did, of course, don the jacket for important meetings with foreign dignitaries, but he didn’t think internal meetings were important enough to be uncomfortable for.
That suited George Winston, who tossed his coat over a chair when he came in. Like himself, Scott Adler was a working guy, and those were the people with whom Winston was most comfortable. He might be a career government puke, but the son of a bitch had a work ethic, which was more than he could say for too many of the people in his own department. He was doing his best to weed the drones out, but it was no easy task, and civil-service rules made firing unproductive people a non-trivial exercise.
“Have you read the Chinese stuff?” Adler asked, as soon as the lunch tray was on the table.
“Yeah, Scott. I mean, holy shit, fella,” TRADER observed to EAGLE.
“Welcome to the club. The intelligence stuff we get can be very interesting.” The State Department had its own spook service, called Intelligence and Research, or I&R, which, while it didn’t exactly compete with CIA and the other services, occasionally turned up its own rough little diamonds from the thick diplomatic mud. “So, what do you think of our little yellow brothers?”
Winston managed not to growl. “Buddy, I might not even eat their goddamned food anymore.”
“They make our worst robber barons look like Mother Teresa. They’re conscienceless motherfuckers, George, and that’s a fact.” Winston immediately started liking Adler more. A guy who talked like this had real possibilities. Now it was his turn to be coldly professional to counterpoint Adler’s working-class patois.
“They’re ideologically driven, then?”
“Totally—well, maybe with a little corruption thrown in, but remember, they figure that their political astuteness entitles them to live high on the hog, and so to them it’s not corruption at all. They just collect tribute from the peasants, and ‘peasant’ is a word they still use over there.”
“In other words, we’re dealing with dukes and earls?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Essentially, yes. They have an enormous sense of personal entitlement. They are not used to hearing the word ‘no’ in any form, and as a result they don’t always know what to do when they do hear it from people like me. That’s why they’re often at a disadvantage in negotiations—at least, when we play hardball with them. We haven’t done much of that, but last year, after the Airbus shoot-down I came on a little strong, and then we followed up with official diplomatic recognition of the ROC government on Taiwan. That really put the PRC noses seriously out of joint, even though the ROC government hasn’t officially declared its independence.”
“What?” Somehow SecTreas had missed that.
“Yeah, the people on Taiwan play a pretty steady and reasonable game. They’ve never really gone out of their way to offend the mainland. Even though they have embassies all over the world, they’ve never actually proclaimed the fact that they’re an independent nation. That would flip the Beijing Chinese out. Maybe the guys in Taipei think it would be bad manners or something. At the same time, we have an understanding that Beijing knows about. If somebody messes with Taiwan, Seventh Fleet comes over to keep an eye on things, and we will not permit a direct military threat to the Republic of China government. The PRC doesn’t have enough of a navy to worry our guys that much, and so all that flies back and forth, really, is words.” Adler looked up from his sandwich. “Sticks and stones, y‘know?”
“Well, I had breakfast with Jack this morning, and we talked about the trade talks.”
“And Jack wants to play a little rougher?” SecState asked. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Ryan had always preferred fair play, and that was often a rare commodity in the intercourse among nation-states.
“You got it,” Winston confirmed around a bite of his sandwich. One thing about working-class people like Adler, the SecTreas thought, they knew what a proper lunch was. He was so tired of fairyfied French food for lunch. Lunch was supposed to be a piece of meat with bread wrapped around it. French cuisine was just fine, but for dinner, not for lunch.
“How rough?”
“We get what we want. We need them to get accustomed to the idea that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them.”
“That’s a tall order, George. If they don’t want to listen?”
“Knock louder on the door, or on their heads. Scott, you read the same document this morning