The Bear and the Dragon

around the country now. Wise wondered if the government appreciated the implications of that. Probably not. Neither Marx nor Mao had really understood how powerful a thing information was, because it was the place where one found the Truth, once you rooted through it a little, and Truth wasn’t Theory. Truth was the way things really were, and that’s what made it a son of a bitch. You could deny it, but only at your peril, because sooner or later the son of a bitch would bite you on the ass. Denying it just made the inevitable bite worse, because the longer you put it off, the wider its jaws got. The world had changed quite a bit since CNN had started up. As late as 1980, a country could deny anything, but CNN’s signals, the voice and the pictures, came straight down from the satellite. You couldn’t deny pictures worth a damn.

And that made Barry Wise the croupier in the casino of Information and Truth. He was an honest dealer-he had to be in order to survive in the casino, because the customers demanded it. In the free marketplace of ideas, Truth always won in the end, because it didn’t need anything else to prop it up. Truth stood by itself, and sooner or later the wind would blow the props away from all the bullshit.

It was a noble enough profession, Wise thought. His mission in life was reporting history, and along the way, he got to make a little of it himself-or at least to help-and for that reason he was feared by those who thought that defining history was their exclusive domain. The thought often made him smile to himself. He’d helped a little the other day, Wise thought, with those two churchmen. He didn’t know where it would lead. That was the work of others.

He still had more work of his own to do in China.

CHAPTER 29 Billy Budd

So, what else is going to go wrong over there?” Ryan asked.

“Things will quiet down if the other side has half a brain,” Adler said hopefully.

“Do they?” Robby Jackson asked, just before Arnie van Damm could.

“Sir, that’s not a question with an easy answer. Are they stupid? No, they are not. But do they see things in the same way that we do? No, they do not. That’s the fundamental problem dealing with them-”

“Yeah, Klingons,” Ryan observed tersely. “Aliens from outer space. Jesus, Scott, how do we predict what they’re going to do?”

“We don’t, really,” SecState answered. “We have a bunch of good people, but the problem is in getting them all to agree on something when we need an important call. They never do,” Adler concluded. He frowned before going on. “Look, these guys are kings from a different culture. It was already very different from ours long before Marxism arrived, and the thoughts of our old friend Karl only made things worse. They’re kings because they have absolute power. There are some limitations on that power, but we don’t fully understand what they are, and therefore it’s hard for us to enforce or to exploit them. They are Klingons. So, what we need is a Mr. Spock. Got one handy, anyone?”

Around the coffee table, there were the usual half-humorous snorts that accompany an observation that is neither especially funny nor readily escapable.

“Nothing new from SORGE today?” van Damm asked.

Ryan shook his head. “No, the source doesn’t produce something every day.”

“Pity,” Adler said. “I’ve discussed the take from SORGE with some of my I and R people-always as my own theoretical musings. .”

“And?” Jackson asked.

“And they think it’s decent speculation, but not something to bet the ranch on.”

There was amusement around the coffee table at that one.

“That’s the problem with good intelligence information. It doesn’t agree with what your own people think- assuming they really think at all,” the Vice President observed.

“Not fair, Robby,” Ryan told his VP.

“I know, I know.” Jackson held up surrendering hands. “I just can’t forget the motto of the whole intelligence community: ‘We bet your life.’ It’s lonely out there with a fighter plane strapped to your back, risking your life on the basis of a piece of paper with somebody’s opinion typed on it, when you never know the guy it’s from or the data it’s based on.” He paused to stir his coffee. “You know, out in the fleet we used to think-well, we used to hope-that decisions made in this room here were based on solid data. It’s quite a disappointment to learn what things are really like.”

“Robby, back when I was in high school, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember wondering if the world was going to blow up. But I still had to translate half a page of Caesar’s goddamned Gallic Wars, and I saw the President on TV, and I figured things were okay, because he was the President of the United Goddamned States, and he had to know what was really going on. So, I translated the battle with the Helvetii and slept that night. The President knows, because he’s the President, right? Then I become President, and I don’t know a damned thing more than I knew the month before, but everybody out there”-Ryan waved his arm at the window-“thinks I’m fucking omniscient…. Ellen!” he called loudly enough to get through the door.

The door opened seven seconds later. “Yes, Mr. President?”

“I think you know, Ellen,” Jack told her.

“Yes, sir.” She fished in her pocket and pulled out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims. Ryan took one out, along with the pink butane lighter stashed inside. He lit the smoke and took a long hit. “Thanks, Ellen.”

Her smile was downright motherly. “Surely, Mr. President.” And she headed back to the secretaries’ room, closing the curved door behind her.

“Jack?”

“Yeah, Rob?” Ryan responded, turning.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Okay, I am not omniscient, and I’m not perfect,” POTUS admitted crossly after the second puff. “Now, back to China.”

“They can forget MFN,” van Damm said. “Congress would impeach you if you asked for it, Jack. And you can figure that the Hill will offer Taiwan any weapons system they want to buy next go-round.”

“I have no problems with that. And there’s no way I was going to offer them MFN anyway, unless they decide to break down and start acting like civilized people.”

“And that’s the problem,” Adler reminded them all. “They think we’re the uncivilized ones.”

“I see trouble,” Jackson said, before anyone else could. Ryan figured it was his background as a fighter pilot to be first in things. “They’re just out of touch with the rest of the world. The only way to get them back in touch will involve some pain. Not to their people, especially, but sure as hell to the guys who make the decisions.”

“And they’re the ones who control the guns,” van Damm noted.

“Roger that, Arnie,” Jackson confirmed.

“So, how can we ease them the right way?” Ryan asked, to center the conversation once more.

“We stick to it. We tell them we want reciprocal trade access, or they will face reciprocal trade barriers. We tell them that this little flare-up with the Nuncio makes any concessions on our part impossible, and that’s just how things are. If they want to trade with us, they have to back off,” Adler spelled out. “They don’t like being told such things, but it’s the real world, and they have to acknowledge objective reality. They do understand that, for the most part,” SecState concluded.

Ryan looked around the room and got nods. “Okay, make sure Rutledge understands what the message is,” he told EAGLE.

“Yes, sir,” SecState agreed, with a nod. People stood and started filing out. Vice President Jackson allowed himself to be the last in the line of departure.

“Hey, Rob,” Ryan said to his old friend.

“Funny thing, watched some TV last night for a change, caught an old movie I hadn’t seen since I was a