Thomas agreed. Everyone rose then, and Thomas offered his hand to the deputy ambassador.
'Thank you for everything,' Thomas said.
'I'm truly sorry about all this.'
'So far, no real harm has been done.'
'We're going to see that it stays that way,' Thomas said.
'I'll have a room prepared for the two of you,' Williamson said.
'It's not fancy, but it's a place to crash.'
'Thanks,' Thomas said.
'But until we find our man, I have a feeling I won't be getting a lot of sleep.'
'None of us will, Mr. Thomas,' Williamson assured him.
'If you'll excuse me. Ambassador Small is due back from Washington at ten p.m. He'll want to be briefed on this as soon as possible.'
Thomas left and walked down the corridor to Moore's office. The ADPI hated having lost the Harpooner. But he also hated the fact that the bastard was probably laughing at them for taking the whale bait. He also wondered if the Harpooner might somehow have known that Battat had come from Moscow. Maybe that was why he'd let the agent live, to create conflict between the CIA office in Moscow and Baku. Or maybe he did it just to confuse them, have them waste time wondering why he hadn't killed Battat.
Thomas shook his head. Your mind is all over the damn place, he chided himself. Stop it. You've got to focus. But that was going to be tough, Thomas knew, because the Harpooner was obviously a man who liked to keep his trackers off balance by mixing games with reality.
And so far, he was doing a helluva job.
Washington, D.C.
Monday, 3:00 p.m.
The cell phone rang in the office of the red-haired man. He shooed out two young assistants who closed the door behind them. Then he swiveled his chair so the high leather back was facing the door. He looked out the window, drew the cell phone from his inside jacket pocket, and answered on the fifth ring. If the phone had been stolen or lost and someone answered before that, the caller had been instructed to hang up.
'Yes?' the red-haired man said softly.
'He's completed phase one,' said the caller.
'Everything is exactly on schedule.'
'Thank you,' said the red-haired man and clicked off.
He immediately punched in a new number. The phone was answered on the fifth ring.
'Hello?' said a gravelly voice.
'We're on track,' said the red-haired man.
'Very good,' said the other.
'Anything from Benn?' asked the red-haired man.
'Nothing yet,' said the other.
'It will come.'
The men hung up.
The red-haired man put the phone back in his jacket pocket. He looked out across his desk and the office beyond. The photographs with the president and foreign heads of state. The commendations. A seven-by-ten-inch American flag that had been given to him by his mother.
The red-haired man had carried it, folded, in his back pocket during his tour of duty in Vietnam. It was framed on the wall, still creased and soiled with sweat and mud, the lubricants of combat.
As the red-haired man called his two aides back to the office, the ordinary nature of that act, the return of routine, underscored the extreme and complex nature of what he and his partners were undertaking. To remake the international political and economic map was one thing. But to do it quickly, in a stroke such as this, was unprecedented.
The work was daunting, and it was exciting. If the operation ever were to become publicly known, it would be considered monstrous by some. But to many, so were the American Revolution and the Civil War in their day.
So was the involvement of the United States in World War II, before Pearl Harbor. The red-haired man only hoped that if their actions were ever revealed, people would understand why they had been necessary. That the world in which the United States existed was radically different from the world into which the United States had been born. That in order to grow it was sometimes necessary to destroy. Sometimes rules, sometimes lives.
Sometimes both.
Camp Springs, Maryland Monday, 3:14 p.m.
Paul Hood called Senator Fox after returning from the White House. She admitted being totally confused by the president's remarks and had put in a call to him to talk about it. Hood asked her to hold off until after he had had a chance to review the situation. She agreed.
Then Hood called Bob Herbert. Hood briefed the intelligence chief on his conversation with the First Lady, after which he asked Herbert to find out what he could about the phone call from the hotel and whether anyone else had noticed any odd behavior from the president.
