It wasn't Matsuda who spoke in reply. It couldn't be. It had to be another, one whose corporation was still immensely strong, or apparently so. It also had to be one who had never agreed with him. The rule was as important as it was unspoken, and though eyes didn't turn, thoughts did. The man looked down at his half-empty cup of tea—this was not a night for alcohol—and pondered his own fate. He spoke without looking up, because he was afraid to see the identical look in the eyes arrayed around the black lacquer table. "How, Yamata-san, would we achieve that which you propose?"
"No shit?" Chavez asked. He spoke in Russian, for you were not supposed to speak English here at Monterey, and he hadn't learned that colloquialism in Japanese yet.
"Fourteen agents," Major Oleg Yurievich Lyalin, KGB (retired), replied, as matter-of-factly as his ego allowed.
"And they never reactivated your net?" Clark asked, wanting to roll his eyes.
"They couldn't." Lyalin smiled and tapped the side of his head. "THISTLE was my creation. It turned out to be my life insurance."
No shit, Clark almost said. That Ryan had gotten him out alive was somewhere to the right of a miracle. Lyalin had been tried for treason with the normal KGB attention to a speedy trial, had been in a death cell, and known the routine as exactly as any man could. Told that his execution date was a week hence, he'd been marched to the prison commandant's office, informed of his right as a Soviet citizen to appeal directly to the President for executive clemency, and invited to draft a handwritten letter to that end. The less sophisticated might have thought the gesture to be genuine. Lyalin had known otherwise. Designed to make the execution easier, after the letter was sealed, he would be led back to his cell, and the executioner would leap from an open door to his right, place a pistol right next to his head and fire. As a result it was not overly surprising that his hand had shaken while holding the ballpoint pen, and that his legs were rubbery as he was led out. The entire ritual had been carried out, and Oleg Yurievich remembered his amazement on actually reaching his basement cell again, there to be told to gather up what belongings he had and to follow a guard, even more amazingly back to the commandant's office, there to meet someone who could only have been an American citizen, with his smile and his tailored clothes, unaware of KGB's wry valedictory to its traitorous officer.
"I would've pissed my pants," Ding observed, shuddering at the end of the story.
"I was lucky there," Lyalin admitted with a smile. "I'd urinated right before they took me up. My family was waiting for me at Sheremetyevo. It was one of the last PanAm flights."
"Hit the booze pretty hard on the way over?" Clark asked with a smile.
"Oh, yes," Oleg assured him, not adding how he'd shaken and then vomited on the lengthy flight to New York's JFK International Airport, and had insisted on a taxi ride through New York to be sure that the impossible vision of freedom was real.
Chavez refilled his mentor's glass. Lyalin was trying to work his way off hard liquor, and contented himself with Coors Light. "I've been in a few tight places, tovarich, but that one must have been really uncomfortable."
"I have retired, as you see. Domingo Estebanovich, where did you learn Russian so well?"
"The kid's got a gift for it, doesn't he?" Clark noted. "Especially the slang."
"Hey, I like to read, okay? And whenever I can I catch Russian TV at the home office and stuff. What's the big deal?" The last sentence slipped out in English. Russian didn't quite have that euphemism.
"The big deal is that you're truly gifted, my young friend," Major Lyalin said, saluting with his glass.
Chavez acknowledged the compliment. He hadn't even had a high-school diploma when he'd sneaked into the U.S. Army, mainly by promising to be a grunt, not a missile technician, but it pleased him that he had indeed raced through George Mason University for his subsequent undergraduate degree, and was now within a dissertation of his master's. He marveled at his luck and wondered how many others from his barrio could have done as well, given an equal smile from Chance.
"So does Mrs. Foley know that you left a network behind?"
"Yes, but all her Japanese speakers must be elsewhere. I don't think they would have tried to reactivate without letting me know. Besides, they will only activate if they are told the right thing."
"Jesus," Clark whispered, also in English, since one only swears in his native tongue. That was a natural consequence of the Agency's de-emphasis of human intelligence in favor of electronic bullshit, which was useful but not the be-all and end-all that the paper-pushers thought it to be. Of CIA's total of over fifteen thousand employees, somewhere around four hundred fifty of them were field officers, actually out on the street or in the weeds, talking to real people and trying to learn what their thoughts were instead of counting beans from overheads and reading newspaper articles for the rest.
"You know, sometimes I wonder how we ever won the fuckin' war."
"America tried very hard not to, but the Soviet Union tried harder." Lyalin paused. "THISTLE was mainly concerned with gathering commercial information. We stole many industrial designs and processes from Japan, and your country's policy is not to use intelligence services for that purpose." Another pause. "Except for one thing."
"What's that, Oleg?" Chavez asked, popping another Coors open.
"There's no real difference, Domingo. Your people—I tried for several months to explain that to them. Business is the government over there. Their parliament and ministries, they are the 'legend,' the maskirovka for the business empires."
"In that case there's one government in the world that knows how to make a decent car." Chavez chuckled. He'd given up on buying the Corvette of his dreams—the damned things just cost too much—and settled on a "Z" that was almost as sporty for half the price. And now he'd have to get rid of it, Ding told himself. He had to be more respectable and settled if he were going to marry, didn't he?
"Nyet. You should understand this: the opposition is not what your country thinks it is. Why do you suppose you have such problems negotiating with them? I discovered this fact early on, and KGB understood it readily."
As they had to, Clark told himself, nodding. Communist theory predicted that very "fact," didn't it? Damn, wasn't that a hoot! "How were the pickings?" he asked.
"Excellent," Lyalin assured him. "Their culture, it's so easy for them to take insults, but so hard for them to respond. They conceal much anger. Then, all you need do is show sympathy."
Clark nodded again, this time thinking. This guy is a real pro. Fourteen well-placed agents, he still had the names and addresses and phone numbers in his head, and, unsurprisingly, nobody at Langley had followed up on it because of those damned-fool ethics laws foisted on the Agency by lawyers—a breed of government servant that sprouted up like crabgrass everywhere you looked, as though anything the Agency did was, strictly speaking, ethical at all. Hell, he and Ding had kidnapped Corp, hadn't they? In the interests of justice, to be sure, but if they had brought him to America for trial, instead of leaving him with his own countrymen, some high-priced and highly ethical defense attorney, perhaps even acting pro bono—obstructing justice for free, Clark told himself—would have ranted and raved first before cameras and later before twelve good men (and women) about how this patriot had resisted an invasion of his country, et cetera, et cetera.