by James, Seth
“Exactly my observation,” Senator Perkins said and then affected a chuckle. “Though some—not you but your distant cousins in television—have, of course, gone off the deep end. A leak undoubtedly happened, of course, but some reporters—hungry for ratings, I don't doubt—have insinuated quite outlandishly.”
Insinuated what? “Pressure of the business, I guess,” Tobias said. “They have to write something or air something and in the absence of fact they cover suspicion.”
“Yes, exactly,” Senator Perkins said with an authoritative nod. “And when the facts come out? When we learn that—as is the only reasonable possibility—some low-level staffer, present at his first meeting where confidential subjects were covered, blabbed to his girlfriend or mother or some busy-body who then gave it to your Les Vonka? Will they report as thoroughly the truth as they've reported supposition?”
“Depends on how juicy the truth is,” Tobias said with a wink and a grin.
“Ah ha, there you are,” Senator Perkins said, smiling and waving a finger. “You're right, of course. If it’s a girl staffer, yes! She could cry quite dramatically for the cameras,” he said and took a moment as if considering the possibility. He then said, “But in any event, if a name ever emerges it will come as an anticlimax. No second Watergate, or Parnell-gate as they're saying. No interest.”
“Why not?” Tobias asked in the voice of a student.
“Because the voters don't buy it,” Senator Perkins said. The rehearsed quality returned to his voice. “It was wrong of whomever to reveal Sally Parnell's identity, of course, but at the end of the day Les Vonka's piece is fundamentally correct. She did fail to find the evidence British Intelligence found. The voters won't take kindly to someone whose failure endangered us all, who then calls for heads to roll. And when a girl is dragged before the cameras, in tears, to blubberingly apologize and beg for forgiveness? The voters will wash their hands of it,” he said, brushing his palms together, “and return their concerns to real national security.”
“And the Senate?” Tobias asked. “Does the Senate also believe Mrs. Parnell missed something in Niger? That a purchase of uranium was indeed attempted?”
“Of course,” Senator Perkins said. “You undoubtedly know the minds of those in the SSCI better than I do. But those of us outside that committee are quite certain. We have a great deal of trust in our British allies,” he said, his fingertips inadvertently finding each other in an arch over his waist. “These things simply cannot be faked.”
Tobias froze for a moment. Who said anything about faked? What faked? The Niger documents? Tobias noticed himself not responding, and knew it would draw the Senator's attention, so he dropped his eyes to the man's hands. Senator Perkins quickly dispensed with this gesture he unaccountably disliked, and smiled.
“Well, if the Senate is convinced,” Tobias said, “and the voters are convinced, that only leaves scandal value. Though I hope—for purely selfish reasons, naturally—that it doesn't turn out to be your crying female staffer. That'd play well on TV but doesn't do me a lot of good. Now, a male staffer obsessed with the beautiful but unapproachable Mrs. Parnell, who leaves a long suicide note and journals detailing his stalking before throwing himself in the Potomac? That I can use.”
Senator Perkins laughed loudly at the vicious humor before coming to his feet and thanking Tobias for his time. They shook hands and Tobias left, forgetting what had brought him to the Russell Building in the first place. Back at the pole to which he'd locked his bike, he called Sally.
“I've just been fed a line,” he said, without introducing himself, after she answered.
“Mmm, that sounds good,” she said facetiously. “What did you have to drink with it?”
“Oh, a little bile noir,” he said, playing along. “The line was a bit bland but dessert—dessert was interesting. To do with the Niger docs. How do I put this? Okay, I was talking with—”
“Hold on,” she said. A second passed. “The NOC in me is still not comfortable talking about important things over the phone. Let's meet. Same place as last time,” she said and then quickly added: “don't say its name.”
Tobias took his phone away from his ear and looked at it, suddenly wondering if it were bugged. “Okay,” he said. “I mean, sure, I'd love to.”
“Great,” she said. “I'm downtown, as it happens. I'll be there in ten minutes.”
By the time Tobias neared his local pub, he was sweating profusely and so stopped at his apartment. He dropped off his bike, changed his shirt in a flash, and called himself an idiot fifteen times as he sped up and slowed down his walk to the pub.
Sally sat in a booth a little more than halfway down the wall; a couple shopping bags waved their paper handles beside her on the bench seat. It was dark and cool inside and Tobias sighed contentedly as he weaved through the tables, motioning to Mike the bartender and asking for a bottle of water. He dropped into the seat opposite Sally and knew his back would attach itself to the leather upholstery within seconds, right through his shirt and despite the air conditioning.
“A little hot outside?” she said with a grin.
“Good Christ,” he said, “every year I say, this is it! No more biking for work in the summer. And every August, here I am, sweating a year of my life away. Thanks, Mike,” he said to the bartender, who'd came over with the bottled water.
After the usual hamming with Mike, Tobias ordered a bottle of champagne, excusing the extravagance by saying they'd need something chilled.
“If I had a glass of red,” said Tobias, “I'd have to stay in here until after sunset.”
“That's a good enough excuse for me,” she said. “Think they have any caviar to go with it.”
“Somehow, I doubt it,” Tobias whispered. “Hey, Mike! Got any caviar back there?”
“Where do you think you are?” Mike cried from behind the bar, sounding a little hurt. “Actually, this is first class champagne,” he said, taking a bottle from the wine refrigerator and holding it up. “The wife insists,” he explained. “I probably should get some caviar to go with it. When the wife opens a bottle after closing, we always have it with fruit. You want fruit? We got a good fruit platter; all local, all fresh. Strawberries, raspberries, melons, kiwi. Those kiwi ain't local, though.”
“Ooo! That sounds nice,” Sally said.
“Yeah?” Tobias said. “Let's do that, Mike.”
“Where is he from, with that accent? Brooklyn?” she asked quietly.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “His wife's local. She runs the food side of things. Which is why you can get a decent dinner here. Come to think of it,” he said, his eyebrows contracting, “I don't know her name. He always calls her 'the wife.' She must have a name.”
Sally rolled her eyes as Mike came over with an ice bucket, bottle, and two glasses. A young man carried a platter of mixed fruits, crackers, and cheese in from the kitchen. Mike then deftly sent the cork across the room—all but empty of customers at this early hour—and behind the bar, said “two points,” filled their glasses, and told them to enjoy.
Tobias drained half of his glass in one pull, enjoying the cold refreshing burn.
Sally gave him an inquisitive look and asked: “Just how interesting is this news?”
“Ha,” he laughed. “That was for the heat. But the news is—I was going to say 'good,' but 'interesting' is the right word. I'd gone down to one of the Senate's office buildings, covering a different story,” he admitted. Sally feigned insult by throwing down the end of a strawberry she'd just bitten into. “A thousand apologies,” he said. “Anyway, an aide to Senator Perkins half dragged me to an audience with his boss. In the ten years I've covered Congress, I've spoken to Senator Perkins exactly twice: once at a party full of cameras and once in an elevator. Now, I'm sitting across from him and he's telling me all about some child's education bill he's sponsoring? I knew it was a pretense and waited for him to get to the point. He's Big Oil's man in the Senate and, not surprisingly, the Administration's
voice there, too. I figured he was going to pump me for where my investigation had gone, who I was looking at, right? Nope he starts telling me how proud he is of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,” Tobias said.
Sally snorted and said, “I bet he's real proud of how it's working.”
“It gets better,” Tobias said. “I played along and asked him what he thought of the whole thing (he'd said voters wouldn't take it seriously). He said that, though he condemned whoever leaked your name, Vonka's piece drew the correct conclusions, that you'd 'failed to find in Niger what British Intelligence had found.' I asked if the rest of the Senate believed Vonka's piece. He said yes but then, out of nowhere, he added: 'These things simply cannot be faked.'”
Sally lost the angry cast to her features. “Unprompted?” she asked.
“All I asked was if the Senate believed Mrs. Parnell missed something in Niger,” Tobias said. “He answered, 'these things simply cannot be faked.'”
They say silently as the bubbles left their glasses, staring at one another.
“What can't be faked?” she asked rhetorically. “The Niger docs?”
“Presumably,” he said. “Joe said sometimes bogus intel would be sold to intelligence services by people who just wanted to make a fast buck. But faked! Is that what they're worried I'll find out?”
Sally took a sip from her glass and noticed it had warmed from her hand resting on it; the bubbles had ceased. Tobias reinvigorated it from the bottle. She said, “They couldn't have done a false flag for this. For this?”
“Come again?” he said. “What's a false flag?”
“Technically,” she said, “when a country has one of its military units dress up as a unit from another country and launch an attack. Say, country A attacks country B dressed up as country C so country B goes to war with country C. Spies do the same sort of thing: counter intelligence sometimes means misleading the other guy. But this? Faked Niger docs? Could the Administration have faked the Niger docs, planted them for MI6 to find so they'd give them back—”
“Sounds like money laundering,” Tobias said.
“That's exactly what it is: intel laundering,” she said. “But why? What does the Administration gain? Except an excuse for war.”
“Wait a minute,” Tobias said.
“An excuse for war,” Sally repeated.
“What the hell do they need an excuse for?” he asked.
She cocked her head to one side promptingly.
“Big Oil's man in the Senate?” he asked. “After reporting for the whole of my adult life, I'm a pretty cynical guy; but war for oil?”
“They called Joe into the Oval Office and told him to lie about what he found in Niger,” she asked. “Now a Senator from within their circle, out of the blue, shows they're worried about you thinking the Niger docs are forged. I've served my country for the whole of my adult life and the only thing I'm cynical about is my marriage,” she said, surprising herself and eliciting an unconscious sip of wine from Tobias. “But,” she said, recovering, “but why else would they be pushing so hard to convince people Iraq has WMD?”
“I don't know,” he said quietly after a moment passed on tiptoes.
“Maybe I'm ready to believe anything,” she said, looking into her glass. “Anything to make sense of it all. They threatened Joe with outing me and then they carried out their threat. And they took away twenty years of service—and so many of my agents' lives.”
“It was a betrayal,” Tobias said. “There's no other word.”
“So maybe I want it to be war for oil,” she said. “What they did to me was despicable, despicable like war for oil, for money, which they can never seem to have enough of.” They sat in silence as she drew a long slow breath: Tobias watched her—a woman in whom even sorrow was made beautiful—as she watched the last effervescence rise to the surface of her glass and die. She raised her eyes to his and said: “I want to know why, Tobias. I want to know why my agents had to die. And why they took away the only thing in the world I had left.”
“I'll help,” he said, taking her hand across the table for a moment until he realized what he was doing and snatched his hand back. After clearing his throat he went on in a matter-of-fact voice: “Whether faked by our government for a false flag operation or faked by someone else and our government is deliberately looking the other way, the Niger docs are at the center of it all.”
“The pretense for demanding Joe lie,” she said.
“And the centerpiece of the Administration's case for war powers in Congress,” he said.
“They cannot possibly show what the Administration says they show,” she said.
“If it's not possible,” he said, “then, to misquote the good Senator Perkins, these things can be faked.”
“Only we can't prove it,” she said.
“Not yet,” he said. “But we haven't tried.”
“I've tried!” she said, leaning forward. “I've tried going to Lodge: nothing, he won't risk any more damage to our relationship with the White House. I tried the Justice Department: nothing, they refused to even acknowledge a crime had been committed before your press briefing grandstand, now they say wait-and-see—indefinitely. I've even asked to see those stupid Niger docs but the agency never received a copy. And that useless report given to Congress doesn't quote directly,” she said, shouting in tone but whispering in volume. “We may deduce they're wrong and infer they're fakes but without—”
“Then we find them,” he said firmly.
“Just like that?” she said.
“Why not?” he demanded. “Someone has seen them, knows where they are, and can leak us a copy or the name of who forged them or sold them or whatever. We look. It may not be easy but so what? Aside from my being a journalist—forth estate's responsibilities in the balance of power and all that jazz—and your being the offended party—to say nothing of your agents lives—let's consider the worst case scenario. It could be war for oil: everyone in the Administration is tied to oil in one way or another. How many people who suspect a profit motive and foul play have even a single lead toward proving anything? We have two. So don't tell me they've taken everything,” he said and then grinned to soften it. She held his eye and he could tell she was thinking something, something repetitively, something undisclosed—what was it? he thought—and in the midst of his wondering his mouth started moving. “For one, I'm sitting across from you, looking at the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on—they can't take that away. Not if you fell off the face of the earth; you'd still have left an indelible image graven upon the mind of every man whose heart has stopped for a moment at the sight of you.”
Her eyes grew a little wider but not unconsciously, not in surprise but in appraisal. He'd realized what he was saying halfway through and finished with a flourish: better a grand mistake than a feeble excuse.
“I shouldn't say things like that to a married woman,” he said, his disarming grin trying to elbow some room on his face between a sad smile and embarrassed fear. “I've been accused of being an unconscious flirt; I apologize.”
“No, it's okay,” she said softly.
“It isn't,” he said. “I know better than that.”
“No, it is okay,” she said and straightened her back, “because when I said they'd taken the last thing I had, I meant the career they took away, my life's work, was the only thing I had left because by next summer my children will have flow the nest and—and my marriage is a sham.”
She heaved a shuddering sigh, smiled as someone finished with heavy labor, and then swallowed the full contents of her glass. Tobias had pasted himself to his seat-back and looked at her so strangely she couldn't help but laugh. And the sense of relief she felt, to tell another human being of what pained her—that urge born in the animal past to give warning to your kind of present danger, transformed by the human condition to a need to express—had relieved a tension greater than she'd expected. And so she laughed like someone released from bondage, free of ca
reful words and discretion and the fear of discovery. And that is the laugh every lover's heart has felt when the object of its desire responds with delight to a first overture of passion.
“It wasn't always a sham,” she said, suddenly conscious of how self-serving it may sound to someone not fully possessed of the facts. “I was only twenty-two when I met Joe,” she said. “And every woman who meets him falls a little bit in love with him. Obviously it was good for my career, the perfect cover for traveling and entering embassies,” she said, dropping Tobias's gaze. “But at the time I wasn't sure if I was using my passion for Joe as an excuse to improve my career or improving my career as an excuse for pursuing a romance so strong in intensity and so seemingly perfect that it scared the hell out of me. So we got married.”
“Did he know?” Tobias asked, recognizing the journalist's voice he used and wondering at it. Instead of interrogating his feelings, however, he had begun observing, recording, and the neutrality that always accompanied this state quieted his personal thoughts. “Before you were married, I mean?”
“Yes,” she said, also watching him. “Yes, when I thought he was close to asking me to marry him, I cleared it with the agency. So when he popped the question, I told him who I was before I answered. I told him to think about it and ask me again tomorrow. He didn't miss a beat of course; can't ruffle Joe's feathers. He said it was more perfect than he imagined and asked again,” she said. She watched as Tobias nodded along with her story, showing both the attentiveness and warmth of a waiter. She'd had many revealing conversations over the years, but never with her life on display; she couldn't read Tobias though, not at that moment. “You're one cool cucumber, Tobias,” she breathed, a little coolness tinkling in her voice.
Surprised again, Tobias started. He laughed a single syllable and slapped his cheeks with one hand. “Sorry about that,” he said. “The journalist popped up there for a minute, didn't he? I guess I'm a little, I don't know, shocked. That's not the right word. Thunderstruck.” He leaned his elbows on the table, coming closer to her. “I've been telling myself for a month now,” he said, “to put you out of my mind, to quit wondering if what I've seen in you is interest in me, to stop picturing you when we've talked. Yeah, I've had a lot of luck with that,” he said. She continued to look questioningly at him. “We've been talking on the phone for two weeks straight—like a couple of high school kids—and rarely about work; of course I'm interested.”