The President nodded, looking down at the briefing papers. “Yeah, Basil talked the PM out of it.” That was Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called (erroneously) MI6. Basil was an old friend of Ryan’s, going back to his CIA days. “It was a remarkably stand-up thing to do.”
“Well, our friends in Paris don’t seem to think the same way.”
“They usually don’t,” Ryan agreed. The odd thing was the dichotomy inherent in dealing with the French. In some things, they weren’t so much allies as blood brothers, but in others they were less than mere associates, and Ryan had trouble figuring out the logic by which the French changed their minds. Well, the President thought, that’s what I have a State Department for…. “So, you think the PRC is building up its military again?”
“Big time, but not so much their navy, which makes our friends in Taiwan feel a little better.”
That had been one of President Ryan’s foreign-policy initiatives after concluding hostilities with the defunct United Islamic Republic, now restored to the separate nations of Iran and Iraq, which were at least at peace with each other. The real reasons for the recognition of Taiwan had never been made known to the public. It looked pretty clear to Ryan and his Secretary of State, Scott Adler, that the People’s Republic of China had played a role in the Second Persian Gulf War, and probably in the preceding conflict with Japan, as well. Exactly why? Well, some in CIA thought that China lusted after the mineral riches in eastern Siberia— this was suggested by intercepts and other access to the electronic mail of the Japanese industrialists who’d twisted their nation’s path into a not-quite-open clash with America. They’d referred to Siberia as the “Northern Resource Area,” harkening back to when an earlier generation of Japanese strategists had called South Asia the “Southern Resource Area.” That had been part of another conflict, one known to history as the Second World War. In any case, the complicity of the PRC with America’s enemies had merited a countermove, Ryan and Adler had agreed, and besides, the Republic of China on Taiwan was a democracy, with government officials elected by the people of that nation island— and that was something America was supposed to respect.
“You know, it would be better if they started working their navy and threatening Taiwan. We are in a better position to forestall that than—”
“You really think so?” SecTreas asked, cutting his President off.
“The Russians do,” Jack confirmed.
“Then why are the Russians selling the Chinese so much hardware?” Winston demanded. “That doesn’t make sense!”
“George, there is no rule demanding that the world has to make sense.” That was one of Ryan’s favorite aphorisms. “That’s one of the things you learn in the intelligence business. In 1938, guess who was Germany’s number one trading partner?”
SecTreas saw that sandbag coming before it struck. “France?”
“You got it.” Ryan nodded. “Then, in ’40 and ’41, they did a lot of trade with the Russians. That didn’t work out so well either, did it?”
“And everyone always told me that trade was a moderating influence,” the Secretary observed.
“Maybe it is among people, but remember that governments don’t have principles so much as interests— at least the primitive ones, the ones who haven’t figured it all out yet…”
“Like the PRC?”
It was Ryan’s turn to nod. “Yeah, George, like those little bastards in Beijing. They rule a nation of a billion people, but they do it as though they were the new coming of Caligula. Nobody ever told them that they have a positive duty to look after the interests of the people they rule— well, maybe that’s not true,” Ryan allowed, feeling a little generous. “They have this big, perfect theoretical model, promulgated by Karl Marx, refined by Lenin, then applied in their country by a pudgy sexual pervert named Mao.”
“Oh? Pervert?”
“Yeah.” Ryan looked up. “We had the data over at Langley. Mao liked virgins, the younger the better. Maybe he liked to see the fear in their cute little virginal eyes— that’s what one of our pshrink consultants thought, kinda like rape, not so much sex as power. Well, I guess it could have been worse— at least they were girls,” Jack observed rather dryly, “and their culture is historically a little more liberal than ours on that sort of thing.” A shake of the head. “You should see the briefs I get whenever a major foreign dignitary comes over, the stuff we know about their personal habits.”
A chuckle: “Do I really want to know?”
A grimace: “Probably not. Sometimes I wish they didn’t give me the stuff. You sit them down right here in the office, and they’re charming and businesslike, and you can spend the whole fucking meeting looking for horns and hooves.” That could be a distraction, of course, but it was more generally thought that as in playing poker for high stakes, the more you knew about the guy on the other side of the table, the better, even if it might make you want to throw up during the welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn. But that was the business of being President, Ryan reminded himself. And people actually fought like tigers to get there. And would again, when he left, POTUS reminded himself. And so, Jack, is it your job to protect your country from the kind of rat who lusts to be where all the really good cheese is stored? Ryan shook his head again. So many doubts. It wasn’t so much that they never went away. They just kept getting bigger all the time. How strange that he understood and could recount every small step that had led him to this office, and yet he still asked himself several times every hour how the hell he’d come to be in this place… and how the hell he’d ever get out. Well, he had no excuses at all this time. He’d actually run for election to the Presidency. If you could call it that— Arnie van Damm didn’t, as a matter of fact— which you could, since he’d fulfilled the constitutional requirements, a fact on which just about every legal scholar in the nation had agreed, and talked about on every major news network ad nauseam. Well, Jack reminded himself, I wasn’t watching much TV back then, was I? But it all really came down to one thing: The people you dealt with as President were very often people whom you would never willingly invite into your home, and it had nothing to do with any lack of manners or personal charm, which, perversely, they usually displayed in abundance. One of the things Arnie had told Jack early on was that the main requirement to enter the political profession was nothing more nor less than the ability to be pleasant to people whom you despised, and then to do business with them as if they were bosom friends.
“So, what do we know about our heathen Chinese friends?” Winston asked. “The current ones, that is.”
“Not much. We’re working on that. The Agency has a long way to go, though we are started on the road. We still get intercepts. Their phone system is leaky, and they use their cell phones too much without encrypting them. Some of them are men of commendable vigor, George, but nothing too terribly scandalous that we know about. Quite a few of them have secretaries who are very close to their bosses.”
The Secretary of the Treasury managed a chuckle. “Well, a lot of that going around, and not just in Beijing.”
“Even on Wall Street?” Jack inquired, with a theatrically raised eyebrow.
“I can’t say for sure, sir, but I have heard the occasional rumor.” Winston grinned at the diversion.
And even right here in this room, Ryan reminded himself. They’d changed the rug long since, of course, and all the furniture, except for the Presidential desk. One of the problems associated with holding this job was the baggage piled on your back by previous officeholders. They said the public had a short memory, but that wasn’t true, was it? Not when you heard the whispers, followed by chuckles, and accompanied by knowing looks and the occasional gesture that made you feel dirty to be the subject of the chuckles. And all you could do about it was to live your life as best you could, but even then the best you could hope for was for people to think you were smart enough not to get caught, because they all did it, right? One of the problems with living in a free country was that anyone outside this palace/prison could think and say whatever he wished. And Ryan didn’t even have the right that any other citizen might have to punch out whatever twit said something about his character that the twit was unwilling to back up. It hardly seemed fair, but as a practical matter, it would force Ryan to visit a lot of corner bars, and break a lot of knuckles, to little gain. And sending sworn cops or armed Marines out to handle matters wasn’t exactly a proper use of Presidential power, was it?