Ed Foley seen this yet?”
“I called it in, and sent the fax over. So, yeah, he’s seen it.”
“Pat?” Ryan turned to the Attorney General, the smartest lawyer Ryan had yet met, and that included all of his Supreme Court appointees.
“Mr. President, this is a stunning revelation, again, if we assume it’s true, and not some sort of false-flag provocation, or a play by the Russians to make something happen—problem is, I can’t see the rationale for such a thing. We appear to be faced with something that’s too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false as well. I’ve worked foreign counterintelligence operations for a long time. I’ve never seen nothing like this before. We’ve always had an understanding with the Russians that they wouldn’t hit anybody in Washington, and we wouldn’t hit anybody in Moscow, and to the best of my knowledge that agreement was never violated by either side. But this thing here. If it’s real, it’s tantamount to an act of war. That doesn’t seem like a very prudent thing for the Chinese to do either, does it?”
POTUS looked up from the fax. “It says here that your guy Reilly turned the connection with the Chinese ... ?”
“Keep reading,” Murray told him. “He was there during a surveillance and just kinda volunteered his services, and—bingo.”
“But can the Chinese really be this crazy...” Ryan’s voice trailed off. “This isn’t the Russians messing with our heads?” he asked.
“What would be the rationale behind that?” Martin asked. “If there is one, I don’t see it.”
“Guys, nobody is this crazy!” POTUS nearly exploded. It was penetrating all the way into his mind now. The world wasn’t rational yet.
“Again, sir, that’s something you’re better equipped to evaluate than we are,” Martin observed. It had the effect of calming Jack down a few notches.
“All the time I spent at Langley, I saw a lot of strange material, but this one really takes the prize.”
“What do we know about the Chinese?” Murray asked, expecting to hear a reply along the lines of jack shit, because the Bureau had not experienced conspicuous success in its efforts to penetrate Chinese intelligence operations in America, and figured that the Agency had the same problem and for much the same reason—Americans of Chinese ethnicity weren’t thick in government service. But instead he saw that President Ryan instantly adopted a guarded look and said nothing. Murray had interviewed thousands of people during his career and along the way had picked up the ability to read minds a little bit. He read Ryan’s right then and wondered about what he saw there.
“Not enough, Dan. Not enough,” Ryan replied tardily. His mind was still churning over this report. Pat Martin had put it right. It was too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false. He needed the Foleys to go over this for him, and it was probably time to get Professor Weaver down from Brown University, assuming Ed and Mary Pat wouldn’t throw a complete hissy-fit over letting him into both SORGE and this FBI bombshell. SWORDSMAN wasn’t sure of much right now, but he was sure that he needed to figure this stuff out, and do it damned fast. American relations with China had just gone down the shitter, and now he had information to suggest they were making a direct attack on the Russian government. Ryan looked up at his guests. “Thanks for this, guys. If you have anything else to tell me, let me know quick as you can. I have to ponder this one.”
“Yeah, I believe it, Jack. I’ve told Reilly to offer all the assistance he can and report back. They know he’s doing that, of course. So, your pal Golovko wants you to know this one. How you handle that one’s up to you, I suppose.”
“Yeah, I get all the simple calls.” Jack managed a smile. The worst part was the inability to talk things over with people in a timely way. Things like this weren’t for the telephone. You wanted to see a guy’s face and body language when you picked his brain—her brain, in MP’s case—on a topic like this one. He hoped George Weaver was as smart as everyone said. Right now he needed a witch.
The new security pass was entirely different from his old SDI one, and he was heading for a different Pentagon office. This was the Navy section of the Pentagon. You could tell by all the blue suits and serious looks. Each