“Mr. Foreign Minister,” Rutledge started off, when it was next his turn, “the government of the Republic of China is one elected in free and fair elections by the people who live in that country. In America’s eyes, that makes the government of the Republic of China legitimate”—he didn’t say that the government of the People’s Republic was, therefore, illegitimate, but the thought hung in the room like a dark cloud—”and that makes the government in question worthy of international recognition, as you may have noticed has been the case in the last year.
“It is the policy of our government to recognize such governments. We will not change policies based upon firm principles to suit the wishes of other countries which do not share those principles. We can talk until you run out of cigarettes, but my government’s position in this case is set in stone. So, you can recognize this fact and allow the meeting to move on to productive areas, or you can beat this dead horse until nothing is left of it. The choice is yours, of course, but is it not better to be productive than not?”
“America cannot dictate to the People’s Republic that which concerns us. You claim to have your principles, and surely we have our own, and one of ours is the importance of our country’s territorial integrity.”
For Mark Gant, the hard part was keeping an impassive face. He had to pretend that this all made sense and was important, when he’d much prefer to set up his computer to review stock prices, or for that matter read a paperback book under the rim of the table. But he couldn’t do that. He had to pretend that this was all interesting, which, if successfully done, could get him nominated for the next Academy Award ceremonies for Best Actor in a Supporting Role: “For keeping awake during the most boring contest since the Iowa grass-growing championships, the winner is…” He concentrated on not shifting in his seat, but that just made his ass tired, and these seats hadn’t been designed to fit his ass. Maybe one of those skinny Chinese ones, but not that of a Chicago-raised professional who liked having a beer and a corned-beef sandwich for lunch at least once a week and didn’t work out enough. His ass required a broader and softer seat for comfort, but he didn’t have one. He tried to find something interesting. He decided that Foreign Minister Shen had terrible skin, as though his face had once been on fire and a friend had tried to extinguish the flames with an ice pick. Gant tried to conjure up the image of that supposed event without smiling. Then came the fact that Shen was smoking so much, lighting his smokes from cheap paper matches instead of a proper lighter. Perhaps he was one of those people who set things down and forgot where they were, which would also explain why he used cheap throwaway pens instead of something in keeping with his rank and status. So, this important son of a bitch had suffered from terminal acne as a kid and was a butterfingers….? It was something worthy of an inward smile as the minister droned on in passable English. That engendered a new thought. He had access to an earphone for simultaneous translation.., could he get one tuned to a local station? They had to have a radio station in Beijing that played music of some sort or other, didn’t they?
When Rutledge’s turn came, it was almost as bad. The stated American position was as repetitive as the Chinese one, perhaps more reasonable but no less boring. Gant imagined that lawyers talking over a divorce settlement probably went through bullshit like this. Like diplomats, they were paid by the hour and not by the product. Diplomats and lawyers. What a pair, Gant thought. He was unable even to look at his watch. The American delegation had to present a united front of solid stone, Gant thought, to show the Heathen Chinese that the Forces of Truth and Beauty were firm in their resolve. Or something like that. He wondered if it would feel different negotiating with the British, for example, everyone speaking much the same language, but those negotiations were probably handled with phone calls or e-mails rather than this formalistic crap….
Lunch came at the expected hour, about ten minutes late because the Shen guy ran over, which was hardly unexpected. The American team all headed to the men’s room, where no talking was done for fear of bugs. Then they went back outside, and Gant went to Rutledge.
“This is how you earn your living?” the stock TRADER asked with no small degree of incredulity.
“I try to. These talks are going pretty well,” the Assistant Secretary of State observed.
“What?” Gant inquired with total amazement.
“Yeah, well, their Foreign Minister is doing the negotiating, so we’re playing with their varsity,” Rutledge explained. “That means that we’ll be able to reach a real agreement instead of a lot of back-and-forth between lower-level people and the Politburo—the additional layer of people can really mess things up. There’ll be some of that, of course. Shen will have to talk over his positions with them every evening, maybe even right now—he’s nowhere to be seen. I wonder who he reports to, exactly. We don’t think he really has plenipotentiary powers, that the rest of the big boys second-guess him a lot. Like the Russians used to be. That’s the problem with their system. Nobody really trusts anybody else.”
“You serious?” TELESCOPE asked.
“Oh, yeah, it’s how their system works.”
“That’s a clusterfuck,” Gant observed.
“Why do you think the Soviet Union went belly-up?” Rutledge asked with amusement. “They never had their act together on any level because they fundamentally didn’t know how properly to exercise the power they had. It was rather sad, really. But they’re doing a lot better now.”
“But how are the talks going, well?”
“If all they have to throw at us is Taiwan, their counter-arguments on trade won’t be all that impressive. Taiwan’s a settled issue, and they know it. We may have a mutual-defense treaty with them in ten or eleven months, and they probably know that. They have good intelligence sources in Taipei.”
“How do we know that?” Gant demanded.
“Because our friends in Taipei make sure they do. You want your adversaries to know a lot of things. It makes for better understandings, cuts down on mistakes and stuff.” Rutledge paused. “I wonder what’s for lunch…
Jesus, Gant thought. Then he thanked God that he was just here to offer economic backup for this diplomat. They were playing a game so different from anything he’d ever encountered before that he felt like a truck driver doing some day-trading on his laptop at a highway phone booth.
The newsies showed up for lunch so that they could get more B-roll tape of diplomats chatting amiably about such things as the weather and the food—the viewers would think they were handling matters of state, of course, when in fact at least half of the talks between diplomats at such affairs were limited to the problems of raising children or killing the crabgrass in your lawn. It was all, in fact, a kind of gamesmanship with few parallels in other forms of endeavor, Gant was only beginning to understand. He saw Barry Wise approach Rutledge without a microphone or camera in attendance.
“So, how’s it going, Mr. Secretary?” the reporter asked.
“Pretty well. In fact, we had a fine opening session,” Rutledge replied in Gant’s earshot. It was a shame, TELESCOPE decided, that the people couldn’t see what really happened. It would be the funniest thing this side of Chris Rock. It made Laverne & Shirley look like King Lear in its lunacy, and the world chess championship look like a heavyweight-championship fight in its torpor. But every field of human endeavor had its rules, and these were just different ones.
“There’s our friend,” the cop observed, as the car pulled out. It was Suvorov/Koniev in his Mercedes C-class. The license tag number checked, as did the face in the binoculars.
Provalov had gotten the local varsity to handle this case, with even some help now from the Federal Security Service, formerly the Second Chief Directorate of the former KGB, the professional spy-chasers who’d made life in Moscow difficult for foreign intelligence operations. They remained superbly equipped, and though not so well funded as in the past, there was little to criticize in their training. The problem, of course, was that they knew all that themselves, and took on a degree of institutional arrogance that had gotten the noses of his homicide investigators severely out of joint. Despite all that, they were useful allies. There were a total of seven vehicles to handle the surveillance. In America, the FBI would have arranged a helicopter as well, but Michael Reilly wasn’t here to make that condescending observation, somewhat to Provalov’s relief. The man had become a friend, and a gifted mentor in the business of investigation, but enough was sometimes enough. There were trucks containing TV cameras to tape the business of the morning, and every automobile had two people in it so that driving wouldn’t interfere with watching. They followed Suvorov/Koniev into central Moscow.