“A large-scale operation would be out of the question,” said Orda finally. “But a reconaissance in force, conducted at a time when the island was not monitored by the Japanese or the Americans, proceeding carefully as you’ve outlined…What is the minimal force you would need, if such a group were under your direct, personal command?”
Chapter 4
“Define venti.”
The skinny young man with half a goatee blinked.
“Venti?”repeated Fisher.
The thick aroma of ground caffeine in the upscale coffee shop had obviously intoxicated the clerk’s delicate senses. Fisher sympathized, but not to the point of being patient.
“How about I hop over the counter and get the coffee myself?” he asked the clerk, who had a tag on his shirt declaring he wasn’t a clerk at all but something in an obscure Romance language that seemed to mean lawgiver.
“Venti would be, uh, bigger than grande,” said the clerk. He pronounced the last e with an exaggerated swagger, as if the accent might somehow make him European.
“So there’s grande and extra grande, which is large and extra large, except that large is what used to be regular, but you can charge more by calling it large. So venti is large, and I want extra large, so I guess I want extra venti.” Fisher took out a cigarette. “What would that be? Vento?”
“Um—”
“Because it sounds kind of Latin, you know what I mean? It’s not Latin, but it’s close.” He lit the cigarette.“Venti, vento, ventanimous — I came, I saw, I coffeed. Works for me.”
“You can’t smoke in here,” said the clerk.
“Yeah, I know,” said Fisher. “So you gonna get me the ventanimous or what?”
The clerk stared at the cigarette. “Mocha?”
“Just regular coffee. Straight.”
The young man took cover behind the dessert display, whispering to one of his coworkers. Fisher surveyed the counter, looking for something to put his ashes in. A display near the register was filled with CDs “celebrating the organic music of the Rain Forest.” Next to it was a small glossy photo of the man who had actually picked the coffee being prepared today; it seemed likely the company had spent more on the glossy photo than on the beans. A legend below the photo declared that the coffee had been harvested with integrity, which Fisher agreed was a good thing: You couldn’t have too much integrity in a hot beverage, as far as he was concerned.
On the other hand, Fisher wasn’t sure about organic music. Possibly it was the song they sang when they tore the trees down to panel the interior of the store.
The clerk with the pseudo-Latin job title sent a braver, skinnier coworker forward with the coffee. Fisher paid for it — the price represented a month’s car payment — and then sat along the wall. Several people stared, eyeing his cigarette with obvious envy.
He’d taken only two sips from the coffee — while admittedly on the strong side, it lacked the metallic, burned aftertaste so highly prized by true connoisseurs of java — when a gentleman clad in the dark blue favored by officers of the law approached his table. Fisher reached into his jacket for his Bureau ID, expecting the cop to riff a variation of “license and registration” on him. Instead he touched his holster, unsnapping the gun restraint at the top.
“FBI,” said Fisher. “Relax.”
“Put it down slowly,” said the cop.
Fisher pulled out his ID and laid it on the table.
“I meant the cigarette,” said the policeman.
Fisher’s cell phone began to vibrate.
“How about I take it outside?” he suggested, figuring the heavy lacquer of the walls would interfere with his reception.
“Good idea,” said the policeman, whose hand remained poised near his weapon as the FBI agent walked out. The small concrete patio near the sidewalk was crowded with smoking refugees, but Fisher found an unoccupied table near the Dumpster, where the refreshing aroma of spent coffee beans mixed with more earthly scents.
“Fisher.”
“McDonald.”
“Betty, how are you?” he asked, starting to sip the coffee. “Did the GSA help?”
“About as much as Congressman Taft,” she said.
“Good,” said Fisher. It was best not to acknowledge sarcasm in an amateur.
She sighed. Fisher recognized the sound of a Tootsie Roll being unwrapped.
“We persevered despite your help. There are some interesting intersections,” she said between chews. “Ferrone Radiavonics, which according to your papers worked on the F/A-22V’s radar.”
“Yup?”
“They’re owned by a company which is owned by another company which is part of a trust controlled by the people who control El-Def.”
“This is going somewhere, right?”
“Megan York’s family and friends have an important interest in about half a dozen defense projects besides Cyclops,” she told him.
“Controlling interests?”
“Big interests.”
“Like which ones?”
“God, Fisher, do you do anything besides drink coffee and smoke cigarettes all day?”
“Nope.”
“The augmented-ABM project is the biggest. The connection’s rather convoluted.”
“Bonham’s involved?”
“He has stock in some of the companies. His stake is unclear. There are others.” Betty ran down a list that included an unmanned submarine project and a satellite network. “Awful lot of stock to own, given his supposed net worth. Get this: He claims his condo cost under two-fifty. Can’t possibly be, not near the Beltway. No way.”
As she talked the call-waiting feature beeped Fisher’s line with another call.
“Gotta get going, Betty. Keep digging.”
“Digging for what?”
He clicked onto the other line and immediately regretted doing so.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Why, Jemma, hello to you. Actually, I am in a coffee emporium in downtown central north Alexandria. I think it’s downtown. Hard to tell.”
“I need you to get on a plane right away. You have to go to Afghanistan. Did you catch the President’s speech?”
“The President?”
“Fisher, I don’t have any time for your bullshit.”
“Such language. I bet there’s an ordinance against it here.”
“Fisher — I’m going to give you twenty minutes to get over to Andrews. There’s a plane waiting.”
“A big one, I hope.”
Chapter 5
Blitz had expected some of the criticism. It was mostly knee-jerk anti-Americanism, the kind that would interpret a cure for cancer as somehow part of a plot to bring a McDonald’s restaurant to every intersection in the world. A few of the sources were surprising, or at least ironic: A German newspaper accused the U.S. of trying to enforce its “ethos” on the world, as if eliminating all life-forms from several hundred thousand square miles was a lifestyle choice.
But there were a few nuanced opinions — he couldn’t call them criticisms exactly — that did disturb him. One, recognizing that mankind now stood at the precipice of a new age, went on to warn that the shape of this age was not so clear-cut:
One of the lessons that seems not to be understood about the use of the atomic bombs against Japan was that they helped end the war precisely because they were weapons of indiscriminate annihilation. They made possible the erasing of an entire people — not simply the removal of combatants, but of all people. World War II to a great degree erased the line between combatant and noncombatant. The Allied powers involved in the fight understood — though they could not admit it publicly — that the only real way to win the war was to combine military victory with severe crippling of the civilian population. The atomic bombs were the culmination of that, a step further along the line that led from Dresden to the firebombing of Tokyo. There would have been no final victory without these mass destructions, just more in the cycle of engagements that had wracked the world for one hundred, two hundred years.