The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [35]
"Good day," the young lady said in reply. "Are you Nomuri?"
"Yes, and you are … ?"
"Lian Ming," the secretary replied.
An interesting name, Chester thought. "Lian" in Mandarin meant "graceful willow." She was short, like most Chinese women, with a square-ish face and dark eyes. Her least attractive feature was her hair, short and cut in a manner that harkened back to the worst of the 1950s in America, and then only for children in Appalachian trailer parks. For all that, it was a classically Chinese face in its ethnicity, and one much favored in this tradition-bound nation. The look in her eyes, at least, suggested intelligence and education.
"You are here to discuss computers and printers," she said neutrally, having absorbed some of her boss's sense of importance and centrality of place in the universe.
"Yes, I am. I think you will find our new pin-matrix printer particularly appealing."
"And why is that?" Ming asked.
"Do you speak English?" Nomuri asked in that language.
"Certainly," Ming replied, in the same.
"Then it becomes simple to explain. If you transliterate Mandarin into English, the spelling, I mean, then the printer transposes into Mandarin ideographs automatically, like this," he explained, pulling a sheet of paper from his plastic folder and handing it to the secretary. "We are also working on a laser-printer system which will be even smoother in its appearance."
"Ah," the secretary observed. The quality of the characters was superb, easily the equal of the monstrous typewriting machine that secretaries had to use for official documents—or else have them hand-printed and then further processed on copying machines, mainly Canons, also of Japanese manufacture. The process was time-consuming, tedious, and much hated by the secretarial staff. "And what of inflection variations?"
Not a bad question, Nomuri noted. The Chinese language was highly dependent on inflection. The tone with which a word was delivered determined its actual meaning from as many as four distinct options, and it was also a determining factor in which ideograph it designated in turn.
"Do the characters appear on the computer screen in that way as well?" the secretary asked.
"They can, with just a click of the mouse," Nomuri assured her. "There may be a 'software' problem, insofar as you have to think simultaneously in two languages," he warned her with a smile.
Ming laughed. "Oh, we always do that here."
Her teeth would have benefited from a good orthodontist, Nomuri thought, but there weren't many of them in Beijing, along with the other bourgeois medical specialties, like reconstructive surgery. For all that, he'd gotten her to laugh, and that was something..
"Would you like to see me demonstrate our new capabilities?" the CIA field officer asked.
"Sure, why not?" She appeared a little disappointed that he wasn't able to do so right here and now.
"Excellent, but I will need you to authorize my bringing the hardware into the building. Your security people, you see."
How did I forget that? he saw her ask herself, blinking rather hard in a mild self-rebuke. Better to set the hook all the way.
"Do you have the authority for that, or must you consult someone more senior?" The most vulnerable point in any communist bureaucrat was their sense of importance-of-place.
A knowing smile: "Oh, yes, I can authorize that on my own authority."
A smile of his own: "Excellent. I can be here with my equipment at, say, ten in the morning."
"Good, the main entrance. They will be awaiting you."
"Thank you, Comrade Ming," Nomuri said with his best officious (short) bow to the young secretary—and, probably, mistress to her minister, the field officer thought. This one had possibilities, but he'd have to be careful