Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (70 page)

“Jack, this is getting rather serious,” Golovko said. “By the way, our officer met with your officers. He reports favorably on them—and thank you, by the way, for the copy of their report. It included data we did not have. Not vitally important, but interesting even so. So tell me, do they know to seek out these rockets?”

“The order went out,” Ryan assured him.

“To my people as well, Ivan Emmetovich. We will find them, never fear,” Golovko felt the need to add. He had to be thinking the same thing: the only reason the missiles had not been used was that both sides had possessed them, because it was like threatening a mirror. That was no longer true, was it? And so came Ryan's question:

“And then what?” he asked darkly. “What do we do then?”

“Do you not say in your language, 'One thing at a time'?”

Isn't this just great? Now I have a friggin' Russian trying to cheer me up!

“Thank you, Sergey Nikolay'ch. Perhaps I deserved that as well.”

•     •     •

“So why did we sell Citibank?” George Winston asked.

“Well, he said to look out for banks that were vulnerable to currency fluctuations,” Gant replied. “He was right. We got out just in time I think, see for yourself.” The trader typed another instruction into his terminal and was rewarded with a graphic depiction of what First National City Bank stock had done on Friday, and sure enough it had dropped off the table in one big hurry, largely because
Columbus
, which had purchased the issue in large quantities over the preceding five weeks, had held quite a bit, and in selling it had shaken faith in the stock badly. “Anyway, that set off an alarm in our program—”

“Mark, Citibank is one of the benchmark stocks in the model, isn't it?” Winston asked calmly. There was nothing to be gained by leaning on Mark too hard.

“Oh.” His eyes opened a little wider. “Well, yes, it is, isn't it?”

That was when a very bright light blinked on in Winston's mind. It was not widely known how the “expert systems” kept track of the market. They worked in several interactive ways, monitoring both the market as a whole and also modeling benchmark stocks more closely, as general indicators of developing market trends. Those were stocks which over time had tracked closely with what everything else was doing, with a bias toward general stability, those that both dropped and rose more slowly than more speculative issues, steady performers. There were two reasons for it, and one glaring mistake. The reasons were that while the market fluctuated every day, even in the most favorable of circumstances, the idea was to not only bag an occasional killing on a high-flyer, but also to hedge your money on safe stocks—not that any stock was truly safe, as Friday had proven—when everything else became unsettled. For those reasons, the benchmark stocks were those that over time had provided safe havens. The mistake was a common one: dice have no memory. Those benchmark stocks were such because the companies they represented had historically good management. Management could change over time. So it was not the stocks that were stable. It was the management, and that was only something from the past, whose currency had to be examined periodically—despite which, those stocks were used to grade trends. And a trend was a trend only because people thought it was, and in thinking so, they made it so. Winston had regarded benchmark stocks only as predictors of what the people in the market would do, and for him trends were always psychological, predictors of how people would follow an artificial model, not the performance of the model itself. Gant, he realized, didn't quite see it that way, like so many of the technical traders.

And in selling off Citibank,
Columbus
had activated a little alarm in its own computer-trading system. And even someone as bright as Mark had forgotten that Citibank was part of the goddamned model!

“Show me other bank stocks,” Winston ordered.

“Well, Chemical went next,” Gant told, him, pulling up that track as well. “Then Manny-Hanny, and then others, too. Anyway, we saw it coming, and we jumped into metals and the gold stocks. You know, when the dust settles, it's going to turn out that we did okay. Not great, but pretty okay,” Gant said, calling up his executive program for overall transactions, wanting to show something he'd done right. "I took the money from a quick flip on Silicon Alchemy and laid this put

on GM and—"

Winston patted him on the shoulder. “Save that for later, Mark. I can see it was a good play.”

“Anyway, we were ahead of the trends all the way. Yeah, we got a little hurt when the calls came in and we had to dump a lot of solid things, but that happened to everybody—”

“You don't see it, do you?”

“See what, George?”

“We were the trend.”

Mark Gant blinked his eyes, and Winston could tell.

He didn't see it.

29

Written Records

The presentation went very well, and at the end of it Cathy Ryan was handed an exquisitely wrapped box by the Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery from
Chiba
University
, who led the Japanese delegation. Unwrapping it, she found a scarf of watered blue silk, embroidered with gold thread. It looked to be more than a hundred years old.

“The blue goes so well with your eyes, Professor Ryan,” her colleague said with a smile of genuine admiration. “I fear it is not a sufficiently valuable gift for what I have learned from you today. I have hundreds of diabetic patients at my hospital. With this technique we can hope to restore sight for most of them. A magnificent breakthrough, Professor.” He bowed, formally and with clear respect.

“Well, the lasers come from your country,” Cathy replied. She wasn't sure what emotion she was supposed to have. The gift was stunning. The man was as sincere as he could be, and his country might be at war with hers. But why wasn't it on the news? If there were a war, why was this foreigner not under arrest? Was she supposed to be gracious to him as a learned colleague or hostile to him as an enemy? What the hell was going on? She looked over at Andrea Price, who just leaned against the back wall and smiled, her arms crossed across her chest.

“And you have taught us how to use them more efficiently. A stunning piece of applied research.” The Japanese professor turned to the others and raised his hands. The assembled multitude applauded, and a blushing Caroline Ryan started thinking that she just might get the Lasker statuette for her mantelpiece after all. Everyone shook her hand before leaving for the bus that waited to take them back to the Stouffer's on
Pratt Street
.

“Can I see it?” Special Agent Price asked after all were gone and the door safely closed. Cathy handed the scarf over. “Lovely. You'll have to buy a new dress to go with it.”

“So there never was anything to worry about,” Dr. Ryan observed. Interestingly, once she'd gotten fifteen seconds into her lecture, she'd forgotten about it anyway. Wasn't that interesting?

“No, like I told you, I didn't expect anything.” Price handed the scarf back, not without some reluctance. The little professor was right, she thought. It did go nicely with her eyes. “Jack Ryan's wife” was all she'd heard, and then some. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Retinal surgery?” Cathy closed her notebook. “I started off working the front end of the eye, right up to the time little Jack was born. Then I had an idea about how the retina is attached naturally and how we might reattach bad ones. Then we started looking at how to fix blood vessels. Bernie let me run with it, and I got a research grant from NIH to play with, and one thing led to another…”

“And now you're the best in the world at this,” Price concluded the story.

“Until somebody with better hands comes along and learns how to do it, yes.” Cathy smiled. “I suppose I am, for a few more months, anyway.”

“So how's the champ?” Bernie Katz asked, entering the room and seeing Price for the first time. The pass on her coat puzzled him. “Do I know you?”

“Andrea Price.” The agent gave Katz a quick and thorough visual check before shaking hands. He actually found it flattering until she added, “Secret Service.”

“Where were the cops like you when I was a kid?” the surgeon asked gallantly.

“Bernie was one of my first mentors here. He's department chairman now,” Cathy explained.

“About to be overtaken in prestige by my colleague. I come bearing good news. I have a spy on the Lasker Committee. You're in the finals, Cathy.”

“What's a Lasker?” Price asked.

“There's one step up from a Lasker Prize,” Bernie told her. “You have to go to
Stockholm
to collect it.”

“Bernie, I'll never have one of those. A Lasker is hard enough.”

“So keep researching, girl!” Katz hugged her and left.

I want it, I want it, I want it! Cathy told herself silently. She didn't have to give voice to the words. It was plain for Special Agent Price to see. Damn, didn't this beat guarding politicians?

“Can I watch one of your procedures?”

“If you want. Anyway, come on.” Cathy led her back to her office, not minding her at all now. On the way they walked through the clinic, then one of the labs. In the middle of a corridor, Dr. Ryan stopped dead in her tracks, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a small notebook.

“Did I miss something?” Price asked. She knew she was talking too much, but it look time to learn the habits of your protectees. She also read Cathy Ryan as the type who didn't like being protected, and so needed to be made comfortable about it.

“You'll have to get used to me,” Professor Ryan said, smiling as she scribbled a few notes. “Whenever 1 have an idea, I write it down right away.”

“Don't trust your memory?”

“Never. You can't trust your memory with things that affect live patients. One of the first things they teach you in medical school.” Cathy shook her head as she finished up. “Not in this business. Too many opportunities to screw up. If you don't write it down, then it never happened.”

That sounded like a good lesson to remember, Andrea Price told herself, following her principal down the corridor. The code name, S
URGEON
, was perfect for her. Precise, smart, thorough. She might even have made a good agent except for her evident discomfort around guns.

It was already a regular routine, and in many ways that was not new. For a generation, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force had responded to Russian fighter activity out of the forward base at Dolinsk Sokol—at first in cooperation with the USAF—and one of the regular tracks taken by the Soviet Air Force had earned the name “Tokyo Express,” probably an unknowing reference to a term invented in 1942 by the
United States
Marines on
Guadalcanal
.

For security reasons the E-767s were based with the 6th Air Wing at Komatsu, near
Tokyo
, but the two F-15Js that operated under the control of the E-767 now aloft over the town of
Nemuro
at the northeast tip of the
island
of
Hokkaido
were actually based on the
Home
Island
at Chitose. These were a hundred miles offshore, and each carried eight missiles, four each of heat-seekers and radar-homers. All were warshots now, requiring only a target.

It was after
midnight
, local time. The pilots were well rested and alert, comfortably strapped into their ejection seats, their sharp eyes scanning the darkness while fingers made delicate course-corrections on the sticks. Their own targeting radars were switched off, and though their aircraft still flashed with anticollision strobe lights, those were easily switched off should the necessity arise, making them visually nonexistent.

“Eagle One-Five,” the digital radio told the element leader, “check out commercial traffic fifty kilometers zero-three-five your position, course two-one-five, angels three-six.”

“Roger, Kami,” the pilot replied on keying his radio. Kami, the call sign for the orbiting surveillance aircraft, was a word with many meanings, most of them supernatural like “soul” or “spirit.” And so they had rapidly become the modern manifestation of the spirits guarding their country, with the F-15Js as the strong arms that gave power to the will of those spirits. On command, the two fighters came right, climbing on a shallow, fuel-efficient slope for five minutes until they were at thirty-seven thousand feet, cruising outbound from their country at five hundred knots, their radars still off, but now they received a digital feed from the Kami that appeared on their own sets, one more of the new innovations and something the Americans didn't have. The element leader alternated his eyes up and down. A pity, he thought, that the hand-off display didn't integrate with his head-up display. Maybe the next modification would do that.

“There,” he said over his low-power radio.

“I have it,” his wingman acknowledged.

Both fighters turned to the left now, descending slowly behind what appeared to be an Air Canada 767-ER. Yes, the floodlit tail showed the maple-leaf logo of that airline. Probably the regular transpolar flight out of
Toronto
International into Narita. The timing was about right. They approached from almost directly astern—not quite exactly, lest an overly quick overtake result in a ramming—and the buffet told them that they were in the wake turbulence of a “heavy,” a wide-bodied commercial transport. The flight leader closed until he could see the line of cabin lights, and the huge engine under each wing, and the stubby nose of the Boeing product. He keyed his radio again.

“Kami, Eagle One-Five.”

“Eagle.”

“Positive identification, Air Canada Seven-Six-Seven Echo Romeo, inbound at indicated course and speed.” Interestingly, the drill for the BARCAP—Barrier Combat Air Patrol—was to use English. That was the international language of aviation. All their pilots spoke it, and it worked better for important communications.

“Roger.” And on further command, the fighters broke off to their programmed patrol area. The Canadian pilot of the airliner would never know that two armed fighters had closed to within three hundred meters of his aircraft—but then he had no reason to expect that any would, because the world was at peace, at least this part of it.