If cigarettes were good for anything, it was for this, Nomuri thought. His left arm was curled around Ming, his body snuggled up against her, staring at the ceiling in the lovely, relaxed, deflationary moment, and puffing gently on his Kool as an accent to the moment, feeling Ming’s breathing, and feeling very much like a man. The sky outside the windows was dark. The sun had set.
Nomuri stood, stopping first in the bathroom and then heading to the kitchenette. He returned with two wine glasses. Ming sat up in bed and took a sip from hers. For his part, Nomuri couldn’t resist reaching over to touch her. Her skin was just so smooth and inviting.
“My brain is still not working,” she said, after her third sip.
“Darling, there are times when men and women don’t need their brains.”
“Well, your sausage doesn’t need one,” she responded, reaching down to fondle it.
“Gently, girl! He’s run a long hard race!” the CIA officer warned her with an inner smile.
“Oh, so he has.” Ming bent down to deliver a gentle kiss. “And he won the race.”
“No, but he did manage to catch up with you.” Nomuri lit another cigarette. Then he was surprised to see Ming reach into her purse and pull out one of her own. She lit it with grace and took a long puff, finally letting the smoke out her nose.
“Dragon girl!” Nomuri announced with a laugh. “Do flames come next? I didn’t know you smoked.”
“At the office, everyone does.”
“Even the minister?”
Another laugh: “Especially the minister.”
“Someone should tell him that smoking is dangerous to the health, and not good for the yang.”
“A smoked sausage is not a firm sausage,” Ming said, with a laugh. “Maybe that’s his problem, then.”
“You do not like your minister?”
“He is an old man with what he thinks is a young penis. He uses the office staff as his personal bordello. Well, it could be worse,” Ming admitted. “It’s been a long time since I was his favorite. Lately he’s fixed on Chai, and she is engaged, and Fang knows it. That is not a civilized act on the part of a senior minister.”
“The laws do not apply to him?”
She snorted with borderline disgust. “The laws apply to none of them. Nomuri-san, these are government ministers. They are the law in this country, and they care little for what others think of them or their habits— few enough find out in any case. They are corrupt on a scale that shames the emperors of old, and they say they are the guardians of the common people, the peasants and workers they claim to love as their own children. Well, I suppose sometimes I am one of those peasants, eh?”
“And I thought you liked your minister,” Nomuri responded, goading her on. “So, what does he talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
“The late work that kept you away from here,” he answered, waving at the bedclothes with a smile.
“Oh, talk between the ministers. He keeps an extensive personal political diary— in case the president might want to oust him, that is his defense, you see, something he could present to his peers. Fang doesn’t want to lose his official residence and all the privileges that come along with it. So, he keeps records of all he does, and I am his secretary, and I transcribe all his notes. Sometimes it can take forever.”
“On your computer, of course.”
“Yes, the new one, in perfect Mandarin ideographs now that you’ve given us the new software.”
“You keep it on your computer?”
“On the hard drive, yes. Oh, it’s encrypted,” she assured him. “We learned that from the Americans, when we broke into their weapons records. It’s called a robust encryption system, whatever that means. I select the file I wish to open and type in the decryption key, and the file opens. Do you want to know what key I use?” She giggled. “YELLOW SUBMARINE. In English because of the keyboard— it was before your new software— and it’s from a Beatles song I heard on the radio once. ‘We all live in a yellow submarine,’ something like that. I listened to the radio a lot back then, when I was first studying English. I spent half an hour looking up submarines in the dictionary and then the encyclopedia, trying to find out why a ship was painted yellow. Ahh!” Her hands flew up in the air.
The encryption key! Nomuri tried to hide his excitement. “Well, it must be a lot of folders. You’ve been his secretary for a lot of time,” he said casually.
“Over four hundred documents. I keep them by number instead of making up new names for them. Today was number four hundred eighty-seven, as a matter of fact.”
Holy shit, Nomuri thought, four hundred eighty-seven computer documents of inside-the-Politburo conversations. This makes a gold mine look like a toxic waste dump.
“What exactly do they talk about? I’ve never met a senior government functionary,” Nomuri explained.
“Everything!” she answered, finishing her own cigarette. “Who’s got ideas in the Politburo, who wants to be nice to America, who wants to hurt them— everything you can imagine. Defense policy. Economic policy. The big one lately is how to deal with Hong Kong. ‘One Country, Two Systems’ has developed problems with some industrialists around Beijing and Shanghai. They feel they are treated with less respect than they deserve— less than they get in Hong Kong, that is— and they are unhappy about it. Fang’s one of the people trying to find a compromise to make them happy. He might. He’s very clever at such things.”
“It must be fascinating to see such information— to really know what’s going on in your country!” Nomuri gushed. “In Japan, we never know what the zaibatsu and the MITI people are doing— ruining the economy, for the most part, the fools. But because nobody knows, no action is ever taken to fix things. Is it the same here?”
“Of course!” She lit another smoke, getting into the conversation, and hardly noticing that it wasn’t about love anymore. “Once I studied my Marx and my Mao. Once I believed in it all. Once I even trusted the senior ministers to be men of honor and integrity, and totally believed the things they taught me in school. But then I saw how the army has its own industrial empire, and that empire keeps the generals rich and fat and happy. And I saw how the ministers use women, and how they furnish their apartments. They’ve become the new emperors. They have too much power. Perhaps a woman could use such power without being corrupted, but not a man.”
Feminism’s made it over here, too? Nomuri reflected. Maybe she was too young to remember Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who could have given corruption lessons to the court of Byzantium.
“Well, that is not a problem for people like us. And at least you get to see such things, and at least you get to know it. That makes you even more unique, Ming-chan,” Nomuri suggested, tracing the palm of his hand over her left nipple. She shivered right on command..
“You think so?”
“Of course.” A kiss this time, a nice lingering one, while his hand stroked her body. He was so close. She had told him of all the information she had— she’d even given him the fucking encryption key! So her ‘puter was wired into the phone system— that meant he could call in to it, and with the right software he could go snooping around her hard drive, and with the encryption key he could lift things right off, and cross-load them right to Mary Pat’s desk. Damn, first I get to fuck a Chinese citizen, and then I can fuck their whole country. It didn’t get much better than this, the field spook decided, with a smile at the ceiling.
C H A P T E R – 13
Penetration Agent
Well, he left the prurient parts out this time, Mary Pat saw when she lit up her computer in the morning. Operation SORGE was moving right along.
Whoever this Ming girl was, she talked a little too much. Odd. Hadn’t the MSS briefed all the executive secretaries about this sort of thing? Probably—it would have been a remarkable oversight if they hadn’t—but it also seemed likely that of the well-known reasons for committing treason and espionage (known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego), this one was Ego. Young Miss Ming was being used sexually by her Minister Fang, and she didn’t much like it, and that made perfect sense to Mary Patricia Foley. A woman only had so much to give, and to have it taken coercively by a man of power wasn’t something calculated to make a woman happy—though ironically the powerful man in question probably thought he was honoring her with his biological attention. After all, was he not a great man, and was she not a peasant? The thought was good for a snort as she took a sip of morning seventh-floor coffee. It didn’t matter what culture or race, men were all the same, weren’t they? So many of them thought from the dick instead of the brain. Well, it was going to cost this one dearly, the Deputy Director (Operations) concluded.