“Pick a name for the source,” Foley instructed his wife.
“SONGBIRD will do for now.” It was a sentimental thing for MP, naming agents for birds. It dated back to CARDINAL.
“Fair enough. Let me see the translations you get, okay?”
“You bet, honey-bunny.” Mary Pat leaned over her husband’s desk to deliver a kiss, before heading back to her own office.
On arriving there, MP checked her computer for the SORGE file. She’d have to change that, MP realized. Even the name of this special-access compartment would be classified top secret or higher. Then she did a page count, making a note on a paper pad next to the screen.
ALL 1,349 PAGES OF RECIPES RECEIVED, she wrote as a reply to cgood@jadecastle.com. WILL LOOK THE RECIPES OVER. THANKS A BUNCH. MARY. She hit the RETURN key, and off the letter went, through the electronic maze called the Internet. One thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages, the DDO thought. It would keep the analysts busy for quite a while. Inside the Old Headquarters Building, analysts would see bits and pieces of SORGE material, covered under other transitory code names randomly chosen by a computer in the basement, but only Sears would know the whole story-and, in fact, he didn’t even know that, did he? What he knew might-probably would-be enough to get this Ming woman killed, once the MSS realized who’d had access to the information. They could do some things in Washington to protect her, but not much.
Nomuri rose early in his Beijing apartment, and the second thing he did was to log on to check his e-mail. There it was, number seven in the list, one from patsbakery@brownienet.com. He selected the decryption system and typed in the key…, so, the pages had all been received. That was good. Nomuri dragged the message he’d dispatched to the “wipe-info” bin, where Norton Utilities not only deleted the file, but also five times electronically scrubbed the disk segments where they’d briefly resided, so that the files could never be recovered by any attempt, no matter how skilled. Next he eliminated the record of having sent any e-mail to brownienet. Now there was no record whatever of his having done anything, unless his telephone line was tapped, which he didn’t really suspect. And even then the data was scrambled, fully encrypted, and thus not recoverable. No, the only dangers in the operation now attached to Ming. His part of it, being the spymaster, was protected by the method in which her desktop computer called him, and from now on those messages would be sent out to brownienet automatically, and erased the same way, in a matter of seconds. It would take a very clever counterintelligence operation to hurt Nomuri now.
CHAPTER 15
“What's this mean, Ben?” Ryan asked, seeing a change in his morning schedule.
“Ed and Mary Pat want to talk something over with you. They didn’t say what it was,” Goodley replied. “The Vice President can be here, too, and me, but that’s it, they requested.”
“Some new kind of toilet paper in the Kremlin, I suppose,” POTUS said. It was a long-standing CIA joke from Ryan’s time in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. He stirred his coffee and leaned back in his comfortable chair. “Okay, what else is happening in the world, Ben?”
“So, this is mao-tai?” Cardinal DiMilo asked. He didn’t add that he’d been given to understand that Baptists didn’t drink alcoholic beverages. Odd, considering that Jesus’ first public miracle had been to change water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. But Christianity had many faces. In any case, the mao-tai was vile, worse than the cheapest grappa. With advancing years, the Cardinal preferred gentler drinks. It was much easier on the stomach.
“I should not drink this,” Yu admitted, “but it is part of my heritage.”
“I know of no passage in Holy Scripture that prohibits this particular human weakness,” the Catholic said. And besides, wine was part of the Catholic liturgy. He saw that his Chinese host barely sipped at his tiny cup. Probably better for his stomach, too, the Italian reasoned.
He’d have to get used to the food, too. A gourmet like many Italians, Renato Cardinal DiMilo found that the food in Beijing was not as good as he’d experienced in Rome’s numerous Chinese restaurants. The problem, he thought, was the quality of the ingredients rather than the cook. In this case, the Reverand Yu’s wife was away in Taiwan to see her sick mother, he’d said, apologizing on the Catholic’s arrival. Monsignor Schepke had taken over the serving, rather like a young lieutenant-aide serving the needs of his general, Yu had thought, watching ‘the drama play out with some amusement. The Catholics certainly had their bureaucratic ways. But this Renato fellow was a decent sort, clearly an educated man, and a trained diplomat from whom Yu realized he might learn much.
“So, you cook for yourself. How did you learn?”
“Most Chinese men know how. We learn from our parents as children.”
DiMilo smiled. “I, as well, but I have not cooked for myself in years. The older I get the less they allow me to do for myself, eh, Franz?”
“I have my duties also, Eminence,” the German answered. He was drinking the mao-tai with a little more gusto. Must be nice to have a young stomach lining, both the older men thought.
“So, how do you find Beijing?” Yu asked.
“Truly fascinating. We Romans think that our city is ancient and redolent with history, but Chinese culture was old before the Romans set one stone upon another. And the art we saw yesterday…
“The jade mountain,” Schepke explained. “I spoke with the guide, but she didn’t know about the artists involved, or the time required to carve it.”
“The names of artisans and the time they needed-these were not matters of importance to the emperors of old. There was much beauty then, yes, but much cruelty as well.”
“And today?” Renato asked.
“Today as well, as you know, Eminence,” Yu confirmed with a long sigh. They spoke in English, and Yu’s Oklahoma accent fascinated his visitors. “The government lacks the respect for human life, which you and I would prefer.”
“Changing that will not be simple,” Monsignor Schepke added. The problem wasn’t limited to the communist PRC government. Cruelty had long been part of Chinese culture, to the point that someone had once said that China was too vast to be governed with kindness, an aphorism picked up with indecent haste by the left wings of the world, ignoring the explicit racism in such a statement. Perhaps the problem was that China had always been crowded, and in crowds came anger, and in anger came a callous disregard for others. Nor had religion helped. Confucius, the closest thing China had developed to a great religious leader, preached conformity as a person’s best action. While the Judeo-Christian tradition talked of transcendent values of right and wrong, and the human rights that devolved from them, China saw authority as Society, not God. For that reason, Cardinal DiMilo thought, communism had taken root here. Both societal models were alike in their absence of an absolute rule of right and wrong. And that was dangerous. In relativism lay man’s downfall, because, ultimately, if there were no absolute values, what difference was there between a man and a dog? And if there were no such difference, where was man’s fundamental dignity? Even a thinking atheist could mark religion’s greatest gift to human society: human dignity, the value placed on a single human life, the simple idea that man was more than an animal. That was the foundation of all human progress, because without it, human life was doomed to Thomas Hobbes’s model, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Christianity-and Judaism, and Islam, which were also religions of The Book-required merely that man believe in that which was self-evident: There was order in the universe, and that order came from a source, and that source was called God. Christianity didn’t even require that a man believe in that idea-not anymore, anyway-just that he accept the sense of it, and the result of it, which was human dignity and human progress. Was that so hard?