covered under other transitory code names randomly chosen by a computer in the basement, but only Sears would know the whole story—and, in fact, he didn’t even know that, did he? What he knew might—probably would—be enough to get this Ming woman killed, once the MSS realized who’d had access to the information. They could do some things in Washington to protect her, but not much.
Nomuri rose early in his Beijing apartment, and the second thing he did was to log on to check his e-mail. There it was, number seven in the list, one from patsbakery@brownienet.com. He selected the decryption system and typed in the key ... so, the pages had all been received. That was good. Nomuri dragged the message he’d dispatched to the “wipe-info” bin, where Norton Utilities not only deleted the file, but also five times electronically scrubbed the disk segments where they’d briefly resided, so that the files could never be recovered by any attempt, no matter how skilled. Next he eliminated the record of having sent any e-mail to brownienet. Now there was no record whatever of his having done anything, unless his telephone line was tapped, which he didn’t really suspect. And even then the data was scrambled, fully encrypted, and thus not recoverable. No, the only dangers in the operation now attached to Ming. His part of it, being the spymaster, was protected by the method in which her desktop computer called him, and from now on those messages would be sent out to brownienet automatically, and erased the same way, in a matter of seconds. It would take a very clever counterintelligence operation to hurt Nomuri now.
CHAPTER 15
Exploitation
What’s this mean, Ben?” Ryan asked, seeing a change in his morning schedule.
“Ed and Mary Pat want to talk something over with you. They didn’t say what it was,” Goodley replied. “The Vice President can be here, too, and me, but that’s it, they requested.”
“Some new kind of toilet paper in the Kremlin, I suppose,” POTUS said. It was a long-standing CIA joke from Ryan’s time in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. He stirred his coffee and leaned back in his comfortable chair. “Okay, what else is happening in the world, Ben?”
So, this is mao-tai?” Cardinal DiMilo asked. He didn’t add that he’d been given to understand that Baptists didn’t drink alcoholic beverages. Odd, considering that Jesus’ first public miracle had been to change water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. But Christianity had many faces. In any case, the mao-tai was vile, worse than the cheapest grappa. With advancing years, the Cardinal preferred gentler drinks. It was much easier on the stomach.
“I should not drink this,” Yu admitted, “but it is part of my heritage.”
“I know of no passage in Holy Scripture that prohibits this particular human weakness,” the Catholic said. And besides, wine was part of the Catholic liturgy. He saw that his Chinese host barely sipped at his tiny cup. Probably better for his stomach, too, the Italian reasoned.
He’d have to get used to the food, too. A gourmet like many Italians, Renato Cardinal DiMilo found that the food in Beijing was not as good as he’d experienced in Rome’s numerous Chinese restaurants. The problem, he thought, was the quality of the ingredients rather than the cook. In this case, the Reverand Yu’s wife was away in Taiwan to see her sick mother, he’d said, apologizing on the Catholic’s arrival. Monsignor Schepke had taken over the serving, rather like a young lieutenant-aide serving the needs of his general, Yu had thought, watching the drama play out with some amusement. The Catholics certainly had their bureaucratic ways. But this Renato fellow was a decent sort, clearly an educated man, and a trained diplomat from whom Yu realized he might learn much.
“So, you cook for yourself. How did you learn?”
“Most Chinese men know how. We learn from our parents as children.”
DiMilo smiled. “I, as well, but I have not cooked for myself in years. The older I get the less they allow me to do for myself, eh, Franz?”
“I have my duties also, Eminence,” the German answered. He was drinking the mao-tai with a little more gusto. Must be nice to have a young stomach lining, both the older men thought.
“So, how do you find Beijing?” Yu asked.
“Truly fascinating. We Romans think that our city is ancient and redolent with history, but Chinese culture was old before the Romans set one stone upon another. And the art we