“Marvelous,” she murmured, still taking pictures.
“I beg your pardon?” the tall, square-jawed man standing at her shoulder said coldly. He was the chief of mission for the U.S. embassy here.
“All those people,” Rousset explained, nodding at the Georgians packed below them. Beneath a sea of rose- colored flags and placards, the silent crowd was slowly flowing east toward the Parliament building. “There must be tens of thousands of people down there in the freezing cold. Maybe more. And all of them united in sorrow and grief. Just for one sick man.” She shook her head.
“It’s going to make a marvelous story.”
“More like a terrible tragedy,” her companion said tightly. “For Georgia certainly, and perhaps for the whole Caucasus region.”
She lowered the camera and glanced sidelong at him from under her long lashes. “Really? Would you like to explain why … in a way my readers can understand, I mean?”
“Not for attribution?” he asked quietly.
Rousset nodded. “No problem.” She smiled delicately. “Let’s say that you’ll appear in print as ‘an expert Western observer of Georgian politics.’”
“Fair enough,” the diplomat agreed. He sighed. “Look, Ms. Rousset, you need to understand that President Yashvili is more than just an ordinary politician to those people. He’s become a symbol of their democratic Rose Revolution, a symbol of Georgia’s peace, prosperity, and maybe even its continued existence.”
He waved a hand at the distant hills and mountains. “For centuries, this region was torn back and forth between rival empires, Persia, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and finally the Russians. Even after the Soviet Union imploded, Georgia was still a wreck, ravaged by ethnic infighting, corruption, and political chaos. When the Rose Revolution swept him into office, Mikhail Yashvili began changing all that. He’s given these people their first real taste of competent, democratic government in eight hundred years.”
“And now he’s dying,” Rousset prompted. “Of cancer?”
“Maybe.” The tall American diplomat shrugged gloomily. “But no one really knows. My sources inside the government say that his doctors haven’t been able to identify the illness killing him. All they know is that his vital organs are failing rapidly, shutting down one by one.”
“So what happens next?” the female New York Times reporter wondered aloud. “After Yashvili dies.”
“Nothing good.”
Rousset pressed harder. “Gould other regions break away?just like South Ossetia and Abkhazia?” Fighting in those two self-declared “autonomous republics” had killed thousands and lasted for years.
“Or maybe even escalate into another all-out civil war?” she went on. Filing reports from a war zone was a risky business, but it was also the path to journalistic stardom. And Sarah Rousset had always been ambitious.
“Possibly,” the tall man admitted. “Yashvili doesn’t really have a clearly defined successor, at least not anyone trusted by all the different political factions, nationalities, and ethnic groups in Georgia.”
“What about the Russians?” she asked. “There are still lots of native Russians living here in Tbilisi, right? If serious fighting broke out in and around the city, would the Kremlin send in troops to stop it?”
The diplomat shrugged again. “As to that, Ms. Rousset, your guess is as good as mine.”
Chapter Five
President Samuel Adams Castilla led his guest into the darkened Oval Office and flipped on the lights. With one hand, he loosened his carefully knotted bow tic and then unbuttoned his formal dinner jacket. “Take a pew, Bill,” he said quietly, motioning toward one of the two armchairs set in front of the room’s marble fireplace. “Can I get you a drink?”
His Director of National Intelligence, William Wexler, shook his head quickly. “Thank you, but no, Mr. President.” The trim, telegenic former U.S. senator smiled fulsomely, evidently hoping to take the sting out of his refusal.
“Your wine stewards were very generous at dinner tonight. I rather think that one more glass of anything might tip me right over the edge.”
Castilla nodded coollv. Some members of the White House social staff seemed to harbor the unexpressed conviction that guests at state dinners should always be offered enough rope to hang themselves ?or, in this case, enough alcohol to put a whole regiment of U.S. Marines under the table.
Guests who were wise resisted temptation and pushed away their wineglasses before it was too late. Guests who were not wise were rarely invited back, no matter how influential or popular or powerful thev might be.
He glanced at the ornate eighteenth-century clock ticking softly on one curved wall. It was well past midnight. Again he waved Wexler into a chair and then sat down across from him. “First, I appreciate your willingness to stay on so late tonight.”
“It’s really no trouble, Mr. President,” Wexler said in a rich, professional politician’s baritone. He smiled again, this time revealing a set of perfect teeth. Although he was in his early sixties, his deeply tanned face showed very few lines or wrinkles. “After all, sir, I serve at your pleasure.”
Castilla wondered about that. Stung by a series of damaging and very public failures, Congress had recently enacted the first major reorganization of America’s intelligence-gathering apparatus in more than fifty years. The legislation had created a new cabinet-level post?the director of national intelligence. In theory, the DNI was supposed to be able to coordinate the U.S. government’s complex array of competing intelligence agencies, departments, and bureaus. In practice, the CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, and others were still wag-ing a fierce bureaucratic war behind the scenes to severely limit his powers.
Overcoming so much powerful institutional resistance would take a very shrewd and strong-willed man, and Castilla was beginning to have serious doubts that Wexler had either the will or the mental dexterity. It was no real secret that the former senator would never have been his first choice for the position, but Congress had dug in its collective heels and refused to approve anyone but one of its own. With even nominal control over a total intelligence budget of more than fortv billion dollars, the Senate and House of Representatives were very interested in making sure the DNI post went to someone they knew and trusted.
Wexler had served as a senator from one of the smaller New England states for more than twenty years, compiling an earnest, if relatively undistin-guished, legislative record, and earning a reputation as a decent, hardworking member of the various Congressional committees overseeing the armed forces and intelligence agencies. Over his years of service, he had accumulated a great many friends and very few serious enemies.
A solid majority of the Senate had believed he was the perfect choice to head the U.S. intelligence community. Privately, Castilla was convinced that Bill Wexler was a painfully polite, well-intentioned pushover. Which meant that the reforms intended to streamline and strengthen the management of U.S. intelligence operations had only added yet another layer of red tape to the whole system.
“What exactly can I do for you, Mr. President?” the national intelligence director said at last, breaking the small silence. If he was at all puzzled by Castilla’s decision to pull him aside at the state dinner to arrange this unusual and highly irregular late-night conference, he hid it well.
“I want you to redirect our intelligence-gathering and analysis efforts,” the president told him flatly. Like it or not, he realized, he had to try working through this man?at least for now.
Wexler raised a single quizzical eyebrow. “In what way?”
“I want more focus on political and military developments inside Russia, and on events in the smaller countries around its borders,” Castilla said. “And that’s going to require extensive shifts in the allocation of satellite time, SIGINT translation priorities, and analyst assignments.”
“Russia?” Wexler was astonished.
“That’s right.”
“But the Cold War is over,” the intelligence director protested.
“So they tell me,” Castilla said drily. He leaned forward in his chair.
