Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

Feminism’s made it over here, too? Nomuri reflected. Maybe she was too young to remember Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who could have given corruption lessons to the court of Byzantium.

“Well, that is not a problem for people like us. And at least you get to see such things, and at least you get to know it. That makes you even more unique, Ming-chan,” Nomuri suggested, tracing the palm of his hand over her left nipple. She shivered right on command.

“You think so?”

“Of course.” A kiss this time, a nice lingering one, while his hand stroked her body. He was so close. She had told him of all the information she had-she’d even given him the fucking encryption key! So her ’puter was wired into the phone system-that meant he could call in to it, and with the right software he could go snooping around her hard drive, and with the encryption key he could lift things right off, and cross-load them right to Mary Pat’s desk. Damn, first I get to fuck a Chinese citizen, and then I can fuck their whole country. It didn’t get much better than this, the field spook decided, with a smile at the ceiling.

Well, he left the prurient parts out this time, Mary Pat saw when she lit up her computer in the morning. Operation SORGE was moving right along. Whoever this Ming girl was, she talked a little too much. Odd. Hadn’t the MSS briefed all the executive secretaries about this sort of thing? Probably-it would have been a remarkable oversight if they hadn’t-but it also seemed likely that of the well-known reasons for committing treason and espionage (known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego), this one was Ego. Young Miss Ming was being used sexually by her Minister Fang, and she didn’t much like it, and that made perfect sense to Mary Patricia Foley. A woman only had so much to give, and to have it taken coercively by a man of power wasn’t something calculated to make a woman happy-though ironically the powerful man in question probably thought he was honoring her with his biological attention. After all, was he not a great man, and was she not a peasant? The thought was good for a snort as she took a sip of morning seventh-floor coffee. It didn’t matter what culture or race, men were all the same, weren’t they? So many of them thought from the dick instead of the brain. Well, it was going to cost this one dearly, the Deputy Director (Operations) concluded.

Ryan saw and heard the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, every day. It covered intelligence information developed by CIA, was prepared late every night and printed early every morning, and there were less than a hundred copies, almost all of which were shredded and burned later in the day of delivery. A few copies, maybe three or four, were kept as archives, in case the electronic files somehow got corrupted, but even President Ryan didn’t know where the secure-storage site was. He hoped it was carefully guarded, preferably by Marines.

The PDB didn’t contain everything, of course. Some things were so secret that even the President couldn’t be trusted. That was something Ryan accepted with remarkable equanimity. Sources’ names had to remain secret, even from him, and methods were often so narrowly technical that he’d have trouble understanding the technology used anyway. But even some of the “take,” the information obtained by the CIA through nameless sources and overly intricate methods, was occasionally hidden from the Chief Executive, because some information had to come from a certain limited number of sources. The intelligence business was one in which the slightest mistake could end the life of a priceless asset, and while such things had happened, nobody had ever felt good about it-though to some politicians, it had been a matter of infuriating indifference. A good field spook viewed his agents as his own children, whose lives were to be protected against all hazards. Such a point of view was necessary. If you didn’t care that much, then people died-and with their lost lives went lost information, which was the whole point of having a clandestine service in the first place.

“Okay, Ben,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair and flipping through the PDB pages. “What’s interesting?”

“Mary Pat has something happening in China. Not sure what it is, though. She’s keeping these cards pretty close. The rest of today’s document you can get on CNN.”

Which was, depressingly, not infrequently the case. On the other hand, the world was fairly sedate, and penetrating information wasn’t all that necessary … or apparently so, Ryan corrected himself. You could never tell. He’d learned that one at Langley, too.

“Maybe I’ll call her about it,” POTUS said, flipping the page. “Whoa!”

“The Russian oil and gold?”

“Are these numbers for real?”

“It appears so. They track with what TRADER’S been feeding us from his sources, step for step.”

“Ummhmm,” Ryan breathed, looking over the resulting forecasts for the Russian economy. Then he frowned with some disappointment. “George’s people did a better evaluation of results.”

“Think so? CIA’s economics troops have a pretty decent track record.”

“George lives in that business. That’s better than being an academic observer of events, Ben. Academia is fine, but the real world is the real world, remember.”

Goodley nodded. “Duly noted, sir.”

“Throughout the ’80s, CIA overestimated the Soviet economy. Know why?”

“No, I don’t. What went wrong?”

Jack smiled wryly. “It wasn’t what was wrong. It was what was right. We had an agent back then who fed us the same information the Soviet Politburo got. It just never occurred to us that the system was lying to itself. The Politburo based its decisions on a chimera. Their numbers were almost never right because the underlings were covering their own asses. Oops.”

“Same thing in China, you suppose?” Goodley asked. “They’re the last really Marxist country, after all.”

“Good question. Call Langley and ask. You’ll get an answer from the same sort of bureaucrat the Chinese have in Beijing, but to the best of my knowledge we don’t have a penetration agent in Beijing who can give us the numbers we want.” Ryan paused and looked at the fireplace opposite his desk. He’d have to have the Secret Service put a real fire in it someday … “No, I expect the Chinese have better numbers. They can afford to. Their economy is working, after a fashion. They probably deceive themselves in other ways. But they do deceive themselves. It’s a universal human characteristic, and Marxism doesn’t ameliorate it very much.” Even in America, with its free press and other safeguards, reality often slapped political figures in the face hard enough to loosen some teeth. Everywhere, people had theoretical models based on ideology rather than facts, and those people usually found their way into academia or politics, because real-world professions punished that sort of dreamer more than politics ever did.

“Morning, Jack,” a voice said from the corridor door.

“Hey, Robby.” POTUS pointed to the coffee tray. Vice President Jackson got himself a cup, but passed on the croissants. His waistline looked a little tight. Well, Robby had never looked like a marathoner. So many fighter pilots tended to have thick waists. Maybe it was good for fighting g-forces, Jack speculated.

“Read the PDB this morning. Jack, this Russian oil and gold thing. Is it really that big?”

“George says it’s even bigger. You ever sit down with him to learn economics?”

“End of the week, we’re going to play a round at Burning Tree, and I’m reading Milton Friedman and two other books to bone up for it. You know, George comes across as pretty smart.”