thing they relished, was it?
All in all, it would be a good workup for Seventh Fleet. They’d need it.
The Indians were indeed getting frisky. He now had seven of his boats oper-
ating with Mike Dubro, and between those and what he had assigned to
DATELINE PARTNERS, that was the whole active collection. How the mighty
had fallen, ComSubPac told himself. Well, that’s what the mighty usually
did.
The meet procedure was not unlike the courtship ritual between swans. You
showed up at a precise place at a precise time, in this case carrying a newspa-
per-folded, not rolled-in your left hand, and looked in a shop window at a
huge collection of cameras and consumer electronics, just as a Russian
would automatically do on his first trip to Japan, to marvel at the plethora of
products available to those who had hard currency to spend. If he were being
trailed-possible but most unlikely-it would appear normal. In due course,
exactly on time, a person bumped into him.
“Excuse me,” the voice said in English, which was also normal, for the
person he’d inadvertently nudged was clearly gaijin.
“Quite all right,” Clark replied in an accented voice, without looking.
“First time in Japan?”
“No, but my first time in Tokyo.”
“Okay, it’s all clear.” The person bumped him again on the way down
the street. Clark waited the requisite four or five minutes before following. It
was always so tedious, but necessary. Japan wasn’t enemy soil. It wasn’t like
the jobs he’d done in Leningrad (in dark’s mind that city’s name would
never change; besides, his Russian accent was from that region) or Moscow,
but the safest course of action was to pretend that it was. Just as well that it
wasn’t, though. There were so many foreigners in this city that the Japanese
security service, such as it was, would have gone crazy trying to track them
all.
In fact it was Clark’s first time here, aside from plane changes and stop-
overs, and that didn’t count. The crowding on the street was like nothing
he’d ever seen; not even New York was this tight. It also made him uneasy to
stand out so much. There is nothing worse for an intelligence officer than not
to be able to blend in, but his six-one height marked him as someone who
didn’t belong, visible from a block away to anyone who bothered to look.
And so many people looked at him, Clark noted. More surprisingly, people
made way for him, especially women, and children positively shrank from
his presence as though Godzilla had returned to crush their city. So it was
true. He’d heard the stories but never quite believed them. Hairy barbarian.
/•’M////V. / never thought of myself that wa\. John (old himself, walking into a
McDonald’s. It was crowded at lunch hour, and after turning Ins head he had
to take a seat with another man. Mary Pat was right, he thought. Nomuri ix
pretty good.
“So what’s the story?” Clark asked amid the din of the fast-food place.
“Well, I’ve ID’d her and I’ve got the building she lives in.”
“That’s fast work.”
“Not very hard. Our friend’s security detail doesn’t know shit about
countersurveillance.”
Besides, Clark didn’t say, you look like you belong, right down to the har-
ried and tense look of a salaryman bolting down his lunch so that he can
race back to his desk. Well, that never came hard to a field spook, did it? It
wasn’t hard to be tense on a field assignment. The difficult part, which they
emphasized at the Farm, was to appear at ease.
“Okay, then all I have to do is get permission for the pickup.” Among
other things. Nomuri wasn’t authorized to know about his work with THIS-
TLE. John wondered if that would change.
“Sayonara.” And Nomuri made his exit while Clark attacked his rice
ball. Not bad. The kid’s all business, he thought. His next thought was, Rice
ball at McDonald’s?
The briefing documents on his desk had nothing at all to do with his being
the President, but everything to do with his remaining in the office, and for
that reason they were always at the top of the pile. The upward move in the
approval ratings was . . . very edifying, Durling thought. Of likely voters-
and they were the ones who really counted-fully 10 percent more approved
of his policies than had done so last week, a numerical improvement that
covered both his foreign and domestic performance. All in all, it was about
what a fourth-grader might feel on bringing home a particularly good report
card to doubtful parents. And that 10 percent was only the beginning, his
chief pollster thought, since the implications of the policy changes were tak-
ing a little time to sink in. Already the Big Three were speculating publicly
about hiring back some of the seven hundred thousand workers laid off in
the previous decades, and that was just the assembly workers. Then you had
to consider the people in independent parts companies, the tire companies,
the glass companies, the battery companies . .. That could start to revitalize
the Rust Belt, and the Rust Belt accounted for a lot of electoral votes.
What was obvious, or should have been, was that it wouldn’t stop with
cars. It couldn’t. The United Auto Workers (cars and related parts) looked
forward to the restoration of thousands of paying members. The Interna-
tional Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (TVs, even VCRs?) could not be
far behind, and there were additional unions that had just begun to consider
how large a piece of the pie they might receive. Though simple in con-
ccpl, the Trade Reform Act represented, like many simple concepts, a wide-
ranging alteration in how the United States of America did business. Presi-
dent Durling had thought he’d understood that concept, but soon the phone
on his desk would ring. Looking at it, he already knew the voices that
he would hear, and it wasn’t too great a stretch to imagine what words
they would speak, what arguments they would put forth, and what promises
they would make. And he would be amenable to accepting the promises.
He’d never really planned to be President of the United States, not as Bob
Fowler had planned his entire life toward that goal, not even allowing the
death of his first wife to turn him from that path. Durling’s last goal had been
the governorship of California, and when he’d been offered the chance for
the second place on the Fowler ticket he’d taken it more out of patriotism
than anything else. That was not something he’d say even to his closest ad-
visers, because patriotism was passe in the modern political world, but
Roger Durling had felt it even so, had remembered that the average citizen
had a name and a face, remembered having some of them die under his com-
mand in Vietnam, and, in remembering, thought that he had to do his best for
them.
But what was the best? he asked himself again, as he had done on un-
counted occasions. The Oval Office was a lonely place. It was often filled
with all manner of visitors, from a foreign chief of state to a schoolchild
who’d won an essay contest, but in due course they all left, and the President
was alone again with his duty. The oath he’d taken was so simple as to be
devoid of meaning. “Faithfully execute the office of … to the best of my
ability, preserve, protect, and defend …” Fine words, but what did they
mean? Perhaps Madison and the others had figured that he’d know. Perhaps
in 1789 everyone had-it was just understood-but that was more than two
hundred years in the past, and somehow they’d neglected to write it down
for the guidance of future generations.
Worse still, there were plenty of people ever ready to tell you what they
thought the words meant, and when you added up all the advice, 2 plus 2
ended up as 7. Labor and management, consumer and producer, taxpayer
and transfer recipient. They all had their needs. They all had their agendas.
They all had arguments, and fine lobbyists to make them, and the scary part
was that each one made sense in one way or another, enough that many be-
lieved that 2 + 2 really did = 7. Until you announced the sum, that is, and
then everybody said it was too much, that the country couldn’t afford the
other groups’ special interests.
On top of all of that, if you wanted to accomplish anything at all, you had
to get here, and having gotten here, to stay here, and that meant making
promises you had to keep. At least some of them. And somewhere in the
process, the country just got lost, and the Constitution with it, and at the end
of the day you were preserving, protecting, and defending-what?