The Bear and the Dragon

  Her eyes, he saw, were a little uneasy themselves, a little frightened, and with luck maybe his were, too, because women everywhere liked their men to be just a little vulnerable. Maybe John Wayne hadn’t gotten all the action he wanted, Nomuri thought quickly. Then he smiled.

  “I guessed right on the size.”

  “Yes, and it feels wonderful, like a second skin, smooth and silky.” Every woman has it, Nomuri realized: the ability to smile and, regardless of the exterior, show the woman within, often a perfect woman, full of tenderness and desire, demureness and coquetry, and all you had to do ...

  ... his hand came out and touched her face as gently as his slight shaking allowed. What the hell was this? he demanded of himself. Shaking? James Bond’s hands never shook. This was the time when he was supposed to scoop her up in his arms and stride in a masterful way off to the bed, there to possess her like Vince Lombardi taking over a football team, like George Patton leading an attack. But for all his triumphal anticipation of this moment, things were different from what he’d expected. Whoever or whatever Ming was, she was giving herself to him. There was no more in her than that—that was all she had. And she was giving it to him.

  He bent his head down to kiss her, and there he caught the scent of the Dream Angel perfume, and somehow it suited the moment perfectly. Her arms came around him sooner than he’d expected. His hands replicated her gesture, and he found that her skin was smooth, like oiled silk, and his hands rubbed up and down of their own accord. He felt something strange on his chest and looked down to see her small hands undoing his buttons, and then her eyes looked into his, and her face was no longer plain. He unbuttoned his own cuffs, and she forced his shirt off, down his back, then lifted his T-shirt over his head—or tried to, for her arms were too short to make it quite all the way—and then he hugged her tighter, feeling the silklike artificial fibers of her new bra rub on his hairless chest. It was then that his hug became harder, more insistent, and his kiss harder on her mouth, and he took her face in his hands and looked hard into her dark, suddenly deep eyes, and what he saw was woman.

  Her hands moved and unfastened his belt and slacks, which fell to his ankles. He nearly fell himself when he moved one leg, but Ming caught him and both laughed a little as he lifted his feet clear of his loafers and the slacks, and with that they both took a step toward the bed. Ming took another and turned, displaying herself for him. He’d underestimated the girl. Her waist was a full four inches slimmer than he’d thought—must be the damned boiler suit she wore to work, Nomuri thought at once—and her breasts filled the bra to perfection. Even the awful haircut seemed right just now, somehow fitting the amber skin and slanted eyes.

  What came next was both easy and very, very hard. Nomuri reached out to her side, pulling her close, but not too close. Then he let his hand wander across her chest, for the first time feeling her breast through the gossamer fabric of the bra, at the same time watching her eyes closely for a reaction. There was little of that, though her eyes did seem to relax, perhaps even smile just a little at his touch, and then came the obligatory next step. With both hands, he unfastened the front closure of the bra. Instantly Ming’s hands dropped to cover herself. What did that mean? the CIA officer wondered, but then her hands dropped and she pulled him to her, and their bodies met and his head came down to kiss her again, and his hands slid the bra straps off her arms and onto the floor. There was little left to be done, and both, so it seemed, advanced with a combination of lust and fear. Her hands went down and loosened the elastic band of his briefs, with her eyes now locked on his, and this time she smiled, a for-real smile that made him blush, because he was as ready as he needed to be, and then her hands pushed down on the briefs, and all that left was his socks, and then it was his turn to kneel and pull down on the red silklike panties. She kicked them loose and each stood apart to inspect the other. Her breasts were about a large B, Nomuri thought, the nipples brown as potting soil. Her waist was not nearly model-thin, but a womanly contrast with both the hips and upper body. Nomuri took a step and then took her hand and walked her to the bed, laying her down with a gentle kiss, and for this moment he was not an intelligence officer for his country.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lessons of the Trade

  The pathway started in Nomuri’s apartment, and from there went to a Web site established in Beijing, notionally for Nippon Electric Company, but the site had been designed for NEC by an American citizen who worked for more than one boss, one of whom was a front operated by and for the Central Intelligence Agency. The precise address point for Nomuri’s e-mail was then accessible to the CIA’s Beijing station chief, who, as a matter of fact, didn’t know anything about Nomuri. That was a security measure to which he would probably have objected, but which he would have understood as a characteristic of Mary Patricia Foley’s way of running the Directorate of Operations—and besides which, Station Beijing hadn’t exactly covered itself with glory in recruiting senior PRC officials to be American agents-in-place.

  The message the station chief downloaded was just gibberish to him, scrambled letters that might as easily have been typed by a chimpanzee in return for a bunch of bananas at some research university, and he took no note of it, just super-encrypting on his own in-house system called TAPDANCE and cross-loading it to an official government communications network that went to a communications satellite, to be downloaded at Sunnyvale, California, then uploaded yet again, and downloaded at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. From there the message went by secure fiber-optic landline to CIA headquarters at Langley, and then first of all into Mercury, the Agency’s communications center, where the Station Beijing super-encryption was stripped away, revealing the original gibberish, and then cross-loaded one last time to Mrs. Foley’s personal computer terminal, which was the only one with the encryption system and daily key-selection algorithm for the counterpart system on Chet Nomuri’s laptop, which was called INTERCRYPT. MP was doing other things at the time, and took twenty minutes to log into her own system and note the arrival of a SORGE message. That piqued her interest at once. She executed the command to decrypt the message, and got gibberish, then realized (not for the first time) that Nomuri was on the other side of the date line, and had therefore used a different key sequence. So, adjust the date for tomorrow... and, yes! She printed a hard copy of the message for her husband, and then saved the message to her personal hard drive, automatically encrypting it along the way. From there, it was a short walk to Ed’s office.

  “Hey, baby,” the DCI said, without looking up. Not too many people walked into his office without announcement. The news had to be good. MP had a beaming smile as she handed the paper over.

  “Chet got laid last night!” the DDO told the DCI.

  “Am I supposed to break out a cigar?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked. His eyes scanned the message.

  “Well, it’s a step forward.”

  “For him, maybe,” Ed Foley responded with a twinkling eye. “I suppose you can get pretty horny on that sort of assignment, though I never had that problem myself.” The Foleys had always worked the field as a married couple, and had gone through The Farm together. It had saved the senior Foley from all the complications that James Bond must have encountered.

  “Eddie, you can be such a mudge!”

  That made the DCI look up. “Such a what?”

  “Curmudgeon!” she growled. “This could be a real breakthrough. This little chippy is personal secretary to Fang Gan. She knows all sorts of stuff we want to know.”

  “And Chet got to try her out last night. Honey, that’s not the same thing as recruitment. We don’t have an agent-in-place quite yet,” he reminded his wife.

  “I know, I know, but I have a feeling about this.”

  “Woman’s intuition?” Ed asked, scanning the message again for any sordid details, but finding only cold facts, as though The Wall Street Journal had covered the seduction. Well, at least
Nomuri had a little discretion. No rigid quivering rod plunging into her warm moist sheath—though Nomuri was twenty-nine, and at that age the rod tended to be pretty rigid. Chet was from California, wasn’t he? the DCI wondered. So, probably not a virgin, maybe even a competent lover, though on the first time with anybody you mainly wanted to see if the pieces fit together properly—they always did, at least in Ed Foley’s experience, but you still wanted to check and see. He remembered Robin Williams’s takeoff on Adam and Eve, “Better stand back, honey. I don’t know how big this thing gets!” The combination of careful conservatism and out-of-control wishful thinking common to the male of the species. “Okay, so, what are you going to reply? ‘How many orgasms did the two of you have’?”

  “God damn it, Ed!” The pin in the balloon worked, the DCI saw. He could almost see steam coming out of his wife’s pretty ears. “You know damned well what I’m going to suggest. Let the relationship blossom and ease her into talking about her job. It’ll take a while, but if it works it’ll be worth the wait.”

  And if it doesn’t work, it’s not a bad deal for Chester, Ed Foley thought. There weren’t many professions in the world in which getting sex was part of the job that earned you promotions, were there?

  “Mary?”

  “Yes, Ed?”

  “Does it strike you as a little odd that the kid’s reporting his sex life to us? Does it make you blush a little?”

  “It would if he were telling me face-to-face. The e-mail method is best for this, I think. Less human content.”

  “You’re happy with the security of the information transfer?”

  “Yeah, we’ve been through this. The message could just be sensitive business information, and the encryption system is very robust. The boys and girls at Fort Meade can break it, but it’s brute force every time, and it takes up to a week, even after they make the right guesses on how the encryption system works. The PRC guys would have to go from scratch. The trapdoor in the ISP was very cleverly designed, and the way we tap into it should also be secure—and even then, just because an embassy phone taps into an ISP doesn’t mean anything. We have a consular official downloading pornography from a local Web site through that ISP as another cover, in case anybody over there gets real clever.” That had been carefully thought through. It would be something that one would wish to be covert, something the counterintelligence agency in Beijing would find both understandable and entertaining in its own right, if and when they cracked into it.

  “Anything good?” Ed Foley asked, again, just to bedevil his wife.

  “Not unless you’re into child abuse. Some of the subjects for this site are too young to vote. If you downloaded it over here, the FBI might come knocking on your door.”

  “Capitalism really has broken out over there, eh?”

  “Some of the senior Party officials seem to like this sort of thing. I guess when you’re pushing eighty, you need something special to help jump-start the motor.” Mary Pat had seen some of the photographs, and once had been plenty. She was a mother, and all of those photographic subjects had been infants once, strange though that might seem to a subscriber to that Web site. The abusers of girls must have thought that they all sprang into life with their legs spread and a welcoming look in their doll-child faces. Not quite, the DDO thought, but her job wasn’t to be a clergyman. Sometimes you had to do business with such perverts, because they had information which her country needed. If you were lucky, and the information was really useful, then you often arranged for them to defect, to live in the United States, where they could live and enjoy their perversions to some greater or lesser degree, after being briefed on the law, and the consequences of breaking it. Afterward there was always a bathroom and soap to wash your hands. It was a need of which she’d availed herself more than once. One of the problems with espionage was that you didn’t always do business with the sort of people whom you’d willingly invite into your home. But it wasn’t about Miss Manners. It was about getting information that your country needed to guard its strategic interests, and even to prevail in war, if it came to that. Lives were often at stake, either directly or indirectly. And so, you did business with anyone who had such information, even if he or she wasn’t exactly a member of the clergy.

  “Okay, babe. Keep me posted,” Foley told his wife.

  “Will do, honey-bunny.” The DDO headed back to her own office. There she drew up her reply to Nomuri: MESSAGE RECEIVED. KEEP US POSTED ON YOUR PROGRESS. MP. ENDS.

  The reply came as a relief to Nomuri when he woke and checked his e-mail. It was a disappointment that he didn’t wake up with company, but to expect that would have been unrealistic. Ming would have been ill-advised to spend the night anywhere but in her own bed. Nomuri couldn’t even drive her back. She’d just left, carrying her presents—well, wearing some of them—for the walk back to her own shared flat where, Nomuri fervently hoped, she wouldn’t discuss her evening’s adventures with her room-mates. You never knew about women and how they talked. It wasn’t all that dissimilar with some men, Nomuri remembered from college, where some of his chums had talked at length about their conquests, as though they’d slain a dragon with a Popsicle stick. Nomuri had never indulged in this aural spectator sport. Either he’d had a spy’s mentality even then, or he’d been somehow imbued with the dictum that a gentleman didn’t kiss and tell. But did women? That was a mystery to him, like why it was that women seemed to go to the bathroom in pairs—he’d occasionally joked that that was when they’d held their “union meetings.” Anyway, women talked more than men did. He was sure of that. And while they kept many secrets from men, how many did they keep from other women? Jesus, all that had to happen was for her to tell a roomie that she’d had her brains fucked out by a Japanese salaryman, and if that roomie was an informant to the MSS, Ming would get a visit from a security officer, who at the very least would counsel her never to see Nomuri again. More likely, the counseling would involve a demand to send that degenerate American bourgeois trash (the Victoria’s Secret underthings) back to him, plus a threat to lose her ministry job if she ever appeared on the same street with him again. And that also meant that he’d be tailed and observed and investigated by the MSS, and that was something he had to take seriously. They didn’t have to catch him committing espionage. This was a communist country, where due process of law was a bourgeois concept unworthy of serious consideration, and civil rights were limited to doing what one was told. As a foreigner doing business in the PRC, he might get some easiness of treatment, but not all that much.

  So, he hadn’t just gotten his rocks off, Nomuri told himself, past the delightful memories of a passionate evening. He’d crossed a wide red line in the street, and his safety depended entirely upon on how discreet Ming was. He hadn’t—could not have—warned her to keep her mouth shut about their time together. Such things weren’t said, because they added a level of gravity to what was supposed to have been a time of joy and friendship ... or even something potentially bigger than friendship. Women thought in such terms, Chester reminded himself, and for that reason he might see a pointed nose and whiskers the next time he looked in the mirror, but this was business, not personal, he told himself as he shut down his computer.

  Except for one small thing. He’d had sexual relations with an intelligent and not entirely unattractive young female human being, and the problem was that when you gave a little bit of your heart away, you never really got it back. And his heart, Nomuri belatedly realized, was distantly connected to his dick. He wasn’t James Bond. He could not embrace a woman as a paid whore embraced a man. It just wasn’t in him to be that sort of heartless swine. The good news was that for this reason he could stand to look in a mirror for the time being. The bad news was that this ability might be short-lived, if he treated Ming as a thing and not a person.

  Nomuri needed advice on how to feel about this operation, and he didn’t have a place to get it. It wasn’t the sort of thing to e-mail to Mary Pat or to one of the pshrink
s the Agency employed for counseling DO people who needed a little guidance with their work. This sort of thing had to be handled face-to-face with a real person, whose body language you could read and whose tone of voice would deliver its own content. No, e-mail wasn’t the medium he needed right now. He needed to fly to Tokyo and meet a senior officer of the Directorate of Operations who could counsel him on how to handle things. But if the guy told him to cut himself off from intimate contact with Ming, then what would he do? Nomuri asked himself. It wasn’t as though he had a girlfriend of any kind, and he had his needs for intimacy, too—and besides, if he cut her off, what effect would that have on his potential, prospective agent? You didn’t check your humanity by the door when you joined up with the Agency, despite what all the books said and the public expectations were. All the chuckles over beer during the nights after training sessions seemed a distant thing now, and all the expectations he and his colleagues had had back then. They’d been so far off the mark, in spite of what their training officers had told them. He’d been a child then, and to some extent even in Japan, but suddenly he was a man, alone in a country that was at best suspicious, and at worst hostile to him and his country. Well, it was in her hands now, and that was something he couldn’t change.

  Her co-workers noted a slight difference in their colleague. She smiled a little more, and in a somewhat different way. Something good must have happened to her, some of them thought, and for this they rejoiced, albeit in a reserved and private way. If Ming wished to share the experience with them, all well and good, and if not, that, too, was okay with them, because some things were private, even among a group of women who shared virtually everything, including stories of their minister and his fumbling, lengthy, and occasionally futile efforts at lovemaking. He was a wise man, and usually a gentle one, though as a boss he had his bad points. But Ming would notice none of those today. Her smile was sweeter than ever, and her eyes twinkled like little diamonds, the rest of the admin/secretarial staff all thought. They’d all seen it before, though not with Ming, whose love life had been an abbreviated one, and whom the minister liked a little too much, but whom he serviced imperfectly and too seldom. She sat at her computer to do her correspondence and translations of Western news articles that might be of interest to the Minister. Ming had the best English skills of anyone in this corner of the building, and the new computer system worked superbly. The next step, so the story went, was a computer into which you’d just speak, making the characters appear by voice command, sure to become the curse of every executive secretary in the world, because it would largely make them obsolete. Or maybe not. The boss couldn’t fuck a computer, could he? Not that Minister Fang was all that intrusive in his demands. And the perks he delivered in return weren’t bad at all.