“And what people might they be?” the sergeant asked. If there was a growing distribution network in Moscow, he might as well learn about it.
Nomuri’s job for Nippon Electric Company involved selling high-end desktop computers and peripherals. For him that meant the PRC government, whose senior bureaucrats had to have the newest and best of everything, from cars to mistresses, paid for in all cases by the government, which in turn took its money from the people, whom the bureaucrats represented and protected to the best of their abilities. As in many things, the PRC could have bought American brands, but in this case it chose to purchase the slightly less expensive (and less capable) computers from Japan, in the same way that it preferred to buy Airbus airlines from the European maker rather than Boeings from America-that had been a card played a few years before to teach the Americans a lesson. America had briefly resented it, then had quickly forgotten about it, in the way America seemed to handle all such slights, which was quite a contrast to the Chinese, who never forgot anything.
When President Ryan had announced the reestablishment of their official recognition of the Republic of China government on Taiwan, the repercussions had thundered through the corridors of power in Beijing like the main shocks of a major earthquake. Nomuri hadn’t been here long enough yet to see the cold fury the move had generated, but the aftershocks were significant enough, and he’d heard echoes of it since his arrival in Beijing. The questions directed at himself were sometimes so direct and so demanding of an explanation that he’d momentarily wondered if his cover might have been blown, and his interlocutors had known that he was a CIA “illegal” field officer in the capital of the People’s Republic of China, entirely without a diplomatic cover. But it hadn’t been that. It was just a continuing echo of pure political rage. Paradoxically, the Chinese government was itself trying to shove that rage aside because they, too, had to do business with the United States of America, now their number one trading partner, and the source of vast amounts of surplus cash, which their government needed to do the things which Nomuri was tasked to find out about. And so, here he was, in the outer office of one of the nation’s senior officials.
“Good day,” he said, with a bow and a smile to the secretary. She worked for a senior minister named Fang Gan, he knew, whose office was close by. She was surprisingly well dressed for a semi-ordinary worker, in a nation where fashion statements were limited to the color of the buttons one wore on the Mao jacket that was as much a part of the uniform of civilian government workers as was the gray-green wool of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.
“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 with her both for himself and for her, he thought to himself while waiting for the elevator. That’s why Langley paid him so much, not counting the princely salary from Nippon Electric Company that was his to keep. He needed it to survive here. The price of living was bad enough for a Chinese. For a foreigner, it was worse, because for foreigners everything was-had to be-special. The apartments were special-and almost certainly bugged. The food he bought in a special shop was more expensive-and Nomuri didn’t object to that, since it was also almost certainly healthier.
China was what Nomuri called a thirty-foot country. Everything looked okay, even impressive, until you got within thirty feet of it. Then you saw that the parts didn’t fit terribly well. He’d found it could be especially troublesome getting into an elevator, of all things. Dressed as he was in Western-made clothing (the Chinese thought of Japan as a Western country, which would have amused a lot of people, both in Japan and the West), he was immediately spotted as a qwai-a foreign devil-even before people saw his face. When that happened, the looks changed, sometimes to mere curiosity, sometimes to outright hostility, because the Chinese weren’t like the Japanese; they weren’t trained as thoroughly to conceal their feelings, or maybe they just didn’t give a damn, the CIA officer thought behind his own blanked-out poker face. He’d learned the practice from his time in Tokyo, and learned it well, which explained both why he had a good job with NEC and why he’d never been burned in the field.