Ann leaned forward and patted the back of his hand, her dazzling white smile even brighter than the yellow designer kerchief she wore in her long brown hair.
“I bet if you let your hair down you’ll have a blast, she said. “I read about Bloopers in Spin. Order a pickledog and French-fried pie. You’ll love them.”
Hood snickered. “How about putting that on our agency seal? ‘Op-Center-making the world safe for pickle-flavored hot dogs.”‘
“I’ll have to ask Lowell what that would be in Latin,” Ann smiled. “We’d want it to at least sound lofty.”
Rodgers sighed and both Hood and Ann glanced over. The two-star General was sitting with his leg across a knee, shaking it briskly.
“Sorry, Mike,” Hood said. “I’m letting my hair down a little too early.”
“It’s not that,” Rodgers said. “You’re just not talking my language.”
As a press director, Ann was accustomed to listening for the truth behind soft-pedaled words. She detected both criticism and envy in Rodgers’s voice.
“It’s not my language either,” Hood admitted. “But one thing you learn with kids-and Ann will back me up-is that you’ve got to adapt. Hell, I find myself wanting to say the same things about rap music and heavy metal that my parents said about the Young Rascals. You’ve got to roll with these things.”
Rodgers’s expression was dubious. “Do you know what George Bernard Shaw said about adaptation?”
“Can’t say that I do,” Hood admitted.
“He said, ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ I don’t like rap and never will. More than that, I won’t ever pretend to.”
Hood said, “What do you do when Lieutenant Colonel Squires listens to it?”
Rodgers said, “I order him to shut it off. He tells me I’m being unreasonable-”
“And you quote Shaw,” Ann said.
Rodgers looked at her and nodded.
Hood raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. Well, let’s see if we can all agree on what has to be done over the next few days, anyway. First, my schedule.”
Hood shucked his boyish smile and was all business as he looked back at the computer screen. Ann tried to wink a smile out of the Deputy Director, but didn’t get it. The truth was he rarely smiled, and only seemed genuinely happy when he’d been out hunting boar, totalitarians, or anyone who put their careers before the safety of fighting men and women.
“I’ll be doing the Magna Studio tour on Monday,” Hood continued, “and Wallace World Amusement Park on Tuesday. The kids want to surf, so Wednesday’s a beach day-and so on. If you need me, I’ll have the cellular with me. It won’t be a problem getting to the nearest police station or FBI office in case you need me on a secure line in a hurry.”
“It should be a quiet week,” Ann said. She had dumped Intelligence Officer Bob Herbert’s morning update into her powerbook before coming to the meeting, and now sheflipped up the lid. “The borders in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are relatively cool. The CIA was able to help Mexican authorities close down the rebel base in Jalapa without incident. Things are calm in Asia after the near war in Korea. And the Ukrainians and Russians are at least talking again about who owns what in the Crimea.”
“Mike, will the outcome of the Russian elections affect that?” Hood asked.
“We don’t think so,” Rodgers said. “The new Russian President, Kiril Zhanin, has crossed swords with Ukrainian leader Vesnik in the past, but Zhanin’s a pro. He’ll extend an olive branch. In any case, our projection is for no Code Reds during the coming week.”
Hood nodded. Ann knew he put little faith in what he called the three Ps-projections, polls, and psychobabble-but at least he was pretending to listen to them now. When he first came to Op-Center, Paul and staff psychologist Liz Gordon got along like Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.
“I hope you’re right,” Hood said, “but if Op-Center is called in on anything over a Code Blue, I want to be the one who signs off on our activities.”
Rodgers’s leg stopped moving. The light brown eyes that usually seemed golden appeared dark. “I can handle it, Paul.”
“Never said you couldn’t. You showed everyone what you could do when you stopped those missiles in North Korea.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“None,” said Hood. “This isn’t about ability, Mike. It’s about accountability.”
“I understand,” Rodgers insisted in his courtly way. “But the regulations allow for this. The Deputy Director is allowed to okay operations when the Director is away.”
“The word is ‘indisposed,’ not ‘away,”‘ Hood pointed out. “I won’t be indisposed, and you know how Congress gets about foreign adventures. If anything goes wrong, I’m the one who’ll be hauled in front of a Senate committee and asked to explain why. I want to be able to tell them because I was there, not because I read about it in your report.”
Rodgers’s high-ridged nose, broken four times in college basketball, dropped slightly. “I understand.”
“But you still don’t agree,” said Hood.
“No. Frankly, I’d welcome the chance to take on Congress. I’d give those seat-warmers a lesson in government by action, not consensus.”
Hood said, “That’s why I’d like to be the one to handle them, Mike. They still pay the bills around here.”
“Which is the reason men like Ollie North do what they do,” Rodgers said. “To get around all the Deputy Directors’ Coordinating Committees. The milksops who take proposals under advisement and sit on them for months and finally give them back too diluted and too late to matter worth a damn.”
Hood looked like he wanted to say something and Rodgers looked like he wanted to hear it and lob it right back. Instead, both men regarded each other in silence.
“Well,” Ann said jauntily, “that gives us control over those tense, single-hostage Code Greens and multiple-domestic-hostage Blues, and puts the easy, overseas-hostage Yellows, and state-of-war Reds on your shoulders.” She closed the lid of her powerbook, looked at her watch, and rose. “Paul, you’ll send your schedule to our computers?”
Hood looked at the computer. He touched Alt/F6 on his keyboard, then hit PB/Enter and MR/Enter. “Done,” he said.
“Great. Will you try to have a wonderful and relaxing trip?”
Hood nodded. Then he regarded Rodgers again. “Thanks for your help,” he said, rising and shaking Rodgers’s hand across the desk. “If I knew how to make this better for you, Mike, I would.”
“See you in a week,” Rodgers said, then turned and walked past Ann.
“I’ll see you too,” Ann said to Hood, giving him a little goodbye wave and an encouraging smile. “Don’t forget to write … and relax.”
“I’ll send you a postcard from Bloopers,” he said.
Ann shut the door and followed Rodgers down the hall. She elbowed around coworkers and hurried past the open office doors and the closed doors of Op-Center’s intelligence-gathering departments.
“Are you all right?” she asked when she fell in beside him.
Rodgers nodded.
“You don’t look all right.”
“I still can’t strike the right note with him.”
“I know,” Ann said. “Sometimes you think he’s really got a handle on some kind of larger worldview. The rest of the time you feel like he’s trying to keep you in line, like a smarty-pants school monitor.”
Rodgers looked at her. “That’s a fair assessment, Ann. You’ve obviously given this-him-a lot of thought.”
She flushed. “I tend to reduce everybody to sound bites. It’s a bad habit.”
To change the course of the conversation, Ann made a point of emphasizing the “everybody.” She knew at once that that had been a mistake.
“What’s my sound bite?” Rodgers asked.
Ann looked at him squarely. “You’re a frank, decisive man in a world that has grown too complex for those qualities.”
They stopped beside his office. “And is that good or bad?” he asked.
“It’s troublesome,” Ann replied. “With a little bit of give, you could probably get a lot more.”
Without taking his eyes off Ann, Rodgers entered his code in the keypad on the jamb. “But if something isn’t what you want, is it worth having?” he asked.
“I’ve always felt that half is better than none’ ” she replied.
“I see. I just don’t agree.” Rodgers smiled now. “And Ann? Next time, if you mean to say I’m stubborn, just come out and say it.”
Rodgers flipped her a little salute, walked into his office, and shut the door behind him.
Ann stood there for a moment before turning and walking slowly toward her office. She felt bad for Mike. He was a good man, and a bright one. But he was fatally flawed by his desire for action over diplomacy, even when that action disregarded little things like national sovereignty and congressional approval. It was his reputation as a fire-eater that had caused him to be passed over as Assistant Secretary of Defense, landing him here as a consolation prize. He accepted the post because he was first and foremost a good soldier, but he was never happy about it … or about reporting to a nonmilitary superior.