“Sir, we’ve got to do something about this,” Toad said with a slight edge in his voice.
“What is this evidence of?” Jake gestured toward the photo. “What?” That was the nub of it. At best this photo might destroy one alibi. “We’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Do you think the CIA killed Keren?” Toad asked.
“I have no idea. If the Mossad knows and wanted us to believe, they could have given us real proof. They didn’t. Which raises another question — is Farrell still working for the Mossad?”
Toad spent several seconds processing it. “I can’t see her working for anyone else. She…”
Toad ran out of steam when Jake Grafton gave him one of those cold glances. With thinning hair and a nose a tad too large, Jake Grafton’s face wasn’t memorable. It was just another face among the throng. Until he fixed those gray eyes on you with one of those looks that could freeze water, that is — then you got a glimpse of the hard, determined man inside.
“Maybe they wanted to smear Herb,” Toad added lamely.
“That’s one possibility. Another is that they want to discredit me.”
“You?”
“I’m not going to be around here very long if I sally forth to slay a dragon armed with nothing but a peashooter and one pea. You see that? The dragon will fry my britches. And if there’s no dragon I just immolated myself.”
Jake rooted in his desk drawer for a pack of matches. He found them, then dumped the trash from his wastecan onto the floor. One by one he lit the prints and dropped them into the gray metal wastecan. The negative went last. When the celluloid was consumed, Jake picked up the trash and tossed it back into the can.
Then he picked up a file on the Russian army and opened it. Several minutes later Toad remembered the computer printout of the front page of the London Times that was inside his pocket. He wadded it up and tossed it into the classified burn bag.
3
June in Washington is very similar to early summer in any other large city in the northeastern part of the United States. The days of clouds and rain come regularly, interspersed with periods of sunshine and balmy breezes, perfect days when it seems the whole world is ripe, flourishing, vibrantly alive. Weekends are for shopping expeditions, yard work, an occasional party.
Workdays in the nation’s capital begin here like everywhere else. Most people turn on one of the television morning shows as they dress and drink a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. While they take a quick squint at the morning newspaper and gobble a fat pill, Willard Scott tells them about the weather and a lady having her hundredth birthday. Why supposedly sane people choose to spend the worst moments of the day with Willard Scott, Bryant Gumbel and their colleagues on the other networks is a phenomenon that will probably intrigue archeologists of a future age.
With the kids shoved out the door to swimming lessons or other summer activities, working people fire up their horseless chariots and join the commuting throng. Tooling out of the subdivision they tune in another set of fools on their car radios. On each of the morning “drive shows” one or two jaded disk jockeys and one syrupy sweet, eternally cheerful female crank out some combination of pop music, weather and crude humor interspersed with reports from a helicopter pilot about the traffic jams that form every morning around stalls, wrecks and road construction projects. This mix is occasionally enlivened with a blow-by-blow account of a spectacular police chase of a freeway speeder who suddenly remembered his thirty-two unpaid parking tickets when he saw the cop’s flashing light.
And “news,” lots of it. Usually “news” is presented in short snippets, “sound bites,” some of them worth the ten seconds of air time they get, most not. To prevent the working citizen creeping through traffic from getting too down from an overdose of reality, the producers of these shows leaven the mix with the inane doings of show business celebrities and the latest risqué tidbits from the court trials of current cretins. Nothing heavy, nothing in depth, just a once-over-lightly on items that would only interest a heavy metal groupie or a social scientist from planet Zork.
Jake Grafton never listened. Callie had the television going every morning while she fixed Amy’s breakfast, but Jake read the newspaper. If the Washington Post thought an international story was worth the front page, the American intelligence community was going to be wrestling with it before lunch.
In the car Jake turned off the radio the instant it babbled to life. Amy and Callie always left the squawk box on, he always turned it off.
Today he drove in the usual blessed silence while he reviewed the crises of yesterday and the likely flaps on today’s agenda. The Middle East was boiling again: another assassination, more riots protesting ongoing Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, more terrorism and murder. Chaos in the Balkans, another wave of Haitians heading for Florida, the usual anarchy in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, or as the bureaucrats had labeled it, the CIS — all in all, this was just another day in the 1990s.
Normally there was little the Americans could do to improve any international situation. Nor, as the optimists noted, was there much they could do that would make things worse. Still everything had to go through the gristmill and be forwarded on to the policymakers for their information. And in the case of the DIA, to the appropriate units of the military to ensure they weren’t luxuriating in blissful ignorance.
Besides the usual international crises, the top echelons of the military and civilian policymakers were still trying to formulate America’s response to the shape of the post-Communist world. The world had changed almost overnight, yet change was the bureaucracy’s worst enemy, the crisis to which it had the most difficulty responding.
This morning Jake Grafton thought about change. The knee-jerk reaction had been to reorganize, to draw more lines on the organization chart. That had been easy, though it hadn’t been enough. The brave new world had to be faced whether the policymakers were comfortable or not.
They were uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Men and women who had spent their adult lives as warriors of the cold war now had to face the unknown without experience or perspective. Mistakes were inevitable, grievous mistakes that were going to cost people their reputations, their careers. This sense of dangerous uncertainty collided with the extraordinary dynamics of the evolving geopolitical landscape to produce a stress-filled crisis atmosphere in which tension was almost tangible.
This situation is like war, Jake Grafton decided. Every change in the international scene reveals a new opportunity to the bold few and a new pitfall to the cautious many.
He was musing along these lines when the Pentagon came into view. It was a low, sprawling building much larger than it looked.
As he parked the car he was wondering if there was any place at all for nuclear weapons in this changing world. Were they obsolete, like horse cavalry and battleships? He also wondered if he was the only person in the Pentagon asking that question.
“Everyone would have been better off if Russia had had another revolution and shot all the Communists.”
General Albert Sidney Brown delivered himself of this opinion and stopped the strategy conference dead. Which was perhaps what he intended. The subject was the growth of virulent anti-Semitism in the former Soviet states.