“So what is it?” Qati asked just after dawn. He’d been away the previous day, meeting some other guerrilla leaders, and also for a trip to the doctor, Ghosn knew, though he could not ask about that.
“Not sure,” the engineer replied. “I’d guess a jamming pod, something like that.”
“That’s useful,” the Commander said at once. Despite the rapprochement, or whatever the key phrase was, between East and West, business was still business. The Russians still had a military, and that military still had weapons. Countermeasures against those weapons were items of interest. Israeli equipment was particularly prized, since the Americans copied it. Even old equipment showed how the Israeli engineers thought through problems, and could provide useful clues to newer systems.
“Yes, we should be able to sell it to our Russian friends.”
“How did the American work out?” Qati asked next.
“Quite well. I do like him, Ismael. I understand him better now.” The engineer explained why. Qati nodded.
“What should we do with him, then?”
Ghosn shrugged. “Weapons training, perhaps? Let’s see if he fits in with the men.”
“Very well. I’ll send him out this morning to see how well he knows combat skills. And you, how soon will you pick the thing apart?”
“I planned to do it today.”
“Excellent. Do not let me stop you.”
“How are you feeling, Commander?”
Qati frowned. He felt terrible, but he was telling himself that part of that was the possibility of some sort of treaty with the Israelis. Could it be real? Could it be possible? History said no, but there had been so many changes.... Some sort of agreement between the Zionists and the Saudis ... well, after the Iraq business, what could he expect? The Americans had played their role, and now they were presenting some kind of bill. Disappointing, but hardly unexpected, and whatever the Americans were up to would divert attention away from the latest Israeli atrocity. That people calling themselves Arabs had been so womanly as to meekly accept fire and death.... Qati shook his head. You didn’t fight that way. So the Americans would do something or other to neutralize the political impact of the Israeli massacre, and the Saudis were playing along like the lapdogs they were. Whatever was in the offing, it could hardly affect the Palestinian struggle. He should soon be feeling better, Qati told himself.
“It is of no account. Let me know when you’ve determined exactly what it is.”
Ghosn took his dismissal and left. He was worried about his commander. The man was ill—he knew that much from his brother-in-law, but exactly how sick he didn’t know. In any case, he had work to do.
The workshop was a disreputable-looking structure of plain wood walls and a roof of corrugated steel. Had it looked more sturdy, some Israeli F-16 pilot might have destroyed it years before.
The bomb—he still thought of it by that name—lay on the dirt floor. An A-frame like that used for auto or truck service stood over it, with a chain for moving the bomb if necessary, but yesterday two men had set it up in accordance with his instructions. Ghosn turned on the lights—he liked a brightly lit work area—and contemplated the ... bomb.
Why do I keep calling it that? he asked himself. Ghosn shook his head. The obvious place to begin was the access door. It would not be easy. Impact with the ground had telescoped the bombcase, doubtless damaging the internal hinges ... but he had all the time he wanted.
Ghosn selected a screwdriver from his toolbox and went to work.
President Fowler slept late. He was still fatigued from the flight, and ... he almost laughed at himself in the mirror. Good Lord, three times in less than twenty-four hours ... wasn’t it? He tried to do the arithmetic in his head, but the effort defeated him before his morning coffee. In any case, three times in relatively short succession. He hadn’t done that in quite a long time! But he’d also gotten his rest. His body was composed and relaxed after the morning shower, and the razor plowed through the cream on his face, revealing a man with younger, leaner features that matched the twinkle in his eyes. Three minutes later he selected a striped tie to go with the white shirt and gray suit. Not somber, but serious was the prescription for the day. He’d let the churchmen dazzle the cameras with their red silk. His speech would be all the more impressive if delivered by a well-turned-out businessman/politician, which was his political image, despite the fact that he’d never in his life run a private business of any sort. A serious man, Bob Fowler—with a common touch to be sure, but a serious man whom one could trust to do The Right Thing.
Well, I will sure as hell prove that today, the President of the United States told himself in yet another mirror as he checked his tie. His head turned at the knock on the door. “Come in.”
“Good morning, Mr. President,” said Special Agent Connor.
“How are you today, Pete?” Fowler asked, turning back to the mirror ... the knot wasn’t quite right, and he started afresh.
“Fine, thank you, sir. It’s a mighty nice day outside.”
“You people never get enough rest. Never get to see the sights, either. That’s my fault, isn’t it?” There, Fowler thought, that’s perfect.
“It’s okay, Mr. President. We’re all volunteers. What do you want for breakfast, sir?”
“Good morning, Mr. President!” Dr. Elliot came in behind Connor. “This is the day!”
Bob Fowler turned with a smile. “It sure as hell is! Join me for breakfast, Elizabeth?”
“Love to. I have the morning brief-it’s a nice short one for a change.”
“Pete, breakfast for two ... a big one. I’m hungry.”
“Just coffee for me,” Liz said to the servant. Connor caught the tone of her voice; but did not react beyond nodding before he left. “Bob, you look wonderful.”
“So do you, Elizabeth.” And so she did, in her most expensive suit, which was also serious-looking but just feminine enough. She took her seat and did the briefing.
“CIA says the Japanese are up to something,” she said as she concluded.
“What?”
“They caught a whiff, Ryan says, of something in the next round of trade negotiations. The Prime Minister is quoted as saying something unkind.”
“What exactly?”
“‘This is the last time we’ll be cut out of our proper role on the world stage, and I’ll make them pay for this,’ ” Dr. Elliot quoted. “Ryan thinks it’s important.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Ryan’s being paranoid again. He’s been cut out of this end of the treaty works, and he’s trying to remind us how important he is. Marcus agrees with my assessment, but forwarded the report out of a fit of objectivity,” Liz concluded with heavy irony.
“Cabot is something of a disappointment, isn’t he?” Fowler observed as he looked over the briefing notes.
“He doesn’t seem very effective at telling his people who the boss is. He’s being captured by the bureaucracy over there, especially Ryan.”
“You really don’t like him, do you?” the President noted.
“He’s arrogant. He’s—”
“Elizabeth, he has a very impressive record. I don’t much care for him either as a person, but as an intelligence officer he has done a lot of things very, very well.”
“He’s a throwback. He’s James Bond—or thinks he is. Fine,” Elliot admitted, “he’s done some important things, but that sort of thing is history. We need someone now with a broader view.”
“Congress won’t go for it,” the President said as breakfast was wheeled in. The food had been scanned for radioactives, checked for electronic devices, and sniffed for explosives—which, the President thought, put one hell of a strain on the dogs, who probably liked sausage as well as he did. “We’ll serve ourselves, thanks,” the President dismissed the Navy steward before going on. “They love him there, Congress loves the guy.” He didn’t have to add the fact that Ryan, as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, was not merely
a presidential appointee. He’d also been through a confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate. Such people were not easily dismissed. There had to be a reason.
“I never have figured that out. Especially Trent. Of all the people to sign off on Ryan, why him?”
“Ask him,” Fowler suggested as he buttered his pancakes.
“I have. He danced around the issue like the prima ballerina at the New York Ballet.” The President laughed uproariously at that.
“Christ, woman, don’t ever let anybody hear you say that!”
“Robert, we both support the estimable Mr. Trent’s choice of sexual preference, but he is a prissy son of a bitch and we both know it.”
“True,” Fowler had to agree. “So what are you telling me, Elizabeth?”
“It’s time for Cabot to put Ryan in his place.”
“How much of this is envy for Ryan’s part in the treaty, Elizabeth?”
Elliot’s eyes flared, but the President was looking at his plate. She took a deep breath before speaking and tried to decide if it were a goad or not. Probably not, but the President wasn’t the sort to be impressed by emotions in matters like this. “Bob, we’ve been through that. Ryan connected a few ideas that other people had already come up with. He’s an intelligence officer, for God’s sake! All they do is report what other people do.”
“He’s done more than that.” Fowler saw where this was going, but it was fun to play games with her.
“Fine, he’s killed people! Is that what’s special about him? James goddamned Bond! You even let them execute the ones who—”
“Elizabeth, those terrorists also killed seven Secret Service agents. My life depends on those people, and it would have been damned ungracious and just plain idiotic of me to commute the sentences of people who killed their colleagues.” The President almost frowned at that—So much for strongly held principle, eh, Bob? a voice asked him—but managed to control himself.
“And now you can’t do it at all, or people will say that you failed to do it once out of personal self-interest. You allowed yourself to be trapped and outmaneuvered,” she pointed out. She had been goaded after all, Liz decided, and answered in kind, but Fowler wasn’t buying.
“Elizabeth, I may be the only former prosecutor in America who doesn’t believe in capital punishment, but ... we do live in a democracy, and the people support the idea.” He looked up from his meal. “Those people were terrorists. I can’t say I’m happy that I allowed them to be executed, but if anyone deserved it, they did. The time wasn’t right to make a statement on that issue. Maybe in my second term. We have to wait for the right case. Politics is the art of the possible. That means one thing at a time, Elizabeth. You know that as well as I do.”
“If you don’t do something, you’ll wake up and find that Ryan is running CIA for you. He’s able, I admit, but he’s something from the past. He’s the wrong person for the times we live in.”
God, you’re an envious woman, Fowler thought. But we all have our weaknesses. It was time to stop playing with her, though. It wouldn’t do to offend her too deeply.
“What do you have in mind?”
“We can ease him out.”
“I’ll think about it—Elizabeth, let’s not spoil the day with a discussion like this one, okay? How do you plan to break the news of the treaty terms?”
Elliot leaned back and sipped at her coffee. She reproached herself for moving too soon and too passionately on this. She disliked Ryan greatly, but Bob was right. It wasn’t the time, wasn’t the place. She had all the time in the world to make her play, and she knew that she had to do it with skill.
“A copy of the treaty, I think.”
“Can they read that fast?” Fowler laughed. The media was full of such illiterates.
“You should see the speculation. The lead Times piece was faxed in this morning. They’re frantic. They’ll eat it up. Besides, I ginned up some Cliff Notes for them.”
“However you want to do it,” the President said as he finished off his sausage. He checked his watch. Timing was everything. There was a six-hour time difference between Rome and Washington. That meant the treaty could not be signed until two in the afternoon at the earliest, so as to catch the morning news shows. But the American people had to be prepped for the news, and that meant that the TV crews had to have the details of the treaty by three, Eastern Daylight Time, in order to absorb everything fully. Liz would break the news at nine, twenty minutes from now, he noted. “And you’ll be playing up Charlie’s part in it?”
“Right. It’s only fair that he should get most of the credit.”
And so much for Ryan’s part in the process, Bob Fowler noted without comment. Well, Charlie was the guy who really got it moving, wasn’t he? Fowler felt vaguely sorry for Ryan. Though he also thought the DDCI something from the past, he’d learned all that the man had done, and was impressed. Arnie van Damm thought a lot of Ryan also, and Arnie was the best judge of character in the administration. But Elizabeth was his National Security Advisor, and he could not have her and the DDCI at each other’s throats, could he? No, he couldn’t. It was that simple.
“Dazzle them, Elizabeth.”
“Won’t be hard.” She smiled at him and left.
The task proved much harder than he’d expected. Ghosn thought about asking for help, but decided against it. Part of his aura in the organization was that he worked alone with these things except for the donkeywork, for which he would occasionally require a few strong backs.
The bomb/device/pod turned out to be of sturdier construction than he’d expected. Under the strong worklights, he took the time to wash it off with water and found a number of unexplained items. There were screw-in points which were plugged shut with slot-bolts. On removing one, he found yet another electrical lead. More surprising, the bombcase was thicker than he’d expected. He’d dismantled an Israeli jamming pod before, but though it had mostly been of aluminum construction, there had been several places where the case had been of fiberglass or plastic, which was transparent to electronic radiation.
He’d started on the access hatch, but found it nearly impossible to pry open and tried to find something easier. But there wasn’t anything easier. Now he returned to the hatch, frustrated that several hours of work had led nowhere.
Ghosn sat back and lit a cigarette. What are you? he asked the object.
It was so much like a bomb, he realized. The heavy case—why hadn’t he realized that it was so damned heavy, too heavy for a jamming pod ... but it couldn’t be a bomb, could it? No fuses, no detonator, what he had seen of the inside was electrical wiring and connectors. It had to be some kind of electronic device. He stubbed the cigarette out in the dirt and walked over to his workbench.
Ghosn had a wide variety of tools, one of which was a gasoline-powered rotary saw, useful for cutting steel. It was really a two-man tool, but he decided to use it alone, and to use it on the hatch, which had to be less sturdy than the case itself. He set the cutting depth to nine millimeters and started the tool, manhandling it onto the hatch. The sound of the saw was dreadful, more so as the diamond-edge of the blade bit into the steel, but the weight of the saw was sufficient to keep it from jerking off the bomb, and he slowly worked it down along the edge of the access hatch. It took twenty minutes for him to make the first cut. He stopped the saw and set it aside, then probed the cut with a bit of thin wire.
Finally! he told himself. He was through. He’d guessed right. The rest of the bombcase seemed to be ... four centimeters or so, but the hatch was only a quarter of that. Ghosn was too happy to have accomplished something to ask himself why a jamming pod needed a full centimeter of hardened steel around it. Before starting again, he donned ear protection. His ears were ringing from the abuse of the first cut, and he didn’t want a headache to make the job worse than it already was.
The “Special Report” graphics appeared on all the TV networks within seconds of one another. The network anchors who’d risen early—by the
standards of their stint in Rome, that is—to receive their brief from Dr. Elliot raced to their booths literally breathless, and handed over their notes to their respective producers and researchers.
“I knew it,” Angela Miriles said. “Rick, I told you!”
“Angie, I owe you lunch, dinner, and maybe breakfast in any restaurant you can name.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” The chief researcher chuckled. The bastard could afford it.
“How do we do this?” the producer asked.
“I’m going to wing it. Give me two minutes and we’re flying.”
“Shit,” Angie observed quietly to herself. Rick didn’t like winging it. He did, however, like scooping the print reporters, and the timing of the event made that a gimme. Take that, New York Times! He sat still only long enough for makeup, then faced the cameras as the network’s expert—some expert! Miriles thought to herself—joined Rick in the anchor booth.
“Five!” the assistant director said. “Four, three, two, one!” His hand jerked at the anchor.