by A. J Tata
“Two days!” Stone shouted.
“Talbosa was adamant. He will not reconsider. Better two days than none,” Takishi said flatly.
Kaitachi and Takishi stood, straightened their pants and coats, and bowed slightly toward Stone, who crushed a smoking butt into the ashtray and followed the two men to the door.
“At a later time, we will discuss our concerns about Korea and China,” Kaitachi said as the two men walked past the administrative assistant and a disheveled-looking blonde clutching a stack of papers and books to her breast.
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you about Korea. They are our allies and yours too, I might add. I mean we all want satisfaction, don’t we?” he said, looking at Takishi
“That we do,” Takishi replied. “But we all have our beasts of burden.”
The two men departed, and Stone reentered his office as Fox commented, “I think we can see our way through this, Bob. We get the hostages back and evacuate the Philippines, then we continue to steam toward Iraq. We can’t let Saddam think that we are weak. Plus, Talbosa’s demand gets us off the hook. We’d love to send in more troops, but hey, we can’t.” Fox mocked himself, shrugging his shoulders as if he were helpless.
Stone looked at the diminutive man and said, “You know, Saul, I think you’re right. I just hope this thing in the Philippines doesn’t get any worse.”
Diamond leveled his judgmental eyes upon Stone and asked, “Are we protesting too much, Bob?”
“Why are you saying this to me?”
“We just believe that this situation in the Philippines seems a bit, how shall we say …” Diamond said, looking at Fox, who finished the sentence for him, “… contrived.”
“Well, call whoever contrived it and tell him to turn it off, so I can get some sleep at night,” Stone retorted angrily.
Diamond and Fox stood in unison and began to exit through the side door into Fox’s office. Diamond stopped, turned around, and said, “What is it that gathers no moss?”
Stone watched the two men depart and stood there dumbfounded.
Had he been compromised? Or was Diamond picking up on his code with Takishi and simply toying with him? Possibly warning him?
His intercom buzzed, and his secretary said, “Sir, I think you’ll want to see Miss Morris.”
CHAPTER 53
The secretary of defense’s administrative assistant, whom Meredith knew, looked at her with a raised eyebrow as the two Japanese men exited. She was holding her materials in one hand, her coat and purse in the other. She looked quite the country bumpkin, she knew, in the blue jeans and flannel shirt. She looked up and saw Stone open his office door.
Two Japanese men stepped out, smiled, and gave her an awkward glance. The three men shook hands, and the two Japanese departed. One of the men looked at Meredith lustfully, his eyes undressing her with the evil look of a hyena sensing carrion.
She heard an awkward exchange about getting satisfaction and beasts of burden and watched the SecDef reenter his office.
“Sir, I just need a couple of minutes about Secretary Rathburn,” she said.
He held up a hand and closed his door behind him. She turned to Latisha White, the secretary, and mouthed the word, “Please.”
“You come dressed like that, it must be important,” Latisha said. She buzzed the secretary, and a few minutes later he reappeared, asking, “You are?”
“I’m Mr. Rathburn’s assistant, Meredith Morris. I need to talk to you.” The urgency in her voice convinced Stone to give her a standing audience just inside his closed door. “Sir, I think we’ve got a concern over this entire revolution—” she was nervous. Her words were not working.
“Of course we’re concerned. Now if you’ll let me get on with the business of resolving this crisis—”
“No. Please. I’ve done some research. I think Japan is behind this whole thing. They’re providing weapons—”
“What!” Stone screamed. He had enough. “I’ll have you know that the Japanese ambassador just came in here and offered to solve the entire affair for us in the next two days without firing a shot.”
She was confused. Why would they do that? There had to be a motive. They would never offer to do such a thing. It was unprecedented.
“It’s a trick!” she said, holding up her hand.
“Get out!” he exclaimed, but then held her shoulder and said, “Wait.”
He walked over to the intercom and said to Latisha, “I’ll be receiving a briefing from Ms. Morris for the next fifteen minutes. Can you please hold all calls and readjust my schedule accordingly. He looked at Meredith and hissed with a sideways glance, “First, I want to know about Keith, uh, Secretary Rathburn. When did you last see him?”
Keith? Meredith wondered. Rathburn’s first name is Bart.
“Sir, I put him on the Gulfstream in Palau hours before they landed in Manila. I should have been on that plane but the DACOWITS group trumped me.” Her voice trailed off as she considered the possibility that she could have been killed in Manila.
“So, we don’t know for sure that he’s captured,” Stone said.
“I think that’s established, sir. The rebels have contacted us with demands. We’ve seen grainy photos taken with cell phones. I think it’s true.”
She watched Stone consider her comments and nod, indicating she should continue. So, she proceeded to give Stone her analysis and the reasoning behind it. Stone admitted that she had uncovered something, but he was so confused by Takishi’s visit that he was having a hard time meshing Meredith’s bold analysis with what he actually knew.
“There certainly seem to be some inconsistencies, but why would they offer to resolve the issue for us?” he asked.
“How did he say he was going to do it?” she countered.
“He said they could deal with Commander Talbosa and get our people out of there. If he can do it, I don’t care what he’s got up his sleeve,” Stone said, flatly.
“Unless it’s nuclear weapons,” she replied, trying to scare him. He stared at her.
“Not possible,” he said. “Their constitution prevents any production of nuclear or offensive weapons. I’m sure it’s just a snafu in the shipping log.”
Frustrated, she dropped her head on his conference table and stretched her fingers out as if to choke somebody.
“Do we know for a fact what’s on those ships?”
“I don’t need to know. The Japanese have been a good and faithful ally for almost sixty years,” he said.
“Because they needed us,” she replied. “Before that, Americans were dying because they bombed the hell out of Pearl Harbor with no warning. Can’t you see it?”
She slammed her fist into his conference table.
“It’s the perfect crime. They start the revolution. Then they ask us to back down while they handle it. Next thing you know, they own the Philippines.” She had not come to that conclusion until then. It was so obvious, though. Especially after reading Matt’s paper, it all made sense.
“That’s preposterous,” Stone said. As the notion took hold, however, Stone thought, Holy shit.
“Sir, you okay?”
“Anything else, Meredith?” Stone asked without emotion.
“No, sir,” she said, looking away and grabbing her materials. She walked out of the office and passed Latisha, whom she thanked.
Meredith trudged to her office, where she thanked Mark for his quick response earlier that afternoon. The office was a zoo, everybody working hard on the crisis. She guessed that it was good news if the Japanese ambassador could get the Americans out of the Philippines. Then the U.S. could wash its hands of the entire ordeal.
But she knew nothing was ever that simple.
CHAPTER 54
Meredith walked into Rathburn’s office and sat down at his desk. There was the usual assortment of photos of the political appointee with various administration dignitaries as well as foreign leaders.
She picked up one framed picture of Rat
hburn with his wife and two boys. They were leaning together, all dressed in white, with the chrome stanchion of a sailboat behind them. The smooth waters reflected in the picture made her believe that the photo had probably been taken while they were sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.
She sighed and twirled around in the chair, looking through the yellowish tinted window.
She thought about Japan, the Philippines, Iraq, and Afghanistan. What did they all have in common?
Nothing. So separate them, she thought to herself. First came Afghanistan, and now this weird, almost myopic drive to get into Iraq. The country wants to kick some ass, so they look primed for a good ass kicking, she thought. Not enough juice to squeeze out of Afghanistan to satiate the appetite.
“Enough for what?” she whispered.
And now there is this Philippine revolution, uprising really. So, where did that come from? Did our intelligence not see this coming?
She remembered her discussion with Matt and everything he had told her about Japanese soldiers on the island of Mindanao. She coupled that information with her newfound intelligence about the ten missing ships.
Something was out there floating around, and she thought she had it nailed. Japan was going to be the aggressor somewhere, and the Philippines made sense to her.
But why would they start a war just so they could fight it? How could they be that confident that America would not intervene in a significant way?
Unless they had assurances.
She tapped her finger against her lip, thinking. Chess moves. Everything was choreographed, orchestrated, she determined.
But who was doing it?
Everyone knew that that troll Fox and self-aggrandizing Diamond were poking and prodding their way to get everyone hooked into Iraq. There was no question about their intentions.
But was there a countermovement? Were there people in the U.S. government who believed that going into Iraq was off the mark?
She knew that Stone had neoconservative leanings but was very much his own man when it came to decision making. Meredith also knew that she couldn’t pretend to know the Byzantine machinations of decision making within the Pentagon or even the White House.
Yet, she did understand that sometimes frenzy and momentum became currents too swift to fight lest you drown trying to swim against the tide. And so perhaps, she thought, tapping her lip, just perhaps there were some folks trying to do what they considered to be a good deed.
Stop a war in Iraq by starting one in the Philippines.
The more she thought about it, the more sense it made.
CHAPTER 55
Meredith waited until everyone had departed for the day, walked through the outer cubicles and offices one time, then reentered Rathburn’s office.
Dead men tell no lies, she thought. Meredith immediately scolded herself. He’s not dead.
Yet.
She tried to stop herself, but couldn’t prevent the sinking feeling that her boss was either dead or about to be killed.
She wandered around Rathburn’s E-ring lair, where he had worked for the past three months as the newly appointed assistant secretary of defense for international affairs. Typically an impotent position, Rathburn had seemed unusually powerful and con-nected in his beginning days with the Department of Defense.
What were his connections? she wondered. He had been a professor at Georgetown University’s National Security Studies Program and was woven tightly with the party leadership that had risen to power. What gave him that link?
Meredith, just over thirty, had always wondered how powerful men achieved their status. There were worlds that she could simply not imagine, and even the idea of taking a simple trip to Palau with Rath-burn had excited her beyond belief. To approach the source of importance and authority was akin to discovering truth. It was, she thought, like reaching out with her hand to touch Mother Teresa. Would some of the goodness rub off? Could she wave her hands over the wafting fumes of power, inhaling them, and experience the sensation herself? Achieve the status?
Rathburn had somehow drunk the elixir and one morning found himself in position to influence world events via his connection to the secretary of defense.
She picked up a football signed by all of the Washington Redskins. Next to it was a large machete given to him by a Gurkha soldier in Nepal. Other mementoes were scattered on several bookshelves and display tables.
She studied the diplomas on the wall for the first time as she spun the football in her hands the way a wide receiver might as he shot the breeze with the quarterback. She had seen the diplomas before, of course, but had never really read them. Rathburn had earned a Harvard undergraduate degree with a major in economics; a Harvard MBA; and a Princeton Ph.D. in political economy. Interesting, she thought. Mostly a finance background.
I guess that is what makes the world turn, she mused.
She sat at his computer and contemplated what she was about to do. Meredith had thought at length that day after her meeting with Stone. She had gone for a run around the Washington Monument from the Pentagon and during that exercise she began thinking about the comments she’d heard from the Japanese man leaving Stone’s office. The Japanese emissary had spoken in perfect English, as if he had attended Harvard.
What was the reference to “Beasts of Burden?” Sure, she knew it was a famous Rolling Stones’ song, but could it have been something else? Then, Stone’s preceding comment about getting satisfaction on one hand seemed innocuous enough, while on the other hand, when coupled with the “Beasts of Burden” comment, could have been some kind of code.
Speaking of codes, she thought, she pulled out the three-by-five card she’d had the computer technician give her months ago. Rathburn was always forgetting his password and finally the overworked twenty-two-year-old jotted on the card the secret and regular computer code words for access to Rathburn’s computer.
“Don’t tell anyone. I’ll deny it,” he had said, winked at her, tugged on his earlobe, and departed.
As they had before when Rathburn had called for help, the passwords worked, and she was into both his unclassified and classified hard drives.
She first checked his Internet browser cache to see what kind of Web sites he surfed. She found Google, Yahoo!, MSNBC, and the garden variety of other URLs. Nothing unusual, she determined.
Then she clicked on history and was interested to see that Rathburn had never cleared his history file. She was able to view his activity from three months before, when he assumed the job. She spent some time perusing the Web sites that he had visited; again, nothing unusual. He apparently had a G-mail account and a Yahoo! e-mail account.
She tried to find the user names of those accounts, but everything came up with the blank sign-in screen. If he had been logged in, the browser had ultimately logged him out for inactivity. She then opened his Outlook work e-mail account, scanned through those, and again saw nothing that would raise a red flag.
She clicked on my pictures and saw nothing, then clicked on the trash bin and found one deleted photo.
It was a photo of four men, one of whom she presumed was Rathburn, all standing with arms laced around their buddies’ shoulders. She did a double-take as each man was wearing a Halloween mask. She immediately recognized Mick Jagger and thought she could tell which one was Keith Richards, but she wasn’t enough of a Rolling Stones enthusiast to remember the other two members of the band. There was a big tongue and lips superimposed on the photo, and she remembered that to be the logo on one of the Stones’ albums. Sticky Fingers maybe? Maybe not.
Huh, she thought.
She switched the Cybex Switchview box to the classified computer, which could not access the Internet but could access a Secret domain. There wasn’t much there, some routine e-mails on Outlook.
She closed the dialogue boxes and opened the my computer icon. She saw the common O: drive, where they shared office files and such, which she opened. Scanning through those there was nothing she either hadn’t seen o
r hadn’t put in there herself during her duties as his special assistant.
She closed the O: drive and studied the open my computer box and looked at all of the network drives. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. No references to the Rolling Stones or Keith or “Beasts of Burden.” Just the one photo, but what did that mean?
Frustrated and beginning to feel foolish, she stood, grabbed the football she had initially picked up, and began to put it back in the orange placekicker’s tee from which she had lifted the pigskin.
Her eye caught something in the center of the tee. She studied it more closely and saw that there was a small tear in the middle where the ball would rest on its pointed end. She touched it and determined that the tear was actually a tab, like a battery compartment cover. Meredith pulled at the tab and peeled back the soft orange material.
In the bottom of the well of the tee was a small thumb drive.
Huh, she thought.
Meredith flipped over the tee and a SanDisk 1-gig removable drive tumbled onto the desk. She sat back down and picked up the drive, which was indeed about the size of her thumb.
She removed the plastic tip and inserted it into the computer. A moment later a dialogue box appeared asking her if she wanted to open a file.
“Of course,” she whispered.
She clicked on the box and a series of tan manila folders appeared on the screen. They were, in order:
pred-china.
aig.
mick jagger.
charlie watts
ronnie wood.
None of the folders would open though, as they were all password-protected.
Fearing locking the drive from errant attempts to enter a password, she closed all the dialogue boxes, clicked on the icon to eject the thumb drive, then removed the device from the computer.
Meredith pocketed the drive, pushed the orange plastic back into the tee, replaced the football on the tee, then dusted off everything she had touched.
After shutting down both computers, she walked out of the office. Stepping through the darkened halls of the E-ring after most of the Pentagon work force had already departed, Meredith stopped and turned. What had she heard?