“Either that, or they wanted to embarrass him,” Hood said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sell him a project, tell him it’s been cleared with other agencies and foreign governments, and then have him make a big public stumble.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Hood said.
He didn’t, but he didn’t like where this was leading him. Op-Center had once run a psy-ops game called Alternate Reality on how to make Saddam Hussein so paranoid that he would turn on his most trusted advisers. What if a foreign government were doing something like that to the president?
It was a far-fetched idea, but so was the KGB killing a dissident by poking him with a poisoned umbrella, and the CIA attempting to slip Fidel Castro a poison cigar. Yet these things had happened.
Then there was another option he didn’t want to consider: that it wasn’t a foreign government but our own. It was possible.
It could also be less sinister than that. The First Lady said her husband wasn’t himself. What if she was right? Lawrence had spent four tough years in the White House and then eight tough years winning it back. Now he was in the hot seat again. That was a lot of pressure.
Hood was aware of several presidents who had showed signs of breaking during extended periods of stress: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. In the case of Nixon, his closest advisers encouraged him to resign not just for the health of the nation but for his own mental well-being. With Clinton, the president’s staff and friends decided not to bring in doctors or psychiatrists but to keep a careful watch and hope he came through the impeachment crisis. He did.
But in at least two cases, allowing the president to carry the full burden of decision making and politicking was not the best policy. Wilson ended up with a stroke trying to push the League of Nations through Congress. And toward the end of World War II, burdened by the pressure of winning the war and drawing up plans for a postwar world, Roosevelt’s closest advisers feared for his health. Had they impressed on him the absolute need to slow down, he might not have died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Any of those scenarios could be correct, or they could all be dead wrong. But Hood had always believed that it was better to consider every option, even the least likely, rather than be surprised. Especially when the result of being right could be cataclysmic. He would have to proceed carefully. If he could get to see the president, he would have an opportunity to lay his few cards on the table and also observe Lawrence, see whether Megan’s concerns had merit. The worst that could happen was the president would ask for his resignation. Fortunately, he still had his last one on file.
“What are you thinking?” Herbert asked.
Hood reached for the telephone. “I’ve got to see the president.”
“Excellent,” Herbert said. “Straight ahead has always been my favorite way, too.”
Hood punched in the president’s direct line. The phone beeped at the desk of his executive secretary, Jamie Leigh, instead of going through the switchboard. Hood asked Mrs. Leigh if she could please squeeze him in for a few minutes somewhere. She asked him for a log line for the calendar to let the president know what this was about. Hood said that it had to do with Op-Center having a role in the United Nations intelligence program.
Mrs. Leigh liked Hood, and she arranged for him to see the president for five minutes, from four-ten to four-fifteen.
Hood thanked her then looked at Herbert. “I’ve got to get going,” Hood said. “My appointment’s in forty minutes.”
“You don’t look happy,” Herbert said.
“I’m not,” Hood said. “Can we get someone to nail down who Fenwick is meeting in New York?”
“Mike was able to connect with someone at the State Department when you two were up there,” Herbert said.
“Who?”
“Lisa Baroni,” Herbert told him. “She was a liaison with the parents during the crisis.”
“I didn’t meet her,” Hood said. “How did Mike find her?”
“He did what any good spymaster does,” Herbert said. “When he’s someplace new, he looks for the unhappy employee and promises them something better if they deliver. Let’s see if she can deliver.”
“Good,” Hood said as he rose. “God. I feel like I do whenever I go to Christmas Eve Mass.”
“And how is that?” Herbert asked. “Guilty that you don’t go to church more often?”
“No,” Hood replied. “I feel like there’s something going on that’s much bigger than me. And I’m afraid that when I figure out what that is, it’s going to scare the hell out of me.”
“Isn’t that what church is supposed to be about?” Herbert asked.
Hood thought about that for a moment. Then he grinned as he left the office. “Touché,” he said.
“Good luck,” Herbert replied as he wheeled out after him.
THIRTEEN
Gobustan is a small, rustic village located forty-three miles south of Baku. The region was settled as far back as 8000 B.C. and is riddled by caves and towering outcroppings of rock. The caves boast prehistoric art as well as more recent forms of expression — graffiti left two thousand years ago by Roman legionnaires.
Situated low in the foothills, just beneath the caves, are several shepherds’ shacks. Spread out over hundreds of acres of grazeable land, they were built early in the century and most of them remain in use, though not always by men tending their flocks. One large shack is hidden behind a rock that commands a view of the entire village. The only way up is along a rutted dirt road cut through the foothills by millennia of foot traffic and erosion.
Inside, five men sat around a rickety wooden table in the center of the small room. Another man sat on a chair by a window overlooking the road. There was an Uzi in his lap. A seventh man was still in Baku, watching the hospital. They weren’t sure when the patient would arrive, but when he did, Maurice Charles wanted his man to be ready.
The window was open, and a cool breeze was blowing in. Except for the occasional hooting of an owl or rocks dislodged by prowling foxes in search of field mice, there was silence outside the shack — the kind of silence that the Harpooner rarely heard in his travels around the world.
Except for Charles, the men were stripped to their shorts. They were studying photographs that had been received through a satellite uplink. The portable six-inch dish had been mounted on the top of the shack, which had an unobstructed view of the southeastern sky and the GorizonT3. Located 35,736 kilometers above twenty-one degrees twenty-five minutes north, sixty degrees twenty-seven minutes east, that was the satellite the United States National Reconnaissance Office used to keep watch on the Caspian Sea. Charles’s American contact had given him the restricted web site and access code, and he had downloaded images from the past twenty-four hours.
The decoder they used, a StellarPhoto Judge 7, had also been provided by Charles’s contact through one of the embassies. It was a compact unit roughly the size and configuration of a fax machine. The SPJ 7 printed photographs on thick sublimation paper, a slick, oilbased sheet that could not be faxed or electronically transmitted. Any attempt to do so would be like pressing on a liquid crystal display. All the receiver would see was a smudge. The unit provided magnification with a resolution of ten meters. Combined with infrared lenses on the satellite, he was able to read the numbers on the wing of the plane.