implied to be suspect.

“Yeah, Jack,” Winston said, with a laugh of his own. “We've got enough that we can afford to be honest. Besides, who the hell needs an oilfield or gold mine?”

“Further developments on the size of either?”

Goodley shook his head. “No, Sir. The initial information is firming up nicely. Both discoveries are big. The oil especially, but the gold as well.”

“The gold thing will distort the market somewhat,” SecTreas opined. “Depending on how fast it comes on stream. It might also cause a shutdown of the mine we have operating in the Dakotas.”

“Why?” Goodley asked.

“If the Russian strike is as good as the data suggests, they'll be producing gold for about twenty-five percent less than what it costs there, despite environmental conditions. The attendant reduction of the world price of gold will then make Dakota unprofitable to operate.” Winston shrugged. “So, they'll mothball the site and sit until the price goes back up. Probably after the initial flurry of production, our Russian friends will scale things back so that they can cash in in a more, uh, orderly way. What'll happen is that the other producers, mainly South Africans, will meet with them and offer advice on how to exploit that find more efficiently. Usually the new kids listen to advice from the old guys. The Russians have coordinated diamond production with the De Beers people for a long time, back to when the country was called the Soviet Union. Business is business, even for commies. So, you going to offer our help to our friends in Moscow?” TRADER asked SWORDSMAN.

Ryan shook his head. “I can't yet. I can't let them know that we know. Sergey Nikolay'ch would start wondering how, and he'd probably come up with SIGINT, and that's a method of gathering information that we try to keep covert.” Probably a waste of time, Ryan knew, but the game had rules, and everyone played by those rules. Golovko could guess at signals intelligence, but he'd never quite know. I'll probably never stop being a spook, the President admitted to himself. Keeping and guarding secrets was one of the things that came so easily to him -- a little too easily, Arnie van Damm often warned. A modern democratic government was supposed to be more open, like a torn curtain on the bedroom window that allowed people to look in whenever they wished. That was an idea Ryan had never grown to appreciate. He was the one who decided what people were allowed to know and when they'd know it. It was a point of view he followed even when he knew it to be wrong, for no other reason than it was how he'd learned government service at the knee of an admiral named James Greer. Old habits were hard to break.

“I'll call Sam Sherman at Atlantic Richfield,” Winston suggested. “If he breaks it to me, then it's in the open, or at least open enough.”

“Can we trust him?”

Winston nodded. “Sam plays by the rules. We can't ask him to screw over his own board, but he knows what flag to salute, Jack.”

“Okay, George, a discreet inquiry.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President, sir.”

“God damn it, George!”

“Jack, when the hell are you going to learn to relax in this fucking job?” SecTreas asked POTUS.

“The day I move out of this goddamned museum and become a free man again,” Ryan replied with a submissive nod. Winston was right. He had to learn to stay on a more even keel in the office of President. In addition to not being helpful to himself, it wasn't especially helpful to the country for him to be jumpy with the folderol of office-holding. That also made it easy for people like the Secretary of the Treasury to twist his tail, and George Winston was one of the people who enjoyed doing that...maybe because it ultimately helped him relax, Ryan thought. Backwards English on the ball or something. “George, why do you think I should relax in this job?”

“Jack, because you're here to be effective, and being tight all the time does not make you more effective. Kick back, guy, maybe even learn to like some aspect of it.”

“Like what?”

“Hell.” Winston shrugged, and then nodded to the secretaries' office. “Lots of cute young interns out there.”

“There's been enough of that,” Ryan said crossly. Then he did manage to relax and smile a little. “Besides, I'm married to a surgeon. Make that little mistake and I could wake up without something important.”

“Yeah, I suppose it's bad for the country to have the President's dick cut off, eh? People might not respect us anymore.” Winston stood. “Gotta go back across the street and look at some economic models.”

“Economy looking good?” POTUS asked.

“No complaints from me or Mark Gant. Just so the Fed Chairman leaves the discount rate alone, but I expect he will. Inflation is pretty flat, and there's no upward pressure anywhere that I see happening.”

“Ben?”

Goodley looked through his notes, as though he'd forgotten something. “Oh, yeah. Would you believe, the Vatican is appointing a Papal Nuncio to the PRC?”

“Oh? What's that mean, exactly?” Winston asked, stopping halfway to the door.

“The Nuncio is essentially an ambassador. People forget that the Vatican is a nation-state in its own right and has the usual trappings of statehood. That includes diplomatic representation. A nuncio is just that, an ambassador -- and a spook,” Ryan added.

“Really?” Winston asked.

“George, the Vatican has the world's oldest intelligence service. Goes back centuries. And, yeah, the Nuncio gathers information and forwards it to the home office, because people talk to him -- who better to talk to than a priest, right? They're good enough at gathering information that we've made the occasional effort to crack their communications. Back in the '30s, a senior cryppie at the State Department resigned over it,” Ryan informed his SecTreas, reverting back to history teacher.

“We still do that?” Winston directed this question at Goodley, the President's National Security Adviser. Goodley looked first to Ryan, and got a nod. “Yes, sir. Fort Meade still takes a look at their messages. Their ciphers are a little old-fashioned, and we can brute-force them.”

“And ours?”

“The current standard is called TAPDANCE. It's totally random, and therefore it's theoretically unbreakable -- unless somebody screws up and reuses a segment of it, but with approximately six hundred forty-seven million transpositions on every daily CD-ROM diskette, that's not very likely.”

“What about the phone systems?”

“The STU?” Goodley asked, getting a nod. “That's computer-based, with a two-fifty-six-kay computer-generated encryption key. It can be broken, but you need a computer, the right algorithm, and a couple of weeks at least, and the shorter the message the harder it is to crack it, instead of the other way around. The guys at Fort Meade are playing with using quantum-physics equations to crack ciphers, and evidently they're having some success, but if you want an explanation, you're going to have to ask somebody else. I didn't even pretend to listen,” Goodley admitted. “It's so far over my head I can't even see the bottom of it.”

“Yeah, get your friend Gant involved,” Ryan suggested. “He seems to know 'puters pretty well. As a matter of fact, you might want to get him briefed in on these developments in Russia. Maybe he can model the effects they'll have on the Russian economy.”

“Only if everyone plays by the rules,” Winston said in warning. “If they follow the corruption that's been gutting their economy the last few years, you just cant predict anything, Jack.”

“We cannot let it happen again, Comrade President,” Sergey Nikolay'ch said over a half-empty glass of vodka. This was still the bestin the world, if the only such Russian product of which he could make that boast. That thought generated an angry frown at what his nation had become.

“Sergey Nikolay'ch, what do you propose?”

“Comrade President, these two discoveries are a gift from Heaven itself. If we utilize them properly, we can transform our country -- or at least make a proper beginning at doing that. The earnings in hard currencies will be colossal, and we can use that money to rebuild so much of our infrastructure that we can transform our economy. If, that is” -- he held up a cautionary finger -- “if we don't allow a thieving few to take the money and bank it in Geneva or Liechtenstein. It does us no good there, Comrade President.”

Golovko didn't add that a few people, a few well-placed individuals, would profit substantially from this. He didn't even add that he himself would be one of them, and so would his president. It was just too much to ask any man to walk away from such an opportunity. Integrity was a virtue best found among those able to afford it, and the press be damned, the career intelligence officer thought. What had they ever done for his country or any other? All they did was expose the honest work of some and the dishonest work of others, doing little actual work themselves -- and besides, they were as easily bribed as anyone else, weren't they?