The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [184]
He had nothing to do and lots of time in which to do it—once awake he was never able to escape back into sleep—so he decided to flip on his reading light and go over some documents, most of which hed been given without any particular expectation that he would read them. The purpose of diplomacy, Commander Spock had once said on Star Trek, was to prolong a crisis. Certainly the discourse meandered enough to make the Mississippi River look like a laser beam, but like the Father of Waters, it eventually had to get downstream, or downhill, or wherever the hell it was that rivers went. But this morning—what had awakened him? He looked out the window, seeing the orange-pink smudge beginning to form at the horizon, backlighting the buildings. Gant found them ugly, but he knew he just wasnt used to them. The tenements of Chicago werent exactly the Taj Mahal, and the wood-frame house of his youth wasnt Buckingham Palace. Still, the sense of different-ness here was overpowering. Everywhere you looked, things seemed alien, and he wasnt cosmopolitan enough to overcome that feeling. It was like a background buzz in the Muzak, never quite there, but never gone away either. It was almost a sense of foreboding, but he shook it off. There was no reason to feel anything like that. He didnt know that he would be proven wrong very soon.
Barry Wise was already up in his hotel room, with breakfast coming—the hotel was one of an American chain, and the breakfast menu approximately American as well. The local bacon would be different, but even Chinese chickens laid real eggs, he was sure. His previous days experiment with waffles hadnt worked out very well, and Wise was a man who needed a proper breakfast to function throughout the day.
Unlike most American TV correspondent/reporters, Wise looked for his own stories. His producer was a partner, not a boss-handler. He credited that fact for his collection of Emmy awards, though his wife just grumbled about dusting the damned things behind the basement bar.
He needed a fresh new story for today. His American audience would be bored with another talking-head-plus-Broll piece on the trade negotiations. He needed some local color, he thought, something to make the American people feel as one with the Chinese people. It wasnt easy, and thered been enough stories on Chinese restaurants, which was the only Chinese thing with which most Americans were familiar. What, then? What did Americans have in common with the citizens of the Peoples Republic of China? Not a hell of a lot, Wise told himself, but there had to be something he could use. He stood when breakfast arrived, looking out the picture windows as the waiter wheeled the cart close to the bed. It turned out that theyd goofed on his order, ham instead of bacon, but the ham looked okay and he went with it, tipping the waiter and sitting back down.
Something, he thought, pouring his coffee, but what? Hed been through this process often enough. The writers of fiction often chided reporters for their own sort of "creativity," but the process was real. Finding stuff of interest was doubly hard for reporters, because, unlike novelists, they couldnt make things up. They had to use reality, and reality could be a son of a bitch, Barry Wise thought. He reached for his reading glasses in the drawer of the night table and was surprised to see …
Well, it wasnt all that surprising. It was a matter of routine in any American hotel, a Bible left there by the Gideon Society. It was only here, probably, because the hotel was American-owned and -operated, and they had a deal with the Gideon people