to show it to Scott Adler?”
“That’s our recommendation,” the DCI agreed. “Adler is pretty good at figuring people out, and his take on some of this—especially page five—will be very interesting. Tony Bretano, too.”
“Okay, that’s EAGLE and THUNDER. Who else?” Ryan asked.
“That’s all for now,” Ed Foley said, with a nod from his wife. “Mr. Pres—”
Ryan’s eyes flared a little. “My name is ...”
The DCI held up his hand. “Okay. Jack, let’s keep this one real close for a while. We’ll figure a way to launder the information so that some others can know what we’ve learned. But not how. Not ever that. SONGBIRD’S too precious an asset to lose.”
“This is potentially right up there with CARDINAL, isn’t it?”
“Maybe even better, Jack,” Mary Pat said. “This is like having a bug in the boardroom, and we’ve streamlined our methods on this one. We’re being very, very careful with this source.”
“Okay, what about analysts?” Ben Goodley asked. “Our best guy with the PRC is Professor Weaver up at Brown University. You know him, Ed.”
Foley nodded. “Yeah, I know him, but let’s hold off for a while. We have a pretty good guy in-house. Let me see what he can develop for us before we start farming things out. By the way, we’re looking at something like a total of fifteen hundred printed pages from this source, plus daily information from now on.”
Ryan looked up at that one. Daily information. How the hell had they arranged that? Back to business, he told himself. “Okay, for one thing, I want an evaluation of the Zhang Han San character,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen this bastard’s name before. He started two wars we got pulled into. What the hell is he all about?”
“We have a psychiatrist on staff to work on that,” Mary Foley replied. After, she didn’t say, we scrub this information clean of source-related material. “He does our profiling.”
“Okay, yeah, I remember him.” Ryan nodded agreement on this point. “Anything else?”
“Just the usual,” Ed Foley said as he stood. “Don’t leave these documents on your desk, okay?”
They all nodded agreement. They all had personal safes for that purpose, and every one was wired into the Secret Service command center, and was on round-the-clock TV surveillance. The White House was a good place to store documents, and besides, the secretaries were cleared higher than God. Mary Pat left the office with a special spring in her step. Ryan waved for his Vice President to stay as the rest walked toward the West Entrance.
“What do you think?” SWORDSMAN asked TOMCAT.
“This looks pretty damned hot, Jack. Jesus, boy, how the hell do they get stuff like this?”
“If they ever get around to telling me, I can’t tell you, Rob, and I’m not sure I want to know. It isn’t always pretty.”
The retired fighter pilot agreed. “I believe it. Not quite the same as catapulting off the boat and shooting the bastard in the lips, is it?”
“But just as important.”
“Hey, Jack, I know. Battle of Midway, like. Joe Rochefort and his band of merry men at FRUPAC back in ’42 saved our country a lot of hassles with our little yellow friends in WestPac when they told Nimitz what was coming.”
“Yeah, Robby, well, looks like we have more of the same sort of friends. If there’s operational stuff in here, I want your opinion of it.”
“I can do that already. Their army and what passes for a navy are talking in the open about how they take us on, how to counter carriers and stuff like that. It’s mostly pipe dreams and self-delusion, but my question is, why the hell are they putting this in the open? Maybe to impress the unwashed of the world—reporters and the other idiots who don’t know shit about war at sea—and maybe to impress their own people with how smart and how tough they are. Maybe to put more heat on the ROC government on Taiwan, but if they want to invade, they have something to do first, like building a real navy with real amphibious capability. But that would take ten years, and we’d probably notice all the big gray canoes in the water. They’ve got some submarines, and the Russians, of all people, are selling them hardware—just forked over a Sovremenny-class DDG, complete with Sunburn missiles, supposedly. Exactly what they want to do with them, I have no idea. It’s not the way I’d build up a navy, but they didn’t ask me for advice. What freaks me is,