Kendrick studied her taut, striking face, seeing the fear in her eyes. ‘You mean that, don’t you? You are frightened.’
‘So would you be if you knew the men and women who help us, who trust us, who risk their lives to bring us information. Every day they wonder if something they did or didn’t do will trip them up. A lot of them have committed suicide because they couldn’t stand the strain, others have gone mad and disappeared into the deserts, preferring to die at peace with their Allah rather than go on. But most do go on because they believe in us, believe that we’re fair and really want peace. They deal with gun-wielding lunatics at every turn, and bad as things are, it’s only through them that they’re not worse, with a great deal more blood in the streets… Yes, I’m frightened because many of those people are friends—of mine and my father and mother. The thought of their being betrayed, as you were betrayed—and that’s what you were, Evan, betrayed— makes me want to crawl out on the sands and die like those we’ve driven mad. Because someone way down deep is opening our most secret files to others outside. All he or she needed in your case was a name, your name, and people are afraid for their lives in Masqat and Bahrain. How many other names can be fed? How many other secrets learned?’
Evan reached over, not covering her hand but now holding it, gripping it. ‘If you believe that, why don’t you help me?’
‘Help you?’
‘I have to know who’s doing this to me, and you have to know who’s over there, or down there, making it possible. I’d say our objectives dovetail, wouldn’t you? I’ve got Dennison in a vice he can’t squirm out of, and I can get you a quiet White House directive to stay over here. Actually, he’d jump at the chance to find a leak; it’s an obsession with him.’
Khalehla frowned. ‘It doesn’t work that way. Besides, I’d be out of my class. I’m very good where I am, but out of my element, my Arab element, I’m not first rate.’
‘Number one,’ countered Kendrick firmly. ‘I consider you first rate because you saved my life and I consider my life relatively important. And two, as I mentioned, you have expertise in areas I know nothing about. Procedures. “Covert avenues of referral”—I learned that one as a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, but I haven’t the vaguest idea what it means. Hell, lady, you even know what the “cellars” are when I always thought they were the basements in a suburban development which, thank God, I never had to build. Please, you said in Bahrain that you wanted to help me. Help me now! Help yourself.’
Adrienne Rashad replied, her dark eyes searching his coldly. ‘I could help, but there might be times when you’d have to do as I tell you. Could you do that?’
‘I’m not wild about jumping off bridges or tall buildings—’
‘It would be in the area of what you’d say, and to whom I’d want you to say it. There might also be times when I wouldn’t be able to explain things to you. Could you accept that?’
‘Yes. Because I’ve watched you, listened to you, and I trust you.’
‘Thank you.’ She squeezed his hand and released it. ‘I’d have to bring someone with me.’
‘Why?’
‘First of all, it’s necessary. I’d need a temporary transfer and he can get it for me without giving an explanation—forget the White House, it’s too dangerous, too unstable. Second, he could be helpful in areas way beyond my reach.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Mitchell Payton. He’s director of Special Projects—that’s a euphemism for “Don’t ask”.’
‘Can you trust him? I mean totally, no doubts at all.’
‘No doubts at all. He processed me into the Agency.’
‘That’s not exactly a reason.’
‘The fact that I’ve called him “Uncle Mitch” since I was six years old in Cairo is, however. He was a young operations officer posing as an instructor at the university. He became a friend of my parents—my father was a professor there and my mother’s an American from California; so was Mitch.’
‘Will he give you a transfer?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘He has no choice. I just told you, someone’s giving away a part of our soul that’s not for sale. It’s you this time. Who’s it going to be next?’
* * *
Chapter 25
Mitchell Jarvis Payton was a trim sixty-three-year-old academic who had been sucked into the Central Intelligence Agency thirty-four years before because he fitted a description someone had given to the personnel procurement division at the time. That someone had disappeared into other endeavours and no job had been listed for Payton, only the requirements—marked urgent. However, by the time his prospective employers realized that they had no specific employment for the prospect it was too late. He had been signed up by the Agency’s aggressive recruiters in Los Angeles and sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for indoctrination. It was an embarrassing situation as Dr Payton, in a rush of personal and patriotic fervour, had submitted his resignation, effective immediately, to the State education authorities. It was an inauspicious beginning for a man whose career would develop so auspiciously.
MJ, as he had been called for as long as he could remember, had been a twenty-nine-year-old associate professor with a doctorate in Arabian Studies from the University of California where he subsequently taught. One bright morning he was visited by two gentlemen from the government who convinced him that his country urgently needed his talents. What the specifics entailed they were not at liberty, of course, to disclose, but insofar as they represented the most exciting sphere of government service, they assumed that the position was overseas, in the area of his expertise. The young bachelor had leaped at the opportunity, and when faced with perplexed superiors in Langley, who wondered what to do with him, he adamantly suggested that he had cut his ties in LA because he had at least assumed that he would be sent to Egypt. So he had been sent to Cairo—we can’t get enough observers in Egypt who understand the goddamned language. As an undergraduate he had studied American Literature, chosen because Payton did not think there was a hell of a lot of it. It was for this reason that an employment agency in Rome, in reality a CIA subsidiary, had placed him at the Cairo University as an Arabic-speaking instructor of American Literature.
There he had met the Rashads, a lovely couple who became an important part of his life. At Payton’s first faculty meeting, he sat beside the renowned Professor Rashad, and in their pre-conference small-talk he learned that Rashad had not only gone to university in California, but had married a classmate of MJ’s. A deep friendship blossomed, as did MJ’s reputation within the Central Intelligence Agency. Through talents he had no idea he possessed, and which at times actually frightened him, he discovered that he was an exceptionally convincing liar. They were days of turmoil, of rapidly shifting alliances that had to be monitored, the spreading American penetration kept out of sight. He was able, through his fluent Arabic and his understanding that people could be motivated with sympathetic words backed up with money, to organize various groups of opposing factions who reported on each other’s movements to him. In return, he provided funds for their causes—minor expenditures for the then sacrosanct CIA but major contributions to the zealots’ meagre coffers. And through his efforts in Cairo, Washington averted a number of potentially explosive embarrassments. So, typically of the old-school-tie network in DC’s intelligence community, if a good fellow did such a fine job where he was, forget the convergence of specific factors that made him good where he was and bring him back to Washington to see what he could do there. MJ Payton was the exception in a long line of failures. He succeeded James Jesus Angleton, the Grey Fox of clandestine operations, as the director of Special Projects. And he never forgot what his friend, Rashad, told him when he reached his ascendancy.
‘You never could have made it, MJ, if you had married. You have the self-confidence of never having been manipulated.’
Perhaps.
Yet a test of manipulation had come full force to him when the headstrong daughter of his dear friends had arrived in Washington, as adamant as he had ever seen her. A terrible thing had happened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she was determined to devote her life—at least a part of her life—to lessening the fires of hatred and violence that were ripping her Mediterranean world apart. She never told ‘Uncle Mitch’ what had happened to her—she did not have to, really—but she would not take no for an answer. She was qualified; she was as fluent in English and French as she was in Arabic, and she was currently learning both Yiddish and Hebrew. He had suggested the Peace Corps and she had slammed her bag down on the floor in front of his desk.