Chapter 28
Collision Courses
Those sonsabitches,” Vice President Jackson observed with his coffee.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of statecraft, Robby,” Ryan told his friend. It was 7:45 A.M. in the Oval Office. Cathy and the kids had gotten off early, and the day was starting fast. “We’ve had our suspicions, but here’s the proof, if you want to call it that. The war with Japan and that little problem we had with Iran started in Beijing—well, not exactly, but this Zhang guy, acting for Xu, it would seem, aided and abetted both.”
“Well, he may be a nasty son of a bitch, but I wouldn’t give him points for brains,” Robby said, after a moment’s reflection. Then he thought some more. “But maybe that’s not fair. From his point of view, the plans were pretty clever, using others to be his stalking horse. He risked nothing himself, then he figured to move in and profit on the risks of others. It certainly looked efficient, I suppose.”
“Question is, what’s his next move?”
“Between this and what Rutledge reports from Beijing, I’d say we have to take these people a little seriously,” Robby reflected. Then his head perked up some more. “Jack, we have to get more people in on this.”
“Mary Pat will flip out if we even suggest it,” Ryan told him.
“Too damned bad. Jack, it’s the old problem with intelligence information. If you spread it out too much, you risk compromising it, and then you lose it—but if you don’t use it at all, you might as well not even have it. Where do you draw the line?” It was a rhetorical question. “If you err, you err on the side of safety—but the safety of the country, not the source.”
“There’s a real, live person on the other end of this sheet of paper, Rob,” Jack pointed out.
“I’m sure there is. But there are two hundred fifty million people outside this room, Jack, and the oath we both swore was to them, not some Chinese puke in Beijing. What this tells us is that the guy making policy in China is willing to start wars, and twice now we’ve sent our people to fight wars he’s had a part in starting. Jesus, man, war is supposed to be a thing of the past, but this Zhang guy hasn’t figured that one out yet. What’s he doing that we don’t know about?”
“That’s what SORGE’s all about, Rob. The idea is that we find out beforehand and have a chance to forestall it.”
Jackson nodded. “Maybe so, but once upon a time, there was a source called MAGIC that told us a lot about an enemy’s intentions, but when that enemy launched the first attack, we were asleep—because MAGIC was so important we never told CINCPAC about it, and he ended up not preparing for Pearl Harbor. I know intel’s important, but it has its operational limitations. All this really tells us is that we have a potential adversary with little in the way of inhibitions. We know his mind-set, but not his intentions or current operations. Moreover, SORGE’S giving us recollections of private conversations between one guy who makes policy and another guy who tries to influence policy. A lot of stuff is being left out. This looks like a cover-your-ass diary, doesn’t it?”
Ryan told himself that this was a particularly smart critique. Like the people at Langley, he’d allowed himself to wax a little too euphoric about a source they’d never even approached before. SONGBIRD was good, but not without limitations. Big ones.
“Yeah, Rob, that’s probably just what it is. This Fang guy probably keeps the diary just to have something to pull out of the drawer if one of his colleagues on the Chinese Politburo tries to butt-f*ck him.”
“So, it isn’t Sir Thomas More whose words we’re reading,” TOMCAT observed.
“Not hardly,” Ryan conceded. “But it’s a good source. All the people who’ve looked at this for us say it feels very real.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t true, Jack, I’m saying it isn’t all,” the Vice President persisted.
“Message received, Admiral.” Ryan held up his hands in surrender. “What do you recommend?”
“SecDef for starters, and the Chiefs, and J-3 and J-5, and probably CINCPAC, your boy Bart Mancuso,” Jackson added, with a hint of distaste.
“Why don’t you like the guy?” SWORDSMAN asked.
“He’s a bubblehead,” the career fighter pilot answered. “Submariners don’t get around all that much . . . but I grant you he’s a pretty good operator.” The submarine operation he’d run on the Japs using old boomers had been pretty swift, Jackson admitted to himself.
“Specific recommendations?”
“Rutledge tells us that the ChiComms are talking like they’re real torqued over the Taiwan thing. What if they act on that? Like a missile strike into the island. Christ knows they have enough missiles to toss, and we have ships in harbor there all the time.”
“You really think they’d be dumb enough to launch an attack on a city with one of our ships tied alongside?” Ryan asked. Nasty or not, this Zhang guy wasn’t going to risk war with America quite that foolishly, was he?
“What if they don’t know the ship’s there? What if they get bad intel? Jack, the shooters don’t always get good data from the guys in the back room. Trust me. Been there, done that, got the f*cking scars, y’know?”
“The ships can take care of themselves, can’t they?”
“Not if they don’t have all their systems turned on, and can a Navy SAM stop a ballistic inbound?” Robby wondered aloud. “I don’t know. How about we have Tony Bretano check it out for us?”
“Okay, give him a call.” Ryan paused. “Robby, I have somebody coming in in a few minutes. We need to talk some more about this. With Adler and Bretano,” the President added.
“Tony’s very good on hardware and management stuff, but he needs a little educating on operations.”
“So, educate him,” Ryan told Jackson.
“Aye, aye, sir.” The Vice President headed out the door.
They got the container back to its magnetic home less than two hours after removing it, thanking God—Russians were allowed to do that now—that the lock mechanism wasn’t one of the new electronic ones. Those could be very difficult to break. But the problem with all such security measures was that they all too often ran the chance of going wrong and destroying that which they were supposed to protect, which only added complexity to a job with too much complexity already. The world of espionage was one in which everything that could go wrong invariably did, and so over the years, every way of simplifying operations had been adopted by all the players. The result was that since what worked for one man worked for all, when you saw someone following the same procedures as your own intelligence officers and agents, you knew you had a player in your sights.
And so the stakeout on the bench was renewed—of course it had never been withdrawn, in case Suvorov/ Koniev should appear unexpectedly while the transfer case was gone off to the lab—with an ever-changing set of cars and trucks, plus coverage in a building with a line-of-sight to the bench. The Chinese subject was being watched, but no one saw him set a telltale for the dead-drop. But that could be as simple as calling a number for Suvorov/Koniev’s beeper . . . but probably no, since they’d assume that every phone line out of the Chinese embassy was bugged, and the number would be captured and perhaps traced to its owner. Spies had to be careful, because those who chased after them were both resourceful and unrelenting. That fact made them the most conservative of people. But difficult to spot though they might be, once spotted they were usually doomed. And that, the FSS men all hoped, would be the case with Suvorov/Koniev.
In this case, it took until after nightfall. The subject left his apartment building and drove around for forty minutes, following a path identical to one driven two days before—probably checking to see if he had a shadow, and also to check for some telltale alert the FSS people hadn’t spotted yet. But this time, instead of driving back to his flat, he came by the park, parked his car two blocks from the bench, and walked there by an indirect route, pausing on the way twice to light a cigarette, which gave him ample opportunity to turn and check his back. Everything was right out of the playbook. He saw nothing, though three men and a woman were following him on foot. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, which gave her the excuse to stop every so often to adjust the infant’s blanket. The men just walked, not looking at the subject or, so it seemed, anything else.
“There!” one of the FSS people said. Suvorov/Koniev didn’t sit on the bench this time. Instead he rested his left foot on it, tied his shoelace, and adjusted his pants cuff. The pickup of the holder was accomplished so skillfully that no one actually saw it, but it seemed rather a far-fetched coincidence that he would pick that particular spot to tie his shoes—and besides, one of the FSS men would soon be there to see if he’d replaced one holder with another. With that done, the subject walked back to his car, taking a different circuitous route and lighting two more American Marlboros on the way.
The amusing part, Lieutenant Provalov thought, was how obvious it was once you knew whom to look at. What had once been anonymous was now as plain as an advertising billboard.
“So, now what do we do?” the militia lieutenant asked his FSS counterpart.
“Not a thing,” the FSS supervisor replied. “We wait until he places another message under the bench, and then we get it, decode it, and find out what exactly he’s up to. Then we make a further decision.”
“What about my murder case?” Provalov demanded.
“What about it? This is an espionage case now, Comrade Lieutenant, and that takes precedence.”
Which was true, Oleg Gregoriyevich had to admit to himself. The murder of a pimp, a whore, and a driver was a small thing compared to state treason.
His naval career might never end, Admiral Joshua Painter, USN (Ret.), thought to himself. And that wasn’t so bad a thing, was it? A farm boy from Vermont, he’d graduated the Naval Academy almost forty years earlier, made it through Pensacola, then gotten his life’s ambition, flying jets off aircraft carriers. He’d done it for the next twenty years, plus a stint as a test pilot, commanded a carrier air wing, then a carrier, then a group, and finally topped out as SACLANT/CINCLANT/CINCLANTFLT, three very weighty hats that he’d worn comfortably enough for just over three years before removing the uniform forever. Retirement had meant a civilian job paying about four times what the government had, mainly consulting with admirals he’d watched on the way up and telling them how he would have done it. In fact, it was something he would have done for free in any officers’ club on any Navy base in America, maybe for the cost of dinner and a few beers and a chance to smell the salt air.
But now he was in the Pentagon, back on the government payroll, this time as a civilian supergrade and special assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Tony Bretano, Josh Painter thought, was smart enough, a downright brilliant engineer and manager of engineers. He was prone to look for mathematical solutions to problems rather than human ones, and he tended to drive people a little hard. All in all, Bretano might have made a decent naval officer, Painter thought, especially a nuc.
His Pentagon office was smaller than the one he’d occupied as OP-05—Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Air—ten years earlier, a job since de-established. He had his own secretary and a smart young commander to look after him. He was an entry-port to the SecDef’s office for a lot of people, one of whom, oddly enough, was the Vice President.
“Hold for the Vice President,” a White House operator told him on his private line.
“You bet,” Painter replied.
“Josh, Robby.”
“Good morning, sir,” Painter replied. This annoyed Jackson, who’d served under Painter more than once, but Josh Painter wasn’t a man able to call an elected official by his Christian name. “What can I do for you?”
“Got a question. The President and I were going over something this morning, and I didn’t have the answer to his question. Can an Aegis intercept and kill a ballistic inbound?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. We looked at that during the Gulf War and—oh, okay, yeah, I remember now. We decided they could probably stop one of those Scuds because of its relatively slow speed, but that’s the top end of their ability. It’s a software problem, software on the SAM itself.” Which was the same story for the Patriot missiles as well, both men then remembered. “Why did that one come up?”
“The President’s worried that if the Chinese toss one at Taiwan and we have a ship alongside, well, he’d prefer that the ship could look after herself, y’know?”
“I can look into that,” Painter promised. “Want me to bring it up with Tony today?”
“That’s affirmative,” TOMCAT confirmed.
“Roger that, sir. I’ll get back to you later today.”
“Thanks, Josh,” Jackson replied, hanging up.
Painter checked his watch. It was about time for him to head in anyway. The walk took him out into the busy E-Ring corridor, then right again into the SecDef’s office, past the security people and the various private secretaries and aides. He was right on time, and the door to the inner office was open.
“Morning, Josh,” Bretano greeted.
“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“Okay, what’s new and interesting in the world today?”
“Well, sir, we have an inquiry from the White House that just came in.”
“And what might that be?” THUNDER asked. Painter explained. “Good question. Why is the answer so hard to figure out?”
“It’s something we’ve looked at on and off, but really Aegis was set up to deal with cruise-missile threats, and they top out at about Mach Three or so.”
“But the Aegis radar is practically ideal for that sort of threat, isn’t it?” The Secretary of Defense was fully briefed in on how the radar-computer system worked.
“It’s a hell of a radar system, sir, yes,” Painter agreed.
“And making it capable for this mission is just a question of software?”
“Essentially yes. Certainly it involves software in the missile’s seekerhead, maybe also for the SPY and SPG radars as well. That’s not exactly my field, sir.”
“Software isn’t all that difficult to write, and it isn’t that expensive either. Hell, I had a world-class guy at TRW who’s an expert on this stuff, used to work in SDIO downstairs. Alan Gregory, retired from the Army as a half-colonel, Ph.D. from Stony Brook, I think. Why not have him come in to check it out?”
It amazed Painter that Bretano, who’d run one major corporation and had almost been headhunted away to head Lockheed-Martin before President Ryan had intercepted him, had so little appreciation for procedure.
“Mr. Secretary, to do that, we have to—”
“My ass,” THUNDER interrupted. “I have discretionary authority over small amounts of money, don’t I?”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Painter confirmed.
“And I’ve sold all my stock in TRW, remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, I am not in violation of any of those f*cking ethics laws, am I?”
“No, sir,” Painter had to agree.
“Good, so call TRW in Sunnyvale, get Alan Gregory, I think he’s a junior vice president now, and tell him we need him to fly here right away and look into this, to see how easy it would be to upgrade Aegis to providing a limited ballistic-missile-defense capability.”
“Sir, it won’t make some of the other contractors happy.” Including, Painter did not add, TRW.
“I’m not here to make them happy, Admiral. Somebody told me I was here to defend the country efficiently.”
“Yes, sir.” It was hard not to like the guy, even if he did have the bureaucratic sensibilities of a pissed-off rhinoceros.
“So let’s find out if Aegis has the technical capabilities to do this particular job.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“What time do I have to drive up to the Hill?” the SecDef asked next.
“About thirty minutes, sir.”
Bretano grumbled. Half his working time seemed to be spent explaining things to Congress, talking to people who’d already made up their minds and who only asked questions to look good on C-SPAN. For Tony Bretano, an engineer’s engineer, it seemed like a hellishly unproductive way to spend his time. But they called it public service, didn’t they? In a slightly different context, it was called slavery, but Ryan was even more trapped than he was, leaving THUNDER with little room to complain. And besides, he’d volunteered, too.
They were eager enough, these Spetsnaz junior officers, and Clark remembered that what makes elite troops is often the simple act of telling them that they are elite—then waiting for them to live up to their own self-image. There was a little more to it, of course. The Spetsnaz were special in terms of their mission. Essentially they’d been copies of the British Special Air Service. As so often happened in military life, what one country invented, other countries tended to copy, and so the Soviet Army had selected troops for unusually good fitness tests and a high degree of political reliability—Clark never learned exactly how one tested for that characteristic—and then assigned them a different training regimen, turning them into commandos. The initial concept had failed for a reason predictable to anyone but the political leadership of the Soviet Union: The great majority of Soviet soldiers were drafted, served two years, then went back home. The average member of the British SAS wasn’t even considered for membership until he’d served four years and had corporal’s stripes, for the simple reason that it takes more than two years to learn to be a competent soldier in ordinary duties, much less the sort that required thinking under fire—yet another problem for the Soviets, who didn’t encourage independent thought for any of those in uniform, much less conscripted non-officers. To compensate for this, some clever weapons had been thought up. The spring-loaded knife was one with which Chavez had played earlier in the day. At the push of a button, it shot off the blade of a serious combat knife with a fair degree of accuracy over a range of five or six meters. But the Soviet engineer who’d come up with this idea must have been a movie watcher, because only in the movies do men fall silently and instantly dead from a knife in the chest. Most people find this experience painful, and most people respond to pain by making noise. As an instructor at The Farm, Clark had always warned, “Never cut a man’s throat with a knife. They flop around and make noise when you do that.”
By contrast, after all the thought and good engineering that had gone into the spring-knife, their pistol silencers were garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots, when manufacturing a decent suppressor required only about fifteen minutes of work from a semi-skilled machinist. John sighed to himself. There was no understanding these people.
But the individual troopers were just fine. He’d watched them run with Ding’s Team-2, and not one of the Russians fell out of the formation. Part of that had been pride, of course, but most of it had been ability. The shoot-house experience had been less impressive. They weren’t as carefully trained as the boys from Hereford, and not nearly so well equipped. Their supposedly suppressed weapons were sufficiently noisy to make John and Ding both jump ... but for all that, the eagerness of these kids was impressive. Every one of the Russians was a senior lieutenant in rank, and each was airborne-qualified. They all were pretty good with light weapons—and the Russian snipers were as good as Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber, much to the surprise of the latter. The Russian sniper rifles looked a little clunky, but they shot pretty well—at least out to eight hundred meters.
“Mr. C, they have a ways to go, but they got spirit. Two weeks, and they’ll be right on line,” Chavez pronounced, looking skeptically at the vodka. They were in a Russian officers’ club, and there was plenty of the stuff about.
“Only two?” John asked.
“In two weeks, they’ll have all their skills down pat, and they’ll master the new weapons.” RAINBOW was transferring five complete team-sets of weapons to the Russian Spetsnaz team: MP-10 submachine guns, Beretta .45 pistols, and most important, the radio gear that allowed the team to communicate even when under fire. The Russians were keeping their own Dragunov long-rifles, which was partly pride, but the things could shoot, and that was sufficient to the mission. “The rest is just experience, John, and we can’t really give ‘em that. All we can really do is set up a good training system for ’em, and the rest they’ll do for themselves.”
“Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn’t fight.” Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.
“Shame their country’s in such a mess,” Chavez observed.
“It’s their mess to clean up, Domingo. They’ll do it if we keep out of their way.” Probably, John didn’t add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He’d been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an “illegal” field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he’d been back in the ‘70s and ’80s. Jesus, the chances he’d taken back then! More recently, he’d been in KGB—to him it would always be KGB—headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he’d hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.
“Ivan Sergeyevich!” a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces—a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.
“Yuriy Andreyevich,” Clark responded. He’d kept his given name and patronymic from his CIA cover as a convenience that, he was sure, the Russians knew all about anyway. So, no harm was done. He lifted a vodka bottle. It was apple vodka, flavored by some apple skins at the bottom of the bottle, and not bad to the taste. In any case, vodka was the fuel for any sort of business meeting in Russia, and since he was in Rome it was time to act Italian.
Kirillin gunned down his first shot as though he’d been waiting all week for it. He refilled and toasted John’s companion: “Domingo Stepanovich,” which was close enough. Chavez reciprocated the gesture. “Your men are excellent, comrades. We will learn much from them.”
Comrades, John thought. Son of a bitch! “Your boys are eager, Yuriy, and hard workers.”
“How long?” Kirillin asked. His eyes didn’t show the vodka one little bit. Perhaps they were immune, Ding thought. He had to go easy on the stuff, lest John have to guide him home.
“Two weeks,” Clark answered. “That’s what Domingo tells me.”
“That fast?” Kirillin asked, not displeased by the estimate.
“They’re good troops, General,” Ding said. “Their basic skills are there. They’re in superb physical condition, and they’re smart. All they need is familiarization with their new weapons, and some more directed training that we’ll set up for them. And after that, they’ll be training the rest of your forces, right?”
“Correct, Major. We will be establishing regional special-operations and counterterror forces throughout the country. The men you train this week will be training others in a few months. The problem with the Chechens came as a surprise to us, and we need to pay serious attention to terrorism as a security threat.”
Clark didn’t envy Kirillin the mission. Russia was a big country containing too many leftover nationalities from the Soviet Union—and for that matter from the time of the czars—many of whom had never particularly liked the idea of being part of Russia. America had had the problem once, but never to the extent that the Russians did, and here it wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon. Economic prosperity was the only sure cure—prosperous people don’t squabble; it’s too rough on the china and the silverware—but prosperity was a way off in the future yet.
“Well, sir,” Chavez went on, “in a year you’ll have a serious and credible force, assuming you have the funding support you’re going to need.”
Kirillin grunted. “That is the question here, and probably in your country as well, yes?”
“Yeah.” Clark had himself a laugh. “It helps if Congress loves you.”
“You have many nationalities on your team,” the Russian general observed.
“Yeah, well, we’re mainly a NATO service, but we’re used to working together. Our best shooter now is Italian.”
“Really? I saw him, but—”
Chavez cut him off. “General, in a previous life, Ettore was James Butler Hickok. Excuse me, Wild Bill Hickok to you. That son of a bitch can sign his name with a handgun.”
Clark refilled the vodka glasses. “Yuriy, he’s won money off all of us at the pistol range. Even me.”
“Is that a fact?” Kirillin mused, with the same look in his eyes that Clark had had a few weeks earlier. John punched him on the arm.
“I know what you’re thinking. Bring money when you have your match with him, Comrade General,” John advised. “You’ll need it to pay off his winnings.”
“This I must see,” the Russian announced.
“Hey, Eddie!” Chavez waved his number-two over.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell the general here how good Ettore is with a pistol.”
“That f*cking Eyetalian!” Sergeant Major Price swore. “He’s even taken twenty pounds off Dave Woods.”
“Dave’s the range-master at Hereford, and he’s pretty good, too,” Ding explained. “Ettore really ought to be in the Olympics or something—maybe Camp Perry, John?”
“I thought of that, maybe enter him in the President’s Cup match next year . . .” Clark mused. Then he turned. “Go ahead, Yuriy. Take him on. Maybe you will succeed where all of us failed.”
“All of you, eh?”
“Every bloody one of us,” Eddie Price confirmed. “I wonder why the Italian government gave him to us. If the Mafia want to go after him, I wish the bastards luck.”
“This I must see,” Kirillin persisted, leading his visitors to wonder how smart he was.
“Then you will see it, Tovarisch General,” Clark promised.
Kirillin, who’d been on the Red Army pistol team as a lieutenant and a captain, couldn’t conceive of being beaten in a pistol match. He figured these NATO people were just having fun with him, as he might do if the situation were reversed. He waved to the bartender and ordered pepper vodka for his own next round. But all that said, he liked these NATO visitors, and their reputation spoke forcefully for itself. This Chavez, a major—he was really CIA, Kirillin knew, and evidently a good spy at that, according to his briefing from the SVR—had the look of a good soldier, with confidence won in the field, the way a soldier ought to win his confidence. Clark was much the same—and also very capable, so the book on him read—with his own ample experience both as a soldier and a spy. And his spoken Russian was superb and very literate, his accent of St. Petersburg, where he probably could—and probably once or twice had, Kirillin reflected—pass for a native. It was so strange that such men as these had once been his sworn enemies. Had battle happened, it would have been bloody, and its outcome very sad. Kirillin had spent three years in Afghanistan, and had learned firsthand just how horrid a thing combat was. He’d heard the stories from his father, a much-decorated infantry general, but hearing them wasn’t the same as seeing, and besides, you never told the really awful parts because you tended to edit them out of your memory. One did not discuss seeing a friend’s face turn to liquid from a rifle bullet over a few drinks in a bar, because it was just not the sort of thing you could describe to one who didn’t understand, and you didn’t need to describe it to one who did. You just lifted your glass to toast the memory of Grisha or Mirka, or one of the others, and in the community of arms, that was enough. Did these men do it? Probably. They’d lost men once, when Irish terrorists had attacked their own home station, to their ultimate cost, but not without inflicting their own harm on highly trained men.
And that was the essence of the profession of arms right there. You trained to skew the odds your way, but you could never quite turn them all the way in the direction you wished.
Yu Chun had experienced a thoroughly vile day. In the city of Taipei to look after her aged and seriously ill mother, she’d had a neighbor call urgently, telling her to switch on her TV, then seen her husband shot dead before her blinking eyes. And that had just been the first hammer blow of the day.
The next one involved getting to Beijing. The first two flights to Hong Kong were fully booked, and that cost her fourteen lonely and miserable hours sitting in the terminal as an anonymous face in a sea of such faces, alone with her horror and additional loneliness, until she finally boarded a flight to the PRC capital. That flight had been bumpy, and she had cowered in her last-row window seat, hoping that no one could see the anguish on her face, but hiding it as well as she might conceal an earthquake. In due course, that trial had ended, and she managed to leave the aircraft, and actually made it through immigration and customs fairly easily because she carried virtually nothing that could conceal contraband. Then it started all over again with the taxi to her home.
Her home was hidden behind a wall of policemen. She tried to pass through their line as one might wiggle through a market checkout, but the police had orders to admit no one into the house, and those orders did not include an exception for anyone who might actually live there. That took twenty minutes and three policemen of gradually increasing rank to determine. By this time, she’d been awake for twenty-six hours and traveling for twenty-two of them. Tears did not avail her in the situation, and she staggered her way to the nearby home of a member of her husband’s congregation, Wen Zhong, a man who operated a small restaurant right in his home, a tall and rotund man, ordinarily jolly, liked by all who met him. Seeing Chun, he embraced her and took her into his home, at once giving her a room in which to sleep and a few drinks to help her relax. Yu Chin was asleep in minutes, and would remain that way for some hours, while Wen figured he had his own things to do. About the only thing Chun had managed to say before collapsing from exhaustion was that she wanted to bring Fa An’s body home for proper burial. That Wen couldn’t do all by himself, but he called a number of his fellow parishioners to let them know that their pastor’s widow was in town. He understood that the burial would be on the island of Taiwan, which was where Yu had been born, but his congregation could hardly bid their beloved spiritual leader farewell without a ceremony of its own, and so he called around to arrange a memorial service at their small place of worship. He had no way of knowing that one of the parishioners he called reported directly to the Ministry of State Security.
Barry Wise was feeling pretty good about himself. While he didn’t make as much money as his colleagues at the other so-called “major” networks—CNN didn’t have an entertainment division to dump money into news—he figured that he was every bit as well known as their (white) talking heads, and he stood out from them by being a serious newsie who went into the field, found his own stories, and wrote his own copy. Barry Wise did the news, and that was all. He had a pass to the White House press room, and was considered in just about every capital city in the world not only as a reporter with whom you didn’t trifle, but also as an honest conveyor of information. He was by turns respected and hated, depending on the government and the culture. This government, he figured, had little reason to love him. To Barry Wise, they were f*cking barbarians. The police here had delusions of godhood that evidently devolved from the big shots downtown who must have thought their dicks were pretty big because they could make so many people dance to their tune. To Wise, that was the sign of a little one, instead, but you didn’t tell them that out loud, because, small or not, they had cops with guns, and the guns were certainly big enough.
But these people had huge weaknesses, Wise also knew. They saw the world in a distorted way, like people with astigmatism, and assumed that was its real shape. They were like scientists in a lab who couldn’t see past their own theories and kept trying to twist the experimental data into the proper result—or ended up ignoring the data which their theory couldn’t explain.
But that was going to change. Information was getting in. In allowing free-market commerce, the government of the PRC had also allowed the installation of a forest of telephone lines. Many of them were connected to fax machines, and even more were connected to computers, and so lots of information was circulating around the country now. Wise wondered if the government appreciated the implications of that. Probably not. Neither Marx nor Mao had really understood how powerful a thing information was, because it was the place where one found the Truth, once you rooted through it a little, and Truth wasn’t Theory. Truth was the way things really were, and that’s what made it a son of a bitch. You could deny it, but only at your peril, because sooner or later the son of a bitch would bite you on the ass. Denying it just made the inevitable bite worse, because the longer you put it off, the wider its jaws got. The world had changed quite a bit since CNN had started up. As late as 1980, a country could deny anything, but CNN’s signals, the voice and the pictures, came straight down from the satellite. You couldn’t deny pictures worth a damn.
And that made Barry Wise the croupier in the casino of Information and Truth. He was an honest dealer—he had to be in order to survive in the casino, because the customers demanded it. In the free marketplace of ideas, Truth always won in the end, because it didn’t need anything else to prop it up. Truth stood by itself, and sooner or later the wind would blow the props away from all the bullshit.
It was a noble enough profession, Wise thought. His mission in life was reporting history, and along the way, he got to make a little of it himself—or at least to help—and for that reason he was feared by those who thought that defining history was their exclusive domain. The thought often made him smile to himself. He’d helped a little the other day, Wise thought, with those two churchmen. He didn’t know where it would lead. That was the work of others.
He still had more work of his own to do in China.