by Clancy, Tom
The stunning young woman had approached him early in the evening, just minutes after he arrived. She was a reporter. After assuring him that she was not angling for an interview—her beat, she said, was the environment and meteorology—the woman asked if she could stop by later in the evening.
“I’m drawn to men who create technological quantum leaps,” she said.
Who could resist a come-on like that?
Two hours later Wilson left the party with his two bodyguards and driver. He had agreed to meet the woman at eleven P.M. There were paparazzi outside, and Wilson did not want to be photographed leaving with anyone. The world was a conservative place. He preferred to remain a champion of the financial and science sections, not a libertine of the gossip page.
Wilson had the top-floor Federal Suite, and his bodyguards had the adjoining Presidential Suite. Motion detectors had been installed outside Wilson’s door and on the floor of the balcony. If anyone tried to enter without being announced, vibrating wristbands would silently wake the bodyguards.
Wilson had ordered a 1970 Dom Perignon from room service and a light gray beluga caviar. He had candles delivered, along with a dozen roses for the bedroom nightstands. He opened his bow tie but left it hanging around his neck and sprayed a hint of Jivago Millennium above the collar. He probably did not need any of that. After all, he had made a technological quantum leap. But growing up the son of a pub owner, it made him happy to smell something other than ale and cigarettes. It made him even happier to be with women who did not smell of them.
His guest arrived on time and was announced. One of the guards met her at the elevator and escorted her to the suite. Wilson met her at the door with a rose. It made her smile. The rose seemed to disappear.
They ate caviar on toast tips. They drank champagne. They stood close on the balcony and looked out at the White House. They did not say much. She seemed content just to be there, and he was delighted to have her. As a distant church bell sounded midnight, they went quickly from the balcony to the authentic Hepplewhite mahogany settee to the bedroom.
The woman blew out the candles on the dresser, set her purse on the night table, and pushed him back on the king-size bed. She was as assertive as she was beautiful. Wilson understood that, and he went along with it. To succeed in her business, at her age, took confidence. She was showing that now.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Just lie there,” she replied as she settled on top of him.
He looked up at her and smiled. She moved her fingers down his arms and pushed them to his side. She placed her knees in his open palms and dragged her long nails across his chest, along the side of his neck, his scalp. Her toned body moved in excited spasms, like a whip. Shining through the window, the lights of Lafayette Park showed Wilson occasional flashes of cheekbone and shoulder.
Lady lightning, Wilson thought. With thunder rolling from deep inside her.
Champagne always brought out the Byron in him. Wilson was about to share his little metaphor aloud when his companion suddenly leaned across his chest and pulled a large, full pillow from behind him. She dragged it across his face and then leaned into it, hard.
“Hey!” Wilson shouted. He repeated the cry but lacked the breath to say more. He shut his eyes and closed his mouth and tried to push up with his head. His neck cramped painfully, and he stopped.
Wilson’s hands were pinned by the woman’s knees. He struggled unsuccessfully to raise them while he wriggled helplessly from side to side. He screamed into the pillow, hoping his bodyguards would hear him. If they did, he did not hear them. He heard nothing but bedsprings laughing beneath his head, his heart punching up against his throat, and his own thick wheezing as he fought to draw breath. His hands throbbed and the flesh of his belly and thighs burned where it rubbed hers. The pillow was wet with perspiration and saliva.
This is a game, Wilson thought hopefully as rusty circles filled the insides of his eyelids. This is what turns her on.
If it was, he did not approve. But he did not dwell on that. His thoughts were not his own. Wilson’s head filled with visual doggerel, images that came from other times and places.
And then, suddenly, the slide show stopped. His face cooled, his mouth opened wide, and his lungs filled with sweet air. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She was still perched above him, a slightly darker silhouette than the ceiling above. His eyes were misty with sweat. They smeared the woman as she bent close. The park lights sparked off something else, something in her hands. He tried to raise his arms to push her back, but they were still pinned. He couldn’t speak or scream, because he was still desperately sucking air through his wide-open mouth.
She moved closer and put the palm of her left hand against the bottom of his nose. She pushed up.
“What—?” was all he could say as his head arched back. He cried out weakly, but he sounded like a pig calling for dinner.
Or a man having sex, he thought. Christ. The bodyguards would not come, even if they heard him.
A moment after that, Wilson felt a cool sting in his mouth. He felt the weight of the woman leave him. He saw her get up. But that did not help. Within moments a cold, tingling numbness moved down from his ears along the sides of his neck. It filled his shoulders and arms and poured across his chest like an overturned bucket of ice. It tickled his navel and rolled down his legs.
This time there were no mental images, no struggle. The lights, and his lungs, simply snapped off.
THREE
Washington, D. C. Monday, 8:02 A.M.
Op-Center was officially known as the National Crisis Management Center. That was what it said on the charter, on the small brass sign beside the front door, and on the badge Paul Hood had just swiped through the lock to enter the lobby. Which was why Hood felt a little schizophrenic when he arrived and there was no crisis. He felt paradoxically relaxed and anxious.
Roughly half of the seventy-eight employees at Op-Center were dedicated to intelligence gathering and analysis. The other half handled crises that were imminent or had already gone “active,” as they euphemistically described rebellions, hostage situations, terrorism, and other crises. When half the team was idle, Hood worried that someone on the Hill would notice. The intelligence community could learn something from Congress. With nothing more than newspapers, gossip, and intuition, they profiled people and agencies with eerie accuracy. After that came the auto-da-fé. After that, people who once moved through the corridors of power became consultants. Hanging out the shingle saved face. What they really were was unemployed.
Hood did not know what he would do if the Inquisition came for him. Ironically, he knew how to stop it. Prior to joining Op-Center, Paul Hood was a two-term mayor of Los Angeles. He got to know a lot of people in the movie industry, and he learned that many of them were extraneous. If they did not find fault with perfectly fine scripts, there would be no reason for them to be employed. The United States military had somewhat the same mentality. Military intelligence financed “cheerleaders,” as they called them. These were both indigenous and undercover teams that fomented conflict around the globe. “Counterfeit mobilization,” they called it. A world at peace did not need increased military spending. And a downsized military would not be prepared to handle a real war when it arose.
There was some sense to the Department of Defense policy. However, counterfeit mobilization only worked one way for intelligence agencies. You had to pick a foreign national, frame him, and have your guys smoke him out. As much as he hated the sense of entitlement diplomatic plates gave diplomatic personnel, Hood had a problem with that. First, it tied up personnel from watching for real spies and saboteurs. Second, it could begin a pattern of escalation abroad until you actually turned allies into enemies. Third, it was wrong. It was not fashionable in Washington, but Hood believed in the Ten Commandments. He did not always keep them, but he tried. And bearing false witness was one of the You shall nots.
Hood greeted the guard, use
d his card to access the elevator, then descended one level to the heart of the National Crisis Management Center. There, Hood passed windowless offices that were set off a circular corridor of stainless steel. He reached his own wood-paneled office, near the back. He was greeted by his assistant, “Bugs” Benet, who sat in a small cubicle located to the right of the door. The young man was busy at the computer, logging the reports of the evening crew.
“Morning,” Hood said. “Anything?”
“Quiet,” Benet replied.
Hood already knew that, more or less. If there had been any kind of significant development, nighttime director Curt Hardaway or his deputy Bill Abram would have notified him.
“Did you hear about William Wilson?” Benet asked.
“Yes,” Hood replied. “It was on the radio.”
“Heart attack at thirty-one,” Benet said.
“Sex is among the most strenuous physical activities, up there with full court basketball and rock climbing,” Liz Gordon said as she walked by.
Hood smiled at the psychologist. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t have said that at the Brookings Institution.”
“Probably not.” Liz smiled as she continued toward her office. The thirty-five-year-old woman had given up a post at the independent research and policy institute to take this job with Op-Center. Initially, Hood had not put much faith in profiling. But Liz had impressed him with her insights about leaders, about field operatives, about soldiers, and about Op-Center staff that were bending under personal and professional stress. She had been especially helpful with Hood’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Harleigh. The eldest of his two children had been among the hostages taken by rogue peacekeepers at the United Nations. Liz had given him solid, effective advice about dealing with her post-traumatic stress disorder. The psychologist had also helped Hood reconnect with his twelve-year-old son Alexander after the stressful divorce from Sharon.
Hood shut the door, went to his desk, and input his personal computer code. It was not the name of his children, or his first pet, or the date he started working here. Those were things that a hacker might figure out. Instead, it was Dickdiver, the main character of his favorite novel, Tender Is the Night. It also made Hood smile to key it in. Hood and his long-ago fiancée Nancy Jo Bosworth had read it to each other when they first moved in together. When there was still magic in his world and romance in his heart. Before stolen software designs compelled Nancy to run off without telling him why or where. It took almost twenty years for Hood to find her. It happened by accident, during a trip to Germany on Op-Center business. Nancy told him she had wanted the money for them but grew ashamed. Since she could not return it, she kept it for herself.
Old feelings returned for them both. Though the passions were not acted upon, they helped to undermine what had been a colorless, rebound marriage to Sharon. While Hood was alone now, the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel was still the key to a sublime place, the last time Hood was truly happy. The password was his way of remembering that every day.
Hood started going through his E-mail. He used to come to the office and read the newspaper, then answer phone calls. Now the news was on-line, and the telephone was something you used in the car or at lunch. GovNet, which provided Op-Center’s secure Internet access, was devoting a lot of space to Wilson’s death on their welcome screen. That was not surprising, since his firewalls made it possible for most government agencies to link what had formerly been dedicated lines. They were reporting that he had gone to a party at Senator Don Orr’s town house, left around ten-thirty, and went back to his suite at the Hay-Adams. A woman had come to visit him. According to the hotel, she arrived at eleven and left around twelve-thirty. The concierge reported that she had been wearing a block print coat that came down to her knees and a matching crocheted hat with a black ribbon. The wide brim was dipped low. Obviously, she did not want to be recognized. That was not unusual. Many officials and businessmen had trysts in local hotels. They did not want their guests to be identified or photographed by security cameras. Typically, hotel management respected the desire for privacy by allowing expected visitors to pass without scrutiny.
The Metropolitan Police did not know who the woman caller was. She had given a name, Anna Anderson, which had led them to an elderly woman who was clearly not the perp. She may have selected the name as a joke, a reference to the woman who claimed to be Anastasia, the daughter of Czar Nicholas II. The security cameras in the hotel lobby and on the street showed her leaving unhurriedly and walking down Sixteenth Street, where she was lost in the night. Visitors like her seldom used valet parking. They did not want their license numbers traced. Washingtonians assumed that everyone, from waiters to cab drivers, was looking for a payday from a tabloid newspaper or television show. More often than not they were right. The police assumed that Wilson died after the woman left. Otherwise she could have called 911 and then slipped away. This belief was reinforced by the fact that there did not appear to be anything suspicious about Wilson’s death. He had perspired heavily—presumably from the exertion—and the bed suggested “an active evening,” as one source put it. Though Wilson was young and had no history of heart trouble, many forms of heart disease could slip past a routine electrocardiograph. The autopsy would tell them more.
There was nothing exceptional in the E-mails. A few résumés from agencies and private businesses that were being downsized. Op-ed pieces from the left, right, and center. Requests for interviews, which Hood routinely declined. He was not a self-promoter and saw no benefit to giving out information about how Op-Center worked, or with whom. His E-mail even contained links to passwordprotected web sites of individuals who were willing to provide intelligence from various countries and foreign agencies. He forwarded these to Bob Herbert. Most were con artists, a few were foreign agents trying to find out about Op-Center, but occasionally there were nuclear scientists or biotechnicians who genuinely wanted to get out of the situations they were in. As long as they were willing to talk, American operatives or embassy officials in their countries were willing to listen.
Hood was about to access his personal address for private E-mail when Bugs beeped him. Senator Debenport was on the line. Hood was not surprised. It was budget time on the Hill, and the South Carolina senator had recently replaced Senator Barbara Fox as the chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. Those were the officials who kept track of what the federal intelligence agencies did and how much it cost.
“Good morning, Senator,” Hood said.
“That may be true somewhere,” the sandpaper-voiced senator replied. “Not in my office.”
Hood did not ask why. He already knew the answer.
“Paul, last night the CIOC Budget Subcommittee agreed that we have to work out a strategic retrenchment,” Debenport told him.
The CIOC’s euphemism for budget cuts.
“We took a four percent hit last fiscal year and six percent the year before that,” Hood told him. “What’s the damage now?”
“We’re looking at just upwards of twenty percent,” Debenport replied.
Hood felt sick.
“The night crew is going to have to cut its staff by fifty percent. I know that’s a lot, but we had no choice,” Debenport went on.
“What are you talking about? You’re the head of the damn committee.”
“That’s right, Paul. And as such I have a duty that transcends my personal feelings about the value of Op-Center’s work,” Debenport said. “It will be my call where to make the cuts, though I want your input and I will rely heavily on it. We would prefer you work backwards. Make your way back to Op-Center’s original configuration.”
“Our original configuration had a military component,” Hood pointed out. “That’s already been cut.”
“Yes, and those funds were reallocated to General Rodgers’s field personnel,” Debenport said. “That’s an area we feel should undergo deoperation. We looked closely at the internal breakdowns of the other intelligence groups. Th
e Company and the Feds have those areas covered. Merge that post with the political officer.”
“Senator, how much are you taking from the CIA, the FBI, and the NRO?” Hood asked.
“Paul, those are all older, established—”
“You’re not cutting them, are you?” Hood asked.
Debenport was silent.
“Senator?”
“If you really want to know, Paul, they’re getting a small bump,” Debenport told him.
“Amazing,” Hood replied. “How much time did they spend lobbying the committee?”
“They did the usual PowerPoint dance, but that wasn’t the key to the increase,” Debenport said. “Those boys grabbed a lot of Homeland Security detail out of the gate. We can write those budget request entries in ink.”
“Because of a buzz phrase,” Hood said. “We might have been in a position to reorient ourselves if our attention hadn’t been on stopping nuclear war between India and Pakistan.”
“Yes, and frankly your success is part of the problem. You’ve shifted the majority of your operations from the United States to other countries—”
“At the president’s request,” Hood reminded him. “He asked us to augment Op-Center’s domestic agenda after we stopped a leftist military coup in Russia.”
“I know the history,” Debenport said. “I also know the future. The voters don’t much care whether Moscow turns Red again or Tokyo is nuked or Spain falls apart or France gets hijacked by radicals. Not anymore. Foreign aid resources are being downsized across the board.”
“Your constituents may not care, but we know that what happens there affects what happens here,” Hood said.
“That’s true,” Debenport said. “Which is why the mandate the president gave you is not being changed.”
“Only our funding. We’re supposed to do the same job but with eighty percent of an already stretched budget.”
