Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

He shrugged as they passed a Dunkin’ Donuts box. “Coin toss, Mary.”

“I suppose. I sure hope it comes up heads this time.”

“Jack’s going to ask us in … an hour and a half, I suppose.”

“Something like that,” the DDO agreed in a breathy voice.

“The NATO thing ought to work, ought to make them think things over,” the DCI thought aloud.

“Don’t bet the ranch on it, honey bunny,” Mary Pat warned.

“I know.” Pause. “When does Jack get on the airplane to come home?”

She checked her watch. “About two hours.”

“We should know by then.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Ten minutes later, informed of the shape of the world en route by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, they arrived at Langley, again parking in the underground garage, and again taking the elevator up to the seventh floor, where, again, they split up, going to their separate offices. In this, Ed surprised his wife. She’d expected him to hover over her shoulder as she flipped on her office computer, looking for another brownie recipe, as she called it. This happened at seven-fifty-four.

“You’ve got mail,” the electronic voice announced as she accessed her special Internet account. Her hand wasn’t quite shaking when she moved the mouse to click on the proper icon, but nearly so. The letter came up, went through the descrambling process, and came up as clear-text she couldn’t read. As always, MP saved the document to her hard drive, confirmed that it was saved, then printed up a hard copy, and finally deleted the letter from her electronic in-box, completely erasing it off the Internet. Then she lifted her phone.

“Please have Dr. Sears come up right away,” she told her secretary.

Joshua Sears had also come in early this morning, and was sitting at his desk reading the New York Times financial page when the call came. He was in the elevator in under a minute, and then in the office of the Deputy Director (Operations).

“Here,” Mary Pat said, handing over the six pages of ideographs. “Take a seat.”

Sears sat in a comfortable chair and started his translation. He could see that the DDO was a little exercised about this, and his initial diagnosis came as he turned to page two.

“This isn’t good news,” he said, without looking up. “Looks like Zhang is guiding Premier Xu in the direction he wants. Fang is uneasy about it, but he’s going along, too. Marshal Luo is fully on the team. I guess that’s to be expected. Luo’s always been a hardball guy,” Sears commented. “Talk here’s about operational security, concern that we might know what they’re up to-but they think they’re secure,” Sears assured the DDO.

As many times as she’d heard that sort of thing, it never failed to give her a severe case of the chills, hearing the enemy (to Mary Pat nearly everyone was an enemy) discuss the very possibility that she’d devoted her entire professional life to realizing. And almost always you heard their voices saying that, no, there wasn’t anyone like her out there hearing them. She’d never really left her post in Moscow, when she’d been control officer for Agent CARDINAL. He’d been old enough to have been her grandfather, but she’d thought of him as her own newborn, as she gave him taskings, and collected his take, forwarding it back to Langley, always worried for his safety. She was out of that game now, but it came down to the same thing. Somewhere out there was a foreign national sending America information of vital interest. She knew the person’s name, but not her face, not her motivation, just that she liked to share her bed with one of her officers, and she kept the official diary for this Minister Fang, and her computer sent it out on the Web, on a path that ended at her seventh-floor desk.

“Summary?” she asked Dr. Sears.

“They’re still on the warpath,” the analyst replied. “Maybe they’ll turn off it at some later date, but there is no such indication here.”

“If we warn them off …?”

Sears shrugged. “No telling. Their real concern is internal political dissension and possible collapse. This economic crisis has them worried about political ruin for them all, and that’s all they’re worried about.”

“Wars are begun by frightened men,” the DDO observed.

“That’s what history tells us,” Sears agreed. “And it’s happening again, right before our eyes.”

“Shit,” Mrs. Foley observed. “Okay, print it up and get it back to me, fast as you can.”

“Yes, ma’am. Half hour. You want me to show this to George Weaver, right?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. The academic had been going over the SORGE data for several days, taking his time to formulate his part of the SNIE slowly and carefully, which was the way he worked. “You mind working with him?”

“Not really. He knows their heads pretty well, maybe a little better than I do-he has a master’s in psychology from Yale. Just he’s a little slow formulating his conclusions.”

“Tell him I want something I can use by the end of the day.”

“Will do,” Sears promised, rising for the door. Mary Pat followed him out, but took a different turn.

“Yeah?” Ed Foley said, when she came into his office.

“You’ll have the write-up in half an hour or so. Short version: They are not impressed by the NATO play.”

“Oh, shit,” the DCI observed at once.

“Yeah,” his wife agreed. “Better find out how quick we can get the information to Jack.”

“Okay.” The DCI lifted his secure phone and punched the speed-dial button for the White House.

There was one last semi-official meeting at the American Embassy before departure, and again it was Golovko speaking for his President, who was away schmoozing with the British Prime Minister.

“What did you make of Auschwitz?” the Russian asked.

“It ain’t Disney World,” Jack replied, taking a sip of coffee. “Have you been there?”

“My uncle Sasha was part of the force that liberated the camp,” Sergey replied. “He was a tank commander-a colonel-in the Great Motherland War.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“When I was a boy. Sasha-my mother’s brother, he was-was a true soldier, a hard man with hard rules for life, and a committed communist. That must have shaken him, though,” Golovko went on. “He didn’t really talk about what effect it had on him. Just that it was ugly, and proof to him of the correctness of his cause. He said he had an especially good war after that-he got to kill more Germans.”

“And what about the things-”

“Stalin did? We never spoke of that in my family. My father was NKVD, as you know. He thought that whatever the state did was correct. Not unlike what the fascisti thought at Auschwitz, I admit, but he would not have seen it that way. Those were different times, Ivan Emmetovich. Harder times. Your father served in the war as well, as I recall.”

“Paratrooper, One-Oh-First. He never talked much about it, just the funny things that happened. He said the night drop into Normandy was pretty scary, but that’s all-he never said what it was like running around in the dark with people shooting at him.”

“It cannot be very enjoyable, to be a soldier in combat.”

“I don’t suppose it is. Sending people out to do it isn’t fun, either. God damn it, Sergey! I’m supposed to protect people, not risk their lives.”

“So, you are not like Hitler. And not like Stalin,” the Russian added graciously. “And neither is Eduard Petrovich. It is a gentler world we live in, gentler than that of our fathers and our uncles. But not gentle enough yet. When will you know how our Chinese friends reacted to yesterday’s events?”