Debt of Honor

'The order is given. Get the girl out now.'

'Anything we need to know?' Mary Pat asked.

'I haven't been comfortable with this from the beginning. I think maybe we deliver a little message to her sugar daddy—and we do it early enough to get his attention.'

'Yeah,' Mr. Foley said. 'I read the paper this morning, too. He isn't saying friendly stuff, but we are laying it on them pretty hard, y'know?'

'Sit down, Jack,' Mary Pat said. 'Can I get you coffee or anything?'

'No, thanks, MP.' He looked up after taking a place on a worn couch.

'A light just went off. Our friend Goto seems to be an odd duck.'

'He does have his quirks,' Ed agreed. 'Not terribly bright, a lot of bombast once you get through the local brand of rhetoric, but not all that many ideas. I'm surprised he's getting the chance.'

'Why?' Jack asked. The State Department material on Goto had been typically respectful of the foreign statesman.

'Like I said, he's no threat to win the Nobel in physics, okay? He's an apparatchik. Worked his way up the way politicos do. I'm sure he's kissed his share of asses along the way—'

'And to make up for that, he has some bad habits with women,' MP added. 'There's a lot of that over there. Our boy Nomuri sent in a lengthy dispatch on what he's seen.' It was the youth and inexperience, the DDO knew. So many field officers on their first major assignment reported everything, as though writing a book or something. It was mainly the product of boredom.

'Over here he couldn't get elected dogcatcher,' Ed noted with a chuckle.

Think so? Ryan thought, remembering Edward Kealty. On the other hand, it might just turn out to be something America could use in the right forum and under the right circumstances. Maybe the first time they met, if things went badly, President Durling could make a quiet reference to his former girlfriend, and the implications of his bad habits on Japanese-American relations…

'How's THISTLE doing?'

Mary Pat smiled as she rearranged the Sega games on the basement TV. This was where the kids told Mario and all the others what to do. 'Two of the old members are gone, one retired and one on overseas assignment, in Malaysia, as I recall. The rest of them are contacted. If we ever want to—'

'Okay, let's think about what we want them to do for us.'

'Why?' MP asked. 'I don't mind, but why?'

'We're pushing them too hard. I've told the President that, but he's got political reasons for pushing, and he isn't going to stop. What we're doing is going to hurt their economy pretty bad, and now it turns out that their new PM has a real antipathy to us. If they decide to push back, I want to know before it happens.'

'What can they do?' Ed Foley sat on his son's favorite Nintendo chair.

'I don't know that, either, but I want to find out. Give me a few days to figure out what our priorities are. Damn, I don't have a few days,' Jack said next. 'I have to prep for the Moscow trip.'

'It takes time to set up anyway. We can get our boys the comm gear and stuff.'

'Do it,' Jack ordered. 'Tell 'em they're in the spy business for-real.'

'We need presidential authorization for that,' Ed warned. Activating a spy network in a friendly country was not a trivial undertaking.

'I can deliver it for you.' Ryan was sure that Durling wouldn't object. 'And get the girl out, earliest opportunity.'

'Debrief her where?' MP asked. 'For that matter, what if she says no? You're not telling us to kidnap her, are you?'

Ouch, Jack thought. 'No, I don't suppose that's a good idea. They know how to be careful, don't they?'

'Clark does.' Mary Pat knew from what he'd taught her and her husband at the Farm, all those years ago: No matter where you are, it's enemy territory. It was a good axiom for field spooks, but she'd always wondered where he'd picked it up.

Most of these people should have been at work, Clark thought but so did they, and that was the problem, wasn't it? He'd seen his share of demonstrations, most of them expressing displeasure with his country. The ones in Iran had been especially unpleasant, knowing that there were Americans in the hands of people who thought 'Death to America!' was a perfectly reason able expression of concern with the foreign policy of his country. He'd been in the field, part of the rescue mission that had failed—the lowest point, Clark told himself, in a lengthy career. Being there to see it all fail, having to scramble out of the country, they were not good memories. This scene brought some of it back.

The American Embassy wasn't taking it too seriously. Business as usual, after a fashion, the Ambassador had all his people inside the embassy building, another example of Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Meets-the-Siegfried-Line design, this one located across from the Ocura Hotel. After all, this was a civilized country, wasn't it? The local police had an adequate guard force outside the fence, and as vociferous as the demonstrators were, they didn't seem the sort to attack the severe-looking cops arrayed around the building.

But the people in the street were not kids, not students taking a day off from class—remarkably, the media never reported that so many of those student demonstrations coincided with semester finals, a worldwide phenomenon. In the main, these were people in their thirties and forties, and for that reason the chants weren't quite right. There was a remarkably soft edge on the expressions. Embarrassed to be here, somewhat confused by the event, more hurt than angry, he thought as Chavez snapped his pictures. But there were a lot of them. And there was a lot of hurt. They wanted to blame someone—the inevitable them, the someone else who always made the bad things happen. That perspective was not uniquely Japanese, was it?

As with everything in Japan, it was a highly organized affair. People, already formed into groups with leaders, had arrived mostly by crowded commuter trains, boarded buses at the stations, and been dropped off only a few blocks away. Who chartered the buses? Clark wondered. Who printed the signs? The wording on them was literate, which was odd, he was slow to realize. Though often well schooled in English, Japanese citizens messed up the foreign tongue as much as one might expect, especially on slogans. He'd seen one young man earlier in the day wearing a T-shirt with the legend ' Inspire in Paradise,' probably an exact representation of something in Japanese, and yet another example of the fact that no language translated precisely into another. But not these signs. The syntax was perfect in every case he saw, better, in fact, than he might have seen in an American demonstration. Wasn't that interesting?

Well, what the hell, he thought. I'm a journalist, right?

'Excuse me,' John said, touching a middle-aged man on the arm.

'Yes?' The man turned in surprise. He was nicely turned out, wore a dark suit, and his tie was neatly knotted in the collar of his white shirt. There wasn't even much anger on his face, nor any emotion that might have built up from the spirit of the moment. 'Who are you?'

'I am a Russian journalist, for the Interfax News Agency,' Clark said, showing an ID card marked in Cyrillic.

'Ah.' The man smiled and bowed politely. Clark returned the gesture correctly, drawing an approving look for his good manners.

'May I please ask you some questions?'

'Certainly.' The man almost seemed relieved to be able to stop shouting. A few questions established that he was thirty-seven, married with one child, a salaryman for an auto company, currently laid off, and very upset with America at the moment—though not at all unhappy with Russia, he added quickly.

He's embarrassed by all this, John thought, thanking the man for his opinion.

'What was that all about?' Chavez asked quietly from behind his camera.

'Russkiy,' 'Klerk' replied sharply.

'Da, tovarisch.'

'Follow me,' 'Ivan Sergeyevich' said next, entering the crowd. There was something else odd, he thought, something he wasn't quite getting. Ten meters into the crowd, it was clear. The people at the periphery of the mob were supervisory. The inside was composed of blue-collar workers, more casually dressed, people with less dignity to lose. Here the mood was different. The looks he got were angrier, and though they became more polite when he