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 cla.s.sic 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned media happy. I'm here to serve the people to the best of my ability, Scott. And that's by-G.o.d 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."

CHAPTER 21.

Simmering So, what did you develop last night?" Reilly asked. He'd be late to his emba.s.sy 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 bulls.h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 wh.o.r.e, but, of course, a very expensive one."

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

"You came in early this morning?" Reilly asked. He must have, to have all this work done already.

"Before six," Oleg confirmed. The case was becoming more exciting for him as well. "In any case, Klementi Ivan'ch kept her all night. She left his apartment and caught a taxi home at seven-forty this morning. She looked happy and satisfied, according to my people."

That was good for a chuckle. She didn't leave her trick until after Oleg hit the office? That must have affected his att.i.tude somewhat, Reilly thought, with an inward grin. It sure as h.e.l.l would have affected his. "Well, good for our subject. I expect he won't be getting too much of that in a few months," the FBI agent thought aloud, hoping it would make his Russian colleague a little happier about life.

"One can hope," Provalov agreed coldly. "I have four men watching his apartment. If he leaves and appears to be heading away for a while, I will try to get a team into his apartment to plant some electronic surveillance."

"They know how to be careful?" Reilly asked. If this Suvorov mutt was as trained as they thought, he'd leave telltales in his apartment that could make breaking in dicey.

"They are KGB-trained also. One of them helped catch a French intelligence officer back in the old times. Now, I have a question for you," the Russian cop said.

"Shoot."

"What do you know of a special counterterrorist group based in England?"

"The 'Men of Black,' you mean?"

Provalov nodded. "Yes. Do you know anything about them?"

Reilly knew he had to watch his words, even though he knew d.a.m.ned little. "Really, I don't know anything more than what I've seen in the papers. It's some sort of multinational NATO group, part military and part police, I think. They had a good run of luck last year. Why do you ask?"

"A request from on high, because I know you. I've been told that they are coming to Moscow to a.s.sist in training our people-Spetsnaz groups with similar tasks," Oleg explained.

"Really? Well, I've never been in the muscle end of the Bureau, just in a local SWAT team once. Gus Werner probably knows a lot about them. Gus runs the new Counter-Terrorism Division at Headquarters. Before that, Gus ran HRT and had a field command-a field division, that is, a big-city field office. I've met him once, just to say h.e.l.lo. Gus has a very good service rep."

"Rep?"

"Reputation, Oleg. He's well regarded by the field agents. But like I said, that's the muscle end of the Bureau. I've always been with the chess players."

"Investigations, you mean."

Reilly nodded. "That's right. It's what the FBI is supposed to be all about, but the outfit's mutated a bit over the years." The American paused. "So, you're covering this Suvorov/Koniev guy real tight?" Reilly asked, to recenter the discussion.

"My men have orders to be discreet, but yes, we will keep a close eye on him, as you say."

"You know, if he really is working with the Chinese spooks . . . do you think they might want to kill that Golovko guy?"

"I do not know, but we must regard that as a real possibility."

Reilly nodded, thinking this would make an interesting report to send to Washington, and maybe discuss with the CIA station chief as well.

I want the files for everyone who ever worked with him," Sergey Nikolay'ch ordered. "And I want you to get me his personal file."

"Yes, Comrade Chairman," Major Shelepin replied, with a bob of the head.

The morning briefing, delivered by a colonel of the militia, had pleased neither the SVR Chairman nor his princ.i.p.al bodyguard. In this case, for a change, the legendarily slow Russian bureaucracy had been circ.u.mvented, and the information fast-tracked to those interested in it. That included the man whose life might have been spared accidentally after all.

"And we will set up a special-action group to work with this Provalov child."

"Of course, Comrade Chairman."

It was strange, Sergey Nikolay'ch thought, how rapidly the world could change. He vividly remembered the morning of the murder-it was not the sort of thing a man could forget. But after the first few days of shock and attendant fear, he'd allowed himself to relax, to believe that this Avseyenko had been the real target of an underworld rub out-an archaic American term he liked-and that his own life had never been directly threatened. With the acceptance of that belief, the entire thing had become like driving past an ordinary traffic accident. Even if some unfortunate motorist had been killed there at the side of the road, you just dismissed it as an irrelevance, because that sort of thing couldn't happen to you in your own expensive official car, not with Anatoliy driving. But now he'd begun to wonder if perhaps his life had been spared by accident. Such things were not supposed to occur-there shouldn't have been any need for them.

Now he was more frightened than he'd been that bright Moscow morning, looking down from his window at the smoking wreck on the pavement. It meant that he might be in danger still, and he dreaded that prospect as much as the next man.

Worse still, his hunter might well be one of his own, a former KGB officer with connections to Spetsnaz, and if he were in contact with the Chinese . . .

. . . But why would the Chinese wish to end his life? For that matter, why would the Chinese wish to perform any such crime in a foreign land? It was beyond imprudent.

None of this made any sense, but as a career intelligence officer, Golovko had long since shed the illusion that the world was supposed to make sense. What he did know was that he needed more information, and at least he was in a very good place to seek it out. If he wasn't as powerful as he might once have been, he was still powerful enough for his own purposes, Golovko told himself.

Probably.

He didn't try to come to the ministry very often. It was just a routine security measure, but a sensible one. Once you recruited an agent, you didn't want to hang out with him or her for fear of compromise. That was one of the things they taught you at The Farm. If you compromised one of your agents, you might have trouble sleeping at night, because CIA was usually active in countries where the Miranda warning was delivered by a gun or knife or fist, or something just as bad-as unpleasant as a police state could make it, and that, the instructors had told his cla.s.s, could be pretty f.u.c.kin' unpleasant. Especially in a case like this, he was intimate with this agent, and breaking away from her could cause her to stop her cooperation, which, Langley had told him, was pretty d.a.m.ned good, and they wanted more of it. Erasing the program he'd had her input on her machine would be difficult for a CalTech-trained genius, but you could accomplish the same thing by clobbering the whole hard drive and reinstalling new files over the old ones, because the valuable little gopher file was hidden in the system software, and a write-over would destroy it as surely as the San Francisco Earthquake.

So, he didn't want to be here, exactly, but he was a businessman, in addition to being a spook, and the client had called him in. The girl two desks away from Ming had a computer problem, and he was the NEC rep for the ministry offices.

It turned out to be a minor problem-you just couldn't turn some women loose on computers. It was like loosing a four-year-old in a gun shop, he thought, but didn't dare say such things aloud in these liberated times, even here. Happily, Ming hadn't been in sight when he'd come in. He'd walked over to the desk with the problem and fixed it in about three minutes, explaining the error to the secretary in simple terms she was sure to understand, and which would now make her the office expert for an easily replicated problem. With a smile and a polite j.a.panese bow, he'd made his way to the door, when the door to the inner office opened, and Ming came out with her Minister Fang behind her, looking down at some papers.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, Nomuri-san," Ming said in surprise, as Fang called the name "Chai," and waved to another of the girls to follow him in. If Fang saw Nomuri there, he didn't acknowledge it, simply disappeared back into his private office.

"h.e.l.lo, Comrade Ming," the American said, speaking in English. "Your computer operates properly?" he asked formally.

"Yes, it does, thank you."

"Good. Well, if you experience a problem, you have my card."

"Oh, yes. You are well settled in to Beijing now?" she asked politely.

"Yes, thank you, I am."

"You should try Chinese food instead of sticking to the food of your homeland, though, I admit, I have developed a taste lately for j.a.panese sausage," she told him, and everyone else in the room, with a face that would have done Amarillo Slim proud.

For his part, Chester Nomuri felt his heart not so much skip a beat as stop entirely for about ten seconds, or so it seemed. "Ah, yes," he had to say in reply, as soon as he got breath back in his lungs. "It can be very tasty."

Ming just nodded and went to her desk and back to work. Nomuri nodded and bowed politely to the office and made his departure as well, then headed down the corridor immediately for a men's room, the need to urinate urgent. Sweet Jesus. But that was one of the problems with agents. They sometimes got off on their work the way a drug addict got off on the immediate rush when the chemical hit his system, and they'd tickle the dragon with their new and playful enthusiasm just to experience a little more of the rush, forgetting that the dragon's tail was a lot closer to its mouth than it appeared. It was foolish to enjoy danger. Zipping himself back up, he told himself that he hadn't broken training, hadn't stumbled on his reply to her playful observation. But he had to warn her about dancing in a minefield. You never really knew where to put your feet, and discovering the wrong places was usually painful.

That's when he realized why it had happened, and the thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Ming loved him. She was playful because . . . well, why else would she have said that? As a game? Did she regard the whole thing as a game? No, she wasn't the right personality type to be a hooker. The s.e.x had been good, maybe too good-if such a thing were possible, Nomuri thought as he resumed walking toward the elevator. She'd surely be over tonight after saying that. He'd have to stop by the liquor store on the way home and get some more of that awful j.a.panese scotch for thirty bucks a liter. A working man couldn't afford to get drunk here unless he drank the local stuff, and that was too vile to contemplate.

But Ming had just consecrated their relationship by risking her life in front of her minister and her co-workers, and that was far more frightening to Nomuri than her illconsidered remark about his d.i.c.k and her fondness for it. Jesus, he thought, this is getting too serious. But what could he do now? He'd seduced her and made a spy of her, and she'd fallen for him for no better reason, probably, than that he was younger than the old f.u.c.ker she worked for, and was far nicer to her. Okay, so he was pretty good in the sack, and that was excellent for his male ego, and he was a stranger in a strange land and he had to get his rocks off, too, and doing it with her was probably safer to his cover than picking up some hooker in a bar-and he didn't even want to consider getting seriously involved with a real girl in his real life- -but how was this so different from that? he asked himself. Aside from the fact that while she was loving him, her computer was sending her transcribed notes off into the etherworld . . . .

It was doing it again soon after the close of regular business hours, and the eleven-hour differential pretty much guaranteed that it arrived on the desks of American officials soon after their breakfasts. In the case of Mary Patricia Foley, mornings were far less hectic than they'd once been. Her youngest was not yet in college, but preferred to fix her own oatmeal from the Quaker envelopes, and now drove herself to school, which allowed her mother an extra twenty-five minutes or so of additional sleep every morning. Twenty years of being a field spook and mother should have been enough to drive her to distracted insanity, but it was, actually, a life she'd enjoyed, especially her years in Moscow, doing her business right there in the belly of the beast, and giving the b.a.s.t.a.r.d quite an ulcer at the time, she remembered with a smile.

Her husband could say much the same. The first husband-wife team to rise so high at Langley, they drove together to work every morning-in their own car rather than the "company" one to which they were ent.i.tled, but with lead and chase cars full of people with guns, because any terrorist with half a brain would regard them as targets more valuable than rubies. This way they could talk on the way in-and the car was swept for bugs on a weekly basis.

They took their usual reserved and oversized place in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Old Headquarters Building, then rode up in the executive elevator, which somehow was always waiting for them, to their seventh-floor offices.

Mrs. Foley's desk was always arrayed just so. The overnight crew had all her important papers arranged just so, also. But today, as she had for the last week, instead of looking over the striped-border folders full of TOP SECRET CODEWORDED material, she first of all flipped on her desktop computer and checked her special e-mail. This morning was no disappointment. She copied the file electronically to her hard drive, printed up a hard copy, and when that was off her printer, deleted the e-mail from her system, effectively erasing it from electronic existence. Then she reread the paper copy and lifted the phone for her husband's office.

"Yeah, baby?"

"Some egg-drop soup," she told the Director of Central Intelligence. It was a Chinese dish he found especially vile, and she enjoyed teasing her husband.

"Okay, honey. Come on in." It had to be pretty good if she was trying to turn his stomach over this early in the friggin' morning, the DCI knew.

More SORGE?" the President asked, seventy-five minutes later.

"Yes, sir," Ben Goodley replied, handing the sheet over. It wasn't long, but it was interesting.

Ryan skimmed through it. "a.n.a.lysis?"

"Mrs. Foley wants to go over it with you this afternoon. You have a slot at two-fifteen."

"Okay. Who else?"

"The Vice President, since he's around." Goodley knew that Ryan liked to have Robby Jackson in for strategically interesting material. "He's fairly free this afternoon as well."

"Good. Set it up," POTUS ordered.

Six blocks away, Dan Murray was just arriving at his capacious office (considerably larger than the President's, as a matter of fact) with his own security detail, because he, as the country's princ.i.p.al counterintelligence and counterterrorist officer, had ail manner of information that others were interested in. This morning only brought in some more.

"Morning, Director," one of the staff said-she was a sworn agent carrying a side arm, not just a secretary.

"Hey, Toni," Murray responded. This agent had very nice wheels, but the FBI Director realized that he'd just proven to himself that his wife, Liz, was right: He was turning into a dirty old man.

The piles on the desk were arranged by the overnight staff, and there was a routine for this. The rightward-most pile was for intelligence-related material, the leftward-most for counterintelligence operations, and the big one in the middle was for ongoing criminal investigations requiring his personal attention or notification. That tradition went back to "Mr. Hoover," as he was remembered at the FBI, who seemingly went over every field case bigger than the theft of used cars off the government parking lot.

But Murray had long worked the "black" side of the Bureau, and that meant he attacked the rightward pile first. There wasn't much there. The FBI was running some of its own pure intelligence operations at the moment, somewhat to the discomfort of CIA-but those two government agencies had never gotten along terribly well, even though Murray rather liked the Foleys. What the h.e.l.l, he thought, a little compet.i.tion was good for everybody, so long as CIA didn't mess with a criminal investigation, which would be a very different kettle of fish. The top report was from Mike Reilly in Moscow. . . .

"d.a.m.n . . ." Murray breathed. Then an inward smile. Murray had personally selected Reilly for the Moscow slot, over the objections of some of his senior people, who had all wanted Paul Landau out of the Intelligence Division. But no, Murray had decided, Moscow needed help with cop work, not spy-chasing, at which they had lots of good experience, and so he'd sent Mike, a second-generation agent who, like his father, Pat Reilly, had given the Mafia in New York City a serious case of indigestion. Landau was now in Berlin, playing with the German Bundeskriminalamt, the BKA, doing regular crime liaison stuff, and doing it pretty well. But Reilly was a potential star. His dad had retired an ASAC. Mike would do better than that.

And the way he'd bonded with this Russian detective, Provalov, wouldn't hurt his career one bit. So. They'd uncovered a link between a former KGB officer and the Chinese MSS, eh? And this was part of the investigation into the big ka-boom in Moscow . . . ? Jesus, could the Chinese have had a part in that? If so, what the h.e.l.l did that mean? Now, this was something the Foleys had to see. To that end, Director Murray lifted his phone. Ten minutes later, the Moscow doc.u.ment slid into his secure fax machine to Langley-and just to make sure that CIA didn't take credit for an FBI job, a hard copy was hand-carried to the White House, where it was handed to Dr. Benjamin Goodley, who'd surely show it to the President before lunch.

It had gotten to the point that he recognized her knock at the door. Nomuri set his drink down and jumped to answer, pulling it open less than five seconds after the first s.e.xy tap tap.

"Ming," Chet said.

"Nomuri-san," she greeted in turn.

He pulled her in the door, closed, and locked it. Then he lifted her off the floor with a pa.s.sionate hug that was less than three percent feigned.

"So, you have a taste for j.a.panese sausage, eh?" he demanded, with a smile and a kiss.

"You didn't even smile when I said it. Wasn't it funny?" she asked, as he undid a few of her b.u.t.tons.

"Ming-" Then he hesitated and tried something he'd learned earlier in the day. "Bau-bei," he said instead. It translated to "beloved one."

Ming smiled at the words and made her own reply: "Shing-gan," which literally meant "heart and liver," but in context meant "heart and soul."

"Beloved one," Nomuri said, after a kiss, "do you advertise our relationship at your office?"

"No, Minister Fang might not approve, but the other girls in the office probably would not object if they found out," she explained, with a coquettish smile. "But you never know."

"Then why risk exposing yourself by making such a joke, unless you wish me to betray you?"

"You have no sense of humor," Ming observed. But then she ran her hands under his shirt and up his chest. "But that is all right. You have the other things I need."

Afterward, it was time to do business.

"Bau-bei?"