The Bear and the Dragon

Sometimes the documents were short enough to translate standing in front of her desk, but this one was pretty long. It was, in fact, going to take eight line-and-a-half-spaced pages off his laser printer. He took his time on this because of its content. He rechecked his translation. Suddenly he had doubts about his understanding of the Chinese language. He couldn’t afford to mistranslate or misrepresent this sort of thing. It was just too hot. All in all, he took two and a half hours, more than double what Mrs. Foley probably expected, before he walked back.

“What took so long?” MP asked when he returned.

“Mrs. Foley, this is hot.”

“How hot?”

“Magma,” Sears said, as he handed the folder across.

“Oh?” She took the pages and leaned back in her comfortable chair to read it over. SORGE, source SONGBIRD. Her eyes cataloged the heading, yesterday’s meeting of the Chinese Politburo. Then Sears saw it. Saw her eyes narrow as her hand reached for a butterscotch. Then her eyes shifted to him. “You weren’t kidding. Evaluation?”

“Ma’am, I can’t evaluate the accuracy of the source, but if this is for real, well, then we’re looking in on a process I’ve never seen before outside history books, and hearing words that nobody has ever heard in this building-not that I’ve ever heard about, anyway. I mean, every minister in their government is quoted there, and most of them are saying the same thing-”

“And it’s not something we want them to say,” Mary Patricia Foley concluded his statement. “Assuming this is all accurately reported, does it feel real?”

Sears nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It sounds to me like real conversation by real people, and the content tracks with the personalities as I know them. Could it be fabricated? Yes, it could. If so, the source has been compromised in some way or other. However, I don’t see that this could be faked without their wanting to produce a specific effect, and that would be an effect which would not be overly attractive to them.”

“Any recommendations?”

“It might be a good idea to get George Weaver down from Providence,” Sears replied. “He’s good at reading their minds. He’s met a lot of them face-to-face, and he’ll be a good backup for my evaluation.”

“Which is?” Mary Pat asked, not turning to the last page, where it would be printed up.

“They’re considering war.”

The Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency stood and walked out her door, with Dr. Joshua Sears right behind her. She took the short walk to her husband’s office and went through the door without even looking at Ed’s private secretary.

Ed Foley was having a meeting with the Deputy Director (Science and Technology) and two of his senior people when MP walked in. He looked up in surprise, then saw the blue folder in her hand. “Yeah, honey?”

“Excuse me, but this can’t wait even one minute.” Her tone of voice told as much as her words did.

“Frank, can we get together after lunch?”

“Sure, Ed.” DDS amp;T gathered his documents and his people and headed out.

When they were gone and the door closed, the DCI asked, “SORGE?”

Mary Pat just nodded and handed the folder across, taking a seat on the couch. Sears remained standing. It was only then that he realized his hands were a little moist. That hadn’t happened to him before. Sears, as head of the DI’s Office of China Assessments, worked mainly on political evaluations: who was who in the PRC’s political hierarchy, what economic policies were being pursued-the Society Page for the People’s Republic, as he and his people thought of it, and joked about it over lunch in the cafeteria. He’d never seen anything like this, nothing hotter than handling internal dissent, and while their methods for handling such things tended to be a little on the rough side, as he often put it-mainly it meant summary execution, which was more than a little on the rough side for those affected-the distances involved helped him to take a more detached perspective. But not on this.

“Is this for real?” the DC asked.

“Dr. Sears thinks so. He also thinks we need to get Weaver down from Brown University.”

Ed Foley looked over at Sears. “Call him. Right now.”

“Yes, sir.” Sears left the room to make the call.

“Jack has to see this. What’s he doing now?”

“He’s leaving for Warsaw in eight hours, remember? The NATO meeting, the photo opportunity at Auschwitz, stopping off at London on the way home for dinner at Buckingham Palace. Shopping on Bond Street,” Ed added. There were already a dozen Secret Service people in London working with the Metropolitan Police and MI-5, properly known as the Security Service. Twenty more were in Warsaw, where security concerns were not all that much of an issue. The Poles were very happy with America right now, and the leftover police agencies from the communist era still kept files on everyone who might be a problem. Each would have a personal baby-sitter for the entire time Ryan was in the country. The NATO meeting was supposed to be almost entirely ceremonial, a basic feel-good exercise to make a lot of European politicians look pretty for their polyglot constituents.

“Jesus, they’re talking about making a move on Grushavoy!” Ed Foley gasped, getting to page three. “Are they totally off their fuckin’ rockers?”

“Looks like they found themselves in a corner unexpectedly,” his wife observed. “We may have overestimated their political stability.”

Foley nodded and looked up at his wife. “Right now?”

“Right now,” she agreed.

Her husband lifted his phone and punched speed-dial #1.

“Yeah, Ed, what is it?” Jack Ryan asked.

“Mary and I are coming over.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“That important?” the President asked.

“This is CRITIC stuff, Jack. You’ll want Scott, Ben, and Arnie there, too. Maybe George Winston. The foundation of the issue is his area of expertise.”

“China?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, come on over.” Ryan switched phones. “Ellen, I need SecState, SecTreas, Ben, and Arnie in my office, thirty minutes from right now.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” his secretary acknowledged. This sounded hot, but Robby Jackson was on his way out of town again, to give a speech in Seattle, at the Boeing plant of all places, where the workers and the management wanted to know about the 777 order to China. Robby didn’t have much to say on that point, and so he’d talk about the importance of human rights and America’s core beliefs and principles, and all that wave-the-flag stuff. The Boeing people would be polite about it, and it was hard to be impolite to a black man, especially one with Navy Wings of Gold on his lapel, and learning to handle this political bullshit was Robby’s main task. Besides, it took pressure off Ryan, and that was Jackson’s primary mission in life, and oddly enough, one which he accepted with relative equanimity. So, his VC-20B would be over Ohio right about now, Jack thought. Maybe Indiana. Just then Andrea came in.

“Company coming?” Special Agent Price-O’Day asked. She looked a little pale, Jack thought.

“The usual suspects. You feeling okay?” the President asked.

“Stomach is a little upset. Too much coffee with breakfast.”

Morning sickness? Ryan wondered. If so, too bad. Andrea tried so hard to be one of the boys. Admitting this female failing would scar her soul as though from a flamethrower. He couldn’t say anything about it. Maybe Cathy could. It was a girl thing.

“Well, the DCI’s coming over with something he says is important. Maybe they’ve changed the toilet paper in the Kremlin, as we used to say at Langley back when I worked there.”

“Yes, sir.” She smiled. Like most Secret Service agents, she’d seen the people and the secrets come and go, and if there were important things for her to know, she’d find out in due course.

General-Lieutenant Kirillin liked to drink as much as most Russians, and that was quite a lot by American standards. The difference between Russians and Brits, Chavez had learned, was that the Brits