“That tape is my property!” Wise protested. “It belongs to me and my company.”
The cop’s English wasn’t that good. He just repeated his demand: “Give me tape!”
“Okay, Barry,” Pete said. “I got it.”
The cameraman—his name was Peter Nichols—lifted the camera up and hit the EJECT button, punching the Beta-format tape out of the Sony camera. This he gave to the police officer with a downcast and angry expression. The cop took it with his own expression of satisfaction and turned on his heel to go back into the hospital.
There was no way he could have known that, like any news cameraman, Pete Nichols could deal seconds as skillfully as any Las Vegas poker dealer. He winked at Barry Wise, and the four headed off to the van.
“Send it up now?” the producer asked.
“Let’s not be too obvious about it,” Wise thought. “Let’s move a few blocks.”
This they did, heading west toward Tiananmen Square, where a news van doing a satellite transmission wasn’t out of the ordinary. Wise was already on his satellite phone to Atlanta.
“This is Wise Mobile in Beijing with an upload,” the correspondent said into the phone.
“Hey, Barry,” a familiar voice said in reply. “This is Ben Golden. What you got for us?”
“It’s hot,” Wise told his controller half a world away. “A double murder and a childbirth. One guy who got whacked is a Catholic cardinal, the Vatican ambassador to Beijing. The other one’s a Chinese Baptist minister. They were both shot on camera. You might want to call Legal about it.”
“Fuck!” Atlanta observed.
“We’re uploading the rough-cut now, just so you get it. I’ll stand by to do the talking. But let’s get the video uploaded first.”
“Roger that. We’re standing by on Channel Zero Six.”
“Zero Six, Pete,” Wise told his cameraman, who also ran the uplink.
Nichols was kneeling by the control panels. “Standing by… tape’s in… setting up for Six.., transmitting… now!” And with that, the Ku-band signal went racing upward through the atmosphere to the satellite hovering 22,800 miles directly over the Admiralty Islands in the Bismarck Sea.
CNN doesn’t bother encrypting its video signals. To do so is technically inconvenient, and few people bother pirating signals they could just as easily get off their cable systems for free in a few minutes, or even get live just four seconds later.
But this one was coming in at an awkward hour, which was, however, good for CNN Atlanta, because some headquarters people would want to go over it. A shooting death was not what the average American wanted with his Rice Krispies in the morning.
It was also downloaded by the American intelligence community, which holds CNN in very high regard, and doesn’t distribute its news coverage very far in any case. But this one did go to the White House Office of Signals, a largely military operation located in the basement of the West Wing. There a watch officer had to decide how important it was. If it ranked as a CRITIC priority, the President had to know about it in fifteen minutes, which meant waking him up right now, which was not something to be done casually to the Commander-in-Chief. A mere FLASH could wait a little longer, like—the watch officer checked the wall clock—yeah, like until breakfast. So, instead, they called the President’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. They’d let him make the call. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer.
“Yeah?” Goodley snarled into the phone while he checked the clock radio next to his bed.
“Dr. Goodley, this is Signals. We just copied something off CNN from Beijing that the Boss is going to be interested in.”
“What is it?” CARDSHARP asked. Then he heard the reply. “How certain are you of this?”
“The Italian guy looks like he might possibly have survived, from the video—I mean if there was a good SURGEON close—but the Chinese minister had his brains blowed right out. No chance for him at all, sir.”
“What was it all about?”
“We’re not sure of that. NSA might have the phone conversation between this Wise guy and Atlanta, but we haven’t seen anything about it yet.”
“Okay, tell me what you got again,” Goodley ordered, now that he was approximately awake.
“Sir, we have a visual of two guys getting shot and a baby being born in Beijing. The video comes from Barry Wise of CNN. The video shows three gunshots. One is upwards into the ceiling of what appears to be a hospital delivery room. The second shot catches a guy in the back. That guy is identified as the Papal Nuncio to Beijing. The third shot goes right into the head of a guy identified as a Baptist minister in Beijing. That one appears to be a Chinese national. In between, we have a baby being born. Now we—stand by a minute, Dr. Goodley, okay, I have FLASH traffic from Fort Meade. Okay, they got it, too, and they got a voice transmission via their ECHELON system, reading it now. Okay, the Catholic cardinal is dead, according to this, says Cardinal Renato DiMilo—can’t check the spelling, maybe State Department for that—and the Chinese minister is a guy named Yu Fa An, again no spelling check. They were there to, oh, okay, they were there to prevent a late-term abortion, and looks like they succeeded, but these two clergy got their asses killed doing it. Third one, a monsignor named Franz Schepke—that sounds pretty German to me—was there, too, and looks like he survived—oh, okay, he must be the tall one you see on the tape. You gotta see the tape. It’s a hell of a confused mess, sir, and when this Yu guy gets it, well, it’s like that video from Saigon during the Tet Offensive. You know, where the South Vietnamese police colonel shot the North Vietnamese spy in the side of the head with a Smith Chief’s Special, you know, like a fountain of blood coming out the head. Ain’t something to watch with your Egg McMuffin, y’know?” the watch officer observed. The reference came across clearly enough. The news media had celebrated the incident as an example of the South Vietnamese government’s bloodthirstiness. They had never explained—probably never even knew—that the man shot had been an officer of the North Vietnamese army captured in a battle zone wearing civilian clothing, therefore, under the Geneva Protocols was a spy liable to summary execution, which was exactly what he’d received.
“Okay, what else?”
“Do we wake the Boss up for this? I mean, we got a diplomatic team over there, and this has some serious implications.”
Goodley thought about that for a second or two. “No. I’ll brief him in a few hours.”
“Sir, it’s sure as hell going to be on CNN’s seven o’clock morning report,” the watch officer warned.
“Well, let me brief him when he has more than just pictures.”
“Your call, Dr. Goodley.”
“Thanks. Now, I think I’ll try to get one more hour before I drive over to Langley.” The phone went down before Goodley heard a reaction. His job carried a lot of prestige, but it denied him sleep and much of a social or sex life, and at moments like this he wondered what the hell was so goddamned prestigious about it.
C H A P T E R – 25
Fence Rending
The speed of modern communications makes for curious disconnects. In this case, the American government knew what had happened in Beijing long before the government of the People’s Republic did. What appeared in the White House Office of Signals appeared also in the State Department’s Operations Center, and there the senior officer present had decided, naturally enough, to get the information immediately to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. There Ambassador Carl Hitch took the call at his desk on the encrypted line. He forced the caller from Foggy Bottom to confirm the news twice before making his first reaction, a whistle. It wasn’t often that an accredited ambassador of any sort got killed in a host country, much less by a host country. What the hell, he wondered, was Washington going to do about this?
“Damn,” Hitch whispered. He hadn’t even met Cardinal DiMilo yet. The official reception had been planned for two weeks from now in a future that would never come. What was he supposed to do? First, he figured, get off a message of condolence to the Vatican mission. (Foggy Bottom would so notify the Vatican through the Nuncio in Washington, probably. Maybe even Secretary Adler would drive over himself to offer official condolences. Hell, President Ryan was Catholic, and maybe he would go himself, Hitch speculated.) Okay, Hitch told himself, things to do here. He had his secretary call the Nuncio’s residence, but all he got there was a Chinese national answering the phone, and that wasn’t worth a damn. That would have to go on the back burner.., what about the Italian Embassy? he thought next. The Nuncio was an Italian citizen, wasn’t he? Probably. Okay. He checked his card file and dialed up the Italian ambassador’s private line.