The Bear and the Dragon

CHAPTER 23

Bacon and eggs, toast and hash-brown potatoes, plus some Colombian -bean coffee. Gant was Jewish but not observant, and he loved his bacon. Everyone was up and looking pretty good, he thought. The government-issued black capsule (they all called it that, evidently some sort of tradition that he didn’t know about) had worked for all of them, and the cookie-pushers were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Most of the talk, he noted, was about the NBA. The Lakers were looking tough again. Rutledge, Gant saw, was at the head of the table chatting amiably with Ambassador Hitch, who seemed a solid citizen. Then a more ruffled employee of the embassy came in with a manila folder whose borders were lined with striped red-and-white tape. This he handed to Ambassador Hitch, who opened it at once.

Gant realized at once that it was classified material. There wasn’t much of that to be seen at Treasury, but there was some, and he’d been screened for a Top Secret/Special Access clearance as part of his employment on Secretary Winston’s personal staff. So, there was intel coming in from Washington for the negotiations. Exactly what it was about, he couldn’t see, and didn’t know if he would see it. He wondered if he could flex his institutional muscles on this one, but Rutledge would be the one who decided if he got to see it or not, and he didn’t want to give the State Department puke the excuse to show who was the he-bull in this herd. Patience was a virtue he’d long had, and this was just one more chance to exercise it. He returned to his breakfast, then decided to stand and get more off the buffet. Lunch in Beijing probably wouldn’t be very appealing, even at their Foreign Ministry Building, where they would feel constrained to show off their most exotic national dishes, and Fried Panda Penis with candied bamboo roots wasn’t exactly to his taste. At least the tea they served was acceptable, but even at its best, tea wasn’t coffee.

“Mark?” Rutledge looked up from his seat and waved the Treasury guy over. Gant walked over with his refilled plate of eggs and bacon.

“Yeah, Cliff?”

Ambassador Hitch made room for Gant to sit down, and a steward arrived with fresh silverware. The government could make one comfortable when it wanted. He asked the guy for more hash browns and toast. Fresh coffee arrived seemingly of its own volition.

“Mark, this just came in from Washington. This is codeword material-”

“Yeah, I know. I can’t even see it now, and I am not allowed to have any memory of it. So, can I see it now?”

Rutledge nodded and slipped the papers across. “What do you make of these foreign-exchange figures?”

Gant took a bite of bacon and stopped chewing almost at once. “Damn, they’re that low? What have they been pissing their money away on?”

“What does this mean?”

“Cliff, once upon a time, Dr. Samuel Johnson put it this way: ‘Whatever you have, spend less.’ Well, the Chinese didn’t listen to that advice.” Gant flipped the pages. “It doesn’t say what they’ve been spending it on.”

“Mainly military stuff, so I am told,” Ambassador Hitch replied. “Or things that can be applied to military applications, especially electronics. Both finished goods and the machinery with which to make electronic stuff. I gather it’s expensive to invest in such things.”

“It can be,” Gant agreed. He turned the pages back to start from the beginning. He saw it was transmitted with the TAPDANCE encryption system. That made it hot. TAPDANCE was only used for the most sensitive material because of some technical inconveniences in its use… so this was some really hot intelligence, TELESCOPE thought. Then he saw why. Somebody must have bugged the offices of some very senior Chinese officials to get this stuff… “Jesus.”

“What does this mean, Mark?”

“It means they’ve been spending money faster than it’s coming in, and investing it in noncommercial areas for the most part. Hell, it means they’re acting like some of the idiots we have in our government. They think money is just something that appears when you snap your fingers, and then you can spend it as fast as you want and just snap your fingers to get some more… These people don’t live in the real world, Cliff. They have no idea how and why the money appears.” He paused. He’d gone too far. A Wall Street person would understand his language, but this Rutledge guy probably didn’t. “Let me rephrase. They know that the money comes from their trade imbalance with the United States, and it appears that they believe the imbalance to be a natural phenomenon, something they can essentially dictate because of who they are. They think the rest of the world owes it to them. In other words, if they believe that, negotiating with them is going to be hard.”

“Why?” Rutledge asked. Ambassador Hitch, he saw, was already nodding. He must have understood these Chinese barbarians better.

“People who think this way do not understand that negotiations mean give and take. Whoever’s talking here thinks that he just gets whatever the hell he wants because everybody owes it to him. It’s like what Hitler must have thought at Munich. I want, you give, and then I am happy. We’re not going to cave for these bastards, are we?”

“Those are not my instructions,” Rutledge replied.

“Well, guess what? Those are the instructions your Chinese counterpart has. Moreover, their economic position is evidently a lot more precarious than what we’ve been given to expect. Tell CIA they need better people in their financial-intelligence department,” Gant observed. Then Hitch shifted his glance across the table to the guy who must have run the local CIA office.

“Do they appreciate how serious their position is?” Rutledge asked.

“Yes and no. Yes, they know they need the hard currency to do the business they want to do. No, they think they can continue this way indefinitely, that an imbalance is natural in their case because-because why? Because they think they’re the fucking master race?” Gant asked.

Again it was Ambassador Hitch who nodded. “It’s called the Middle Kingdom Complex. Yes, Mr. Gant, they really do think of themselves in those terms, and they expect people to come to them and give, not for themselves to go to other people as supplicants. Someday that will be their downfall. There’s an institutional…, maybe a racial arrogance here that’s hard to describe and harder to quantify.” Then Hitch looked over to Rutledge. “Cliff, you’re going to have an interesting day.”

Gant realized at once that this was not a blessing for the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy.

“They should be eating breakfast right about now,”

Secretary Adler said over his Hennessey in the East Room.

The reception had gone well-actually Jack and Cathy Ryan found these things about as boring as reruns of Gilligan‘s Island, but they were as much a part of the Presidency as the State of the Union speech. At least the dinner had been good-one thing you could depend on at the White House was the quality of the food-but the people had been Washington people. Even that, Ryan did not appreciate, had been greatly improved from previous years. Once Congress had largely been populated with people whose life’s ambition was “public service,” a phrase whose noble intent had been usurped by those who viewed $130,000 per year as a princely salary (it was far less than a college dropout could earn doing software for a computer-game company, and a hell of a lot less than one could make working on Wall Street), and whose real ambition was to apply their will to the laws of their nation. Many of them now, mainly because of speeches the President had made all over the country, were people who actually had served the public by doing useful work until, fed up with the machinations of government, they had decided to take a few years off to repair the train wreck Washington had become, before escaping back to the real world of productive work. The First Lady had spent much of the evening talking with the junior senator from Indiana, who in real life was a pediatric SURGEON of good reputation and whose current efforts were centered on straightening out government health-care programs before they killed too many of the citizens they supposedly wanted to assist. His greatest task was to persuade the media that a physician might know as much about making sick people well as Washington lobbyists did, something he’d been bending SURGEON’S ear about most of the night.

“That stuff we got from Mary Pat ought to help Rutledge.”

“I’m glad that Gant guy is there to translate it for him. Cliff is going to have a lively day while we sleep off the food and the booze, Jack.”

“Is he good enough for the job? I know he was tight with Ed Kealty. That does not speak well for the guy’s character.”

“Cliff’s a fine technician,” Adler said, after another sip of brandy. “And he has clear instructions to carry out, and some awfully good intelligence to help him along. This is like the stuff Jonathan Yardley gave our guys during the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations. We’re not exactly reading their cards, but we are seeing how they think, and that’s damned near as good. So, yes, I think he’s good enough for this job, or I wouldn’t have sent him out.”

“How’s the ambassador we have there?” POTUS asked.

“Carl Hitch? Super guy. Career pro, Jack, ready to retire soon, but he’s like a good cabinetmaker. Maybe he can’t design the house for you, but the kitchen will be just fine when he’s done-and you know, I’ll settle for that in a diplomat. Besides, designing the house is your job, Mr. President.” -

“Yeah,” Ryan observed. He waved to an usher, who brought over some ice water. He’d pushed the booze enough for one night, and Cathy was starting to razz him about it again. Damn, being married to a doctor Jack thought. “Yeah, Scott, but who the hell do I go to for advice when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” EAGLE replied. Maybe some humor, he thought: “Try doing a seance and call up Tom Jefferson and George Washington.” He turned with a chuckle and finished his Hennessey. “Jack, just take it easy on yourself and do the fuckin’ job. You’re doing just fine. Trust me.”

“I hate this job,” SWORDSMAN observed with a friendly smile at his Secretary of State.

“I know. That’s probably why you’re doing it pretty well. God protect us all from somebody who wants to hold high public office. Hell, look at me. Think I ever wanted to be SecState? It was a lot more fun to eat lunch in the cafeteria with my pals and bitch about the dumb son of a bitch who was. But now-shit, they’re down there saying that about me! It ain’t fair, Jack. I’m a working guy.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, look at it this way: When you do your memoirs, you’ll get a great advance from your publisher. The Accidental President?” Adler speculated for the title.

“Scott, you get funny when you’re drunk. I’ll settle for working on my golf game.”

“Who spoke the MAGIC word?” Vice President Jackson asked as he joined the conversation.

“This guy whips my ass so bad out there,” Ryan complained to Secretary Adler, “that sometimes I wish I had a sword to fall on. What’s your handicap now?”

“Not playing much, Jack, it’s slipped to six, maybe seven.”

“He’s going to turn pro-Senior Tour,” Jack advised.

“Anyway, Jack, this is my father. His plane was late and he missed the receiving line,” Robby explained.

“Reverend Jackson, we finally meet.” Jack took the hand of the elderly black minister. For the inauguration he’d been in the hospital with kidney stones, which probably had been even less fun than the inauguration.

“Robby’s told me a lot of good things about you.”

“Your son is a fighter pilot, sir, and they exaggerate a lot.”

The minister had a good laugh at that. “Oh, that I know, Mr. President. That I know.”

“How was the food?” Ryan asked. Hosiah Jackson was a man on the far side of seventy, short like his son, and rotund with increasing years, but he was a man possessed of the immense dignity that somehow attached to black men of the cloth.

“Much too rich for an old man, Mr. President, but I ate it anyway.”

“Don’t worry, Jack. Pap doesn’t drink’ TOMCAT advised. On the lapel of his tuxedo jacket was a miniature of his Navy Wings of Gold. Robby would never stop being a fighter pilot.

“And you shouldn’t either, boy! That Navy taught you lots of bad habits, like braggin’ on yourself too much.”

Jack had to jump to his friend’s defense. “Sir, a fighter pilot who doesn’t brag isn’t allowed to fly. And besides, Dizzy Dean said it best-if you can do it, it isn’t bragging. Robby can do it… or so he claims.”

“They started talking over in Beijing yet?” Robby asked, checking his watch.

“Another half hour or so,” Adler replied. “It’s going to be interesting,” he added, referring to the SORGE material.

“I believe it,” Vice President Jackson agreed, catching the message. “You know, it’s hard to love those people.”

“Robby, you are not allowed to say such things,” his father retorted. “I have a friend in Beijing.”

“Oh?” His son didn’t know about that. The answer came rather as a papal pronouncement.

“Yes, Reverend Yu Fa An, a fine Baptist preacher, educated at Oral Roberts University. My friend Gerry Patterson went to school with him.”

“Tough place to be a priest-or minister, I guess,” Ryan observed.

It was as though Jack had turned the key in the minister’s dignity switch. “Mr. President, I envy him. To preach the Gospel of the Lord anywhere is a privilege, but to preach it in the land of the heathen is a rare blessing.”

“Coffee?” a passing usher asked. Hosiah took a cup and added cream and sugar.

“This is fine,” he observed at once.

“One of the fringe bennies here, Pap,” Jackson told his dad with considerable affection. “This is even better than Navy coffee-well, we have navy stewards serving it. Jamaica Blue Mountain, costs like forty bucks a pound,” he explained.

“Jesus, Robby, don’t say that too loud. The media hasn’t figured that one out yet!” POTUS warned. “Besides, I asked. We get it wholesale, thirty-two bucks a pound if you buy it by the barrel.”

“Gee, that’s a real bargain,” the VP agreed with a chuckle.

With the welcoming ceremony done, the plenary session began without much in the way of fanfare. Assistant Secretary Rutledge took his seat, greeted the Chinese diplomats across the table, and began. His statement started off with the usual pleasantries that were about as predictable as the lead credits for a feature film.

“The United States,” he went on, getting to the meat of the issue, “has concerns about several disturbing aspects of our mutual trading relationship. The first is the seeming inability of the People’s Republic to abide by previous agreements to recognize international treaties and conventions on trademarks, copyrights, and patents. All of these items have been discussed and negotiated at length in previous meetings like this one, and we had thought that the areas of disagreement were successfully resolved. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case.” He went on to cite several specific items, which he described as being illustrative but in no way a comprehensive listing of his areas of “concern.”

“Similarly,” Rutledge continued, “commitments to open the Chinese market to American goods have not been honored. This has resulted in an imbalance in the mercantile exchange which ill serves our overall relationship. The current imbalance is approaching seventy billion U.S. dollars, and that is something the United States of America is not prepared to accept.

“To summarize, the People’s Republic’s commitment to honor international treaty obligations and private agreements with the United States has not been carried out. It is a fact of American law that our country has the right to adopt the trade practices of other nations in its own law. This is the well-known Trade Reform Act, enacted by the American government several years ago. It is my unpleasant obligation, therefore, to inform the government of the People’s Republic that America will enforce this law with respect to trade with the People’s Republic forthwith, unless these previously agreed-upon commitments are met immediately,” Rutledge concluded. Immediately is a word not often used in international discourse. “That concludes my opening statement.”

For his part, Mark Gant halfway wondered if the other side might leap across the polished oak table with swords and daggers at the end of Rutledge’s opening speech. The gauntlet had been cast down in forceful terms not calculated to make the Chinese happy. But the diplomat handling the other side of the table-it was Foreign Minister Shen Tang-reacted no more than he might on getting the check in a restaurant and finding that he’d been overcharged about five bucks’ worth. Not even a look up. Instead the Chinese minister continued to look down at his own notes, before finally lifting his eyes as he felt the end of Rutledge’s opening imminent, with no more feeling or emotion than that of a man in an art gallery looking over some painting or other that his wife wanted him to purchase to cover a crack in the dining room wall.

“Secretary Rutledge, thank you for your statement,” he began in his turn.

“The People’s Republic first of all welcomes you to our country and wishes to state for the record its desire for a continued friendly relationship with America and the American people.

“We cannot, however, reconcile America’s stated desire for friendly relations with her action to recognize the breakaway province on the island of Taiwan as the independent nation it is not. Such action was calculated to inflame our relationship-to fan the flames instead of helping to extinguish them. The people of our country will not accept this unconscionable interference with Chinese internal affairs and-” The diplomat looked up in surprise to see Rutledge’s hand raised in interruption. He was sufficiently shocked by this early breach of protocol that he actually stopped talking.

“Minister,” Rutledge intoned, “the purpose of this meeting is to discuss trade. The issue of America’s diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China is one best left to another venue. The American delegation has no desire to detour into that area today.” Which was diplo-speak for “Take that issue and shove it.”

“Mr. Rutledge, you cannot dictate to the People’s Republic what our concerns and issues are,” Minister Shen observed, in a voice as even as one discussing the price of lettuce in the street market. The rules of a meeting like this were simple: The first side to show anger lost.

“Do go on, then, if you must,” Rutledge responded tiredly. You’re wasting my time, but I get paid whether I work or not, his demeanor proclaimed.

Gant saw that the dynamic for the opening was that both countries had their agendas, and each was trying to ignore that of the other in order to take control of the session. This was so unlike a proper business meeting as to be unrecognizable as a form of verbal intercourse-and in terms of other intercourse, it was like two naked people in bed, purportedly for the purpose of sex, starting off their foreplay by fighting over the TV remote. Gant had seen all manner of negotiations before, or so he thought. This was something entirely new and, to him, utterly bizarre.

“The renegade bandits on Taiwan are part of China in their history and heritage, and the People’s Republic cannot ignore this deliberate insult to our nationhood by the Ryan Regime.”

“Minister Shen, the government of the United States of America has a long history of supporting democratically elected governments throughout the world. That has been part of our nation’s ethos for over two hundred years. I would remind the People’s Republic that the United States of America has the longest-lived government in the world.

We have lived under our constitutional form of government for well over two hundred years. That is a small number in terms of Chinese history, but I would remind you further that when America elected her first President and first Congress, China was ruled by a hereditary monarch. The government of your country has changed many times since then, but the government of the United States of America has not. Thus it is well within our power both as an independent nation under recognized international law, and also as a moral right as a long-lived and therefore legitimate form of government, both to act as we choose and to foster governments like our own. The government of the Republic of China is democratically elected, and therefore it commands the respect of similarly chosen governments of the people, like our own. In any case, Minister, the purpose of this meeting is to discuss trade. Shall we do that, or shall we fritter away our time discussing irrelevancies?”

“Nothing could be more relevant to this discussion than the fundamental lack of respect shown by your government-by the Ryan Regime, shall I say?-for the government of our country. The Taiwan issue is one of fundamental importance to…” He droned on for another four minutes.

“Minister Shen, the United States of America is not a ‘regime’ of any sort. It is an independent nation with a freely elected government chosen by its people. That experiment in government which we undertook when your country was ruled by the Manchu Dynasty is one which you might consider imitating at some future date, for the benefit of your own people. Now, shall we return to the issue at hand, or do you wish to continue wasting your own time and mine by discussing a topic for which I have neither instructions nor much in the way of interest?”

“We will not be brushed aside so cavalierly as that,” Shen responded, earning Rutledge’s brief and irrelevant respect for his unexpected command of the English language.

The American chief diplomat settled back in his chair and looked politely across the table while he thought over his wife’s plans for redecorating the kitchen of their Georgetown town house. Was green and blue the right color scheme? He preferred earth tones, but he was far more likely to win this argument in Beijing than that one in Georgetown. A lifetime spent in diplomacy didn’t enable him to win arguments with Mrs. Rutledge over items like decorating…

So it went for the first ninety minutes, when there came time for the first break. Tea and finger food was served and people wandered out the French doors-a strange place to find those, Gant thought-into the garden. It was Gant’s first adventure in diplomacy, and he was about to learn how these things really worked. People paired off, American and Chinese. You could tell who was who from a distance. Every single one of the Chinese smoked, a vice shared by only two of the American delegation, both of whom looked grateful for the chance to enjoy their habit indoors in this country. They might be trade Nazis, the Treasury Department official reflected, but they weren’t health Nazis.

“What do you think?" a voice asked. Gant turned to see the same little guy who’d bugged him at the reception. His name was Xue Ma, Gant remembered, all of five-foot-nothing, with poker-player’s eyes and some acting ability. Smarter than he appeared to be, the American reminded himself. So, how was he supposed to handle this? When in doubt, Gant decided, fall back on the truth.

“It’s my first time observing diplomatic negotiations. It’s intensely boring,” Gant replied, sipping his (dreadful) coffee.

“Well, this is normal,” Xue answered.

“Really? It’s not that way in business. How do you get anything done?”

“Every endeavor has its process,” the Chinese man told him.

“I suppose. Can you tell me something?” TELESCOPE asked.

“I can try.”

“What’s the big deal about Taiwan?”

“What was the big deal when your Civil War began?” Xue replied, with a clever question of his own.

“Well, okay, but after fifty years, why not call it even and start over?”

“We do not think in such short terms,” Xue answered with a superior smile.

“Okay, but in America we call that living in the past.” Take that, you little Chink!

“They are our countrymen,” Xue persisted.

“But they have chosen not to be. If you want them back, then make it advantageous for them. You know, by achieving the same prosperity here that they’ve achieved there.” You backward commie.

“If one of your children ran away from home, would you not work for his return?”

“Probably, but I would entice him, not threaten him, especially if I didn’t have the ability to threaten him effectively.” And your military is for shit, too. So the briefings had told them before flying over.

“But when others encourage our child to abscond and defy their father, are we not to object?”

“Look, pal,” Gant responded, not quite showing the inward heat he felt-or so he thought. “If you want to do business, then do business. If you want to chat, we can chat. But my time is valuable, and so is the time of our country, and we can save the chat for another time.” And then Gant realized that, no, he wasn’t a diplomat, and this was not a game he could play and win. “As you see, I am not gifted at this sort of exchange. We have people who are, but I am not one of them. I am the kind of American who does real work and earns real money. If you enjoy this game, that’s fine, but it’s not my game. Patience is a good thing, I suppose, but not when it impedes the objective, and I think your minister is missing something.”

“What is that, Mr. Gant?”

“It is we who will have what we wish to have out of these meetings,” Gant told the little Chinese man, and realized instantly that he’d stuck his own foot into his mouth about to the knee. He finished his coffee and excused himself, then headed unnecessarily for the bathroom, where he washed his hands before heading back outside. He found Rutledge standing alone, examining some spring flowers.

“Cliff, I think I fucked something up,” Gant confessed quietly.

“What’s that?” the Assistant Secretary asked, then listened to the confession. “Don’t sweat it. You didn’t tell them anything I haven’t already told them. You just don’t understand the language.”

“But they’ll think we’re impatient, and that makes us vulnerable, doesn’t it?”

“Not with me doing the talking inside,” Rutledge answered, with a gentle smile. “Here I am Jimmy Connors at the U.S. Open, Mark. This is what I do.”

“The other side thinks so, too.”

“True, but we have the advantage. They need us more than we need them.”

“I thought you didn’t like taking this sort of line with people,” Gant observed, puzzled by Rutledge’s attitude.

“I don’t have to like it. I just have to do it, and winning is always fun.” He didn’t add that he’d never met Minister Shen before, and therefore had no personal baggage to trip over, as often happened with diplomats who had been known to put personal friendship before the interest of their countries. They usually justified it by telling themselves that the bastard would owe them one next time, which would serve their country’s interest. Diplomacy had always been a personal business, a fact often lost on observers, who thought of these verbose technicians as robots.

Gant found all of this puzzling, but he would play along with Rutledge because he had to, and because the guy at least acted as though he knew what the hell he was doing. Whether he did or not… Gant wondered how he’d be able to tell. Then it was time to go back indoors.

The ashtrays had been cleaned and the water bottles replenished by the domestic help, who were probably all politically reliable functionaries of one sort or another, or more likely professional intelligence officers, who were here because their government took no chances with anything, or at least tried not to. It was, in fact, a waste of trained personnel, but communists had never been overly concerned with utilizing manpower in an efficient way.

Minister Shen lit a smoke and motioned for Rutledge to lead off. For his part, the American remembered that Bismarck had counseled the use of a cigar in negotiations, because some found the thick tobacco smoke irritating and that gave the smoker the advantage.

“Minister, the trade policies of the People’s Republic are set in place by a small number of people, and those policies are set in place for political reasons. We in America understand that. What you fail to understand is that ours truly is a government of the people, and our people demand that we address the trade imbalance. The People’s Republic’s inability to open markets to American goods costs the jobs of American citizens. Now, in our country it is the business of the government to serve the people, not to rule them, and for that reason, we must address the trade imbalance in an effective way.

“I fully agree that it is the business of government to serve the interests of the people, and for that reason, we must consider also the agony that the Taiwan issue imposes on the citizens of my country. Those who should be our countrymen have been separated from us, and the United States has assisted in the estrangement of our kinsmen…

The remarkable thing, Rutledge thought, was that this droning old fart hadn’t died from smoking those damned things. They looked and smelled like the Lucky Strikes his grandfather had died of, at age eighty. It had not been a death to please a physician, however. Grandpa Owens had been driving his great-grandson to South Station in Boston when, lighting one, he’d dropped it into his lap and, in retrieving it, strayed onto the wrong side of the road. Grandpa hadn’t believed in seat belts, either…, the bastard actually chain-smoked, lighting a new one with the butt of the previous one, like Bogie in a ‘30s movie. Well, maybe it was a way for the Chinese to pursue their population-control policy… but in rather an ugly way…

“Mr. Foreign Minister,” Rutledge started off, when it was next his turn, “the government of the Republic of China is one elected in free and fair elections by the people who live in that country. In America’s eyes, that makes the government of the Republic of China legitimate”-he didn’t say that the government of the People’s Republic was, therefore, illegitimate, but the thought hung in the room like a dark cloud-”and that makes the government in question worthy of international recognition, as you may have noticed has been the case in the last year.

“It is the policy of our government to recognize such governments. We will not change policies based upon firm principles to suit the wishes of other countries which do not share those principles. We can talk until you run out of cigarettes, but my government’s position in this case is set in stone. So, you can recognize this fact and allow the meeting to move on to productive areas, or you can beat this dead horse until nothing is left of it. The choice is yours, of course, but is it not better to be productive than not?”

“America cannot dictate to the People’s Republic that which concerns us. You claim to have your principles, and surely we have our own, and one of ours is the importance of our country’s territorial integrity.”

For Mark Gant, the hard part was keeping an impassive face. He had to pretend that this all made sense and was important, when he’d much prefer to set up his computer to review stock prices, or for that matter read a paperback book under the rim of the table. But he couldn’t do that. He had to pretend that this was all interesting, which, if successfully done, could get him nominated for the next Academy Award ceremonies for Best Actor in a Supporting Role: “For keeping awake during the most boring contest since the Iowa grass-growing championships, the winner is…” He concentrated on not shifting in his seat, but that just made his ass tired, and these seats hadn’t been designed to fit his ass. Maybe one of those skinny Chinese ones, but not that of a Chicago-raised professional who liked having a beer and a corned-beef sandwich for lunch at least once a week and didn’t work out enough. His ass required a broader and softer seat for comfort, but he didn’t have one. He tried to find something interesting. He decided that Foreign Minister Shen had terrible skin, as though his face had once been on fire and a friend had tried to extinguish the flames with an ice pick. Gant tried to conjure up the image of that supposed event without smiling. Then came the fact that Shen was smoking so much, lighting his smokes from cheap paper matches instead of a proper lighter. Perhaps he was one of those people who set things down and forgot where they were, which would also explain why he used cheap throwaway pens instead of something in keeping with his rank and status. So, this important son of a bitch had suffered from terminal acne as a kid and was a butterfingers…? It was something worthy of an inward smile as the minister droned on in passable English. That engendered a new thought. He had access to an earphone for simultaneous translation…, could he get one tuned to a local station? They had to have a radio station in Beijing that played music of some sort or other, didn’t they?

When Rutledge’s turn came, it was almost as bad. The stated American position was as repetitive as the Chinese one, perhaps more reasonable but no less boring. Gant imagined that lawyers talking over a divorce settlement probably went through bullshit like this. Like diplomats, they were paid by the hour and not by the product. Diplomats and lawyers. What a pair, Gant thought. He was unable even to look at his watch. The American delegation had to present a united front of solid stone, Gant thought, to show the Heathen Chinese that the Forces of Truth and Beauty were firm in their resolve. Or something like that. He wondered if it would feel different negotiating with the British, for example, everyone speaking much the same language, but those negotiations were probably handled with phone calls or e-mails rather than this formalistic crap…

Lunch came at the expected hour, about ten minutes late because the Shen guy ran over, which was hardly unexpected. The American team all headed to the men’s room, where no talking was done for fear of bugs. Then they went back outside, and Gant went to Rutledge.

“This is how you earn your living?” the stock TRADER asked with no small degree of incredulity.

“I try to. These talks are going pretty well,” the Assistant Secretary of State observed.

“What?” Gant inquired with total amazement.

“Yeah, well, their Foreign Minister is doing the negotiating, so we’re playing with their varsity,” Rutledge explained. “That means that we’ll be able to reach a real agreement instead of a lot of back-and-forth between lower-level people and the Politburo-the additional layer of people can really mess things up. There’ll be some of that, of course. Shen will have to talk over his positions with them every evening, maybe even right now-he’s nowhere to be seen. I wonder who he reports to, exactly. We don’t think he really has plenipotentiary powers, that the rest of the big boys second-guess him a lot. Like the Russians used to be. That’s the problem with their system. Nobody really trusts anybody else.”

“You serious?” TELESCOPE asked.

“Oh, yeah, it’s how their system works.”

“That’s a clusterfuck,” Gant observed.

“Why do you think the Soviet Union went belly-up?” Rutledge asked with amusement. “They never had their act together on any level because they fundamentally didn’t know how properly to exercise the power they had. It was rather sad, really. But they’re doing a lot better now.”

“But how are the talks going, well?”

“If all they have to throw at us is Taiwan, their counter-arguments on trade won’t be all that impressive. Taiwan’s a settled issue, and they know it. We may have a mutual-defense treaty with them in ten or eleven months, and they probably know that. They have good intelligence sources in Taipei.”

“How do we know that?” Gant demanded.

“Because our friends in Taipei make sure they do. You want your adversaries to know a lot of things. It makes for better understandings, cuts down on mistakes and stuff.” Rutledge paused. “I wonder what’s for lunch…

Jesus, Gant thought. Then he thanked God that he was just here to offer economic backup for this diplomat. They were playing a game so different from anything he’d ever encountered before that he felt like a truck driver doing some day-trading on his laptop at a highway phone booth.

The newsies showed up for lunch so that they could get more B-roll tape of diplomats chatting amiably about such things as the weather and the food-the viewers would think they were handling matters of state, of course, when in fact at least half of the talks between diplomats at such affairs were limited to the problems of raising children or killing the crabgrass in your lawn. It was all, in fact, a kind of gamesmanship with few parallels in other forms of endeavor, Gant was only beginning to understand. He saw Barry Wise approach Rutledge without a microphone or camera in attendance.

“So, how’s it going, Mr. Secretary?” the reporter asked.

“Pretty well. In fact, we had a fine opening session,” Rutledge replied in Gant’s earshot. It was a shame, TELESCOPE decided, that the people couldn’t see what really happened. It would be the funniest thing this side of Chris Rock. It made Laverne amp; Shirley look like King Lear in its lunacy, and the world chess championship look like a heavyweight-championship fight in its torpor. But every field of human endeavor had its rules, and these were just different ones.

“There’s our friend,” the cop observed, as the car pulled out. It was Suvorov/Koniev in his Mercedes C-class. The license tag number checked, as did the face in the binoculars.

Provalov had gotten the local varsity to handle this case, with even some help now from the Federal Security Service, formerly the Second Chief Directorate of the former KGB, the professional spy-chasers who’d made life in Moscow difficult for foreign intelligence operations. They remained superbly equipped, and though not so well funded as in the past, there was little to criticize in their training. The problem, of course, was that they knew all that themselves, and took on a degree of institutional arrogance that had gotten the noses of his homicide investigators severely out of joint. Despite all that, they were useful allies. There were a total of seven vehicles to handle the surveillance. In America, the FBI would have arranged a helicopter as well, but Michael Reilly wasn’t here to make that condescending observation, somewhat to Provalov’s relief. The man had become a friend, and a gifted mentor in the business of investigation, but enough was sometimes enough. There were trucks containing TV cameras to tape the business of the morning, and every automobile had two people in it so that driving wouldn’t interfere with watching. They followed Suvorov/Koniev into central Moscow.

Back at his apartment, another team had already defeated his lock and was inside his flat. What happened there was as graceful as any performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. Once inside, the investigative team stood still at first, scanning for telltales, left-behind items as innocuous as a human hair stuck in place across a closet door to show if someone had opened it. Suvorov’s KGB file was finally in Provalov’s possession now, and he knew all the things the man had been trained in-it turned out that his training had been quite thorough, and Suvorov’s grades had been, well, “C” class most of the time: not outstanding enough to earn him the chance to operate in the field as an “illegal” officer on the home ground of the “Main Enemy,” meaning the United States, but good enough that he’d become a diplomatic-intelligence specialist, mainly going over information brought in by others, but spending some time in the field, trying to recruit and “run” agents. Along the way, he’d established contact with various foreign diplomats, including three from China-those three he’d used to gather low-level diplomatic information, mainly chitchat-level stuff, but it was all regarded as useful. Suvorov’s last field assignment had been from 1989 to ‘91 in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing, where he’d again tried to gather diplomatic intelligence, and, they saw, with some success this time. The accomplishments had not been questioned at the time, Provalov saw, probably because he’d had some minor victories against the same country’s diplomatic service while in Moscow. His file said that he could both speak and write Chinese, skills learned at the KGB Academy that had militated in favor of making him a China specialist.

One of the problems with intelligence operations was that what looked suspicious was often innocuous, and what looked innocuous could well be suspicious. An intelligence officer was supposed to establish contact with foreign nationals, often foreign intelligence officers, and then the foreign spy could execute a maneuver that the Americans called a “flip,” turning an enemy into an asset. The KGB had done the same thing many times, and part of the price of doing such business was that it could happen to your own people, not so much while you were not looking as when you were. Nineteen eighty-nine to ‘91 had been the time of glasnost, the “openness” that had destroyed the Soviet Union as surely as smallpox had annihilated primitive tribesmen. At that time, KGB was having problems of its own, Provalov reminded himself, and what if the Chinese had recruited Suvorov? The Chinese economy had just been starting to grow back then, and so they’d had the money to toss around, not as much as the Americans always seemed to have, but enough to entice a Soviet civil servant looking at the prospect of losing his job soon.

But what had Suvorov been doing since then? He was now driving a Mercedes-Benz automobile, and those didn’t appear in your mailbox. The truth was that they didn’t know, and finding out would not be very easy. They knew that neither Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov nor Ivan Yurievich Koniev had paid his income taxes, but that merely put him at the same level as most Russian citizens, who didn’t want to be bothered with such irrelevancies. And, again, they hadn’t wanted to question his neighbors. Those names were now being checked to see if any were former KGB, and perhaps, therefore, allies of their suspect. No, they didn’t want to alert him in any way.

The apartment looked “clean” in the police sense. With that, they began looking around. The bed was mussed up. Suvorov/Koniev was a man and therefore not terribly neat. The contents of the apartment were, however, expensive, much of them of foreign manufacture. West German appliances, a common affectation of the Russian well-to-do. The searchers wore latex surgical gloves as they opened the refrigerator door (refrigerator-freezers are well-regarded hiding places) for a visual examination. Nothing obvious. Then dresser drawers. The problem was that their time was limited and any residence just had too many places to hide things, whether rolled up in a pair of socks or inside the toilet-paper tube. They didn’t really expect to find much, but making the effort was de rigueur-it was too hard to explain to one’s superiors why one didn’t do it than it was to send the search team in to waste their expensively trained time. Elsewhere, people were tapping the apartment’s phone. They’d thought about installing some pinhole-lens cameras. These were so easy to hide that only a paranoid genius was likely to find them, but putting them in took time-the hard part was running the wires to the central monitoring station-and time was an asset they didn’t have. As it was, their leader had a cell phone in his shirt pocket, waiting for it to vibrate with the word that their quarry was driving back home, in which case they’d tidy up and leave in a hurry.

He was twelve kilometers away. Behind him, the trail cars were switching in and out of visual coverage as deftly as the Russian national football team advancing the soccer ball into tied-game opposition. Provalov was in the command vehicle, watching and listening as the KGB/FSS team leader used a radio and a map to guide his people in and out. The vehicles were all dirty, middle-aged, nondescript types that could be owned by the Moscow city government or gypsy-cab operators, expected to dart around, concealing themselves among the numerous twins they all had. In most cases, the second vehicle occupant was in the back seat, not the front, to simulate a taxi’s passenger, and they even had cell phones to complete the disguise, which allowed them to communicate with their base station without looking suspicious. That, the FSS leader remarked to the cop, was one advantage of new technology.

Then came the call that the subject had pulled over, stopped, and parked his car. The two surveillance vehicles in visual contact continued past, allowing new ones to close in and stop.

“He’s getting out’ a Federal Security Service major reported. “I’m getting out to follow on foot.” The major was young for his rank, usually a sign of a precocious and promising young officer on the way up, and so it was in this case. He was also handsome with his twenty-eight years, and dressed in expensive clothing like one of the new crop of Moscovite business entrepreneurs. He was talking into his phone in a highly animated fashion, the very opposite of what someone conducting a surveillance would do. That enabled him to get within thirty meters of the subject, and to watch his every move with hawk’s eyes. Those eyes were needed to catch the most elegant of maneuvers. Suvorov/Koniev sat on a bench, his right hand already in his overcoat pocket while his left fiddled with the morning paper he’d brought out from the car-and that is what tipped the FSS major that he was up to no good. A newspaper was the main disguise used by a spy, something to cover the actions of the working hand, just as a stage MAGICian kept one hand ostentatiously busy while the other performed the actual illusion. And so it was here, so beautifully done that had he been an untrained man, he would never have caught it. The major took a seat on another bench and dialed up another false number on his cell phone and started talking to a fictitious business associate, then watched his surveillance subject stand and walk with studied casualness back to his parked Mercedes.

Major Yefremov called a real number when his subject was a hundred meters away. “This is Pavel Georgiyevich. I am staying here to see what he left behind,” he told his base station. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, watching the figure get back into his car and drive off. When he was well out of sight, Yefremov walked over to the other bench and reached under. Oh, yes. A magnetic holder. Suvorov had been using this one for some time. He’d glued a metal plate to the bottom of the green-painted wood, and to this he could affix a magnetic holder… about a centimeter in thickness, his hand told him. Their subject was a “player” after all. He’d just executed a dead-drop.

On hearing it, Provalov experienced the thrill of seeing a crime committed before his very eyes. Now they had their man committing a crime against the state. Now he was theirs. Now they could arrest him at any time. But they wouldn’t, of course. The operation’s commander next to him ordered Yefremov to retrieve the container for examination. That would be done very speedily,, because the container would have to be returned. They only had half of the spy team. The other half would come to pick it up.

It was the computer. It had to be. On turning it on, they found a maze of folders, but one of them, they quickly saw, had encrypted contents. The encryption program was one they hadn’t come across before. It was American, and its name was written down. They could do no more now. They lacked the proper disks to copy the covert file. That they could fix, and they could also copy the encryption program. Next, they’d have to plant a bugging device on the keyboard. In that way, they could use Sovorov’s own password code to crack the encrypted file. With that decision made, the burglary team left the premises.

The next part was virtually preordained. They followed I the Mercedes using the same multi-car drill, but the break came when a dump truck-still the dominant form of life on the Moscow streets-was closest. The subject parked the German sedan and jumped out, took just enough time to affix a strip of paper tape to a lamppost, and hopped back into his car. He didn’t even bother to look around, as though he’d only done something routine.

But he hadn’t. He’d just posted a flag, a notice to someone unknown that the dead-drop had something in it. That someone would walk or drive past and see the tape and know where to go. So, they had to examine the capsule quickly and replace it, lest they warn the enemy spy that their little operation had been compromised. No, you didn’t do that until you had to, because things like this were like an unraveling sweater on a pretty woman. You didn’t stop pulling the yarn until the tits were exposed, the FSS commander told Provalov.