The Krone Experiment (15 page)
Danielson was relieved to hear these words
from Isaacs, but as her potential guilt feelings receded further
she found anger in their place.
“But that’s so unfair! I worked hard on that
project. Why should it be canceled?”
“Maybe not fair, but logical in the scheme of
how things really work around here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you want to get things done, you have to
fight for what you think is right.” He pointed a finger at her.
“Just as you’re doing right now.”
She met his gaze straight on. He
continued.
“The fact that I use the word fight means
that somebody holds opposite views, and they’re going to be
fighting back. I push for what I think is right and get pushed
back. You lose some skirmishes to win the battles. I’m sorry that
this skirmish was particularly important to you personally.”
Danielson glanced at the closed door to
Kathleen’s office.
“I guess I see.”
Isaacs was quick on the uptake.
“Kathleen told you about me and McMasters,”
he stated flatly, then laughed gently as Danielson looked
surprised. “Kathleen knows everything that goes on around here. I
would have been disappointed if she hadn’t bent your ear a little
out there.
“McMasters is old school, losing his touch
and very defensive about it. I’ve had to challenge him on occasion
and he doesn’t like that. Frankly, I don’t think he likes me. He
may resent the fact that my grandfather wore a yarmulke. Who knows?
The feeling is fairly mutual. In any case, let me give it to you
straight out. He killed Project QUAKER out of spite because I
killed some of his projects. Simple as that.”
The fire was in her eyes again.
“I don’t think that’s so simple. I think it’s
wrong.”
“Wrong. Yes, I think it was wrong, too, but
you’re not looking at the bigger picture. If I let McMasters get
his way here, I can get other more important things done more
efficiently.”
“But I don’t see how he can get away with
this—this obstructionism.”
“For one thing he’s not a total loss. He’s
effective at keeping up the day to day affairs of the Agency, as
long as tricky strategic questions aren’t involved. If nothing
else, he keeps the Director from meddling in the details so we can
get our job done. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.”
“But how can you write QUAKER off as
unimportant. Doesn’t it worry you that we don’t know what that
signal is?”
“You misunderstand me. I am worried about
that signal. I’m sorry as hell McMasters canceled it. But we don’t
really have any proof that it’s important. That’s why he picked it.
And there are other projects of proven merit that can proceed
without his interference.”
Danielson sat, looking angry and
unconvinced.
Isaacs wondered how much of her reaction was
righteous indignation and how much resentment at not being allowed
her own way on the project. Did she betray some inflexibility in
the face of interference? She would have to learn to get along if
she wanted to move up.
“How did you come to work for the Agency?” he
asked.
The change in topic and tone caught her off
guard.
“I beg your pardon?”
Isaacs folded his hands and leaned on his
forearms. “I was thinking about your future in the Agency. That got
me to wondering what brought you this way in the first place.”
Danielson gave him a long look, wondering
what was on his mind. She did not reveal her inner thoughts often,
but as her boss, maybe Isaacs had a right to be curious about her
underlying motivation. He did seem sympathetic. She was in a mood
to talk and succumbed to that.
“It’s funny you should ask.” She relaxed back
in her chair and looked at her hands then up at Isaacs. “I was
thinking about that while I was waiting.
“Like anyone, I suppose I had a mixture of
emotional and logical reasons. I had a desire to serve my country.
My senior year I interviewed a bunch of Orange County firms, and
the Agency, mostly out of curiosity. They ended up offering me a
stipend to go to graduate school and a job when I got my degree.
That appealed to me.” She laughed briefly. “If some of my fellow
graduate students at Stanford had known I was funded by the Agency,
they would have gone wild.”
“Hot bed of radicals, eh?”
“Well, you know, that’s the time of life for
feeling that way. I guess I was raised differently.”
Isaacs leaned back in his chair. “It’s been a
long time since I looked at your file. You were raised by your
father, if I remember correctly.”
“Since I was five. My father has been a big
influence on me, for better or worse. He was Navy. I suppose the
Agency is my way of carrying the flag.”
“Nothing wrong with that. We’re all here for
that reason in one form or another.” He regarded Danielson for a
long moment.
“Do you plan to make a career in the
Agency?”
“I haven’t any thought of quitting.”
“Not the same thing. Right now you’re down in
the trenches, working hard, trying to please everyone.”
Danielson wondered if he had been reading her
mind as she had daydreamed in the outer office.
“You have three choices,” Isaacs continued.
“You can continue doing what you are doing. You can move up. Or you
can do something else. You ought to think about it. The Agency
would love to have you right where you are, hard working,
productive, underpaid, forever. If you want to get out of that slot
you need to set your sights.
“I’ve been watching you. Your work on
Tyuratam has been first rate. You didn’t crack QUAKER, but your
insight about the trajectory would have escaped a lot of people.
That showed a rare gift for breaking out of established channels of
thought. You have the talents necessary to get ahead. I’d like to
see you do it. But it’s a big challenge.”
“I’m not sure what to say. I appreciate your
support. I do have some vague ambitions,” she laughed quietly. “But
I haven’t been actively coveting your job.”
Isaacs smiled with her and thought about the
special toughness of mind needed to get ahead in the Agency. He
wondered whether any woman could make it in this male bastion. Pat
Danielson had some of the necessary qualities. A patriotic
upbringing and a workaholic nature got her through graduate school,
brought her here, and kept her here. Did being an only child of a
single parent give her that extra edge, or portend a problem as yet
unseen?
This time it was as if Danielson read Isaacs’
mind.
“I know I have a built-in handicap,” she
said. “I don’t see a lot of women in charge around here.”
Isaacs nodded thoughtfully.
“No woman has ever risen to the level of a
Deputy Director. You couldn’t hope to in less than a decade even if
you were the President’s daughter-in-law. But if, as a woman, you
have any desire to aim at that level, you’ll have to be
particularly resourceful at setting your goals and working toward
them.”
He leaned up on his forearms again.
“You wouldn’t be crazy to decide there are
better things to do with your life.”
“Better things,” she mused. “I haven’t found
anything better.”
Isaacs picked up a pencil and fiddled with
it. He looked up at her. “Nor anyone?”
Danielson understood his line of thought and
found it irritating, despite her original willingness to get a
little personal.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s a bit
chauvinistic. Are you worried someone will turn my head, and I’ll
run off to the suburbs to make babies?”
“I’m sorry. It does sound that way. But even
if I denied my culpability there are people in the Agency who will
raise that kind of argument. Fact is, they’ll hit you both ways. If
you don’t get married, they’ll suggest there’s something wrong
there.”
“So I need to snap up a quick husband and
continue to labor in the trenches until the powers that be, present
company excepted, stamp me with the seal of approval.” Her
irritation waned to be replaced by bemusement. “Somehow, even with
all the emphasis on security, it never occurred to me that the
Agency would have any interest in my love life. They don’t check
up, do they?”
“No,” Isaacs laughed. “Not without special
cause. They turn up a few tidbits of everybody’s past during the
security check. Yours couldn’t have been too sordid; you’re
here.”
Danielson wondered if Allan was in the file.
Allan with the blond hair, golden tan, easy smile. Peter Pan with
surfboard. He was probably still on the beach.
Isaacs detected her pensive look and switched
gears.
“I’ve managed to get off the point. I just
wanted you to know that I think you have a future with the Agency,
if you want to work for it. One thing you’ll have to learn is that
hard work alone isn’t all there is. You will always have to do a
little getting along by going along. The art is to make the most
judicious choice of what to give and what to get. I had to make a
hard choice with QUAKER. I hope we’ll find that I chose
correctly.”
Danielson looked at him seriously. “I
appreciate your taking the time to talk with me like this. I’ll try
to give some thought to exactly where I’m heading.”
“If I can give you any more bad advice,”
Isaacs smiled, “give me a call.”
Danielson smiled good-bye and let herself
out. Despite other pressing duties, she spent the remainder of the
day glumly divesting herself of any involvement with Project
QUAKER. She gathered up a number of files and voluminous personal
notes. The better part of an hour was required to transfer several
analytical computer programs and extensive sets of data onto master
storage tapes and to delete all active files from the computer
memory. Despite Isaacs’ attempt at explanation, she drove home that
evening thinking that she knew what a miscarriage would feel
like.
That same evening Isaacs sat in his living
room looking at, but not perceiving, the early evening television
news. He loosely supported a half-consumed drink on the arm of the
sofa where beaded moisture slowly soaked into the velveteen. The
coaster on the side table went unused. The cook made final
preparations for dinner and from upstairs the bass from his
daughter’s stereo carried subliminally. The town-house perched over
a two-car garage off a steeply sloping Georgetown street. Inside it
was furnished in a refined, tasteful way. In his wry moods Isaacs
estimated he could afford between a quarter and a third of it. The
person responsible for the lion’s share came bustling in,
discarding her purse and jacket. His wife, Muriel, was a
dark-haired, slender woman, attractive, although a bit long in the
face. She had some money of her own and, more important, a
successful, politically-oriented law practice.
She came in alternately damning a
recalcitrant senatorial aide with whom she was forced to have
dealings and crowing over the successful completion of another case
in which an out-of-court settlement had saved their client the
embarrassment of a court appearance. She elaborated on these
developments in a keyed-up, stream-of-consciousness flow as she
mixed herself a drink at the bar and sat alongside her husband. As
she chatted, Isaacs half-listened, nodding and responding with
appropriate monosyllables on occasion. Muriel realized he was down
and covered for him for awhile, but finally inquired.
“You’re quiet tonight. How was your day?”
Isaacs smiled tiredly at his wife, then
looked down at his drink. He sat up and tried belatedly to brush
some of the collected moisture off the sofa arm.
He smiled again, more genuinely, at his
gloomy forgetfulness.
“I shouldn’t let him get under my skin.
McMasters outflanked me this afternoon. A petty move on his part,
but I had to put aside a potentially significant project that is
only in the early stages. One of my young people was pretty
disappointed. She’d put a lot of good work into it.”
“Can’t you go over his head?”
“No, it’s not that kind of thing. He put me
on the spot before enough evidence was in to make a rigorous case.
That’s one thing that bothers me, though. Now we won’t know. If it
is serious, it’ll catch us by surprise later.”
“I don’t suppose you can continue
surreptitiously?”
Isaacs chuckled.
“You’ve got too many clients who spend their
lives going back on campaign promises. No. It would be hard to do
and hell to pay if I got caught. He gave me an order as a senior
officer. Even if it’s stupid, I’d be putting my job on the line and
jeopardizing a lot of programs of proven importance. The Director
would rule against me unless I had an overwhelming motivation for
my insubordination.”
Muriel grinned and raised her glass in a mock
toast. “So you’re going to eat it?”
He returned the gesture.
“I can assure you I’ve already done so in my
most humble and cooperative way.”
*****
The USS Seamount, out of Pearl Harbor, sailed
steadily toward the Bering Sea carrying a cargo of sixteen nuclear-
tipped missiles. Her blunt hull cut cleanly through the water at
four hundred fathoms, maintaining a steady twenty-five knots.
Lt. J. G. Augustus Washington sat at the
controls of the sophisticated computerized sonar, his consciousness
merged with the surrounding sea, as it would be eight hours a day
for the next three months. Half his mind tuned to the sounds coming
through his headset and to the green glow of the twin display
screens in front of him. He automatically registered the turning of
the screw on a distant Japanese tanker bound for Valdez, a school
of whales somewhere to the west, and the anonymous squeals, rattles
and clicks that characterize the undersea world. The other part of
his mind wandered to his recently ended shore leave, to his wife.
His quarterly sessions at sea were rough and lonely for a young
woman married only a couple of years, but if she couldn’t be home
in Little Rock, Hawaii was not bad duty for her. At least blacks
were not the bottom of the heap. There were always the native
Hawaiians. And their reunions—oooeee! Almost worth three months of
nothing doing. He swore it would be another two weeks before he
would even begin to think about sex, then recognized that he had
already succumbed and laughed softly to himself.
He began to form an image of his woman
standing on the bed in the moonlight, naked and spread-eagled over
him when the angry boiling broke forth from the earphones. Tension
seized his gut and left his heart pounding. He jerked upright in
his seat, his eyes fixed on the brilliant dot on the right hand
screen that passively recorded incoming signals. His gaze whipped
to the left screen that registered the reflection of the active
signals the submarine emitted and saw only the faintest
reading.
“Holy Christ!”
His exclamation cut through the cabin,
violating the hush of routine.
“What have you got?” inquired the duty
officer, moving to his side.
Washington’s eyes remained fixed on the
screens before him. He reached to flip on the external speaker and
the bizarre hiss filled the cabin. He hit another switch and the
right screen shifted to the target Doppler indicator mode.
Off-scale! He twisted a knob.
“Somethin’s comin’ at us like a bat outa
hell! Five thousand—shit! No!” He looked at the right screen again.
“Coming on four thousand meters already—goddamn! I can’t even get a
reading on it. Closin’ fast. From directly beneath us! And I can’t
even see it in active mode! Sucker must be small!”
