such whispers had happened already. If so, word had gotten back to the whisperers that the tallest tree is quickly cut for lumber, and the well with the sweetest water is first to be drunk dry, and he who shouts too loudly is first to be silenced. So, maybe the Chinese industrial leaders were just biding their time and looking around the rooms where they gathered, wondering which of their number would be the first to take the risk, and maybe he would be rewarded with fame and honor and later memories of heroism-or maybe, more likely, his family would be billed for the 7.62x39 cartridge needed to send him into the next life, which Buddha had promised but which the government contemptuously denied.
So, they haven’t made it public yet. That’s a little odd,” Ryan thought aloud.
“It is,” Ben Goodley agreed with a nod.
“Any idea why they’re sitting on the news?”
“No, sir … unless somebody is hoping to cash in on it somehow, but exactly how …” CARDSHARP shrugged.
“Buy stock in Atlantic Richfield? Some mine-machine builder-”
“Or just buy options in some land in eastern Siberia,” George Winston suggested. “Not that such a thing is ever done by the honorable servants of the people.” The President laughed hard enough that he had to set his coffee down.
“Certainly not in this administration,” POTUS pointed out. One of the benefits the media had with Ryan’s team was that so many of them were plutocrats of one magnitude or another, not “working” men. It was as if the media thought that money just appeared in the hands of some fortunate souls by way of miracle … or some unspoken and undiscovered criminal activity. But never by work. It was the oddest of political prejudices that wealth didn’t come from work, but rather from something else, a something never really described, but always implied to be suspect.
“Yeah, Jack,” Winston said, with a laugh of his own. “We’ve got enough that we can afford to be honest. Besides, who the hell needs an oil field or gold mine?”
“Further developments on the size of either?”
Goodley shook his head. “No, sir. The initial information is firming up nicely. Both discoveries are big. The oil especially, but the gold as well.”
“The gold thing will distort the market somewhat,” SecTreas opined. “Depending on how fast it comes on stream. It might also cause a shutdown of the mine we have operating in the Dakotas.”
“Why?” Goodley asked.
“If the Russian strike is as good as the data suggests, they’ll be producing gold for about twenty-five percent less than what it costs there, despite environmental conditions. The attendant reduction of the world price of gold will then make Dakota unprofitable to operate.” Winston shrugged. “So, they’ll mothball the site and sit until the price goes back up. Probably after the initial flurry of production, our Russian friends will scale things back so that they can cash in in a more, uh, orderly way. What’ll happen is that the other producers, mainly South Africans, will meet with them and offer advice on how to exploit that find more efficiently. Usually the new kids listen to advice from the old guys. The Russians have coordinated diamond production with the De Beers people for a long time, back to when the country was called the Soviet Union. Business is business, even for commies. So, you going to offer our help to our friends in Moscow?” TRADER asked SWORDSMAN.
Ryan shook his head. “I can’t yet. I can’t let them know that we know. Sergey Nikolay’ch would start wondering how, and he’d probably come up with SIGINT, and that’s a method of gathering information that we try to keep covert.” Probably a waste of time, Ryan knew, but the game had rules, and everyone played by those rules. Golovko could guess at signals intelligence, but he’d never quite know. I’ll probably never stop being a spook, the President admitted to himself. Keeping and guarding secrets was one of the things that came so easily to him-a little too easily, Arnie van Damm often warned. A modern democratic government was supposed to be more open, like a torn curtain on the bedroom window that allowed people to look in whenever they wished. That was an idea Ryan had never grown to appreciate. He was the one who decided what people were allowed to know and when they’d know it. It was a point of view he followed even when he knew it to be wrong, for no other reason than it was how he’d learned government service at the knee of an admiral named James Greer. Old habits were hard to break.
“I’ll call Sam Sherman at Atlantic Richfield,” Winston suggested. “If he breaks it to me, then it’s in the open, or at least open enough.”
“Can we trust him?”
Winston nodded. “Sam plays by the rules. We can’t ask him to screw over his own board, but he knows what flag to salute, Jack.”
“Okay, George, a discreet inquiry.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, sir.”
“God damn it, George!”
“Jack, when the hell are you going to learn to relax in this fucking job?” SecTreas asked POTUS.
“The day I move out of this goddamned museum and become a free man again,” Ryan replied with a submissive nod. Winston was right. He had to learn to stay on a more even keel in the office of President. In addition to not being helpful to himself, it wasn’t especially helpful to the country for him to be jumpy with the folderol of office-holding. That also made it easy for people like the Secretary of the Treasury to twist his tail, and George Winston was one of the people who enjoyed doing that … maybe because it ultimately helped him relax, Ryan thought. Backwards English on the ball or something. “George, why do you think I
“Jack, because you’re here to be effective, and being tight all the time does not make you more effective. Kick back, guy, maybe even learn to like some aspect of it.”
“Like what?”
“Hell.” Winston shrugged, and then nodded to the secretaries’ office. “Lots of cute young interns out there.”
“There’s been enough of that,” Ryan said crossly. Then he did manage to relax and smile a little. “Besides, I’m married to a surgeon. Make that little mistake and I could wake up without something important.”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s bad for the country to have the President’s dick cut off, eh? People might not respect us anymore.” Winston stood. “Gotta go back across the street and look at some economic models.”
“Economy looking good?” POTUS asked.
“No complaints from me or Mark Gant. Just so the Fed Chairman leaves the discount rate alone, but I expect he will. Inflation is pretty flat, and there’s no upward pressure anywhere that I see happening.”
“Ben?”
Goodley looked through his notes, as though he’d forgotten something. “Oh, yeah. Would you believe, the Vatican is appointing a Papal Nuncio to the PRC?”
“Oh? What’s that mean, exactly?” Winston asked, stopping halfway to the door.
“The Nuncio is essentially an ambassador. People forget that the Vatican is a nation-state in its own right and has the usual trappings of statehood. That includes diplomatic representation. A nuncio is just that, an ambassador-and a spook,” Ryan added.
“Really?” Winston asked.
“George, the Vatican has the world’s oldest intelligence service. Goes back centuries. And, yeah, the Nuncio gathers information and forwards it to the home office, because people talk to him-who better to talk to than a priest, right? They’re good enough at gathering information that we’ve made the occasional effort to crack their communications. Back in the thirties, a senior cryppie at the State Department resigned over it,” Ryan informed his SecTreas, reverting back to history teacher.
“We still do that?” Winston directed this question at Goodley, the President’s National Security Adviser. Goodley looked first to Ryan, and got a nod. “Yes, sir. Fort Meade still takes a look at their messages. Their ciphers are a little old-fashioned, and we can brute-force them.”
“And ours?”
“The current standard is called TAPDANCE. It’s totally random, and therefore it’s theoretically unbreakable- unless somebody screws up and reuses a segment of it, but with approximately six hundred forty-seven million trans-positions on every daily CD-ROM diskette, that’s not very likely.”
