"I suppose, Mr. C. Does seem kinda amusing, though . . . and kinda cute," he allowed.

"Not bad duty being the father of a little guy, is it?"

"I got no complaints," Chavez agreed, leaning his seat back now that the gear was up.

"How's Ettore working out?" Back to business, Clark decided. This grandpa stuff had its limitations.

"He's in better shape now. Needed about a month to get caught up. He took some razzing, but he handled it just fine. You know, he's smart. Good tactical instincts, considering he's a cop and not a soldier."

"Being a cop in Sicily isn't like walking a beat on Oxford Street in London, you know?"

"Yeah, guess so," Chavez agreed. "But on the simulator he hasn't made a single shoot/no-shoot mistake yet, and that's not bad. The only other guy who hasn't blown one is Eddie Price." The computerized training simulator back at Hereford was particularly ruthless in its presentation of possible tactical scenarios, to the point that in one a twelveyear-old picked up an AK-74 and hosed you if you didn't pay close enough attention. The other nasty one was the woman holding the baby who'd just happened to pick up a pistol from a dead terrorist and turn innocently to face the incoming Men of Black. Ding had taken her down once, to find a Cabbage Patch doll on his desk the next morning with a packet of McDonald's ketchup spread across the face. The RAINBOW troopers had a lively, if somewhat perverse, inst.i.tutional sense of humor.

"So, what exactly are we supposed to be doing?"

"The old Eighth Chief Directorate of the KGB, their executive protective service," John explained. "They've got worries about domestic terrorists-from the Chechens, I guess, and other internal nationalities who want out of the country. They want us to help train up their boys to deal with them."

"How good are they?" Ding asked.

RAINBOW SIX shrugged. "Good question. The personnel are former KGB types, but with Spetsnaz training, so, probably career people as opposed to two-year in-and-outs in the Red Army. All probably t.i.tular commissioned officers, but with sergeants' duties. I expect they'll be smart, properly motivated, probably in decent physical shape, and they'll understand the mission. Will they be as good as they need to be? Probably not," John thought. "But in a few weeks we ought to be able to point them in the right direction."

"So mainly we're going to be training up their instructors?"

Clark nodded. "That's how I read it, yeah."

"Fair enough," Chavez agreed, as the lunch menu appeared. Why was it, he wondered, that airline food never seemed to have what you wanted? This was dinner food, not lunch food. What the h.e.l.l was wrong with a cheeseburger and fries? Oh, well, at least he could have a decent beer. The one thing he'd come to love about life in the UK was the beer. There wouldn't be anything like it in Russia, he was sure.

Sunrise in Beijing was as drab as the polluted air could make it, Mark Gant thought. For some reason he'd slipped out of synch with the local time, despite the black capsule and planned sleep. He'd found himself awake just at first light, which fought through air that was as bad as Los Angeles on its worst-ever day. Certainly there was no EPA in the PRC, and this place didn't even have much in the way of automobiles yet. If that ever happened, China might solve its local population problem with ma.s.s ga.s.sing. He hadn't been around enough to recognize this as a problem of Marxist nations-but there weren't many of them left to be examples, were there? Gant had never smoked-it was a vice largely removed from the stock-trading community, where the normal working stress was enough of a killer that they needed few others-and this degree of air pollution made his eyes water.

He had nothing to do and lots of time in which to do it-once awake he was never able to escape back into sleep-so he decided to flip on his reading light and go over some doc.u.ments, most of which he'd been given without any particular expectation that he would read them. The purpose of diplomacy, Commander Spock had once said on Star Trek, was to prolong a crisis. Certainly the discourse meandered enough to make the Mississippi River look like a laser beam, but like the Father of Waters, it eventually had to get downstream, or downhill, or wherever the h.e.l.l it was that rivers went. But this morning-what had awakened him? He looked out the window, seeing the orange-pink smudge beginning to form at the horizon, backlighting the buildings. Gant found them ugly, but he knew he just wasn't used to them. The tenements of Chicago weren't exactly the Taj Mahal, and the wood-frame house of his youth wasn't Buckingham Palace. Still, the sense of different-ness here was overpowering. Everywhere you looked, things seemed alien, and he wasn't cosmopolitan enough to overcome that feeling. It was like a background buzz in the Muzak, never quite there, but never gone away either. It was almost a sense of foreboding, but he shook it off. There was no reason to feel anything like that. He didn't know that he would be proven wrong very soon.

Barry Wise was already up in his hotel room, with breakfast coming-the hotel was one of an American chain, and the breakfast menu approximately American as well. The local bacon would be different, but even Chinese chickens laid real eggs, he was sure. His previous day's experiment with waffles hadn't worked out very well, and Wise was a man who needed a proper breakfast to function throughout the day.

Unlike most American TV correspondent/reporters, Wise looked for his own stories. His producer was a partner, not a boss-handler. He credited that fact for his collection of Emmy awards, though his wife just grumbled about dusting the d.a.m.ned things behind the bas.e.m.e.nt bar.

He needed a fresh new story for today. His American audience would be bored with another talking-head-plus-B-roll piece on the trade negotiations. He needed some local color, he thought, something to make the American people feel as one with the Chinese people. It wasn't easy, and there'd been enough stories on Chinese restaurants, which was the only Chinese thing with which most Americans were familiar. What, then? What did Americans have in common with the citizens of the People's Republic of China? Not a h.e.l.l of a lot, Wise told himself, but there had to be something he could use. He stood when breakfast arrived, looking out the picture windows as the waiter wheeled the cart close to the bed. It turned out that they'd goofed on his order, ham instead of bacon, but the ham looked okay and he went with it, tipping the waiter and sitting back down.

Something, he thought, pouring his coffee, but what? He'd been through this process often enough. The writers of fiction often chided reporters for their own sort of "creativity," but the process was real. Finding stuff of interest was doubly hard for reporters, because, unlike novelists, they couldn't make things up. They had to use reality, and reality could be a son of a b.i.t.c.h, Barry Wise thought. He reached for his reading gla.s.ses in the drawer of the night table and was surprised to see . . .

Well, it wasn't all that surprising. It was a matter of routine in any American hotel, a Bible left there by the Gideon Society. It was only here, probably, because the hotel was American-owned and -operated, and they had a deal with the Gideon people . . . but what a strange place to find a Bible. The People's Republic wasn't exactly overrun with churches. Were there Christians here? Hmph. Why not find out? Maybe there was a story in that. . . . Better than nothing, anyway. With that semi-decided, he went back to breakfast. His crew would be waking up about now. He'd have his producer look around for a Christian minister, maybe even a Catholic priest. A rabbi was too much to hope for. That would mean the Israeli emba.s.sy, and that was cheating, wasn't it?

How was your day, Jack?" Cathy asked.

The night was an accident. They had nothing to do, no political dinner, no speech, no reception, no play or concert at the Kennedy Center, not even an intimate party of twenty or thirty on the bedroom level of the residence portion of the White House, which Jack hated and Cathy enjoyed, because they could invite people they actually knew and liked to those, or at least people whom they wanted to meet. Jack didn't mind the parties as such, but he felt that the bedroom level of The House (as the Secret Service called it, as opposed to the other House, sixteen blocks down the street) was the only private s.p.a.ce he had left-even the place they owned at Peregrine Cliff on Chesapeake Bay had been redone by the Service. Now it had fireprotection sprinklers, about seventy phone lines, an alarm system like they used to protect nuclear-weapon storage sites, and a new building to house the protective detail who deployed there on the weekends when the Ryans decided to see if they still had a house to retreat to when this official museum got to be too much.

But tonight there was none of that. Tonight they were almost real people again. The difference was that if Jack wanted a beer or drink, he couldn't just walk to the kitchen and get it. That wasn't allowed. No, he had to order it through one of the White House ushers, who'd either take the elevator down to the bas.e.m.e.nt-level kitchen, or to the upstairs bar. He could, of course, have insisted and walked off to make his own, but that would have meant insulting one of the ushers, and while these men, mainly black (some said they traced their lineage back to Andrew Jackson's personal slaves), didn't mind, it seemed unnecessarily insulting to them. Ryan had never been one to have others do his work, however. Oh, sure, it was nice to have his shoes shined every night by some guy who didn't have anything else to do, and who drew a comfortable government salary to do it, but it just seemed unmanly to be fussed over as if he were some sort of n.o.bleman, when in fact his father had been a hardworking homicide detective on the Baltimore city police force, and he'd needed a government scholarship (courtesy of the United States Marine Corps) to get through Boston College without having his mom take a job. Was it his working-cla.s.s roots and upbringing? Probably, Ryan thought. Those roots also explained what he was doing now, sitting in an easy chair with a drink in his hand, watching TV, as though he were a normal person for a change.

Cathy's life was actually the least changed in the family, except that every morning she flew to work on a Marine Corps VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, to which the taxpayers and the media didn't object-not after SANDBOX, also known as Katie Ryan, had been attacked in her daycare center by some terrorists. The kids were off watching televisions of their own, and Kyle Daniel, known to the Secret Service as SPRITE, was asleep in his crib. And so, that Dr. Ryan-code name SURGEON-was sitting in her own chair in front of the TV, going over her patient notes and checking a medical journal as part of her never-ending professional education.

"How are things at work, honey?" SWORDSMAN asked SURGEON.

"Pretty good, Jack. Bernie Katz has a new granddaughter. He's all bubbly about it."

"Which kid?"

"His son Mark-got married two years ago. We went, remember?"

"That's the lawyer?" Jack asked, remembering the ceremony, in the good old days, before he'd been cursed into the Presidency.

"Yeah, his other son, David, is the doctor-up at Yale, on the faculty, thoracic surgeon."

"Have I met that one?" Jack couldn't remember.

"No. He went to school out west, UCLA." She turned the page in the current New England Journal of Medicine, then decided to dog-ear it. It was an interesting piece on a new discovery in anesthesia, something worth remembering. She'd talk about it at lunch with one of the professors. It was her custom to lunch with her colleagues in different fields, to keep current on what was going on in medicine. The next big breakthrough, she thought, would be in neurology. One of her Hopkins colleagues had discovered a drug that seemed to make damaged nerve cells regrow. If it panned out, that was a n.o.bel Prize. It would be the ninth hanging on the trophy wall of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her work with surgical lasers had won her a Lasker Public Service Award-the highest such award in American medicine-but it hadn't been fundamental enough for a trip to Stockholm. That was fine with her. Ophthalmology wasn't that sort of field, but fixing people's sight was pretty d.a.m.ned rewarding. Maybe the one good thing about Jack's elevation and her attendant status as First Lady was that she'd have a real shot at the Directorship of the Wilmer Inst.i.tute if and when Bernie Katz ever decided to hang it up. She'd still be able to practice medicine-that was something she never wanted to give up-and also be able to oversee research in her field, decide who got the grants, where the really important exploratory work was, and that, she thought, was something she might be good at. So, maybe this President stuff wasn't a total loss.

Her only real beef was that people expected her to dress like a supermodel, and while she had always dressed well, being a clotheshorse had never appealed to her. It was enough, she figured, to wear nice formal gowns at all the d.a.m.ned formal affairs she had to attend (and not get charged for it, since the gowns were all donated by the makers). As it was, Women's Wear Daily didn't like her normal choice of clothing, as though her white lab coat was a fashion statement-no, it was her uniform, like the Marines who stood at the doors to the White House, and one she wore with considerable pride. Not many women, or men, could claim to be at the very pinnacle of their profession. But she could. As it was, this had turned into a nice evening. She didn't even mind Jack's addiction to The History Channel, even when he grumbled at some minor mistake in one of their shows. a.s.suming, she chuckled to herself, that he was right, and the show was wrong. . . . Her winegla.s.s was empty, and since she didn't have any procedures scheduled for the next day, she waved to the usher for a refill. Life could have been worse. Besides, they'd had their big scare with those d.a.m.ned terrorists, and with good luck and that wonderful FBI agent Andrea Price had married, they'd survived, and she didn't expect anything like that to happen again. Her own Secret Service detail was her defense against that. Her own Princ.i.p.al Agent, Roy Altman, inspired the same sort of confidence at his job that she did at hers, Cathy judged.

"Here you go, Dr. Ryan," the usher said, delivering the refilled gla.s.s.

"Thank you, George. How are the kids?"

"My oldest just got accepted to Notre Dame," he answered proudly.

"That's wonderful. What's she going to major in?"

"Premed."

Cathy looked up from her journal. "Great. If there's any way I can help her, you let me know, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am, I sure will." And the nice thing, George thought, was that she wasn't kidding. The Ryans were very popular with the staff, despite their awkwardness with all the fussing. There was one other family the Ryans looked after, the widow and kids of some Air Force sergeant whose connection with the Ryans n.o.body seemed to understand. And Cathy had personally taken care of two kids of staff members who'd had eye problems.

"What's tomorrow look like, Jack?"

"Speech to the VFW convention in Atlantic City. I chopper there and back after lunch. Not a bad speech Callie wrote for me."

"She's a little weird."

"She's different," the President agreed, "but she's good at what she does."

Thank G.o.d, Cathy didn't say aloud, that I don't have to do much of that! For her, a speech was telling a patient how she was going to fix his or her eyes.

There's a new Papal Nuncio in Beijing," the producer said.

"That's an amba.s.sador, like, isn't it?"

The producer nodded. "Pretty much. Italian guy, Cardinal Renato DiMilo. Old guy, don't know anything about him."

"Well, maybe we can drive over and meet the guy," Barry thought as he knotted his tie. "Got an address and phone number?"

"No, but our contact at the American Emba.s.sy can get'em quick enough."

"Give the guy a call," Wise ordered gently. He and the producer had been together for eleven years, and together they'd dodged bullets and won those Emmys, which wasn't bad for a couple of ex-Marine sergeants.

"Right."

Wise checked his watch. The timing worked just fine. He could get a report at his leisure, upload it on the satellite, and Atlanta could edit it and show it to people for breakfast in America. That would pretty much take care of his day in this heathen country. d.a.m.n, why couldn't they do trade conferences in Italy? He remembered Italian food fondly from his time in the Mediterranean Fleet Marine Force. And the Italian women. They'd like the United States Marine uniform. Well, lots of women did.

One thing neither Cardinal DiMilo nor Monsignor Schepke had learned to like was Chinese breakfast food, which was totally alien from anything Europeans had ever served for the early-morning meal. And so Schepke fixed breakfast every morning before their Chinese staff came in-they'd do the dishes, which was enough for both churchmen. Both had already said their morning ma.s.s, which necessitated their rising before six every morning, rather like soldiers did, the elderly Italian had often remarked to himself.

The morning paper was the International Herald Tribune, which was too American-oriented, but the world was an imperfect place. At least the paper showed the football scores, and European football was a sport of interest to both of them, and one which Schepke could still go out and play when the opportunity arose. DiMilo, who'd been a pretty good midfielder in his day, had to content himself with watching and kibitzing now.

The CNN crew had their own van, an American make that had been shipped into the PRC ages ago. It had its own miniature satellite transceiver rig, a small technical miracle of sorts that enabled instant contact with any place in the world via orbiting communications satellites. It could do anything but operate when the vehicle was moving, and someone was working on that feature, which would be the next major breakthrough, because then the mobile crews could work with little threat of interference from the gomers in whatever country they happened to be operating.

They also had a satellite-navigation system, which was a genuine miracle that allowed them to navigate anywhere, in any city for which they had a CD-ROM map. With it, they could find any address faster than a local taxi driver. And with a cell phone, they could get the address itself, in this case from the U.S. emba.s.sy, which had the street addresses for all foreign legations, of which the Papal Nuncio's house was just one more. The cell phone also allowed them to call ahead. The call was answered by a Chinese voice at first, then one that sounded German, of all things, but which said, sure, come on over.

Barry Wise was dressed in his usual coat and tie-his neatness was another leftover from the Marines-and he knocked on the door, finding the expected local-he was tempted to call them "natives," but that was too English, and distantly racist-at the door to conduct them in. The first Westerner they met was clearly not a Cardinal. Too young, too tall, and far too German.

"h.e.l.lo, I am Monsignor Schepke," the man greeted him.

"Good day, I am Barry Wise of CNN."

"Yes," Schepke acknowledged with a smile. "I have seen you many times on the television. What brings you here?"

"We're here to cover the trade meeting between America and China, but we decided to look for other items of interest. We were surprised to see that the Vatican has a diplomatic mission here."

Schepke ushered Wise into his office and motioned him to a comfortable chair. "I've been here for several months, but the Cardinal just arrived recently."

"Can I meet him?"

"Certainly, but His Eminence is on the phone to Rome at the moment. Do you mind waiting a few minutes?"

"No problem," Wise a.s.sured him. He looked the monsignor over. He looked athletic, tall, and very German. Wise had visited that country many times, and always felt somewhat uneasy there, as if the racism that had occasioned the Holocaust was still there somewhere, hiding close by but out of sight. In other clothing, he would have taken Schepke for a soldier, even a Marine. He looked physically fit and very smart, clearly a keen observer.

"What order are you in, if I may ask?" Wise said.

"The Society of Jesus," Schepke replied.

A Jesuit, Wise thought at once. That explained it. "From Germany?"

"Correct, but I'm based in Rome now at Robert Bellarmine University, and I was asked to accompany His Eminence here because of my language skills." His English was about halfway between English and American, but not Canadian, grammatically perfect and remarkably precise in his p.r.o.nunciations.

And because you're smart, Wise added to himself. He knew that the Vatican had a respected intelligence-gathering service, probably the oldest in the world. So, this Monsignor was a combination diplomat and spook, Wise decided.

"I won't ask how many languages you speak. I'm sure you have me beat," Wise observed. He'd never met or even heard of a dumb Jesuit.

Schepke offered a friendly smile. "It is my function." Then he looked at his desk phone. The light had gone out. Schepke excused himself and headed to the inner office, then returned. "His Eminence will see you now."

Wise rose and followed the German priest in. The man he saw was corpulent and clearly Italian, dressed not in priestly robes, but rather a coat and trousers, with a red shirt (or was it a vest?) underneath his Roman collar. The CNN correspondent didn't remember if the protocol was for him to kiss the man's ring, but hand-kissing wasn't his thing anyway, and so he just shook hands in the American custom.

"Welcome to our legation," Cardinal DiMilo said. "You are our first American reporter. Please-" The Cardinal gestured him to a chair.

"Thank you, Your Eminence." Wise did remember that part of the protocol.

"How may we serve you this day?"

"Well, we're in town to cover the trade talks-America and China-and we're just looking for a story about life in Beijing. We just learned last night that the Vatican has an emba.s.sy here, and we thought we might come over to talk to you, sir."

"Marvelous," DiMilo observed with a gracious priestly smile. "There are a few Christians in Beijing, though this is not exactly Rome."

Wise felt a lightbulb go off. "What about Chinese Christians?"

"We've only met a few. We're going over to see one this afternoon, as a matter of fact, a Baptist minister named Yu."

"Really?" That was a surprise. A local Baptist?

"Yes," Schepke confirmed. "Good chap, he was even educated in America, at Oral Roberts University."

"A Chinese citizen from Oral Roberts?" Wise asked somewhat incredulously, as the STORY! light flashed in his head.

"Yes, it is somewhat unusual, isn't it?" DiMilo observed.

It was unusual enough that a Baptist and a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church were on speaking terms, Wise thought, but to have it happen here seemed about as likely as a live dinosaur strolling up the Mall in Washington. Atlanta would sure as h.e.l.l like this one.

"Could we go over with you?" the CNN correspondent asked.

The terror began soon after she arrived at her workplace. For all the waiting and all the antic.i.p.ation, it still came as a surprise, and an unwelcome one, the first twinge in her lower abdomen. The last time, now nearly six years before, it had presaged the birth of Ju-Long, and been a surprise as well, but that pregnancy had been authorized, and this one was not. She'd hoped that it would begin in the morning, but on a weekend, in their apartment, where she and Quon could handle things without external complications, but babies came at their own time in China, as they did elsewhere in the world, and this one would be no exception. The question was whether or not the State would allow it to take his first breath, and so the first muscle twinge, the first harbinger of the contractions of frank labor, brought with it the fear that murder would be committed, that her own body would be the scene of the crime, that she would be there to see it, to feel the baby stop moving, to feel death. The fear was the culmination of all the sleepless nights and the nightmares which had caused her to sweat in her bed for weeks. Her co-workers saw her face and wondered. A few of the women on the shop floor had guessed her secret, though they'd never discussed it with her. The miracle was that no one had informed on her, and that had been Lien-Hua's greatest fear of all-but that just wasn't the sort of thing one woman could do to another. Some of them, too, had given birth to daughters who had "accidentally" died a year or two later to satisfy their husbands' desire for a male heir. That was one more aspect of life in the People's Republic that was rarely the subject of conversation, even among women in private.

And so Yang Lien-Hua looked around the factory floor, feeling her muscles announce what was to come, and all she could hope was that it would stop, or delay itself. Another five hours, and she could pedal her bicycle home and deliver the baby there, and maybe that wasn't as good as on a weekend, but it was better than having an emergency here. "Lotus Flower" told herself that she had to be strong and resolute. She closed her eyes, and bit her lip, and tried to concentrate on her job, but the twinges soon grew into discomfort. Then would come mild pain, followed by the real contractions that would deny her the ability to stand, and then . . . what? It was her inability to see just a few hours beyond where she stood that contorted her face worse than pain ever could. She feared death, and while that fear is known to all humans, hers was for a life still part of herself, but not really her own. She feared seeing it die, feeling it die, feeling an unborn soul depart, and while it would surely go back to G.o.d, that was not G.o.d's intention. She needed her spiritual counselor now. She needed her husband, Quon. She needed Reverend Yu even more. But how would she make that happen?

The camera setup went quickly. Both of the churchmen watched with interest, since neither had seen this happen before. Ten minutes later, both were disappointed with the questions. Both had seen Wise on television, and both had expected better of him. They didn't realize that the story he really wanted was a few miles and an hour or so away.

"Good," Wise said, when the vanilla questions were asked and answered. "Can we follow you over to your friend's place?"

"Certainly," His Eminence replied, standing. He excused himself, because even Cardinals have to visit the bathroom before motoring off-at least they did at DiMilo's age. But he reappeared and joined Franz for the walk to the car, which the Monsignor would drive, to the continuing disappointment of their own servant/driver who was, as they suspected, a stringer for the Ministry of State Security. The CNN van followed, twisting through the streets until they arrived at the modest house of the Reverend Yu Fa An. Parking was easy enough. The two Catholic churchmen walked to Yu's door, carrying a large package, Wise noted.

"Ah!" Yu observed with a surprised smile, on opening the door. "What brings you over?"

"My friend, we have a gift for you," His Eminence replied, holding up the package. It was clearly a large Bible, but no less pleasing for the obvious nature of the gift. Yu waved them in, then saw the Americans.

"They asked if they could join us," Monsignor Schepke explained.

"Certainly," Yu said at once, wondering if maybe Gerry Patterson might see the story, and even his distant friend Hosiah Jackson. But they didn't get the cameras set up before he unwrapped the package.

Yu did this at his desk, and on seeing it, he looked up in considerable surprise. He'd expected a Bible, but this one must have cost hundreds of American dollars . . . It was an edition of the King James version in beautifully literate Mandarin . . . and magnificently ill.u.s.trated. Yu stood and walked around the desk to embrace his Italian colleague.

"May the Lord Jesus bless you for this, Renato," Yu said, with no small emotion.

"We both serve Him as best we can. I thought of it, and it seemed something you might wish to have," DiMilo replied, as he might to a good parish priest in Rome, for that was what Yu was, wasn't it? Close enough, certainly.