"Sure," he replied, picking a seat and relaxing into it. He watched the DDO take some pages off her laser printer and hand them across.

"Okay, it says the date is last March twenty-first, and the place is Beijing-hmph, the Council of Ministers Building, eh? Minister Fang is talking to Minister Zhang." Sears ran his eyes down the page. "Mrs. Foley, this is hot stuff. They're talking about the possibilities of Iran-no, the old UIR-taking over the entire Persian Gulf oil fields, and what effect it would have on China. Zhang appears to be optimistic, but guarded. Fang is skeptical . . . oh, this is an aide-memoir, isn't it? It's Fang's notes from a private conversation with Zhang."

"The names mean anything to you?"

"Both are Ministers Without Portfolio. They're both full Politburo members without direct ministerial duties. That means they're both trusted by the chairman, the PRC premier, Xu Kun Piao. They go back thirty years plus, well into the time of Mao and Chou. As you know, the Chinese are really into lengthy relationships. They develop-well, not friendships as we understand them, but a.s.sociations. It's a comfort-level thing, really. Like at a card table. You know what the other guy's mannerisms and capabilities are, and that makes for a long, comfortable game. Maybe you won't win big, but you won't lose your shirt either."

"No, they don't gamble, do they?"

"This doc.u.ment demonstrates that. As we suspected, the PRC backed the Ayatollah Daryaei in his play, but they never allowed their support to be public. From skimming this, it appears that this Zhang guy is the one who ramrodded this-and the play the j.a.panese made. We've been trying to build a book on this Zhang guy-and Fang as well-without a whole lot of success. What do I need to know about this?" he asked, holding the page up.

"It's code word," MP replied. By federal statute, "top secret" was as high as it went, but in reality there were more secret things than that, called "special-access programs," which were designated by their controlling code words. "This one's called SORGE." She didn't have to say that he could not discuss this information with anyone, and that even dreaming in bed about it was forbidden. Nor did she have to say that in SORGE was Sears's path to a raise and much greater personal importance within the CIA's pantheon of bureaucrats.

"Okay." Sears nodded. "What can you tell me?"

"What we have here is a digest of conversations between Fang and Zhang, and probably other ministers as well. We've found a way to crash into their doc.u.ments storage. We believe the doc.u.ments are genuine," MP concluded. Sears would know that he was being misled on sources and methods, but that was to be expected. As a senior member of the DI-the Directorate of Intelligence-it was his job to evaluate information provided to him by various sources, in this case the DO. If he got bad information, his evaluation would be bad as well, but what Mrs. Foley had just told him was that he would not be held at fault for bad information. But he'd also question the authenticity of the doc.u.ments in an internal memo or two, just to cover his own a.s.s, of course.

"Okay, ma'am. In that case, what we have here is pure nitroglycerine. We've suspected this, but here's confirmation. It means that President Ryan did the right thing when he granted diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. The PRC had it coming. They conspired to wage aggressive war, and since we got involved, you can say that they conspired against us. Twice, I bet. We'll see if another of these doc.u.ments refers to the j.a.panese adventure. You'll recall that the j.a.panese industrialists implicated this Zhang guy by name. That's not a hundred percent, but if it's confirmed by this, then it's almost something you could take before a judge. Mrs. Foley, this is some source we have here."

"Evaluation?"

"It feels right," the a.n.a.lyst said, reading over the page again. "It sounds like conversation. I mean, it's unguarded, not official diplomatic-speak or even inside-minister-speak. So, it sounds like what it purports to be, the notes of a private, informal policy discussion between two senior colleagues."

"Any way to cross-check it?" MP asked next.

An immediate shake of the head. "No. We don't know much about either one of these guys. Zhang, well, we have the evaluation from Secretary Adler-you know, from the shuttle diplomacy after the Airbus shoot-down, which pretty well confirms what that Yamata guy told the j.a.panese police and our FBI guys about how the Chinese nudged them into the conflict with us, and what for. The PRC looks on eastern Siberia with covetous eyes," Sears reminded her, showing his knowledge of the PRC policies and objectives. "For Fang Gan, we have photos of him sipping mao-tai at receptions in his Mao jacket and smiling benignly, like they all do. We know he's tight with Xu, there are stories that he likes to play with the office help-but a lot of them do that-and that's about it."

It was good of Sears not to remind her that playing with the office help wasn't a character defect limited to China.

"So, what do we think about them?"

"Fang and Zhang? Well, both are Ministers Without Portfolio. So, they're utility infielders, maybe even a.s.sistant coaches. Premier Xu trusts their judgment. They get to sit in at the Politburo as full voting members. They get to hear everything and cast votes on everything. They influence policy not so much by making it as shaping it. Every minister knows them. These two know all the others. They've both been around a long time. Both are well into their sixties or seventies, but people over there don't mellow with age like they do in America. Both will be ideologically sound, meaning they're both probably solid communists. That implies a certain ruthlessness, and you can add to that their age. At seventy-five, death starts being a very real thing. You don't know how much time you have left, and these guys don't believe in an afterlife. So, whatever goals they have, they have to address pretty quick at that age, don't they?"

"Marxism doesn't mix well with humanity, does it?"

Sears shook his head. "Not hardly, and toss in a culture that places a much lower value on human life than ours does."

"Okay. Good brief. Here," she said, handing over ten printed pages. "I want a written evaluation after lunch. Whatever you might be working on now, SORGE is more important."

That meant a "seventh-floor tasking" to Dr. Sears. He'd be working directly for the Directors. Well, he had a private office already, and a computer that wasn't hooked into any telephone lines, even a local area network, as many of the CIA's 'puters were. Sears tucked the papers into a coat pocket and departed, leaving Mary Pat to look out her floorto-ceiling windows and contemplate her next move. Really it was Ed's call, but things like this were decided collegially, especially when the DCI was your husband. This time she'd wander over to see him.

The DCI's office is long and relatively narrow, with the director's office near the door, well away from the sitting area. Mary Pat took the easy chair across from the desk.

"How good is it?" Ed asked, knowing the reason for her visit.

"Calling this SORGE was unusually prescient for us. It's at least that good."

Since Richard Sorge dispatches from Tokyo to Moscow might have saved the Soviet Union in 1941, that got Ed Foley's eyes to widen some. "Who looked at it?"

"Sears. He seems pretty smart, by the way. I've never really talked to him before."

"Harry likes him," Ed noted, referring to Harry Hall, the current Deputy Director (Intelligence), who was in Europe at the moment. "Okay, so he says it looks pretty good, eh?"

A serious nod. "Oh, yeah, Eddie."

"Take it to see Jack?" They could not not take this to the President, could they?

"Tomorrow, maybe?"

"Works for me." Just about any government employee can find s.p.a.ce in his or her day for a drive to the White House. "Eddie, how far can this one spread?"

"Good question. Jack, of course. Maybe the Vice President. I like the guy," the DCI said, "but usually the veep doesn't get into stuff like this. SecState, SecDef, both are maybes. Ben Goodley, again a maybe. Mary, you know the problem with this."

It was the oldest and most frequent problem with really valuable high-level intelligence information. If you spread it too far, you ran the risk of compromising the information-which also meant getting the source killed-and that killed the goose laying the golden eggs. On the other hand, if you didn't make some use of the information, then you might as well not have the eggs anyway. Drawing the line was the most delicate operation in the field of intelligence, and you never knew where the right place was to draw it. You also had to worry about methods of spreading it around. If you sent it encrypted from one place to another, what if the bad guys had cracked your encryption system? NSA swore that its systems, especially TAPDANCE, could not be broken, but the Germans had thought ENIGMA crackproof, too.

Almost as dangerous was giving the information, even by hand, to a senior government official. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds talked too much. They lived by talking. They lived by leaking. They lived by showing people how important they were, and importance in D.C. meant knowing what other people didn't know. Information was the coin of the realm in this part of America. The good news here was that President Ryan understood about that. He'd been CIA, as high as Deputy Director, and so he knew about the value of security. The same was probably true of Vice President Jackson, former naval aviator. He'd probably seen lives lost because of bad intelligence. Scott Adler was a diplomat, and he probably knew as well. Tony Bretano, the well-regarded SecDef, worked closely with CIA, as all Secretaries of Defense had to do, and he could probably be trusted as well. Ben Goodley was the President's National Security Advisor, and thus couldn't easily be excluded. So, what did that total up to? Two in Beijing. At Langley, the DCI, DDCI, DDI, and DDO, plus Sears from inside the DI. That made seven. Then the President, Vice President, SecState, SecDef, and Ben Goodley. That made twelve. And twelve was plenty for the moment, especially in a town where the saying went, If two people know it, it's not a secret. But the entire reason for having CIA was this sort of information.

"Pick a name for the source," Foley instructed his wife.

"SONGBIRD will do for now." It was a sentimental thing for MP, naming agents for birds. It dated back to CARDINAL.

"Fair enough. Let me see the translations you get, okay?"

"You bet, honey-bunny." Mary Pat leaned over her husband's desk to deliver a kiss, before heading back to her own office.

On arriving there, MP checked her computer for the SORGE file. She'd have to change that, MP realized. Even the name of this special-access compartment would be cla.s.sified top secret or higher. Then she did a page count, making a note on a paper pad next to the screen.

ALL 1,349 PAGES OF RECIPES RECEIVED, she wrote as a reply to [email protected] WILL LOOK THE RECIPES OVER. THANKS A BUNCH. MARY. She hit the RETURN key, and off the letter went, through the electronic maze called the Internet. One thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages, the DDO thought. It would keep the a.n.a.lysts busy for quite a while. Inside the Old Headquarters Building, a.n.a.lysts would see bits and pieces of SORGE material, covered under other transitory code names randomly chosen by a computer in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but only Sears would know the whole story-and, in fact, he didn't even know that, did he? What he knew might-probably would-be enough to get this Ming woman killed, once the MSS realized who'd had access to the information. They could do some things in Washington to protect her, but not much.

Nomuri rose early in his Beijing apartment, and the second thing he did was to log on to check his e-mail. There it was, number seven in the list, one from He selected the decryption system and typed in the key . . . so, the pages had all been received. That was good. Nomuri dragged the message he'd dispatched to the "wipe-info" bin, where Norton Utilities not only deleted the file, but also five times electronically scrubbed the disk segments where they'd briefly resided, so that the files could never be recovered by any attempt, no matter how skilled. Next he eliminated the record of having sent any e-mail to brownienet. Now there was no record whatever of his having done anything, unless his telephone line was tapped, which he didn't really suspect. And even then the data was scrambled, fully encrypted, and thus not recoverable. No, the only dangers in the operation now attached to Ming. His part of it, being the spymaster, was protected by the method in which her desktop computer called him, and from now on those messages would be sent out to brownienet automatically, and erased the same way, in a matter of seconds. It would take a very clever counterintelligence operation to hurt Nomuri now.

CHAPTER 15.

Exploitation What's this mean, Ben?" Ryan asked, seeing a change in his morning schedule.

"Ed and Mary Pat want to talk something over with you. They didn't say what it was," Goodley replied. "The Vice President can be here, too, and me, but that's it, they requested."

"Some new kind of toilet paper in the Kremlin, I suppose," POTUS said. It was a long-standing CIA joke from Ryan's time in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. He stirred his coffee and leaned back in his comfortable chair. "Okay, what else is happening in the world, Ben?"

So, this is mao-tai?" Cardinal DiMilo asked. He didn't add that he'd been given to understand that Baptists didn't drink alcoholic beverages. Odd, considering that Jesus' first public miracle had been to change water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. But Christianity had many faces. In any case, the mao-tai was vile, worse than the cheapest grappa. With advancing years, the Cardinal preferred gentler drinks. It was much easier on the stomach.

"I should not drink this," Yu admitted, "but it is part of my heritage."

"I know of no pa.s.sage in Holy Scripture that prohibits this particular human weakness," the Catholic said. And besides, wine was part of the Catholic liturgy. He saw that his Chinese host barely sipped at his tiny cup. Probably better for his stomach, too, the Italian reasoned.

He'd have to get used to the food, too. A gourmet like many Italians, Renato Cardinal DiMilo found that the food in Beijing was not as good as he'd experienced in Rome's numerous Chinese restaurants. The problem, he thought, was the quality of the ingredients rather than the cook. In this case, the Reverand Yu's wife was away in Taiwan to see her sick mother, he'd said, apologizing on the Catholic's arrival. Monsignor Schepke had taken over the serving, rather like a young lieutenant-aide serving the needs of his general, Yu had thought, watching the drama play out with some amus.e.m.e.nt. The Catholics certainly had their bureaucratic ways. But this Renato fellow was a decent sort, clearly an educated man, and a trained diplomat from whom Yu realized he might learn much.

"So, you cook for yourself. How did you learn?"

"Most Chinese men know how. We learn from our parents as children."

DiMilo smiled. "I, as well, but I have not cooked for myself in years. The older I get the less they allow me to do for myself, eh, Franz?"

"I have my duties also, Eminence," the German answered. He was drinking the mao-tai with a little more gusto. Must be nice to have a young stomach lining, both the older men thought.

"So, how do you find Beijing?" Yu asked.

"Truly fascinating. We Romans think that our city is ancient and redolent with history, but Chinese culture was old before the Romans set one stone upon another. And the art we saw yesterday . . ."

"The jade mountain," Schepke explained. "I spoke with the guide, but she didn't know about the artists involved, or the time required to carve it."

"The names of artisans and the time they needed-these were not matters of importance to the emperors of old. There was much beauty then, yes, but much cruelty as well."

"And today?" Renato asked.

"Today as well, as you know, Eminence," Yu confirmed with a long sigh. They spoke in English, and Yu's Oklahoma accent fascinated his visitors. "The government lacks the respect for human life, which you and I would prefer."

"Changing that will not be simple," Monsignor Schepke added. The problem wasn't limited to the communist PRC government. Cruelty had long been part of Chinese culture, to the point that someone had once said that China was too vast to be governed with kindness, an aphorism picked up with indecent haste by the left wings of the world, ignoring the explicit racism in such a statement. Perhaps the problem was that China had always been crowded, and in crowds came anger, and in anger came a callous disregard for others. Nor had religion helped. Confucius, the closest thing China had developed to a great religious leader, preached conformity as a person's best action. While the Judeo-Christian tradition talked of transcendent values of right and wrong, and the human rights that devolved from them, China saw authority as Society, not G.o.d. For that reason, Cardinal DiMilo thought, communism had taken root here. Both societal models were alike in their absence of an absolute rule of right and wrong. And that was dangerous. In relativism lay man's downfall, because, ultimately, if there were no absolute values, what difference was there between a man and a dog? And if there were no such difference, where was man's fundamental dignity? Even a thinking atheist could mark religion's greatest gift to human society: human dignity, the value placed on a single human life, the simple idea that man was more than an animal. That was the foundation of all human progress, because without it, human life was doomed to Thomas Hobbes's model, "nasty, brutish, and short."

Christianity-and Judaism, and Islam, which were also religions of The Book-required merely that man believe in that which was self-evident: There was order in the universe, and that order came from a source, and that source was called G.o.d. Christianity didn't even require that a man believe in that idea-not anymore, anyway-just that he accept the sense of it, and the result of it, which was human dignity and human progress. Was that so hard?

It was for some. Marxism, in condemning religion as "the opiate of the people," merely prescribed another, less effective drug-"the radiant future," the Russians had called it, but it was a future they'd never been able to deliver. In China, the Marxists had shown the good sense to adopt some of the forms of capitalism to save their country's economy, but not to adopt the principle of human freedom that usually came along with it. That had worked to this point, DiMilo thought, only because Chinese culture had a preexisting model of conformity and acceptance of authority from above. But how long would that last? And how long could China prosper without some idea of the difference between what was right and what was wrong? Without that information, China and the Chinese were doomed to perdition. Someone had to bring the Good News of Jesus to the Chinese, because with that came not only eternal salvation, but temporal happiness as well. Such a fine bargain, and yet there were those too stupid and too blind to accept it. Mao had been one. He'd rejected all forms of religion, even Confucius and the Lord Buddha. But when he'd lain dying in his bed, what had Chairman Mao thought? To what Radiant Future had he looked forward then? What did a communist think on his deathbed? The answer to that question was something none of the three clergymen wanted to know, or to face.

"I was disappointed to see the small number of Catholics here-not counting foreigners and diplomats, of course. How bad is the persecution?"

Yu shrugged. "It depends on where you are, and the political climate, and the personality of the local party leadership. Sometimes they leave us alone-especially when foreigners are here, with their TV cameras. Sometimes they can become very strict, and sometimes they can hara.s.s us directly. I have been questioned many times, and been subjected to political counseling." He looked up and smiled. "It's like having a dog bark at you, Eminence. You need not answer back. Of course, you will be spared any of that," the Baptist pointed out, noting DiMilo's diplomatic status, and his resulting personal inviolability.

The cardinal caught that reference, somewhat to his discomfort. He didn't see his life as any more valuable than anyone else's. Nor did he wish his faith to appear less sincere than this Chinese Protestant's, who'd been educated at some pretentious pseudo-university in the American prairie, whereas he had acquired his knowledge in some of the most ancient and honored inst.i.tutions of higher learning on the planet, whose antecedents went back to the Roman empire, and beyond that, to the chambers of Aristotle himself. If there was one vanity Renato Cardinal DiMilo possessed, it was in his education. He'd been superbly educated, and he knew it. He could discuss Plato's Republic in Attic Greek, or the law cases of Marcus Tullius Cicero in Imperial Latin. He could debate a committed Marxist on the attributes of that political philosophy in the same language the German Marx himself had spoken-and win, because Marx had left a lot of unfilled holes in the walls of his political theories. He'd forgotten more about human nature than some psychologists knew. He was in the Vatican's diplomatic service because he could read minds-better than that, he could read the minds of politicians and diplomats highly skilled in concealing their thoughts. He could have been a gambler of talent and riches with these skills, but instead he applied them for the Greater Glory of G.o.d.

His only failing was that, like all men, he could not predict the future, and thus could not see the world war that this meeting would ultimately bring about.

"So, does the government hara.s.s you?" the Cardinal asked his host.

A shrug. "Occasionally. I propose to hold a prayer service in public to test their willingness to interfere with my human rights. There is some danger involved, of course."

It was a challenge skillfully delivered, and the elderly Catholic cleric rose to it: "Keep Franz and me informed, if you would."

SONGBIRD?" Ryan asked. "What can you tell me about him?"

"Do you really want to know, Jack?" Ed Foley asked, somewhat pointedly.

"You telling me I ought not to know?" Ryan responded. Then he realized that Robby Jackson and Ben Goodley were here as well, and he could know things that they could not. Even at this level, there were rules of cla.s.sification. The President nodded. "Okay, we'll let that one go for now."

"The overall operation is called SORGE. That'll change periodically," Mary Pat told the a.s.sembled audience. Unusually, the Secret Service had been hustled out of the Oval Office for this briefing-which told the USSS a lot more than CIA would have liked-and also a special jamming system had been switched on. It would interfere with any electronic device in the room. You could see that from the TV set to the left of the President's desk, tuned to CNN. The screen was now full of snow, but with the sound turned all the way down, there was no annoying noise to disturb the meeting. The possibility of a bug in this most secure of rooms was slight, but so great was the value of SORGE that this card was being played as well. The briefing folders had already been pa.s.sed out. Robby looked up from his.

"Notes from the Chinese Politburo? Lordy," Vice President Jackson breathed. "Okay, no sources and methods. That's cool with me, guys. Now, how reliable is it?"

"For the moment, reliability is graded 'B+' " Mary Pat answered. "We expect to upgrade that later on. The problem is that we don't grade 'A' or higher without outside confirmation, and this stuff is so deep inside that we have no other a.s.set to verify what we have here."

"Oops," Jackson observed. "So it could all be a false flag. Pretty one, I admit, but false even so."

"Perhaps, but unlikely. There's stuff here that is awfully sensitive to let out voluntarily, even for a major sting operation."

"So I see," Ryan partially agreed. "But I remember what Jim Greer used to say: Ain't nothing too crazy to be true. Our fundamental problem with these guys is that their culture is so different in so many ways that they might as well be Klingons."

"Well, they don't display much love for us in this," Ben Goodley observed, flipping halfway through the briefing folder. "Jesus, this is interesting material. We going to show it to Scott Adler?"

"That's our recommendation," the DCI agreed. "Adler is pretty good at figuring people out, and his take on some of this-especially page five-will be very interesting. Tony Bretano, too."

"Okay, that's EAGLE and THUNDER. Who else?" Ryan asked.

"That's all for now," Ed Foley said, with a nod from his wife. "Mr. Pres-"

Ryan's eyes flared a little. "My name is . . ."

The DCI held up his hand. "Okay. Jack, let's keep this one real close for a while. We'll figure a way to launder the information so that some others can know what we've learned. But not how. Not ever that. SONGBIRD'S too precious an a.s.set to lose."

"This is potentially right up there with CARDINAL, isn't it?"

"Maybe even better, Jack," Mary Pat said. "This is like having a bug in the boardroom, and we've streamlined our methods on this one. We're being very, very careful with this source."

"Okay, what about a.n.a.lysts?" Ben Goodley asked. "Our best guy with the PRC is Professor Weaver up at Brown University. You know him, Ed."

Foley nodded. "Yeah, I know him, but let's hold off for a while. We have a pretty good guy in-house. Let me see what he can develop for us before we start farming things out. By the way, we're looking at something like a total of fifteen hundred printed pages from this source, plus daily information from now on."

Ryan looked up at that one. Daily information. How the h.e.l.l had they arranged that? Back to business, he told himself. "Okay, for one thing, I want an evaluation of the Zhang Han San character," Ryan said. "I've seen this b.a.s.t.a.r.d's name before. He started two wars we got pulled into. What the h.e.l.l is he all about?"

"We have a psychiatrist on staff to work on that," Mary Foley replied. After, she didn't say, we scrub this information clean of source-related material. "He does our profiling."

"Okay, yeah, I remember him." Ryan nodded agreement on this point. "Anything else?"

"Just the usual," Ed Foley said as he stood. "Don't leave these doc.u.ments on your desk, okay?"

They all nodded agreement. They all had personal safes for that purpose, and every one was wired into the Secret Service command center, and was on round-the-clock TV surveillance. The White House was a good place to store doc.u.ments, and besides, the secretaries were cleared higher than G.o.d. Mary Pat left the office with a special spring in her step. Ryan waved for his Vice President to stay as the rest walked toward the West Entrance.

"What do you think?" SWORDSMAN asked TOMCAT.

"This looks pretty d.a.m.ned hot, Jack. Jesus, boy, how the h.e.l.l do they get stuff like this?"

"If they ever get around to telling me, I can't tell you, Rob, and I'm not sure I want to know. It isn't always pretty."

The retired fighter pilot agreed. "I believe it. Not quite the same as catapulting off the boat and shooting the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the lips, is it?"