“Secretary of State on Three,” his secretary told him over the intercom. SecTreas grunted and picked up the phone. “Yeah, I saw it too, Scott.”
So, Yuriy Andreyevich, how did it go?” Clark asked. It had taken over a week to set up and mainly because General Kirillin had spent a few hours on the pistol range working on his technique. Now he’d just stormed into the officers’ club bar looking as though he’d taken one in the guts.
“Is he a Mafia assassin?”
Chavez had himself a good laugh at that. “General, he came to us because the Italian police wanted to get him away from the Mafia. He got in the way of a mob assassination, and the local chieftain made noises about going after him and his family. What did he get you for?”
“Fifty euros,” Kirillin nearly spat.
“You were confident going in, eh?” Clark asked. “Been there, done that.”
“Got the fuckin’ T-shirt,” Ding finished the statement with a laugh. And fifty euros was a dent even in the salary of a Russian three-star.
“Three points, in a five-hundred-point match. I scored four ninety-three!”
“Ettore only got four ninety-six?” Clark asked. “Jesus, the boy’s slowing down.” He slid a glass in front of the Russian general officer.
“He’s drinking more over here,” Chavez observed.
“That must be it.” Clark nodded. The Russian general officer was not, however, the least bit amused.
“Falcone is not human,” Kirillin said, gunning down his first shot of vodka.
“He could scare Wild Bill Hickok, and that’s a fact. And you know the worst part about it?”
“What is that, Ivan Sergeyevich?”
“He’s so goddamned humble about it, like it’s fucking normal to shoot like that. Jesus, Sam Snead was never that good with a five-iron.”
“General,” Domingo said after his second vodka of the evening. The problem with being in Russia was that you tended to pick up the local customs, and one of those was drinking. “Every man on my team is an expert shot, and by expert, I mean close to being on his country’s Olympic team, okay? Big Bird’s got us all beat, and none of us are used to losing any more’n you are. But I’ll tell you, I’m goddamned glad he’s on my team.” Just then, Falcone walked through the door. “Hey, Ettore, come on over!”
He hadn’t gotten any shorter. Ettore towered over the diminutive Chavez, and still looked like a figure from an El Greco painting. “General,” he said in greeting to Kirillin. “You shoot extremely well.”
“Not so good as you, Falcone,” the Russian responded.
The Italian cop shrugged. “I had a lucky day.”
“Sure, guy,” Clark reacted, as he handed Falcone a shot glass.
“I’ve come to like this vodka,” Falcone said on gunning it down. “But it affects my aim somewhat.”
“Yeah, Ettore.” Chavez chuckled. “The general told us you blew four points in the match.”
“You mean you have done better than this?” Kirillin demanded.
“He has,” Clark answered. “I watched him shoot a possible three weeks ago. That was five hundred points, too.”
“That was a good day,” Falcone agreed. “I had a good night’s sleep beforehand and no hangover at all.”
Clark had himself a good chuckle and turned to look around the room. Just then, another uniform entered the room and looked around. He spotted General Kirillin and walked over.
“Damn, who’s this recruiting poster?” Ding wondered aloud as he approached.
“Tovarisch General,” the man said by way of greeting.
“Anatoliy Ivan’ch,” Kirillin responded. “How are things at the Center?”
Then the guy turned. “You are John Clark?”
“That’s me,” the American confirmed. “Who are you?”
“This is Major Anatoliy Shelepin,” General Kirillin answered. “He’s chief of personal security for Sergey Golovko.”
“We know your boss.” Ding held out his hand. “Howdy. I’m Domingo Chavez.”
Handshakes were exchanged all around.
“Could we speak in a quieter place?” Shelepin asked. The four men took over a corner booth in the club. Falcone remained at the bar.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch sent you over?” the Russian general asked.
“You haven’t heard,” Major Shelepin answered. It was the way he said it that got everyone’s attention. He spoke in Russian, which Clark and Chavez understood well enough. “I want my people to train with you.”
“Haven’t heard what?” Kirillin asked.
“We found out who tried to kill the Chairman,” Shelepin announced.
“Oh, he was the target? I thought they were after the pimp,” Kirillin objected.
“You guys want to tell us what you’re talking about?” Clark asked.
“A few weeks ago, there was an assassination attempt in Dzerzhinskiy Square,” Shelepin responded, explaining what they’d thought at the time. “But now it appears they hit the wrong target.”
“Somebody tried to waste Golovko?” Domingo asked. “Damn.”
“Who was it?”
“The man who arranged it was a former KGB officer named Suvorov—so we believe, that is. He used two ex—Spetsnaz soldiers. They have both been murdered, probably to conceal their involvement, or at least to prevent them from discussing it with anyone.” Shelepin didn’t add anything else. “In any case, we have heard good things about your RAINBOW troops, and we want you to help train my protective detail.”
“It’s okay with me, so long as it’s okay with Washington.” Clark stared hard into the bodyguard’s eyes. He looked damned serious, but not very happy with the world at the moment.
“We will make the formal request tomorrow.”
“They are excellent, these RAINBOW people,” Kirillin assured him. “We’re getting along well with them. Anatoliy used to work for me, back when I was a colonel.” The tone of voice told what he thought of the younger man.
There was more to this, Clark thought. A senior Russian official didn’t just ask a former CIA officer for help with something related to his personal safety out of the clear blue. He caught Ding’s eye and saw the same thought. Suddenly both were back in the spook business.
“Okay,” John said. “I’ll call home tonight if you want.” He’d do that from the American Embassy, probably on the STU-6 in the station chief’s office.
C H A P T E R – 37
Fallout
The VC-137 landed without fanfare at Andrews Air Force Base. The base lacked a proper terminal and the attendant jetways, and so the passengers debarked on stairs grafted onto a flatbed truck. Cars waited at the bottom to take them into Washington. Mark Gant was met by two Secret Service agents who drove him at once to the Treasury Department building across the street from the White House. He’d barely gotten used to being on the ground when he found himself in the Secretary’s office.
“How’d it go?” George Winston asked.
“Interesting, to say the least,” Gant said, his mind trying to get used to the fact that his body didn’t have a clue where it was at the moment. “I thought I’d be going home to sleep it off.”
“Ryan’s invoking the Trade Recovery Act against the Chinese.”
“Oh? Well, that’s not all that much of a surprise, is it?”
“Look at this,” SecTreas commanded, handing over a recently produced printout. “This” was a report on the current cash holdings of the People’s Republic of China.
“How solid is this information?” telescope asked TRADER.
The report was an intelligence estimate in all but name. Employees within the Treasury Department routinely kept track of international monetary transactions as a means of determining the day-to-day strength of the dollar and other internationally traded currencies. That included the Chinese yuan, which had been having a slightly bad time of late.
“They’re this thin?” Gant asked. “I thought they were running short of cash, but I didn’t know it was quite this bad …”
“It surprised me, too,” SecTreas admitted. “It appears that they’ve been purchasing a lot of things on the international market lately, especially jet engines from France, and because they’re late paying for the last round, the French company has decided to take a harder line—they’re the only game in town. We won’t let GE or Pratt and Whitney bid on the order, and the Brits have similarly forbidden Rolls-Royce. That makes the French the sole source, which isn’t so bad for the French, is it? They’ve jacked up the price about fifteen percent, and they’re asking for cash up front.”
“The yuan’s going to take a hit,” Gant predicted. “They’ve been trying to cover this up, eh?”
“Yeah, and fairly successfully.”
“That’s why they were hitting us so hard on the trade deal. They saw this one coming, and they wanted a favorable announcement to bail them out. But they sure didn’t play it very smart. Damn, you have this sort of a problem, you learn to crawl a little.”
“I thought so, too. Why, do you think?”
“They’re proud, George. Very, very proud. Like a rich family that’s lost its money but not it’s social position, and tries to make up for the one with the other. But it doesn’t work. Sooner or later, people find out that you’re not paying your bills, and then the whole world comes crashing in on you. You can put it off for a while, which makes sense if you have something coming in, but if the ship don’t dock, you sink.” Gant flipped some pages, thinking: The other problem is that countries are run by politicians, people with no real understanding of money, who figure they can always maneuver their way out of whatever comes up. They’re so used to having their own way that they never really think they can’t have it that way all the time. One of the things Gant had learned working in D.C. was that politics was just as much about illusion as the motion-picture business was, which perhaps explained the affinity the two communities had for each other. But even in Hollywood you had to pay the bills, and you had to show a profit. Politicians always had the option of using T-bills to finance their accounts, and they also printed the money. Nobody expected the government to show a profit, and the board of directors was the voters, the people whom politicians conned as a way of life. It was all crazy, but that was the political game.