The Bear and the Dragon - By Tom Clancy Page 0,336

two or three million people had never done.

If there were such a thing as ghosts, they’d spoken to him without words, but done it in one voice: Never again. And silently, Ryan agreed. Not while he lived. Not while America lived.

CHAPTER 46

Journey Home

They waited for SORGE, and rarely had anyone waited more expectantly even for the arrival of a firstborn child. There was a little drama to it, too, because SORGE didn’t deliver every day, and they could not always see a pattern when it appeared and when it didn’t. Ed and Mary Pat Foley both awoke early that morning, and lay in bed for over an hour with nothing to do, then finally arose to drink their breakfast coffee and read the papers in the kitchen of their middle-class home in suburban Virginia. The kids went off to school, and then the parents finished dressing and walked out to their “company” car, complete with driver and escort vehicle. The odd part was that their car was guarded but their house was not, and so a terrorist only had to be smart enough to attack the house, which was not all that hard. The Early Bird was waiting for them in the car, but it had little attraction for either of them this morning. The comic strips in the Post had been more interesting, especially “Non Sequitur,” their favorite morning chuckle, and the sports pages.

“What do you think?” Mary Pat asked Ed. That managed to surprise him, since his wife didn’t often ask his opinion of a field-operations question.

He shrugged as they passed a Dunkin’ Donuts box. “Coin toss, Mary.”

“I suppose. I sure hope it comes up heads this time.”

“Jack’s going to ask us in ... an hour and a half, I suppose.”

“Something like that,” the DDO agreed in a breathy voice.

“The NATO thing ought to work, ought to make them think things over,” the DCI thought aloud.

“Don’t bet the ranch on it, honey bunny,” Mary Pat warned.

“I know.” Pause. “When does Jack get on the airplane to come home?”

She checked her watch. “About two hours.”

“We should know by then.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Ten minutes later, informed of the shape of the world en route by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, they arrived at Langley, again parking in the underground garage, and again taking the elevator up to the seventh floor, where, again, they split up, going to their separate offices. In this, Ed surprised his wife. She’d expected him to hover over her shoulder as she flipped on her office computer, looking for another brownie recipe, as she called it. This happened at seven-fifty-four.

“You’ve got mail,” the electronic voice announced as she accessed her special Internet account. Her hand wasn’t quite shaking when she moved the mouse to click on the proper icon, but nearly so. The letter came up, went through the descrambling process, and came up as clear-text she couldn’t read. As always, MP saved the document to her hard drive, confirmed that it was saved, then printed up a hard copy, and finally deleted the letter from her electronic in-box, completely erasing it off the Internet. Then she lifted her phone.

“Please have Dr. Sears come up right away,” she told her secretary.

Joshua Sears had also come in early this morning, and was sitting at his desk reading the New York Times financial page when the call came. He was in the elevator in under a minute, and then in the office of the Deputy Director (Operations).

“Here,” Mary Pat said, handing over the six pages of ideographs. “Take a seat.”

Sears sat in a comfortable chair and started his translation. He could see that the DDO was a little exercised about this, and his initial diagnosis came as he turned to page two.

“This isn’t good news,” he said, without looking up. “Looks like Zhang is guiding Premier Xu in the direction he wants. Fang is uneasy about it, but he’s going along, too. Marshal Luo is fully on the team. I guess that’s to be expected. Luo’s always been a hardball guy,” Sears commented. “Talk here’s about operational security, concern that we might know what they’re up to—but they think they’re secure,” Sears assured the DDO.

As many times as she’d heard that sort of thing, it never failed to give her a severe case of the chills, hearing the enemy (to Mary Pat nearly everyone was an enemy) discuss the very possibility that she’d devoted her entire professional life to realizing. And almost always you heard their voices saying that,