class, could be pretty fuckin’ unpleasant. Especially in a case like this, he was intimate with this agent, and breaking away from her could cause her to stop her cooperation, which, Langley had told him, was pretty damned good, and they wanted more of it. Erasing the program he’d had her input on her machine would be difficult for a CalTech- trained genius, but you could accomplish the same thing by clobbering the whole hard drive and reinstalling new files over the old ones, because the valuable little gopher file was hidden in the system software, and a write-over would destroy it as surely as the San Francisco Earthquake.
So, he didn’t want to be here, exactly, but he was a businessman, in addition to being a spook, and the client had called him in. The girl two desks away from Ming had a computer problem, and he was the NEC rep for the ministry offices.
It turned out to be a minor problem-you just couldn’t turn some women loose on computers. It was like loosing a four-year-old in a gun shop, he thought, but didn’t dare say such things aloud in these liberated times, even here. Happily, Ming hadn’t been in sight when he’d come in. He’d walked over to the desk with the problem and fixed it in about three minutes, explaining the error to the secretary in simple terms she was sure to understand, and which would now make her the office expert for an easily replicated problem. With a smile and a polite Japanese bow, he’d made his way to the door, when the door to the inner office opened, and Ming came out with her Minister Fang behind her, looking down at some papers.
“Oh, hello, Nomuri-san,” Ming said in surprise, as Fang called the name “Chai,” and waved to another of the girls to follow him in. If Fang saw Nomuri there, he didn’t acknowledge it, simply disappeared back into his private office.
“Hello, Comrade Ming,” the American said, speaking in English. “Your computer operates properly?” he asked formally.
“Yes, it does, thank you.”
“Good. Well, if you experience a problem, you have my card.”
“Oh, yes. You are well settled in to Beijing now?” she asked politely.
“Yes, thank you, I am.”
“You should try Chinese food instead of sticking to the food of your homeland, though, I admit, I have developed a taste lately for Japanese sausage,” she told him, and everyone else in the room, with a face that would have done Amarillo Slim proud.
For his part, Chester Nomuri felt his heart not so much skip a beat as stop entirely for about ten seconds, or so it seemed. “Ah, yes,” he had to say in reply, as soon as he got breath back in his lungs. “It can be very tasty.”
Ming just nodded and went to her desk and back to work. Nomuri nodded and bowed politely to the office and made his departure as well, then headed down the corridor immediately for a men’s room, the need to urinate urgent. Sweet Jesus. But that was one of the problems with agents. They sometimes got off on their work the way a drug addict got off on the immediate rush when the chemical hit his system, and they’d tickle the dragon with their new and playful enthusiasm just to experience a little more of the rush, forgetting that the dragon’s tail was a lot closer to its mouth than it appeared. It was foolish to enjoy danger. Zipping himself back up, he told himself that he hadn’t broken training, hadn’t stumbled on his reply to her playful observation. But he had to warn her about dancing in a minefield. You never really knew where to put your feet, and discovering the wrong places was usually painful.
That’s when he realized why it had happened, and the thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Ming loved him. She was playful because … well, why else would she have said that? As a game? Did she regard the whole thing as a game? No, she wasn’t the right personality type to be a hooker. The sex had been good, maybe too good-if such a thing were possible, Nomuri thought as he resumed walking toward the elevator. She’d surely be over tonight after saying that. He’d have to stop by the liquor store on the way home and get some more of that awful Japanese scotch for thirty bucks a liter. A working man couldn’t afford to get drunk here unless he drank the local stuff, and that was too vile to contemplate.
But Ming had just consecrated their relationship by risking her life in front of her minister and her co-workers, and that was far more frightening to Nomuri than her ill-considered remark about his dick and her fondness for it.
— but how was
It was doing it again soon after the close of regular business hours, and the eleven-hour differential pretty much guaranteed that it arrived on the desks of American officials soon after their breakfasts. In the case of Mary Patricia Foley, mornings were far less hectic than they’d once been. Her youngest was not yet in college, but preferred to fix her own oatmeal from the Quaker envelopes, and now drove herself to school, which allowed her mother an extra twenty-five minutes or so of additional sleep every morning. Twenty years of being a field spook and mother should have been enough to drive her to distracted insanity, but it was, actually, a life she’d enjoyed, especially her years in Moscow, doing her business right there in the belly of the beast, and giving the bastard quite an ulcer at the time, she remembered with a smile.
Her husband could say much the same. The first husband-wife team to rise so high at Langley, they drove together to work every morning-in their own car rather than the “company” one to which they were entitled, but with lead and chase cars full of people with guns, because any terrorist with half a brain would regard them as targets more valuable than rubies. This way they could talk on the way in-and the car was swept for bugs on a weekly basis.
They took their usual reserved and oversized place in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building, then rode up in the executive elevator, which somehow was always waiting for them, to their seventh-floor offices.
Mrs. Foley’s desk was always arrayed just so. The overnight crew had all her important papers arranged just so, also. But today, as she had for the last week, instead of looking over the striped-border folders full of TOP SECRET CODEWORDED material, she first of all flipped on her desktop computer and checked her special e-mail. This morning was no disappointment. She copied the file electronically to her hard drive, printed up a hard copy, and when that was off her printer, deleted the e-mail from her system, effectively erasing it from electronic existence. Then she reread the paper copy and lifted the phone for her husband’s office.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Some egg-drop soup,” she told the Director of Central Intelligence. It was a Chinese dish he found especially vile, and she enjoyed teasing her husband.
“Okay, honey. Come on in.” It had to be pretty good if she was trying to turn his stomach over this early in the friggin’ morning, the DCI knew.
More SORGE?' the President asked, seventy-five minutes later.
“Yes, sir,” Ben Goodley replied, handing the sheet over. It wasn’t long, but it was interesting.
Ryan skimmed through it. “Analysis?”
“Mrs. Foley wants to go over it with you this afternoon. You have a slot at two-fifteen.”
“Okay. Who else?”
“The Vice President, since he’s around.” Goodley knew that Ryan liked to have Robby Jackson in for strategically interesting material. “He’s fairly free this afternoon as well.”
“Good. Set it up,” POTUS ordered.
Six blocks away, Dan Murray was just arriving at his capacious office (considerably larger than the President’s, as a matter of fact) with his own security detail, because he, as the country’s principal counterintelligence and counterterrorist officer, had ail manner of information that others were interested in. This morning only brought in some more.
