Chapter 25
Fence Rending
The speed of modem communications makes for curious disconnects. In this case, the American government knew what had happened in Beijing long before the government of the People’s Republic did. What appeared in the White House Office of Signals appeared also in the State Department’s Operations Center, and there the senior officer present had decided, naturally enough, to get the information immediately to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. There Ambassador Carl Hitch took the call at his desk on the encrypted line. He forced the caller from Foggy Bottom to confirm the news twice before making his first reaction, a whistle. It wasn’t often that an accredited ambassador of any sort got killed in a host country, much less by a host country. What the hell, he wondered, was Washington going to do about this?
“Damn,” Hitch whispered. He hadn’t even met Cardinal DiMilo yet. The official reception had been planned for two weeks from now in a future that would never come. What was he supposed to do? First, he figured, get off a message of condolence to the Vatican mission. (Foggy Bottom would so notify the Vatican through the Nuncio in Washington, probably. Maybe even Secretary Adler would drive over himself to offer official condolences. Hell, President Ryan was Catholic, and maybe he would go himself, Hitch speculated.) Okay, Hitch told himself, things to do here. He had his secretary call the Nuncio’s residence, but all he got there was a Chinese national answering the phone, and that wasn’t worth a damn. That would have to go on the back burner ... what about the Italian Embassy? he thought next. The Nuncio was an Italian citizen, wasn’t he? Probably. Okay. He checked his card file and dialed up the Italian ambassador’s private line.
“Paulo? This is Carl Hitch. Thanks, and you? I have some bad news, I’m afraid ... the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal DiMilo, he’s been shot and killed in some Beijing hospital by a Chinese policeman ... it’s going to be on CNN soon, not sure how soon ... we’re pretty certain of it, I’m afraid ... I’m not entirely sure, but what I’ve been told is that he was there trying to prevent the death of a child, or one of those late-term abortions they do here ... yeah ... say, doesn’t he come from a prominent family?” Then Hitch started taking notes. “Vincenzo, you said? I see ... Minister of Justice two years ago? I tried to call over there, but all I got was some local answering the phone. German? Schepke?” More notes. “I see. Thank you, Paulo. Hey, if there’s anything we can help you with over here ... right. Okay. Bye.” He hung up. “Damn. Now what?” he asked the desk. He could spread the bad news to the German Embassy, but, no, he’d let someone else do that. For now ... he checked his watch. It was still short of sunrise in Washington, and the people there would wake up to find a firestorm. His job, he figured, was to verify what had happened so that he could make sure Washington had good information. But how the hell to do that? His best potential source of information was this Monsignor Schepke, but the only way to get him was to stake out the Vatican Embassy and wait for him to come home. Hmm, would the Chinese be holding him somewhere? No, probably not. Once their Foreign Ministry found out about this, they’d probably fall all over themselves trying to apologize. So, they’d put extra security on the Nuncio’s place, and that would keep newsies away, but they’re not going to mess with accredited diplomats, not after killing one. This was just so bizarre. Carl Hitch had been a foreign-service officer since his early twenties. He’d never come across anything like this before, at least not since Spike Dobbs had been held hostage in Afghanistan by guerrillas, and the Russians had screwed up the rescue mission and gotten him killed. Some said that had been deliberate, but even the Soviets weren’t that dumb, Hitch thought. Similarly, this hadn’t been a deliberate act either. The Chinese were communists, and communists didn’t gamble that way. It just wasn’t part of their nature or their training.
So, how had this happened? And what, exactly, had happened ?
And when would he tell Cliff Rutledge about it? And what effect might this have on the trade talks? Carl Hitch figured he’d have a full evening.
The People’s Republic will not be dictated to,” Foreign Minister Shen Tang concluded.
“Minister,” Rutledge replied, “it is not the intention of the United States to dictate to anyone. You make your national policy to suit your nation’s needs. We understand and respect that. We require, however, that you understand and respect our right to make our national policy as well, to suit our country’s needs. In this case, that means invoking the provisions of the Trade Reform Act.”
That was a big, sharp sword to wave, and everyone in the room knew it, Mark Gant thought. The TRA enabled the Executive Branch to replicate any nation’s trade laws as applied to American goods, and mirror-image them against that nation’s own goods. It was international proof of the adage that the shoe could sure pinch if it was on the other foot. In this case, everything China did to exclude American manufactured goods from the Chinese marketplace would simply be invoked in order to do the same to Chinese goods, and with a trade surplus of seventy billion dollars per year, that could well mean seventy billion dollars—all of it hard currency. The money to buy the things the PRC government wanted from America or elsewhere wouldn’t be there anymore. Trade would become trade, one of mine for one of yours, which was the theory that somehow never became reality.
“If America embargoes Chinese trade, China can and will do the same to America,” Shen shot back.
“Which serves neither your purposes nor our own,” Rutledge responded. And that dog ain’t gonna hunt, he didn’t have to say. The Chinese knew that well enough without being told.
“And what of most-favored-nation status for our country? What of entry into the World Trade Organization?” the Chinese foreign minister demanded.
“Mr. Minister, America cannot look favorably upon either so long as your country expects open export markets while closing your import markets. Trade, sir, means trade, the even exchange of your goods for ours,” Rutledge pointed out again—about the twelfth time since lunch, he reckoned. Maybe the guy would get it this time. But that was unfair. He already got it. He just wasn’t acknowledging the fact. It was just domestic Chinese politics projected into the international arena.
“And again you dictate to the People’s Republic!” Shen replied, with enough anger, real or feigned, to suggest that Rutledge had usurped his parking place.
“No, Minister, we do no such thing. It is you, sir, who tried to dictate to the United States of America. You say that we must accept your trade terms. In that, sir, you are mistaken. We see no more need to buy your goods than you do to buy ours.” Just that you need our hard cash a damned sight more than we need your chew toys for our f*cking dogs!
“We can buy our airliners from Airbus just as easily as from Boeing.”
This really was getting tiresome. Rutledge wanted to respond: But without our dollars, what will you pay for them with, Charlie? But Airbus had excellent credit terms for its customers, one more way in which a European government-subsidized enterprise played “fair” in the marketplace with a private American corporation. So, instead he said:
“Yes, Mr. Minister, you can do that, and we can buy trade goods from Taiwan, or Korea, or Thailand, or Singapore, just as easily as we can buy them here.” And they’ll f*cking well buy their airplanes from Boeing! “But that does not serve the needs of your people, or of ours,” he concluded reasonably.
“We are a sovereign nation and a sovereign people,” Shen retorted, continuing on as he had before, and Rutledge figured that the rhetoric was all about taking command of the verbiage. It was a strategy that had worked many times before, but Rutledge had instructions to disregard all the diplomatic theatrics, and the Chinese just hadn’t caught on yet. Maybe in a few more days, he thought.
“As are we, Minister,” Rutledge said, when Shen concluded. Then he ostentatiously checked his watch, and here Shen took the cue.
“1 suggest we adjourn until tomorrow,” the PRC foreign minister said.
“Good. I look forward to seeing you in the morning, Minister,” Rutledge responded, rising and leaning across the table to shake hands. The rest of the party did the same, though Mark Gant didn’t have a counterpart to be nice to at the moment. The American party shuffled out, downstairs toward their waiting cars.
“Well, that was lively,” Gant observed, as soon as they were outside.
Rutledge actually had himself a nice grin. “Yeah, it was kind of diverting, wasn’t it?” A pause. “I think they’re exploring how far bluster can take them. Shen is actually rather a sedate kind of guy. He likes it nice and gentle most of the time.”
“So, he has his instructions, too?” Gant wondered.
“Of course, but he reports to a committee, their Politburo, whereas we report to Scott Adler, and he reports to President Ryan. You know, I was a little mad about the instructions I had coming over here, but this is actually turning into fun. We don’t get to snarl back at people very often. We’re the U.S. of A., and we’re supposed to be nice and calm and accommodating to everybody. That’s what I’m used to doing. But this—this feels good.” That didn’t mean that he approved of President Ryan, of course, but switching over from canasta to poker made an interesting change. Scott Adler liked poker, didn’t he? Maybe that explained why he got along so well with that yahoo in the White House.
It was a short drive back to the embassy. The Americans in the delegation rode mainly in silence, blessing the few minutes of quiet. The hours of precise diplomatic exchange had had to be attended to in the same way a lawyer read a contract, word by goddamned word, seeking meaning and nuance, like searching for a lost diamond in a cesspool. Now they sat back in their seats and closed their eyes or looked mutely at the passing drab scenery with no more than an unstifled yawn, until they pulled through the embassy gate.
About the only thing to complain about was the fact that the limousines here, like those everywhere, were hard to get in and out of, unless you were six years old. But as soon as they alighted from their official transport, they could see that something was wrong. Ambassador Hitch was right there, and he hadn’t bothered with that before. Ambassadors have high diplomatic rank and importance. They do not usually act as doormen for their own countrymen.
“What’s the matter, Carl?” Rutledge asked.
“A major bump in the road,” Hitch answered.
“Somebody die?” the Deputy Secretary of State asked lightly.
“Yeah,” was the unexpected answer. Then the ambassador waved them inside. “Come on.”
The senior delegation members followed Rutledge into the ambassador’s conference room. Already there, they saw, were the DCM—the Deputy Chief of Mission, the ambassador’s XO, who in many embassies was the real boss—and the rest of the senior staff, including the guy Gant had figured was the CIA station chief. What the hell? TELESCOPE thought. They all took their seats, and then Hitch broke the news.
“Oh, shit,” Rutledge said for them all. “Why did this happen?”
“We’re not sure. We have our press attaché trying to track this Wise guy down, but until we get more information, we really don’t know the cause of the incident.” Hitch shrugged.
“Does the PRC know?” Rutledge asked next.
“Probably they’re just finding out,” the putative CIA officer opined. “You have to assume the news took a while to percolate through their bureaucracy.”
“How do we expect them to react?” one of Rutledge’s underlings asked, sparing his boss the necessity of asking the obvious and fairly dumb question.
The answer was just as dumb: “Your guess is as good as mine,” Hitch said.
“So, this could be a minor embarrassment or a major whoopsie,” Rutledge observed. “Whoopsie” is a term of art in the United States Department of State, usually meaning a massive f*ckup.
“I’d lean more toward the latter,” Ambassador Hitch thought. He couldn’t come up with a rational explanation for why this was so, but his instincts were flashing a lot of bright red lights, and Carl Hitch was a man who trusted his instincts.
“Any guidance from Washington?” Cliff asked.
“They haven’t woken up yet, have they?” And as one, every member of the delegation checked his watch. The embassy people already had, of course. The sun had not yet risen on their national capital. What decisions would be made would happen in the next four hours. Nobody here would be getting much sleep for a while, because once the decisions were made, then they’d have to decide how to implement them, how to present the position of their country to the People’s Republic.
“Ideas?” Rutledge asked.
“The President won’t like this very much,” Gant observed, figuring he knew about as much as anyone else in the room. “His initial reaction will be one of disgust. Question is, will that spill over into what we’re here for? I think it might, depending on how our Chinese friends react to the news.”
“How will the Chinese react?” Rutledge asked Hitch.
“Not sure, Cliff, but I doubt we’ll like it. They will regard the entire incident as an intrusion—an interference with their internal affairs—and their reaction will be somewhat crass, I think. Essentially they’re going to say, ‘Too damned bad.’ If they do, there’s going to be a visceral reaction in America and in Washington. They don’t understand us as well as they’d like to think they do. They misread our public opinion at every turn, and they haven’t shown me much sign of learning. I’m worried,” Hitch concluded.
“Well, then it’s our job to walk them through this. You know,” Rutledge thought aloud, “this could work in favor of our overall mission here.”
Hitch bristled at that. “Cliff, it would be a serious mistake to try to play this one that way. Better to let them think it through for themselves. The death of an ambassador is a big deal,” the American ambassador told the people in the room, in case they didn’t know. “All the more so if the guy was killed by an agent of their government. But, Cliff, if you try to shove this down their throats, they’re going to choke, and I don’t think we want that to happen either. I think our best play is to ask for a break of a day or two in the talks, to let them get their act together.”
“That’s a sign of weakness for our side, Carl,” Rutledge replied, with a shake of the head. “I think you’re wrong on that. I think we press forward and let them know that the civilized world has rules, and we expect them to abide by them.”
What lunacy is this?” Fang Gan asked the ceiling. “We’re not sure,” Zhang Han San replied. “Some troublesome churchman, it sounds like.”
“And some foolish policeman with more gun than brains. He’ll be punished, of course,” Fang suggested.
“Punished? For what? For enforcing our population-control laws, for protecting a doctor against an attack by some gwai?” Zhang shook his head. “Do we allow foreigners to spit upon our laws in this way? No, Fang, we do not. I will not see us lose face in such a way.”
“Zhang, what is the life of one insignificant police officer next to our country’s place in the world?” Fang demanded. “The man he killed was an ambassador, Zhang, a foreigner accredited to our country by another—”
“Country?” Zhang spat. “A city, my friend, no, not even that—a district in Rome, smaller than Qiong Dao!” He referred to Jade Island, home of one of the many temples built by the emperors, and not much larger than the building itself. Then he remembered a quote from Iosef Stalin. “How big an army does that Pope have, anyway? Ahh!” A dismissive wave of the hand.
“He does have a country, whose ambassador we accredited, in the hope of improving our position in the diplomatic world,” Fang reminded his friend. “His death is to be regretted, at the least. Perhaps he was merely one more troublesome foreign devil, Zhang, but for the purposes of diplomacy we must appear to regret his passing.” And if that meant executing some nameless policeman, they had plenty of policemen, Fang didn’t add.
“For what? For interfering with our laws? An ambassador may not do such a thing. That violates diplomatic protocol, does it not? Fang, you have become overly solicitous to the foreign devils,” Zhang concluded, using the term from history to identify the lesser people from those lesser lands.
“If we want their goods in trade, and we want them to pay for our goods so that we might have their hard currency, then we must treat them like guests in our home.”
“A guest in your home does not spit on the floor, Fang.”
“And if the Americans do not react kindly to this incident?”
“Then Shen will tell them to mind their own affairs,” Zhang replied, with the finality of one who had long since made up his mind.
“When does the Politburo meet?”
“To discuss this?” Zhang asked in surprise. “Why? The death of some foreign troublemaker and a Chinese ... churchman? Fang, you are too cautious. I have already discussed the incident with Shen. There will be no full meeting of the Politburo for this trivial incident. We will meet the day after tomorrow, as usual.”
“As you say,” Fang responded, with a nod of submission. Zhang had him ranked on the Politburo. He had much influence with the foreign and defense ministries, and the ear of Xu Kun Piao. Fang had his own political capital—mainly for internal matters—but less such capital than Zhang, and so he had to spend it carefully, when it could profit himself. This was not such a case, he thought. With that, he went back to his office and called Ming to transcribe his notes. Then, later, he thought, he’d have Chai come in. She was so useful in easing the tension of his day.
He felt better on waking this morning than was usually the case, probably because he’d gotten to sleep at a decent hour, Jack told himself, on the way to the bathroom for the usual morning routine. You never got a day off here, at least not in the sense that most people understood the term. You never really got to sleep late—8:25 was the current record dating all the way back to that terrible winter day when this had begun—and every day you had to have the same routine, including the dreaded national security briefing, which told you that some people really did believe that the world couldn’t get on without you. The usual look in the mirror. He needed a haircut, Jack saw, but for that the barber came here, which wasn’t a bad deal, really, except that you lost the fellowship of sitting in a male place and discussing male things. Being the most powerful man in the world insulated you from so many of the things that mattered. The food was good, and the booze was just fine, and if you didn’t like the sheets they were changed at the speed of light, and people jumped to the sound of your voice. Henry VIII never had it so good ... but Jack Ryan had never thought to become a crowned monarch. That whole idea of kingship had died across the world except in a few distant places, and Ryan didn’t live in one of them. But the entire routine at the White House seemed designed to make him feel like a king, and that was disturbing on a level that was like grasping a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was there, but every time you tried to hold it, the damned stuff just vanished. The staff was just so eager to serve, grimly—but pleasantly—determined to make everything easy for them. The real worry was the effect this might have on his kids. If they started thinking they were princes and princesses, sooner or later their lives would go to hell in one big hurry. But that was his problem to worry about, Jack thought as he shaved. His and Cathy’s. Nobody else could raise their kids for them. That was their job. Just that all of this White House crap got in the way practically all the time.
The worst part of all, however, was that he had to be dressed all the time. Except in bed or in the bathroom, the President had to be properly dressed—or what would the staff think? So, Ryan couldn’t walk out into the corridor without pants and at least some kind of shirt. At home, a normal person would have padded around barefoot in his shorts, but while a truck driver might have that freedom in his own home, the President of the United States did not have that freedom in his.
Then he had to smile wryly at the mirror. He bitched to himself about the same things every morning, and if he really wanted to change them, he could. But he was afraid to, afraid to take action that would cause people to lose their jobs. Aside from the fact that it would really look shitty in the papers—and practically everything he did made it into the news—it would feel bad to him, here, shaving every morning. And he didn’t really need to walk out to the box and get the paper in the morning, did he?
And if you factored out the dress code, it wasn’t all that bad. The breakfast buffet was actually quite nice, though it wasted at least five times the food it actually served. His cholesterol was still in the normal range, and so Ryan enjoyed eggs for his morning meal two or even three times a week, somewhat to his wife’s distaste. The kids opted mainly for cereal or muffins. These were still warm from the downstairs kitchen and came in all sorts of healthy—and tasty—varieties.
The Early Bird was the clipping service the government provided for senior officials, but for breakfast SWORDSMAN preferred the real paper, complete with cartoons. Like many, Ryan lamented the retirement of Gary Larson and the attendant loss of the morning Far Side, but Jack understood the pressure of enforced daily output. There was also a sports page to be read, something the Early Bird left out completely. And there was CNN, which started in the White House breakfast room promptly at seven.
Ryan looked up when he heard the warning that kids should not see what they were about to show. His kids, like all other kids, stopped what they were doing to look.
“Eww, gross!” Sally Ryan observed, when some Chinese guy got shot in the head.
“Head wounds do that,” her mother told her, wincing even so. Cathy did surgery, but not that sort. “Jack, what’s this all about?”
“You know as much as I do, honey,” the President told the First Lady.
Then the screen changed to some file tape showing a Catholic Cardinal. Then Jack caught “Papal Nuncio” off the audio, leaning to reach for the controller to turn the sound up.
“Chuck?” Ryan said, to the nearest Secret Service agent. “Get me Ben Goodley on the phone, if you could.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” It took about thirty seconds, then Ryan was handed the portable phone. “Ben, what the hell’s this thing out of Beijing?”
In Jackson, Mississippi, Reverend Gerry Patterson was accustomed to rising early in preparation for his morning jog around the neighborhood, and he turned on the bedroom TV while his wife went to fix his hot chocolate (Patterson didn’t approve of coffee any more than he did of alcohol). His head turned at the words “Reverend Yu,” then his skin went cold when he heard, “a Baptist minister here in Beijing ...” He came back into the bedroom just in time to see a Chinese face go down, and shoot out blood as from a garden hose. The tape didn’t allow him to recognize a face.
“My God ... Skip ... God, no ...” the minister breathed, his morning suddenly and utterly disrupted. Ministers deal with death on a daily basis, burying parishioners, consoling the bereaved, entreating God to look after the needs of both. But it was no easier for Gerry Patterson than it would have been for anyone else this day, because there had been no warning, no “long illness” to prepare the mind for the possibility, not even the fact of age to reduce the surprise factor. Skip was—what? Fifty-five? No more than that. Still a young man, Patterson thought, young and vigorous to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to his flock. Dead? Killed, was it? Murdered? By whom? Murdered by that communist government? A Man of God, murdered by the godless heathen?
Oh, shit,” the President said over his eggs. “What else do we know, Ben? Anything from SORGE?” Then Ryan looked around the room, realizing he’d spoken a word that was itself classified. The kids weren’t looking his way, but Cathy was..“Okay, we’ll talk about it when you get in.” Jack hit the kill button on the phone and set it down.
“What’s the story?”
“It’s a real mess, babe,” SWORDSMAN told SURGEON. He explained what he knew for a minute or so. “The ambassador hasn’t gotten to us with anything CNN didn’t just show.”
“You mean with all the money we spend on CIA and stuff, CNN is the best source of information we have?” Cathy Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously.
“You got it, honey,” her husband admitted.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Jack tried to explain: “CIA can’t be everywhere, and it would look a little funny if all our field spooks carried video-cams everywhere they went, you know?”
Cathy made a face at being shut down so cavalierly. “But—”
“But it’s not that easy, Cathy, and the news people are in the same business, gathering information, and occasionally they get there first.”
“But you have other ways of finding things out, don’t you?”
“Cathy, you don’t need to know about things like that,” POTUS told FLOTUS.
That was a phrase she’d heard before, but not one she’d ever learned to love. Cathy went back to her morning paper while her husband graduated to the Early Bird. The Beijing story, Jack saw, had happened too late for the morning editions, one more thing to chuff up the TV newsies and annoy the print ones. Somehow the debate over the federal education budget didn’t seem all that important this morning, but he’d learned to scan the editorials, because they tended to reflect the questions the reporters would ask at the press conferences, and that was one way for him to defend himself.
By 7:45, the kids were about ready for their drive to school, and Cathy was ready for her flight to Hopkins. Kyle Daniel went with her, with his own Secret Service detail, composed exclusively of women who would look after him at the Hopkins daycare center rather like a pack of she-wolves. Katie would head back to her daycare center, the rebuilt Giant Steps north of Annapolis. There were fewer kids there now, but a larger protective detail. The big kids went to St. Mary’s. On cue, the Marine VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter eased down on the South Lawn helipad. The day was about to start for real. The entire Ryan family took the elevator downstairs. First Mom and Dad walked the kids to the west entrance of the West Wing, where, after hugs and kisses, three of the kids got into their cars to drive off. Then Jack walked Cathy to the helicopter for the kiss goodbye, and the big Sikorsky lifted off under the control of Colonel Dan Malloy for the hop to Johns Hopkins. With that done, Ryan walked back to the West Wing, and inside to the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was waiting for him.
“How bad?” Jack asked his national security adviser.
“Bad,” Goodley replied at once.
“What was it all about?”
“They were trying to stop an abortion. The Chinese do them late-term if the pregnancy is not government-approved. They wait until just before the baby pops out and zap it in the top of the head with a needle before it gets to take a breath. Evidently, the woman on the tape was having an unauthorized baby, and her minister—that’s the Chinese guy who gets it in the head, a Baptist preacher educated, evidently, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, would you believe? Anyway, he came to the hospital to help. The Papal Nuncio, Renato Cardinal DiMilo, evidently knew the Baptist preacher pretty well and came to offer assistance. It’s hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it blew up real bad, as the tape shows.”
“Any statements?”
“The Vatican deplores the incident and has requested an explanation. But it gets worse. Cardinal DiMilo is from the DiMilo family. He has a brother, Vincenzo DiMilo, who’s in the Italian parliament—he was a cabinet minister a while back—and so the Italian government has issued its own protest. Ditto the German government, because the Cardinal’s aide is a German monsignor named Schepke, who’s a Jesuit, and he got a little roughed up, and the Germans aren’t very happy either. This Monsignor Schepke was arrested briefly, but he was released after a few hours when the Chinese remembered he had diplomatic status. The thinking at State is that the PRC might PNG the guy, just to get him the hell out of the country and make the whole thing all go away.”
“What time is it in Beijing?”
“Us minus eleven, so it’s nine at night there,” CARDSHARP answered.
“The trade delegation will need instructions of some sort about this. I need to talk to Scott Adler as soon as he gets in this morning.”
“You need more than that, Jack.” It was the voice of Arnold van Damm, at the door to the office.
“What else?”
“The Chinese Baptist who got killed, I just heard he has friends over here.”
“Oral Roberts University,” Ryan said. “Ben told me.”
“The churchgoers are not going to like this one, Jack,” Arnie warned.
“Hey, guy, I don’t goddamn like it,” the President pointed out. “Hell, I don’t like abortion under the best of circumstances, remember?”
“I remember,” van Damm said, recalling all the trouble Ryan had gotten into with his first Presidential statement on the issue.
“And this kind of abortion is especially barbaric, and so, two guys go to the f*cking hospital and try to save the baby’s life, and they get killed for it! Jesus,” Ryan concluded, “and we have to do business with people like this.”
Then another face showed up at the door. “You’ve heard, I suppose,” Robby Jackson observed.
“Oh, yeah. Hell of a thing to see over breakfast.”
“My pap knows the guy.”
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Remember at the reception last week? He told you about it. Pap and Gerry Patterson both support his congregation out of Mississippi—some other congregations, too. It’s a Baptist thing, Jack. Well-off churches look after ones that need help, and this Yu guy sure as hell needed help, looks like. I haven’t talked to him yet, but Pap is going to raise pure f*cking hell about this one, and you can bet on it,” the Vice President informed his boss.
“Who’s Patterson?” van Damm asked.
“White preacher, got a big air-conditioned church in the suburbs of Jackson. Pretty good guy, actually. He and Pap have known each other forever. Patterson went through school with this Yu guy, I think.”
“This is going to get ugly,” the Chief of Staff observed.
“Arnie, baby, it’s already ugly,” Jackson pointed out. The CNN cameraman had been a little too good, or had just been standing in a good place, and had caught both shots in all their graphic majesty.
“What’s your dad going to say?” Ryan asked.
TOMCAT made them wait for it. “He’s going to call down the Wrath of Almighty God on those murdering cocksuckers. He’s going to call Reverend Yu a martyr to the Christian faith, right up there with the Maccabees of the Old Testament, and those courageous bastards the Romans fed to the lions. Arnie, have you ever seen a Baptist preacher calling down the Vengeance of the Lord? It beats the hell out of the Super Bowl, boy,” Robby promised. “Reverend Yu is standing upright and proud before the Lord Jesus right now, and the guys who killed him have their rooms reserved in the Everlasting Fires of Hell. Wait till you hear him go at it. It’s impressive, guys. I’ve seen him do it. And Gerry Patterson won’t be far behind.”
“And the hell of it is, I can’t disagree with any of it. Jesus,” Ryan breathed. “Those two men died to save the life of a baby. If you gotta die, that’s not a bad reason for it.”
They both died like men, Mr. C,” Chavez was saying in Moscow. “I wish I was there with a gun.” It had hit Ding especially hard. Fatherhood had changed his perspective on a lot of things, and this was just one of them. The life of a child was sacrosanct, and a threat against a child was an invitation to immediate death in his ethical universe. And in the real universe, he was known to have a gun a lot of the time, and the training to use it efficiently.
“Different people have different ways of looking at things,” Clark told his subordinate. But if he’d been there, he would have disarmed both of the Chinese cops. On the videotape, they hadn’t looked all that formidable. And you didn’t kill people to make a fashion statement. Domingo still had the Latin temperament, John reminded himself. And that wasn’t so bad a thing, was it?
“What are you saying, John?” Ding asked in surprise.
“I’m saying two good men died yesterday, and I imagine God’ll look after both of them.”
“Ever been to China?”
He shook his head. “Taiwan once, for R and R, long time ago. That was okay, but aside from that, no closer than North Vietnam. I don’t speak the language and I can’t blend in.” Both factors were distantly frightening to Clark. The ability to disappear into the surroundings was the sine qua non of being a field-intelligence officer.
They were in a hotel bar in Moscow after their first day of lecturing their Russian students. The beer on tap was acceptable. Neither of them was in a mood for vodka. Life in Britain had spoiled them. This bar, which catered to Americans, had CNN on a large-screen TV next to the bar, and this was CNN’s lead story around the globe. The American government, the report concluded, hadn’t reacted to the incident yet.
“So, what’s Jack going to do?” Chavez wondered.
“I don’t know. We have that negotiations team in Beijing right now for trade talks,” Clark reminded him.
“The diplomatic chatter might get a little sharp,” Domingo thought.
Scott, we can’t let this one slide,” Jack said. A call from the White House had brought Adler’s official car here instead of Foggy Bottom.
“It is not, strictly speaking, pertinent to trade talks,” the Secretary of State pointed out.
“Maybe you want to do business with people like that,” Vice President Jackson responded, “but the people outside the Beltway might not.”
“We have to consider public opinion on this, Scott,” Ryan said. “And, you know, we have to damn well consider my opinion. The murder of a diplomat is not something we can ignore. Italy is a NATO member. So is Germany. And we have diplomatic relations with the Vatican and about seventy million Catholics in the country, plus millions more Baptists.”
“Okay, Jack,” EAGLE said, with raised, defensive hands. “I am not defending them, okay? I’m talking about the foreign policy of the United States of America here, and we’re not supposed to manage that on the basis of emotions. The people out there pay us to use our heads, not our dicks.”
Ryan let out a long breath. “Okay, maybe I had that coming. Go on.”
“We issue a statement deploring this sorry incident in strong language. We have Ambassador Hitch make a call on their foreign ministry and say the same thing, maybe even stronger, but in more informal language. We give them a chance to think this mess through before they become an international pariah, maybe discipline those trigger-happy cops—hell, maybe shoot them, given how the law works over there. We let common sense break out, okay?”
“And what do I say?”
Adler thought that one over for a few seconds. “Say whatever you want. We can always explain to them that we have a lot of churchgoers here and you have to assuage their sensibilities, that they have inflamed American public opinion, and in our country, public opinion counts for something. They know that on an intellectual level, but deep down in the gut they don’t get it. That’s okay,” SecState went on. “Just so they get it in the brain, because the brain talks to the gut occasionally. They have to understand that the world doesn’t like this sort of thing.”
“And if they don’t?” the Vice President asked.
“Well, then we have a trade delegation to show them the consequences of uncivilized behavior.” Adler looked around the room. “Are we okay on that?”
Ryan looked down at the coffee table. There were times when he wished he were a truck driver, able to scream out bloody murder when certain things happened, but that was just one more freedom the President of the United States didn’t have. Okay, Jack, you have to be sensible and rational about all this. He looked up. “Yes, Scott, we’re sort of okay on that.”
“Anything from our, uh, new source on this issue?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, MP hasn’t sent anything over yet.”
“If she does ...”
“You’ll get a copy real fast,” the President promised. “Get me some talking points. I’ll have to make a statement—when, Arnie?”
“Eleven-ish ought to be okay,” van Damm decided. “I’ll talk to some media guys about this.”
“Okay, if anybody has ideas later today, I want to hear them,” Ryan said, standing, and adjourning the meeting.