The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [23]
CHAPTER 3—The Problems with Riches
The issue was trade, not exactly the President's favorite, but then, at this level, every issue took on sufficient twists that even the ones you thought you knew about became strange at best, unknown and alien at worst.
"George?" Ryan said to his Secretary of the Treasury, George Winston.
"Mr. Pres—"
"Goddammit, George!" The President nearly spilled his coffee with the outburst.
"Okay." SecTreas nodded submission. "It's hard to make the adjustment … Jack." Ryan was getting tired of the Presidential trappings, and his rule was that here, in the Oval Office, his name was Jack, at least for his inner circle, of which Winston was one. After all, Ryan had joked a few times, after leaving this marble prison, he might be working for TRADER, as the Secret Service knew him, back in New York on The Street, instead of the other way 'round. After leaving the Presidency, something for which Jack prostrated himself before God every night—or so the stories went—he'd have to find gainful employment somewhere, and the trading business beckoned. Ryan had shown a rare gift for it, Winston reminded himself. His last such effort had been a California company called Silicon Alchemy, just one of many computer outfits, but the only one in which Ryan had taken an interest. So skillfully had he brought that firm to IPO that his own stock holdings in SALC—its symbol on the big board—were now valued at just over eighty million dollars, making Ryan by far the wealthiest American President in history. It was something his politically astute Chief of Staff, Arnold van Damm, did not advertise to the news media, who typically regarded every wealthy man as a robber baron, excepting, of course, the owners of the papers and TV stations themselves, who were, of course, the best of public-spirited citizens. None of this was widely known, even in the tight community of Wall Street big-hitters, which was remarkable enough. Should he ever return to The Street, Ryan's prestige would be sufficient to earn money while he slept in his bed at home And that, Winston freely admitted, was something well and truly earned, and be damned to whatever the media hounds thought of it.
"It's China?" Jack asked.
"That's right, Boss," Winston confirmed with a nod. "Boss" was a term Ryan could stomach, as it was also the in-house term the Secret Service—which was part of Winston's Department of the Treasury—used to identify the man they were sworn to protect. "They're having a little cash-shortfall problem, and they're looking to make it up with us."
"How little?" POTUS asked.
"It looks as though it will annualize out to, oh, seventy billion or so."
"That is, as we say, real money."
George Winston nodded. "Anything that starts with a 'B' is real enough, and this is a little better than six 'Bs' a month."
"Spending it for what?"
"Not entirely sure, but a lot of it has to be military-related. The French arms industries are tight with them now, since the Brits kiboshed the jet-engine deal from Rolls-Royce."
The President nodded, looking down at the briefing papers. "Yeah, Basil talked the PM out of it." That was Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called (erroneously) MI6. Basil was an old friend of Ryan's, going back to his CIA days. "It was a