The next part was virtually preordained. They followed I the Mercedes using the same multi-car drill, but the break came when a dump truck—still the dominant form of life on the Moscow streets—was closest. The subject parked the German sedan and jumped out, took just enough time to affix a strip of paper tape to a lamppost, and hopped back into his car. He didn’t even bother to look around, as though he’d only done something routine.
But he hadn’t. He’d just posted a flag, a notice to someone unknown that the dead-drop had something in it. That someone would walk or drive past and see the tape and know where to go. So, they had to examine the capsule quickly and replace it, lest they warn the enemy spy that their little operation had been compromised. No, you didn’t do that until you had to, because things like this were like an unraveling sweater on a pretty woman. You didn’t stop pulling the yarn until the tits were exposed, the FSS commander told Provalov.
C H A P T E R – 24
Infanticide
“What’s this?” the President asked at his morning intelligence briefing.
“A new SORGE source, this one’s called WARBLER. I’m afraid it’s not as good from an intelligence point of view, though it does tell us things about their ministers,” Dr. Goodley added with some feigned delicacy.
Whoever WARBLER was, Ryan saw, she—it was definitely a she—kept a very intimate diary. She, too, worked with this Minister Fang Gan, and, it appeared, he was enamored of her, and she, if not exactly enamored of him, certainly kept records of his activities. All of them, Ryan saw. It was enough to make his eyes go a little wide this early in the morning.
“Tell Mary Pat that she can sell this stuff to Hustler if she wants, but I really don’t need it at eight in the goddamned morning.”
“She included it to give you a feel for the source,” Ben explained. “The material isn’t as narrowly political as we’re getting from SONGBIRD, but MP thinks it tells us a lot about the guy’s character, which is useful, and also there’s some political content to go along with the information on Fang’s sex life. It would appear he’s a man of, well, commendable vigor, I guess, though the girl in question would clearly prefer a younger lover. It appears that she had one, but this Fang guy scared him off.”
“Possessive bastard,” Ryan saw, skimming that section. “Well, I guess at that age you hold on to what you need. Does this tell us anything?”
“Sir, it tells us something about the kind of people who make decisions over there. Here we call them sexual predators.”
“Of which we have a few in government service ourselves,” Ryan observed. The papers had just broken a story on a member of the Senate.
“At least not in this office,” Goodley told his President. He didn’t add anymore.
“Well, this President is married to a SURGEON. She knows how to use sharp instruments,” Ryan said, with a wry grin. “So, the Taiwan stuff yesterday was just a ploy because they haven’t figured out how to address the trade issues yet?”
“So it would appear, and yes, that does seem a little odd. Also, MP thinks that they might have a low-level source in State. They know a little more than they could have gotten from the press, she thinks.”
“Oh, great,” Jack noted. “So what happened? The Japanese corporations sold their old sources to the Chinese?”
Goodley shrugged. “No telling at this time.”
“Have Mary Pat call Dan Murray about this. Counterespionage is the FBI’s department. Is this something we want to move on at once, or will this compromise SONGBIRD?”
“That’s for somebody else to judge, sir,” Goodley said, reminding the President that he was good, but not quite that good at this business.
“Yeah, somebody other than me, too. What else?”
“The Senate Select Intelligence Committee wants to look into the Russian situation.”
“That’s nice. What’s the beef?”
“They seem to have their doubts about how trustworthy our friends in Moscow are. They’re worried that they’re going to use the oil and gold money to become the USSR again, and maybe threaten NATO.”
“NATO’s moved a few hundred miles east, last time I looked. The buffer zone will not hurt our interests.”
“Except that we are obligated to defend Poland now,” Goodley reminded his boss.
“I remember. So, tell the Senate to authorize funds to move a tank brigade east of Warsaw. We can take over one of the old Soviet laagers, can’t we?”
“If the Poles want us to. They don’t seem overly concerned, sir.”
“Probably more worried by the Germans, right?”
“Correct, and there is a precedent for that concern.”
“When will Europe get the word that peace has finally broken out for good and all?” Ryan asked the ceiling.
“There’s a lot of history, some of it pretty recent, for them to remember, Mr. President. And much of it militates in the other direction.”
“I’ve got a trip to Poland scheduled, don’t I?”
“Yes, not too far off, and they’re working out the itinerary right now.”
“Okay, I’ll tell the Polish president personally that he can depend on us to keep the Germans under control. If they step out of line—well, we’ll take Chrysler back.” Jack sipped his coffee and checked his watch. “Anything else?”
“That should do it for today.”
The President looked up slyly. “Tell Mary Pat if she sends me more of this WARBLER stuff, I want the pictures to go with it.”
“Will do, sir.” Goodley had himself a good hoot at that.
Ryan picked up the briefing papers again and read through them more slowly this time, between sips of coffee and snorts, with a few grumbles thrown in. Life had been much easier when he was the guy who prepared these briefing papers than it was now that he was the guy who had to read them. Why was that? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? Before, he’d been the one to find the answers and anticipate the questions, but now that other people had done all that stuff for him . . . it was harder. That didn’t make any sense at all, damn it. Maybe, he decided, it was because, after him, the information stopped. He had to make the decisions, and so whatever other decisions and analyses had been made at lower levels, the process came to one place and stopped cold. It was like driving a car:
Someone else could tell him to turn right at the corner, but he was the guy at the wheel who had to execute the turn, and if somebody clobbered the car, he was the guy who’d get the blame. For a moment, Jack wondered if he was better suited to being a step or two down in the process, able to do the analysis work and make his recommendations with confidence . . . but always knowing that someone else would always get the credit for making the right move, or the blame for making the wrong one. In that insulation from consequence, there was safety and security. But that was cowardice talking, Ryan reminded himself. If there were anyone in Washington better suited for making decisions, he hadn’t met the guy yet, and if that was arrogance talking, then so be it.
But there ought to be someone better, Jack thought, as the clock wound to his first appointment of the day, and it wasn’t his fault that there wasn’t. He checked his appointment sheet. The whole day was political bullshit… except it wasn’t bullshit. Everything he did in this office affected the lives of American citizens in one way or another, and that made it important, to them and to him. But who had decided to make him the national daddy? What the hell made him so damned smart? The people behind his back, as he thought of it, outside the overly thick windows of the Oval Office, all expected him to know how to do the right thing, and over the dinner table or a low-stakes card game, they’d bitch and moan and complain about the decisions he’d made that they didn’t like, as though they knew better— which was easy to say out there. In here it was different. And so, Ryan had to apply himself to every little decision, even menus for school lunches—that one was a real son of a bitch. If you gave kids what they liked to eat, nutritionists would complain that they really ought to eat healthy twigs and berries, but for the most part, parents would probably opt for burgers and fries, because that’s what the kids would eat, and even healthy food, uneaten, did them little good. He’d talked that one over with Cathy once or twice, but he really didn’t need to. She let their own kids eat pizza whenever they wished, claiming that pizza was high in protein, and that a kid’s metabolism could eat almost anything without ill effect, but when cornered, she’d admit that put her at odds with some of her fellow professors at Johns Hopkins. And so what was Jack Ryan, President of the United States, Doctor of Philosophy in History, Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and a Certified Public Accountant (Ryan couldn’t even remember why he had bothered taking that exam), supposed to think, when experts—including the one he was married to—disagreed? That was worth another snort, when his desk buzzer went off and Mrs. Sumter announced that his first appointment of the day was here. Already Jack was wishing for a bummed cigarette, but he couldn’t do that until he had a break in his schedule, because only Mrs. Sumter and a few of his Secret Service detail were allowed to know that the President of the United States suffered, intermittently, from that vice.