Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“China, babe. They really stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes this time, but they don’t seem to know how bad it looked.”

“Killing those two people-how could it not look bad?” SURGEON asked.

“Not everybody values human life in the same way that we do, Cath.”

“The Chinese doctors I’ve met are-well, they’re doctors, and we talk to each other like doctors.”

“I suppose.” Ryan saw a commercial start on the TV show he was pretending to watch, and stood to walk off to the upstairs kitchen for another whiskey. “Refill, babe?”

“Yes, thank you.” With her Christmas-tree smile.

Jack lifted his wife’s wineglass. So, she had no procedures scheduled for the next day. She’d come to love the Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay they’d first sampled at Camp David. For him tonight, it was Wild Turkey bourbon over ice. He loved the pungent smell of the corn and rye grains, and tonight he’d dismissed the upstairs staff and could enjoy the relative luxury of fixing his own-he could even have made a peanut butter sandwich, had he been of such a mind. He walked the drinks back, touching his wife’s neck on the way, and getting the cute little shiver she always made when he did so.

“So, what’s going to happen in China?”

“We’ll find out the same way as everybody else, watching CNN. They’re a lot faster than our intelligence people on some things. And our spooks can’t predict the future any better than the traders on Wall Street.” You’d be able to identify such a man at Merrill Lynch easily if he existed, Jack didn’t bother saying aloud. He’d be the guy with all the millionaires lined up outside his office.

“So, what do you think?”

“I’m worried, Cath,” Ryan admitted, sitting back down.

“About what?”

“About what we’ll have to do if they screw things up again. But we can’t warn them. That only makes it certain that bad things are going to happen, because then they’ll do something really dumb just to show us how powerful they are. That’s how nation-states are. You can’t talk to them like real people. The people who make the decisions over there think with their …”

“… dicks?” Cathy offered with a half giggle.

“Yep,” Jack confirmed with a nod. “A lot of them follow their dicks everywhere they go, too. We know about some foreign leaders who have habits that would get them tossed out of any decent whorehouse in the world. They just love to show everybody how tough and manly they are, and to do that, they act like animals in a goddamned barnyard.”

“Secretaries?”

“A lot of that.” Ryan nodded. “Hell, Chairman Mao liked doing twelve-year-old virgins, like changing shirts. I guess old as he was, it was the best he could do-”

“No Viagra back then, Jack,” Cathy pointed out.

“Well, you suppose that drug will help civilize the world?” he asked, turning to grin at his physician wife. It didn’t seem a likely prospect.

“Well, maybe it’ll protect a lot of twelve-year-olds.”

Jack checked his watch. Another half hour and he’d be turning in. Until then, maybe he could actually watch the TV for a little while.

Rutledge was just waking up. Under his door was an envelope, which he picked up and opened, to find an official communique from Foggy Bottom, his instructions for the day, which weren’t terribly different from those of the previous day. Nothing in the way of concessions to offer, which were the grease of dealing with the PRC. You had to give them something if you wanted to get anything, and the Chinese never seemed to realize that such a procedure could and occasionally should work the other way as well. Rutledge headed to his private bathroom and wondered if it had been like this chatting with German diplomats in May 1939. Could anyone have prevented that war from breaking out? he wondered. Probably not, in retrospect. Some chiefs of state were just too damned stupid to grasp what their diplomats told them, or maybe the idea of war just appealed to one sort of mind. Well, even diplomacy had its limitations, didn’t it?

Breakfast was served half an hour later, by which time Rutledge was showered and shaved pink. His staff were all there in the dining room, looking over the papers for the most part, learning what was going on back home. They already knew, or thought they knew, what was going to happen here. A whole lot of nothing. Rutledge agreed with that assessment. He was wrong, too.

Got the address?” Wise asked his driver. He was also the team’s cameraman, and drew the driving duty because of his steady hands and genius for anticipating traffic clogs.

“Got it, Barry,” the man assured him. Better yet, it had been inputted into the satellite-navigation system, and the computer would tell them how to get there. Hertz was going to conquer the world someday, Wise reflected with a chuckle. Just so they didn’t bring back the O.J. commercials.

“Going to rain, looks like,” Barry Wise thought aloud.

“Could be,” his producer agreed.

“What do you suppose happened to the gal who had the baby?” the cameraman asked from the driver’s seat.

“Probably home with her kid now. I bet they don’t keep mothers in the hospital very long here,” Wise speculated. “Trouble is, we don’t know her address. No way to do a follow-up on her and the kid.” And that was too bad, Wise could have added. They had the surname, Yang, on their original tape, but the given names of the husband and wife were both garbled.

“Yeah, I bet there’s a lot of Yangs in the phone book here.”

“Probably,” Wise agreed. He didn’t even know if there was such a thing as a Beijing phone book-or if the Yang family had a phone-and none of his crew could read the ideographic characters that constituted the Chinese written language. All of those factors combined to make a stone wall.

“Two blocks,” the cameraman reported from the front seat. “Just have to turn left … here…”

The first thing they saw was a crowd of khaki uniforms, the local police, standing there like soldiers on guard duty, which was essentially what they were, of course. They parked the van and hopped out, and were immediately scrutinized as though they were alighting from an alien spacecraft. Pete Nichols had his camera out and up on his shoulder, and that didn’t make the local cops any happier, because they’d all been briefed on this CNN crew at the Longfu hospital and what they’d done to damage the People’s Republic. So the looks they gave the TV crew were poisonous-Wise and his crew could not have asked for anything better for their purposes.

Wise just walked up to the cop with the most rank-stuff on his uniform.

“Good day,” Barry said pleasantly.

The sergeant in command of the group just nodded. His face was entirely neutral, as though he were playing cards for modest stakes.

“Could you help us?” Wise asked.

“Help you do what?” the cop asked in his broken English, suddenly angry at himself for admitting he could speak the language. Better if he’d played dumb, he realized a few seconds too late.

“We are looking for Mrs. Yu, the wife of the Reverend Yu, who used to live here.”

“No here,” the police sergeant replied with a wave of the hands. “No here.”

“Then we will wait,” Wise told him.

Minister,” Cliff Rutledge said in greeting.

Shen was late, which was a surprise to the American delegation. It could have meant that he was delivering a message to his guests, telling them that they were not terribly important in the great scheme of things; or he might have been delayed by new instructions from the Politburo; or maybe his car hadn’t wanted to start this morning. Personally, Rutledge leaned toward option number two. The Politburo would want to have input into these talks. Shen Tang had probably been a moderating influence, explaining to his colleagues that the American position, however unjust, would be difficult to shake in this series of talks, and so the smart long-term move would be to accommodate the American position for now, and make up for the losses in the next go-around the following year-the American sense of fair play, he would have told them, had cost them more negotiations than any other single factor in history, after all.