Beck got the Israeli colonel out of Dickson’s office before Dickson, white with fury, could think of something sufficiently scathing to say; then, making excuses to Netanayhu that the colonel assured him were unnecessary, Beck helped Netanayhu into his bulletproof and now spray-sealed raincoat and walked his Israeli ally to a waiting limo before going back into Dickson’s office, forebearing to knock and slamming the door behind him.
“What the fuck did you think you were accomplishing, Dickson?” Beck, who almost never used foul language to a superior, strode across the Indo-Tabriz carpet and glowered down at Dickson, who had evidently put on his breathing mask as soon as Beck left and hurriedly ripped it off now, his eyes defiant and his thin hair askew as he slouched at his desk, snapping the mask’s elastic.
“Accomplishing? Nothing at all, Beck. Which shows that I’m saner than you are. What’s the use of this? Any of it?” Snap ! went the elastic. Snap !
“If you keep this up—Sir—I’m going to have to suggest that you take a leave of absence until you’re thinking more clearly.”
And Beck could do it—had his own channels to those still putatively in control. But he didn’t want to do it; he wanted to put his Bureau Chief back on track, shake him out of his funk.
“I… I can’t stand it when those greasy little bastards start treating me like an idiot son.”
“Then don’t act like one. Look, I know how you feel—things are tough.” Beck wished he didn’t know how Dickson felt; there were lots of anti-Semites in the diplomatic corps, but having one at the helm in Jerusalem now, when America desperately needed Israeli help and protection for its citizens from angry Arab mobs in the Middle East, might turn out to have the opposite of the balancing effect intended by State when they’d sent Dickson here. However, Beck didn’t have time to do much more than say, “No American likes it when he’s face to face with somebody who thinks we’re about to become a nation of refugees. The Israelis are probably the staunchest allies we’ve got right now. Try to remember that.”
“Oh, mother of God, why me,” Dickson whispered, not an answer Beck considered to be confidence-building.
“Because,” Beck said, “I need you.” It was a standard ploy, but Dickson raised his bleary, sick eyes. “I want to explain to you what you’ve got to do in—” Beck consulted his black chrome watch “—fifteen minutes, and I want you to do it as perfectly as you’ve ever done anything in your life. A lot of other lives depend on it.”
Dickson was nodding slowly, like one of those glass birds that dip into a water glass for hours once you get them started. “Righty-O, son.” He straightened up. “And thanks for… covering my lapse. It won’t happen again. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“I’ve got a genetic engineer coming over here, a man named Morse, one of ours, who was at the conference. His clearance is Top Top and he’s got an anti-cancer drug: it’s a sort of vaccination… unproven, of—”
“He’s got a what? ” Dickson’s face was lit from within as if someone had just rolled back the clock seventy-two hours.
“Recombinant DNA—you’ve heard of it, surely?” Beck said wearily. He’d been running on nerves for the last eighteen hours and he needed fuel—food, coffee, an enemy he could fight, something else besides Dickson’s slow vapidity. He conjured Chris Patrick’s ass and the vision buoyed him. “My conference, remember? On the Dead Sea? This morning I had breakfast with Morse and briefed him on the situation at home—the news will be out momentarily in any case.”
Beck waited for a roar of outrage from Dickson at this flagrant violation of security, but none was forthcoming.
Instead, Dickson murmured, “A cure for cancer, well, I’ll be damned.”
“An experimental drug which the Israelis have agreed to help us produce in sufficient quantity to do a test—on Americans. It won’t help those already dying, but it will prevent fragmentation of DNA, inversions, inhibit free radicals from—”
“Speak to me in English, Beck,” Dickson said with disgust. “If this… Morse has got something, and the Israelis will loan us facilities, what’s the problem?”
“Problems. A half dozen of them. First, security clearance—Morse can’t give the formula to the Israelis without permission until you tell him he can. Second, waivers of some sort: Morse still thinks there’s an FDA; he figures about twenty years of testing are in order before trying this stuff on humans. He wants it in writing that the Food and Drug Administration won’t pull his license. Third, he’s got family back there and he wants them out, if they’re alive. Fourth, he wants to go along to make sure we get to his family, give them preferential injections, and bring them out. Fifth and sixth, he wants a lot of money and a position at one of the universities here under our auspices—” Beck raised his hands—this sort of morass was Dickson’s territory, not his own—and looked at his chief, hoping for some sign in that flaccid face of Dickson’s former sharpness, an indication that what he was saying was getting through to Dickson.
“I can’t guarantee this Morse a visiting professorship at an Israeli university,” Dickson mused, head down, tapping his Cross pen on his terrifyingly clean desk—Dickson’s desktop was always invisible. Then he looked up and Beck knew that everything was going to be all right, or as all right as the two of them could make it in a world determined to destroy itself even though it might just have a second chance.
Dickson’s small-featured face was a convolution of wrinkles that extended well up into his balding pate: “You’ll have to romance the Israelis, after what I said to Netanayhu.” Dickson got a notepad and started jotting. “As for the rest of it—screw the FDA, if we’ve still got one.”
Excitedly, Dickson got up from his desk and Beck, relief like a dose of fatigue wastes flooding his system, sat heavily upon one corner of it.
“You’ll see Morse, then? Convince him? Give him carte blanche? It’s just for two weeks or so while the Israelis produce the material and I find the other people I need….”
“Other people?” Dickson said warily.
“I told you I’ll want the reporter, Chris Patrick; the paperwork’s being done for her.”
“I remember,” Dickson snapped, his old self. “I’m not addled or senile.”
Beck didn’t comment on Dickson’s state of mind: what he had to say next wasn’t going to go down well. “I’ll need some support types—people who can handle the logistics, security, and anything that might come up in the field. If this leaks, we’ll never get out of Israel with that serum, let alone as far as the US: the Russians don’t want us any better off than they are; everybody in the world is living in his own I’m-going-to-die-of-cancer nightmare. Morse, his project, and that crate of serum are going to be the hottest intelligence targets since the paperwork from the Manhattan project.”
“How about your Israeli friends?” Dickson asked hopefully.
“No dice. They’re doing enough and we’re not telling them exactly what we’re doing—we’re fak ing it, saying the serum arrests the progress of radiation sickness.”
“Mother of God,” Dickson moaned. “You’re using them for this and you don’t trust them?”
Beck bared his teeth: “I don’t trust anybody—not on this. I’m not sure I trust you. I’ll bet your first thought was how soon you could get your shot.”
“You mean… I’m not going to get one? Beck, we’ve got to take care of our own people first. Those we know will survive—it’s triage….”