“Did you know him?” Janice asked.
“Greeley? No, never met him, although I hear he was… is, a good man.”
“The news is now saying his ambassadorial appointment was a political payoff for campaign contributions.”
“Well, ain’t that a scoop! They are only about a hundred years late on catching on to that dirty little secret. But that’s the soft posts like Canada or Portugal, where some political appointee can’t screw it up too bad. Egypt is prime time, Class one. Those only get career Foreign Service Officers. The press is just looking for any way to slam Mitchell because he isn’t one of them.”
“Because he isn’t a newsman?”
“No, because he’s neither Fox news “Right,” or CNN “Left,” and they both hate that neutrality, like he was selling the secret formula of Coca Cola to the Russians.
“So what do you think is going to happen?” Janice asked as she poured Bill and herself more iced tea.
“Thanks. This is just a guess, but I’d say there’s a delta force or SEAL strike team warming up the coffee right about now waiting for someone to drop a dime on where the man is being held.”
“What about Egyptian sovereignty?”
“That’s covered under ‘Posse comi — fuck ‘em.’”
It took a second for Janice to realize that Bill had just bastardized ‘Posse Comitatus.’
Bill added, “If they get a 20 on this guy, our guys will go in first, snatch him back, then spin it as a joint U.S./Egyptian intelligence op or some kind of bullshit so that the Egyptians save face.”
“Okay, so now I feel better.”
Bill was in the middle of going through a box of stuff in order to throw most of it out and put what was left in a smaller box from which, if he continued the process, he could whittle down the contents of the ten boxes that were taking up valuable baby space in the garage down to one. He was going through old checks and photographs when he heard a familiar voice.
“You are human! You actually do normal stuff!”
“Joey, I don’t believe it. I just found this in the box.”
Bill handed Palumbo an old photograph: a picture of the two of them and some other guys standing in front of a pipe held up by two braced two-by-fours.
“Hey, the high bar, Muzzi, Johnny ‘No’, Soccio, Mush, B.O. Look at the mop of hair on your head!”
“Look how skinny we were.” Hiccock laughed as he tossed the picture back in the keeper box. “What brings you round this way on a Saturday?”
“Something is bugging me and I thought I’d run it by you.”
“Wanna beer?”
“Nah.”
“Okay, then shoot.”
“You remember Brooke Burrell out of the New York Bureau office?”
“Sure do. She was point on the whole virus thing and the poison gas tank plot in New York. Solid agent.”
“One of the best. She and I had a talk, off the record. A lot of it was just agent-to-agent, you know? ‘How do I do this, how should I handle that?’ But she said one thing that…Have you heard the latest out of Egypt?”
“That they took Greely to set El Benham free? Yeah.”
“She had an inkling that Alzir knew he wasn’t going to be in custody long.”
“Have they ever done this before?” Bill asked as he decided to throw out a desk calendar from 1999.
“Not one for one like this, and if they have it’s usually a low-level or convenient grab. A local police chief or U.S. military captive. But it’s always reactive, almost improvised by them. This has pre-meditated all over it.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
“Brooke had a sense about this guy knowing he was going to be sprung, and now she’s right.”
Bill looked at him in a way that said, “So?”
“This is a big play. They wouldn’t do this kinda thing if we caught Al Qaeda number 1. This Alzir guy is deeply connected to something else, something bigger.”
“Bigger than potentially infecting and killing fifty million Americans? I don’t think I want to know what that could be.”
“I want you, as a deputy director of the FBI, to authorize a guy who I have been following for a while. He’s Dr. Robert Fusco, a psych-ops guy who’s got some methods and practices that might give Brooke and us an edge.”
“I am only dep director for stuff under my area.”
“This guy is under your area and, besides, the funding can’t go on any record, so I need you to bury it in your SCIAD budget.”
“Okay, now you’re scaring me. Is this one of your wild-assed ideas?”
“Who was it who taught me to think outside the box?”
Joey positioned it perfectly to create the maelstrom in Bill’s head. It raged there for a minute then he simply said, “You really think this is going to pay off?”
“It’s got a good shot.”
Bill responded in the affirmative by giving Joey the Boulevard Blades gesture of a fist with the thumb jutting out between the index and pointer fingers. Not that they knew it, but it was an actual gesture from the ancient Neapolitan society, meaning “to protect.”
At 4:00 p.m. in the Situation Room beneath the White House, President Mitchell was being pushed to make a decision between two diametrically opposed evils.
The Secretary of State was uncharacteristically lobbying hard to save the life of the man who worked for him. “Mister President, the ambassador is a prime asset of the United States. He is worth every effort to retrieve.”
“Chuck, we can’t negotiate with terrorists. You’ll be setting a precedent that will have every American overseas being kidnapped round the clock,” the Chief of Staff needlessly reminded him. “The only option is military, if we get that lucky. Otherwise, the ambassador is now a combatant and prisoner of war.”
The Secretary of State turned to Mitchell. “Mr. President, how can you sacrifice his life like this?”
“Look, Charles, this ambassador makes over $200,000 dollars a year plus all expenses paid. There are dog faced G.I.s, who are just as valuable to me as he is, who die in shit-holes all over the world and their families barely live at poverty level. So they are both soldiers and, unfortunately, he is as expendable as they are. Chuck, what’s really going on with you? You know the damn policy as well as anyone, yet you continue to lobby for a trade that isn’t going to happen?” The President’s agitation was evident in the way he threw down his pencil.
“I pushed Greely into this post, sir. He wanted out and I personally strong-armed him to take another tour. He is a close personal friend of Saudi Prince Ramalli; they were roommates at Choate. I needed him in that post as part of my mid-east initiative.”
“God damn it, Charles, then get your head out of your ass. We send people to dangerous places and into jeopardy all the time. It may be a first for you, but, trust me, the bad news is you have to live with it.”
Chapter Twelve
Brooke took a deep breath as her hand rested on the latch to the Sheik’s cell. She hoped this would be the last time she’d have to do this. She hated it. But it was working. The last time, he wet himself as she approached. She wanted to let up on him a little because of it, but that would signal that she was weak. She had double-checked and made sure that she wasn’t hitting him in the same spots. That could result in real injury and cause internal bleeding. She wanted him healthy.
Her hand pushed the door open. “What do you know about this?”
She held up the front page of the N.Y. Post. On it was a frame grab from the Al Jazeera video showing the ambassador blindfolded, the jihad flag and AK 47’s around him, as a knife was near his throat.