Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon by Tom Clancy Page A

him a zhopnik, but he was not one of those, of course. He had a different woman on his arm every night, and none of them were ugly, but for some reason he didn't get along well with men, even those from State Security, where, he said, he was once a great national asset.”
    “Is that a fact,” the militia sergeant observed, bored again. If there was anything criminals liked to do, it was boast. He'd heard it all a thousand times or more.
    “Oh, yes. Gregoriy Filipovich claims to have supplied mistresses for all manner of foreigners, including some of ministerial rank, and says that they continue to supply valuable information to Mother Russia. I believe it,” the informer added, editorializing again. “For a week with one of those angels, I would speak much.”
    And who wouldn't? the militiaman wondered with a yawn. “So, how did Avseyenko offend such powerful men?” the cop asked again.
    “I have told you I do not know. Talk to 'the boy,' perhaps he will know.”
    “It is said that Gregoriy was beginning to import drugs,” the cop said next, casting his hook into a different hole, and wondering what fish might lurk in the still waters.
    The informant nodded. “That is true. It was said. But I never saw any evidence of it.”
    “Who would have seen evidence of it?”
    Another shrug. “This I do not know. One of his girls, perhaps. I never understood how he planned to distribute what he thought about importing. To use the girls was logical, of course, but dangerous for them -- and for him, because his whores would not have been loyal to him in the face of a trip to the camps. So, then, what does that leave?” the informant asked rhetorically. “He would have to set up an entirely new organization, and there were also dangers in doing that, were there not? So, yes, I believe he was thinking about importing drugs for sale, and making vast sums of money from it, but Gregoriy was not a man who wished to go to a prison, and I think he was merely thinking about it, perhaps talking a little, but not much. I do not think he had made his final decision. I do not think he actually imported anything before he met his end.”
    “Rivals with the same ideas?” the cop asked next.
    “There are people who can find cocaine and other drugs for you, as you well know.”
    The cop looked up. In fact, the militia sergeant didn't know that for certain. He'd heard rumbles and rumors, but not statements of fact from informants he trusted (insofar as any cop in any city truly trusted any informant). As with many things, there was a buzz on the streets of Moscow, but like most Moscow cops he expected it to show up first in the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city whose criminal activity went back to the czars and which today, with the restoration of free trade with the rest of the world, tended to lead Russia in -- well, led Russia to all forms of illicit activity. If there was an active drug trade in Moscow, it was so new and so small that he hadn't stumbled across it yet. He made a mental note to check with Odessa, to see what if anything was happening down there along those lines.
    “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