The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [128]
"What error is this, Fang?" Zhang asked. "Do you doubt our ideas?"
Always that question, Fang thought with an inward sigh. "I remember when Deng said, It doesnt matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: What emperor said that?"
"But it does matter, my old friend, and well you know it."
"That is true," Fang agreed with a submissive nod, not wanting a confrontation this late in the day, not when he had a headache. Age had made Zhang even more ideologically pure than hed been in his youth, and it hadnt tempered his imperial ambition. Fang sighed once more. He was of a mind to set the issue aside. It wasnt worth the trouble. Though hed mention it just once more, to cover his political backside.
"What if they dont?" Fang asked finally.
"What?"
"What if they dont go along? What if the Americans are troublesome on the trade issue?"
"They will not be," Zhang assured his old friend.
"But if they are, Comrade, what then will we do? What are our options?"
"Oh, I suppose we could punish with one hand and encourage with the other, cancel some purchases from America and then inquire about making some other ones. Its worked before many times," Zhang assured his guest. "This President Ryan is predictable. We need merely control the news. We will give him nothing to use against us."
Fang and Zhang continued their discussion into other issues, until the latter returned to his office, where, again, he dictated his notes of the discussion to Ming, who then typed them into her computer. The minister considered inviting her to his apartment, but decided against it. Though shed become somewhat more attractive in the preceding weeks, catching his eye with her gentle smiles in the outer office, it had been a long day for him, and he was too tired for it, enjoyable though it often was with Ming. Minister Fang had no idea that his dictation would be in Washington, D.C., in less than three hours.
"What do you think, George?"
"Jack," TRADER began, "what the hell is this, and how the hell did we get it?"
"George, this is an internal memorandum—well, of sorts—from the government of the Peoples Republic of China. How we got it, you do not, repeat, not need to know."
The document had been laundered—scrubbed—better than Mafia income. All the surnames had been changed, as had the syntax and adjectives, to disguise patterns of speech. It was thought—hoped would be a better term—that even those whose discourse was being reported would not have recognized their own words. But the content had been protected—even improved, in fact, since the nuances of Mandarin had been fully translated in to American English idiom. That had been the hardest part. Languages do not really translate into one another easily or well. The denotations of words were one thing. The connotations were another, and these never really paralleled from one tongue to another. The linguists employed by the intelligence services were among the best in the country, people who regularly read poetry, and sometimes published journal pieces, under their own names, so that they could communicate their expertise in—and indeed, love of—their chosen foreign language with others of a similar mind. What resulted were pretty good translations, Ryan thought, but he was always a little wary of them.
"These cocksuckers! Theyre talking about how they plan to fuck us over." For all his money, George Winston retained the patois of his working-class origins.
"George, its business, not personal," the President tried as a tension-release gambit.
The Secretary of the Treasury looked up from the briefing document. "Jack, when I ran Columbus Group, I had to regard all of my investors as my family, okay? Their money had to be as important to me as my money. That was my professional obligation as an investment counselor."
Jack nodded. "Okay, George. Thats why I asked you into