by Tom Clancy
“Hello, Chris, thank you for coming.”
The Ambassador would arrive at the White House in only a few minutes. The timing was impossible, but whoever in Tokyo was making decisions had not troubled himself with Nagumo’s convenience, the embassy official knew. It was awkward for another reason as well. Ordinarily a city that took little note of foreigners, Washington would soon change, and now for the first time, Nagumo was gaijin.
“Seiji, what the hell happened out there?” Cook asked.
Both men belonged to the University Club, a plush establishment located next door to the Russian Embassy and, boasting one of the best gyms in town, a favored place for a good workout and a quick meal. A Japanese commercial business kept a suite of rooms there, and though they would not be able to use this rendezvous again, for the moment it did guarantee anonymity.
“What have they told you, Chris?”
“That one of your navy ships had a little accident. Jesus, Seiji, aren’t things bad enough without that sort of mistake? Weren’t the goddamned gas tanks bad enough?” Nagumo took a second before responding. In a way it was good news. The overall events were being kept somewhat secret, as he had predicted and the Ambassador had hoped. He was nervous now, though his demeanor didn’t show it.
“Chris, it was not an accident.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there was a battle of sorts. I mean that my country feels itself to be very threatened, and that we have taken certain defensive measures to protect ourselves.”
Cook just didn’t get it. Though he was part of the State Department’s Japan specialists, he’d not yet been called in for a full briefing and knew only what he’d caught on his car radio, which was thin enough. It was beyond Chris’s imagination, Nagumo saw, to consider that his country could be attacked. After all, the Soviets were gone, weren’t they? It was gratifying to Seiji Nagumo. Though appalled at the risks that his country was running and ignorant of the reasons for them, he was a patriot. He loved his country as much as any man. He was also part of its culture. He had orders and instructions. Within the confines of his own mind he could rage at them, but he’d decided, simply, that he was a soldier of his country, and that was that. And Cook was the real gaijin, not himself. He kept repeating it to himself.
“Chris, our countries are at war, after a fashion. You pushed us too far. Forgive me, I am not pleased by this, you must understand that.”
“Wait a minute.” Chris Cook shook his head as his face twisted into a very quizzical expression. “You mean war? Real war?”
Nagumo nodded slowly, and spoke in a reasonable, regretful tone. “We have occupied the Mariana Islands. Fortunately this was accomplished without loss of life. The brief encounter between our two navies may have been more serious, but not greatly so. Both sides are now withdrawing away from one another, which is a good thing.”
“You’ve killed our people?”
“Yes, I regret to say, some people may have lost their lives on both sides.” Nagumo paused and looked down as though unable to meet his friend’s eyes. He’d already seen there the emotions he’d expected. “Please, don’t blame me for this, Chris,” he went on quietly in a voice clearly under very tight control. “But these things have happened. I had no part in it. Nobody asked me for an opinion. You know what I would have said. You know what I would have counseled.” Every word was true and Cook knew it.
“Christ, Seiji, what can we do?” The question was a manifestation of his friendship and support, and as such, very predictable. Also predictably, it gave Nagumo the opening he’d expected and needed.
“We have to find a way to keep things under control. I do not want my country destroyed again. We have to stop this and stop it quickly.” Which was his country’s objective and therefore his own. “There is no room in the world for this ... this abomination. There are cooler heads in my country. Goto is a fool. There”—Nagumo threw up his hands—“I have said it. He is a fool. Do we allow our countries to do permanent damage to one another because of fools? What of your Congress, what of that Trent maniac with his Trade Reform Act. Look what his reforms have brought us to!” He was really into it now. Able to veil his inner feelings, like most diplomats, he was now discovering acting talents made all the more effective by the fact that he really believed in what he was saying. He looked up with tears in his eyes. “Chris, if people like us don’t get this thing under control—my God, then what? The work of generations, gone. Your country and mine, both badly hurt, people dead, progress thrown away, and for what? Because fools in my country and yours could not work out difficulties on trade? Christopher, you must help me stop this. You must!” Mercenary and traitor or not, Christopher Cook was a diplomat, and his professional creed was to eliminate war. He had to respond, and he did.
“But what can you really do?”
“Chris, you know that my position is really more senior than my post would indicate,” Nagumo pointed out. “How else could I have done the things for you to make our friendship what it is?”
Cook nodded. He’d suspected as much.
“I have friends and influence in Tokyo. I need time. I need negotiating space. With those things I can soften our position, give Goto’s political opponents something to work with. We have to put that man in the asylum he belongs in—or shoot him yourself. That maniac might destroy my country, Chris! For God’s sake, you must help me stop him.” The last statement was an entreaty from the heart.
“What the hell can I do, Seiji? I’m just a DASS, remember? A little Indian, and there’s a bunch of chiefs.”
“You are one of the few people in your State Department who really understand us. They will seek your counsel.” A little flattery. Cook nodded.
“Probably. If they’re smart,” he added. “Scott Adler knows me. We talk.”
“If you can tell me what your State Department wants, I can get that information to Tokyo. With luck I can have my people inside the Foreign Ministry propose it first. If we can accomplish that much, then your ideas will appear to be our ideas, and we can more easily accommodate your wishes.” It was called judo, “the gentle art,” and consisted mainly of using an enemy’s strength and movements against himself. Nagumo thought he was making a very skillful use of it now. It had to appeal to Cook’s vanity that he might be able to manage foreign policy himself through cleverness. It appealed to Nagumo’s that he’d thought up this gambit.
Cook’s face twisted into disbelief again. “But if we’re at war, how the hell will—”
“Goto is not completely mad. We will keep the embassies open as a line of communication. We will offer you a return of the Marianas. I doubt the offer will be completely genuine, but it will be placed on the table as a sign of good faith. There,” Seiji said, “I have now betrayed my country.” As planned.
“What will be acceptable to your government as an end-game scenario?”
“In my opinion? Full independence for the Northern Marianas; an end to their commonwealth status. For reasons of geography and economics they will fall into our sphere of influence in any case. I think it is a fair compromise. We do own most of the land there,” Nagumo reminded his guest. “That is a guess on my part, but a good one.”
“What about Guam?”
“As long as it is demilitarized, it remains U.S. territory. Again a guess, but a good one. Time will be necessary for a full resolution of the various issues, but I think we can stop this war before it goes further.”
“What if we do not agree?”
“Then many people will die. We are diplomats, Chris. It is our mission in life to prevent that.” One more time: “If you can help me, just to let us know what you want us to do so that I can get our side moving in that direction, you and I can end a war, Chris. Please, can you help me?”
“I won’t take money for this, Seiji,” Cook said by way of a reply.
Amazing. The man had principles after all. So much the better that they were not accompanied by insight.
&nbs
p; The Japanese Ambassador arrived, as instructed, at the East Wing entrance. A White House usher opened the door on the stretch Lexus, and the Marine at the door saluted, not having been told not to. He walked in alone, unaccompanied by a bodyguard, and he passed through the metal detectors without incident, then turned west, past a long corridor including, among other things, the entrance to the President’s own movie theater. There were portraits of other presidents, sculptures by Frederic Remington, and other reminders of America’s frontier history. The walk itself was intended to give the man a sense of the size of the country to which he represented his own. A trio of Secret Service agents escorted him up to the State Floor of the building, an area he knew well, then farther west to the wing from which the United States was administered. The looks, he saw, were not unfriendly, merely correct, but that was quite different from the cordiality he ordinarily received in this building. As a final touch, the meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room. It held the Nobel Prize won by Theodore for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
If the mode of arrival was supposed to overawe him, the Ambassador thought, then the final act was counterproductive. The Americans, and others, were known for such foolish theatrics. The Indian Treaty Room in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building had been designed to overawe savages. This one reminded him of his country’s first major conflict, which had raised Japan to the ranks of the great nations by the defeat of another member of that club, czarist Russia, a country far less great than she had appeared, internally corrupt, strewn with dissension, given to posturing and bluster. Much like America, in fact, the Ambassador thought. He needed such ideas right now to keep his knees from trembling. President Durling was standing, and took his hand.
“Mr. Ambassador, you know everyone here. Please be seated.”
“Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for receiving me on such short and urgent notice.” He looked around the conference table as Durling went to his seat at the opposite end, nodding to each of them. Brett Hanson, Secretary of State; Arnold van Damm, the Chief of Staff; John Ryan, National Security Advisor. The Secretary of Defense was also in the building, he knew, but not here. How interesting. The Ambassador had served many years in Washington, and knew much of Americans. There was anger in the faces of the men seated; though the President controlled his emotions admirably, just like the security people who stood at the doors, his look was that of a soldier. Hanson’s anger was outrage. He could not believe that anyone would be so foolish as to threaten his country in any way—he was like a spoiled child resenting a failing grade on an exam from a fair and scrupulous teacher. Van Damm was a politician, and regarded him as a gaijin—a curious little man. Ryan showed the least anger of all, though it was there, indicated more in the way he held his pen than in the fixed stare of his blue cat’s eyes. The Ambassador had never dealt with Ryan beyond a few chance encounters at state functions. The same was true of most of the embassy staff, and though his background was well known to all Washington insiders, Ryan was known to be a European specialist and therefore ignorant of Japan. That was good, the Ambassador thought. Were he more knowledgeable, he might be a dangerous enemy.
“Mr. Ambassador, you requested this meeting,” Hanson said. “We will let you begin.”
Ryan endured the opening statement. It was lengthy and prepared and predictable, what any country would say under these circumstances, added to which was a little national spice. It wasn’t their fault; they’d been pushed, treated as lowly vassals despite years of faithful and productive friendship. They, too, regretted this situation. And so forth. It was just diplomatic embroidery, and Jack let his eyes do the work while his ears filtered out the noise.
More interesting was the demeanor of the speaker. Diplomats in friendly circumstances tended to the florid, and in hostile, they droned, as though embarrassed to speak their words. Not this time. The Japanese Ambassador showed overt strength that spoke of pride in his country and her actions. Not quite defiant, but not embarrassed either. Even the German ambassador who’d given word of Hitler’s invasion to Molotov had shown grief, Jack remembered.
For his part, the President listened impassively, letting Arnie show the anger and Hanson show the shock, Jack saw. Good for him.
“Mr. Ambassador, war with the United States of America is not a trivial thing,” the Secretary of State said when the opening statement was concluded.
The Ambassador didn’t flinch. “It is only a war if you wish it to be. We do not have the desire to destroy your country, but we do have our own security interests.” He went on to state his country’s position on the Marianas. They’d been Japanese territory before, and now they were again. His country had a right to its own defensive perimeter. And that, he said, was that.
“You do know,” Hanson said, “that we have the ability to destroy your country?”
A nod. “Yes, I do. We well remember your use of nuclear weapons on our country.”
Jack’s eyes opened a little wider at that answer. On his pad he wrote, nukes?
“You have something else to say,” Durling observed, entering the conversation.
“Mr. President—my country also has nuclear arms.”
“Delivered how?” Arnie asked with a snort. Ryan blessed him silently for the question. There were times when an ass had his place.
“My country has a number of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. Your own people have seen the assembly plant. You can check with NASA if you wish.” The Ambassador read off the name and the dates in a very matter-of-fact way, noting that Ryan took them down like a good functionary. The room became so quiet that he could hear the scratching of the man’s pen. More interesting still were the looks on the other faces.
“Do you threaten us?” Durling asked quietly.
The Ambassador looked straight into the man’s eyes, twenty feet away. “No, Mr. President, I do not. 1 merely state a fact. I say again, this is a war only if you wish it so. Yes, we know you can destroy us if you wish, and we cannot destroy you, though we can cause you great harm. Over what, Mr. President? A few small islands that are historically our possessions anyway? They have been Japanese in all but name for years now.”
“And the people you killed?” van Damm asked.
“I regret that sincerely. We will of course offer compensation to the families. It is our hope that we can conclude matters. We will not disturb your embassy or its personnel, and we hope that you will grant us the same courtesy, to maintain communications between our governments. Is it so hard,” he asked, “to think of us as equals? Why did you feel the need to hurt us? There was a time when a single airplane crash, due to a mistake made by your people at Boeing, killed more of my citizens than the number of American lives lost in the Pacific. Did we scream at you? Did we threaten your economic security, your very national survival? No. We did not. The time has come for my country to take her place in the world. You’ve withdrawn from the Western Pacific. We must now look to our own defenses. To do that we need what we need. How can we be sure that, having crippled our nation in economic terms, you will not at some later time seek to destroy us physically?”
“We would never do that!” Hanson objected.
“Easily said, Mr. Secretary. You did it once before, and as you yourself just pointed out, you retain that ability.”
“We didn’t start that war,” van Damm pointed out.
“You did not?” the Ambassador asked. “By cutting off our oil and trade, you faced us with ruin, and a war resulted. Just last month you threw our economy into chaos, and you expected us to do nothing—because we had not the ability to defend ourselves. Well, we do have that ability,” the Ambassador said. “Perhaps now we can treat as equals.
“So far as my government is concerned, the conflict is over. We will take no further action against Americans. Your citizens are welcome in my country. We will amend our trade practices to accommodate your laws. This entire incident could be presented to your public as an unfortunate accident,
and we can reach an agreement between ourselves on the Marianas. We stand ready to negotiate a settlement that will serve the needs of your country and of mine. That is the position of my government.” With that, the Ambassador opened his portfolio and extracted the “note” which the rules of international behavior required. He rose and handed it to the Secretary of State.
“If you require my presence, I stand at your service. Good day.” He walked back to the door, past the National Security Advisor, who didn’t follow the Ambassador with his eyes as the others did. Ryan had said nothing at all. That might have been disturbing in a Japanese, but not in an American, really. He’d simply had nothing to say. Well, he was a European specialist, wasn’t he?
The door closed and Ryan waited another few seconds before speaking.
“Well, that was interesting,” Ryan observed, checking his page of notes. “He only told us one thing of real importance.”
“What do you mean?” Hanson demanded.
“Nuclear weapons and the delivery systems. The rest was embroidery, really meant for a different audience. We still don’t know what they’re really doing.”
25
All the King’s Horses
It hadn’t made the media yet, but that was about to change. The FBI was already looking for Chuck Searls. They already knew that it wouldn’t be easy, and the truth of the matter is that all they could do, on the basis of what they had, was to question him. The six programmers who’d worked to some greater or lesser extent on the Electra-Clerk 2.4.0 program had all been interviewed, and all of them denied knowledge of what they all referred to as the “Easter Egg,” in every case with a mixture of outrage at what had been done and admiration at how. Only three widely separated lines of code, and it had taken all six of them working together twenty-seven hours to find it. Then had come the really bad news: all six of them, plus Searls, had had access to the raw program. They were, after all, the six senior programmers at the firm, and like people with identical security clearances, each could access it whenever he or she wished, up to the very moment that it left the office on the toaster-disk. In addition, while there were records of access, each of them also had the ability to fiddle the coding on the master computer and either erase the access-time reference or mix it with the others. For that matter, the Easter Egg could have been in there for the months it had taken to perfect the program, so finely crafted it was. Finally, one of them admitted quite freely, any of them could have done it. There were no fingerprints on computer programs. Of greater importance for the moment, there was no way of undoing what Electra-Clerk 2.4.0 had done.
