“Hey, Barry,” a familiar voice said in reply. “This is Ben Golden. What you got for us?”
“It’s hot,” Wise told his controller half a world away. “A double murder and a childbirth. One guy who got whacked is a Catholic cardinal, the Vatican ambassador to Beijing. The other one’s a Chinese Baptist minister. They were both shot on camera. You might want to call Legal about it.”
“Fuck!” Atlanta observed.
“We’re uploading the rough-cut now, just so you get it. I’ll stand by to do the talking. But let’s get the video uploaded first.”
“Roger that. We’re standing by on Channel Zero Six.”
“Zero Six, Pete,” Wise told his cameraman, who also ran the uplink.
Nichols was kneeling by the control panels. “Standing by… tape’s in… setting up for Six…, transmitting… now!” And with that, the Ku-band signal went racing upward through the atmosphere to the satellite hovering 22,800 miles directly over the Admiralty Islands in the Bismarck Sea.
CNN doesn’t bother encrypting its video signals. To do so is technically inconvenient, and few people bother pirating signals they could just as easily get off their cable systems for free in a few minutes, or even get live just four seconds later.
But this one was coming in at an awkward hour, which was, however, good for CNN Atlanta, because some headquarters people would want to go over it. A shooting death was not what the average American wanted with his Rice Krispies in the morning.
It was also downloaded by the American intelligence community, which holds CNN in very high regard, and doesn’t distribute its news coverage very far in any case. But this one did go to the White House Office of Signals, a largely military operation located in the basement of the West Wing. There a watch officer had to decide how important it was. If it ranked as a CRITIC priority, the President had to know about it in fifteen minutes, which meant waking him up right now, which was not something to be done casually to the Commander-in-Chief. A mere FLASH could wait a little longer, like-the watch officer checked the wall clock-yeah, like until breakfast. So, instead, they called the President’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. They’d let him make the call. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer.
“Yeah?” Goodley snarled into the phone while he checked the clock radio next to his bed.
“Dr. Goodley, this is Signals. We just copied something off CNN from Beijing that the Boss is going to be interested in.”
“What is it?” CARDSHARP asked. Then he heard the reply. “How certain are you of this?”
“The Italian guy looks like he might possibly have survived, from the video-I mean if there was a good SURGEON close-but the Chinese minister had his brains blowed right out. No chance for him at all, sir.”
“What was it all about?”
“We’re not sure of that. NSA might have the phone conversation between this Wise guy and Atlanta, but we haven’t seen anything about it yet.”
“Okay, tell me what you got again,” Goodley ordered, now that he was approximately awake.
“Sir, we have a visual of two guys getting shot and a baby being born in Beijing. The video comes from Barry Wise of CNN. The video shows three gunshots. One is upwards into the ceiling of what appears to be a hospital delivery room. The second shot catches a guy in the back. That guy is identified as the Papal Nuncio to Beijing. The third shot goes right into the head of a guy identified as a Baptist minister in Beijing. That one appears to be a Chinese national. In between, we have a baby being born. Now we-stand by a minute, Dr. Goodley, okay, I have FLASH traffic from Fort Meade. Okay, they got it, too, and they got a voice transmission via their ECHELON system, reading it now. Okay, the Catholic cardinal is dead, according to this, says Cardinal Renato DiMilo-can’t check the spelling, maybe State Department for that-and the Chinese minister is a guy named Yu Fa An, again no spelling check. They were there to, oh, okay, they were there to prevent a late-term abortion, and looks like they succeeded, but these two clergy got their asses killed doing it. Third one, a monsignor named Franz Schepke-that sounds pretty German to me-was there, too, and looks like he survived-oh, okay, he must be the tall one you see on the tape. You gotta see the tape. It’s a hell of a confused mess, sir, and when this Yu guy gets it, well, it’s like that video from Saigon during the Tet Offensive. You know, where the South Vietnamese police colonel shot the North Vietnamese spy in the side of the head with a Smith Chief’s Special, you know, like a fountain of blood coming out the head. Ain’t something to watch with your Egg McMuffin, y’know?” the watch officer observed. The reference came across clearly enough. The news media had celebrated the incident as an example of the South Vietnamese government’s bloodthirstiness. They had never explained-probably never even knew-that the man shot had been an officer of the North Vietnamese army captured in a battle zone wearing civilian clothing, therefore, under the Geneva Protocols was a spy liable to summary execution, which was exactly what he’d received.
“Okay, what else?”
“Do we wake the Boss up for this? I mean, we got a diplomatic team over there, and this has some serious implications.”
Goodley thought about that for a second or two. “No. I’ll brief him in a few hours.”
“Sir, it’s sure as hell going to be on CNN’s seven o’clock morning report,” the watch officer warned.
“Well, let me brief him when he has more than just pictures.”
“Your call, Dr. Goodley.”
“Thanks. Now, I think I’ll try to get one more hour before I drive over to Langley.” The phone went down before Goodley heard a reaction. His job carried a lot of prestige, but it denied him sleep and much of a social or sex life, and at moments like this he wondered what the hell was so goddamned prestigious about it.
CHAPTER 25
The speed of modern communications makes for curious disconnects. In this case, the American government knew what had happened in Beijing long before the government of the People’s Republic did. What appeared in the White House Office of Signals appeared also in the State Department’s Operations Center, and there the senior officer present had decided, naturally enough, to get the information immediately to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. There Ambassador Carl Hitch took the call at his desk on the encrypted line. He forced the caller from Foggy Bottom to confirm the news twice before making his first reaction, a whistle. It wasn’t often that an accredited ambassador of any sort got killed in a host country, much less by a host country. What the hell, he wondered, was Washington going to do about this?
“Damn,” Hitch whispered. He hadn’t even met Cardinal DiMilo yet. The official reception had been planned for two weeks from now in a future that would never come. What was he supposed to do? First, he figured, get off a message of condolence to the Vatican mission. (Foggy Bottom would so notify the Vatican through the Nuncio in Washington, probably. Maybe even Secretary Adler would drive over himself to offer official condolences. Hell, President Ryan was Catholic, and maybe he would go himself, Hitch speculated.) Okay, Hitch told himself, things to do here. He had his secretary call the Nuncio’s residence, but all he got there was a Chinese national answering the phone, and that wasn’t worth a damn. That would have to go on the back burner…, what about the Italian Embassy? he thought next. The Nuncio was an Italian citizen, wasn't he? Probably. Okay. He checked his card file and dialed up the Italian ambassador's private line.
"Paulo? This is Carl Hitch. Thanks, and you? I have some bad news, I'm afraid… the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal DiMilo, he's been shot and killed in some Beijing hospital by a Chinese policeman… it's going to be on CNN soon, not sure how soon… we're pretty certain of it, I'm afraid… I'm not entirely sure, but what I've been told is that he was there trying to prevent the death of a child, or one of those late-term abortions they do here… yeah… say, doesn't he come from a prominent family?" Then Hitch started taking notes. "Vincenzo, you said? I see… Minister of Justice two years ago? I tried to call over there, but all I got was some local answering the phone. German? Schepke?" More notes. "I see. Thank you, Paulo. Hey, if there's anything we can help you with over here… right. Okay. Bye." He hung up. "Damn. Now what?" he asked the desk. He could spread the bad news to the German Embassy, but, no, he'd let someone else do that. For now… he checked his watch. It was still short of sunrise in Washington, and the people there would wake up to find a firestorm. His job, he figured, was to verify what had happened so that he could make sure Washington had good information. But how the hell to do that? His best potential source of information was this Monsignor Schepke, but the only way to get him was to stake out the Vatican Embassy and wait for him to come home. Hmm, would the Chinese be holding him somewhere? No, probably not. Once their Foreign Ministry found out about this, they'd probably fall all over themselves trying to apologize. So, they'd put extra security on the Nuncio's place, and that would keep newsies away, but they're not going to mess with accredited diplomats, not after killing one. This was just so bizarre. Carl Hitch had been a foreign-service officer since his early twenties. He'd never come across anything like this before, at least not since Spike Dobbs had been held hostage in Afghanistan by guerrillas, and the Russians had screwed up the rescue mission and gotten him killed. Some said that had been deliberate, but even the Soviets weren't that dumb, Hitch thought. Similarly, this hadn't been a deliberate act either. The Chinese were communists, and communists didn't gamble that way. It just wasn't part of their nature or their training.