‘Hi, Bob. How are things at Langley?’ MacKenzie asked in front of his secretarial staff, just to be sure they would know that he was meeting with an up-and-coming CIA official, and was therefore still very important indeed to have such guests calling on him.
‘The usual.’ Ritter smiled back. Let’s get on with it.
‘Trouble with traffic?’ he asked, letting Ritter know that he was almost, if not quite, late for the appointment.
‘There’s a little problem on the GW’ Ritter gestured with his head towards MacKenzie’s private office. His host nodded.
‘Wally, we need someone to take notes.’
‘Coming, sir.’ His executive assistant rose from his desk in the secretarial area and brought a pad.
‘Bob Ritter, this is Wally Hicks. I don’t think you’ve met.’
‘How do you do, sir?’ Hicks extended his hand. Ritter took it, seeing yet one more eager White House aide. New England accent, bright-looking, polite, which was about all he was entitled to expect of such people. A minute later they were sitting in MacKenzie’s office, the inner and outer doors closed in the cast-iron frames that gave the Executive Office Building the structural integrity of a warship. Hicks hurried himself about to get coffee for everyone, like a page at some medieval court, which was the way of things in the world’s most powerful democracy.
‘So what brings you in, Bob?’ MacKenzie asked from behind his desk. Hicks flipped open his note pad and began his struggle to take down every word.
‘Roger, a rather unique opportunity has presented itself over in Vietnam.’ Eyes opened wider and ears perked up.
‘What might that be?’
‘We’ve identified a special prison camp southwest of Haiphong,’ Ritter began, quickly outlining what they knew and what they suspected.
MacKenzie listened intently. Pompous though he might have been, the recently arrived investment banker was also a former aviator himself. He’d flown B-24s in the Second World War, including the dramatic but failed mission to Ploesti. A patriot with flaws, Ritter told himself. He would try to make use of the former while ignoring the latter.
‘Let me see your imagery,’ be said after a few minutes, using the proper buzzword instead of the more pedestrian ‘pictures.’
Ritter took the photo folder from his briefcase and set it on the desk. MacKenzie opened it and took a magnifying glass from a drawer. ‘We know who this guy is?’
‘There’s a better photo in the back,’ Ritter answered helpfully.
MacKenzie compared the official family photo with the one from the camp, then with the enhanced blowup.
‘Very close. Not definitive but close. Who is he?’
‘Colonel Robin Zacharias. Air Force. He spent quite some time at Offutt Air Force Base, SAC War Plans. He knows everything, Roger.’
MacKenzie looked up and whistled, which, he thought, was what he was supposed to do in such circumstances. ‘And this guy’s no Vietnamese …’
‘He’s a colonel in the Soviet Air Force, name unknown, but it isn’t hard to figure what he’s there for. Here’s the real punchline.’ Ritter handed over a copy of. the wire-service report on Zacharias’s death.
‘Damn.’
‘Yeah, all of a sudden it gets real clear, doesn’t it?’
‘This sort of thing could wreck the peace talks,’ MacKenzie thought aloud.
Walter Hicks couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t his place to speak in such circumstances. He was like a necessary appliance – an animated tape machine – and the only real reason he was in the room at all was so his boss would have a record of the conversation. Wreck the peace talks he scribbled down, taking the time to underline it, and though nobody else noticed, his fingers went white around the pencil.
‘Roger, the men we believe to be in this camp know an awful lot, enough to seriously compromise our national security. I mean seriously,’ Ritter said calmly. ‘Zacharias knows our nuclear war plans, he helped write SIOP. This is very serious business.’ Merely in speaking sy-op, merely by invoking the unholy name of the ‘Single Integrated Operations Plan,’ Ritter had knowingly raised the stakes of the conversation. The CIA field officer amazed himself at the skillful delivery of the lie. The White House pukes might not grasp the idea of getting people out because they were people. But they had their hot issues, and nuclear war-plans were the unholy of unholies in this and many other temples of government power.
‘You have my attention. Bob.’
‘Mr Hicks, right?’ Ritter asked, turning his head.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Could you please excuse us?’
The junior assistant looked to his boss, his neutral face imploring MacKenzie to let him stay in the room, but that was not to be.
‘Wally, I think we’ll carry on for the moment in executive session,’ the special assistant to the President said, easing the impact of the dismissal with a friendly smile – and a wave towards the door.
‘Yes, sir.’ Hicks stood and walked out the door, closing it quietly.
Fuck, he raged to himself, sitting back down at his desk. How could he advise his boss he didn’t hear what came next? Robert Ritter, Hicks thought. The guy who’d nearly destroyed sensitive negotiations at a particularly sensitive moment by violating orders and bringing some goddamned spy out of Budapest. The information he’d brought had somehow changed the US negotiating position, and that had set the treaty back three months because America had decided to chisel something else out of the Soviets, who had been reasonable as hell to concede the matters already agreed to. That fact had saved Hitter’s career – and probably encouraged him in that idiotically romantic view that individual people were more important than world peace, when peace itself was the only thing that mattered.
And Ritter knew how to jerk Roger around, didn’t he? All that war-plans stuff was pure horseshit. Roger had his office walls covered with photos from The Old Days, when he’d flown his goddamned airplane all over hell and gone, pretending that he was personally winning the war against Hitler, just one more fucking war that good diplomacy would have prevented if only people had focused on the real issues as he and Peter hoped someday to do. This thing wasn’t about war plans or SIOP or any of the other uniformed bullshit that people in this section of the White House Staff played with every goddamned day. It was about people, for Christ’s sake. Uniformed people. Dumbass soldiers, people with big shoulders and little minds who did nothing more useful than kill, as though that made anything in the world better. And besides, Hicks fumed, they took their chances, didn’t they? If they wanted to drop bombs on a peaceful and friendly people like the Vietnamese, well, they should have thought ahead of time that those people might not like it very much. Most important of all, if they were dumb enough to gamble their lives, then they implicitly accepted the possibility of losing them, and so why then should people like Wally Hicks give a flying fuck about them when the dice came up wrong? They probably loved the action. It undoubtedly attracted the sort of women who thought that big dicks came along with small brains, who liked ‘men’ who dragged their knuckles on the ground like well-dressed apes.
This could wreck the peace talks. Even MacKenzie thought that.
All those kids from his generation, dead. And now they might risk not ending the war because of fifteen or twenty professional killers who probably liked what they did. It just made no sense. What if they gave a war and nobody came? was one of his generation’s favored aphorisms, though he knew it to be a fantasy. Because people like that one guy – Zacharias – would always seduce people into following them because little people who lacked Hicks’s understanding and perspective wouldn’t be able to see that it was just all a waste of energy. That was the most amazing part of all. Wasn’t it clear that war was just plain awful? How smart did you have to be to understand that?
Hicks saw the door open. MacKenzie and Ritter came out.
‘Wally, we’re going across the street for a few minutes. Could you tell my eleven o’clock that I’ll be back as soon as I can?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Wasn’t that typical? Ritter’s seduction was complete. He had MacKenzie sold enough that Roger would make the pitch to the National Security Advisor. And they would probably raise pure fucking hell at the peace table, and maybe set things back three months or more, unless somebody saw through the ruse. Hicks lifted his phone and dialed a number.
‘Senator Donaldson’s office.’
‘Hi, I was trying to get Peter Henderson.’
‘I’m sorry, he and the Senator are in Europe right now. They’ll get back next week.’
‘Oh, that’s right. Thanks.’ Hicks hung up. Damn. He was so upset that he’d forgotten.
Some things have to be done very carefully. Peter Henderson didn’t even know that his code name was CASSIUS. It had been assigned to him by an analyst in the US-Canada Institute whose love of Shakespeare’s plays was as genuine as that of any Oxford don. The photo in the file, along with the one-page profile of the agent, had made him think of the self-serving ‘patriot’ in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Brutus would not have been right. Henderson, the analyst had judged, did not have sufficient quality of character. His senator was in Europe on a ‘fact-finding’ tour, mainly having to do with NATO, though they would stop in on the peace talks at Paris just to get some TV tape that might be shown on Connecticut TV stations in the fall. In fact, the ‘tour’ was mainly a shopping trip punctuated by a brief every other day. Henderson, enjoying his first such trip as the Senator’s expert on national-security issues, had to be there for the briefs, but the rest of the time was his, and he had made his own arrangements. At the moment he was touring the White Tower, the famous centerpiece of Her Majesty’s Tower of London, now approaching its nine hundredth year of guardianship on the River Thames.