“As soon as you find it convenient to do so, Minister,” Kilmer answered.
“Very well. I will discuss this matter with my colleagues on the Politburo and reply to you as quickly as we can.”
“I will convey that good news to Washington, Minister. I will not take more time from your day, sir. Thank you very much indeed for your time.” Kilmer stood and shook hands one more time. Kilmer walked through the anteroom without a glance left or right, turned left in the corridor, and headed toward the elevators. The corridor seemed just as long for this little walk, he thought, and the clicking of his heels on the tile floor seemed unusually loud. Kilmer had been an FSO long enough to know that Shen should have reacted more irately to the note. Instead he had received it like an invitation to an informal dinner at the embassy. That meant something, but Kilmer wasn’t sure what. Once in his car, he started composing his dispatch to Foggy Bottom, then quickly realized that this was something he’d better report by voice first over the STU.
How good is he, Carl?” Adler asked the ambassador. ”He’s an okay kid, Scott. Photographic memory, talent I wish I had. Maybe he was promoted a little fast, but he’s got the brains he needs, just a little short on field experience. I figure in another three years or so, he’ll be ready to run his own embassy and start his way up the ladder.”
“Depends. If they’re just maneuvering troops on routine training, they might be a little angry. If it’s for real and we’ve caught them with their hands in the cookie jar, they’ll act hurt and surprised.” Hitch paused for a yawn. “Excuse me. The real question is whether it’ll make them think things over.”
“Will it? You know most of ’em.”
“I don’t know,” Hitch admitted uncomfortably. “Scott, I’ve been there a while, sure, but I can’t say that I fully understand them. They make decisions on political considerations that Americans have a hard time comprehending.”
“The President calls them Klingons,” Adler told the ambassador.
Hitch smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far, but there is logic in the observation.” Then Adler’s intercom buzzed.
“Call from William Kilmer in Beijing on the STU, Mr. Secretary,” the secretary’s voice said.
“This is Scott Adler,” SecState said when he lifted the phone. “Ambassador Hitch is here with me. You’re on speaker.”
“Sir, I made the delivery. Minister Shen hardly blinked. He said he’d get back to us soon, but not exactly when, after he talked it over with his Politburo colleagues. Aside from that, not much of a reaction at all. I can fax you the transcript in about half an hour. The meeting didn’t last ten minutes.”
Adler looked over at Hitch, who shook his head and didn’t look happy at the news.
“Bill, how was his body language?” Hitch asked.
“Like he was on Prozac, Carl. No physical reaction at all.”
“Shen tends to be a little hyperactive,” Hitch explained. “Sometimes he has trouble sitting still. Conclusions, Bill?”
“I’m worried,” Kilmer replied at once. “I think we have a problem here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kilmer. Send the fax quick as you can.” Adler punched the phone button and looked at his guest. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. How soon will we know how they’re going to react to this?”
“Tomorrow morning, I hope, we-”
“We have a source inside their government?” Hitch asked. The blank look he got in reply was answer enough.
Thanks, Scott,” Ryan said, hanging up the phone. He was back in the Oval Office now, sitting in his personally-fitted swivel chair, which was about as comfortable as any artifact could make him. It didn’t help much at the moment, but he supposed it was one less thing to worry about.
“So?”
“So, we wait to see if SORGE tells us anything.”
“SORGE?” Professor Weaver asked.
“Dr. Weaver, we have a sensitive source of information that sometimes gives us information on what their Politburo is thinking,” Ed Foley told the academic. “And that information does not leave this room.”
“Understood.” Academic or not, Weaver played by the rules. “That’s the name for the special stuff you’ve been showing me?”
“Correct.”
“It’s a hell of a source, whoever it is. It reads like a tape of their meetings, captures their personalities, especially Zhang. He’s the real bad actor here. He’s got Premier Xu pretty well wrapped around his little finger.”
“Adler’s met him, during the shuttle talks after the Airbus shoot-down at Taipei,” Ryan said.
“And?” Weaver asked. He knew the name and the words, but not the man.
“And he’s powerful and not a terribly nice chap,” the President answered. “He had a role in our conflict with Japan, and also the fracas with the UIR last year.”
“Machiavelli?”
“That’s pretty close, more a theoretician than a lead actor, the man-behind-the-throne sort of guy. Not an ideologue per se, but a guy who likes to play in the real world-patriot, Ed?” Ryan asked the DCI.
“We’ve had our pshrink profile him.” Foley shrugged. “Part sociopath, part political operator. A guy who enjoys the exercise of power. No known personal weaknesses. Sexually active, but a lot of their Politburo members are. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, eh, Weaver?”
“Mao was like that, as we all know. The emperors used to have rather large stables of concubines.”
“That’s what people did before TV, I suppose,” Arnie van Damm observed.
“Actually that’s not far from the truth,” Weaver agreed. “The carryover to today is cultural, and it’s a fundamental form of personal power that some people like to exercise. Women’s lib hasn’t made it into the PRC yet.”
“I must be too Catholic,” the President thought aloud. “The idea of Mao popping little girls makes my skin crawl.”
“They didn’t mind, Mr. President,” Weaver told him. “Some would bring their little sisters over after they got in bed with the Great Leader. It’s a different culture, and it has different rules from ours.”
“Yeah, just a little different,” observed the father of two daughters, one just starting to date. What would the fathers of those barely nubile little girls have thought? Honored to have their daughters deflowered by the great Mao Zedong? Ryan had a minor chill from the thought, and dismissed it. “Do they care about human life at all? What about their soldiers?”
“Mr. President, the Judeo-Christian Bible wasn’t drafted in China, and efforts by missionaries to get Christianity going over there were not terribly successful-and when Mao came along, he suppressed it fairly effectively, as we saw again recently. Their view of man’s place in nature is different from ours, and, no, they do not value a single human life as we do. We’re talking here about communists who view everything through a political lens, and that is over and above a culture in which a human life had little import. So, you could say it’s a very infelicitous confluence of belief systems from our point of view.”
“They will continue on the path they’re on,” Weaver answered quickly. He was surprised at the reaction.
“God damn it, doesn’t anybody think common sense is going to break out?” Ryan snarled. He looked around the room, to see people suddenly looking down at the royal-blue rug.
“Mr. President, they fear war less than they fear the alternatives to war,” Weaver answered, rather courageously, Arnie van Damm thought. “To repeat, if they don’t enrich their country in oil and gold, they fear an economic collapse that will destroy their entire political order, and that, to them, is more frightening than the
