“Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “If it came to a showdown, the Philippines appear to have the best claim on the islands, and we would back them up. We’ve shed blood together in the past, and that counts. Go on.”
“So, John Chinaman is short of oil, and he may not have the cash to pay for it, especially if our trade with them goes down the toilet. They need our dollars. The yuan isn’t very strong anyway. International trading is also done in dollars, and as I just told you, sir, they’ve spent most of them.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Sir, the PRC is just about bankrupt. In a month or so, they’re going to find that out, and it’s going to be a bit of a shock for them.”
“When did we find this out?”
“That’s my doing, Jack,” the Secretary of the Treasury said. “I called up these documents earlier today, and then I had Mark go over them. He’s our best man for economic modeling, even whacked out with jet lag.”
“So, we can squeeze them on this?”
“That’s one option.”
“What if these demonstrations take hold?”
Gant and Winston shrugged simultaneously. “That’s where psychology enters into the equation,” said Winston. “We can predict it to some extent on Wall Street—that’s how I made most of my money—but psychoanalyzing a country is beyond my ken. That’s your job, pal. I just run your accounting office across the street.”
“I need more than that, George.”
Another shrug. “If the average citizen boycotts Chinese goods, and/or if American companies who do business over there start trimming their sails—”
“That’s damned likely,” Gant interjected. “This has got to have a lot of CEOs shitting their pants.”
“Well, if that happens, the Chinese get one in the guts, and it’s going to hurt, big time,” TRADER concluded.
And how will they react to that? Ryan wondered. He punched his phone button. “Ellen, I need one.” His secretary appeared in a flash and handed him a cigarette. Ryan lit it and thanked her with a smile and a nod.
“Have you talked this one over with State yet?”
A shake of the head. “No, wanted to show it to you first.”
“Hmm. Mark, what did you make of the negotiations?”
“They’re the most arrogant sons of bitches I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve met all sorts of big shots in my time, movers and shakers, but even the worst of them know when they need my money to do business, and when they know that, their manners get better. When you shoot a gun, you try to make sure you don’t have it aimed at your own dick.”
That made Ryan laugh, while Arnie cringed. You weren’t supposed to talk that way to the President of the United States, but some of these people knew that you could talk that way to John Patrick Ryan, the man.
“By the way, along those lines, I liked what you told that Chinese diplomat.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Their dicks aren’t big enough to get in a pissing contest with us. Nice turn of phrase, if not exactly diplomatic.”
“How did you know that?” Gant asked, the surprise showing on his face. “I never repeated that to anybody, not even to that jerk Rutledge.”
“Oh, we have ways,” Jack answered, suddenly realizing that he’d revealed something from a compartment named SORGE. Oops.
“Sounds like something you say at the New York Athletic Club,” SecTreas observed. “But only if you’re four feet or so away from the guy.”
“But it appears it’s true. At least in monetary terms. So, we have a gun we can point at their heads?”
“Yes, sir, we sure do,” Gant answered. “It might take them a month to figure it out, but they won’t be able to run away from it for very long.”
“Okay, make sure State and the Agency find this out. And, oh, tell CIA that they’re supposed to get this stuff to me first. Intelligence estimates are their job.”
“They have an economics unit, but they’re not all that good,” Gant told the others. “No surprise. The smart people in this area work The Street, or maybe academia. You can make more money at Harvard Business School than you can in government service.”
“And talent goes where the money is,” Jack agreed. Junior partners at medium-sized law firms made more than the President, which sometimes explained the sort of people who ended up here. Public service was supposed to be a sacrifice. It was for him—Ryan had proven his ability to make money in the trading business, but for him service to his country had been learned from his father, and at Quantico, long before he’d been seduced into the Central Intelligence Agency and then later tricked into the Oval Office. And once here, you couldn’t run away from it. At least, not and keep your manhood. That was always the trap. Robert Edward Lee had called duty the most sublime of words. And he would have known, Ryan thought. Lee had felt himself trapped into fighting for what was at best a soiled cause because of his perceived duty to his place of birth, and therefore many would curse his name for all eternity, despite his qualities as a man and a soldier. So, Jack, he asked himself, in your case, where do talent and duty and right and wrong and all that other stuff lie? What the hell are you supposed to do now? He was supposed to know. All those people outside the White House’s campuslike grounds expected him to know all the time where the right thing was, right for the country, right for the world, right for every working man, woman, and innocent little kid playing T-ball. Yeah, the President thought, sure. You’re anointed by the wisdom fairy when you walk in here every day, or kissed on the ear by the muse, or maybe Washington and Lincoln whisper to you in your dreams at night. He sometimes had trouble picking his tie in the morning, especially if Cathy wasn’t around to be his fashion adviser. But he was supposed to know what to do with taxes, defense, and Social Security—why? Because it was his job to know. Because he happened to live in government housing at One Thousand six Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue and had the Secret goddamned Service protect him everywhere he went. At the Basic School at Quantico, the officers instructing newly commissioned Marine second lieutenants had told them about the loneliness of command. The difference between that and what he had here was like the difference between a fucking firecracker and a nuclear weapon. This kind of situation had started wars in the past. That wouldn’t happen now, of course, but it had once. It was a sobering thought. Ryan took a last puff on his fifth smoke of the day and killed it in the brown glass ashtray he kept hidden in a desk drawer.
“Thanks for bringing me this. Talk it over with State and CIA,” he told them again. “I want a SNIE on this, and I want it soon.”
“Right,” George Winston said, standing for the underground walk back to his building across the street.
“Mr. Gant,” Jack added. “Get some sleep. You look like hell.”
“I’m allowed to sleep in this job?” telescope asked.
“Sure you are, just like I am,” POTUS told him with a lopsided smile. When they left, he looked at Arnie: “Talk to me.”
“Speak to Adler, and have him talk to Hitch and Rutledge, which you ought to do, too,” Arnie advised.
Ryan nodded. “Okay, tell Scott what I need, and that I need it fast.”
Good news,” Professor North told her, as she came back into the room.
Andrea Price-O’Day was in Baltimore, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, seeing Dr. Madge North, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“Really?”
“Really,” Dr. North assured her with a smile. “You’re pregnant.”
Before anything else could happen, Inspector Patrick O’Day leapt to his feet and lifted his wife in his arms for a powerful kiss and a rib-cracking hug.
“Oh,” Andrea said almost to herself. “I thought I was too old.”
“The record is well into the fifties, and you’re well short of that,” Dr. North said, smiling. It was the first time in her professional career that she’d given this news to two people carrying guns. “Any problems?” Pat asked.
“Well, Andrea, you are prime-ep. You’re over forty and this is your first pregnancy, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She knew what was coming, but she didn’t invite it by speaking the word.
“That means that there is an increased likelihood of Down’s syndrome. We can establish that with an amniocentesis. I’d recommend we do that soon,”
“How soon?”
“I can do it today if you wish.”
“And if the test is …?”
“Positive? Well, then you two have to decide if you want to bring a Down’s child into the world. Some people do, but others don’t. It’s your decision to make, not mine,” Madge North told them. She’d done abortions in her career, but like most obstetricians, she much preferred to deliver babies.