Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

Until then, life had to go on. Both worked at their jobs, as factory workers in the same factory, with a working-class apartment in the Di’Anmen district of Beijing near Jingshan-Coal Hill-Park. They labored at their factory during the day, watched state-run television at night, and in due course, Lien-Hua became pregnant again.

And ran afoul of the government’s population-control policy that was well to the left of draconian. It had long since been decreed that any married couple could have but one child. A second pregnancy required official government permission. Though this was not generally denied to those whose first child had died, pro forma permission had to be obtained, and in the case of politically unacceptable parents, this permission was generally withheld as a method of controlling the living population, as well. That meant that an unauthorized pregnancy had to be terminated. Safely, and at state expense in a state hospital-but terminated.

Christianity translated exactly into political unreliability for the communist government, and unsurprisingly the Ministry of State Security had inserted intelligence officers into Reverend Yu’s congregation. This individual-actually there were three, lest one be corrupted by religion and become unreliable himself-had entered the names of the Yangs on a master list of political unreliables. For that reason, when Mrs. Yang Lien-Hua had duly registered her pregnancy, an official letter had appeared in her box, instructing her to go to the Longfu Hospital located on Meishuguan Street for a therapeutic abortion.

This Lien-Hua was unwilling to do. Her given name translated as “Lotus Flower,” but inside she was made of much sterner stuff. She wrote a week later to the appropriate government agency, telling them that her pregnancy had miscarried. Given the nature of bureaucracies, her lie was never checked out.

That lie had merely won Lotus Flower six months of ever-increasing stress. She never saw a physician, not even one of the “barefoot medics” that the PRC had invented a generation earlier, much to the admiration of political leftists all over the world. Lien-Hua was healthy and strong, and the human body had been designed by Nature to produce healthy offspring long before the advent of obstetricians. Her swelling belly she was able to hide, mostly, in her ill-fitting clothing. What she could not hide-at least from herself-was her inward fear. She carried a new baby in her belly. She wanted it. She wanted to have another chance at motherhood. She wanted to feel her child suckling at her breast. She wanted to love it and pamper it, watch it learn to crawl and stand and walk and talk, to see it grow beyond four years, enter school, learn and grow into a good adult of whom she could be proud.

The problem was politics. The state enforced its will with ruthlessness. She knew what could happen, the syringe filled with formaldehyde stabbed into the baby’s head at the very moment of birth. In China, it was state policy. For the Yangs, it was premeditated, cold-blooded murder, and they were determined not to lose a second child, who, the Reverend Yu had told them, was a gift from God Himself.

And there was a way. If you delivered the baby at home without medical assistance, and if the baby took its first breath, then the state would not kill it. There were some things even the government of the People’s Republic quailed at, and the killing of a living, breathing human infant was one of them. But until it took that breath, it was of no more consequence than a piece of meat in a market. There were even rumors that the Chinese government was selling organs from the aborted newborns on the world’s tissue market, to be used for medical purposes, and that was something the Yangs were able to believe.

So, their plan was for Lien-Hua to deliver the child at home, after which they would present their state with a fait accompli -and eventually have it baptized by Reverend Yu. To this end, Mrs. Yang had kept herself in good physical shape, walking two kilometers every day, eating sensibly, and generally doing all the things the government-published booklets told expectant mothers to do. And if anything went badly wrong, they’d go to Reverend Yu for counsel and advice. The plan enabled Lien-Hua to deal with the stress-in fact it was a heart-rending terror-of her unauthorized condition.

Well?" Ryan asked.

“Rutledge has all the right talents, and we’ve given him the instructions he needs. He ought to carry them out properly. Question is, will the Chinese play ball.”

“If they don’t, things become harder for them,” the President said, if not coldly, then with some degree of determination. “If they think they can bully us, Scott, it’s time they found out who the big kid in the playground is.”

“They’ll fight back. They’ve taken out options on fourteen Boeing 777s-just did that four days ago, remember? That’s the first thing they’ll chop if they don’t like us. That’s a lot of money and a lot of jobs for Boeing in Seattle,” SecState warned.

“I never have been real big on blackmail, Scott. Besides, that’s a classic case of penny-wise, pound-foolish. If we cave because of that, then we lose ten times the money and ten times the jobs elsewhere-okay, they won’t be all in one place, and so the TV news guys won’t be able to point their cameras, and so they won’t do the real story, just the one that can fit on half-inch tape. But I’m not in here to keep the goddamned media happy. I’m here to serve the people to the best of my ability, Scott. And that’s by-God going to happen,” POTUS promised his guest.

“I don’t doubt it, Jack,” Adler responded. “Just remember that it won’t play out quite the way you want it to.”

“It never does, but if they play rough, it’s going to cost them seventy billion dollars a year. We can afford to do without their products. Can they afford to do without our money?” Ryan asked.

Secretary Adler was not totally comfortable with the way the question was posed. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”

So, what did you develop last night?" Reilly asked. He’d be late to his embassy office, but his gut told him that things were breaking loose in the RPG Case-that was how he thought of it-and Director Murray had a personal interest in the case, because the President did, and that made it more important than the routine bullshit on Reilly’s desk.

“Our Chinese friend-the one in the men’s room, that is-is the Third Secretary at their mission. Our friends across town at SVR have suspected that he is a member of their Ministry for State Security. He’s not regarded as a particularly bright diplomat by the Foreign Ministry-ours, that is.”

“That’s how you cover a spook,” Reilly agreed. “A dumb cookie-pusher. Okay, so he’s a player.”

“I agree, Mishka,” Provalov said. “Now, it would be nice to know who passed what to whom.”

“Oleg Gregoriyevich”-Reilly liked the semiformal Russian form of address-“if I’d been standing right there and staring, I might not have been able to tell.” That was the problem dealing with real professionals. They were as good at that maneuver as a Vegas dealer was with a deck of Bicycles. You needed a good lens and a slow-motion camera to be sure, and that was a little bulky for work in the field. But they’d just proved, to their satisfaction at least, that both men were active in the spook business, and that was a break in the case any way you sliced it. “ID the girl?”

“Yelena Ivanova Dimitrova.” Provalov handed the folder across. “Just a whore, but, of course, a very expensive one.”

Reilly flipped it open and scanned the notes. Known prostitute specializing in foreigners. The photo of her was unusually flattering.