The DCI read it three times before handing it back. “Well, if he wants to get laid—it’s not good fieldcraft, honey. Not good to get that involved with your agent—”
“I know that, Ed, but you play the cards you’re dealt, remember? And if we get her a computer like the one Chet’s using, her security won’t be all that bad either, will it?”
“Unless they have somebody pick it apart,” Ed Foley thought aloud.
“Oh, Jesus, Ed, our best people would have a cast-iron motherfucker of a time figuring it all out. I ran that project myself, remember? It’s safe!”
“Easy, honey.” The DCI held up his hand. When Mary used that sort of language, she was really into the matter at hand. “Yeah, I know, it’s secure, but I’m the worrier and you’re the cowgirl, remember?”
“Okay, honey-bunny.” The usual sweet smile that went with seduction and getting her way.
“You’ve already told him to proceed?”
“He’s my officer, Eddie.”
A resigned nod. It wasn’t fair that he had to work with his wife here. He rarely won any arguments at the office, either. “Okay, baby. It’s your operation, run with it, but—”
“But what?”
“But we change GENGHIS to something else. If this one pans out, then we go to a monthly name cycle. This one has some serious implications, and we’ve got to go max-security on it.”
She had to agree with that. As case officers, the two of them had run an agent known in CIA legend as CARDINAL, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, who’d worked inside the Kremlin for more than thirty years, feeding gold-plated information on every aspect of the Soviet military, plus some hugely valuable political intelligence. For bureaucratic reasons lost in the mists of time, CARDINAL had not been handled as a regular agent-in-place, and that had saved him from Aldrich Ames and his treacherous betrayal of a dozen Soviet citizens who’d worked for America. For Ames it had worked out to roughly $100,000 per life given away. Both of the Foleys regretted the fact that Ames was allowed to live, but they weren’t in the law-enforcement business.
“Okay, Eddie, monthly change-cycle. You’re always so careful, honey. You call or me?”
“We’ll wait until she gives us something useful before going to all the trouble, but let’s change GENGHIS to something else. It’s too obviously a reference to China.”
“Okay.” An impish smile. “How about SORGE for the moment?” she suggested. The name was that of Richard Sorge, one of the greatest spies who’d ever lived, a German national who’d worked for the Soviets, and just possibly the man who’d kept Hitler from winning his Eastern Front war with Stalin. The Soviet dictator, knowing this, hadn’t lifted a hand to save him from execution. “Gratitude,” Iosif Vissarionovich had once said, “is a disease of dogs.”
The DCI nodded. His wife had a lively sense of humor, especially as applied to business matters. “When do you suppose we’ll know if she’ll play ball with us?”
“About as soon as Chet gets his rocks off, I suppose.”
“Mary, did you ever ... ?”
“In the field? Ed, that’s a guy thing, not a girl thing,” she told her husband with a sparkling grin as she lifted her papers and headed back out. “Except with you, honey-bunny.”
The Alitalia DC-10 touched down about fifteen minutes early due to the favorable winds. Renato Cardinal DiMilo was pleased enough to think through an appropriate prayer of thanksgiving. A longtime member of the Vatican’s diplomatic service, he was accustomed to long flights, but that wasn’t quite the same as enjoying them. He wore his red—“cardinal”—and black suit that was actually more akin to an official uniform, and not a conspicuously comfortable one at that, despite the custom tailoring that came from one of Rome’s better shops. One of the drawbacks to his clerical and diplomatic status was that he’d been unable to shed his suit coat for the flight, but he’d been able to kick off his shoes, only to find that his feet had swollen on the flight, and getting them back on was more difficult than usual. That evoked a sigh rather than a curse, as the plane taxied to the terminal. The senior flight attendant ushered him to the forward door and allowed him to leave the aircraft first. One advantage to his diplomatic status was that all he ever had to do was wave his diplomatic passport at the control officers, and in this case a senior PRC government official was there to greet him at the end of the jetway.
“Welcome to our country,” the official said, extending his hand.
“It is my pleasure to be here,” the cardinal replied, noting that this communist atheist didn’t kiss his ring, as was the usual protocol. Well, Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general were not exactly welcome in the People’s Republic of China, were they? But if the PRC expected to live in the civilized world, then they’d have to accept representation with the Holy See, and that was that. And besides, he’d go to work on these people, and, who knew, maybe he could convert one or two. Stranger things had happened, and the Roman Catholic Church had handled more formidable enemies than this one.
With a wave and a small escort group, the demi-minister conducted his distinguished visitor through the concourse toward the place where the official car and escort waited.
“How was your flight?” the underling asked.
“Lengthy but not unpleasant” was the expected reply. Diplomats had to act as though they loved flying, though even the flight crews found journeys of this length tiresome. It was his job to observe the new ambassador of the Vatican, to see how he acted, how he looked out the car’s windows, even, which, in this case, was not unlike all the other first-time diplomats who came to Beijing. They looked out at the differences. The shapes of the buildings were new and different to them, the color of the bricks, and how the brickwork looked close up and at a distance, the way in which things that were essentially the same became fascinating because of differences that were actually microscopic when viewed objectively.
It took a total of twenty-eight minutes to arrive at the residence/embassy. It was an old building, dating back to the turn of the previous century, and had been the largish home of an American Methodist missionary—evidently one who liked his American comforts, the official thought—and had passed through several incarnations, including, he’d learned the previous day, that of a bordello in the diplomatic quarter in the 1920s and ’30s, because diplomats liked their comforts as well. Ethnic Chinese, he wondered, or Russian women who’d always claimed to be of the Czarist nobility, or so he’d heard. After all, Westerners enjoyed fucking noblewomen for some reason or other, as if their body parts were different somehow. He’d heard that one, too, at the office, from one of the archivists who kept track of such things at the Ministry. Chairman Mao’s personal habits were not recorded, but his lifelong love for deflowering twelve-year-olds was well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Every national leader had something odd and distasteful about him, the young official knew. Great men had great aberrations.
The car pulled up to the old wooden frame house, where a uniformed policeman opened the door for the visiting Italian, and even saluted, earning himself a nod from the man wearing the ruby-red skullcap.
Waiting on the porch was yet another foreigner, Monsignor Franz Schepke, whose diplomatic status was that of DCM, or deputy chief of mission, which usually meant the person who was really in charge of things while the ambassador—mainly a man chosen for political reasons—reigned in the main office. They didn’t know if that were the case here yet.
Schepke looked as German as his ancestry was, tall and spare with gray-blue eyes that revealed nothing at all, and a wonderful language gift that had mastered not only the complex Chinese language, but also the local dialect and accent as well. Over the phone this foreigner could pass for a party member, much to the surprise of local officials who were not in the least accustomed to foreigners who could even speak the language properly, much less master it.
The German national, the Chinese official saw, kissed his superior’s ring. Then the It
alian shook his hand and embraced the younger churchman. They probably knew each other. Cardinal DiMilo then led Schepke to the escort and introduced them—they’d met many times before, of course, and that made the senior churchman appear just a little backward to the local official. In due course, the luggage was loaded into the residence/embassy building, and the Chinese official got back in the official car for the ride to the Foreign Ministry, where he’d make his contact report. The Papal Nuncio was past his prime, he’d write, a pleasant enough old chap, perhaps, but no great intellect. A fairly typical Western ambassador, in other words.
No sooner had they gotten inside than Schepke tapped his right ear and gestured around the building.
“Everywhere?” the cardinal asked.
“Ja, doch,” Monsignor Schepke replied in his native German, then shifted to Greek. Not modern, but Attic Greek, that spoken by Aristotle, similar to but different from the modern version of that language, a language perpetuated only by a handful of scholars at Oxford and a few more Western universities. “Welcome, Eminence.”
“Even airplanes can take too long. Why can we not travel by ship? It would be a much gentler way to getting from point to point.”
“The curse of progress,” the German priest offered weakly. The Rome-Beijing flight was only forty minutes longer than the one between Rome and New York, after all, but Renato was a man from a different and more patient age.
“My escort. What can you tell me of him?”
“His name is Qian. He’s forty, married, one son. He will be our point of contact with the Foreign Ministry. Bright, well educated, but a dedicated communist, son of another such man,” Schepke said, speaking rapidly in the language learned long before in seminary. He and his boss knew that this exchange would probably be recorded, and would then drive linguists in the Foreign Ministry to madness. Well, it was not their fault that such people were illiterate, was it?
“And the building is fully wired, then?” DiMilo asked, heading over to a tray with a bottle of red wine on it.
“We must assume so,” Schepke confirmed with a nod, while the cardinal poured a glass. “I could have the building swept, but finding reliable people here is not easy, and ...” And those able to do a proper sweep would then use the opportunity to plant their own bugs for whatever country they worked for—America, Britain, France, Israel, all were interested in what the Vatican knew.
The Vatican, located in central Rome, is technically an independent country, hence Cardinal DiMilo’s diplomatic status even in a country where religious convictions were frowned upon at best, and stamped into the earth at worst. Renato Cardinal DiMilo had been a priest for just over forty years, most of which time had been spent in the Vatican’s foreign service. His language skills were not unknown within the confines of his own service, but rare even there, and damned rare in the outside world, where men and women took a great deal of time to learn languages. But DiMilo picked them up easily—so much so that it surprised him that others were unable to do so as well. In addition to being a priest, in addition to being a diplomat, DiMilo was also an intelligence officer—all ambassadors are supposed to be, but he was much more so than most. One of his jobs was to keep the Vatican—therefore the Pope—informed of what was happening in the world, so that the Vatican—therefore the Pope—could take action, or at least use influence in the proper direction.
DiMilo knew the current Pope quite well. They’d been friends for years before his election to the chair of the Pontifex Maximus (“maximus” in this context meaning “chief,” and “pontifex” meaning “bridge-builder,” as a cleric was supposed to be the bridge between men and their God). DiMilo had served the Vatican in this capacity in seven countries. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, he’d specialized in Eastern European countries, where he’d learned to debate the merits of communism with its strongest adherents, mostly to their discomfort and his own amusement. Here would be different, the cardinal thought. It wasn’t just the Marxist beliefs. This was a very different culture. Confucius had defined the place of a Chinese citizen two millennia before, and that place was different from what Western culture taught. There was a place for the teachings of Christ here, of course, as there was everywhere. But the local soil was not as fertile for Christianity as it was elsewhere. Local citizens who sought out Christian missionaries would do so out of curiosity, and once exposed to the gospel would find Christian beliefs more curious still, since they were so different from the nation’s more ancient teachings. Even the more “normal” beliefs that were in keeping, more or less, with Chinese traditions, like the Eastern Spiritualist movement known as Falun Gong, had been ruthlessly, if not viciously, repressed. Cardinal DiMilo told himself that he’d come to one of the few remaining pagan nations, and one in which martyrdom was still a possibility for the lucky or luckless, depending on one’s point of view. He sipped his wine, trying to decide what time his body thought it was, as opposed to what time it was by his watch. In either case, the wine tasted good, reminding him as it did of his home, a place which he’d never truly left, even in Moscow or Prague. Beijing, though—Beijing might be a challenge.
CHAPTER 8
Underlings and Underthings
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. It was exciting in its way, and arousing, and marginally dangerous because of the time and place. Mainly it was an exercise in effective memory and the discerning eye. The hardest part was converting the English units to metric. The perfect female form was supposed to be 36-24-36, not 91.44-60.96- 91.44.
The last time he’d been in a place like this had been in the Beverly Center Mall in Los Angeles, buying for Maria Castillo, a voluptuous Latina who’d been delighted at his error, taking her waist for twenty-four rather than its true twenty-seven. You wanted to err on the low side in numbers, but probably the big side in letters. If you took a 36B chest to be a 34C, she wouldn’t be mad, but if you took a twenty-four-inch waist for a twenty-eight-inch, she’d probably be pissed. Stress, Nomuri told himself with a shake of the head, came in many shapes and sizes. He wanted to get this right because he wanted Ming as a source, but he wanted her as a mistress, too, and that was one more reason not to make a mistake.
The color was the easy part. Red. Of course, red. This was still a country in which red was the “good” color, which was convenient because red had always been the lively choice in women’s underthings, the color of adventure and giggles and ... looseness. And looseness served both his biological and professional purposes. He had other things to figure out, too. Ming was not tall, scarcely five feet—151 centimeters or so, Nomuri thought, doing the conversion in his head. She was short but not really petite. There was no real obesity in China. People didn’t overeat here, probably because of the lingering memory of times when food had not been in abundance and overeating was simply not possible. Ming would have been considered overweight in California, Chester thought, but that was just her body type. She was squat because she was short, and no amount of dieting or working out or makeup could change it. Her waist wouldn’t be much less than twenty-seven inches. For her chest, 34B was about the best he could hope for ... well, maybe 34C—no, he decided, B+ at most. So, a 34B bra, and medium shorts—panties—red silk, something feminine ... something on the wild, whorish side of feminine, something that she could look into the mirror alone with and giggle ... and maybe sigh at how different she looked wearing such things, and maybe smile, that special inward smile women had for such moments. The moment when you knew you had them—and the rest was just dessert.
The best part of Victoria’s Secret was the catalog, designed for men who really, and sensibly, wanted to buy the models themselves, despite the facial attitudes that sometimes made them look like lesbians on quaaludes—but with such bodies, a man couldn’t have everything, could he? Fantasies, things of the mind. Nomuri wondered if the models really existed or were the products of computers. They could do anything with computers these days—make Rosie O’Donnell into Twiggy, or Cindy Crawford
obsolete.
Back to work, he told himself. This might be a place for fantasies, but not that one, not yet. Okay, it had to be sexy. It had to be something that would both amuse and excite Ming, and himself, too: That was all part of it. Nomuri took the catalog off the pile because it was a lot easier for him to see what he wanted in a filled rather than an unfilled condition. He turned pages and stopped dead on page 26. There was a black girl modeling it, and whatever genetic stew she’d come from must have had some fine ingredients, as her face would have appealed to a member of Hitler’s SS just as much as Idi Amin. It was that sort of face. Better yet, she wore something called a Racerback bra with matching string bikini panties, and the color was just perfect, a red-purple that the Romans had once called Tyrrian Scarlet, the color on the toga stripe of members of the senatorial order, reserved by price and custom to the richest of the Roman nobility, not quite red, not quite purple. The bra material was satin and Lycra, and it closed in front, the easier for a girl to put it on, and the more interesting for a guy to take it off, his mind thought, as he headed over to the proper rack of clothing. Thirty-four-B, he thought. If too small, it would be all the more flattering ... small or medium on the string bikini? Shit, he decided, get one of each. Just to be sure, he also got a no-wire triangle-pattern bra and thong panties in an orange-red color that the Catholic Church would call a mortal sin just for looking at. On impulse he got several additional panties on the assumption that they soiled more quickly than bras did, something he wasn’t sure of despite being a field intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. They didn’t tell you about such things at The Farm. He’d have to do a memo on that. It might give MP a chuckle in her seventh-floor office at Langley.
One other thing, he thought. Perfume. Women liked perfume. You’d expect them to like it, especially here. The entire city of Beijing smelled like a steel mill, lots of coal dust and other pollutants in the air—as Pittsburgh had probably been at the turn of the last century—and the sad truth was that the Chinese didn’t bathe as diligently as Californians did, and nowhere nearly as regularly as the Japanese. So, something that smelled nice ...