"Very well. What are the chances for success?" Chief of Staff Arnold van Damm asked. He had to be there, of course. This was more an exercise in politics than statecraft. The down-side political risk was serious, just as the reward for success would be more than noteworthy.

"Sir, there are no guarantees for operations of this kind. If something is said, it is likely that we'll know what it is, but he might not even discuss the matter at all. The equipment has all been tested. It works. The field officer running this operation is well experienced. He's done touchy ones before."

"Like?" van Damm asked.

"Like getting Gerasimov's wife and daughter out a few years ago." Ryan explained on for a minute or so.

"Is the operation worth the risk?" Fowler asked.

That surprised Ryan quite a bit. "Sir, that decision is yours to make."

"But I asked you for an opinion."

"Yes, Mr President, it is. The take we've been getting from NIITAKA shows a considerable degree of arrogance on their part. Something like this might have the net effect of shocking them into playing honest ball with us."

"You approve of our policy of dealing with Japan?" van Damm asked, just as surprised as Ryan had been a moment earlier.

"My approval or disapproval is beside the point, but the answer to your question is, yes."

The Chief of Staff was openly amazed. "But the previous administration - how come you never told us?"

"You never asked, Arnie. I don't make government policy, remember? I'm a spook. I do what you tell me to do, as long as it's legal."

"You're satisfied on the legality of the operation?" Fowler asked, with a barely suppressed smile.

"Mr President, you're the lawyer, not me. If I do not know the legal technicalities - and I don't - I must assume that you, as an officer of the court, are not ordering me to break the law."

"That's the best dance number I've seen since the Kirov Ballet was in the Kennedy Center last summer," van Damm observed, with a laugh.

"Ryan, you know all the moves. You have my approval." Fowler said, after a brief pause. "If we get what we expect, then what?"

"We have to go over that with the State Department guys," Liz Elliot announced.

"That is potentially dangerous," Ryan observed. "The Japanese have been hiring a lot of the people from the trade-negotiation section. We have to assume that they have people inside."

"Commercial espionage?" Fowler asked.

"Sure, why not? NIITAKA has never given us hard evidence of that, but if I were a bureaucrat looking to leave government service and make half a mill' a year representing them - like a lot of them do - how would I present myself to them as a potentially valuable asset? I'd do it the same way a Soviet official or spook presents bonafides to us. You deliver something juicy up-front.

"That's illegal, but we're not devoting any assets to looking at the problem. For that reason, wide dissemination of the information from this operation is very dangerous. Obviously you'll want the opinion of Secretary Talbot and a few others, but I'd be really careful how much farther you spread it. Also, remember that if you tell the P.M. that you know what he said - and if he knows he only said it in one place - you run the risk of compromising this intelligence-gathering technique." The President accepted that without anything more than a raised eyebrow.