And who wouldn’t? the militiaman wondered with a yawn. “So, how did Avseyenko offend such powerful men?” the cop asked again.
“I have told you I do not know. Talk to ‘the boy,’ perhaps he will know.”
“It is said that Gregoriy was beginning to import drugs,” the cop said next, casting his hook into a different hole, and wondering what fish might lurk in the still waters.
The informant nodded. “That is true. It was said. But I never saw any evidence of it.”
“Who would have seen evidence of it?”
Another shrug. “This I do not know. One of his girls, perhaps. I never understood how he planned to distribute what he thought about importing. To use the girls was logical, of course, but dangerous for them—and for him, because his whores would not have been loyal to him in the face of a trip to the camps. So, then, what does that leave?” the informant asked rhetorically. “He would have to set up an entirely new organization, and there were also dangers in doing that, were there not? So, yes, I believe he was thinking about importing drugs for sale, and making vast sums of money from it, but Gregoriy was not a man who wished to go to a prison, and I think he was merely thinking about it, perhaps talking a little, but not much. I do not think he had made his final decision. I do not think he actually imported anything before he met his end.”
“Rivals with the same ideas?” the cop asked next.
“There are people who can find cocaine and other drugs for you, as you well know.”
The cop looked up. In fact, the militia sergeant didn’t know that for certain. He’d heard rumbles and rumors, but not statements of fact from informants he trusted (insofar as any cop in any city truly trusted any informant). As with many things, there was a buzz on the streets of Moscow, but like most Moscow cops he expected it to show up first in the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city whose criminal activity went back to the czars and which today, with the restoration of free trade with the rest of the world, tended to lead Russia in—well, led Russia to all forms of illicit activity. If there was an active drug trade in Moscow, it was so new and so small that he hadn’t stumbled across it yet. He made a mental note to check with Odessa, to see what if anything was happening down there along those lines.
“And what people might they be?” the sergeant asked. If there was a growing distribution network in Moscow, he might as well learn about it.
Nomuri’s job for Nippon Electric Company involved selling high-end desktop computers and peripherals. For him that meant the PRC government, whose senior bureaucrats had to have the newest and best of everything, from cars to mistresses, paid for in all cases by the government, which in turn took its money from the people, whom the bureaucrats represented and protected to the best of their abilities. As in many things, the PRC could have bought American brands, but in this case it chose to purchase the slightly less expensive (and less capable) computers from Japan, in the same way that it preferred to buy Airbus airlines from the European maker rather than Boeings from America—that had been a card played a few years before to teach the Americans a lesson. America had briefly resented it, then had quickly forgotten about it, in the way America seemed to handle all such slights, which was quite a contrast to the Chinese, who never forgot anything.
When President Ryan had announced the reestablishment of their official recognition of the Republic of China government on Taiwan, the repercussions had thundered through the corridors of power in Beijing like the main shocks of a major earthquake. Nomuri hadn’t been here long enough yet to see the cold fury the move had generated, but the aftershocks were significant enough, and he’d heard echoes of it since his arrival in Beijing. The questions directed at himself were sometimes so direct and so demanding of an explanation that he’d momentarily wondered if his cover might have been blown, and his interlocutors had known that he was a CIA “illegal” field officer in the capital of the People’s Republic of China, entirely without a diplomatic cover. But it hadn’t been that. It was just a continuing echo of pure political rage. Paradoxically, the Chinese government was itself trying to shove that rage aside because they, too, had to do business with the United States of America, now their number one trading partner, and the source of vast amounts of surplus cash, which their government needed to do the things which Nomuri was tasked to find out about. And so, here he was, in the outer office of one of the nation’s senior officials.
“Good day,” he said, with a bow and a smile to the secretary. She worked for a senior minister named Fang Gan, he knew, whose office was close by. She was surprisingly well dressed for a semi-ordinary worker, in a nation where fashion statements were limited to the color of the buttons one wore on the Mao jacket that was as much a part of the uniform of civilian government workers as was the gray-green wool of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.
“Good day,” the young lady said in reply. “Are you Nomuri?”
“Yes, and you are ... ?”
“Lian Ming,” the secretary replied.
An interesting name, Chester thought. “Lian” in Mandarin meant “graceful willow.” She was short, like most Chinese women, with a square-ish face and dark eyes. Her least attractive feature was her hair, short and cut in a manner that harkened back to the worst of the 1950s in America, and then only for children in Appalachian trailer parks. For all that, it was a classically Chinese face in its ethnicity, and one much favored in this tradition-bound nation. The look in her eyes, at least, suggested intelligence and education.
“You are here to discuss computers and printers,” she said neutrally, having absorbed some of her boss’s sense of importance and centrality of place in the universe.
“Yes, I am. I think you will find our new pin-matrix printer particularly appealing.”
“And why is that?” Ming asked.
“Do you speak English?” Nomuri asked in that language.
“Certainly,” Ming replied, in the same.
“Then it becomes simple to explain. If you transliterate Mandarin into English, the spelling, I mean, then the printer transposes into Mandarin ideographs automatically, like this,” he explained, pulling a sheet of paper from his plastic folder and handing it to the secretary. “We are also working on a laser-printer system which will be even smoother in its appearance.”
“Ah,” the secretary observed. The quality of the characters was superb, easily the equal of the monstrous typewriting machine that secretaries had to use for official documents—or else have them hand-printed and then further processed on copying machines, mainly Canons, also of Japanese manufacture. The process was time-consuming, tedious, and much hated by the secretarial staff. “And what of inflection variations?”
Not a bad question, Nomuri noted. The Chinese language was highly dependent on inflection. The tone with which a word was delivered determined its actual meaning from as many as four distinct options, and it was also a determining factor in which ideograph it designated in turn.
“Do the characters appear on the computer screen in that way as well?” the secretary asked.
“They can, with just a click of the mouse,” Nomuri assured her. “There may be a ‘software’ problem, insofar as you have to think simultaneously in two languages,” he warned her with a smile.
Ming laughed. “Oh, we always do that here.”
Her teeth would have benefited from a good orthodontist, Nomuri thought, but there weren’t many of them in Beijing, along with the other bourgeois medical specialties, like reconstructive surgery. For all that, he’d gotten her to laugh, and that was something.
“Would you like to see me demonstrate our new capabilities?” the CIA field officer asked.
“Sure, why not?” She appeared a little disappointed that he wasn’t able to do so right here and now.
“Excellent, but I will need you to authorize my bringing the hardware into the building. Your security people, you see.”
How did I forget that? he saw her ask herself, blinking rather hard in a
mild self-rebuke. Better to set the hook all the way.
“Do you have the authority for that, or must you consult someone more senior?” The most vulnerable point in any communist bureaucrat was their sense of importance-of-place.
A knowing smile: “Oh, yes, I can authorize that on my own authority.”
A smile of his own: “Excellent. I can be here with my equipment at, say, ten in the morning.”
“Good, the main entrance. They will be awaiting you.”
“Thank you, Comrade Ming,” Nomuri said with his best officious (short) bow to the young secretary—and, probably, mistress to her minister, the field officer thought. This one had possibilities, but he’d have to be careful with her both for himself and for her, he thought to himself while waiting for the elevator. That’s why Langley paid him so much, not counting the princely salary from Nippon Electric Company that was his to keep. He needed it to survive here. The price of living was bad enough for a Chinese. For a foreigner, it was worse, because for foreigners everything was—had to be—special. The apartments were special—and almost certainly bugged. The food he bought in a special shop was more expensive—and Nomuri didn’t object to that, since it was also almost certainly healthier.
China was what Nomuri called a thirty-foot country. Everything looked okay, even impressive, until you got within thirty feet of it. Then you saw that the parts didn’t fit terribly well. He’d found it could be especially troublesome getting into an elevator, of all things. Dressed as he was in Western-made clothing (the Chinese thought of Japan as a Western country, which would have amused a lot of people, both in Japan and the West), he was immediately spotted as a qwai—a foreign devil—even before people saw his face. When that happened, the looks changed, sometimes to mere curiosity, sometimes to outright hostility, because the Chinese weren’t like the Japanese; they weren’t trained as thoroughly to conceal their feelings, or maybe they just didn’t give a damn, the CIA officer thought behind his own blanked-out poker face. He’d learned the practice from his time in Tokyo, and learned it well, which explained both why he had a good job with NEC and why he’d never been burned in the field.
The elevator ran smoothly enough, but somehow it just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was, again, because the pieces didn’t quite seem to fit together. Nomuri hadn’t had that feeling in Japan. For all their faults, the Japanese were competent engineers. The same was doubtless true of Taiwan, but Taiwan, like Japan, had a capitalist system which rewarded performance by giving it business and profits and comfortable salaries for the workers who turned out good work. The PRC was still learning how to do that. They exported a lot, but to this point the things exported were either fairly simple in design (like tennis shoes), or were manufactured mostly in strict accordance to standards established elsewhere and then slavishly copied here in China (like electronic gadgets). This was already changing, of course. The Chinese people were as clever as any, and even communism could keep them down only so long. Yet the industrialists who were beginning to innovate and offer the world genuinely new products were treated by their government masters as ... well, as unusually productive peasants at best. That was not a happy thought for the useful men who occasionally wondered over drinks why it was that they, the ones who brought wealth into their nation, were treated as ... unusually productive peasants, by the ones who deemed themselves the masters of their country and their culture. Nomuri walked outside, toward his parked automobile, wondering how long that could last.
This whole political and economic policy was schizophrenic, Nomuri knew. Sooner or later, the industrialists would rise up and demand that they be given a voice in the political operation of their country. Perhaps—doubtless—such whispers had happened already. If so, word had gotten back to the whisperers that the tallest tree is quickly cut for lumber, and the well with the sweetest water is first to be drunk dry, and he who shouts too loudly is first to be silenced. So, maybe the Chinese industrial leaders were just biding their time and looking around the rooms where they gathered, wondering which of their number would be the first to take the risk, and maybe he would be rewarded with fame and honor and later memories of heroism—or maybe, more likely, his family would be billed for the 7.62x39 cartridge needed to send him into the next life, which Buddha had promised but which the government contemptuously denied.
So, they haven’t made it public yet. That’s a little odd,” Ryan thought aloud.
“It is,” Ben Goodley agreed with a nod.
“Any idea why they’re sitting on the news?”
“No, sir ... unless somebody is hoping to cash in on it somehow, but exactly how ...” CARDSHARP shrugged.
“Buy stock in Atlantic Richfield? Some mine-machine builder—”
“Or just buy options in some land in eastern Siberia,” George Winston suggested. “Not that such a thing is ever done by the honorable servants of the people.” The President laughed hard enough that he had to set his coffee down.
“Certainly not in this administration,” POTUS pointed out. One of the benefits the media had with Ryan’s team was that so many of them were plutocrats of one magnitude or another, not “working” men. It was as if the media thought that money just appeared in the hands of some fortunate souls by way of miracle ... or some unspoken and undiscovered criminal activity. But never by work. It was the oddest of political prejudices that wealth didn’t come from work, but rather from something else, a something never really described, but always implied to be suspect.
“Yeah, Jack,” Winston said, with a laugh of his own. “We’ve got enough that we can afford to be honest. Besides, who the hell needs an oil field or gold mine?”
“Further developments on the size of either?”
Goodley shook his head. “No, sir. The initial information is firming up nicely. Both discoveries are big. The oil especially, but the gold as well.”
“The gold thing will distort the market somewhat,” SecTreas opined. “Depending on how fast it comes on stream. It might also cause a shutdown of the mine we have operating in the Dakotas.”
“Why?” Goodley asked.
“If the Russian strike is as good as the data suggests, they’ll be producing gold for about twenty-five percent less than what it costs there, despite environmental conditions. The attendant reduction of the world price of gold will then make Dakota unprofitable to operate.” Winston shrugged. “So, they’ll mothball the site and sit until the price goes back up. Probably after the initial flurry of production, our Russian friends will scale things back so that they can cash in in a more, uh, orderly way. What’ll happen is that the other producers, mainly South Africans, will meet with them and offer advice on how to exploit that find more efficiently. Usually the new kids listen to advice from the old guys. The Russians have coordinated diamond production with the De Beers people for a long time, back to when the country was called the Soviet Union. Business is business, even for commies. So, you going to offer our help to our friends in Moscow?” TRADER asked SWORDSMAN.
Ryan shook his head. “I can’t yet. I can’t let them know that we know. Sergey Nikolay’ch would start wondering how, and he’d probably come up with SIGINT, and that’s a method of gathering information that we try to keep covert.” Probably a waste of time, Ryan knew, but the game had rules, and everyone played by those rules. Golovko could guess at signals intelligence, but he’d never quite know. I’ll probably never stop being a spook, the President admitted to himself. Keeping and guarding secrets was one of the things that came so easily to him—a little too easily, Arnie van Damm often warned. A modern democratic government was supposed to be more open, like a torn curtain on the bedroom window that allowed people to look in whenever they wished. That was an idea Ryan had never grown to appreciate. He was the one who decided what people were allowed to know and when they’d know it. It was a point of view he followed even when he knew it to be wrong, for no other reason than it was how he’d learned government service at the knee of an admiral named James Gr
eer. Old habits were hard to break.
“I’ll call Sam Sherman at Atlantic Richfield,” Winston suggested. “If he breaks it to me, then it’s in the open, or at least open enough.”
“Can we trust him?”
Winston nodded. “Sam plays by the rules. We can’t ask him to screw over his own board, but he knows what flag to salute, Jack.”
“Okay, George, a discreet inquiry.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, sir.”
“God damn it, George!”
“Jack, when the hell are you going to learn to relax in this fucking job?” SecTreas asked POTUS.
“The day I move out of this goddamned museum and become a free man again,” Ryan replied with a submissive nod. Winston was right. He had to learn to stay on a more even keel in the office of President. In addition to not being helpful to himself, it wasn’t especially helpful to the country for him to be jumpy with the folderol of office-holding. That also made it easy for people like the Secretary of the Treasury to twist his tail, and George Winston was one of the people who enjoyed doing that ... maybe because it ultimately helped him relax, Ryan thought. Backwards English on the ball or something. “George, why do you think I should relax in this job?”
“Jack, because you’re here to be effective, and being tight all the time does not make you more effective. Kick back, guy, maybe even learn to like some aspect of it.”
“Like what?”
“Hell.” Winston shrugged, and then nodded to the secretaries’ office. “Lots of cute young interns out there.”
“There’s been enough of that,” Ryan said crossly. Then he did manage to relax and smile a little. “Besides, I’m married to a surgeon. Make that little mistake and I could wake up without something important.”