Scott Adler was regarded as too young and inexperienced for the job, but that judgment came from would-be political appointees who’d schemed their way to near-the-top, whereas Adler had been a career foreign-service officer since his graduation from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy twenty-six years earlier. Those who’d seen him work regarded him as a very astute diplomatic technician. Those who played cards with him-Adler liked to play poker before a major meeting or negotiation-thought he was one very lucky son of a bitch.

His seventh-floor office at the State Department building was capacious and comfortable. Behind his desk was a credenza covered with the usual framed photographs of spouse, children, and parents. He didn’t like wearing his suit jacket at his desk, as he found it too confining for comfort. In this he’d outraged some of the senior State Department bureaucrats, who thought this an entirely inappropriate informality. He did, of course, don the jacket for important meetings with foreign dignitaries, but he didn’t think internal meetings were important enough to be uncomfortable for.

That suited George Winston, who tossed his coat over a chair when he came in. Like himself, Scott Adler was a working guy, and those were the people with whom

Winston was most comfortable. He might be a career government puke, but the son of a bitch had a work ethic, which was more than he could say for too many of the people in his own department. He was doing his best to weed the drones out, but it was no easy task, and civil-service rules made firing unproductive people a non-trivial exercise.

“Have you read the Chinese stuff?” Adler asked, as soon as the lunch tray was on the table.

“Yeah, Scott. I mean, holy shit, fella,” TRADER observed to EAGLE.

“Welcome to the club. The intelligence stuff we get can be very interesting.” The State Department had its own spook service, called Intelligence and Research, or I amp;R, which, while it didn’t exactly compete with CIA and the other services, occasionally turned up its own rough little diamonds from the thick diplomatic mud. “So, what do you think of our little yellow brothers?”

Winston managed not to growl. “Buddy, I might not even eat their goddamned food anymore.”

“They make our worst robber barons look like Mother Teresa. They’re conscienceless motherfuckers, George, and that’s a fact.” Winston immediately started liking Adler more. A guy who talked like this had real possibilities. Now it was his turn to be coldly professional to counterpoint Adler’s working-class patois.

“They’re ideologically driven, then?”

“Totally-well, maybe with a little corruption thrown in, but remember, they figure that their political astuteness entitles them to live high on the hog, and so to them it’s not corruption at all. They just collect tribute from the peasants, and ‘peasant’ is a word they still use over there.”

“In other words, we’re dealing with dukes and earls?”

The Secretary of State nodded. “Essentially, yes. They have an enormous sense of personal entitlement. They are not used to hearing the word ‘no’ in any form, and as a result they don’t always know what to do when they do hear it from people like me. That’s why they’re often at a disadvantage in negotiations-at least, when we play hardball with them. We haven’t done much of that, but last year after the Airbus shoot-down I came on a little strong, and then we followed up with official diplomatic recognition of the ROC government on Taiwan. That really put the PRC noses seriously out of joint, even though the ROC government hasn’t officially declared its independence.”

“What?” Somehow SecTreas had missed that.

“Yeah, the people on Taiwan play a pretty steady and reasonable game. They’ve never really gone out of their way to offend the mainland. Even though they have embassies all over the world, they’ve never actually proclaimed the fact that they’re an independent nation. That would flip the Beijing Chinese out. Maybe the guys in Taipei think it would be bad manners or something. At the same time, we have an understanding that Beijing knows about. If somebody messes with Taiwan, Seventh Fleet comes over to keep an eye on things, and we will not permit a direct military threat to the Republic of China government. The PRC doesn’t have enough of a navy to worry our guys that much, and so all that flies back and forth, really, is words.” Adler looked up from his sandwich. “Sticks and stones, y’know?”

“Well, I had breakfast with Jack this morning, and we talked about the trade talks.”

“And Jack wants to play a little rougher?” SecState asked. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Ryan had always preferred fair play, and that was often a rare commodity in the intercourse among nation-states.

“You got it’ Winston confirmed around a bite of his sandwich. One thing about working-class people like Adler, the SecTreas thought, they knew what a proper lunch was. He was so tired of fairyfied French food for lunch. Lunch was supposed to be a piece of meat with bread wrapped around it. French cuisine was just fine, but for dinner, not for lunch.

“How rough?”

“We get what we want. We need them to get accustomed to the idea that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them.”

“That’s a tall order, George. If they don’t want to listen?”

“Knock louder on the door, or on their heads. Scott, you read the same document this morning I did, right?”

“Yeah,” SecState confirmed.

“The people they’re cheating out of their jobs are American citizens.”

“I know that. But what you have to remember is that we can’t dictate to a sovereign country. The world doesn’t work that way.”

“Okay, fine, but we can tell them that they can’t dictate trade practices to us, either.”

“George, for a long time America has taken a very soft line on these issues.”

“Maybe, but the Trade Reform Act is now law-”

“Yeah, I remember. I also remember how it got us into a shooting war,” Adler reminded his guest.

“We won. I remember that, too. Maybe other people will as well. Scott, we’re running a huge trade deficit with the Chinese. The President says that has to stop. I happen to agree. If we can buy from them, then they damned well have to buy from us, or we buy our chopsticks and teddy bears elsewhere.”

“There are jobs involved,” Adler warned. “They know how to play that card. They cancel contracts and stop buying our finished goods, and then some of our people lose their jobs, too.”

“Or, if we succeed, then we sell more finished goods to them, and our factories have to hire people to make them. Play to win, Scott,” Winston advised.

“I always do, but this isn’t a baseball game with rules and fences. It’s like racing a sailboat in the fog. You can’t always see your adversary, and you can damned near never see the finish line.”

“I can buy you some radar, then. How about I give you one of my people to help out?”

“Who?”

“Mark Gant. He’s my computer whiz. He really knows the issues from a technical, monetary point of view.”

Adler thought about that. State Department had always been weak in that area. Not too many business-savvy people ended up in the Foreign Service, and learning it from books wasn’t the same as living it out in the real world, a fact that too many State Department “professionals” didn’t always appreciate as fully as they should.

“Okay, send him over. Now, just how rough are we supposed to play this?”

“Well, I guess you’ll need to talk that one over with Jack, but from what he told me this morning, we want the playing field leveled out.”

An easy thing to say, Adler thought, but less easy to accomplish. He liked and admired President Ryan, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that SWORDSMAN was not the most patient guy in the world, and in diplomacy, patience was everything-hell, patience was just about the only thing. “Okay,” he said, after a moment’s reflection. “I’ll talk it over with him before I tell my people what to say. This could get nasty. The Chinese play rough.”