Ryan shook his head. “I can’t yet. I can’t let them know that we know. Sergey Nikolay’ch would start wondering how, and he’d probably come up with SIGINT, and that’s a method of gathering information that we try to keep covert.” Probably a waste of time, Ryan knew, but the game had rules, and everyone played by those rules. Golovko could guess at signals intelligence, but he’d never quite know. I’ll probably never stop being a spook, the President admitted to himself. Keeping and guarding secrets was one of the things that came so easily to him— a little too easily, Arnie van Damm often warned. A modern democratic government was supposed to be more open, like a torn curtain on the bedroom window that allowed people to look in whenever they wished. That was an idea Ryan had never grown to appreciate. He was the one who decided what people were allowed to know and when they’d know it. It was a point of view he followed even when he knew it to be wrong, for no other reason than it was how he’d learned government service at the knee of an admiral named James Greer. Old habits were hard to break.
“I’ll call Sam Sherman at Atlantic Richfield,” Winston suggested. “If he breaks it to me, then it’s in the open, or at least open enough.”
“Can we trust him?”
Winston nodded. “Sam plays by the rules. We can’t ask him to screw over his own board, but he knows what flag to salute, Jack.”
“Okay, George, a discreet inquiry.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, sir.”
“God damn it, George!”
“Jack, when the hell are you going to learn to relax in this fucking job?” SecTreas asked POTUS.
“The day I move out of this goddamned museum and become a free man again,” Ryan replied with a submissive nod. Winston was right. He had to learn to stay on a more even keel in the office of President. In addition to not being helpful to himself, it wasn’t especially helpful to the country for him to be jumpy with the folderol of office-holding. That also made it easy for people like the Secretary of the Treasury to twist his tail, and George Winston was one of the people who enjoyed doing that… maybe because it ultimately helped him relax, Ryan thought. Backwards English on the ball or something. “George, why do you think I should relax in this job?”
“Jack, because you’re here to be effective, and being tight all the time does not make you more effective. Kick back, guy, maybe even learn to like some aspect of it.”
“Like what?”
“Hell.” Winston shrugged, and then nodded to the secretaries’ office. “Lots of cute young interns out there.”
“There’s been enough of that,” Ryan said crossly. Then he did manage to relax and smile a little. “Besides, I’m married to a SURGEON. Make that little mistake and I could wake up without something important.”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s bad for the country to have the President’s dick cut off, eh? People might not respect us anymore.” Winston stood. “Gotta go back across the street and look at some economic models.”
“Economy looking good?” POTUS asked.
“No complaints from me or Mark Gant. Just so the Fed Chairman leaves the discount rate alone, but I expect he will. Inflation is pretty flat, and there’s no upward pressure anywhere that I see happening.”
“Ben?”
Goodley looked through his notes, as though he’d forgotten something. “Oh, yeah. Would you believe, the Vatican is appointing a Papal Nuncio to the PRC?”
“Oh? What’s that mean, exactly?” Winston asked, stopping halfway to the door.
“The Nuncio is essentially an ambassador. People forget that the Vatican is a nation-state in its own right and has the usual trappings of statehood. That includes diplomatic representation. A nuncio is just that, an ambassador— and a spook,” Ryan added.
“Really?” Winston asked.
“George, the Vatican has the world’s oldest intelligence service. Goes back centuries. And, yeah, the Nuncio gathers information and forwards it to the home office, because people talk to him— who better to talk to than a priest, right? They’re good enough at gathering information that we’ve made the occasional effort to crack their communications. Back in the ’30s, a senior cryppie at the State Department resigned over it,” Ryan informed his SecTreas, reverting back to history teacher.
“We still do that?” Winston directed this question at Goodley, the President’s National Security Adviser. Goodley looked first to Ryan, and got a nod. “Yes, sir. Fort Meade still takes a look at their messages. Their ciphers are a little old-fashioned, and we can brute-force them.”
“And ours?”
“The current standard is called TAPDANCE. It’s totally random, and therefore it’s theoretically unbreakable— unless somebody screws up and reuses a segment of it, but with approximately six hundred forty-seven million transpositions on every daily CD-ROM diskette, that’s not very likely.”
“What about the phone systems?”
“The STU?” Goodley asked, getting a nod. “That’s computer-based, with a two-fifty-six-kay computer-generated encryption key. It can be broken, but you need a computer, the right algorithm, and a couple of weeks at least, and the shorter the message the harder it is to crack it, instead of the other way around. The guys at Fort Meade are playing with using quantum-physics equations to crack ciphers, and evidently they’re having some success, but if you want an explanation, you’re going to have to ask somebody else. I didn’t even pretend to listen,” Goodley admitted. “It’s so far over my head I can’t even see the bottom of it.
“Yeah, get your friend Gant involved,” Ryan suggested. “He seems to know ‘puters pretty well. As a matter of fact, you might want to get him briefed in on these developments in Russia. Maybe he can model the effects they’ll have on the Russian economy.”
“Only if everyone plays by the rules,” Winston said in warning. “If they follow the corruption that’s been gutting their economy the last few years, you just cant predict anything, Jack.”
We cannot let it happen again, Comrade President,” Sergey Nikolay’ch said over a half-empty glass of vodka. This was still the best in the world, if the only such Russian product of which he could make that boast. That thought generated an angry frown at what his nation had become.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch, what do you propose?”
“Comrade President, these two discoveries are a gift from Heaven itself. If we utilize them properly, we can transform our country— or at least make a proper beginning at doing that. The earnings in hard currencies will be colossal, and we can use that money to rebuild so much of our infrastructure that we can transform our economy. If, that is”— he held up a cautionary finger— “if we don’t allow a thieving few to take the money and bank it in Geneva or Liechtenstein. It does us no good there, Comrade President.”
Golovko didn’t add that a few people, a few well-placed individuals, would profit substantially from this. He didn’t even add that he himself would be one of them, and so would his president. It was just too much to ask any man to walk away from such an opportunity. Integrity was a virtue best found among those able to afford it, and the press be damned, the career intelligence officer thought. What had they ever done for his country or any other? All they did was expose the honest work of some and the dishonest work of others, doing little actual work themselves— and besides, they were as easily bribed as anyone else, weren’t they?
“And so, who gets the concession to exploit these resources?” the Russian president asked.
“In the case of the oil, our own exploration company, plus the American company, Atlantic Richfield. They have the most experience in producing oil in those environmental conditions anyway, and our people have much to learn from them. I would propose a fee-for-service arrangement, a generous one, but not an ownership percentage in the oil field itself. The exploration contract was along those lines, generous in absolute terms, but no share at all in the fields discovered.”
“And the gold strike?”
“Easier still. No foreigners were involved in that discovery at all. Comrade Gogol will have an interest in the discovery, of course, but he is an old man with no heirs, and, it would seem, a man of the simplest tastes. A properly heated hut and a new hunting rifle will probably make him very happy, from what these reports tell us.”
“And the value of this venture?”
“Upwards of seventy billions. And all we need do is purchase some special equipment, the best of which comes from the American company Caterpillar.”
“Is that necessary, Sergey?”
“Comrade President, the Americans are our friends, after a fashion, and it will not hurt us to remain on good terms with their President. And besides, their heavy equipment is the world’s finest.”
“Better than the Japanese?”