Rutledge nodded and slipped the papers across. “What do you make of these foreign-exchange figures?”
Gant took a bite of bacon and stopped chewing almost at once. “Damn, they’re that low? What have they been pissing their money away on?”
“What does this mean?”
“Cliff, once upon a time, Dr. Samuel Johnson put it this way: ‘Whatever you have, spend less.’ Well, the Chinese didn’t listen to that advice.” Gant flipped the pages. “It doesn’t say what they’ve been spending it on.”
“Mainly military stuff, so I am told,” Ambassador Hitch replied. “Or things that can be applied to military applications, especially electronics. Both finished goods and the machinery with which to make electronic stuff. I gather it’s expensive to invest in such things.”
“It can be,” Gant agreed. He turned the pages back to start from the beginning. He saw it was transmitted with the TAPDANCE encryption system. That made it hot. TAPDANCE was only used for the most sensitive material because of some technical inconveniences in its use . . . so this was some really hot intelligence, TELESCOPE thought. Then he saw why. Somebody must have bugged the offices of some very senior Chinese officials to get this stuff… “Jesus.”
“What does this mean, Mark?”
“It means they’ve been spending money faster than it’s coming in, and investing it in noncommercial areas for the most part. Hell, it means they’re acting like some of the idiots we have in our government. They think money is just something that appears when you snap your fingers, and then you can spend it as fast as you want and just snap your fingers to get some more. . . These people don’t live in the real world, Cliff. They have no idea how and why the money appears.” He paused. He’d gone too far. A Wall Street person would understand his language, but this Rutledge guy probably didn’t. “Let me rephrase. They know that the money comes from their trade imbalance with the United States, and it appears that they believe the imbalance to be a natural phenomenon, something they can essentially dictate because of who they are. They think the rest of the world owes it to them. In other words, if they believe that, negotiating with them is going to be hard.”
“Why?” Rutledge asked. Ambassador Hitch, he saw, was already nodding. He must have understood these Chinese barbarians better.
“People who think this way do not understand that negotiations mean give and take. Whoever’s talking here thinks that he just gets whatever the hell he wants because everybody owes it to him. It’s like what Hitler must have thought at Munich. I want, you give, and then I am happy. We’re not going to cave for these bastards, are we?”
“Those are not my instructions,” Rutledge replied.
“Well, guess what? Those are the instructions your Chinese counterpart has. Moreover, their economic position is evidently a lot more precarious than what we’ve been given to expect. Tell CIA they need better people in their financial-intelligence department,” Gant observed. Then Hitch shifted his glance across the table to the guy who must have run the local CIA office.
“Do they appreciate how serious their position is?” Rutledge asked.
“Yes and no. Yes, they know they need the hard currency to do the business they want to do. No, they think they can continue this way indefinitely, that an imbalance is natural in their case because—because why? Because they think they’re the fucking master race?” Gant asked.
Again it was Ambassador Hitch who nodded. “It’s called the Middle Kingdom Complex. Yes, Mr. Gant, they really do think of themselves in those terms, and they expect people to come to them and give, not for themselves to go to other people as supplicants. Someday that will be their downfall. There’s an institutional.., maybe a racial arrogance here that’s hard to describe and harder to quantify.” Then Hitch looked over to Rutledge. “Cliff, you’re going to have an interesting day.”
Gant realized at once that this was not a blessing for the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy.
“They should be eating breakfast right about now,”
Secretary Adler said over his Hennessey in the East Room.
The reception had gone well—actually Jack and Cathy Ryan found these things about as boring as reruns of Gilligan‘s Island, but they were as much a part of the Presidency as the State of the Union speech. At least the dinner had been good—one thing you could depend on at the White House was the quality of the food—but the people had been Washington people. Even that, Ryan did not appreciate, had been greatly improved from previous years. Once Congress had largely been populated with people whose life’s ambition was “public service,” a phrase whose noble intent had been usurped by those who viewed $130,000 per year as a princely salary (it was far less than a college dropout could earn doing software for a computer-game company, and a hell of a lot less than one could make working on Wall Street), and whose real ambition was to apply their will to the laws of their nation. Many of them now, mainly because of speeches the President had made all over the country, were people who actually had served the public by doing useful work until, fed up with the machinations of government, they had decided to take a few years off to repair the train wreck Washington had become, before escaping back to the real world of productive work. The First Lady had spent much of the evening talking with the junior senator from Indiana, who in real life was a pediatric SURGEON of good reputation and whose current efforts were centered on straightening out government health-care programs before they killed too many of the citizens they supposedly wanted to assist. His greatest task was to persuade the media that a physician might know as much about making sick people well as Washington lobbyists did, something he’d been bending SURGEON’S ear about most of the night.
“That stuff we got from Mary Pat ought to help Rutledge.”
“I’m glad that Gant guy is there to translate it for him. Cliff is going to have a lively day while we sleep off the food and the booze, Jack.”
“Is he good enough for the job? I know he was tight with Ed Kealty. That does not speak well for the guy’s character.”
“Cliff’s a fine technician,” Adler said, after another sip of brandy. “And he has clear instructions to carry out, and some awfully good intelligence to help him along. This is like the stuff Jonathan Yardley gave our guys during the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations. We’re not exactly reading their cards, but we are seeing how they think, and that’s damned near as good. So, yes, I think he’s good enough for this job, or I wouldn’t have sent him out.”
“How’s the ambassador we have there?” POTUS asked.
“Carl Hitch? Super guy. Career pro, Jack, ready to retire soon, but he’s like a good cabinetmaker. Maybe he can’t design the house for you, but the kitchen will be just fine when he’s done—and you know, I’ll settle for that in a diplomat. Besides, designing the house is your job, Mr. President.”
“Yeah,” Ryan observed. He waved to an usher, who brought over some ice water. He’d pushed the booze enough for one night, and Cathy was starting to razz him about it again. Damn, being married to a doctor Jack thought. “Yeah, Scott, but who the hell do I go to for advice when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” EAGLE replied. Maybe some humor, he thought: “Try doing a séance and call up Tom Jefferson and George Washington.” He turned with a chuckle and finished his Hennessey. “Jack, just take it easy on yourself and do the fuckin’ job. You’re doing just fine. Trust me.”
“I hate this job,” SWORDSMAN observed with a friendly smile at his Secretary of State.
“I know. That’s probably why you’re doing it pretty well. God protect us all from somebody who wants to hold high public office. Hell, look at me. Think I ever wanted to be SecState? It was a lot more fun to eat lunch in the cafeteria with my pals and bitch about the dumb son of a bitch who was. But now—shit, they’re down there saying that about me! It ain’t fair, Jack. I’m a working guy.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, look at it this way: When you do your memoirs, you’ll get a great advance from your publisher. The Accidental President?” Adler speculated for the title.
“Scott, you get funny when you’re drunk. I’ll settle for working on my golf game.”
“Who spoke the MAGIC word?” Vice President Jackson asked as he joined the conversation.
“This guy whips my ass so bad out there,” Ryan complained to Secretary Adler, “that sometimes I wish I had a sword to fall on. What’s your handicap now?”