Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (521 page)

“Hello,” Jackson said agreeably.

“Pastor,” the man replied, uneasily, as though wanting to say more.

It was a look Hosiah had seen often enough. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Pastor ... years ago ...” And his voice choked up again. “Pastor,” he began again. “Pastor, I sinned.”

“My friend, we all sin. God knows that. That’s why he sent His Son to be with us and conquer our sins.” The minister grabbed the man’s shoulder to steady him.

“I was in the Klan, Pastor, I did ... sinful things ... I ... hurt nigras just cuz I hated them, and I—”

“What’s your name?” Hosiah asked gently.

“Charlie Picket,” the man replied. And then Hosiah knew. He had a good memory for names. Charles Worthington Picket had been the Grand Kleegle of the local Klavern. He’d never been convicted of a major crime, but his name was one that came up much of the time.

“Mr. Picket, those things all happened many years ago,” he reminded the man.

“I ain’t never—I mean, I ain’t never
killed
nobody. Honest, Pastor, I ain’t never done that,” Picket insisted, with real desperation in his voice. “But I know’d thems that did, and I never told the cops. I never told them not to do it ... sweet Jesus, I don’t know what I was back then, Pastor. I was ... it was...”

“Mr. Picket, are you sorry for your sins?”

“Oh, yes, oh Jesus, yes, Pastor. I’ve prayed for forgiveness, but—”

“There is no ‘but,’ Mr. Picket. God has forgiven you your sins,” Jackson told him in his gentlest voice.

“Are you sure?”

A smile and a nod. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Pastor, you need help at your church, roofing and stuff, you call me, y’hear? That’s the house of God, too. Maybe I didn’t always know it, but by damn I know it now, sir.”

He’d probably never called a black man “sir” in his life, unless there’d been a gun to his head. So, the minister thought, at least one person had listened to his sermon, and learned something from it. And that wasn’t bad for a man in his line of work.

“Pastor, I gots to apologize for all the evil words and thoughts I had. Ain’t never done that, but I gots to do it now.” He seized Hosiah’s hand. “Pastor, I am sorry, sorry as a man can be for all the things I done back then, and I beg your forgiveness.”

“And the Lord Jesus said, ‘Go forth and sin no more.’ Mr. Picket, that’s all of scripture in one sentence. God came to forgive our sins. God has already forgiven you.”

Finally, their eyes met. “Thank you, Pastor. And God bless you, sir.”

“And may the Lord bless you, too.” Hosiah Jackson watched the man walk off to his pickup truck, wondering if a soul had just been saved. If so, Skip would be pleased with the black friend he’d never met.

CHAPTER 32

Coalition Collision

I
t was a long drive from the airport to the Vatican, every yard of it covered by cameras in the high-speed motorcade, until finally the vehicles entered the Piazza San Pietro, St. Peter’s Square. There, waiting, was a squad of Swiss Guards wearing the purple-and-gold uniforms designed by Michelangelo. Some of the Guards pulled the casket containing a Prince of the Church, martyred far away, and carried it through the towering bronze doors into the cavernous interior of the church, where the next day a Requiem Mass would be celebrated by the Pope himself.

But it wasn’t about religion now, except to the public. For the President of the United States, it was about matters of state. It turned out that Tom Jefferson had been right after all. The power of government devolved directly from the people, and Ryan had to act now, in a way that the people would approve, because when you got down to it, the nation wasn’t his. It was theirs.

And one thing made it worse. SORGE had coughed up another report that morning, and it was late coming in only because Mary Patricia Foley wanted to be doubly sure that the translation was right.

Also in the Oval Office were Ben Goodley, Arnie van Damm, and the Vice President. “Well?” Ryan asked them.

“Cocksuckers,” Robby said, first of all. “If they really think this way, we shouldn’t sell them shit in a paper bag. Even at Top Gun after a long night of boilermakers, even Navy fighter pilots don’t talk like this.”

“It is callous,” Ben Goodley agreed.

“They don’t issue consciences to the political leaders, I guess,” van Damm said, making it unanimous.

“How would your father react to information like this, Robby?” Ryan asked.

“His immediate response will be the same as mine: Nuke the bastards. Then he’ll remember what happens in a real war and settle down some. Jack, we have to punish them.”

Ryan nodded. “Okay, but if we shut down trade to the PRC, the first people hurt are the poor schlubs in the factories, aren’t they?”

“Sure, Jack, but who’s holding them hostage, the good guys or the bad guys? Somebody can
always
say that, and if fear of hurting them prevents you from taking any action, then you’re only making sure that things
never
get better for them. So, you can’t allow yourself to be limited that way,” TOMCAT concluded, “or
you
become the hostage.”

Then the phone rang. Ryan got it, grumbling at the interruption.

“Secretary Adler for you, Mr. President. He says it’s important.”

Jack leaned across his desk and punched the blinking button. “Yeah, Scott.”

“I got the download. It’s not unexpected, and people talk differently inside the office than outside, remember.”

“That’s great to hear, Scott, and if they talk about taking a few thousand Jews on a train excursion to Auschwitz, is that supposed to be funny, too?”

“Jack, I’m the Jew here, remember?”

Ryan let out a long breath and pushed another button. “Okay, Scott, you’re on speaker now. Talk,” POTUS ordered.

“This is just the way the bastards talk. Yes, they’re arrogant, but we already knew that. Jack, if other countries knew how
we
talk inside the White House, we’d have a lot fewer allies and a lot more wars. Sometimes intelligence can be too good.”

Adler really was a good SecState, Ryan thought. His job was to look for simple and safe ways out of problems, and he worked damned hard at it.

“Okay, suggestions?”

“I have Carl Hitch lay a note on them. We demand a statement of apology for this fuckup.”

“And if they tell us to shove it?”

“Then we pull Rutledge and Hitch back for ‘consultations,’ and let them simmer for a while.”

“The note, Scott?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Write it on asbestos paper and sign it in blood,” Jack told him coldly.

“Yes, sir,” SecState acknowledged, and the line went dead.

It was a lot later in the day in Moscow when Pavel Yefremov and Oleg Provalov came into Sergey Golovko’s office.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have you in sooner,” the SVR chairman told his guests. “We’ve been busy with problems—the Chinese and that shooting in Beijing.” He’d been looking into it just like every other person in the world.

“Then you have another problem with them, Comrade Chairman.”

“Oh?”

Yefremov handed over the decrypt. Golovko took it, thanking the man with his accustomed good manners, then settled back in his chair and started reading. In less than five seconds, his eyes widened.

“This is not possible,” his voice whispered.

“Perhaps so, but it is difficult to explain otherwise.”

“
I
was the target?”

“So it would appear,” Provalov answered.

“But
why
?”

“That we do not know,” Yefremov said, “and probably nobody in the city of Moscow knows. If the order was given through a Chinese intelligence officer, the order originated in Beijing, and the man who forwarded it probably doesn’t know the reasoning behind it. Moreover, the operation is set up to be somewhat deniable, since we cannot even prove that this man is an intelligence officer, and not an assistant or what the Americans call a ‘stringer.’ In fact, their man was identified for us by an American,” the FSS officer concluded.

Golovko’s eyes came up. “How the hell did
that
happen?”

Provalov explained. “A Chinese intelligence officer in Moscow is unlikely to be concerned by the presence of an American national, whereas any Russian citizen is a potential counterintelligence officer. Mishka was there and offered to help, and I permitted it. Which leads me to a question.”

“What do you tell this American?” Golovko asked for him.

The lieutenant nodded. “Yes, Comrade Chairman. He knows a good deal about the murder investigation because I confided in him and he offered some helpful suggestions. He is a gifted police investigator. And he is no fool. When he asks how this case is going, what can I say?”

Golovko’s initial response was as predictable as it was automatic:
Say nothing.
But he restrained himself. If Provalov said nothing, then the American would have to be a fool not to see the lie, and, as he said, the American was no fool. On the other hand, did it serve Golovko‘s—or Russia’s—purposes for America to know that his life was in danger? That question was deep and confusing. While he pondered it, he’d have his bodyguard come in. He beeped his secretary.

“Yes, Comrade Chairman,” Major Shelepin said, coming in the door.

“Something new for you to worry about, Anatoliy Ivan’ch,” Golovko told him. It was more than that. The first sentence turned Shelepin pale.

I
t started in America with the unions. These affiliations of working people, which had lost power in the preceding decades, were in their way the most conservative organizations in America, for the simple reason that their loss of power had made them mindful of the importance of what power they retained. To hold on to that, they resisted any change that threatened the smallest entitlement of their humblest member.

China had long been a
bête noir
for the labor movement, for the simple reason that Chinese workers made less in a day than American union automobile workers made during their morning coffee break. That tilted the playing field in favor of the Asians, and
that
was something the AFL/CIO was not prepared to approve.

So much the better that the government that ruled those underpaid workers disregarded human rights. That just made them easier to oppose.

American labor unions are nothing if not organized, and so every single member of Congress started getting telephone calls. Most of them were taken by staffers, but those from senior union officials in a member’s state or district usually made it all the way through, regardless of which side the individual member stood on. Attention was called to the barbaric action of that godless state which also, by the way, shit on its workers
and
took American jobs through its unfair labor practices. The size of the trade surplus came up in every single telephone call, which would have made the members of Congress think that it was a carefully orchestrated phone campaign (which it was) had they compared notes on the telephone calls with one another (which they didn’t).

Later in the day, demonstrations were held, and though they were about as spontaneous as those held in the People’s Republic of China, they were covered by the local and/or national media, because it was a place to send cameras, and the newsies belonged to a union, too.

Behind the telephone calls and in front of the TV coverage of the demonstrations came the letters and e-mails, all of which were counted and cataloged by the members’ staffers.

Some of them called the White House to let the President know what was happening on the Hill. Those calls
all
went to the office of Arnold van Damm, whose own staff kept a careful count of the calls, their position, and their degree of passion, which was running pretty high.

On top of that came the notices from the religious communities, virtually all of which China had managed to offend at once.

The one unexpected but shrewd development of the day didn’t involve a call or letter to anyone in the government. Chinese manufacturers located on the island of Taiwan all had lobbying and public-relations agencies in America. One of these came up with an idea that caught on as rapidly as the powder inside a rifle cartridge. By midday, three separate printers were turning out peel-off stickers with the flag of the Republic of China and the caption “We’re the good guys.” By the following morning, clerks at retail outlets all over America were affixing them to items of Taiwanese manufacture. The news media found out about it even before the process had begun, and thus aided the Republic of China industrialists by letting the public know of their “them not us” campaign even before it had properly begun.

The result was that the American public was reacquainted with the fact that there were indeed two countries called China, and that only one of them killed people of the clergy and then beat up on those who tried to say a few prayers on a public street. The other one even played Little League baseball.

It wasn’t often that union leaders and the clergy both cried out so vociferously, and together they were being heard. Polling organizations scrambled to catch up, and were soon framing their questions in such a way that the answers were defined even before they were given.

T
he draft note arrived in the Beijing embassy early in the morning. When decrypted by an NS employee, it was shown to the embassy’s senior watch officer, who managed not to throw up and decided to awaken Ambassador Hitch at once. Half an hour later, Hitch was in the office, sleepy and crabby at being awakened two hours before his accustomed time. The content of the note wasn’t contrived to brighten his day. He was soon on the phone to Foggy Bottom.

“Yes, that’s what we want you to say,” Scott Adler told him on the secure phone.

“They’re not going to like it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, Carl.”

“Okay, just so you know,” Hitch told the SecState.