He sat at the bar of the medium-sized restaurant— different from the last one— smoking a cigarette, which was new for the CIA officer. He wasn’t coughing, though his first two had made the room seem to spin around some. Carbon monoxide poisoning, he thought. Smoking reduced the oxygen supply to your brain, and was bad for you in so many ways. But it also made waiting a lot easier. He’d bought a Bic lighter, blue, with a facsimile of the PRC flag on it, so that it appeared like their banner was waving in a clear sky. Yeah, he thought, sure, and here I am wondering if my girl will show up, and she’s already— he checked his watch— nine minutes late. Nomuri waved to the bartender and ordered another Scotch. It was a Japanese brand, drinkable, not overly expensive, and when you got down to it, booze was booze, wasn’t it?
Are you coming, Ming? the case officer’s mind asked the air around him. Like most bars around the world, this one had a mirror behind the glasses and bottles, and the California native examined his face quizzically, pretending it was someone else’s, wondering what someone else might see in it. Nervousness? Suspicion? Fear? Loneliness? Lust? There could be someone making that evaluation right now, some MSS counterintelligence officer doing his stakeout, careful not to look toward Nomuri too much of the time. Maybe using the mirror as an indirect surveillance tool. More likely sitting at an angle so that his posture naturally pointed his eyes to the American, whereas Nomuri would have to turn his head to see him, giving the surveillance agent a chance to avert his glance, probably toward his partner— you tended to do this with teams rather than an individual— whose head would be on the same line of sight, so that he could survey his target without seeming to do so directly. Every nation in the world had police or security forces trained in this, and the methods were the same everywhere because human nature was the same everywhere, whether your target was a drug dealer or a spook. That’s just the way it was, Nomuri said to himself, checking his watch again. Eleven minutes late. It’s cool, buddy, women are always late. They do it because they can’t tell time, or it takes them fucking forever to get dressed and do their makeup, or because they don’t remember to wear a watch… or most likely of all, because it gives them an advantage. Such behavior, perhaps, made women appear more valuable to men— after all, men waited for them, right? Not the other way around. It put a premium on their affection, which if not waited for, might not appear one day, and that gave men something to fear.
Chester Nomuri, behavioral anthropologist, he snorted to himself, looking back up in the mirror.
For Christ’s sake, dude, maybe she’s working late, or the traffic is heavy, or some friend at the office needed her to come over and help her move the goddamned furniture. Seventeen minutes. He fished out another Kool and lit it from his ChiComm lighter. The East is Red, he thought. And maybe this was the last country in the world that really was red… wouldn’t Mao be proud…?
Where are you?
Well, whoever from the MSS might be watching, if he had any doubts about what Nomuri was doing, they’d damned sure know he was waiting for a woman, and if anything his stress would look like that of a guy bewitched by the woman in question. And spooks weren’t supposed to be bewitched, were they?
What are you worrying about that for, asshole, just because you might notget laid tonight?
Twenty-three minutes late. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. If this was a mechanism women used to control men, then it was an effective one.
James Bond never had these problems, the intelligence officer thought. Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang was always master of his women— and if anyone needed proof that Bond was a character of fiction, that was sure as hell it!
As it turned out, Nomuri was so entranced with his thoughts that he didn’t see Ming come in. He felt a gentle tap on his back, and turned rapidly to see—
—she wore the radiant smile, pleased with herself at having surprised him, the beaming dark eyes that crinkled at the corners with the pleasure of the moment.
“I am so sorry to be late,” she said rapidly. “Fang needed me to transcribe some things, and he kept me in the office late.”
“I must talk to this old man,” Nomuri said archly, hauling himself erect on the barstool.
“He is, as you say, an old man, and he does not listen very well. Perhaps age has impeded his hearing.”
No, the old fucker probably doesn’t want to listen, Nomuri didn’t say. Fang was probably like bosses everywhere, well past the age when he looked for the ideas of others.
“So, what do you want for dinner?” Nomuri asked, and got the best possible answer.
“I’m not hungry.” With sparkles in the dark eyes to affirm what she did want. Nomuri tossed off the last of his drink, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked out with her.
So?” Ryan asked.
“So, this is not good news,” Arnie van Damm replied.
“I suppose that depends on your point of view. When will they hear arguments?”
“Less than two months, and that’s a message, too, Jack. Those good ‘strict-constructionist’ justices you appointed are going to hear this case, and if I had to bet, I’d wager they’re hot to overturn Roe. ”
Jack settled back in his chair and smiled up at his Chief of Staff. “Why is that bad, Arnie?”
“Jack, it’s bad because a lot of the citizens out there like to have the option to choose between abortion or not. That’s why. ‘Pro choice’ is what they call it, and so far it’s the law.”
“Maybe that’ll change,” the President said hopefully, looking back down at his schedule. The Secretary of the Interior was coming in to talk about the national parks.
“That is not something to look forward to, damn it! And it’ll be blamed on you!”
“Okay, if and when that happens, I will point out that I am not a justice of the United States Supreme Court, and stay away from it entirely. If they decide the way I— and I guess you— think they will, abortion becomes a legislative matter, and the legislature of the ‘several states,’ as the Constitution terms them, will meet and decide for themselves if the voters want to be able to kill their unborn babies or not— but, Arnie, I’ve got four kids, remember. I was there to see them all born, and be damned if you are going to tell me that abortion is okay!” The fourth little Ryan, Kyle Daniel, had been born during Ryan’s Presidency, and the cameras had been there to record his face coming out of the delivery room, allowing the entire nation— and the world, for that matter— to share the experience. It had bumped Ryan’s approval rating a full fifteen points, pleasing Arnie very greatly at the time.
“God damn it, Jack, I never said that, did I?” van Damm demanded. “But you and I do objectionable things every so often, don’t we? And we don’t deny other people the right to do such things, too, do we? Smoke, for example?” he added, just to twist Ryan’s tail a little.
“Arnie, you use words as cleverly as any man I know, and that was a good play. I’ll give you that. But there’s a qualitative difference between lighting up a goddamned cigarette and killing a living human being.”
“True, if a fetus is a living human being, which is something for theologians, not politicians.”
“Arnie, it’s like this. The pro-abortion crowd says that whether or not a fetus is human is beside the point because it’s inside a woman’s body, and therefore her property to do with as she pleases. Fine. It was the law in the Roman Republic and Empire that a wife and children were property of the paterfamilias, the head of the family, and he could kill them anytime he pleased. You think we should go back to that?”
“Obviously not, since it empowers men and dis-empowers women, and we don’t do things like that anymore.”
“So, you’ve taken a moral issue and degraded it to what’s good politically and what’s bad politically. Well, Arnie, I am not here to do that. Even the President is allowed to have some moral principles, or am I supposed to check my ideas of right and wrong outside the door when I show up for work in the morning?”
“But he’s not allowed to impose it on others. Moral principles are things you keep on the inside, for yourself.”
“What we call law is nothing more or less than the public’s collective belief, their conviction of what right and wrong is. Whether it’s about murder, kidnapping, or running a red light, society decides what the rules are. In a democratic republic, we do that through the legislature by electing people who share our views. That’s how laws happen. We also set up a constitution, the supreme law of the land, which is very carefully considered because it decides what the other laws may and may not do, and therefore it protects us against our transitory passions. The job of the judiciary is to interpret the laws, or in this case the constitutional principles embodied in those laws, as they apply to reality. In Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court went too far. It legislated; it changed the law in a way not anticipated by the drafters, and that was an error. All a reversal of Roe will do is return the abortion issue to the state legislatures, where it belongs.”