Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (37 page)

“So we meet for the first time.”

“It’s my pleasure, sir.” Chuck Searls, the computer engineer, knew that his three-piece suit and neat haircut had surprised the man. He held out his hand and bobbed his head in what he supposed was a proper greeting for his benefactor.

“My people tell me that you are very skilled.”

“You’re very kind. I’ve worked at it for some years, and I suppose I have a few small talents.” Searls had read up on Japan.

And very greedy,
Yamata thought,
but well-mannered.
He would settle for that. It was, all in all, a fortunate accident. He’d purchased the man’s business four years earlier, left current management in place, as was his custom, then discovered that the real brains of the outfit were in this man. Searls was the nearest thing to a wizard that his executive had ever seen, the man had reported to Yamata-san, and though the American’s title hadn’t changed, his salary had. And then, a few years ago, Searls had remarked that he was tiring of his job ...

“Everything is prepared?”

“Yes, sir. The initial software upgrade went in months ago. They love it.”

“And the—”

“Easter egg, Mr. Yamata. That’s what we call it.”

Raizo had never encountered the expression. He asked for an explanation and got it—but it meant nothing to him.

“How difficult to implement it?”

“That’s the clever part,” Searls said. “It keys on two stocks. If General Motors and Merck go through the system at values which I built in, twice and in the same minute, the egg hatches, but only on a Friday, like you said, and only if the five-minute period falls in the proper time-range.”

“You mean this thing could happen by accident?” Yamata asked in some surprise.

“Theoretically, yes, but the trigger values for the stocks are well outside the current trading range, and the odds of having that happen all together by accident are about thirty million to one. That’s why I picked this method for hatching the egg. I ran a computer-search of trading patterns and ...”

Another problem with mercenaries was that they could never stop themselves from telling you how brilliant they were. Even though it was probably true in this case, Yamata found it difficult to sit through the dissertation. He did it anyway. Good manners required it.

“And your personal arrangements?”

Searls merely nodded. The flight to Miami. The connecting flights to Antigua, via Dominica and Grenada, all with different names on the tickets, paid for by different credit cards. He had his new passport, his new identity. On the Caribbean island, there was a certain piece of property. It would take an entire day, but then he’d be there, and he had no plans to leave it, ever.

For his part, Yamata neither knew nor wanted to know what Searls would do. Had this been a screen drama, he would have arranged for the man’s life to end, but it would have been dangerous. There was always the chance that there might be more than one egg in the nest, wasn’t there? Yes, there had to be. Besides, there was honor to be considered. This entire venture was about honor.

“The second third of the funds will be transferred in the morning. When that happens, I would suggest that you execute your plans.”
Ronin,
Yamata thought, but even some of them were faithful after a fashion.

“Members,” the Speaker of the House said after Al Trent had concluded his final wrap-up speech, “will cast their votes by electronic device.”

On C-SPAN the drone of repeated words was replaced by classical music, Bach’s Italian Concerto in this case. Each member had a plastic card—it was like an automatic teller machine, really. The votes were tallied by a simple computer displayed on TV screens all over the world. Two hundred eighteen votes were needed for passage. That number was reached in just under ten minutes. Then came the final rush of additional “aye” votes as members rushed from committee hearings and constituent meetings to enter the chamber, record their votes, and return to whatever they’d been doing.

Through it all, Al Trent stayed on the floor, mainly chatting amiably with a member of the minority leadership, his friend Sam Fellows. It was remarkable how much they agreed on, both thought. They could scarcely have been more different, a gay New England liberal and a Mormon Arizonan conservative.

“This’ll teach the little bastards a lesson,” Al observed.

“You sure ramrodded the bill through,” Sam agreed. Both men wondered what the long-term effects on employment would be in their districts.

Less pleased were the officials of the Japanese Embassy, who called the results in to their Foreign Ministry the moment the music stopped and the Speaker announced, “HR- 12313, the Trade Reform Act, is approved.”

The bill would go to the Senate next, which, they reported, was a formality. The only people likely to vote against it were those furthest away from reelection. The Foreign Minister got the news from his staff at about nine local time in Tokyo and informed Prime Minister Koga. The latter had already drafted his letter of resignation for the Emperor. Another man might have wept at the destruction of his dreams. The Prime Minister did not. In retrospect, he’d had more real influence as a member of the opposition than in this office. Looking at the morning sun on the well-kept grounds outside his window, he realized that it would be a more pleasant life, after all.

Let Goto deal with this.

“You know, the Japanese make some awfully good stuff that we use at Wilmer,” Cathy Ryan observed over dinner. It was time for her to comment on the law, now that it was halfway passed.

“Oh?”

“The diode laser system we use on cataracts, for one. They bought the American company that invented it. Their engineers really know how to support their stuff, too. They’re in practically every month with a software upgrade.”

“Where’s the company located?” Jack asked.

“Someplace in California.”

“Then it’s an American product, Cathy.”

“But not all the parts are,” his wife pointed out.

“Look, the law allows for special exceptions to be made for uniquely valuable things that—”

“The government’s going to make the rules, right?”

“True,” Jack conceded. “Wait a minute. You told me their docs—”

“I never said they were dumb, just that they need to think more creatively. You know,” she added, “just like the government does.”

“I told the President this wasn’t all that great an idea. He says the law will be in full force just a few months.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

13

Winds and Tides

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“But your country made thousands of them,” the PR director objected.

“That is true,” Klerk agreed, “but the factories were not open to the public, and not even to Soviet journalists.”

Chavez was doing the photography work, and was putting on quite a show, John Clark noted without a smile, dancing around the workers in their white coveralls and hard hats, turning, twisting, squatting, his Nikon pressed against his face, changing rolls every few minutes, and along the way getting a few hundred frames of the missile production line. They were SS-19 missile bodies, sure as hell. Clark knew the specifications, and had seen enough photos at Langley to know what they looked like—and enough to spot some local modifications. On the Russian models the exterior was usually green. Everything the Soviet Union had built for military use had to be camouflaged, even missiles inside of transport containers sitting in the bottom of concrete silos were the same pea-soup green that they liked to paint on tanks. But not these. The paint had weight, and there was no point in expending fuel to drive the few kilograms of paint to suborbital speed, and so these missile bodies were bright, shiny steel. The fittings and joints looked far more refined than he would have expected on a Russian production line.

“You’ve modified our original design, haven’t you?”

“Correct.” The PR guy smiled. “The basic design was excellent. Our engineers were very impressed, but we have different standards, and better materials. You have a good eye, Mr. Klerk. Not too long ago an American NASA engineer made the same observation.” The man paused. “What sort of Russian name is Klerk?”

“It’s not Russian,” Clark said, continuing to scribble his notes. “My grandfather was English, a Communist. His name was Clark. In the 1920s he came to Russia to be part of the new experiment.” An embarrassed grin. “I suppose he’s disappointed, wherever he is.”

“And your colleague?”

“Chekov? He’s from the Crimea. The Tartar blood really shows, doesn’t it? So how many of these will you build?”

Chavez was at the top end of the missile body at the end of the line. A few of the assembly workers were casting annoyed glances his way, and he took that to mean that he was doing his job of imitating an intrusive, pain-in-the-ass journalist right. Aside from that the job was pretty easy. The assembly bay of the factory was brightly lit to assist the workers in their tasks, and though he’d used his light meter for show, the camera’s own monitoring chip told him that he had all the illumination he needed. This Nikon F-20 was one badass camera. Ding switched rolls. He was using ASA-64 color slide film—Fuji film, of course—because it had better color saturation, whatever that meant.

In due course, Mr. C shook hands with the factory representative and they all headed toward the door. Chavez—Chekov—twisted the lens off the camera body and stowed everything away in his bag. Friendly smiles and bows sent them on their way. Ding slid a CD into the player and turned the sound way up. It made conversation difficult, but John was always a stickler for the rules. And he was right. There was no knowing if someone might have bugged their rental car. Chavez leaned his head over to the right so that he wouldn’t have to scream his question.

“John, is it always this easy?”

Clark wanted to smile, but didn’t. He’d reactivated yet another member of THISTLE a few hours earlier, who had insisted that he and Ding look at the assembly floor.

“You know, I used to go into Russia, back when you needed more than a passport and American Express.”

“Doing what?”

“Mainly getting people out. Sometimes recovering data packs. Couple of times I emplaced cute little gadgets. Talk about lonely, talk about scary.” Clark shook his head. Only his wife knew that he colored his hair, just a little, because he didn’t like gray there. “You have any idea what we would have paid to get into ... Plesetsk, I think, is where they made those things, the Chelomei Design Bureau.”

“They really wanted us to see that stuff.”

“Sure as hell,” Clark agreed.

“What do I do with the photos?”

John almost said to toss them, but it was data, and they were working on company time. He had to draft and send a story to Interfax to maintain his cover—he wondered if anyone would print it.
Wouldn’t that be a gas,
he thought with a shake of the head. All they were doing, really, was circling in a holding pattern, waiting for the word and the opportunity to meet Kimberly Norton. The film and a copy of his story, he decided, would find their way into the diplomatic bag. If nothing else, it was good practice for Ding—and for himself, Clark admitted.

“Turn that damned noise down,” he said, and they switched to Russian. Good language practice.

“I miss the winters at home,” Chekov observed.

“I don’t,” Klerk answered. “Where did you ever acquire the taste for that awful American music?” he asked with a growl.

“Voice of America,” came the reply. Then the voice laughed.

“Yevgeniy Pavlovich, you have no respect. My ears can’t tolerate that damned noise. Don’t you have something else to play?”

“Anything would be an improvement,” the technician observed to himself, as he adjusted his headphones and shook his head to clear them of the damned
gaijin
noise. Worse still, his own son listened to the same trash.

Despite all the denials that had gone back and forth over the past few weeks, the reality of it was finally plain for all to see. The huge, ugly car-carriers swinging at anchor in several different harbors were silent witnesses on every TV news broadcast on NHK. The Japanese car companies owned a total of a hundred nineteen of them, not counting foreign-flag ships operating under charter that were now heading back to their own home ports. Ships that never stayed still any longer than it took to load another cargo of autos now sat like icebergs, clogging anchorages. There was no sense in loading and dispatching them. Those awaiting pier space in American ports would take weeks to unload. The crews took the opportunity to do programmed maintenance, but they knew that when those make-work tasks were done, they would truly be out of business.

The effect snowballed rapidly. There was little point in manufacturing automobiles that could not be shipped. There was literally no place to keep them. As soon as the huge holding lots at the ports were filled, and the train-cars on their sidetracks, and the lots at the assembly plants, there was simply no choice. Fully a half-dozen TV crews were on hand when the line supervisor at the Nissan plant reached up and pressed a button. That button rang bells all up and down the line. Ordinarily used because of a problem in the assembly process, this time it meant that the line was stopped. From the beginning, where the frames were placed on the moving chain-belt, to the end, where a navy-blue car sat with its door open, awaiting a driver to take it out of the building, workers stood still, looking at one another. They’d told themselves that this could never happen. Reality to them was showing up for work, performing their functions, attaching parts, testing, checking off—very rarely finding a problem—and repeating the processes for endless numbing but well-compensated hours, and at this moment it was as if the world had ceased to rotate. They’d known, after a fashion. The newspapers and TV broadcasts, the rumors that had raced up and down the line far more quickly than the cars ever had, the bulletins from management. Despite all that, they now stood around as if stunned by a hard blow to the face.