War of Eagles (23 page)

Chase extended an arm down the hallway. Hood went back to his room to get his briefcase. Then he let the ambassador’s executive assistant show him to the guest office.

“Is the ambassador available by phone?” Hood asked.

“The ambassador went to see the prime minister with his translator, no one else,” Chase told him. “The president and I have a cell phone number in the event of a crisis. Short of war or a death, neither of us would interrupt the ambassador during a mission of state.”

“Don’t you usually go with him to these meetings, just in case someone has an emergency that does not quite qualify as a crisis?” Hood was not being facetious. It was unusual for an aide not to be present to tug on an ambassador’s sleeve in case information or an opinion were needed.

“I usually go with him but not this time,” Chase admitted.

“May I ask why?”

“You may, but I don’t have an answer,” Chase said. “The ambassador did not ask me to go.”

“Is there anything you
can
tell me about the ambassador’s morning?” Hood pressed.

“To tell the truth, Mr. Hood, I do not know very much, and what I do know I am not at liberty to discuss. I am sure you understand.”

“Actually, I don’t. I am here at the request of the president—” Hood went silent. Suddenly, he understood. He was here to talk to the prime minister, which was typically the ambassador’s job. Joseph Hasen had gone to see the prime minister first. He was probably being territorial if not downright preemptive. “You know what? It isn’t important why he went,” Hood said.

Chase gave him a puzzled look as they walked. Hood ignored him. The former head of the underground NCMC was going to have to get better at being an aboveground diplomat.

The office was located just around the corner, past the oil portraits of former ambassadors. The large canvases were hung on ivory white walls. The walls were plain, save for the ornate crown molding along the top. The door to the office had marble pilasters topped by a frieze of junks sailing from east to west. Hood tried not to read any warnings of conquest into that.

“My intercom number is four twelve,” Chase said as he left. “Is there a message in case the ambassador calls?”

“Only that I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible,” Hood replied.

“I’ll tell him,” Chase promised.

The aide left the door open behind him. Hood closed it. The office was actually a desk stuck in a small library. There was no computer, just a phone on the desk. Visitors probably brought their own laptops. Hood felt a chill of disorientation. The office underscored how different his life was now from only two days ago. He walked slowly across the Persian rug. It was a silk tribal rug from K’om, patterns of dark earth colors surrounding the portrait of a woman. There were burn marks along the edges and bloodstains on the woman’s cheek. Hood had read about the rug in the briefing folder. It had once been in the ambassador’s office in Teheran. Hasen’s brother-in-law had been an attaché there when the Iranians took over the embassy. He managed to escape by pretending to be Iranian. He had wrapped the body of a dead “freedom fighter” in the rug and dragged it out to make his story more convincing.

There wasn’t an office like this at Op-Center, one with history on the floor and volumes stacked on seven tiers of built-in bookcases. Even the records room was mostly digital. It was erased during the e-bomb attack, then replaced with copies from other agencies. Looking around, Hood got a sense of the magnitude of loss the Egyptians experienced when the library at Alexandria burned.

When was that?
Hood wondered.

That information was somewhere in here, in one of the encyclopedias or dictionaries. He would have to go and find it if he wanted to know, not plug keywords into a search engine.

Like this mission,
he thought. He had to go somewhere, and now he had to search for information. That was his new life. He would no longer be struggling against the chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee for funding, he would be trying to run the ball around ambassadors and their staff, heads of state and their staff, and every organization in Washington that had information he might need. The size of the task suddenly became very apparent.

And daunting, bordering on frightening. It was astonishing that anything got done. He looked down at the rug. He did not approve or sympathize, but he understood the frustration that pushed radicals to do what they did.

“Which means you’ve got to push back,” he murmured.

As he thought that, his brain shifted to a default setting: Sharon. He did not like the fact that his subconscious apparently regarded her as an anarchist. He felt ashamed. He went to the desk and sat in the leather seat and decided to push back. At the real enemy, not the one in his head.

It was very early in the morning in Washington. Hood called Bob Herbert at Op-Center. If he did not find the intelligence chief at the office, he would not bother him at home.

Herbert was there.

“This is why bureaucracy sucks,” the intelligence chief said.

Declarative statements like that passed for “Hello” from Bob Herbert, especially when he was working on a project. Caller ID had liberated him even further. It allowed him to vault right into a complaint without the inconvenience of having to wait for an answer to “Who’s this?”

“What’s wrong?” Hood asked.

“The retooling of Op-Center, which was done to streamline our operation, has left me with all my old associates plus a new one,” he said. “It’s a good thing I’m in my chair, because this Mississippi boy ain’t finding his footing.”

“You want to talk about it?” Hood asked.

“No. I’m done.”

Herbert was always blunt and aggressive, but he never whined. And he did not displace his anger the way Hood did. He smacked the source, hard.

“Are we getting anywhere?” Hood asked.

“No, as I just told
Frau Feldherr
,” Herbert replied.

Well, at least Hood knew who had triggered this outburst. General Carrie had been at Op-Center two days, and Herbert already saw her—or the people she represented—as the gestapo.

“I heard from Mike a few minutes ago,” Herbert went on. “He’s in Beijing at the Grand National Hotel. He was going to catch some winks, then meet up with his Xichang people. What about you?”

“Apparently, I won’t know anything new until I go to the National Day reception tonight,” Hood told him.

“I wonder when we’re going to know anything, and if we’re going to like what we find out,” Herbert said.

“You lost me.”

“About Op-Center,” he said. “Maybe you and Mike are lucky to be out there, doing something else.”

“Did something happen?” Hood asked.

“Not really. Some words with Carrie, then with Darrell.”

“That’s nothing new for you, Bob,” Hood said.

“I know. I just get this sense that something is ramping up,” Herbert told him. “Something not good. The DoD effectively takes over Op-Center, and the president pulls its top guy out to keep him close. That doesn’t sound like rewarding Paul Hood for services rendered. Plus, we’ve got marines at our disposal. I was talking to Mike about that before. Striker redux. It sounds like a strategic realignment.”

“That could be,” Hood agreed. “Why do you assume that’s a bad thing?”

“When I was a kid back in Neshoba County, we had a problem with the deer population after a dry spring. They were moving in on the resorts, the golf clubs, eating everything they could. The mayor and the board of aldermen of Philadelphia recommended that we send a team of environmentalists into these areas to do a complete study of the problem. Most of those guys were hunters. By the end of the summer the deer population was no longer a problem. In fact, it was damn near invisible. Except in the venison counters at the meat markets. You can solve problems or you can pick off the parts of them that are unlucky enough to show their heads. I’m afraid that we’re starting to look for quick fixes instead of permanent ones.”

“Whacking the weeds instead of uprooting them,” Hood said.

“Yeah. Same thing, if you like aphorisms instead of folksy narratives,” Herbert joked.

“That’s my years as a homeowner talking,” Hood replied. And as soon as he said it he felt that pinch of anger at Sharon again. He always liked doing the lawn, especially when the kids were younger and went out to “help” by pulling up dandelions or raking leaves to jump in. Hood got himself out of that place quickly. “Look, Bob. The future of American intelligence is not our concern at the moment.”

“True, true,” Herbert said. “I’m letting it go. But the operative phrase is ‘at the moment.’ I don’t want to be caught with my drawers down when it does become our concern. It’s the Big RB. It’s Liz Gordon’s white paper.”

“I know,” Hood said.

“There are moral issues at stake, but more importantly, there are tactical ones,” Herbert said. “I’m not a patriot for a paycheck, Paul. If I think something is wrong, I’m going to fight it.”

The words “And I’ll be fighting at your side” snagged in the back of Hood’s throat. He was not afraid to take on the DoD. What scared him was civil war between American government factions at a time when the nation needed to be united. Even if the weeds were not eradicated, containing them was better than ignoring them while the intelligence departments fought.

“I hope it won’t come to that,” Hood said.

“Spoken like a newly minted diplomat,” Herbert replied.

Hood could hear the disappointment in Herbert’s voice, but he refused to let it bother him. This was not about Bob Herbert’s approval. It was about preventing the nation from being drawn into Chinese politics.

If that’s even possible,
Hood thought as he said good-bye and hung up. Herbert himself had taken to calling the world the Big RB—the big rubber band ball. That was his view of globalization, a tight intertwining of finance and culture and religion. It was an apt description. All of the strands were still distinct. United, they were a potentially powerful force. But remove one of them, and the neighboring strands would start to slip. If they did, then the entire structure would pop. Psychologist Liz Gordon had done a profile of the planet called—rather more academically—
The Forced Unity of Disharmony
. She declared that slippage was inevitable. One passage in the book-length study asked the reader to imagine what would have happened if the Sioux and Cheyenne who battled Custer had, instead, been dropped into New York City. Would the so-called “hostiles” have fought to keep from being captured, or would they have surrendered to superior numbers? Would they have taken hostages? Would they simply have scattered, gone underground to reconnoiter and then strike at night, at will? Would the police have tried to contain them—or kill them outright, the way the Seventh Cavalry did? How would ordinary citizens have reacted to a much different culture? With fear, curiosity, or a confusing mixture of both?

“The problem with globalization,” Liz wrote in a cautionary summation, “is that all of those worlds do intersect now, and in more layers than anyone can successfully isolate, study, and chart.”

In other words, like Bob Herbert said, it was a Big RB ready to pop. And maybe, Hood thought, the DoD was preparing to deal with it in a way that did not isolate, study, or chart.

Hood took his laptop from his briefcase and booted it. He wanted to have a close look at the party list, make sure he knew the players. He also had a walk around the library. He pulled out a current encyclopedia yearbook so he could read up on National Day. He was a guest in a strange land and wanted to know something of their history and customs.

As Hood did his research, he could not help feeling that his efforts were sluggish and obsolete. He did not feel like a hunter. Perhaps he was experiencing some of what Herbert felt.

If you’re not a hunter, you’re venison.

After ten years in the business, Shek had talked his way out of a job. He was happy it turned out that way.

When he was a boy, Yuan “the Emperor” Shek used to look forward to his mother coming to his room and singing him a good night song. His favorite was “The World Beneath the Stone of Farmer Woo.” It seems the farmer had to move a large stone in his field in order to plant corn. But when he did so, he found all manner of insects and tunnels, nests and roots, and even a family of field mice. Food came and went in organized supply lines, “Many ants with many legs in service of the empress.” At the end of the song the farmer replaced the rock and grew his crops around it.

Young Shek lived in the back of the schoolhouse where his mother was the only teacher. His father was a soldier who was rarely home. There were plenty of rocks in a field behind the school. Most of them were too small to conceal more than a few bugs or small snakes. Shek was not strong enough to move the larger rocks, where he imagined the riches to be much greater.

One day, when his father was home, the older man showed his son how to get the rock to move. Not with a lever but with gunpowder. Carefully placed in cracks or under the edges, the tiny charges made Shek the master of the field. He even wrote a little song about himself, “The Emperor of the Empress Ant.”

Explosives became a very big—and profitable—part of Shek’s life. From a soldier friend who sometimes visited with his father, the boy learned how to manufacture explosives using fertilizer and other ingredients. Shek put them to work moving rocks for fun, creating popping toys to celebrate birthdays or holidays, and even for pest control. He taught himself how to set off charges using a slight amount of pressure applied to a trigger plate—in this case, pieces of bark peeled from trees. His small Emperor Mousetraps were a big seller in the village. He pedaled them from a small, flat rock along the main road until his mother found out what he was doing. She lent him a card table from the school.