it yet anyway, based on the size of their economy. And, I think we rattle the Trade Reform Act at them nice and hard. Oh, there’s one other thing, and I’m surprised it’s not in here,” Winston said, pointing down at the briefing sheet.
“What’s that?”
“We can get ’em by the short hairs pretty easy, I think. CIA doesn’t agree, but Mark Gant thinks their foreign-exchange account’s a little thin.”
“Oh?” the President asked, stirring his coffee.
Winston nodded emphatically. “Mark’s my tech-weenie, remember. He’s very good at modeling stuff on the computers. I’ve set him up with his own little section to keep an eye on various things. Pulled the professor of economics out of Boston University to work there, Morton Silber, another good man with the microchips. Anyway, Mark’s been looking at the PRC, and he thinks they’re driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon because they’ve been pissing away their money, mainly on military hardware and heavy-manufacturing equipment, like to make tanks and things. It’s a repeat of the old communist stuff, they have a fixation on heavy industry. They are really missing the boat on electronics. They have little companies manufacturing computer games and stuff, but they’re not applying it at home, except for that new computer factory they set up that’s ripping off Dell.”
“So you think we ought to shove that up their ass at the trade negotiations?”
“I’m going to recommend it to Scott Adler at lunch this afternoon, as a matter of fact,” SecTreas agreed. “They’ve been warned, but this time we’re going to press it hard.”
“Back to their foreign exchange account. How bad is it?”
“Mark thinks they’re down to negative reserves.”
“In the hole? For how much?” POTUS asked.
“He says at least fifteen billion, floated with paper out of German banks for the most part, but the Germans have kept it quiet-and we’re not sure why. It could be a normal transaction, but either the Germans or the PRC wants to keep it under wraps.”
“Wouldn’t be the Germans, would it?” Ryan asked next.
“Probably not. It makes their banks look good. And, yeah, that leaves the Chinese covering it up.”
“Any way to confirm that?”
“I have some friends in Germany. I can ask around, or have a friend do it for me. Better that way, I guess. Everybody knows I’m a government employee now, and that makes me sinister,” Winston observed with a sly grin. “Anyway, I am having lunch with Scott today. What do I tell him about the trade negotiations?’
Ryan thought about that for several seconds. This was one of those moments-the frightening ones, as he thought of them-when his words would shape the policy of his own country, and, possibly, others as well. It was easy to be glib or flip, to say the first thing that popped into his mind, but, no, he couldn’t do that. Moments like this were too important, too vast in their potential consequences, and he couldn’t allow himself to make government policy on a whim, could he? He had to think the matter through, quickly perhaps, but through.
“We need China to know that we want the same access to their markets that we’ve given them to ours, and that we won’t tolerate their stealing products from American companies without proper compensation. George, I want the playing field level and fair for everyone. If they don’t want to play that way, we start hurting them.”
“Fair enough, Mr. President. I will pass that message along to your Secretary of State. Want I should deliver this, too?” Winston asked, holding up his SORGE briefing sheet.
“No, Scott gets his own version of it. And, George, be very, very careful with that. If the information leaks, a human being will lose his life,” SWORDSMAN told TRADER, deliberately disguising the source as a man, and therefore deliberately misleading his Secretary of the Treasury. But that, too, was business, and not personal.
“It goes into my confidential files.” Which was a pretty secure place, they both knew. “Nice reading the other guy’s mail, isn’t it?”
“Just about the best intelligence there is,” Ryan agreed.
“The guys at Fort Meade, eh? Tapping into somebody’s cell phone via satellite?”
“Sources and methods-you really don’t want to know that, George. There’s always the chance that you’ll spill it to the wrong person by mistake, and then you have some guy’s life on your conscience. Something to be avoided, trust me.”
“I hear you, Jack. Well, I have a day to start. Thanks for the coffee and the pastry, Boss.”
“Any time, George. Later.” Ryan turned to his appointment calendar as the Secretary walked out the corridor door, from which he’d go downstairs, cross outside because the West Wing wasn’t directly connected to the White House proper, dart back inside, and head off into the tunnel leading to Treasury.
Outside Ryan’s office, the Secret Service detail went over the appointment list also, but their copy also included the results of a National Crime Information Computer check, to make sure that no convicted murderer was being admitted into the Sanctum Sanctorum of the United States of America.
CHAPTER 17 The Coinage of Gold
Scott Adler was regarded as too young and inexperienced for the job, but that judgment came from would-be political appointees who’d schemed their way to near-the-top, whereas Adler had been a career foreign-service officer since his graduation from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy twenty-six years earlier. Those who’d seen him work regarded him as a very astute diplomatic technician. Those who played cards with him-Adler liked to play poker before a major meeting or negotiation-thought he was one very lucky son of a bitch.
His seventh-floor office at the State Department building was capacious and comfortable. Behind his desk was a credenza covered with the usual framed photographs of spouse, children, and parents. He didn’t like wearing his suit jacket at his desk, as he found it too confining for comfort. In this he’d outraged some of the senior State Department bureaucrats, who thought this an entirely inappropriate informality. He did, of course, don the jacket for important meetings with foreign dignitaries, but he didn’t think internal meetings were important enough to be uncomfortable for.
That suited George Winston, who tossed his coat over a chair when he came in. Like himself, Scott Adler was a working guy, and those were the people with whom Winston was most comfortable. He might be a career government puke, but the son of a bitch had a work ethic, which was more than he could say for too many of the people in his own department. He was doing his best to weed the drones out, but it was no easy task, and civil- service rules made firing unproductive people a non-trivial exercise.
“Have you read the Chinese stuff?” Adler asked, as soon as the lunch tray was on the table.
“Yeah, Scott. I mean, holy shit, fella,” TRADER observed to EAGLE.
“Welcome to the club. The intelligence stuff we get can be very interesting.” The State Department had its own spook service, called Intelligence and Research, or I amp;R, which, while it didn’t exactly compete with CIA and the other services, occasionally turned up its own rough little diamonds from the thick diplomatic mud. “So, what do you think of our little yellow brothers?”
Winston managed not to growl. “Buddy, I might not even eat their goddamned food anymore.”
“They make our worst robber barons look like Mother Teresa. They’re conscienceless motherfuckers, George, and that’s a fact.” Winston immediately started liking Adler more. A guy who talked like this had real possibilities. Now it was his turn to be coldly professional to counterpoint Adler’s working-class patois.
“They’re ideologically driven, then?”
“Totally-well, maybe with a little corruption thrown in, but remember, they figure that their political astuteness entitles them to live high on the hog, and so to them it’s not corruption at all. They just collect tribute from the peasants, and ‘peasant’ is a word they still use over there.”
“In other words, we’re dealing with dukes and earls?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Essentially, yes. They have an enormous sense of personal entitlement. They are not used to hearing the word ‘no’ in any form, and as a result they don’t always know what to do when they do hear it from people like me. That’s why they’re often at a disadvantage in negotiations-at least, when we play hardball with them. We haven’t done much of that, but last year, after the Airbus shoot-down I came on a little strong, and then we followed up with official diplomatic recognition of the ROC government on Taiwan. That really
