“Yeah, Ellen?” Ryan said when the buzzer went off. “The AG and the FBI Director want to come over, on something important, they said. You have an opening in forty minutes.”
“Fair enough.” Ryan didn’t wonder what it was about. He’d find out quickly enough. When he realized what he’d just thought, he cursed the Presidency once more. He was becoming jaded. In this job?
“What the hell?” Ed Foley observed. “Seems to be solid information, too,” Murray told the DCI.
“What else do you know?”
“The fax just came in, only two pages, and nothing much more than what I just told you, but I’ll send it over to you. I’ve told Reilly to offer total cooperation. Anything to offer from your side?” Dan asked.
“Nothing comes to mind. This is all news to us, Dan. My congrats to your man Reilly for turning it.” Foley was an information whore, after all. He’d take from anybody.
. “Good kid. His father was a good agent, too.” Murray knew better than to be smug about it, and Foley didn’t deserve the abuse. Things like this were not, actually, within CIA’s purview, and not likely to be tumbled to by one of their operations.
For his part, Foley wondered if he’d have to tell Murray about SORGE. If this was for real, it had to be known at the very highest levels of the Chinese government. It wasn’t a free-lance operation by their Moscow station. People got shot for fucking around at this level, and such an operation would not even occur to communist bureaucrats, who were not the most inventive people in the world.
“Anyway, I’m taking Pat Martin over with me. He knows espionage operations from the defensive side, and I figure I’ll need the backup.”
“Okay, thanks. Let me go over the fax and I’ll be back to you later today.”
He could hear the nod at the other end. “Right, Ed. See ya.”
His secretary came in thirty seconds later with a fax in a folder. Ed Foley checked the cover sheet and called his wife in from her office.
C H A P T E R – 35
Breaking News
“Shit,” Ryan observed quietly when Murray handed him the fax from Moscow: “Shit!” he added on further reflection. “Is this for real?”
“We think so, Jack,” the FBI Director confirmed. He and Ryan went back more than ten years, and so he was able to use the first name. He filled in a few facts. “Our boy Reilly, he’s an OC expert, that’s why we sent him over there, but he has FCI experience, too, also in the New York office. He’s good, Jack,” Murray assured his President. “He’s going places. He’s established a very good working relationship with the local cops—helped them out on some investigations, held their hands, like we do with local cops over here, y’know?”
“And?”
“And this looks gold-plated, Jack. Somebody tried to put a hit on Sergey Nikolay’ch, and it looks as though it was an agency of the Chinese government.”
“Jesus. Rogue operation?”
“If so, we’ll find out when some Chinese minister dies of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage—induced by a bullet in the back of the head,” Murray told the President.
“Has Ed Foley seen this yet?”
“I called it in, and sent the fax over. So, yeah, he’s seen it.”
“Pat?” Ryan turned to the Attorney General, the smartest lawyer Ryan had yet met, and that included all of his Supreme Court appointees.
“Mr. President, this is a stunning revelation, again, if we assume it’s true, and not some sort of false-flag provocation, or a play by the Russians to make something happen—problem is, I can’t see the rationale for such a thing. We appear to be faced with something that’s too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false as well. I’ve worked foreign counter intelligence operations for a long time. I’ve never seen nothing like this before. We’ve always had an understanding with the Russians that they wouldn’t hit anybody in Washington, and we wouldn’t hit anybody in Moscow, and to the best of my knowledge that agreement was never violated by either side. But this thing here. If it’s real, it’s tantamount to an act of war. That doesn’t seem like a very prudent thing for the Chinese to do either, does it?”
POTUS looked up from the fax. “It says here that your guy Reilly turned the connection with the Chinese . . . ?”
“Keep reading,” Murray told him. “He was there during a surveillance and just kinda volunteered his services, and—bingo.”
“But can the Chinese really be this crazy . . .” Ryan’s voice trailed off. “This isn’t the Russians messing with our heads?” he asked.
“What would be the rationale behind that?” Martin asked. “If there is one, I don’t see it.”
“Guys, nobody is this crazy!” POTUS nearly exploded. It was penetrating all the way into his mind now. The world wasn’t rational yet.
“Again, sir, that’s something you’re better equipped to evaluate than we are,” Martin observed. It had the effect of calming Jack down a few notches.
“All the time I spent at Langley, I saw a lot of strange material, but this one really takes the prize.”
“What do we know about the Chinese?” Murray asked, expecting to hear a reply along the lines of jack shit, because the Bureau had not experienced conspicuous success in its efforts to penetrate Chinese intelligence operations in America, and figured that the Agency had the same problem and for much the same reason—Americans of Chinese ethnicity weren’t thick in government service. But instead he saw that President Ryan instantly adopted a guarded look and said nothing. Murray had interviewed thousands of people during his career and along the way had picked up the ability to read minds a little bit. He read Ryan’s right then and wondered about what he saw there.
“Not enough, Dan. Not enough,” Ryan replied tardily. His mind was still churning over this report. Pat Martin had put it right. It was too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false. He needed the Foleys to go over this for him, and it was probably time to get Professor Weaver down from Brown University, assuming Ed and Mary Pat wouldn’t throw a complete hissy-fit over letting him into both SORGE and this FBI bombshell. SWORDSMAN wasn’t sure of much right now, but he was sure that he needed to figure this stuff out, and do it damned fast. American relations with China had just gone down the shitter, and now he had information to suggest they were making a direct attack on the Russian government. Ryan looked up at his guests. “Thanks for this, guys. If you have anything else to tell me, let me know quick as you can. I have to ponder this one.”
“Yeah, I believe it, Jack. I’ve told Reilly to offer all the assistance he can and report back. They know he’s doing that, of course. So, your pal Golovko wants you to know this one. How you handle that one’s up to you, I suppose.”
“Yeah, I get all the simple calls.” Jack managed a smile. The worst part was the inability to talk things over with people in a timely way. Things like this weren’t for the telephone. You wanted to see a guy’s face and body language when you picked his brain—her brain, in MP’s case—on a topic like this one. He hoped George Weaver was as smart as everyone said. Right now he needed a witch.
The new security pass was entirely different from his old SDI one, and he was heading for a different Pentagon office. This was the Navy section of the Pentagon. You could tell by all the blue suits and serious looks. Each of the uniformed services had a different corporate mentality. In the U.S. Army, everyone was from Georgia. In the Air Force, they were all from southern California. In the Navy, they all seemed to be swamp Yankees, and so it was here in the Aegis Program Office.
Gregory had spent most of the morning with a couple of serious commander-rank officers who seemed smart enough, though both were praying aloud to get the hell back on a ship and out to sea, just as Army officers always wanted to get back out in the field where there was mud to put on your boots and you had to dig a hole to piss in—but that’s where the soldiers were, and any officer worth his salt wanted to be where the soldiers were. For sailors, Gregory imagined, it was salt water and fish, and probably better food than the MREs inflicted on the guys in BDUs.
But from his conversations with the squids, he’d learned much of what he’d already known. The Aegis radar/missile system had been developed to deal with the Russian airplane and cruise-missile threat to the Navy’s aircraft carriers. It entailed a superb phased-array radar called the SPY and a fair-to-middlin’ surface-to-air missile originally called the Standard Missile, because, Gregory imagined, it was the only one the Navy had. The Standard had evolved from the SM-1 to the SM-2, actually called the SM-2-MR because it was a “medium-range” missile instead of an ER, or extended-range, one, which had a booster stage to kick it out of the ships’ launch cells a little faster and farther. There were about two hundred of the ER versions sitting in various storage sheds for the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, because full production had never been approved—because, somebody thought, the SM-2-ER might violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had, however, been signed with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which country, of course, no longer existed. But after the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the Navy had looked at using the Standard Missile and Aegis system that shot it off against theater-missile threats like the Iraqi Scud. During that war, Aegis ships had actually been deployed into Saudi and other Gulf ports to protect them against the ballistic inbounds, but no missiles had actually been aimed that way, and so the system had never been combat-tested. Instead, Aegis ships periodically sailed out to Kwajalein Atoll, where their theater-missile capabilities were tested against ballistic target drones, and where, most of the time, they worked. But that wasn’t quite the same, Gregory saw. An ICBM reentry vehicle had a maximum speed of about seventeen thousand miles per hour, or twenty-five thousand feet per second, which was almost ten times the speed of a rifle bullet.