The general shook his head and closed the door behind him. “Sit down and relax, Bill. I’ve got a problem.” Cox stretched out his skinny six-foot-four-inch frame in the only decent armchair in the office. “I sent you last analysis about Iraq and Syria showing signs of kissing and making up over to the CIA to be included in the PDB. Hogan bounced it right back with some scathing remarks about us being out to lunch. I won’t repeat what he said about your linking the Iraqis with the economic negotiations going on between Egypt and Syria.”
Carroll’s mouth twisted into a rueful grimace. Hogan was the staffer in the CIA who compiled the President’s Daily Brief, of PDG, and it was widely rumored that he wrote it up with a crayon. Supposedly, the PDB summarized the best intelligence the United States had for the President, and since the CIA had sole direct-reporting access to the President, all intelligence had to go through the CIA. “The troops over at the CIA think we’re too pro-Israeli.”
“Don’t tell me, Bill.” Cox smiled, raising a hand. “I know that not a single one of those shit-for-brains over there speaks Arabic.” Carroll was fluent in Arabic and Farsi; and could, in a pinch, get along in Berber.
“Someone had better tell the President what’s going down or we’re going to get our asses in the proverbial crack-again,” Carroll said. Cox valued the slender and youthful-looking lieutenant colonel because his linguistic and analytical abilities were backed up by an outstanding record in the field. Carroll was one of the most highly decorated Air Force officers on active duty and wore the Air Force Cross for his role in rescuing 280 prisoners of war.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Cox said. “But no one else, most of all the CIA, is reading the signals the way you do. I floated your analysis by General Howard and he almost threw me out of his office.” Lieutenant General Howard was the Army three-star general in command of the DIA and Cox’s boss. “No one is buying your analysis that Saddam has become a martyr to the Arab people and could be a rallying point against the West. The Agency boys believe that we stomped Saddam hard enough to keep everybody in line and that the Arab claim that they have the men and money to change their third world status and only lack the will to do it is just so much hot air.” Cox held up his hand to keep Carroll silent. “Bill, I agree that Iraq is secretly rebuilding its military much like Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s. A nation learns more from losing a war than from winning it. We know they’ve gotten back all their planes from the Iranians. But the goes against the party line that the Iraqis are now rational actors and that the Mideast is stabilizing.”
“So what else is new?”
‘I need to get the attention of the President or the National Security Council,” Cox said, “but I’m out of ideas and airspeed. If I can’t do it through normal channels, it’ll have to be leaked to the media.”
Carroll studied the pencil he was holding. He gave a little snort and shook his head. “That’s a bad choice …” He understood the general’s problem. Everyone in the administration was hailing the current negotiations between Egypt and Syria for an economic and mutual assistance treaty as a harbinger of peace and stability in that shattered area of the world, as everything the allied forces had fought for. But Carroll had discovered something else. At first, everything he had seen supported the accepted view of the treaty. Then a Mossad contact had passed him a top-secret protocol an Israeli spy had discovered buried deep in the negotiations. The protocol fused the Syrian and Egyptian military command and control systems and established communications links with Iraq.
After blending it with other intelligence, Carroll had come to one simple and overriding conclusion: The Egyptians, the Syrians, and possibly the Iraqis, were using the treaty to prepare for a major war and there could only be one targetIsrael. Cox also had a contact in Mossad, one much higher than Carroll’s, who had passed along the same intelligence to him.
“The Israelis know what’s going down, so why doesn’t the Israeli ambassador warn our State Department?” Carroll asked.
Cox shook his head. “Lots of reasons. Too many congressmen and senators would claim the Israelis are crying wolf. Their new prime minister is one cocky son of a bitch. Yair Ben David thinks Israel can take on all the Arabs as long as they keep their powder dry. He isn’t worried, so his ambassador isn’t worried. Everyone over here is happy because that supports our administration’s position that the Israelis are on top of the situation, Iraq has quit lusting after its neighbors’ oil, and that peace and prosperity are just around the corner. People only see what they want to see.”
The general gave vent to his deeply ingrained cynicism. “What we’ve got here is a classic case of double whifferdill inverted rectalitis where everyone is looking up everyone else’s asshole and seeing light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Right.” Carroll grinned. “And feelin’ cool because the wind is in their face.”
“Bill,” Cox said, looking at his feet, “I can’t leak it.”
“And you want me to?”
There was no answer as the general disappeared out the door.
Just watching Shoshana move across the hotel lobby as they met for their dinner engagement excited Mana and he could feel the start of an erection. He willed it to go away as he joined her, exchanging ritualistic small talk. Up close, it was easier to take his eyes off the dress that promised so much. He was certain she was wearing nothing underneath and became even more excited when she entered the backseat of his limousine and flashed a bare leg.
Inside the car, the dress seemed to move over her, outlining her figure and then hiding it away. He was a flustered young man. “I … I hope that you will like the restaurant,” Mana stammered. “It’s a small place, very exclusive, with a quiet garden.”
“It will be fine if we can talk,” she said and reached out and touched the back of his hand. She was following Habish’s instructions to the letter — get him panting and keep him that way. Shoshana felt sorry for Is’al.
The two-block walk from where the van pool dropped Carroll helped break the tension generated by the DIA and the daily grind at Arlington Station. He was relaxing into the peaceful routine of suburban Virginia when he turned up the walk to his house. He waved at his neighbor, a bureaucrat in the Department of the Interior who got off work much earlier, and braced himself. His son, a two-and-a-half-year-old bruiser, flew down the steps and bounced into his arms, demanding to be caught.
“Daddy, do you know what this is?” Brett Carroll challenged. A picture of a red stop sign was clutched in his small hand.
“Looks like a stop sign to me,” Carroll replied. He knew how to hedge his answers.
“It’s an octagon, Daddy.” Condescension was apparent in his voice. He wiggled out of his father’s arms and ran past his mother, off on the important business of two-year-olds.
“He’s into shapes today,” Carroll’s wife told him. Mary Carroll was a tall, slender woman, a former Air Force officer and one of the POWs that Carroll had helped rescue from Iran. She kissed him and they walked arm in arm into the house, talking about the trouble their son had been in during the day. Mary caught the signs immediately that something was bothering her husband. She waited through dinner, knowing he would soon tell her.
Brett finally had run down and, with howls of protest, had been put to bed at seven-thirty. An unusual calm settled over the house. Mary settled onto the couch next to her husband and waited. “Mary,” he began, “I’ve got a problem …” When he finished talking through his conversation with the general, his wife sat for a minute, studying the problem and her husband’s face.