'As a senator, I also have a responsibility to help alleviate that burden.'
'Senator, I appreciate your position, but this isn't right,' Hood said.
'I used to work on Wall Street. I run a trim operation, leaner than the agencies that are getting an increase. I intend to request, in writing, a hearing of the full CIOC as permitted under charter '
'You can have it, of course. But you will be wasting your time and ours,' Debenport said. 'This decision was unanimous.'
'I see. Let me ask you this, then. Is the CIOC fishing for my resignation?'
'Hell, no,' Debenport said. 'I don't run when I can pass. If the committee thought you had overstayed your welcome, I'd tell you.'
'I appreciate that,' Hood said. 'Did you discuss any of this with the president?'
'That's my next call. I wanted to tell you first,' Debenport said.
'But whatever his feelings, he has no veto power. He doesn't even have a political majority on the committee.'
'So that's it.'
'I'm sorry, Paul.'
Hood was angry, though not at Debenport. He was upset with himself. He should have smelled this one in the oven. He thought the departure of Fox was a signal that things were going to get better. And maybe they had, in a way. Fox did not see why Op-Center was necessary at all.
She believed that the overseas intelligence activities of the CIA and the FBI were sufficient to keep America safe. Of course, she was also one of the senators who had put the bulk of America's spy capabilities into electronic intelligence. That was a huge miscalculation. If there were no operatives on the ground to pinpoint the mud huts, bunkers, apartments, cars, and caves for audio surveillance and spy satellites, a lot of what was called 'incipient hostile intent' went unnoticed. That was when surgical covert activity became a War on Terror.
Still, Hood had hoped that Debenport would fight harder to keep Op-Center fully staffed.
The senator hung up, and Paul sat there, looking at the last E-mail he had opened. It was from the CIA Office of Personnel Security, Department of Communication, regarding updated procedures for the evacuation and decontamination of juveniles in the event of a biological attack on child care facilities serving the intelligence community. It was an important document, but it emphasized the gulf between the agencies. Op-Center did not even have a child care facility.
Hood closed the E-mail and brought up the budget file. He called Op-Center's CFO Ed Colahan and asked him to come to his office. He had come in early. Colahan knew their current fiscal year gave them another six weeks of business as usual. He wanted to be ready for whatever the CIOC decided.
Hood knew he would not be ready for this.
The question Hood had to address was whether to cut personnel from most or all of their ten divisions or whether to eliminate one or two departments entirely. He knew the answer even without looking at the figures. He also knew which departments would get him close to twenty percent. One of them would cost him efficiency.
The other would cost him a friend.
FOUR
Washington, B.C. Monday, 8:20 a.m.
When Don Orr was a little boy, he used to look forward to June 22, the day Miss Clarion's twenty-two-student school closed down for the summer. He did not dislike school. Just the opposite. He loved learning new things. But the first day of summer vacation was special.
He would get up at sunrise. With an olive green baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, he filled his father's canteen and slung it across a small shoulder. He made three or four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pushed them into a knapsack, along with a package of oatmeal cookies and a compass. Then he took a shovel from the tool shed. That was for beheading rattlesnakes if he encountered any.
Holding the shovel like a prophet's staff, he walked out from the family's cattle ranch in Kingsville, Texas. He walked into the hot, windless plain to think about everything he had learned that year.
Being alone like that for a day helped to burn the important things into his brain. He had learned in Bible class
