“You will, for the most part, not be armed in the field. You will survive by your wits. You will sometimes be at risk of your life. I’ve lost friends in the field, some in places you know about, and some in places you don’t. The world may be kinder and gentler now, but not everywhere. You’re not going to be going to the nice places, guys,” John promised them. In the back of the room, Ding Chavez was struggling hard not to smile. That little greasy guy is my partner and he’s engaged to my little girl. No sense, Domingo knew, in scaring them all away.
“What’s good about the job? Well, what’s good about being a cop? Answer: every bad guy you put away saves
546
lives on the street. In this job, getting the right information to the right people saves lives, too. Lots,” Clark emphasized. “When we do the job right, wars don’t happen.
“Anyway, welcome aboard. I am your supervising teacher. You will find the training here stimulating and difficult. It starts at eight-thirty tomorrow morning.” With that John left the podium and walked to the back of the room. Chavez opened the door for him and they walked out into the fresh air.
“Gee, Mr. C., where do I sign up?”
“God damn it, Ding, I had to say something.” It had been John’s longest oration in some years.
“So, to get these rookies aboard, what did Foley have to do?”
“The RIFs have begun, m’boy. Hell, Ding, we had to get things started, didn’t we?”
“I think you should have waited a few weeks. Foley isn’t confirmed by the Senate yet. Better to wait,” Chavez thought. “But I’m just a junior spook.”
“I keep forgetting how smart you’ve gotten.”
“SO WHO THE hell is Zhang Han San?” Ryan asked.
“Somewhere in his fifties, but young looking for his age, ten kilos overweight, five four or so, medium everything, so says our friend,” Dan Murray reported from his written notes. “Quiet and thoughtful, and he stiffed Ya-mata.”
“Oh?”‘Mary Pat Foley said. “How so?”
“Yamata was on Saipan when we got control of things. He placed a call to Beijing, looking to bug out to a safe place. Mr. Zhang reacted as though it were a cold call. ‘What deal? We don’t have any deal,’ ” the FBI Director mimicked. “And after that, the calls didn’t go through at all. Our Japanese friend regards that as a personal betrayal.”
“Sounds as though he’s singing like a canary,” Ed Foley observed. “Does that strike anybody as suspicious?”
“No,” Ryan said. “In World War Two, what Japanese prisoners we took talked plenty.”
‘ 547
“The President’s right,” Murray confirmed. “I asked Tanaka about that myself. He says it’s a cultural thing. Yamata wants to take his own life–the honorable way out in their cultural context–but they’ve got him on suicide watch–not even shoestrings. The resulting disgrace is so great for the guy that he has no particular reason to keep secrets. Hell of an interrogation technique. Anyway, Zhang is supposedly a diplomat–Yamata said he was tit-ularly part of a trade delegation–but State’s never heard of him. The Japanese have no records of the name on any diplomatic list. That makes him a spook, as far as I’m concerned, and so . . .” He looked over at the Foleys.
“I ran the name,” Mary Pat said. “Zippo. But who’s to say it’s a real name?”
“Even if it were,” her husband added, “we don’t know that much about their intelligence people. If 1 had to guess”– and he did –“he’s political. Why? He cut a deal, a quiet one but a big one. Their military is still on an increased readiness and training regime because of that deal, which is why the Russians are still nervous. Whoever this guy is, best guess, he’s a very serious player.” Which wasn’t exactly an earth-shaking revelation.
“Anything you can do to find out?” Murray inquired delicately.
Mrs. Foley shook her head. “No assets in place, at least nothing we can use for this. We have a good husband-wife team in Hong Kong, setting up a nice little network. We have a couple of assets in Shanghai. In Beijing we have some low-level agents in the defense ministry, but they’re long-term prospects and using them on this issue wouldn’t accomplish much more than to endanger them. Dan, the problem we have with China is that we don’t really know how their government works. It has levels of complexity that we can only guess at. The Politburo members, we know who they are–we think. One of the biggies might be dead now, and we’ve been fishing for that tidbit for over a month. Even the Russians let us know when they buried people,” the DDO noted, as she sipped her wine. Ryan had come to like bringing his closest advisers in for drinks after the close of regular office hours. It hadn’t quite oc-
548
curred to him that he was extending their working day. He was also short-circuiting his own National Security Advisor, but as loyal and clever as Ben Goodley was, Jack Ryan still wanted to hear it directly when he could.
Ed took up the explanation. “You see, sure, we think we know the political varsity over there, but we’ve never had a real handle on the second-string players. The dynamic is simple when you think about it, but it took us long enough to twig to it. We’re talking elderly folks over there. They can’t get around all that well. They need mobile eyes and ears, and over the years those gofers have accumulated a lot of power. Who’s really calling the shots? We don’t know for sure, and without ID’ing people, we can’t find out.”
“I can dig it, guys.” Murray grunted, and reached for his beer. “When I was working OC–organized crime– sometimes we ID’d Mafia capi by who held the car door open for whom. Hell of a way to do business.” It was the friendliest thing the Foleys remembered hearing from the FBI about CIA. “Operational security really isn’t all that hard if you think about it a little.”
“Makes a good case for PLAN BLUE,” Jack said next.
“Well, then you might be pleased to know the first fifteen are in the pipeline even as we speak. John should have given them their welcoming speech a few hours ago,” the DCI announced.
Ryan had gone over Foley’s reduction-in-force plan for CIA. Ed planned to swing a mean ax, ultimately reducing the Agency budget by $500 million over five years while increasing the field force. It was something to make people on the Hill happy, though with much of CIA’s real budget in the black part of federal expenditures, few would ever know. Or maybe not, Jack thought. That was likely to leak.
Leaks. He’d hated them over his entire career. But now they were part of statecraft, weren’t they? the President reflected. But what was he supposed to think? That leaks were okay now that he was the one doing it or allowing it? Damn. Laws and principles weren’t supposed to work that way, were they? What exactly, what idea or ideal or principle or rock was he supposed to hold on to?
549
THE BODYGUARD’S NAME was Saleh. He was a physically robust individual, as his work demanded, and, as such, one who tried to deny illness or discomfort of any sort. A man of his station in life simply did not admit to difficulty. But when discomfort didn’t go away as he’d expected and as the doctor had told him–Saleh knew that all men were vulnerable to stomach problems–and then he saw blood in the toilet… it was that, really. The body isn’t supposed to issue blood except from a shaving cut or a bullet wound. Not in any case from moving one’s bowels, and it was the sort of indicator certain to shake any man, all the more so a strong and otherwise confident one. Like many, he delayed somewhat, asking himself if it might be a temporary problem that would go away, that the discomfort would peak and abate, as flu symptoms always did. But these kept getting worse, and finally his fear got the better of him. Before dawn he left the villa, taking the car and driving to the hospital. Along the way he had to stop the car to vomit, deliberately not looking to see what he’d left on the street before heading on, his body weakening with every minute, until the walk from the car to the door seemed to take every bit of energy he had. In what passed here for an emergency room, he waited while people searched for his records. It was the smell of hospitals which frightened him, the same disinfectant odor which makes a dog stop dead and strain backward at the leash and whimper and pull away, because the smell is associated with pain, until finally a black nurse called his name, and then he rose, assembled his dignity and composure, and walked into the same examining room he’d visited before.