Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Really?”

“Of course. There are some advantages to being a foreign barbarian,” he told her with a sly smile. The giggling response was just right, he thought. Yeah. Nomuri took another careful sip of this rocket fuel. She’d just told him what she wanted to wear. Sensible, too, for this culture. However comfy it might be, it would also be quite discreet.

“So, what else can you tell me about yourself?” he asked next.

“There is little to tell. My job is beneath my education, but it carries prestige for … well, for political reasons. I am a highly educated secretary. My employer-well, technically I work for the state, as do most of us, but in fact I work for my minister as if he were in the capitalist sector and paid me from his own pocket.” She shrugged. “I suppose it has always been so. I see and hear interesting things.”

Don’t want to ask about them now, Nomuri knew. Later, sure, but not now.

“It is the same with me, industrial secrets and such. Ahh,” he snorted. “Better to leave such things at my official desk. No, Ming, tell me about you.”

“Again, there is little to tell. I am twenty-four. I am educated. I suppose I am lucky to be alive. You know what happens to many girl babies here …”

Nomuri nodded. “I have heard the stories. They are distasteful,” he agreed with her. It was more than that. It was not unknown for the father of a female toddler to drop her down a well in the hope that his wife would bear him a son on the next try. One-baby-per-family was almost a law in the PRC, and like most laws in a communist state, that one was ruthlessly enforced. An unauthorized baby was often allowed to come to term, but then as birth took place, when the baby “crowned,” the top of the head appearing, the very moment of birth, the attending physician or nurse would take a syringe loaded with formaldehyde, and stab it into the soft spot at the crown of the almost-newborn’s head, push the plunger, and extinguish its life at the moment of its beginning. It wasn’t something the government of the PRC advertised as government policy, but government policy it was. Nomuri’s one sister, Alice, was a physician, an obstetrician gynecologist trained at UCLA, and he knew that his sister would take poison herself before performing such a barbarous act, or take a pistol to use on whoever demanded that she do it. Even so, some surplus girl babies somehow managed to be born, and these were often abandoned, and then given up for adoption, mainly to Westerners, because the Chinese themselves had no use for them at all. Had it been done to Jews, it would have been called genocide, but there were a lot of Chinese to go around. Carried to extremes, it could lead to racial extinction, but here it was just called population control. “In due course Chinese culture will again recognize the value of women, Ming. That is certain.”div›

“I suppose it is,” she allowed. “How are women treated in Japan?”

Nomuri allowed himself a laugh. “The real question is how well they treat us, and how well they permit us to treat them!”

“Truly?”

“Oh, yes. My mother ruled the house until she died.”

“Interesting. Are you religious?”

Why that question? Chet wondered.

“I have never decided between Shinto and Zen Buddhism,” he replied, truthfully. He’d been baptized a Methodist, but fallen away from his church many years before. In Japan he’d examined the local religions just to understand them, the better to fit in, and though he’d learned much about both, neither had appealed to his American upbringing. “And you?”

“I once looked into Falun Gong, but not seriously. I had a friend who got very involved. He’s in prison now.”

“Ah, a pity.” Nomuri nodded sympathetically, wondering how close the friend had been. Communism remained a jealous system of belief, intolerant of competition of any sort. Baptists were the new religious fad, springing up as if from the very ground itself, started off, he thought, from the Internet, a medium into which American Christians, especially Baptists and Mormons, had pumped a lot of resources of late. And so Jerry Falwell was getting some sort of religious/ideological foothold here? How remarkable-or not. The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and also with Mao it would seem, was that as fine as the theoretical model was, it lacked something the human soul craved. But the communist chieftains didn’t and couldn’t like that very much. The Falun Gong group hadn’t even been a religion at all, not to Nomuri’s way of thinking, but for some reason he didn’t fully understand, it had frightened the powers that be in the PRC enough to crack down on it as if it had been a genuinely counterrevolutionary political movement. He heard that the convicted leaders of the group were doing seriously hard time in the local prisons. The thought of what constituted especially hard time in this country didn’t bear much contemplation. Some of the world’s most vicious tortures had been invented in this country, where the value of human life was a far less important thing than in the nation of his origin, Chet reminded himself. China was an ancient land with an ancient culture, but in many ways these people might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings, so detached were their societal values from what Chester Nomuri had grown up with. “Well, I really don’t have much in the way of religious convictions.”

“Convictions?” Ming asked.

“Beliefs,” the CIA officer corrected. “So, are there any men in your life? A fiance, perhaps?”

She sighed. “No, not in some time.”

“Indeed? I find that surprising,” Nomuri observed with studied gallantry.

“I suppose we are different from Japan,” Ming admitted, with just a hint of sadness in her voice.

Nomuri lifted the flask and poured some more mao-tai for both. “In that case,” he said, with a smile and a raised eyebrow, “I offer you a friendly drink.”

“Thank you, Nomuri-san.”

“My pleasure, Comrade Ming.” He wondered how long it would take. Perhaps not too long at all. Then the real work would begin.

It was the sort of coincidence for which police work is known worldwide. Provalov called militia headquarters, and since he was investigating a homicide, he got to speak with the St. Petersburg murder squad leader, a captain. When he said he was looking for some former Spetsnaz soldiers, the captain remembered his morning meeting in which two of his men had reported finding two bodies bearing possible Spetsnaz tattoos, and that was enough to make him forward the call.

“Really, the RPG event in Moscow?” Yevgeniy Petrovich Ustinov asked. “Who exactly was killed?”

“The main target appears to have been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko. He was a pimp,” Provalov told his colleague to the north. “Also his driver and one of his girls, but they appear to have been inconsequential.” He didn’t have to elaborate. You didn’t use an anti-tank rocket to kill a chauffeur and a whore.

“And your sources tell you that two Spetsnaz veterans did the shooting?”

“Correct, and they flew back to St. Petersburg soon thereafter.”

“I see. Well, we fished two such people from the River Neva yesterday, both in their late thirties or so, and both shot in the back of the head.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. We have fingerprints from both bodies. We’re waiting for Central Army Records to match them up. But that will not be very fast.”

“Let me see what I can do about that, Yevgeniy Petrovich. You see, also present at the murder was Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, and we have concerns that he might have been the true target of the killing.”