“Yes, sir,” Ben Goodley replied, handing the sheet over. It wasn’t long, but it was interesting.
Ryan skimmed through it. “Analysis?”
“Mrs. Foley wants to go over it with you this afternoon. You have a slot at two-fifteen.”
“Okay. Who else?”
“The Vice President, since he’s around.” Goodley knew that Ryan liked to have Robby Jackson in for strategically interesting material. “He’s fairly free this afternoon as well.”
“Good. Set it up,” POTUS ordered.
Six blocks away, Dan Murray was just arriving at his capacious office (considerably larger than the President’s, as a matter of fact) with his own security detail, because he, as the country’s principal counterintelligence and counter-terrorist officer, had all manner of information that others were interested in. This morning only brought in some more.
“Morning, Director,” one of the staff said—she was a sworn agent carrying a side arm, not just a secretary.
“Hey, Toni,” Murray responded. This agent had very nice wheels, but the FBI Director realized that he’d just proven to himself that his wife, Liz, was right: He was turning into a dirty old man.
The piles on the desk were arranged by the overnight staff, and there was a routine for this. The rightward-most pile was for intelligence-related material, the leftward-most for counterintelligence operations, and the big one in the middle was for ongoing criminal investigations requiring his personal attention or notification. That tradition went back to “Mr. Hoover,” as he was remembered at the FBI, who seemingly went over every field case bigger than the theft of used cars off the government parking lot.
But Murray had long worked the “black” side of the Bureau, and that meant he attacked the rightward pile first. There wasn’t much there. The FBI was running some of its own pure intelligence operations at the moment, somewhat to the discomfort of CIA—but those two government agencies had never gotten along terribly well, even though Murray rather liked the Foleys. What the hell, he thought, a little competition was good for everybody, so long as CIA didn’t mess with a criminal investigation, which would be a very different kettle of fish. The top report was from Mike Reilly in Moscow….
“Damn .. .“ Murray breathed. Then an inward smile. Murray had personally selected Reilly for the Moscow slot, over the objections of some of his senior people, who had all wanted Paul Landau out of the Intelligence Division. But no, Murray had decided, Moscow needed help with cop work, not spy-chasing, at which they had lots of good experience, and so he’d sent Mike, a second-generation agent who, like his father, Pat Reilly, had given the Mafia in New York City a serious case of indigestion. Landau was now in Berlin, playing with the German Bundeskriminalamt, the BKA, doing regular crime liaison stuff, and doing it pretty well. But Reilly was a potential star. His dad had retired an ASAC. Mike would do better than that.
And the way he’d bonded with this Russian detective, Provalov, wouldn’t hurt his career one bit. So. They’d uncovered a link between a former KGB officer and the Chinese MSS, eh? And this was part of the investigation into the big ka—boom in Moscow…? Jesus, could the Chinese have had a part in that? If so, what the hell did that mean? Now, this was something the Foleys had to see.
To that end, Director Murray lifted his phone. Ten minutes later, the Moscow document slid into his secure fax machine to Langley—and just to make sure that CIA didn’t take credit for an FBI job, a hard copy was hand-carried to the White House, where it was handed to Dr. Benjamin Goodley, who’d surely show it to the President before lunch.
It had gotten to the point that he recognized her knock at the door. Nomuri set his drink down and jumped to answer, pulling it open less than five seconds after the first sexy tap tap.
“Ming,” Chet said.
“Nomuri-san,” she greeted in turn.
He pulled her in the door, closed, and locked it. Then he lifted her off the floor with a passionate hug that was less than three percent feigned.
“So, you have a taste for Japanese sausage, eh?” he demanded, with a smile and a kiss.
“You didn’t even smile when I said it. Wasn’t it funny?” she asked, as he undid a few of her buttons.
“Ming—” Then he hesitated and tried something he’d learned earlier in the day. “Baubei,” he said instead. It translated to “beloved one.”
Ming smiled at the words and made her own reply: “Shing-gan,” which literally meant “heart and liver,” but in context meant “heart and soul.”
“Beloved one,” Nomuri said, after a kiss, “do you advertise our relationship at your office?”
“No, Minister Fang might not approve, but the other girls in the office probably would not object if they found out,” she explained, with a coquettish smile. “But you never know.”
“Then why risk exposing yourself by making such a joke, unless you wish me to betray you?”
“You have no sense of humor,” Ming observed. But then she ran her hands under his shirt and up his chest. “But that is all right. You have the other things I need.”
Afterward, it was time to do business.
“Bau-bei?”
“Yes?”
“Your computer still works properly?”
“Oh, yes,” she assured him in a sleepy voice.
His left hand stroked her body gently. “Do any of the other girls in the office use their computers to surf the ‘Net?”
“Only Chai. Fang uses her as he uses me. In fact, he likes her better. He thinks she has a better mouth.”
“Oh?” Nomuri asked, softening the question with a smile.
“I told you, Minister Fang is an old man. Sometimes he needs special encouragement, and Chai doesn’t mind so much. Fang reminds her of her grandfather, she says,” Ming told him.
Which was good in the American’s mind for a Yuck! and little else. “So, all the girls in the office trade notes on your minister?”
Ming laughed. It was pretty funny. “Of course. We all do.”
Damn, Nomuri thought. He’d always thought that women would be more.., discreet, that it was just the men who bragged in the locker room over their sweat socks.
“The first time he did me,” she went on, “I didn’t know what to do, so I talked with Chai for advice. She’s been there the longest, you see. She just said to enjoy it, and try to make him happy, and I might get a nice office chair out of it, like she did. Chai must be very good to him. She got a new bicycle last November. Me, well, I think he only likes me because I’m a little different to look at. Chai has bigger breasts than I do, and I think I’m prettier, but she has a sweet disposition, and she likes the old man. More than I do, anyway.” She paused. “I don’t want a new bicycle enough for that.”
“What does this mean?” Robby Jackson asked.
“Well, we’re not sure,” the DCI admitted. “This Fang guy had a long talk with our old friend Zhang Han San. They’re talking about the meeting with our trade team that starts tomorrow. Hell”—Ed Foley looked at his watch—”call that fourteen hours from now. And it looks as though they want concessions from us instead of offering any to us. They’re even angrier over our recognition of Taiwan than we’d anticipated.”
“Tough shit” Ryan observed.
“Jack, I agree with your sentiment, but let’s try not to be over-cavalier about their opinions, shall we?” Foley suggested.
“You’re starting to sound like Scott,” the President said.
“So? You want a yes-man handling Langley, you got the wrong guy,” the DCI countered.
“Fair enough, Ed,” Jack conceded. “Go on.”
“Jack, we need to warn Rutledge that the PRC isn’t going to like what he has to say. They may not be in a mood to make many trade concessions.”
“Well, neither is the United States of America,” Ryan told his Director of Central Intelligence. “And we come back to the fact that they need our money more than we need their trade goods.”
“What’s the chance that this is a setup, this information I mean?” Vice President Jackson asked.
“You mean that they’re using this source as a conduit to get back-channel information to us?” Mary Patricia Foley asked. “I evaluate that chance as practically zero. As close to zero as something in the real world can be.”
“MP, how can you be that confident?” President Ryan asked.
“Not here, Jack, but I am that confident,” Mary Pat said, somewhat to the discomfort of her husband, Ryan saw. It was rare in the intelligence community for anyone to feel that confident about anything, but Ed had always been the careful one, and Mary Pat had always been the cowgirl. She was as loyal to her people as a mother was to her infant, and Ryan admired that, even though he also had to remind himself that it wasn’t always realistic.