“We can talk here,” Scherenko said more quietly, sticking to Russian.
“Is that so ... ?”
“Scherenko, Boris Il’ych, Major, deputy rezident, ” he said, finally introducing himself. Next he nodded to each of his guests. “You are John Clark—and Domingo Chavez.”
“And this is the fucking Twilight Zone,” Ding muttered.
“ ‘Plum blossoms bloom, and pleasure women buy new scarves in a brothel room.’ Not exactly Pushkin, is it? Not even Pasternak. Arrogant little barbarians.” He’d been in Japan for three years. He’d arrived expecting to find a pleasant, interesting place to do business. He’d come to dislike many aspects of Japanese culture, mainly the assumed local superiority to everything else in the world, particularly offensive to a Russian who felt exactly the same way.
“Would you like to tell us what this is all about, Comrade Major?” Clark asked.
Scherenko spoke calmly now. The humor of the event was now behind them all, not that the Americans had ever appreciated it. “Your Maria Patricia Foleyeva placed a call to our Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, asking for our assistance. I know that you are running another officer here in Tokyo, but not his name. I am further instructed to tell you, Comrade Klerk, that your wife and daughters are fine. Your younger daughter made the dean’s list at her university again, and is now a good candidate for admission to medical school. If you require further proof of my bonafides, I’m afraid I cannot help you.” The Major noted a thin expression of pleasure on the younger man’s face and wondered what that was all about.
Well, that settles that, John thought. Almost. “Well, Boris, you sure as hell know how to get a man’s attention. Now, maybe you can tell us what the hell is going on.”
“We didn’t see it either,” Scherenko began, going over all the high points. It turned out that his data was somewhat better than what Clark had gotten from Chet Nomuri, but did not include quite everything. Intelligence was like that. You never had the full picture, and the parts left out were always important.
“How do you know we can operate safely?”
“You know that I cannot—”
“Boris Il’ych, my life is in your hands. You know I have a wife and two daughters. My life is important to me, and to them,” John said reasonably, making himself appear all the more formidable to the pro across the table. It wasn’t about fear. John knew that he was a capable field spook, and Scherenko gave the same impression. “Trust” was a concept both central to and alien from intelligence operations. You had to trust your people, and yet you could never trust them all the way in a business where dualisms were a way of life.
“Your cover works better for you than you think. The Japanese think that you are Russians. Because of that, they will not trouble you. We can see to that,” the deputy rezident told them confidently.
“For how long?” Clark asked rather astutely, Scherenko thought.
“Yes, there is always that question, isn’t there?”
“How do we communicate?” John asked.
“I understand that you require a high-quality telephone circuit.” He handed a card under the table. “All of Tokyo is now fiberoptic. We have several similar lines to Moscow. Your special communications gear is being flown there as we speak. I understand it is excellent. I would like to see it,” Boris said with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s just a ROM chip, man,” Chavez told him. “I couldn’t even tell you which one it is.”
“Clever,” Scherenko thought.
“How serious are they?” the younger man asked him.
“They appear to have moved a total of three divisions to the Marianas. Their navy has attacked yours.” Scherenko gave what details he knew. “I should tell you that our estimate is that you will face great difficulties in taking your islands back.”
“How great?” Clark asked.
The Russian shrugged, not without sympathy. “Moscow believes it unlikely. Your capabilities are almost as puny as ours have become.”
And that’s why this is happening, Clark decided on the spot. That was why he had a new friend in a foreign land. He’d told Chavez, practically on their first meeting, a quote from Henry Kissinger: “Even paranoids have enemies.” He sometimes wondered why the Russians didn’t print that on their money, rather like America’s E pluribus unum. The hell of it was, they had a lot of history to back that one up. And so, for that matter, did America.
“Keep talking.”
“We have their government intelligence organs thoroughly penetrated, also their military, but THISTLE is a commercial network, and I gather you have developed better data than I have. I’m not sure what that means.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but Scherenko was distinguishing between what he knew and what he thought; and, like a good spook, giving voice only to the former for now.
“So we both have a lot of work to do.”
Scherenko nodded. “Feel free to come to the chancery.”
“Let me know when the communications gear gets to Moscow.” Clark could have gone on, but held back. He wouldn’t be completely sure until he got the proper electronic acknowledgment. So strange, he thought, that he needed it, but if Scherenko was telling the truth about his degree of penetration in the Japanese government, then he could have been “flipped” himself. And old habits died especially hard in this business. The one comforting thing was that his interlocutor knew that he was holding back, and didn’t appear to mind for the moment.
“I will.”
It didn’t take many people to crowd the Oval Office. The premier power room in what Ryan still hoped was the world’s most powerful nation was smaller than the office he’d occupied during his return to the investment business—and in fact smaller than his corner office in the West Wing, Jack realized for the first time.
They were all tired. Brett Hanson was especially haggard. Only Arnie van Damm looked approximately normal, but, then, Amie always looked as though he were coming off a bender. Buzz Fiedler looked to be in something close to despair. The Secretary of Defense was the worst of all, however. It was he who had supervised the downsizing of the American military, who had told Congress almost on a weekly basis that our capabilities were far in excess of our needs. Ryan remembered the testimony on TV, the internal memos that dated back several years, the almost desperate objections by the uniformed chiefs of staff which they had faithfully not leaked to the media. It wasn’t hard to guess what SecDef was thinking now. This brilliant bureaucrat, so confident in his vision and his judgment, had just run hard into the flat, unforgiving wall called reality.
“The economic problem,” President Durling said, much to SecDef’s relief.
“The hard part is the banks. They’re going to be running scared until we rectify the DTC situation. So many banks now make trades that they don’t know what their own reserves are. People are going to try to cash in their mutual-fund holdings controlled by those banks. The Fed Chairman has already started jawboning them.”
“Saying what?” Jack asked.
“Saying they had an unlimited line of credit. Saying that the money supply will be enough for their needs. Saying that they can loan all the money they want.”
“Inflationary,” van Damm observed. “That’s very dangerous.”
“Not really,” Ryan said. “In the short term inflation is like a bad cold, you take aspirin and chicken soup for it. What happened Friday is like a heart attack. You treat that first. If the banks don’t open for business as usual ... Confidence is the big issue. Buzz is right.”
Not for the first time, Roger Durling blessed the fact that Ryan’s first departure from government had taken him back into the financial sector.
“And the markets?” the President asked SecTreas.
“Closed. I’ve talked to all of the exchanges. Until the DTC records are re-created, there will be no organized trading.”
“What does that mean?” Hanson asked. Ryan noticed that the Defense Secretary wasn’t saying anything. Ordinarily such a con
fident guy, too, Jack thought, quick to render an opinion. In other circumstances he would have found the man’s newly found reticence very welcome indeed.
“You don’t have to trade stocks on the floor of the NYSE,” Fiedler explained. “You can do it in the country-club men’s room if you want.”
“And people will,” Ryan added. “Not many, but some.”
“Will it matter? What about foreign exchanges?” Durling asked. “They trade our stocks all over the world.”
“Not enough liquidity overseas,” Fiedler answered. “Oh, there’s some, but the New York exchanges make the benchmarks that everybody uses, and without those nobody knows what the values are.”
“They have records of the tickers, don’t they?” van Damm asked.
“Yes, but the records are compromised, and you don’t gamble millions on faulty information. Okay, it’s not really a bad thing that the information on DTC leaked. It gives us a cover story that we can use for a day or two,” Ryan thought. “People can relate to the fact that a system fault had knocked stuff down. It’ll hold them off from a total panic for a while. How long to fix the records?”
“They still don’t know,” Fiedler admitted. “They’re still trying to assemble the records.”
“We probably have until Wednesday, then.” Ryan rubbed his eyes. He wanted to get up and pace, just get his blood circulating, but only the President did that in the Oval Office.
“I had a conference call with all the exchange heads. They’re calling everyone in to work, like for a normal day. They have orders to shuffle around and look busy for the TV cameras.”
“Nice idea, Buzz,” the President managed to say first. Ryan gave SecTreas a thumbs-up.
“We have to come up with some sort of solution fast,” Fiedler went on. “Jack’s probably right. By late Wednesday it’s a real panic, and I can’t tell you what’ll happen,” he ended soberly. But the news wasn’t all that bad for this evening. There was a little breathing space, and there were other breaths to be taken.
“Next,” van Damm said, handling this one for the Boss, “Ed Kealty is going to go quietly. He’s working out a deal with Justice. So that political monkey is off our backs. Of course”—the Chief of Staff looked at the President—“then we have to fill that post soon.”
“It’ll wait,” Durling said. “Brett ... India.”
“Ambassador Williams has been hearing some ominous things. The Navy’s analysis is probably right. It appears that the Indians may be seriously contemplating a move on Sri Lanka.”
“Great timing,” Ryan heard, looking down, then he spoke.
“The Navy wants operational instructions. We have a two-carrier battle force maneuvering around. If it’s time to bump heads, they need to know what they are free to do.” He had to say that because of his promise to Robby Jackson, but he knew what the answer would be. That pot wasn’t boiling quite yet.
“We’ve got a lot on the plate. We’ll defer that one for now,” the President said. “Brett, have Dave Williams meet with their Prime Minister and make it clear to her that the United States does not look kindly upon aggressive acts anywhere in the world. No bluster. Just a clear statement, and have him wait for a reply.”
“We haven’t talked to them that way in a long time,” Hanson warned.
“It’s time to do so now, Brett,” Durling pointed out quietly.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
And now, Ryan thought, the one we’ve all been waiting for. Eyes turned to the Secretary of Defense. He spoke mechanically, hardly looking up from his notes.
“The two carriers will be back at Pearl Harbor by Friday. There are two graving docks for repairs, but to get the ships fully mission-capable will require months. The two submarines are dead, you know that. The Japanese fleet is retiring back to the Marianas. There has been no additional hostile contact of any kind between fleet units.
“We estimate about three divisions have been air-ferried to the Marianas. One on Saipan, most of two others on Guam. They have air facilities that we built and maintained ...” His voice droned on, giving details that Ryan already knew, toward a conclusion that the National Security Advisor already feared.
Everything was too small in size. America’s navy was half what it had been only ten years before. There remained the ability to sea-lift only one full division of troops capable of forced-entry assault. Only one, and that required moving all the Atlantic Fleet ships through Panama and recalling others from the oceans of the world as well. To land such troops required support, but the average U.S. Navy frigate had one 3-inch gun. Destroyers and cruisers had but two 5-inch guns each, a far cry from the assembled battleships and cruisers that had been necessary to take the Marianas back in 1944. Carriers, none immediately available, the closest two in the Indian Ocean, and those together did not match the Japanese air strength on Guam and Saipan today, Ryan thought, for the first time feeling anger over the affair. It had taken him long enough to get over the disbelief, Jack told himself.
“I don’t think we can do it,” SecDef concluded, and it was a judgment that no one in the room was prepared to dispute. They were too weary for recriminations. President Durling thanked everyone for the advice and headed upstairs for his bedroom, hoping to get a little sleep before facing the media in the morning.
He took the stairs instead of the elevator, thinking along the way as Secret Service agents at the top and bottom of the stairs watched. A shame for his presidency to end this way. Though he’d never really desired it, he’d done his best, and his best, only a few days earlier, hadn’t been all that bad.
28
Transmissions
The United 747-400 touched down at Moscow’s Scheremetyevo Airport thirty minutes early. The Atlantic jetstream was still blowing hard. A diplomatic courier was first off, helped that way by a flight attendant. He flashed his diplomatic passport at the end of the jetway, where a customs officer pointed him toward an American embassy official who shook his hand and led him down the concourse.
“Come with me. We even have an escort into town.” The man smiled at the lunacy of the event.
“1 don’t know you,” the courier said suspiciously, slowing down. Ordinarily his personality and his diplomatic bag were inviolable, but everything about this trip had been unusual, and his curiosity was thoroughly aroused.
“There’s a laptop computer in your bag. There’s yellow tape around it. It’s the only thing you’re carrying,” said the chief of CIA Station Moscow, which was why the courier didn’t know him. “The code word for your trip is STEAMROLLER.”
“Fair enough.” The courier nodded on their way down the terminal corridor. An embassy car was waiting—it was a stretched Lincoln, and looked to be the Ambassador’s personal wheels. Next came a lead car which, once off the airport grounds, lit off a rotating light, the quicker to proceed downtown. On the whole it struck the courier as a mistake. Better to have used a Russian car for this. Which raised a couple of bigger questions. Why the hell had he been rousted at zero notice from his home to ferry a goddamned portable computer to Moscow? If everything was so goddamned secret, why were the Russians in on it? And if it were this goddamned important, why wait for a commercial flight? A State Department employee of long standing, he knew that it was foolish to question the logic of government operations. It was just that he was something of an idealist.
The rest of the trip went normally enough, right to the embassy, set in west-central Moscow, by the river. Inside the building, the two men went to the communications room, where the courier opened his bag, handed over its contents, and headed off for a shower and a bed, his questions never to be answered, he was sure.
The rest of the work had been done by Russians at remarkable speed. The phone line to Interfax led in turn to RVS, thence by military fiberoptic line all the way to Vladivostok, where another similar line, laid by Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, led to the Japanese home island of Honshu. The laptop had an internal modem, which was hooked to the new
ly installed line and switched on. Then it was time to wait, typically, though everything else had been done at the best possible speed.
It was one-thirty when Ryan got home to Peregrine Cliff. He’d dispensed with his GSA driver, instead letting Special Agent Robberton drive him, and he pointed the Secret Service agent toward a guest room before heading to his own bed. Not surprisingly, Cathy was still awake.
“Jack, what’s going on?”
“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?” he asked as his first dodge. Coming home had been something of a mistake, if a necessary one. He needed fresh clothing more than anything else. A crisis was bad enough. For senior Administration officials to look frazzled and haggard was worse, and the press would surely pick up on it. Worst of all, it was visually obvious. The average Joe seeing the tape on network TV would know, and worried officers made for worried troopers, a lesson Ryan remembered from the Basic Officers’ Course at Quantico. And so it was necessary to spend two hours in a car that would better have been spent on the sofa in his office.
Cathy rubbed her eyes in the darkness. “Nothing in the morning. I have to deliver a lecture tomorrow afternoon on how the new laser system works to some foreign visitors.”
“From where?”
“Japan and Taiwan. We’re licensing the calibration system we developed and—what’s wrong?” she asked when her husband’s head snapped around.
It’s just paranoia, Ryan told himself. Just a dumb coincidence , nothing more than that. Can’t be anything else. But he left the room without a word. Robberton was undressing when he got to the guest room, his holstered pistol hanging on the bedpost. The explanation took only a few seconds, and Robberton lifted a phone and dialed the Secret Service operations center two blocks from the White House. Ryan hadn’t even known that his wife had a code name.
“SURGEON”—well, that was obvious, Ryan thought—“needs a friend tomorrow ... at Johns Hopkins ... oh, yeah, she’ll be fine. See ya.” Robberton hung up. “Good agent, Andrea Price. Single, willowy, brown hair, just joined the detail, eight years on the street. worked with her dad when I was a new agent. Thanks for telling me that.”