here with me. You’re on speaker.”
“Sir, I made the delivery. Minister Shen hardly blinked. He said he’d get back to us soon, but not exactly when, after he talked it over with his Politburo colleagues. Aside from that, not much of a reaction at all. I can fax you the transcript in about half an hour. The meeting didn’t last ten minutes.”
Adler looked over at Hitch, who shook his head and didn’t look happy at the news.
“Bill, how was his body language?” Hitch asked.
“Like he was on Prozac, Carl. No physical reaction at all.”
“Shen tends to be a little hyperactive,” Hitch explained. “Sometimes he has trouble sitting still. Conclusions, Bill?”
“I’m worried,” Kilmer replied at once. “I think we have a problem here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kilmer. Send the fax quick as you can.” Adler punched the phone button and looked at his guest. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. How soon will we know how they’re going to react to this?”
“Tomorrow morning, I hope, we—”
“We have a source inside their government?” Hitch asked. The blank look he got in reply was answer enough.
Thanks, Scott,” Ryan said, hanging up the phone. He was back in the Oval Office now, sitting in his personally-fitted swivel chair, which was about as comfortable as any artifact could make him. It didn’t help much at the moment, but he supposed it was one less thing to worry about.
“So?”
“So, we wait to see if SORGE tells us anything.”
“SORGE?” Professor Weaver asked.
“Dr. Weaver, we have a sensitive source of information that sometimes gives us information on what their Politburo is thinking,” Ed Foley told the academic. “And that information does not leave this room.”
“Understood.” Academic or not, Weaver played by the rules. “That’s the name for the special stuff you’ve been showing me?”
“Correct.”
“It’s a hell of a source, whoever it is. It reads like a tape of their meetings, captures their personalities, especially Zhang. He’s the real bad actor here. He’s got Premier Xu pretty well wrapped around his little finger.”
“Adler’s met him, during the shuttle talks after the Airbus shoot-down at Taipei,” Ryan said.
“And?” Weaver asked. He knew the name and the words, but not the man.
“And he’s powerful and not a terribly nice chap,” the President answered. “He had a role in our conflict with Japan, and also the fracas with the UIR last year.”
“Machiavelli?”
“That’s pretty close, more a theoretician than a lead actor, the man-behind-the-throne sort of guy. Not an ideologue per se, but a guy who likes to play in the real world—patriot, Ed?” Ryan asked the DCI.
“We’ve had our pshrink profile him.” Foley shrugged. “Part sociopath, part political operator. A guy who enjoys the exercise of power. No known personal weaknesses. Sexually active, but a lot of their Politburo members are. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, eh, Weaver?”
“Mao was like that, as we all know. The emperors used to have rather large stables of concubines.”
“That’s what people did before TV, I suppose,” Arnie van Damm observed.
“Actually that’s not far from the truth,” Weaver agreed. “The carryover to today is cultural, and it’s a fundamental form of personal power that some people like to exercise. Women’s lib hasn’t made it into the PRC yet.”
“I must be too Catholic,” the President thought aloud. “The idea of Mao popping little girls makes my skin crawl.”
“They didn’t mind, Mr. President,” Weaver told him. “Some would bring their little sisters over after they got in bed with the Great Leader. It’s a different culture, and it has different rules from ours.”
“Yeah, just a little different,” observed the father of two daughters, one just starting to date. What would the fathers of those barely nubile little girls have thought? Honored to have their daughters deflowered by the great Mao Zedong? Ryan had a minor chill from the thought, and dismissed it. “Do they care about human life at all? What about their soldiers?”
“Mr. President, the Judeo-Christian Bible wasn’t drafted in China, and efforts by missionaries to get Christianity going over there were not terribly successful—and when Mao came along, he suppressed it fairly effectively, as we saw again recently. Their view of man’s place in nature is different from ours, and, no, they do not value a single human life as we do. We’re talking here about communists who view everything through a political lens, and that is over and above a culture in which a human life had little import. So, you could say it’s a very infelicitous confluence of belief systems from our point of view.”
Infelicitous, Ryan thought, there’s a delicate