Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

For Barry Wise, the day had long since begun. His colleagues in Atlanta had praised him to the heavens in an e-mail about his earlier story. Maybe another Emmy, they said. Wise liked getting the awards, but they weren’t the reason for his work. It was just what he did. He wouldn’t even say he enjoyed it, because the news he reported was rarely pretty or pleasant. It was just his job, the work he’d chosen to do. If there was an aspect of it that he actually liked, it was the newness of it. Just as people awoke wondering what they’d see on CNN every day, from baseball scores to executions, so he awoke every day wondering what he’d report. He often had some idea of where the story would be and roughly what it would contain, but you were never really sure, and in the newness was the adventure of his job. He’d learned to trust his instincts, though he never really understood where they came from or how they seemed to know what they did, and today his instincts reminded him that one of the people he’d seen shot the other day had said he was married, and that his wife was on Taiwan. Maybe she’d be back now? It was worth trying out. He’d tried to get Atlanta to check with the Vatican, but that story would be handled by the Rome bureau. The aircraft containing Cardinal DiMilo’s body was on its way back to Italy, where somebody would be making a big deal about it for CNN to cover live and on tape to show to the entire world ten times at least.

The hotel room had a coffeemaker, and he brewed his own from beans stolen from the CNN Beijing bureau office. Sipping coffee, for him as for so many others, helped him think.

Okay, he thought, the Italian guy, the Cardinal, his body was gone, boxed and shipped out on an Alitalia 747, probably somewhere over Afghanistan right now. But what about the Chinese guy, the Baptist minister who took the round in the head? He had to have left a body behind, too, and he had a congregation and-he said he was married, didn’t he? Okay, if so, he had a wife somewhere, and she’d want the body back to bury. So, at the least he could try to interview her … it would be a good follow-up, and would allow Atlanta to play the tape of the killings again. He was sure the Beijing government had written him onto their official shitlist, but fuck ’em, Wise thought with a sip of the Starbucks, it was hardly a disgrace to be there, was it? These people were racist as hell. Even folks on the street cringed to see him pass, with his dark skin. Even Birmingham under Bull Connor hadn’t treated black Americans like aliens from another goddamned planet. Here, everyone looked the same, dressed the same, talked the same. Hell, they needed some black people just to liven up the mix some. Toss in a few blond Swedes and maybe a few Italians to set up a decent restaurant….

But it wasn’t his job to civilize the world, just to tell people what was going on in it. The trade talks were not where it was happening, not today, Wise thought. Today he and his satellite truck would head back to the home of Reverend Yu Fa An. Wise was playing a hunch. No more than that. But they’d rarely failed him before.

Ryan was enjoying another night off. The following night would be different. He had to give another goddamned speech on foreign policy. Why he couldn’t simply announce policy in the press room and be done with it, nobody had yet told him-and he hadn’t asked, for fear of looking the fool (again) before Arnie. This was just how it was done. The speech and the subject had nothing to do with the identity of the group he was addressing. Surely there had to be an easier way to tell the world what he thought. This way, too, Cathy had to come with him, and she hated these things even more than he did, because it took her away from her patient notes, which she guarded about as forcefully as a lion over the wildebeests he’d just killed for lunch. Cathy often complained that this First Lady stuff was hurting her performance as a surgeon. Jack didn’t believe that. It was more likely that like most women, Cathy needed something to bitch about, and this subject was worthier than her more pedestrian complaints, like being unable to cook dinner once in a while, which she missed a lot more than the women’s lib people would have cared to learn. Cathy had spent over twenty years learning to be a gourmet cook, and when time allowed (rarely) she’d sneak down to the capacious White House kitchen to trade ideas and recipes with the head chef. For the moment, however, she was curled up in a comfortable chair making notes on her patient files and sipping at her wineglass, while Jack watched TV, for a change not under the eyes of the Secret Service detail and the domestic staff.

But the President wasn’t really watching TV. His eyes were pointed in that direction, but his mind was looking at something else. It was a look his wife had learned to understand in the past year, almost like open-eyed sleep while his brain churned over a problem. In fact, it was something she did herself often enough, thinking about the best way to treat a patient’s problem while eating lunch at the Hopkins doctors’ cafeteria, her brain creating a picture as though in a Disney cartoon, simulating the problem and then trying out theoretical fixes. It didn’t happen all that much anymore. The laser applications she’d helped to develop were approaching the point that an auto mechanic could perform them-which was not something she or her colleagues advertised, of course. There had to be a mystique with medicine, or else you lost your power to tell your patients what to do in a way that ensured that they might actually do it.

For some reason, that didn’t translate to the Presidency, Cathy thought. With Congress, well, most of the time they went along with him-as well they ought, since Jack’s requests were usually as reasonable as they could be-but not always, and often for the dumbest reasons. “It may be good for the country, but it’s not so good for my district, and …” And they all forgot the fact that when they had arrived in Washington, they’d sworn an oath to the country, not to their stupid little districts. When she’d said that to Arnie, he’d had a good laugh and lectured her on how the real world worked- as though a physician didn’t know that! she fumed. And so Jack had to balance what was real with what wasn’t but ought to be-as opposed to what wasn’t and never would be. Like foreign affairs. It made a lot more sense for a married man to have an affair with some floozy than it did to try to reason with some foreign countries. At least you could tell the floozy that it was all over after three or four times, but these damned foreign chiefs of state would stay around forever with their stupidity.

That was one nice thing about medicine, Professor Ryan thought. Doctors all over the world treated patients pretty much the same way because the human body was the same everywhere, and a treatment regimen that worked at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore worked just as well in Berlin or Moscow or Tokyo, even if the people looked and talked different-and if that was true, why couldn’t people all over the world think the same way? Their damned brains were the same, weren’t they? Now it was her turn to grumble, as her husband did often enough.

“Jack?” she said, as she put her notebook down.

“Yeah, Cathy?”

“What are you thinking about now?”

Mainly how I wish Ellen Sumter was here with a cigarette, he couldn’t say. If Cathy knew he was sneaking smokes in the Oval Office, she didn’t let on, which was probably the case, since she didn’t go around looking for things to fight over, and he never ever smoked in front of her or the kids anymore. Cathy allowed him to indulge his weaknesses, as long as he did so in the utmost moderation. But her question was about the cause for his yearning for some nicotine.