“File’s done,” the computer’s electronic voice finally said. That occasioned a turn in her swivel chair. The DDO first of all backed up her newly downloaded file to a second hard drive, and then to a “toaster” disk, so called because the disk went in and out of the drive box like a slice of bread. With that done, she typed in her decryption code, 51240. She had no idea why Nomuri had specified that number, but knowing was not necessary, just so long as nobody else knew either. After typing in the five digits and hitting RETURN, the file icons changed. They were already aligned in list form, and MP selected the oldest. A page full of Chinese ideographs came up. With that bit of information, MP lifted her office phone and punched the button for her secretary. “Dr. Joshua Sears, DI, Chinese Section. Please ask him to come see me right away.”
That took six endless minutes. It took rather a lot to make Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley shiver, but this was one such occasion. The image on her screen looked like something one might get from inking the feet of several drunken roosters, then making them loiter on a piece of white paper, but within the imagery were words and thoughts. Secret words and hidden thoughts. On her screen was the ability to read the minds of adversaries. It was the sort of thing that could win the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, but infinitely more important. It was the sort of thing that had won wars and altered history from the expected path determined by the most important of players, and in that was the value of espionage, the whole point of having an intelligence community, because the fates of nations really did ride on such things—
—and therefore, the fates of nations rode on Chet Nomuri’s schwantz and how well he used it, Mrs. Foley reflected. What a crazy fucking world it was. How the hell could an historian ever get that right? How did you communicate the importance of seducing some nameless secretary, an underling, a modem-day peasant who merely transcribed the thoughts of the important, but in being compromised made those thoughts available to others, and in doing so, altered the course of history as surely as turning the rudder changed the course of a mighty ship. For Mary Pat, Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a moment of fulfillment to place alongside the birth of her children. Her entire raison d’être lay in black-and-white ideographs on her computer monitor—and she couldn’t read the fucking things. She had the language skills to teach Russian literature at Moscow State University, but all she knew of Chinese was chop suey and moo goo gai pan.
“Mrs. Foley?” A head appeared at her door. “I’m Josh Sears.” He was fifty, tall, losing his hair, most of it gray. Brown eyes. He hit the cafeteria line downstairs a little too hard, the DDO thought.
“Please come in, Dr. Sears. I need you to translate some things for me.”
“Sure,” he replied, picking a seat and relaxing into it. He watched the DDO take some pages off her laser printer and hand them across.
“Okay, it says the date is last March twenty-first, and the place is Beijing—humph, the Council of Ministers Building, eh? Minister Fang is talking to Minister Zhang.” Sears ran his eyes down the page. “Mrs. Foley, this is hot stuff. They’re talking about the possibilities of Iran—no, the old UIR—taking over the entire Persian Gulf oil fields, and what effect it would have on China. Zhang appears to be optimistic, but guarded. Fang is skeptical.., oh, this is an aide-memofr isn’t it? It’s Fang’s notes from a private conversation with Zhang.”
“The names mean anything to you?”
“Both are Ministers Without Portfolio. They’re both full Politburo members without direct ministerial duties. That means they’re both trusted by the chairman, the PRC premier, Xu Kun Piao. They go back thirty years plus, well into the time of Mao and Chou. As you know, the Chinese are really into lengthy relationships. They develop—well, not friendships as we understand them, but associations. It’s a comfort-level thing, really. Like at a card table. You know what the other guy’s mannerisms and capabilities are, and that makes for a long, comfortable game. Maybe you won’t win big, but you won’t lose your shirt either.”
“No, they don’t gamble, do they?”
“This document demonstrates that. As we suspected, the PRC backed the Ayatollah Daryaei in his play, but they never allowed their support to be public. From skimming this, it appears that this Zhang guy is the one who ramrodded this—and the play the Japanese made. We’ve been trying to build a book on this Zhang guy—and Fang as well—without a whole lot of success. What do I need to know about this?” he asked, holding the page up.
“It’s code word,” MP replied. By federal statute, “top secret” was as high as it went, but in reality there were more secret things than that, called “special-access programs,” which were designated by their controlling code words. “This one’s called SORGE.” She didn’t have to say that he could not discuss this information with anyone, and that even dreaming in bed about it was forbidden. Nor did she have to say that in SORGE was Sears’s path to a raise and much greater personal importance within the CIA’s pantheon of bureaucrats.
“Okay.” Sears nodded. “What can you tell me?”
“What we have here is a digest of conversations between Fang and Zhang, and probably other ministers as well.
We’ve found a way to crash into their documents storage. We believe the documents are genuine,” MP concluded. Sears would know that he was being misled on sources and methods, but that was to be expected. As a senior member of the DI—the Directorate of Intelligence—it was his job to evaluate information provided to him by various sources, in this case the DO. If he got bad information, his evaluation would be bad as well, but what Mrs. Foley had just told him was that he would not be held at fault for bad information. But he’d also question the authenticity of the documents in an internal memo or two, just to cover his own ass, of course.
“Okay, ma’am. In that case, what we have here is pure nitroglycerine. We’ve suspected this, but here’s confirmation. It means that President Ryan did the right thing when he granted diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. The PRC had it coming. They conspired to wage aggressive war, and since we got involved, you can say that they conspired against us. Twice, I bet. We’ll see if another of these documents refers to the Japanese adventure. You’ll recall that the Japanese industrialists implicated this Zhang guy by name. That’s not a hundred percent, but if it’s confirmed by this, then it’s almost something you could take before a judge. Mrs. Foley, this is some source we have here.”
“Evaluation?”
“It feels right,” the analyst said, reading over the page again. “It sounds like conversation. I mean, it’s unguarded, not official diplomatic-speak or even inside-minister-speak. So, it sounds like what it purports to be, the notes of a private, informal policy discussion between two senior colleagues.”
“Any way to cross-check it?” MP asked next.
An immediate shake of the head. “No. We don’t know much about either one of these guys. Zhang, well, we have the evaluation from Secretary Adler—you know, from the shuttle diplomacy after the Airbus shoot-down, which pretty well confirms what that Yamata guy told the Japanese police and our FBI guys about how the Chinese nudged them into the conflict with us, and what for. The PRC looks on eastern Siberia with covetous eyes,” Sears reminded her, showing his knowledge of the PRC policies and objectives. “For Fang Gan, we have photos of him sipping mao-tai at receptions in his Mao jacket and smiling benignly, like they all do. We know he’s tight with Xu, there are stories that he likes to play with the office help—but a lot of them do that—and that’s about it.”
It was good of Sears not to remind her that playing with the office help wasn’t a character defect limited to China.
“So, what do we think about them?”
“Fang and Zhang? Well, both are Ministers Without Portfolio. So, they’re utility infielders, maybe even assistant coaches. Premier Xu trusts their judgment. They get to sit in at the Politburo as full voting members. They get to hear everything and cast votes on everything. They influence policy not so much by making it as shaping it. Every minister knows them. These two know all the others. They’ve both been around a long time. Both are well into their sixties or seventies, but people over there don’t mellow with age like they do in America. Both will be ideologically sound, meaning they’re both probably solid communists. That implies a certain ruthlessness, and you can add to that their age. At seventy-five, death starts being a very real thing. You don’t know how much time you have left, and these guys don’t believe in an afterlife. So, whatever goals they have, they have to address pretty quick at that age, don’t they?”