The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “Mr. President, it was Julian Hubbard’s judgment that you didn’t want to know the details. It was a painful decision for you. Julian made it plain that it was my job to carry it through without making small talk about the methods. If that was an error I apologize. It was an attempt to be sensitive to what I took to be your wishes.”

  “That was all?”

  Philindros returned Lockwood’s gaze with expressionless brown eyes. “Mr. President, no—that was not all. The Awad matter was the first time in my experience that American intelligence had been instructed to kill a human being. Candidly, sir, it was the last order I ever expected to receive in my term as DFI. It’s not a pleasant thing to be made a party to murder. I detested giving it. I detest the memory of it still.”

  For once, Philindros did not defer to the President; he let Lockwood be the first to break eye contact.

  A fly settled on Lockwood’s pancakes and fed on the syrup. Lockwood didn’t disturb the fly, though he watched it with close attention.

  When Ibn Awad was murdered in the Hagrebi desert, Lockwood had been in the presidency for only four months. Already he was very tired. He had just lost his first big fight in Congress to undo some of Franklin Mallory’s cold-blooded work. Lockwood had asked for the repeal of a law, enacted during the Mallory administration, under which every schoolchild in America was screened, as a matter of routine, for signs of a criminal personality. The idea of drawing blood from children and counting their chromosomes, of examining the electrical patterns in their brains —of classifying them like so many laboratory animals—filled Lockwood with horror. “If we treat our children as suspects, how can we be free—how can America remain what it is?” he cried in a television address to the nation. But Lockwood had lost. “Do people want a police state?” he asked Julian. “They want to be safe,” Julian replied. “I thought they elected me because they saw the danger of being safe at any price,” Lockwood said. Then he had come down to Live Oaks to have a weekend of peace.

  The time was late April, the foaling season. Lockwood was in one of the barns with Polly, sitting up with a mare in labor, when the scrambler phone rang at ten in the evening. Julian answered. Philindros identified himself. His voice was soft, and Julian had trouble hearing him. He asked him to repeat. Philindros was requesting an immediate meeting with the President.

  “Can’t you tell me?” Julian asked.

  There was a short dead moment on the sound-free line. Then Philindros’s murmuring voice said, “No. It’s something that only the President can act on.”

  Julian hesitated. Lockwood certainly did not want to be disturbed. But Philindros had never behaved in this way before. Julian told him to come, and ordered a helicopter for him.

  The farm lay at the limit of helicopter range from Washington, and it was midnight before the radarmen reported the approach of the White House ship carrying Philindros. Julian met him in a Jeep at the landing pad, which was concealed by a screen of cedars. Lockwood’s greyhounds had leaped into the back of the vehicle—they rode everywhere with the President—and as Philindros approached they stood up on their spindly legs, arching their backs like big exotic cats, and barked shrilly. Philindros stopped in his tracks, his quiet eyes fixed on the animals. “They’re just pets,” Julian said; “get in.” The dogs settled back, side by side on their haunches in the narrow back seat, for the ride back through the aromatic wood. Even in the dark, Julian saw, Philindros noted the cameras and sensors that watched the Jeep in its progress towards the buildings of the farm.

  In the barn, they found Lockwood and Polly kneeling, one on either side of a newborn foal. They were cleaning its eyes and nostrils as the mare, still down herself, watched with white-ringed eyes. Julian drew Philindros away from the stall as the mare heaved to her feet and Lockwood put his body between the animal and his wife. A Secret Service man dressed as a groom swallowed audibly and went into the stall. Lockwood spoke to the mare and she quieted.

  Polly Lockwood came out of the stall. “It’s a colt; the President’s already thinking of the Derby three years from now,” she said. “We’d better have a bottle of champagne ready for him when he comes up to the house.” She smiled at Philindros and showed him her hands, still slippery from the foal, to explain why she didn’t offer them to him. In her long years as a political wife, Polly had learned never to be surprised to see anyone. Philindros congratulated her and gave her the shadow of a bow. He had odd, very careful manners, as though he had passed most of his life in solitary confinement and remembered only dimly how human beings were supposed to treat each other.

  They went outside. It was a starry night, but clouds were forming in the west and they smelled rain in a little breeze that had just begun to blow.

  In the small sitting room that had been fixed up as a place for Julian to work they drank a toast to the foal. The presidential telephones were here, and the other necessary machines. There was no desk—only some chairs and tables and a pair of sofas by a fireplace. Lockwood sat down and pulled off his boots. He swung his feet onto the low table between the sofas. Bits of straw were stuck in the yarn of his red socks.

  Philindros was, as always, freshly groomed. There wasn’t a wrinkle about him despite the late hour and his long ride from Washington in a bucking helicopter. His clothes were dark and his dark hair was brushed as flat as a schoolboy’s after a morning bath. There was no shadow of a beard on his smooth olive skin. Philindros was odorless; he brushed his teeth with table salt and used an unscented soap.

  Philindros looked from the President to Julian and back again. A flicker of expression showed that he wasn’t certain if he should begin to speak while Julian was still present. Polly had left the windows open and her white organdy curtains billowed into the room.

  “Close those, will you?” Lockwood asked. Before Julian could move, Philindros went to the windows and pulled them shut; the sashes, swollen by the spring damp, squealed in their frames. “Sit down, Jack,” Lockwood said; “Julian hears everything I hear. It may save trouble in case you ever want to read my mind if I happen to die suddenly.” Lockwood, grinned; he was still drinking champagne. Philindros did not return the smile.

  “Mr. President,” Philindros began. They had to strain to hear his voice, and Lockwood, whose normal conversational tone could easily be heard by fifty people in an open field, impatiently beckoned him closer. It was useless to ask Philindros to talk louder; he couldn’t. When he did speak, he spoke in spare language and directly to the point; this came of a lifetime of telling men, even great men, facts he was sure they did not want to know. Philindros never carried a briefcase, never referred to notes. He was able to recall, in as much detail as required, anything of importance that his service knew.

  To Lockwood, he now said, without preamble, “We have a fully confirmed report that two nuclear weapons will be delivered to the terrorist group called the Eye of Gaza before midnight tomorrow, Washington time.”

  Lockwood’s face tightened. He took his stocking feet off the table and pulled his body upright. Philindros, holding the President’s gaze, went on without a pause. His voice was as neutral, and almost as rapid, as the heatless green lettering on a computer screen.

  “These weapons,” Philindros continued, “are physically small, about the size of an ordinary suitcase, and are easily portable by one man. They can be detonated by a timing device, by a radio signal, or—the likeliest method because it’s the most certain—by a terrorist on a suicide mission throwing a simple switch. These are ten-kiloton devices, made to be dirty, and big enough to destroy a small city or make a large one uninhabitable for years.”

  Philindros paused. This was one of his shy courtesies. He looked at Lockwood with intensely interested eyes; he wanted Lockwood to ask questions.

  Lockwood said, “The terrorists don’t actually, at this moment, have these bombs in their possession?”

  “That’s correct, sir. But they will have them in a matter of hours if our information is correct.”
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br />   “Do you have any doubt that it is correct?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You say the bombs will be handed over to the Eye of Gaza. Who will hand them over?”

  Philindros cleared his throat. His voice came out a trifle more strongly. “The emir of Hagreb, Ibn Awad,” he said.

  “Who?” Lockwood had his own mannerisms. When something truly astonished him he reached in his pocket and found his reading glasses. He did that now, and with the glasses on his nose peered over the tops of the lenses as though the use of spectacles made it easier for him to understand the spoken word.

  The FIS had reported, not once but several times, that Ibn Awad had plutonium in his possession and was presumed to be fabricating low-yield atomic weapons. Half the petty dictators in the world were doing the same. For years there had been a busy black market in fissionable plutonium centered in the Low Countries, and no one had been able to shut it down, though every police force and intelligence service in the world knew about it. Like the heroin trade, the plutonium market was based entirely on the profit motive. Therefore it could probably never be controlled; it had been running, and returning large fortunes to its operators, since the late seventies, when the possession of nuclear weapons had become a matter of prestige to the scores of small nations around the world who could afford them. The bombs were easy to make, and they were just as great a deterrent to aggression by small country against small country as they had been in the case of the superpowers. The black marketeers understood that their one unforgivable crime would be to furnish fissionable material to terrorists, and they had never done so. Now Ibn Awad was on the verge of doing the unthinkable.

  Lockwood said, “Why?”

  “Ibn Awad,” Philindros replied, “has had a sign from God. An angel appeared to him in the desert and told him to destroy Israel by fire.”

  Lockwood leaned towards Philindros, and, whipping off his glasses, stabbed at Philindros’s leg with them. “God? An angel in the desert? You’re telling me this man is insane.”

  Now Philindros, just for an instant, did show surprise. How could Lockwood not know this basic fact? He shifted his gaze to Julian.

  Julian, nodding, said, “Philindros’s people have been reporting for some time that Awad is—well, unbalanced, sir.”

  “This is a medical certainty?” Lockwood asked.

  “Yes. In October of last year, Awad was physically ill—he needed surgery to remove a cancerous prostate. An American medical team was flown in. They did a complete work-up and diagnosed him as an acute manic-depressive. He loses control over his own behavior for considerable periods of time.”

  “I thought this condition was being treated,” Julian said.

  “It was. The doctors gave him lithium carbonate and he improved. This drug modifies the manic state, which is the dangerous one in people like Awad. But after a month or two he stopped taking the medicine. He said it deprived him of his visions.”

  Lockwood closed his eyes and put his head on the back of the sofa. He remained in this position, silent, for long moments. The storm was drawing closer and Philindros and Julian turned their heads quickly when the first fat drops of rain struck the windowpanes.

  “Get back to the bombs,” Lockwood said. “Where are they?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Lockwood’s eyes snapped open. “You don’t know?”

  “We know they’re hidden somewhere in the Hagrebi desert. Ibn Awad himself concealed them somewhere the last time he went out alone.”

  “Only he knows where they are?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Nuclear weapons give off radiation. Can’t we detect this radiation and find the bombs?” Lockwood spoke slowly, as if to a backward child.

  “Not in time. The Hagrebi desert looks small on the map, but it contains fifty thousand square kilometers, and half of that consists of rocky mountains honeycombed by deep caves. We have no satellite in orbit capable of scanning for the very weak type of radiation these bombs would emit. A search by aircraft would take days, even weeks, and would involve massive intrusion into Hagrebi air space. Ten thousand men on foot and in vehicles would need six months to comb the area. That, of course, would require that we invade Hagreb.”

  It was raining hard now against the rattling windows and Lockwood, flushed and glaring, put his face within a few inches of Philindros’s in order to hear him.

  “What do you know?” Lockwood demanded. “Do you know the targets?”

  “The primary targets are Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.”

  “Can we deny the terrorists those targets if the worst happens and they get their hands on the bombs?”

  “Almost certainly. We could just tell the Israelis what we know. They’d have a ninety percent chance of preventing the bombs from going off inside Israel. But they’d have to flood the country with troops and police, search every person and every room and every vehicle. When Hassan Abdallah saw that happening, he’d know the reason why.”

  “And?”

  “He’d hit another target, probably a city in the West with a large Jewish population.”

  “You mean New York? Miami?”

  Philindros nodded and drew breath to list the other possible targets. Lockwood held up his hand to silence him.

  “We couldn’t keep them out of the United States?”

  The answer was obvious. Even Philindros saw no need to reply. Lockwood knew as well as he how many miles of unguarded coastline and unpatrolled border surrounded America, how weak were the powers of the police, what panic would result if the media got hold of this story.

  “Can we catch Hassan Abdallah?” Lockwood asked. “Can we neutralize the Eye of Gaza?”

  “In a word, no. The Eye of Gaza is the last relic of the old Palestinian terrorist movement. The FIS code word for it is ‘Snake-head’—the body has been cut off, but the fangs remain. It has no political objectives—even Hassan knows that the idea of a Palestinian state is dead. He goes on killing anyway. The Eye of Gaza is a revenge operation, blood for blood. Hassan and his followers are hysterics, and their purpose is to go on killing Jews forever. That’s what drew Hassan and Ibn Awad together; I don’t know where the line between political hysteria and religious hysteria lies.”

  “Forever? This Hassan thinks he can go on forever?”

  “Literally forever, yes. Hassan only recruits the children of terrorists who have died for the cause. Each terrorist’s first duty, before he goes on a mission, is to breed a child to replace him. All missions for the Eye of Gaza are suicide missions, so the child is told from the time he can understand that his father or mother was a hero who was killed by Jews and imperialists. Hassan makes sure his people interbreed with other nationalities, usually while they’re students in foreign universities. A lot of his babies have been fathered on American and German and English and French females. Then they have their mother’s nationality, and can grow up in a democratic country where the police won’t bother them. Sometimes both parents are ordered to die—the father when the child is very small, the mother when the child is in his early teens, to reinforce the psychological impact. Then the child passes into a ‘family’ which is really a cell of the Eye of Gaza. He hears nothing but the details of his parents’ deaths, and the duty to revenge them, from then onward.”

  “Don’t they lose some of the kids?”

  “A few. Some refuse to play the game and have to be killed. The rest are trained for their mission. A mate is found for them while they wait. They are trained by the cell members—a terrorist’s skills are simple, and only need to be used once. They see their baby born and know they’ll be avenged. They’re given their mission. They carry it out and die.”

  “Hassan invented this system?”

  “Yes. In his way, he’s a genius. He’s created an organism that, in theory, cannot be destroyed. It goes on metastasizing forever.”

  Philindros remained as he had been from the beginning of the conversation, seated on the edge
of the sofa with his back straight and his hands resting quietly in his lap. It had stopped raining.

  Lockwood pulled on his boots. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  There was a rule that the floodlights must be on when the President was outdoors at night, and as soon as Lockwood emerged from the house the switches were thrown. The light was so intense that it affected senses other than sight; Julian imagined that it made a noise, a humming like an insect, that was just beyond the range of human hearing. The lights had been designed to eliminate all shadows, so there could be no patch of darkness in which an assassin could lurk. All colors appeared as black. Human faces looked like overexposed photographs. Julian realized, with the little shock this always gave him, that Lockwood’s lithe body was made up of ugly parts—huge hands with bulging knuckles and nails the size of coins, heavy legs, a neck that was corded by tension and too thin in proportion to the great rough head. In bad moments, though nothing might show in Lockwood’s face, his body lost its athlete’s grace; for the moment, he was no longer the natural runner, born with the instinct to make the perfect move without conscious thought.

  Lockwood, with Julian and Philindros following, walked between two long rows of lilac bushes. These were in bloom, and the conical blossoms sparkled with rainwater in the brilliant light. The men came to a large round lawn surrounded by a ring of gravel. To Philindros, Lockwood said, “This is where the hunt used to form—is that the right verb, Julian?—when Polly’s people had Live Oaks. It must have been quite a scene, horses and hounds and ladies and gentlemen drinking juleps out of silver cups early in the day. They looked rich, but it was all a joke. They were always, all of them, on the edge of losing everything. They never let it show. That was their style.” Lockwood stepped off the gravel path onto the spongy turf. He extended an arm and wriggled a forefinger as if he were sketching the absent riders and their plunging hunters in the empty air.

  “I suppose we’ll have to act,” Lockwood said. “The question is, what can we do?” Lockwood was thinking aloud; he didn’t require an answer. “Is there anyone in Hagreb who can talk to Ibn Awad, take him a message from me?”