The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [241]
"Going to rain, looks like," Barry Wise thought.
"Could be," his producer agreed.
"What do you suppose happened to the gal who had the baby?" the cameraman asked from the driver's seat.
"Probably home with her kid now. I bet they don't keep mothers in the hospital very long here," Wise speculated. "Trouble is, we don't know her address. No way to do a follow-up on her and the kid." And that was too bad, Wise could have added. They had the surname, Yang, on their original tape, but the given names of the husband and wife were both garbled.
"Yeah, I bet there's a lot of Yangs in the phone book here."
"Probably," Wise agreed. He didn't even know if there was such a thing as a Beijing phone book—or if the Yang family had a phone—and none of his crew could read the ideographic characters that constituted the Chinese written language. All of those factors combined to make a stone wall.
"Two blocks," the cameraman reported from the front seat. "Just have to turn left … here … "
The first thing they saw was a crowd of khaki uniforms, the local police, standing there like soldiers on guard duty, which was essentially what they were, of course. They parked the van and hopped out, and were immediately scrutinized as though they were alighting from an alien spacecraft. Pete Nichols had his camera out and up on his shoulder, and that didn't make the local cops any happier, because they'd all been briefed on this CNN crew at the Longfu hospital and what they'd done to damage the People's Republic. So the looks they gave the TV crew were poisonous—Wise and his crew could not have asked for anything better for their purposes.
Wise just walked up to the cop with the most rank-stuff on his uniform.
"Good day," Barry said pleasantly.
The sergeant in command of the group just nodded. His face was entirely neutral, as though he were playing cards for modest stakes.
"Could you help us?" Wise asked.
"Help you do what?" the cop asked in his broken English, suddenly angry at himself for admitting he could speak the language. Better if he'd played dumb, he realized a few seconds too late.
"We are looking for Mrs. Yu, the wife of the Reverend Yu, who used to live here."
"No here," the police sergeant replied with a wave of the hands. "No here."
"Then we will wait," Wise told him.
"Minister," Cliff Rutledge said in greeting. Shen was late, which was a surprise to the American delegation. It could have meant that he was delivering a message to his guests, telling them that they were not terribly important in the great scheme of things; or he might have been delayed by new instructions from the Politburo; or maybe his car hadn't wanted to start this morning. Personally, Rutledge leaned toward option number two. The Politburo would want to have input into these talks. Shen Tang had probably been a moderating influence, explaining to his colleagues that the American position, however unjust, would be difficult to shake in this series of talks, and so the smart long-term move would be to accommodate the American position for now, and make up for the losses in the next go-around the following year—the American sense of fair play, he would have told them, had cost them more negotiations than any other single factor in history, after all.
That's what Rutledge would have done in his place, and he knew Shen was no fool. In fact, he was a competent diplomatic technician, and pretty good at reading the situation quickly. He had to know—no, Rutledge corrected himself, he should know or ought to know—that the American position was being driven by public opinion at home, and that that public opinion was against the interests of the PRC, because the PRC had fucked up in public. So, if he'd been able to sell his position to the rest of the Politburo, he'd start off with a small concession, one which would show the course the day would take, allowing Rutledge to