Zhang Han San shook his head. “This is not possible. Nothing was ever written down.” And our security was perfect in both cases, he didn’t trouble himself to add.
“When things are said around people with ears, Zhang, they remember them. There are few secrets in the world. You can no more keep the affairs of state secret than you can conceal the sunrise,” Fang went on, thinking that he’d make sure that this phrase went into the record of the talk that Ming would write up for him. “They spread too far. They reach too many people, and each of them has a mouth.”
“Then what would you have us do?”
“The American has requested an investigation, so, we give him one. The facts we discover will be whatever facts we wish them to be. If a policeman must die, there are many others to take his place. Our trading relationship with America is more important than this trivial matter, Zhang.”
“We cannot afford to abase ourselves before the barbarian.”
“We cannot not afford not to in this case. We cannot allow false pride to put the country at risk.” Fang sighed. His friend Zhang had always been a proud one. A man able to see far, certainly, but too aware of himself and the place he wanted. Yet the one he’d chosen was difficult. He’d never wanted the first place for himself, but instead to be the man who influenced the man at the top, to be like the court eunuchs who had directed the various emperors for over a thousand years. Fang almost smiled, thinking that no amount of power was worth becoming a eunuch, at the royal court or not, and that Zhang probably didn’t wish to go that far, either. But to be the man of power behind the curtain was probably more difficult than to be the man in the first chair . . . and yet, Fang remembered, Zhang had been the prime mover behind Xu’s selection to general secretary. Xu was an intellectual nonentity, a pleasant enough man with regal looks, able to speak in public well, but not himself a man of great ideas . . .
… and that explained things, didn’t it? Zhang had helped make Xu the chief of the Politburo precisely because he was an empty vessel, and Zhang was the one to fill the void of ideas with his own thoughts. Of course. He ought to have seen it sooner. Elsewhere, it was believed that Xu had been chosen for his middle-of-the-road stance on everything— a conciliator, a consensus-maker, they called him outside the PRC. In fact, he was a man of few convictions, able to adopt those of anyone else, if that someone—Zhang—looked about first and decided where the Politburo should go.
Xu was not a complete puppet, of course. That was the problem with people. However useful they might be on some issues, on others they held to the illusion that they thought for themselves, and the most foolish of them did have ideas, and those ideas were rarely logical and almost never helpful. Xu had embarrassed Zhang on more than one occasion, and since he was chairman of the Politburo, Xu did have real personal power, just not the wit to make proper use of it. But—what? Sixty percent of the time, maybe a little more?—he was merely Zhang’s mouthpiece. And Zhang, for his part, was largely free to exert his own influence, and to make his own national policy. He did so mostly unseen and unknown outside the Politburo itself, and not entirely known inside, either, since so many of his meetings with Xu were private, and most of the time Zhang never spoke of them, even to Fang.
His old friend was a chameleon, Fang thought, hardly for the first time. But if he showed humility in not seeking prominence to match his influence, then he balanced that with the fault of pride, and, worse, he didn’t seem to know what weakness he displayed. He thought either that it wasn’t a fault at all, or that only he knew of it. All men had their weaknesses, and the greatest of these were invariably those unknown to their practitioners. Fang checked his watch and took his leave. With luck, he’d be home at a decent hour, after he transcribed his notes through Ming. What a novelty, getting home on time.
C H A P T E R – 28
Collision Courses
“Those sonsabitches,” Vice President Jackson observed with his coffee.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of statecraft, Robby,” Ryan told his friend. It was 7:45 a.m. in the Oval Office. Cathy and the kids had gotten off early, and the day was starting fast. “We’ve had our suspicions, but here’s the proof, if you want to call it that. The war with Japan and that little problem we had with Iran started in Beijing—well, not exactly, but this Zhang guy, acting for Xu, it would seem, aided and abetted both.”
“Well, he may be a nasty son of a bitch, but I wouldn’t give him points for brains,” Robby said, after a moment’s reflection. Then he thought some more. “But maybe that’s not fair. From his point of view, the plans were pretty clever, using others to be his stalking horse. He risked nothing himself, then he figured to move in and profit on the risks of others. It certainly looked efficient, I suppose.”
“Question is, what’s his next move?”
“Between this and what Rutledge reports from Beijing, I’d say we have to take these people a little seriously,” Robby reflected. Then his head perked up some more. “Jack, we have to get more people in on this.”
“Mary Pat will flip out if we even suggest it,” Ryan told him.
“Too damned bad. Jack, it’s the old problem with intelligence information. If you spread it out too much, you risk compromising it, and then you lose it—but if you don’t use it at all, you might as well not even have it. Where do you draw the line?” It was a rhetorical question. “If you err, you err on the side of safety—but the safety of the country, not the source.”
“There’s a real, live person on the other end of this sheet of paper, Rob,” Jack pointed out.
“I’m sure there is. But there are two hundred fifty million people outside this room, Jack, and the oath we both swore was to them, not some Chinese puke in Beijing. What this tells us is that the guy making policy in China is willing to start wars, and twice now we’ve sent our people to fight wars he’s had a part in starting. Jesus, man, war is supposed to be a thing of the past, but this Zhang guy hasn’t figured that one out yet. What’s he doing that we don’t know about?”
“That’s what SORGE’S all about, Rob. The idea is that we find out beforehand and have a chance to forestall it.”
Jackson nodded. “Maybe so, but once upon a time, there was a source called MAGIC that told us a lot about an enemy’s intentions, but when that enemy launched the first attack, we were asleep—because MAGIC was so important we never told CINCPAC about it, and he ended up not preparing for Pearl Harbor. I know intel’s important, but it has its operational limitations. All this really tells us is that we have a potential adversary with little in the way of inhibitions. We know his mindset, but not his intentions or current operations. Moreover, SORGE’S giving us recollections of private conversations between one guy who makes policy and another guy who tries to influence policy. A lot of stuff is being left out. This looks like a cover-your-ass diary, doesn’t it?”
Ryan told himself that this was a particularly smart critique. Like the people at Langley, he’d allowed himself to wax a little too euphoric about a source they’d never even approached before. songbird was good, but not without limitations. Big ones.
“Yeah, Rob, that’s probably just what it is. This Fang guy probably keeps the diary just to have something to pull out of the drawer if one of his colleagues on the Chinese Politburo tries to butt-fuck him.”
“So, it isn’t Sir Thomas More whose words we’re reading,” TOMCAT observed.
“Not hardly,” Ryan conceded. “But it’s a good source. All the people who’ve looked at this for us say it feels very real.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t true, Jack, I’m saying it isn’t all,” the Vice President persisted.
“Message received, Admiral.” Ryan held up his hands in surrender. “What do you recommend?”
“SecDef for starters, and the Chiefs, and J-3 and J-5, and probably CINCPAC, your boy Bart Mancuso,” Jackson added, with a hint of distaste.
“Why don’t you like the guy?” SWORDSMAN asked.
“He’s a bubble-head,” the career fighter pilot answered. “Submariners don’t get around all that much . . . but I grant you he’s a pretty good operator.” The submarine operation he’d run on the Japs using old boomers had been pretty swift, Jackson admitted to himself.