by Gordon Kent
“I would have thought—”
“Don’t think yet. Go slow on that, too. Your predecessor tried to set the world on fire and all that caught was his own pants. I had to get him out of the country before the whole place went up. This is a country where we got things working good for us. I don’t want it screwed up.”
The whole western fringe, O’Neill knew, was in turmoil because of things that were going on in Rwanda and Zaire; there was a neo-Marxist, anti-Mobutu group of Zaireans that had been living in Tanzania for a decade and were supposed to be getting ready to invade their own country; Tanzanian military forces were supposed to be lining up behind them. This was to be ignored?
“Kabila and the Zairean Tutsis—” O’Neill started to say.
“You keep out of that. I’ve got that under control. I want you to focus on the economy. Secondary focus, trans-shipment of drugs from southern Asia.”
“My predecessor had some good contacts in Rwanda.”
“MacPherson inherited some contacts in Rwanda, and he blew them. They’re gone! He was an asshole, I told you. Let it lie.” Prior tried to stare him down, and O’Neill let him. His new boss, after all. “Rwanda is another country,” Prior said, his voice deep with significance.
“‘And besides, the wench is dead,’” O’Neill said. He smiled. Get it? No, you don’t get it. Oh, shit. But he was saved, because Prior didn’t listen to what was said to him by subordinates unless he had asked a direct question.
“Repeat, Rwanda is not in your domain.”
“You don’t want me to even try to contact them?”
“I want you to work with what you got. You got two good clusters of econ-intel contacts that MacPherson didn’t screw up; just stay with them. There’s a couple of business guys that I met socially I’m passing on to you; I want you to bring them along. Thank God, you strike me as the kind of guy might get along here if he behaves himself—you dress well, you talk well, you look okay.”
Okay? There was a compliment for you.
“You play tennis?” Prior said.
“Of course.”
Prior glanced at him. Prior, he guessed, had not grown up in such a way that “of course” he played tennis. “You got a doubles date tomorrow with Amanda and one of the business guys I told you about.” Amanda was the receptionist. “I was supposed to go but I’m going to say I’m suddenly down with a turned ankle and you’re taking my place. If you can beat them, do it; the guy’ll be impressed. He’s in the blue folder.”
“How real is my cover job?” O’Neill said.
Prior snickered. It was a beginner’s question. “Your job is being a case officer. Period.” So much for being the Deputy Attaché for Trade.
O’Neill hugged the folders to his chest and started down the corridor toward his temporary office. Go slow, read the RFIs, and play tennis. It wasn’t quite like being James Bond.
The Pentagon.
Alan Craik walked down the long, long corridor, past a stand of flags and a wall of framed photographs of admirals, past door after door after door. It was early; a hundred, a thousand other men and women were also walking this corridor and all the other corridors exactly like it in the concentric pentagons that gave the building its name. Now and again, through an open door, he could see right through to windows that gave on the vast inner courtyard, and, across it—over the trees, the walks, the tables—other windows, other walls.
He held his attaché case with his orders tight against his right side. His morning coffee burned in his throat. Christ, I’m all tensed up, he thought. Why? This is going to be a piece of cake. Tense because he had already persuaded himself he was going to hate it, he knew. All during that mostly sleepless night, he had told himself not to pre-judge it. Don’t anticipate. Be ready to be pleasantly surprised. Try to love it. If you don’t like your job, there’s something wrong with you, not the job.
He found the right door at last and turned his orders over to a yeoman, and eventually he was led to an office where a woman full commander with a pleasant face shook his hand and said Welcome aboard and Boy are we glad you’re here! We’re three slots short!
She took him around, introduced him. Sketched the roughest outline of the job—reading nine sets of dailies, compiling, writing five summaries, editing, briefing. A big smile. “Could you run a classified package out to the Agency for us? Got a courier pass? You get one up on four—Jackson’ll tell you how. Get it there before lunch, okay?” Big smile.
He had hardly settled behind a desk he was told was his (he was not sure; there was a brassiere in one otherwise empty drawer) when a woman in civilian clothes leaned in his cubicle door. “Hi. I’m Jan—I’m a plans editor. Not why I’m here. Subject: your turn to make the coffee.” Big smile. “Your turn started two minutes ago and the natives are getting restless.”
Not exactly James Bond.
IVI.
Suter had been away at the major contractor’s in Texas, and after that Touhey had had him trotting around congressional offices in Washington, so he hadn’t been at the Columbia location for almost two weeks. He was getting the feel of the job and the place, and he almost wished he had come there directly instead of by way of the Agency; the place had an enormous feeling of things happening, of energy. He found that he admired Touhey, even while his allegiance was to Shreed. Of course, that could change. But it was early days for any of that; for now, he was back, getting to know the offices, some of the people, getting to understand the complexities of the compartmentalization that kept Peacemaker’s secret-weapon function utterly separate from its public, intelligence function.
He had found early on why Han had rushed him through sub-level two. There were, in a limited-access lab, mockups of the modules that latched to Peacemaker’s main unit. Most people in the know referred to the main unit itself as Peacemaker, the modules as “the intel pack” and “the weapon.” Officially, these three were called the Low-Orbit Maneuverable Satellite, or LOMS; the Acquisition and Radiation Module, or ARM; and the Direct Application Module, DAM. Everybody agreed that the weapon module should somehow have had the ARM acronym, but that wasn’t the way it had worked out. Actually, DAM sounded not too shabby as the nickname of a weapon.
Part of the design problem of Peacemaker was Touhey’s requirement that ARM and DAM attach to the LOMS in exactly the same way and have exactly the same shell. Visually, it would be difficult to tell one from the other; the observer would have to get close enough to read the legends on the latches. Touhey had planned way ahead. What he wanted—and got—was a device whose artist’s renderings could go direct to the media without compromising its real nature. That was where they were now, releasing generalized pretty pictures and PR sweet talk, visiting pet congressmen (they were all men) and handing out information packets. They’d made the evening news as a “ground-breaking short-term satellite to plug holes in America’s surveillance grid.” Meanwhile, at a minor contractor in Indiana, the DAM module was being built in drop-dead secrecy.
Suter spent twenty minutes with Touhey, reviewing some of George Shreed’s questions about the project, and then he went up to the cafeteria for coffee. He tried to be seen up there, to get them accustomed to him as a real member of the team. As usual, the big, windowed space had young people dressed like athletes at most of the tables. Suter looked them over, thought they weren’t very interesting, then snapped his eyes back to a woman he didn’t recognize, who had been turned away. She was dark, shapely, truly pretty. Eye candy, he found himself thinking. She was sitting by the window so that the outside glare made him slit his eyes to see her. Nice.
He walked toward her, pretending to look for a place to sit and covertly looking at her again. Really nice. He was going to walk right up to her and ask to sit at her table because everything else was full (although it wasn’t) when somebody called, “Hey, Suter!”
It was Han. Suter smiled. It paid to stay on Han’s good side, he had found. People liked Han, God knows why.
“Hey, Colon
el.” Suter sat down where he could look at the woman.
Han grinned. “This is a side of you I didn’t anticipate,” he said.
“Sir?”
Han grinned some more. “If your tongue hangs out any farther, you’re going to wet your tie. She’s married.”
“Who?”
Han laughed. Suter, he said, was something else.
Suter glanced at the woman. Married. Oh, well—so what?
Sarajevo.
Mike Dukas was standing by a window in the newly painted office of Sarajevo’s Associate Deputy Chief of Police for NATO Liaison. New office, new title, new man. The guy was a Bosnian Muslim, a desk cop, doing what he did best—managing information. In this case, he was briefing Dukas.
Dukas had been in Sarajevo for twenty-two hours. He was still groggy from jet lag and he didn’t have an office of his own yet. He was looking down into the courtyard of a small apartment building next door and wondering what the long heaps of earth like graves were.
When the Associate Deputy Chief shut up to take a breath, Dukas said, “What are those?” He pointed down. “The things that look like graves?”
The Bosnian hesitated a moment, then suddenly became human. “Those are graves,” he said quietly.
Dukas looked at him—disbelief, questioning.
Entirely human now, the Bosnian cop gave him a sad smile. “We couldn’t get to the cemeteries because of the bombardments. The snipers. We buried the dead where we found room. I buried my mother in her rose bushes.”
Welcome to Sarajevo.
5
July
IVI.
Her name was Rose Siciliano, and she was a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. Suter was amused by that, because when he’d seen her Friday, she’d been wearing blue jeans and a Redskins T-shirt. The clothes had meant she probably worked on Upper Level 2, where the whiz-kids played and things had low security classifications. Suter had been surprised to learn that in fact she worked on S1, the first underground level, where security classifications were high and Peacemaker got a lot of its work done. But the S1 location meant she knew Peacemaker only as an intelligence satellite and was walled off from DAM.
He had been back a total of nine hours, four of those spent with a lot of boring crap about British real estate in the South Atlantic that might make potential test targets for Peacemaker, and more spent with the general and some with Han, and he’d still found time to ask about the woman he’d seen at the cafeteria window. He’d thought about her at home, thought about her on the drive in.
She was the just-designated Seaborne Launch Officer. Her arrival signaled Peacemaker’s move from mockup to launchable prototype.
He managed to catch her in the cafeteria by making three trips there his second morning back. He was supposed to be reading targeting pubs, getting up to speed on the flashiest way of using Peacemaker. He was a speed reader, very good and very smart, if he did say so himself; he could spare the time to chase this wonderful-looking woman. And, the third time was the charm: there she was, in the same chair by the window. This time she was wearing a dress and looking like a businesswoman. Even more terrific.
“Mind if I join you?” he said. “I’m Ray Suter.”
She sort of smiled, but also looked a little pained.
“I’m a little lost, and I could use some sympathy. I’m new here.”
“Sure, sit.”
She was not an easy piece of work. Her eyes were amused by him, not charmed. She also had an innate toughness that surprised him; it hadn’t been evident on Friday. Maybe it had been the T-shirt, the suggestion of somebody young and naive.
“I thought you were one of the computer kids,” he said, trying to sound like a man who was embarrassed by some small stupidity. “I noticed you Friday.”
“Friday’s Casual Day in my place,” she said. “Today we’re just regular people. I gotta go.” She was on her feet, tossing her Styrofoam cup into a plastic receptacle.
“I’ll see you again,” he said. He stood.
“Probably.” She looked him up and down, still not charmed. A very tough woman inside that softness. But she smiled. “It’s a small place,” she said.
That afternoon, he called up her personnel file on his computer. He could do that because of Shreed’s influence with Touhey. He had access to everything. Almost the first thing he saw on her file was that she was married to Alan Craik.
His first response was that it was a real kick in the ass. The second was that something might be made of it. After all, taking Craik’s wife to bed would be killing two birds with one stone.
But it would take time. Well, he had time. Launch was still five months away.
IVI.
Rose loved the work at IVI. She was surprised. Desk jobs were usually a pain in the ass, something to be got through because the detailer said it was good for your career, but this one was both exciting and demanding. Two or three days a week, she was on the road, either visiting the contractors or hitting offices in the Navy department. She was going to be launch officer on a ship, and she didn’t know zip about ships, except what you had to know to land a chopper on one. More visits, more reading. She set herself up for a week’s cruise on a survey ship of the kind they would be using.
Alan was living in a short-term rental house in Falls Church, with Mikey and the dog. He hadn’t sold the Norfolk house yet and fussed about it—somewhat childishly, she thought. She missed him, but when the chance came to go to Houston to watch a missile launch from Mission Control, she went and lost a weekend with him. And Mikey. And the dog. She was pregnant but made little of it yet. In a few months, she told herself. When, at an IVI planning meeting, Touhey had talked about moving the test launch date up, she had found herself regretting the pregnancy. What if she had to take childbirth leave and they brought in somebody else and that’s when the launch went? Then, guiltily, she scolded herself. Where are your priorities?
East Africa.
O’Neill was getting the hang of it pretty well. Prior had told him so. Prior was fairly generous with compliments, actually, applying some version of the pop psychology the Agency rented from its consultants—” Motivate Your Subordinates,” “Catch More Flies with Sugar,” “The Four Steps to Excellence.” Or was it five? Or three? Mostly, what he said was, “God, at least you’re better than MacPherson!”
MacPherson fucked every female agent he could get close to and some of the men, I really believe it, Prior had told him. He had no more idea of how to behave than my golden lab. And the files and the stories around the embassy showed that, indeed, MacPherson had been one of God’s great fuckups, a possibly unique creation. Worst of all, he had let sex come into everything, which was not morally wrong but was, in O’Neill’s view, a mistake because sex was too powerful to use; it ended up using you. He would never make that mistake, he was sure.
O’Neill had a tiny house on the mountain slope outside Arusha, but he was seldom there. He also had an office in Arusha, but he was seldom there, either. The office ran itself, thanks to three female in-country employees who were vetted yearly out of Dar. Mostly, O’Neill was on the road, touting the wonders of capitalism and making contacts, but really driving, driving the roads to work out surveillance routes and trying to apply the lessons of the Ranch. The lessons were a bad joke in Africa, having been designed for cities and developed countries, the Ranch’s idea of the terrain of espionage being the shopping center and the parking garage and the supermarket. Now, O’Neill drove hundreds of miles, trying to establish routes from here to—where? That tree? This village without a telephone? That abandoned cement factory? This overgrown sisal field?
Thus, the Rotary Clubs and the Chambers of Commerce and above all the colleges and schools became major waypoints. His excuse for going there was his canned pep talk on Africa and the Free Market Economy. He thought of it as the Flea Market Economy but didn’t say so. He was a good speaker, and educated Africans in particular took to him because he reminded them either of the
ir own days on an American campus or their days in England. English education was still the ideal, and Cambridge O levels, although abandoned in England, were revered here, and O’Neill, with his good clothes and his manners and his cultured voice, was very like those African academics who were more British than the British. They wore dark suits and had morning and afternoon tea in the Common Room, brought round by tea ladies pushing metal tea carts. Like academics everywhere, these were suckers for flattery and money, and the two in combination got him a lot of likely recruits. The trouble was, would they know anything worth squat or would they just want to spout off?
Mostly, they were merely excuses for trying to lay out detailed routes.
He had a five-year-old Toyota LandCruiser. Most of his travel was in the north and east of the country, where the modern economic activity was, but he made reasons to go west to the shore of Lake Tanganyika and up to Bikuba, where there were signs of military presence, because he knew that Rwanda was going to be big, no matter how cautious Prior was. He was also going nuts from the frustration of doing nothing important. On weekends, he came back to Arusha and sat in his nearly empty house. He wrote letters to Alan Craik full of up-to-date, inside stuff and sent them in the diplomatic bag. He reviewed the old files left by his woeful predecessor and the far better man before him, Hammer, who had set up the networks that MacPherson trashed.
He knew that there should be survivors out there who could be wooed back. To get the files, he had to drive to Dar, sign the files out, drive them to Arusha, read them, and drive them back and sign them in before his workday started on Monday. When he pointed out that the files could be sent via e-mail because Tanzania had no means of monitoring transmission, Prior told him that the official Agency position was that e-mail is not secure.
O’Neill selected what he saw as Hammer’s best three agents in Rwanda.
When he next went west, he left a sign at three places, and then he waited.
One agent was dead. One was terrified, living under a new name in Zambia. The third would respond.