own industrial empire, and that empire keeps the generals rich and fat and happy. And I saw how the ministers use women, and how they furnish their apartments. They’ve become the new emperors. They have too much power. Perhaps a woman could use such power without being corrupted, but not a man.”
Feminism’s made it over here, too? Nomuri reflected. Maybe she was too young to remember Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who could have given corruption lessons to the court of Byzantium.
“Well, that is not a problem for people like us. And at least you get to see such things, and at least you get to know it. That makes you even more unique, Ming-chan,” Nomuri suggested, tracing the palm of his hand over her left nipple. She shivered right on command.
“You think so?”
“Of course.” A kiss this time, a nice lingering one, while his hand stroked her body. He was so close. She had told him of all the information she had—she’d even given him the fucking encryption key! So her ’puter was wired into the phone system—that meant he could call in to it, and with the right software he could go snooping around her hard drive, and with the encryption key he could lift things right off, and cross-load them right to Mary Pat’s desk. Damn, first I get to fuck a Chinese citizen, and then I can fuck their whole country. It didn’t get much better than this, the field spook decided, with a smile at the ceiling.
CHAPTER 13
Penetration Agent
Well, he left the prurient parts out this time, Mary Pat saw when she lit up her computer in the morning. Operation SORGE was moving right along. Whoever this Ming girl was, she talked a little too much. Odd. Hadn’t the MSS briefed all the executive secretaries about this sort of thing? Probably—it would have been a remarkable oversight if they hadn’t—but it also seemed likely that of the well-known reasons for committing treason and espionage (known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego), this one was Ego. Young Miss Ming was being used sexually by her Minister Fang, and she didn’t much like it, and that made perfect sense to Mary Patricia Foley. A woman only had so much to give, and to have it taken coercively by a man of power wasn’t something calculated to make a woman happy—though ironically the powerful man in question probably thought he was honoring her with his biological attention. After all, was he not a great man, and was she not a peasant? The thought was good for a snort as she took a sip of morning seventh-floor coffee. It didn’t matter what culture or race, men were all the same, weren’t they? So many of them thought from the dick instead of the brain. Well, it was going to cost this one dearly, the Deputy Director (Operations) concluded.
Ryan saw and heard the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, every day. It covered intelligence information developed by CIA, was prepared late every night and printed early every morning, and there were less than a hundred copies, almost all of which were shredded and burned later in the day of delivery. A few copies, maybe three or four, were kept as archives, in case the electronic files somehow got corrupted, but even President Ryan didn’t know where the secure-storage site was. He hoped it was carefully guarded, preferably by Marines.
The PDB didn’t contain everything, of course. Some things were so secret that even the President couldn’t be trusted. That was something Ryan accepted with remarkable equanimity. Sources’ names had to remain secret, even from him, and methods were often so narrowly technical that he’d have trouble understanding the technology used anyway. But even some of the “take,” the information obtained by the CIA through nameless sources and overly intricate methods, was occasionally hidden from the Chief Executive, because some information had to come from a certain limited number of sources. The intelligence business was one in which the slightest mistake could end the life of a priceless asset, and while such things had happened, nobody had ever felt good about it—though to some politicians, it had been a matter of infuriating indifference. A good field spook viewed his agents as his own children, whose lives were to be protected against all hazards. Such a point of view was necessary. If you didn’t care that much, then people died—and with their lost lives went lost information, which was the whole point of having