by Michael Ryan
“The Republicans’, I guess,” I answered.
“That’s who is trying to kill you,” Sheed said.
“The Republicans? Please, Mr. Sheed. You can’t be serious. All I see are fat fiftyish pasty white guys in straw boaters with red-white-and-blue streamers on them.”
“Yes, well, there are other Republicans. You’ll remember the CIA was run by George Bush. Many agents are glad to do a little moonlighting. Especially the frustrated ones, which almost all of them are. What begins as patriotism shades easily into fanaticism. They are very well-trained and they are neither fat nor fiftyish.”
A different picture appeared in my mind, which wasn’t so funny.
“They’re funded by Republican donors,” Sheed continued. “Fanatical billionaire right-wing donors. They hate Bill Clinton. They’d kill him if they could get away with it. But they couldn’t get away with it. You on the other hand—it would be nothing for them to kill you. After they extracted from you every detail about Democrats’ covert operations that would bring down Clinton.”
“But I don’t know anything! I have no idea what Angela was doing in Mexico!”
“But they don’t know that, do they? You drove her there. As far as they’re concerned, you work for Clinton. You’re a valuable undercover operative just like her.”
Sheed seemed to enjoy telling me this quite a bit too much.
“Of course, you’re under no obligation to accompany Angela,” Sheed continued. “You can leave anytime. But we have no way to protect you if you do. Since we’re not a government agency, we have no access to government protection. I would hate to see you exposed to harm and on your own.”
I tried to detect irony in Sheed’s last remark, but there wasn’t a trace of it. He probably would hate to see me hurt. But I also knew he’d accept it as collateral damage, another civilian killed in the war, and go on with his business.
“It doesn’t seem I have much choice,” I said.
“Not much choice, no,” Sheed replied. “Your stipend by the way is $20,000, payable after the delivery is complete.”
“Well, that’s more than I made last year. I didn’t imagine embarking on a new career, but the old one was sort of tanking anyway.”
“This is one and done, Mr. Wilder. I’m afraid you’re stuck with making jokes. The people looking for you want to cause the president problems before the election, not after. After will do them no good. They’ll simply turn their attention elsewhere. There’s a world of people who can cause problems for Bill Clinton.”
“Such as every woman he’s ever met?”
Sheed sighed. “Oh yes, the dick problem. Every woman he’s ever met has already been paraded before the microphones. That’s old news.”
I certainly had a dick problem myself—hence my current circumstances—but Sheed was diplomatic enough not to remind me, although he probably knew about it and everything else about me.
He continued, “You can sleep on this and give me your decision before we get off the plane in Washington. If you’re not coming along, I’ll buy you a cab ride to Dulles and a ticket to LAX. We’d have to pick up a male agent provided by Richard Clarke, but this could put Angela in peril.”
“Because?”
“Because we can’t trust anybody else. It’s that simple. There’s too much money involved. Can you guess how much the presidency is worth? Federal subsidies, regulations, penalties—every industry, every enterprise. That’s a fraction of the money in play. I’m talking about the men who have that money and mean to keep it and make more.”
I had no doubt that Sheed was accurately describing this secret world of money, politics, and intrigue. I suddenly felt very tired. Maybe I was asleep already, because it seemed that I had entered a nightmare universe populated by aliens. Including Angela, Murderous Princess of Planet Lovetron. A very depressing thought.
“Georges will make you a bed up front,” Sheed said. “Why don’t you catch a nap before we land? You look like you could use it.”
I got up and walked meekly to the front of the plane where one of the seats had already been made into a single bed complete with percale sheets, a down comforter, and a foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow spotlighted by a reading light above the porthole window. A pair of 100 percent Egyptian cotton baby blue pajamas was folded neatly at the foot of the bed. I changed into them in the airplane bathroom behind the pilot’s cabin, picturing Angela in there trying to pee in her hijab. Before I clicked off the reading light above the bed, I glanced back at Sheed at the dining table. He had taken out a briefcase and was reviewing a stack of file folders as if it were eight A.M. in the office and he had just finished his second cup of coffee. Of course he can bill thirty hours a day. He never sleeps.
16.
Sheed and Angela were up and dressed before I even awoke (of course): the power couple. They were halfway through their conquer-the-universe power breakfast when I trundled past the dining table in my 100 percent Egyptian cotton baby blue pajamas carrying my shoes, socks, pants, and anxiety-soaked shirt of the night before, which—because I had no clean one—I would have the privilege of wearing to Meet The President (hoping he has lost his sense of smell).
“Baby blue pajamas!” Angela said. “Be still my beating heart.”
She was arrayed in a tailored black suit with no blouse underneath, a single strand of pearls around her neck, and black pumps on her feet, which unfortunately were connected to those remarkable legs of hers. Be still my beating heart.
I asked, “Any place a girl can go to freshen up?”
“You can use the girls-only bedroom suite if you don’t mind it being decorated with yesterday’s underthings,” Angela said.
“Only kind I wear,” I said.
As before, Sheed didn’t blink at her remarks, or mine. He had perfected the absolute deadpan. Very useful in his profession(s).
The bedroom suite was as beige as the rest of the plane, with dark wood paneling on the closets and dark brown granite counters. Angela’s black machine pistol hung from a strap on an open closet door and her wispy black underwear was clumped like a ball of Kleenex on the rumpled bed. The combination kind of said it all about her: you go for the underwear and get the pistol. The last time I had seen her underwear she was wearing it. I had no intention of becoming enthralled, enamored, enchanted, or en-anything else. My dick was not leading me into perdition this time (I vowed). I would go with her to the unnamed “Middle-Eastern capital,” but I was not going cheerfully. I planned to sulk, pout, and complain like a fourteen-year-old with PMS—which is exactly (?) how I felt.
Her black machine pistol was definitely not wispy, and happily it didn’t have the effect on me that her big black soft leather purse did after I discovered it in the Baja honeymoon suite stuffed with money. The gun was repugnant. It angered me—the thought that Angela had probably shot people with it. How could she choose a life like this? How could she or any of these people believe what they were doing was good? On the other hand, what did I know about anything? Much less covert international power politics. None of these thoughts were in the least consoling. They just made me crankier and I had awakened plenty cranky already.
After I washed my face and dressed and gobbled one of Georges’s sublime fresh-baked croissants, we landed at what appeared to be a military base and were met at the bottom of the stairs by a helicopter with its rotors whirring. When I pulled my little suitcase behind me on board, Angela yelled above the rotor noise, “You could have left that on the plane.”
“Thanks for telling me now,” I yelled back. Maybe we would become like an old married couple sniping at each other in public. Both she and Sheed were dressed as if they had just stepped out of a Park Avenue boutique and there I was pulling my suitcase on rollers and smelling like a walking armpit.
The helicopter lifted off and within minutes we were over Washington and approaching the Capitol Dome on the Congressional Building. All the famous federal buildings and monuments came into view, the on
es that every American has seen pictures of since they were babies. I guess that’s when this became real—we actually were going to meet with the president. I still couldn’t believe it. Didn’t I have to accomplish something first? I hadn’t done anything except learn to imitate the screechy violins in Psycho. Maybe that qualified me for high-level security missions. I’d be about as useful to Angela as a pair of concrete waders. Not only would I not be protecting her, she’d have to protect me. It was like giving a soldier a toddler to take into battle.
We landed on a helicopter pad atop a tall building and ducked under the rotors into an elevator that took us to the lowest level: minus eight—eight floors underground. To access that floor, Sheed punched a code into a keypad next to the button—from memory, instantly and automatically, as if he used it every day. The minus-eighth “floor” was nothing but a long corridor no higher or wider than the elevator itself, which led to one room at its end. Sheed opened the door and switched on the lights. The room was huge, a couple hundred feet from wall to wall, its walls covered with computer screens and electronic maps. Banks of keyboards on desks surrounded an elevated command center in the middle. It looked like the situation room in a bad disaster movie. Only no one was there. It was silent and all the screens were blank. No crusty generals barking orders, no passionate disputes between the egomaniac colonel and the handsome lieutenant. The contrast between the room’s emptiness and the noisy frenetic activity for which it was designed was eerie. Neither Sheed nor Angela appeared startled. They obviously had been here before and knew where they were going—which was to a conference room behind a door off to the side. This room was also dark and Sheed flipped on the lights to reveal a seminar table surrounded by leather chairs. The three of us sat down, Angela between Sheed and me, across the table from where the president obviously sat, which you could tell because his chair was higher than the other chairs and had a headrest on it. This seemed funny to me. Angela asked what the joke was.
“Why does the president get the best chair?” I said.
“Is that how the joke opens?” Angela asked. “Okay, why does the president get the best chair?”
“No,” I said, pointing to the big chair across the table from her. “He gets the best chair. Doesn’t that seem ridiculous to you?”
“Washington runs on symbols,” Sheed said.
“But the best chair?” I said.
They both looked at me like I was from Mars.
I still had my suitcase, of course. I had rolled it behind me the whole way—off the helicopter, into the elevator, down the corridor, through the situation room, and now it was here for my meeting with the president stuffed with my dirty underwear and Psycho props. Maybe the president would like to see my imitation of Norman Bates complete with the screechy violins. I tried to shove the suitcase under my chair so nobody would notice. But it didn’t fit.
I also could smell myself. In this windowless conference room, it was only a matter of time before everyone else smelled me too.
The door opened and Clinton and Clarke walked in, dressed in elegant blue suits and crisp white shirts, a breath of fresh laundry. Clarke was small and trim, but muscled and not as slight as Sheed. He looked like a rat terrier, and had the same affect: scrappy. If there were only one bone in the room, he’d end up with it. I bet he chased the mailman up the block. At the same time, he was so pale he was translucent, a former redhead whose hair had turned white, so he also seemed incongruously vulnerable and, because of it, hyperalert, like a ground squirrel.
Clinton, by contrast, was big. I knew he was six three and 240 pounds when he was gorging, but he seemed as big as the rest of us put together. Plus he exuded bonhomie, which probably took up additional space. The consummate pol. “Jolly” was the word that might come to mind, but it would be the wrong one. He made all the gracious gestures to make you like him, but he was ready to deal with you effectively if you didn’t.
“Good morning, everyone,” he said, taking his presidential chair. “Folsom, looking sharp as usual. And Angela, what can I say? Will you marry me?”
“I’m unfortunately all booked up today, Mr. President,” Angela replied.
Clinton smiled. “And I have yet to have the pleasure of meeting this gentleman,” he said to Sheed about me.
“Robert Wilder, Mr. President,” Sheed said.
“Bill Clinton,” Clinton said, extending his hand across the table for me to shake.
“I recognize you from your picture on the dollar bill,” I said.
Clinton laughed heartily. “Yes, Richard told me you were a comedian. We could use a comedian at all our meetings, couldn’t we, Richard? Mr. Wilder, Richard Clarke.”
Clarke was already seated and reading a file folder in front of him and glanced up at me as if he noticed a fly landing on the table. I realized the file he was reading was about me.
“Yes, let’s start right here, please,” Clarke said. “Mr. Wilder should not even be in this building, much less in this room. Why is he at this meeting?”
“To provide the jokes,” Clinton answered. “What about it, Folsom?”
“He’s escorting Miss Chase,” Sheed said.
“An escort?” Clarke asked. “From an escort service?”
“Richard, you know very well that Angela needs male accompaniment where she’s going. Mr. Wilder is unknown. If you provide her an escort from one of the agencies, he might be identified. Mr. Wilder won’t be. Plus I have vetted him completely and he’s completely trustworthy.”
(“I am?” I thought.)
“I don’t like it, Folsom. I didn’t get his file until a half hour ago. We haven’t had a chance to run it though our databases. There’s been no clearance, no waiver, no thorough background check, nothing. And it’s illegal to involve citizens.”
Clinton laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that objection from you, Richard.”
Clarke glowered. He was so pale his skull lit up red as a Christmas bulb. “What if he writes a book and goes on Oprah?”
Angela laughed at that, and Sheed smiled. Clinton put his hand affectionately on Clarke’s shoulder.
“I’m sure Mr. Wilder will sign a nondisclosure agreement. Right, Mr. Wilder? I’m in enough stand-up routines as it is.”
“Sure,” I said. “No one would believe this happened anyway.”
“Let’s go with it,” Clinton said. “If you’re killed in the line of duty, we’ll have your funeral on Comedy Central.”
“Doesn’t sound like a speaking part,” I said.
Clinton laughed again. “See, Richard, that was a joke.”
Clarke smiled so tightly it looked like his face would split.
“All right,” Clinton said. “Folsom, what’s the plan?”
Sheed produced his briefcase out of nowhere, laid it in front of him on the table, and popped open the solid fourteen-carat gold locks. He took out four copies of a sheet of notes and passed them to Angela and she gave three to me. I kept one and handed the last two across the table to the president, who gave one to Richard Clarke. Suddenly we were all graduate students in Sheed’s seminar, and we looked at his handout.
“This is the situation in Afghanistan,” Sheed said. “These forces define the only order underneath the chaos.” He repeated what he had told me about bin Laden and the Taliban and how this was a climactic historical moment that could go either way: either the Taliban would support bin Laden and provide a base for al-Qaeda’s international terrorism or they would not. If they did, bin Laden’s long-planned operations could start occurring very quickly, in rapid sequence, possibly before the election. To discourage that, the differences—both political and religious—between bin Laden and the Taliban must be amplified. “The best way we can accomplish this,” Sheed concluded, “is to support the mujahideen whose interests align with ours. I now defer to Miss Chase, who has taught me all I know about Islam and was a classmate of Ahmad Jalalzada, the mujahideen we want to support.”
“Thank you, Folsom,” Angela
said. “I should mention that all I know about Islam Ahmad Jalalzada taught me when we were students in Paris. Few Westerners knew much about Islam then, and they still don’t. Worse, what they do know now is derived from bin Laden’s videotaped threats and murderous bombings. They think Islam is a fanatical religion that encourages violence and hatred. This is totally false. Islam is a religion founded on love and brotherhood. It’s based on four principles that must be practiced: Dharma (duty), Karma (virtue), Ardha (success), and Kama (pleasure). It encourages acts of kindness as the most powerful expression of devotion to God. This is Jalalzada’s version of Islam, which sees bin Laden’s version as heretical, and vice versa. The opposition between them could not be more absolute. The Taliban’s version of Islam is actually closer to Jalalzada’s than to bin Laden’s. The opposition between the Taliban and Jalalzada is political—that is to say, they don’t agree on the nature of the government in Afghanistan under which Islam is to be practiced. For the Taliban, the state must be a totalitarian theocracy enforcing fundamentalist religious practices, including purdah for women and the wearing of beards for men ‘longer than the length of your hand.’ Jalalzada graduated from Harvard and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, where I met him. He is the scion of an old royal family and grandson of King Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan. He believes Islam would best thrive in a parliamentary democracy modeled on Western Europe and Turkey. Obviously our interests coincide with Jalalzada’s. The more power he has, the less bin Laden has. In any case, the more support we give Jalalzada the more time we buy from both the inevitable takeover by the Taliban and their possible sponsorship of bin Laden. In fact, Jalalzada may attack bin Laden’s compound if he becomes strong enough. This would be the ideal of what our money could achieve and we could achieve it relatively cheaply.”
“How cheaply?” Clinton asked.
Sheed took over again. “Ten million for this installment. With $10 million Jalalzada could field an army of 10,000 men for three months. Bin Laden has a couple hundred fighters guarding his compound. The rest are Taliban. If the Taliban can be persuaded to look the other way, bin Laden is toast.”
