Christianity translated exactly into political unreliability for the communist government, and unsurprisingly the Ministry of State Security had inserted intelligence officers into Reverend Yu’s congregation. This individual—actually there were three, lest one be corrupted by religion and become unreliable himself—had entered the names of the Yangs on a master list of political unreliables. For that reason, when Mrs. Yang Lien-Hua had duly registered her pregnancy, an official letter had appeared in her box, instructing her to go to the Longfu Hospital located on Meishuguan Street for a therapeutic abortion.
This Lien-Hua was unwilling to do. Her given name translated as “Lotus Flower,” but inside she was made of much sterner stuff. She wrote a week later to the appropriate government agency, telling them that her pregnancy had miscarried. Given the nature of bureaucracies, her lie was never checked out.
That lie had merely won Lotus Flower six months of ever-increasing stress. She never saw a physician, not even one of the “barefoot medics” that the PRC had invented a generation earlier, much to the admiration of political leftists all over the world. Lien-Hua was healthy and strong, and the human body had been designed by Nature to produce healthy offspring long before the advent of obstetricians. Her swelling belly she was able to hide, mostly, in her ill-fitting clothing. What she could not hide—at least from herself—was her inward fear. She carried a new baby in her belly. She wanted it. She wanted to have another chance at motherhood. She wanted to feel her child suckling at her breast. She wanted to love it and pamper it, watch it learn to crawl and stand and walk and talk, to see it grow beyond four years, enter school, learn and grow into a good adult of whom she could be proud.
The problem was politics. The state enforced its will with ruthlessness. She knew what could happen, the syringe filled with formaldehyde stabbed into the baby’s head at the very moment of birth. In China, it was state policy. For the Yangs, it was premeditated, cold-blooded murder, and they were determined not to lose a second child, who, the Reverend Yu had told them, was a gift from God Himself.
And there was a way. If you delivered the baby at home without medical assistance, and if the baby took its first breath, then the state would not kill it. There were some things even the government of the People’s Republic quailed at, and the killing of a living, breathing human infant was one of them. But until it took that breath, it was of no more consequence than a piece of meat in a market. There were even rumors that the Chinese government was selling organs from the aborted newborns on the world’s tissue market, to be used for medical purposes, and that was something the Yangs were able to believe.
So, their plan was for Lien-Hua to deliver the child at home, after which they would present their state with a fait accompli—and eventually have it baptized by Reverend Yu. To this end, Mrs. Yang had kept herself in good physical shape, walking two kilometers every day, eating sensibly, and generally doing all the things the government-published booklets told expectant mothers to do. And if anything went badly wrong, they’d go to Reverend Yu for counsel and advice. The plan enabled Lien-Hua to deal with the stress—in fact it was a heart-rending terror—of her unauthorized condition.
Well?" Ryan asked.
“Rutledge has all the right talents, and we’ve given him the instructions he needs. He ought to carry them out properly. Question is, will the Chinese play ball.”
“If they don’t, things become harder for them,” the President said, if not coldly, then with some degree of determination. “If they think they can bully us, Scott, it’s time they found out who the big kid in the playground is.”
“They’ll fight back. They’ve taken out options on fourteen Boeing 777s—just did that four days ago, remember? That’s the first thing they’ll chop if they don’t like us. That’s a lot of money and a lot of jobs for Boeing in Seattle,” SecState warned.
“I never have been real big on blackmail, Scott. Besides, that’s a classic case of penny-wise, pound-foolish. If we cave because of that, then we lose ten times the money and ten times the jobs elsewhere—okay, they won’t be all in one place, and so the TV news guys won’t be able to point their cameras, and so they won’t do the real story, just the one that can fit on half-inch tape. But I’m not in here to keep the goddamned media happy. I’m here to serve the people to the best of my ability, Scott. And that’s by-God going to happen,” POTUS promised his guest.
“I don’t doubt it, Jack,” Adler responded. “Just remember that it won’t play out quite the way you want it to.”
“It never does, but if they play rough, it’s going to cost them seventy billion dollars a year. We can afford to do without their products. Can they afford to do without our money?” Ryan asked.
Secretary Adler was not totally comfortable with the way the question was posed. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”
CHAPTER 21
Simmering
So, what did you develop last night?" Reilly asked. He’d be late to his embassy office, but his gut told him that things were breaking loose in the RPG Case—that was how he thought of it—and Director Murray had a personal interest in the case, because the President did, and that made it more important than the routine bullshit on Reilly’s desk.
“Our Chinese friend—the one in the men’s room, that is—is the Third Secretary at their mission. Our friends across town at SVR have suspected that he is a member of their Ministry for State Security. He’s not regarded as a particularly bright diplomat by the Foreign Ministry—ours, that is.”
“That’s how you cover a spook,” Reilly agreed. “A dumb cookie-pusher. Okay, so he’s a player.”
“I agree, Mishka,” Provalov said. “Now, it would be nice to know who passed what to whom.”
“Oleg Gregoriyevich”—Reilly liked the semiformal Russian form of address—“if I’d been standing right there and staring, I might not have been able to tell.” That was the problem dealing with real professionals. They were as good at that maneuver as a Vegas dealer was with a deck of Bicycles. You needed a good lens and a slow-motion camera to be sure, and that was a little bulky for work in the field. But they’d just proved, to their satisfaction at least, that both men were active in the spook business, and that was a break in the case any way you sliced it. “ID the girl?”
“Yelena Ivanova Dimitrova.” Provalov handed the folder across. “Just a whore, but, of course, a very expensive one.”
Reilly flipped it open and scanned the notes. Known prostitute specializing in foreigners. The photo of her was unusually flattering.
“You came in early this morning?” Reilly asked. He must have, to have all this work done already.
“Before six,” Oleg confirmed. The case was becoming more exciting for him as well. “In any case, Klementi Ivan’ch kept her all night. She left his apartment and caught a taxi home at seven-forty this morning. She looked happy and satisfied, according to my people.”
That was good for a chuckle. She didn’t leave her trick until after Oleg hit the office? That must have affected his attitude somewhat, Reilly thought, with an inward grin. It sure as hell would have affected his. “Well, good for our subject. I expect he won’t be getting too much of that in a few months,” the FBI agent thought aloud, hoping it would make his Russian colleague a little happier about life.
“One can hope,” Provalov agreed coldly. “I have four men watching his apartment. If he leaves and appears to be heading away for a while, I will try to get a team into his apartment to plant some electronic surveillance.”
“They know how to be careful?” Reilly asked. If this Suvorov mutt was as trained as they thought, he’d leave telltales in his apartment that could make breaking in dicey.
“They are KGB-trained also. One of them helped catch a French intelligence officer back in the old times. Now, I have a question for you,” the Russian cop said.
“Shoot.”
“What do you know of a special counterterrorist group based in England?”
 
; “The ‘Men of Black,’ you mean?”
Provalov nodded. “Yes. Do you know anything about them?”
Reilly knew he had to watch his words, even though he knew damned little. “Really, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve seen in the papers. It’s some sort of multinational NATO group, part military and part police, I think. They had a good run of luck last year. Why do you ask?”
“A request from on high, because I know you. I’ve been told that they are coming to Moscow to assist in training our people—Spetsnaz groups with similar tasks,” Oleg explained.
“Really? Well, I’ve never been in the muscle end of the Bureau, just in a local SWAT team once. Gus Werner probably knows a lot about them. Gus runs the new Counter-Terrorism Division at Headquarters. Before that, Gus ran HRT and had a field command—a field division, that is, a big-city field office. I’ve met him once, just to say hello. Gus has a very good service rep.”
“Rep?”
“Reputation, Oleg. He’s well regarded by the field agents. But like I said, that’s the muscle end of the Bureau. I’ve always been with the chess players.”
“Investigations, you mean.”
Reilly nodded. “That’s right. It’s what the FBI is supposed to be all about, but the outfit’s mutated a bit over the years.” The American paused. “So, you’re covering this Suvorov/Koniev guy real tight?” Reilly asked, to recenter the discussion.
“My men have orders to be discreet, but yes, we will keep a close eye on him, as you say.”
“You know, if he really is working with the Chinese spooks ... do you think they might want to kill that Golovko guy?”
“I do not know, but we must regard that as a real possibility.”
Reilly nodded, thinking this would make an interesting report to send to Washington, and maybe discuss with the CIA station chief as well.
I want the files for everyone who ever worked with him,“" Sergey Nikolay‘ch ordered. ”And I want you to get me his personal file."
“Yes, Comrade Chairman,” Major Shelepin replied, with a bob of the head.
The morning briefing, delivered by a colonel of the militia, had pleased neither the SVR Chairman nor his principal bodyguard. In this case, for a change, the legendarily slow Russian bureaucracy had been circumvented, and the information fast-tracked to those interested in it. That included the man whose life might have been spared accidentally after all.
“And we will set up a special-action group to work with this Provalov child.”
“Of course, Comrade Chairman.”
It was strange, Sergey Nikolay’ch thought, how rapidly the world could change. He vividly remembered the morning of the murder—it was not the sort of thing a man could forget. But after the first few days of shock and attendant fear, he’d allowed himself to relax, to believe that this Avseyenko had been the real target of an underworld rub out—an archaic American term he liked—and that his own life had never been directly threatened. With the acceptance of that belief, the entire thing had become like driving past an ordinary traffic accident. Even if some unfortunate motorist had been killed there at the side of the road, you just dismissed it as an irrelevance, because that sort of thing couldn’t happen to you in your own expensive official car, not with Anatoliy driving. But now he’d begun to wonder if perhaps his life had been spared by accident. Such things were not supposed to occur—there shouldn’t have been any need for them.
Now he was more frightened than he’d been that bright Moscow morning, looking down from his window at the smoking wreck on the pavement. It meant that he might be in danger still, and he dreaded that prospect as much as the next man.
Worse still, his hunter might well be one of his own, a former KGB officer with connections to Spetsnaz, and if he were in contact with the Chinese ...
... But why would the Chinese wish to end his life? For that matter, why would the Chinese wish to perform any such crime in a foreign land? It was beyond imprudent.
None of this made any sense, but as a career intelligence officer, Golovko had long since shed the illusion that the world was supposed to make sense. What he did know was that he needed more information, and at least he was in a very good place to seek it out. If he wasn’t as powerful as he might once have been, he was still powerful enough for his own purposes, Golovko told himself.
Probably.
He didn’t try to come to the ministry very often. It was just a routine security measure, but a sensible one. Once you recruited an agent, you didn’t want to hang out with him or her for fear of compromise. That was one of the things they taught you at The Farm. If you compromised one of your agents, you might have trouble sleeping at night, because CIA was usually active in countries where the Miranda warning was delivered by a gun or knife or fist, or something just as bad—as unpleasant as a police state could make it, and that, the instructors had told his class, could be pretty fuckin’ unpleasant. Especially in a case like this, he was intimate with this agent, and breaking away from her could cause her to stop her cooperation, which, Langley had told him, was pretty damned good, and they wanted more of it. Erasing the program he’d had her input on her machine would be difficult for a CalTech-trained genius, but you could accomplish the same thing by clobbering the whole hard drive and reinstalling new files over the old ones, because the valuable little gopher file was hidden in the system software, and a write-over would destroy it as surely as the San Francisco Earthquake.
So, he didn’t want to be here, exactly, but he was a businessman, in addition to being a spook, and the client had called him in. The girl two desks away from Ming had a computer problem, and he was the NEC rep for the ministry offices.
It turned out to be a minor problem—you just couldn’t turn some women loose on computers. It was like loosing a four-year-old in a gun shop, he thought, but didn’t dare say such things aloud in these liberated times, even here. Happily, Ming hadn’t been in sight when he’d come in. He’d walked over to the desk with the problem and fixed it in about three minutes, explaining the error to the secretary in simple terms she was sure to understand, and which would now make her the office expert for an easily replicated problem. With a smile and a polite Japanese bow, he’d made his way to the door, when the door to the inner office opened, and Ming came out with her Minister Fang behind her, looking down at some papers.
“Oh, hello, Nomuri-san,” Ming said in surprise, as Fang called the name “Chai,” and waved to another of the girls to follow him in. If Fang saw Nomuri there, he didn’t acknowledge it, simply disappeared back into his private office.
“Hello, Comrade Ming,” the American said, speaking in English. “Your computer operates properly?” he asked formally.
“Yes, it does, thank you.”
“Good. Well, if you experience a problem, you have my card.”
“Oh, yes. You are well settled in to Beijing now?” she asked politely.
“Yes, thank you, I am.”
“You should try Chinese food instead of sticking to the food of your homeland, though, I admit, I have developed a taste lately for Japanese sausage,” she told him, and everyone else in the room, with a face that would have done Amarillo Slim proud.
For his part, Chester Nomuri felt his heart not so much skip a beat as stop entirely for about ten seconds, or so it seemed. “Ah, yes,” he had to say in reply, as soon as he got breath back in his lungs. “It can be very tasty.”
Ming just nodded and went to her desk and back to work. Nomuri nodded and bowed politely to the office and made his departure as well, then headed down the corridor immediately for a men’s room, the need to urinate urgent. Sweet Jesus. But that was one of the problems with agents. They sometimes got off on their work the way a drug addict got off on the immediate rush when the chemical hit his system, and they’d tickle the dragon with their new and playful enthusiasm just to experience a little more of the rush, forgetting that the dragon’s tail was a lot closer to its mouth than it appeared. It was foolish t
o enjoy danger. Zipping himself back up, he told himself that he hadn’t broken training, hadn’t stumbled on his reply to her playful observation. But he had to warn her about dancing in a minefield. You never really knew where to put your feet, and discovering the wrong places was usually painful.
That’s when he realized why it had happened, and the thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Ming loved him. She was playful because ... well, why else would she have said that? As a game? Did she regard the whole thing as a game? No, she wasn’t the right personality type to be a hooker. The sex had been good, maybe too good—if such a thing were possible, Nomuri thought as he resumed walking toward the elevator. She’d surely be over tonight after saying that. He’d have to stop by the liquor store on the way home and get some more of that awful Japanese scotch for thirty bucks a liter. A working man couldn’t afford to get drunk here unless he drank the local stuff, and that was too vile to contemplate.
But Ming had just consecrated their relationship by risking her life in front of her minister and her co-workers, and that was far more frightening to Nomuri than her ill-considered remark about his dick and her fondness for it. Jesus, he thought, this is getting too serious. But what could he do now? He’d seduced her and made a spy of her, and she’d fallen for him for no better reason, probably, than that he was younger than the old fucker she worked for, and was far nicer to her. Okay, so he was pretty good in the sack, and that was excellent for his male ego, and he was a stranger in a strange land and he had to get his rocks off, too, and doing it with her was probably safer to his cover than picking up some hooker in a bar—and he didn’t even want to consider getting seriously involved with a real girl in his real life—