Debt of Honor

'Enough for both of us,' Golovko observed. 'Remember when we first met, negotiating to remove those fucking things?' He heard Ryan's snort over the phone. He didn't hear what his colleague was thinking. The first time I was close to those things, aboard your missile submarine, Red October, yeah, I remember that. I remember feeling my skin crawl like I was in the presence of Lucifer himself. He'd never had the least bit of affection for ballistic weapons. Oh, sure, maybe they'd kept the peace for forty years, maybe the thought of them had deterred their owners from the intemperate thoughts that had plagued chiefs of state for all of human history. Or just as likely, mankind had just been lucky, for once.

'Jack, this is getting rather serious,' Golovko said. 'By the way, our officer met with your officers. He reports favorably on them—and thank you, by the way, for the copy of their report. It included data we did not have. Not vitally important, but interesting even so. So tell me, do they know to seek out these rockets?'

'The order went out,' Ryan assured him.

'To my people as well, Ivan Emmetovich. We will find them, never fear,' Golovko felt the need to add. He had to be thinking the same thing: the only reason the missiles had not been used was that both sides had possessed them, because it was like threatening a mirror. That was no longer true, was it? And so came Ryan's question:

'And then what?' he asked darkly. 'What do we do then?'

'Do you not say in your language, 'One thing at a time'?'

Isn't this just great? Now I have a friggin' Russian trying to cheer me up!

'Thank you, Sergey Nikolay'ch. Perhaps I deserved that as well.'

'So why did we sell Citibank?' George Winston asked.

'Well, he said to look out for banks that were vulnerable to currency fluctuations,' Gant replied. 'He was right. We got out just in time I think, see for yourself.' The trader typed another instruction into his terminal and was rewarded with a graphic depiction of what First National City Bank stock had done on Friday, and sure enough it had dropped off the table in one big hurry, largely because Columbus, which had purchased the issue in large quantities over the preceding five weeks, had held quite a bit, and in selling it had shaken faith in the stock badly. 'Anyway, that set off an alarm in our program—'

'Mark, Citibank is one of the benchmark stocks in the model, isn't it?' Winston asked calmly. There was nothing to be gained by leaning on Mark too hard.

'Oh.' His eyes opened a little wider. 'Well, yes, it is, isn't it?'

That was when a very bright light blinked on in Winston's mind. It was not widely known how the 'expert systems' kept track of the market. They worked in several interactive ways, monitoring both the market as a whole and also modeling benchmark stocks more closely, as general indicators of developing market trends. Those were stocks which over time had tracked closely with what everything else was doing, with a bias toward general stability, those that both dropped and rose more slowly than more speculative issues, steady performers. There were two reasons for it, and one glaring mistake. The reasons were that while the market fluctuated every day, even in the most favorable of circumstances, the idea was to not only bag an occasional killing on a high-flyer, but also to hedge your money on safe stocks—not that any stock was truly safe, as Friday had proven—when everything else became unsettled. For those reasons, the benchmark stocks were those that over time had provided safe havens. The mistake was a common one: dice have no memory. Those benchmark stocks were such because the companies they represented had historically good management. Management could change over time. So it was not the stocks that were stable. It was the management, and that was only something from the past, whose currency had to be examined periodically—despite which, those stocks were used to grade trends. And a trend was a trend only because people thought it was, and in thinking so, they made it so. Winston had regarded benchmark stocks only as predictors of what the people in the market would do, and for him trends were always psychological, predictors of how people would follow an artificial model, not the performance of the model itself. Gant, he realized, didn't quite see it that way, like so many of the technical traders.

And in selling off Citibank, Columbus had activated a little alarm in its own computer-trading system. And even someone as bright as Mark had forgotten that Citibank was part of the goddamned model!

'Show me other bank stocks,' Winston ordered.

'Well, Chemical went next,' Gant told, him, pulling up that track as well. 'Then Manny-Hanny, and then others, too. Anyway, we saw it coming, and we jumped into metals and the gold stocks. You know, when the dust settles, it's going to turn out that we did okay. Not great, but pretty okay,' Gant said, calling up his executive program for overall transactions, wanting to show something he'd done right. 'I took the money from a quick flip on Silicon Alchemy and laid this put on GM and—'

Winston patted him on the shoulder. 'Save that for later, Mark. I can see it was a good play.'

'Anyway, we were ahead of the trends all the way. Yeah, we got a little hurt when the calls came in and we had to dump a lot of solid things, but that happened to everybody—'

'You don't see it, do you?'

'See what, George?'

'We were the trend.'

Mark Gant blinked his eyes, and Winston could tell.

He didn't see it.

29—Written Records

The presentation went very well, and at the end of it Cathy Ryan was handed an exquisitely wrapped box by the Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery from Chiba University, who led the Japanese delegation. Unwrapping it, she found a scarf of watered blue silk, embroidered with gold thread. It looked to be more than a hundred years old.

'The blue goes so well with your eyes, Professor Ryan,' her colleague said with a smile of genuine admiration. 'I fear it is not a sufficiently valuable gift for what I have learned from you today. I have hundreds of diabetic patients at my hospital. With this technique we can hope to restore sight for most of them. A magnificent breakthrough, Professor.' He bowed, formally and with clear respect.

'Well, the lasers come from your country,' Cathy replied. She wasn't sure what emotion she was supposed to have. The gift was stunning. The man was as sincere as he could be, and his country might be at war with hers.

But why wasn't it on the news? If there were a war, why was this foreigner not under arrest? Was she supposed to be gracious to him as a learned colleague or hostile to him as an enemy? What the hell was going on? She looked over at Andrea Price, who just leaned against the back wall and smiled, her arms crossed across her chest.

'And you have taught us how to use them more efficiently. A stunning piece of applied research.' The Japanese professor turned to the others and raised his hands. The assembled multitude applauded, and a blushing Caroline Ryan started thinking that she just might get the Lasker statuette for her mantelpiece after all. Everyone shook her hand before leaving for the bus that waited to take them back to the Stouffer's on Pratt Street.

'Can I see it?' Special Agent Price asked after all were gone and the door safely closed. Cathy handed the scarf over. 'Lovely. You'll have to buy a new dress to go with it.'

'So there never was anything to worry about,' Dr. Ryan observed. Interestingly, once she'd gotten fifteen seconds into her lecture, she'd forgotten about it anyway. Wasn't that interesting?

'No, like I told you, I didn't expect anything.' Price handed the scarf back, not without some reluctance. The little professor was right, she thought. It did go nicely with her eyes. 'Jack Ryan's wife' was all she'd heard, and then some. 'How long have you been doing this?'

'Retinal surgery?' Cathy closed her notebook. 'I started off working the front end of the eye, right up to the time little Jack was born. Then I had an idea about how the retina is attached naturally and how we might reattach bad ones. Then we started looking at how to fix blood vessels. Bernie let me run with it, and I got a research grant from NIH to play with, and one thing led to another…'

'And now you're the best in the world at this,' Price concluded the story.

'Until somebody with better hands comes along and learns how to do it, yes.' Cathy smiled. 'I suppose I am,