The Bear and the Dragon

Chapter 24
Infanticide
What’s this?" the President asked at his morning intelligence briefing.
“A new SORGE source, this one’s called WARBLER. I’m afraid it’s not as good from an intelligence point of view, though it does tell us things about their ministers,” Dr. Goodley added with some feigned delicacy.
Whoever WARBLER was, Ryan saw, she—it was definitely a she—kept a very intimate diary. She, too, worked with this Minister Fang Gan, and, it appeared, he was enamored of her, and she, if not exactly enamored of him, certainly kept records of his activities. All of them, Ryan saw. It was enough to make his eyes go a little wide this early in the morning.
“Tell Mary Pat that she can sell this stuff to Hustler if she wants, but I really don’t need it at eight in the goddamned morning.”
“She included it to give you a feel for the source,” Ben explained. “The material isn’t as narrowly political as we’re getting from SONGBIRD, but MP thinks it tells us a lot about the guy’s character, which is useful, and also there’s some political content to go along with the information on Fang’s sex life. It would appear he’s a man of, uh ... well, commendable vigor, I guess, though the girl in question would clearly prefer a younger lover. It appears that she had one, but this Fang guy scared him off.”
“Possessive bastard,” Ryan saw, skimming that section. “Well, I guess at that age you hold on to what you need. Does this tell us anything?”
“Sir, it tells us something about the kind of people who make decisions over there. Here we call them sexual predators.”
“Of which we have a few in government service ourselves,” Ryan observed. The papers had just broken a story on a member of the Senate.
“At least not in this office,” Goodley told his President. He didn’t add anymore.
“Well, this President is married to a surgeon. She knows how to use sharp instruments,” Ryan said, with a wry grin. “So, the Taiwan stuff yesterday was just a ploy because they haven’t figured out how to address the trade issues yet?”
“So it would appear, and yes, that does seem a little odd. Also, MP thinks that they might have a low-level source in State. They know a little more than they could have gotten from the press, she thinks.”
“Oh, great,” Jack noted. “So what happened? The Japanese corporations sold their old sources to the Chinese?”
Goodley shrugged. “No telling at this time.”
“Have Mary Pat call Dan Murray about this. Counterespionage is the FBI’s department. Is this something we want to move on at once, or will this compromise SONGBIRD?”
“That’s for somebody else to judge, sir,” Goodley said, reminding the President that he was good, but not quite that good at this business.
“Yeah, somebody other than me, too. What else?”
“The Senate Select Intelligence Committee wants to look into the Russian situation.”
“That’s nice. What’s the beef?”
“They seem to have their doubts about how trustworthy our friends in Moscow are. They’re worried that they’re going to use the oil and gold money to become the USSR again, and maybe threaten NATO.”
“NATO’s moved a few hundred miles east, last time I looked. The buffer zone will not hurt our interests.”
“Except that we are obligated to defend Poland now,” Goodley reminded his boss.
“I remember. So, tell the Senate to authorize funds to move a tank brigade east of Warsaw. We can take over one of the old Soviet laagers, can’t we?”
“If the Poles want us to. They don’t seem overly concerned, sir.”
“Probably more worried by the Germans, right?”
“Correct, and there is a precedent for that concern.”
“When will Europe get the word that peace has finally broken out for good and all?” Ryan asked the ceiling.
“There’s a lot of history, some of it pretty recent, for them to remember, Mr. President. And much of it militates in the other direction.”
“I’ve got a trip to Poland scheduled, don’t I?”
“Yes, not too far off, and they’re working out the itinerary right now.”
“Okay, I’ll tell the Polish president personally that he can depend on us to keep the Germans under control. If they step out of line—well, we’ll take Chrysler back.” Jack sipped his coffee and checked his watch. “Anything else?”
“That should do it for today.”
The President looked up slyly. “Tell Mary Pat if she sends me more of this WARBLER stuff, I want the pictures to go with it.”
“Will do, sir.” Goodley had himself a good hoot at that.
Ryan picked up the briefing papers again and read through them more slowly this time, between sips of coffee and snorts, with a few grumbles thrown in. Life had been much easier when he was the guy who prepared these briefing papers than it was now that he was the guy who had to read them. Why was that? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? Before, he’d been the one to find the answers and anticipate the questions, but now that other people had done all that stuff for him ... it was harder. That didn’t make any sense at all, damn it. Maybe, he decided, it was because, after him, the information stopped. He had to make the decisions, and so whatever other decisions and analyses had been made at lower levels, the process came to one place and stopped cold. It was like driving a car: Someone else could tell him to turn right at the corner, but he was the guy at the wheel who had to execute the turn, and if somebody clobbered the car, he was the guy who’d get the blame. For a moment, Jack wondered if he was better suited to being a step or two down in the process, able to do the analysis work and make his recommendations with confidence ... but always knowing that someone else would always get the credit for making the right move, or the blame for making the wrong one. In that insulation from consequence, there was safety and security. But that was cowardice talking, Ryan reminded himself. If there were anyone in Washington better suited for making decisions, he hadn’t met the guy yet, and if that was arrogance talking, then so be it.
But there ought to be someone better, Jack thought, as the clock wound to his first appointment of the day, and it wasn’t his fault that there wasn’t. He checked his appointment sheet. The whole day was political bullshit ... except it wasn’t bullshit. Everything he did in this office affected the lives of American citizens in one way or another, and that made it important, to them and to him. But who had decided to make him the national daddy? What the hell made him so damned smart? The people behind his back, as he thought of it, outside the overly thick windows of the Oval Office, all expected him to know how to do the right thing, and over the dinner table or a low-stakes card game, they’d bitch and moan and complain about the decisions he’d made that they didn’t like, as though they knew better—which was easy to say out there. In here it was different. And so, Ryan had to apply himself to every little decision, even menus for school lunches—that one was a real son of a bitch. If you gave kids what they liked to eat, nutritionists would complain that they really ought to eat healthy twigs and berries, but for the most part, parents would probably opt for burgers and fries, because that’s what the kids would eat, and even healthy food, uneaten, did them little good. He’d talked that one over with Cathy once or twice, but he really didn’t need to. She let their own kids eat pizza whenever they wished, claiming that pizza was high in protein, and that a kid’s metabolism could eat almost anything without ill effect, but when cornered, she’d admit that put her at odds with some of her fellow professors at Johns Hopkins. And so what was Jack Ryan, President of the United States, Doctor of Philosophy in History, Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and a Certified Public Accountant (Ryan couldn’t even remember why he had bothered taking that exam), supposed to think, when experts—including the one he was married to—disagreed? That was worth another snort, when his desk buzzer went off and Mrs. Sumter announced that his first appointment of the day was here. Already Jack was wishing for a bummed cigarette, but he couldn’t do that until he had a break in his schedule, because only Mrs. Sumter and a few of his Secret Service detail were allowed to know that the President of the United States suffered, intermittently, from that vice.
Jesus, he thought, as he did so often when the workday began, how did I ever get stuck in here? Then he stood and faced the door, conjuring up his welcoming Presidential smile as he tried to remember who the hell was coming in first to discuss farm subsidies in South Dakota.


The flight, as usual, was out of Heathrow, this one in a Boeing 737, because it wasn’t all that long a hop to Moscow. The Rainbow troopers filled the entire first-class section, which would please the cabin staff, though they didn’t know it yet, because the passengers would be unusually polite and undemanding. Chavez sat with his father-in-law, politely watching the safety-briefing video, though both knew that if the airplane hit the ground at four hundred knots, it really wouldn’t help all that much to know where the nearest emergency exit was. But such things were rare enough to be ignored. Ding grabbed the magazine from the pocket in front and flipped through it in the hope of finding something interesting. He’d already bought all the useful items from the “flying mall” magazine, some to his wife’s pitying amusement.
“So, the little guy’s walking better?” Clark asked.
“You know, the enthusiasm he has for it is kinda funny, the big grin every time he makes it from the TV to the coffee table, like he’s won the marathon, got a big gold medal, and a kiss from Miss America on his way to Disney World.”
“The big things are made up of a lot of little things, Domingo,” Clark observed, as the aircraft started its takeoff run. “And the horizon’s a lot closer when you’re that short.”
“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 twelve-year-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, institutional 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 titular 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 hell 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 mass gassing. 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 documents, 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 hell 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 damned things behind the basement 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 hell 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 bitch, Barry Wise thought. He reached for his reading glasses 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 embassy, 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 space he had left—even the place they owned at Peregrine Cliff on Chesapeake Bay had been redone by the Service. Now it had fire-protection 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 basement-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 nobleman, 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-class 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 Nobel 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 damned 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 Institute 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 damned 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. Assuming, she chuckled to herself, that he was right, and the show was wrong.... Her wineglass 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 damned 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 Principal 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 glass.
“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 nobody 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 God, 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 ambassador, 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 Embassy 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. Damn, 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 mass, 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. embassy, 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.
“Hello, 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 assured 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 pronunciations.
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 embassy 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 hell 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 anticipation, 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 God, that was not God’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 illustrated. 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.
For his part, Barry Wise cursed that he hadn’t quite gotten his camera running for that moment. “We don’t often see Catholics and Baptists this friendly,” the reporter observed.
Yu handled the answer, and this time the camera was rolling. “We are allowed to be friends. We work for the same boss, as you say in America.” He took DiMilo’s hand again and shook it warmly. He rarely received so sincere a gift, and it was so strange to get it here in Beijing from what some of his American colleagues called papists, and an Italian one at that. Life really did have purpose after all. Reverend Yu had sufficient faith that he rarely doubted that, but to have it confirmed from time to time was a blessing.

The contractions came too fast, and too hard. Lien-Hua withstood it as long as she could, but after an hour, it felt as though someone had fired a rifle into her belly. Her knees buckled. She did her best to control it, to remain standing, but it was just too much. Her face turned pasty-white, and she collapsed to the cement floor. A co-worker was there at once. A mother herself, she knew what she beheld.
“It is your time?” she asked.
“Yes.” Delivered with a gasp and a painful nod.
“Let me run and get Quon.” And she was off at once. That bit of help was when things went bad for Lotus Flower.
Her supervisor noted one running employee, and then turned his head to see another prostrate one. He walked over, as one might to see what had happened after an automobile accident, more with curiosity than any particular desire to intervene. He’d rarely taken note of Yang Lien-Hua. She performed her function reliably, with little need for chiding or shouting, and was popular with her co-workers, and that was all he knew about her, really, and all that he figured he needed to know. There was no blood about. She hadn’t fallen from some sort of accident or mechanical malfunction. How strange. He stood over her for a few seconds, seeing that she was in some discomfort and wondering what the problem was, but he wasn’t a doctor or a medic, and didn’t want to interfere. Oh, if she’d been bleeding he might have tried to slap a bandage over the wound or something, but this wasn’t such a situation and so he just stood there, as he figured a manager should, showing that he was there, but not making things worse. There was a medical orderly in the first-aid room two hundred meters away. The other girl had probably run that way to fetch her, he thought.
Lien-Hua’s face contorted after a few minutes’ relative peace, as another contraction began. He saw her eyes screw closed and her face go pale, and her breathing change to a rapid pant. Oh, he realized, that’s it. How odd. He was supposed to know about such things, so that he could schedule substitutions on the line. Then he realized something else. This was not an authorized pregnancy. Lien-Hua had broken the rules, and that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it could reflect badly on his department, and on him as a supervisor ... and he wanted to own an automobile someday.
“What is happening here?” he asked her.
But Yang Lien-Hua was in no shape to reply at the moment. The contractions were accelerating much faster than they’d done with Ju-Long. Why couldn’t this have waited until Saturday? she demanded of Destiny. Why does God wish my child to die aborning? She did her best to pray through the pain, doing her utmost to concentrate, to entreat God for mercy and help in this time of pain and trial and terror, but all she saw around her was more cause for fear. There was no help in the face of her shop supervisor. Then she heard running feet again and looked to see Quon approaching, but before he got to her, the supervisor intercepted him.
“What goes on here?” the man demanded, with all the harshness of petty authority. “Your woman makes a baby here? An unauthorized baby?” the most minor of officials asked and accused in the same breath. “Ju hai,” he added: Bitch!
For his part, Quon wanted this baby as well. He hadn’t told his wife of the fears that he’d shared with her, because he felt that it would have been unmanly, but that last statement from the shop supervisor was a little much for a man under two kinds of simultaneous stress. Recalling his army training, Quon struck out with his fist, following his hand with an imprecation of his own:
“Pok gai,” literally, fall down in the street, but in context, Get the f*ck out of my way! The shop supervisor gashed his head when he went down, giving Quon the satisfaction of seeing an injury to avenge the insult to his wife. But he had other things to do.
With the words said, and the blow struck, he lifted Lien-Hua to her feet and supported her as best he could on the way to where their bicycles were parked. But, now what to do? Like his wife, Quon had wanted this all to happen at home, where at the worst she could call in sick. But he had no more power to stop this process than he did to stop the world from turning on its axis. He didn’t even have time or energy to curse fate. He had to deal with reality as it came, one shaky second at a time, and help his beloved wife as best he could.


You were educated in America?" Wise asked, in front of the rolling camera.
“Yes,” Yu replied over tea. “At Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. My first degree was in electrical engineering, then my divinity degree and my ordination came later.”
“I see you are married,” the reporter observed, pointing to a picture on the wall.
“My wife is away in Taiwan, looking after her mother, who is sick at the moment,” he explained.
“So, how did you two meet?” Wise asked, meaning Yu and the Cardinal.
“That was Fa An’s doing,” the Cardinal explained. “It was he who came to us to extend a greeting to a newcomer in the same—same line of work, one could say.” DiMilo was tempted to say that they enjoyed drinks together, but refrained for fear of demeaning the man before his fellow Baptists, some of whom objected to alcohol in any form. “As you might imagine, there are not so many Christians in this city, and what few there are need to stick together.”
“Do you find it odd, a Catholic and a Baptist to be so friendly?”
“Not at all,” Yu replied at once. “Why should it be odd? Are we not united by faith?” DiMilo nodded agreement at this perfect, if unanticipated, statement of belief.
“And what of your congregation?” Wise asked the Chinese minister next.



The bicycle lot outside was a confused mass of metal and rubber, for few of the Chinese workers owned automobiles, but as Quon helped Lien-Hua to the far corner, the two of them were spotted by someone who did have access to one. He was a factory security guard who drove about the perimeter of the plant very importantly in his three-wheel motorized cart, an accessory more important to his sense of status than his uniform and badge. Like Quon, a former sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, he’d never lost his feeling of personal authority, and this communicated itself in the way he spoke to people.
“Stop!” he called from the driver’s seat in his cart. “What goes on here?”
Quon turned. Lien-Hua had just been hit with another contraction, with buckled knees and gasping breath, and he was almost dragging her to their bikes. Suddenly, he knew that this wasn’t going to work. There was just no way that she could pedal her own bike. It was eleven blocks to their apartment. He could probably drag her up the three flights of steps, but how the hell was he going to get her to the front door?
“My wife is ... she’s hurt,” Quon said, unwilling—afraid—to explain what the problem really was. He knew this guard—his name was Zhou Jingjin—and he seemed a decent enough chap. “I’m trying to get her home.”
“Where do you live, Comrade?” Zhou asked.
“Great Long March Apartments, number seventy-four,” Quon replied. “Can you help us?”
Zhou looked them over. The woman seemed to be in some distress. His was not a country which placed great value on personal initiative, but she was a comrade in difficulty, and there was supposed to be solidarity among the people, and their apartment was only ten or eleven blocks, hardly fifteen minutes even in this slow and awkward cart. He made his decision, based on socialist worker solidarity.
“Load her on the back, Comrade.”
“Thank you, Comrade.” And Quon got his wife there, lifted her bottom up, and set her on the rusted steel deck behind the driver’s compartment. With a wave, he signaled Zhou to head west. This contraction proved a difficult one. Lien-Hua gasped and then cried out, to the distress of her husband, and worse, the distress of the driver, who turned and saw what ought to have been a healthy woman grasping her abdomen in great pain. It was not a pretty thing to see by any stretch of the imagination, and Zhou, having taken one leap of initiative, decided that maybe he ought to take another. The path to Great Long March Apartments led down Meishuguan Street, past the Longfu Hospital, and like most Beijing teaching hospitals, this one had a proper emergency-receiving room. This woman was in distress, and she was a comrade, like himself a member of the working class, and she deserved his help. He looked back. Quon was doing his best to comfort his woman as a man should, far too busy to do much of anything as the security cart bumped along the uneven streets at twenty kilometers per hour.
Yes, Zhou decided, he had to do it. He turned the steering tiller gently, pulled up to the loading dock designed more for delivery trucks than ambulances, and stopped.
It took Quon a few seconds to realize that they’d stopped. He looked around, ready to help his wife off the cart, until he saw that they weren’t at the apartment complex. Disoriented by the previous thirty minutes of unexpected emergency and chaos, he didn’t understand, didn’t grasp where they were, until he saw someone in a uniform emerge from the door. She wore a white bandanna-hat on her head—a nurse? Were they at the hospital? No, he couldn’t allow that.
Yang Quon stood off the cart and turned to Zhou. He started to object that they’d come to the wrong place, that he didn’t want to be here, but the hospital workers had an unaccustomed sense of industry at the moment—the emergency room was perversely idle at the moment—and a wheeled gurney emerged from the door with two men in attendance. Yang Quon tried to object, but he was merely pushed aside by the burly attendants as Lien-Hua was loaded on the gurney and wheeled inside before he could do much more than flap his mouth open and closed. He took a breath and rushed in, only to be intercepted by a pair of clerks asking for the information they needed to fill out their admitting forms, stopping him dead in his tracks as surely as a man with a loaded rifle, but far more ignominiously.

In the emergency room itself, a physician and a nurse watched as the orderlies loaded Lien-Hua onto an examining table. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for their trained eyes to make the first guess, which they shared with a look. Only a few seconds more and her work clothes had been removed, and the pregnant belly was as obvious as a sunrise. It was similarly obvious that Yang Lien-Hua was in frank labor, and that this was no emergency. She could be wheeled to the elevator and taken to the second floor, where there was a sizable obstetrics staff. The physician, a woman, beckoned to the orderlies and told them where to move the patient. Then she walked to the phone to call upstairs and tell them that a delivery was on the way up. With that “work” done, the doctor went back to the physicians’ lounge for a smoke and a magazine.


ComradeYang?" another clerk, a more senior one, said. ”Yes?" the worried husband replied, still stuck in the waiting room, held prisoner by clerks.
“Your wife is being taken upstairs to obstetrics. But,” the clerk added, “there’s one problem.”
“What is that?” Quon asked, knowing the answer, but hoping for a miracle, and utterly trapped by the bureaucratic necessities of the moment.
“We have no record of your wife’s pregnancy in our files. You are in our health district—we show you at Number Seventy-two Great Long March Flats. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s where we live,” Quon sputtered out, trying to find a way out of this trap, but not seeing one anywhere.
“Ah.” The clerk nodded. “I see. Thank you. I must now make a telephone call.”
It was the way the last statement was delivered that frightened Quon: Ah, yes, I have to see that the trash is removed properly. Ah, yes, the glass is broken, and I’ll try to find a repairman. Ah, yes, an unauthorized pregnancy, I’ll call upstairs so that they’ll know to kill the baby when it crowns.



Upstairs, Lien-Hua could see the difference in their eyes. When Ju-Long had been on his way, there’d been joy and anticipation in the eyes of the nurses who oversaw her labor. You could see their eyes crinkle with smiles at the corners of their masks ... but not this time. Someone had come over to where she was in labor room #3 and said something to the nurse, and her head had turned rapidly to where Lien-Hua lay, and her eyes had turned from compassionate to ... something else, and while Mrs. Yang didn’t know what other thing it was, she knew the import. It might not be something the nurse particularly liked, but it was something she would assist in doing, because she had to. China was a place where people did the things they had to do, whether they approved it or liked it or not. Lien-Hua felt the next contraction. The baby in her uterus was trying to be born, not knowing that it was racing to its own destruction at the hands of the State. But the hospital staffers knew. Before, with Ju-Long, they’d been close by, not quite hovering, but close enough to watch and see that things were going well. Not now. Now they withdrew, desiring not to hear the sounds of a mother struggling to bring forth death in a small package.

On the first floor, it was equally plain to Yang Quon. What came back to him now was his firstborn son, Ju-Long, the feel of his small body in his arms, the little noises he made, the first smile, sitting up, crawling, the first step in their small apartment, the first words he’d spoken ... but their little Large Dragon was dead now, never to be seen again, crushed by the wheel of a passenger bus. An uncaring fate had ripped that child from his arms and cast him aside like a piece of blowing trash on the street—and now the State was going to slay his second child. And it would all happen upstairs, less than ten meters away, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.... It was a feeling not unknown to citizens of the People’s Republic, where rule from above was the rule, but opposed to it now was the most fundamental of human drives. The two forces battled within the mind of factory worker Yang Quon. His hands shook at his sides as his mind struggled with the dilemma. His eyes strained, staring at nothing closer than the room’s wall, but straining even so ... something, there had to be something ...
There was a pay telephone, and he did have the proper coins, and he did remember the number, and so Yang Quon lifted the receiver and dialed the number, unable to find the ability within himself to change fate, but hoping to find that ability in another.


I’ll get it," Reverend Yu said in English, rising and walking to where it was ringing.
“A remarkable guy, isn’t he?” Wise asked the two Catholics.
“A fine man,” Cardinal DiMilo agreed. “A good shepherd for his flock, and that is all a man can hope to be.”
Monsignor’s Schepke’s head turned when he caught the tone of Yu’s voice. Something was wrong here, and by the sound, something serious. When the minister returned to the sitting room, his face told the tale.
“What is amiss?” Schepke asked in his perfect Mandarin. Perhaps this was not something for the American reporters.
“One of my congregation,” Yu replied, as he reached for his jacket. “She is pregnant, in labor even now—but her pregnancy is unauthorized, and her husband fears the hospital will try to kill it. I must go to help.”
“Franz, was gibt’s hier?” DiMilo asked in German. The Jesuit then replied in Attic Greek to make damned sure the Americans wouldn’t get it.
“You’ve been told about this, Eminence,” Monsignor Schepke explained in the language of Aristotle. “The abortionists here commit what is virtually murder in any civilized country in the world, and the decision to do so, in this case, is purely political and ideological. Yu wishes to go and help the parents prevent this vile act.”
DiMilo needed less than a second. He stood, and turned his head. “Fa An?”
“Yes, Renato?”
“May we come with you and assist? Perhaps our diplomatic status will have practical value,” His Eminence said, in badly accented but comprehensible Mandarin.
It didn’t take long for Reverend Yu either: “Yes, a fine idea! Renato, I cannot allow this child to die!”
If the desire to procreate is the most fundamental known to mankind, then there are few more powerful calls to action for an adult than child-in-danger. For this, men race into burning buildings and jump into rivers. For this now, three clergymen would go to a community hospital to challenge the power of the world’s most populous nation.
“What’s happening?” Wise asked, surprised by the sudden shifts in language and the way the three churchmen had leapt to their feet.
“A pastoral emergency. A member of Yu’s congregation is in the hospital. She needs him, and we will go with our friend to assist in his pastoral duties,” DiMilo said. The cameras were still running, but this was the sort of thing that got edited out. But what the hell, Wise thought.
“Is it far? Can we help? Want us to run you over?”
Yu thought it over and quickly decided that he couldn’t make his bike go as fast as the American news van. “That is very kind. Yes.”
“Well, let’s go, then.” Wise stood and motioned to the door. His crew broke down their gear in a matter of seconds and beat them all out the door.
Longfu Hospital turned out to be less than two miles away, facing a north-south street. It was, Wise thought, a place designed by a blind architect, so lacking in aesthetic as to be a definite government-owned building even in this country. The communists had probably killed off anyone with a sense of style back in 1950 or so, and no one had attempted to take his place. Like most reporters, the CNN team came in the front door in the manner of a police SWAT team. The cameraman’s tool was up on his shoulder, with the soundman beside him, Barry Wise and the producer trailing while they looked for good establishing shots. To call the lobby dreary was generous. A Mississippi state prison had a better atmosphere than this, to which was added the disinfectant smell that makes dogs cringe in the vet’s office and made kids hug your neck harder for fear of the coming needle.
For his part, Barry Wise was unnaturally alert. He called it his Marine training, though he’d never seen combat operations. But one January night in Baghdad, he’d started looking out the windows forty minutes before the first bombs had fallen from the Stealth fighters, and kept looking until what U.S. Air Force planners had called the AT&T Building took the first spectacular hit. He took the producer’s arm and told him to keep his head up. The other ex-Marine nodded agreement. For him it was the suddenly grim looks on the faces of the three clergymen, who’d been so genial until the phone had rung. For that old Italian guy to look this way—it had to be something, they both were sure, and whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pleasant, and that often made for a good news story, and they were only seconds from their satellite uplink. Like hunters hearing the first rustle of leaves in the forest, the four CNN men looked alertly for the game and the shot.
“Reverend Yu!” Yang Quon called, walking—almost running—to where they were.
“Eminence, this is my parishioner, Mr. Yang.”
“Buon giorno,” DiMilo said in polite greeting. He looked over to see the newsies taking their pictures and keeping out of the way, more politely than he’d expected them to do. While Yu spoke with Yang, he walked over to Barry Wise to explain the situation.
“You are right to observe that relations between the Catholics and the Baptists are not always as friendly as they ought to be, but on this issue we stand as one. Upstairs, the officials of this government wish to kill a human baby. Yu wants to save that child. Franz and I will try to help.”
“This could get messy, sir,” Wise warned. “The security personnel in this country can play rough. I’ve seen it before.”
DiMilo was not an imposing man in physical terms. He was short and a good thirty pounds overweight, the American figured. His hair was thinning. His skin was sagging with age. He probably went out of breath going up two flights of stairs. But for all that, the Cardinal summoned what manhood he had and transformed himself before the American’s eyes. The genial smile and gentle disposition evaporated like steam in cold air. Now he looked more like a general on a battlefield.
“The life of an innocent child is at risk, Signore Wise,” was all DiMilo said, and it was all he had to say. The Cardinal walked back to his Chinese colleague.
“Get that?” Wise asked his cameraman, Pete Nichols.
“F*ckin’ A, Barry!” the guy said behind his eyepiece.
Yang pointed. Yu headed that way. DiMilo and Schepke followed. At the reception desk, the head clerk lifted a phone and made a call. The CNN crew followed the others into the stairwell and headed up to the second floor.
If anything, the obstetrics and gynecology floor was even more drab than the first. They heard the shouts, cries, and moans of women in labor, because in China, the public-health system did not waste drugs on women giving birth. Wise caught up to see that Yang guy, the father of the baby, standing still in the corridor, trying to identify the cries of his own wife from all the others. Evidently, he failed. Then he walked to the nurse’s desk.
Wise didn’t need to understand Chinese to get what the exchange was all about. Yang was supported by Reverend Yu and demanded to know where his wife was. The head nurse asked what the hell they were doing here, and told them all that they had to leave at once! Yang, his back straight with dignity and fear, refused and repeated his question. Again the head nurse told him to get lost. Then Yang seriously broke the rules by reaching across the high countertop and grabbing the nurse. You could see it in her eyes. It shocked her at a very fundamental level that anyone could defy her state-issued authority so blatantly. She tried to back away, but his grip was too strong, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were no longer a display of fear. Now they showed pure killing rage, because for Yang human instincts had cast aside all the societal conditioning he’d absorbed in his thirty-six years. His wife and child were in danger, and for them, right here and right now, he’d face a fire-breathing dragon barehanded and be damned to the consequences! The nurse took the easy way out and pointed to the left. Yang headed that way, Yu and the other two clergy with him, and the CNN crew trailing. The nurse felt her neck and coughed to get her breath back, still too surprised to be fearful, trying to understand how and why her orders had been disregarded.
Yang Lien-Hua was in Labor Room #3. The walls were of yellow glazed brick, the floor tile of some color that had been overcome by years of use, and was now a brown-gray.


For “Lotus Flower,” it had been a nightmare without end. Alone, all alone in this institution of life and death, she’d felt the contractions strengthen and merge into one continuous strain of her abdominal muscles, forcing her unborn child down the birth canal, toward a world that didn’t want it. She’d seen that in the nurses’ faces, the sorrow and resignation, what they must have seen and felt elsewhere in the hospital when death came to take a patient. They’d all learned to accept it as inevitable, and they tried to step away from it, because what had to be done was so contrary to all human instincts that the only way they could be there and see it happen was to—to be somewhere else. Even that didn’t work, and though they scarcely admitted it even to one another, they’d go home from work and lie in their beds and weep bitterly at what they as women had to do to newborns. Some would cradle the dead children who never were, who never got to take that first life-affirming breath, trying to show womanly gentleness to someone who would never know about it, except perhaps the spirits of the murdered babies who might have lingered close by. Others went the other way, tossing them into bins like the trash the state said they were. But even they never joked about it—in fact, never talked about it, except perhaps to note it had been done, or, maybe, “There’s a woman in Number Four who needs the shot.”
Lien-Hua felt the sensations, but worse, knew the thoughts, and her mind cried out to God for mercy. Was it so wrong to be a mother, even if she attended a Christian church? Was it so wrong to have a second child to replace the first that Fate had ripped from her arms? Why did the State deny to her the blessing of motherhood? Was there no way out? She hadn’t killed the first child, as many Chinese families did. She hadn’t murdered her little Large Dragon, with his sparkling black eyes and comical laugh and grasping little hands. Some other force had taken that away from her, and she wanted, she needed another. Just one other. She wasn’t being greedy. She didn’t want to raise two more children. Only one. Only one to suckle at her breasts and smile at her in the mornings. She needed that. She worked hard for the State, asked little in return, but she did ask for this! It was her right as a human being, wasn’t it?
But now she knew only despair. She tried to reverse the contractions, to stop the delivery from happening, but she might as well have tried to stop the tide with a shovel. Her little one was coming out. She could feel it. She could see the knowledge of it in the face of the delivery nurse. She checked her watch and leaned out of the room, waving her arm just as Lien-Hua fought the urge to push and complete the process, and so offer up her child to Death. She fought, controlled her breathing, struggled with her muscles, panted instead of breathing deeply, fought and fought and fought, but it was all for nothing. She knew that now. Her husband was nowhere near to protect her. He’d been man enough to put her here, but not enough to protect her and his own child from what was happening now. With despair came relaxation. It was time. She recognized the feeling from before. She could not fight anymore. It was time to surrender.
The doctor saw the nurse wave. This one was a man. It was easier on the men, and so they gave most of the “shots” in this hospital. He took the 50-cc syringe from stores and then went to the medication closet, unlocking it and withdrawing the big bottle of formaldehyde. He filled the syringe, not bothering to tap out the bubbles, because the purpose of this injection was to kill, and any special care was superfluous. He walked down the corridor toward Labor #3. He’d been on duty for nine hours that day. He’d performed a difficult and successful Caesarian section a few hours before, and now he’d end his working day with this. He didn’t like it. He did it because it was his job, part of the State’s policy. The foolish woman, having a baby without permission. It really was her fault, wasn’t it? She knew what the rules were. Everyone did. It was impossible not to know. But she’d broken the rules. And she wouldn’t be punished for it. Not really her. She wouldn’t go to prison or lose her job or suffer a monetary fine. She’d just get to go home with her uterus the way it had been nine months before—empty. She’d be a little older, and a little wiser, and know that if this happened again, it was a lot better to have the abortion done in the second or third month, before you got too attached to the damned thing. Damned sure it was a lot more comfortable than going through a whole labor for nothing. That was sad, but there was much sadness in life, and for this part of it they’d all volunteered. The doctor had chosen to become a doctor, and the woman in #3 had chosen to become pregnant.
He came into #3, wearing his mask, because he didn’t want to give the woman any infection. That was why he used a clean syringe, in case he should slip and stick her by mistake.
So.
He sat on the usual stool that obstetricians used both for delivering babies and for aborting the late-term ones. The procedure they used in America was a little more pleasant. Just poke into the baby’s skull, suck the brains out, crush the skull and deliver the package with a lot less trouble than a full-term fetus, and a lot easier on the woman. He wondered what the story was on this one, but there was no sense in knowing, was there? No sense knowing that which you can’t change.
So.
He looked. She was fully dilated and effaced, and, yes, there was the head. Hairy little thing. Better give her another minute or two, so that after he did his duty she could expel the fetus in one push and be done with it. Then she could go off and cry for a while and start getting over it. He was concentrating a little too much to note the commotion in the corridor outside the labor room.


Yang pushed the door open himself. And there it all was, for all of them to see. Lien-Hua was on the delivery table. Quon had never seen one of them before, and the way it held a woman’s legs up and apart, it looked for all the world like a device to make women easier to rape. His wife’s head was back and down, not up and looking to see her child born, and then he saw why.
There was the ... doctor, was he? And in his hand a large needle full of—
—they were in time! Yang Quon pushed the doctor aside, off his stool. He darted right to his wife’s face.
“I am here! Reverend Yu came with me, Lien.” It was like a light coming on in a darkened room.
“Quon!” Lien-Hua cried out, feeling her need to push, and finally wanting to.
But then things became more complicated still. The hospital had its own security personnel, but on being alerted by the clerk in the main lobby, one of them called for the police, who, unlike the hospital’s own personnel, were armed. Two of them appeared in the corridor, surprised first of all to see foreigners with TV equipment right there in front of them. Ignoring them, they pushed into the delivery room to find a pregnant woman about to deliver, a doctor on the floor, and four men, two of them foreigners as well!
“What goes on here!” the senior one bellowed, since intimidation was a major tool for controlling people in the PRC.
“These people are interfering with my duties!” the doctor answered, with a shout of his own. If he didn’t act fast, the damned baby would be born and breathe, and then he couldn’t ...
“What?” the cop demanded of him.
“This woman has an unauthorized pregnancy, and it is my duty to terminate the fetus now. These people are in my way. Please remove them from the room.”
That was enough for the cops. They turned to the obviously unauthorized visitors. “You will leave now!” the senior one ordered, while the junior one kept his hand on his service pistol.
“No!” was the immediate reply, both from Yang Quon and Yu Fa An.
“The doctor has given his order, you must leave,” the cop insisted. He was unaccustomed to having ordinary people resist his orders. “You will go now!”
The doctor figured this was the cue for him to complete his distasteful duty, so that he could go home for the day. He set the stool back up and slid it to where he needed to be.
“You will not do this!” This time it was Yu, speaking with all the moral authority his education and status could provide.
“Will you get him out of here?” the doctor growled at the cops, as he slid the stool back in place.
Quon was ill-positioned to do anything, standing as he was by his wife’s head. To his horror, he saw the doctor lift the syringe and adjust his glasses. Just then his wife, who might as well have been in another city for the past two minutes, took a deep breath and pushed.
“Ah,” the doctor said. The fetus was fully crowned now, and all he had to do was—
Reverend Yu had seen as much evil in his life as most clergymen, and they see as much as any seasoned police officer, but to see a human baby murdered before his eyes was just too much. He roughly shoved the junior of the two policemen aside and struck the doctor’s head from behind, flinging him to the right and jumping on top of him.
“Getting this?” Barry Wise asked in the corridor.
“Yep,” Nichols confirmed.
What offended the junior policeman was not the attack on the doctor, but rather the fact that this—this citizen had laid hands on a uniformed member of the Armed People’s Police. Outraged, he drew his pistol from its holster, and what had been a confused situation became a deadly one.
“No!” shouted Cardinal DiMilo, moving toward the young cop. He turned to see the source of the noise and saw an elderly gwai, or foreigner in very strange clothes, moving toward him with a hostile expression. The cop’s first response was a blow to the foreigner’s face, delivered with his empty left hand.
Renato Cardinal DiMilo hadn’t been physically struck since his childhood, and the affront to his personhood was all the more offensive for his religious and diplomatic status, and to be struck by this child! He turned back from the force of the blow and pushed the man aside, wanting to go to Yu’s aid, and to help him keep this murderous doctor away from the baby about to be born. The doctor was wavering on one foot, holding the syringe up in the air. This the Cardinal seized in his hand and hurled against the wall, where it didn’t break, because it was plastic, but the metal needle bent.
Had the police better understood what was happening, or had they merely been better trained, it would have stopped there. But they hadn’t, and it didn’t. Now the senior cop had his Type 77 pistol out. This he used to club the Italian on the back of the head, but his blow was poorly delivered, and all it managed to do was knock him off balance and split his skin.
Now it was Monsignor Schepke’s turn. His Cardinal, the man whom it was his duty to serve and protect, had been attacked. He was a priest. He couldn’t use deadly force. He couldn’t attack. But he could defend. That he did, grasping the older officer’s gun hand and twisting it up, in a safe direction, away from the others in the room. But there it went off, and though the bullet merely flattened out in the concrete ceiling, the noise inside the small room was deafening.
The younger policeman suddenly thought that his comrade was under attack. He wheeled and fired, but missed Schepke, and struck Cardinal DiMilo in the back. The .30 caliber bullet transited the body back to front, damaging the churchman’s spleen. The pain surprised DiMilo, but his eyes were focused on the emerging baby.
The crash of the shot had startled Lien-Hua, and the push that followed was pure reflex. The baby emerged, and would have fallen headfirst to the hard floor but for the extended hands of Reverend Yu, who stopped the fall and probably saved the newborn’s life. He was lying on his side, and then he saw that the second shot had gravely wounded his Catholic friend. Holding the baby, he struggled to his feet and looked vengefully at the youthful policeman.
“Huai dan! he shouted: Villain! Oblivious of the infant in his arms, he lurched forward toward the confused and frightened policeman.
As automatically as a robot, the younger cop merely extended his arm and shot the Baptist preacher right in the forehead.
Yu twisted and fell, bumping into Cardinal DiMilo’s supine form and landing on his back, so that his chest cushioned the newborn’s fall.
“Put that away!” the older cop screamed at his young partner. But the damage had been done. The Chinese Reverend Yu was dead, the back of his head leaking brain matter and venting blood at an explosive rate onto the dirty tile floor.
The doctor was the first to take any intelligent action. The baby was out now, and he couldn’t kill it. He took it from Yu’s dead arms, and held it up by the feet, planning to smack it on the rump, but it cried out on its own. So, the doctor thought as automatically as the second policeman’s shot, this lunacy has one good result. That he’d been willing to kill it sixty seconds before was another issue entirely. Then, it had been unauthorized tissue. Now, it was a breathing citizen of the People’s Republic, and his duty as a physician was to protect it. The dichotomy did not trouble him because it never even occurred to him.
There followed a few seconds in which people tried to come to terms with what had happened. Monsignor Schepke saw that Yu was dead. He couldn’t be alive with that head wound. His remaining duty was to his Cardinal.
“Eminence,” he said, kneeling down to lift him off the bloody floor.
Renato Cardinal DiMilo thought it strange that there was so little pain, for he knew that his death was imminent. Inside, his spleen was lacerated, and he was bleeding out internally at a lethal rate. He had not the time to reflect on his life or what lay in his immediate future, but despite that, his life of service and faith reasserted itself one more time.
“The child, Franz, the child?” he asked in a gasping voice.
“The baby lives,” Monsignor Schepke told the dying man.
A gentle smile: “Bene,” Renato said, before closing his eyes for the last time.
The last shot taken by the CNN crew was of the baby lying on her mother’s chest. They didn’t know her name, and the woman’s face was one of utter confusion, but then she felt her daughter, and the face was transformed as womanly instincts took over completely.
“We better get the f*ck out of here, Barry,” the cameraman advised, with a hiss.
“I think you’re right, Pete.” Wise stepped back and started to his left to get down the corridor to the stairs. He had a potential Emmy-class story in his hands now. He’d seen a human drama with few equals, and it had to go out, and it had to go out fast.
Inside the delivery room, the senior cop was shaking his head, his ears still ringing, trying to figure out what the hell had happened here, when he realized that the light level was lower—the TV camera was gone! He had to do something. Standing erect, he darted from the room and looked right, and saw the last American disappear into the stairwell. He left his junior in the delivery room and ran that way, turned into the fire stairs and ran downstairs as fast as gravity could propel him.
Wise led his people into the main lobby and right toward the main door, where their satellite van was. They’d almost made it, when a shout made them turn. It was the cop, the older one, about forty, they thought, and his pistol was out again, to the surprise and alarm of the civilians in the lobby.
“Keep going,” Wise told his crew, and they pushed through the doors into the open air. The van was in view, with the mini-satellite dish lying flat on the roof, and that was the key to getting this story out.
“Stop!” the cop called. He knew some English, so it would seem.
“Okay, guys, let’s play it real cool,” Wise told the other three.
“Under control,” Pete the cameraman advised. The camera was off his shoulder now, and his hands were out of casual view.
The cop bolstered his pistol and came close, with his right hand up and out flat. “Give me tape,” he said. “Give me tape.” His accent was crummy, but his English was understandable enough.
“That tape is my property!” Wise protested. “It belongs to me and my company.”
The cop’s English wasn’t that good. He just repeated his demand: “Give me tape!”
“Okay, Barry,” Pete said. “I got it.”
The cameraman—his name was Peter Nichols—lifted the camera up and hit the EJECT button, punching the Beta-format tape out of the Sony camera. This he gave to the police officer with a downcast and angry expression. The cop took it with his own expression of satisfaction and turned on his heel to go back into the hospital.
There was no way he could have known that, like any news cameraman, Pete Nichols could deal seconds as skillfully as any Las Vegas poker dealer. He winked at Barry Wise, and the four headed off to the van.
“Send it up now?” the producer asked.
“Let’s not be too obvious about it,” Wise thought. “Let’s move a few blocks.”
This they did, heading west toward Tiananmen Square, where a news van doing a satellite transmission wasn’t out of the ordinary. Wise was already on his satellite phone to Atlanta.
“This is Wise Mobile in Beijing with an upload,” the correspondent said into the phone.
“Hey, Barry,” a familiar voice said in reply. “This is Ben Golden. What you got for us?”
“It’s hot,” Wise told his controller half a world away. “A double murder and a childbirth. One guy who got whacked is a Catholic cardinal, the Vatican ambassador to Beijing. The other one’s a Chinese Baptist minister. They were both shot on camera. You might want to call Legal about it.”
“F*ck!” Atlanta observed.
“We’re uploading the rough-cut now, just so you get it. I’ll stand by to do the talking. But let’s get the video uploaded first.”
“Roger that. We’re standing by on Channel Zero Six.”
“Zero Six, Pete,” Wise told his cameraman, who also ran the uplink.
Nichols was kneeling by the control panels. “Standing by ... tape’s in ... setting up for Six ... transmitting ... now!” And with that, the Ku-band signal went racing upward through the atmosphere to the satellite hovering 22,800 miles directly over the Admiralty Islands in the Bismarck Sea.


CNN doesn’t bother encrypting its video signals. To do so is technically inconvenient, and few people bother pirating signals they could just as easily get off their cable systems for free in a few minutes, or even get live just four seconds later.
But this one was coming in at an awkward hour, which was, however, good for CNN Atlanta, because some headquarters people would want to go over it. A shooting death was not what the average American wanted with his Rice Krispies in the morning.
It was also downloaded by the American intelligence community, which holds CNN in very high regard, and doesn’t distribute its news coverage very far in any case. But this one did go to the White House Office of Signals, a largely military operation located in the basement of the West Wing. There a watch officer had to decide how important it was. If it ranked as a CRITIC priority, the President had to know about it in fifteen minutes, which meant waking him up right now, which was not something to be done casually to the Commander-in-Chief. A mere FLASH could wait a little longer, like—the watch officer checked the wall clock—yeah, like until breakfast. So, instead, they called the President’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. They’d let him make the call. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer.
“Yeah?” Goodley snarled into the phone while he checked the clock radio next to his bed.
“Dr. Goodley, this is Signals. We just copied something off CNN from Beijing that the Boss is going to be interested in.”
“What is it?” CARDSHARP asked. Then he heard the reply. “How certain are you of this?”
“The Italian guy looks like he might possibly have survived, from the video—I mean if there was a good surgeon close—but the Chinese minister had his brains blowed right out. No chance for him at all, sir.”
“What was it all about?”
“We’re not sure of that. NSA might have the phone conversation between this Wise guy and Atlanta, but we haven’t seen anything about it yet.”
“Okay, tell me what you got again,” Goodley ordered, now that he was approximately awake.
“Sir, we have a visual of two guys getting shot and a baby being born in Beijing. The video comes from Barry Wise of CNN. The video shows three gunshots. One is upwards into the ceiling of what appears to be a hospital delivery room. The second shot catches a guy in the back. That guy is identified as the Papal Nuncio to Beijing. The third shot goes right into the head of a guy identified as a Baptist minister in Beijing. That one appears to be a Chinese national. In between, we have a baby being born. Now we—stand by a minute, Dr. Goodley, okay, I have FLASH traffic from Fort Meade. Okay, they got it, too, and they got a voice transmission via their ECHELON system, reading it now. Okay, the Catholic cardinal is dead, according to this, says Cardinal Renato DiMilo—can’t check the spelling, maybe State Department for that—and the Chinese minister is a guy named Yu Fa An, again no spelling check. They were there to, oh, okay, they were there to prevent a late-term abortion, and looks like they succeeded, but these two clergy got their asses killed doing it. Third one, a monsignor named Franz Schepke—that sounds pretty German to me—was there, too, and looks like he survived—oh, okay, he must be the tall one you see on the tape. You gotta see the tape. It’s a hell of a confused mess, sir, and when this Yu guy gets it, well, it’s like that video from Saigon during the Tet Offensive. You know, where the South Vietnamese police colonel shot the North Vietnamese spy in the side of the head with a Smith Chief’s Special, you know, like a fountain of blood coming out the head. Ain’t something to watch with your Egg McMuffin, y’know?” the watch officer observed. The reference came across clearly enough. The news media had celebrated the incident as an example of the South Vietnamese government’s bloodthirstiness. They had never explained—probably never even knew—that the man shot had been an officer of the North Vietnamese army captured in a battle zone wearing civilian clothing, therefore, under the Geneva Protocols was a spy liable to summary execution, which was exactly what he’d received.
“Okay, what else?”
“Do we wake the Boss up for this? I mean, we got a diplomatic team over there, and this has some serious implications.”
Goodley thought about that for a second or two. “No. I’ll brief him in in a few hours.”
“Sir, it’s sure as hell going to be on CNN’s seven o’clock morning report,” the watch officer warned.
“Well, let me brief him when he has more than just pictures.”
“Your call, Dr. Goodley.”
“Thanks. Now, I think I’ll try to get one more hour before I drive over to Langley.” The phone went down before Goodley heard a reaction. His job carried a lot of prestige, but it denied him sleep and much of a social or sex life, and at moments like this he wondered what the hell was so goddamned prestigious about it.