The Bear and the Dragon

“George?” Ryan said to his Secretary of the Treasury, George Winston.

“Mr. Pres-”

“Goddammit, George!” The President nearly spilled his coffee with the outburst.

“Okay.” SecTreas nodded submission. “It’s hard to make the adjustment … Jack.” Ryan was getting tired of the Presidential trappings, and his rule was that here, in the Oval Office, his name was Jack, at least for his inner circle, of which Winston was one. After all, Ryan had joked a few times, after leaving this marble prison, he might be working for TRADER, as the Secret Service knew him, back in New York on The Street, instead of the other way ’round. After leaving the Presidency, something for which Jack prostrated himself before God every night-or so the stories went-he’d have to find gainful employment somewhere, and the trading business beckoned. Ryan had shown a rare gift for it, Winston reminded himself. His last such effort had been a California company called Silicon Alchemy, just one of many computer outfits, but the only one in which Ryan had taken an interest. So skillfully had he brought that firm to IPO that his own stock holdings in SALC-its symbol on the big board-were now valued at just over eighty million dollars, making Ryan by far the wealthiest American President in history. It was something his politically astute Chief of Staff, Arnold van Damm, did not advertise to the news media, who typically regarded every wealthy man as a robber baron, excepting, of course, the owners of the papers and TV stations themselves, who were, of course, the best of public-spirited citizens. None of this was widely known, even in the tight community of Wall Street big-hitters, which was remarkable enough. Should he ever return to The Street, Ryan’s prestige would be sufficient to earn money while he slept in his bed at home. And that, Winston freely admitted, was something well and truly earned, and be damned to whatever the media hounds thought of it.

“It’s China?” Jack asked.

“That’s right, Boss,” Winston confirmed with a nod. “Boss” was a term Ryan could stomach, as it was also the in-house term the Secret Service-which was part of Winston’s Department of the Treasury-used to identify the man they were sworn to protect. “They’re having a little cash-shortfall problem, and they’re looking to make it up with us.”

“How little?” POTUS asked.

“It looks as though it will annualize out to, oh, seventy billion or so.”

“That is, as we say, real money.”

George Winston nodded. “Anything that starts with a ‘B’ is real enough, and this is a little better than six ‘Bs’ a month.”

“Spending it for what?”

“Not entirely sure, but a lot of it has to be military-related. The French arms industries are tight with them now, since the Brits kiboshed the jet-engine deal from Rolls-Royce.”

The President nodded, looking down at the briefing papers. “Yeah, Basil talked the PM out of it.” That was Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called (erroneously) MI6. Basil was an old friend of Ryan’s, going back to his CIA days. “It was a remarkably stand-up thing to do.”

“Well, our friends in Paris don’t seem to think the same way.”

“They usually don’t,” Ryan agreed. The odd thing was the dichotomy inherent in dealing with the French. In some things, they weren’t so much allies as blood brothers, but in others they were less than mere associates, and Ryan had trouble figuring out the logic by which the French changed their minds. Well, the President thought, that’s what I have a State Department for…. “So, you think the PRC is building up its military again?”

“Big time, but not so much their navy, which makes our friends in Taiwan feel a little better.”

That had been one of President Ryan’s foreign-policy initiatives after concluding hostilities with the defunct United Islamic Republic, now restored to the separate nations of Iran and Iraq, which were at least at peace with each other. The real reasons for the recognition of Taiwan had never been made known to the public. It looked pretty clear to Ryan and his Secretary of State, Scott Adler, that the People’s Republic of China had played a role in the Second Persian Gulf War, and probably in the preceding conflict with Japan, as well. Exactly why? Well, some in CIA thought that China lusted after the mineral riches in eastern Siberia-this was suggested by intercepts and other access to the electronic mail of the Japanese industrialists who’d twisted their nation’s path into a not-quite-open clash with America. They’d referred to Siberia as the “Northern Resource Area,” harkening back to when an earlier generation of Japanese strategists had called South Asia the “Southern Resource Area.” That had been part of another conflict, one known to history as the Second World War. In any case, the complicity of the PRC with America’s enemies had merited a countermove, Ryan and Adler had agreed, and besides, the Republic of China on Taiwan was a democracy, with government officials elected by the people of that nation island-and that was something America was supposed to respect.

“You know, it would be better if they started working their navy and threatening Taiwan. We are in a better position to forestall that than-”

“You really think so?” SecTreas asked, cutting his President off.

“The Russians do,” Jack confirmed.

“Then why are the Russians selling the Chinese so much hardware?” Winston demanded. “That doesn’t make sense!”

“George, there is no rule demanding that the world has to make sense.” That was one of Ryan’s favorite aphorisms. “That’s one of the things you learn in the intelligence business. In 1938, guess who was Germany’s number one trading partner?”

SecTreas saw that sandbag coming before it struck. “France?”

“You got it.” Ryan nodded. “Then, in ‘40 and ’41, they did a lot of trade with the Russians. That didn’t work out so well either, did it?”

“And everyone always told me that trade was a moderating influence,” the Secretary observed.

“Maybe it is among people, but remember that governments don’t have principles so much as interests-at least the primitive ones, the ones who haven’t figured it all out yet…”

“Like the PRC?”

It was Ryan’s turn to nod. “Yeah, George, like those little bastards in Beijing. They rule a nation of a billion people, but they do it as though they were the new coming of Caligula. Nobody ever told them that they have a positive duty to look after the interests of the people they rule-well, maybe that’s not true,” Ryan allowed, feeling a little generous. “They have this big, perfect theoretical model, promulgated by Karl Marx, refined by Lenin, then applied in their country by a pudgy sexual pervert named Mao.”

“Oh? Pervert?”

“Yeah.” Ryan looked up. “We had the data over at Langley. Mao liked virgins, the younger the better. Maybe he liked to see the fear in their cute little virginal eyes-that’s what one of our pshrink consultants thought, kinda like rape, not so much sex as power. Well, I guess it could have been worse-at least they were girls,” Jack observed rather dryly, “and their culture is historically a little more liberal than ours on that sort of thing.” A shake of the head. “You should see the briefs I get whenever a major foreign dignitary comes over, the stuff we know about their personal habits.”

A chuckle: “Do I really want to know?”

A grimace: “Probably not. Sometimes I wish they didn’t give me the stuff. You sit them down right here in the office, and they’re charming and businesslike, and you can spend the whole fucking meeting looking for horns and hooves.” That could be a distraction, of course, but it was more generally thought that as in playing poker for high stakes, the more you knew about the guy on the other side of the table, the better, even if it might make you want to throw up during the welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn. But that was the business of being President, Ryan reminded himself. And people actually fought like tigers to get there. And would again, when he left, POTUS reminded himself. And so, Jack, is it your job to protect your country from the kind of rat who lusts to be where all the really good cheese is stored? Ryan shook his head again. So many doubts. It wasn’t so much that they never went away. They just kept getting bigger all the time. How strange that he understood and could recount every small step that had led him to this office, and yet he still asked himself several times every hour how the hell he’d come to be in this place … and how the hell he’d ever get out. Well, he had no excuses at all this time. He’d actually run for election to the Presidency. If you could call it that-Arnie van Damm didn’t, as a matter of fact-which you could, since he’d fulfilled the constitutional requirements, a fact on which just about every legal scholar in the nation had agreed, and talked about on every major news network ad nauseam.