From hundreds of miles away, the whispered word came through as clearly as a church bell. He had to breathe three times before answering, and that came out as a sob.
'Dor?'
'Yes - Daddy, I'm sorry.'
'Are you okay, baby?'
'Yes, Daddy, I'm fine.' And incongruous as the statement was, it was not a lie.
'Where are you?'
'Wait a minute.' Then the voice changed. 'Mr Brown, this is Doctor Rosen again'
'She's there?'
'Yes, Mr Brown, she is. We've been treating her for a week. She's a sick girl, but she's going to be okay. Do you understand? She's going to be okay.'
He was grasping his chest. Brown's heart was a steel fist, and his breathing came in painful gasps that a doctor might have taken for something they were not.
'She's okay?' he asked anxiously.
'She's going to be fine,' Sarah assured him. 'There's no doubt of that, Mr Brown. Please believe me, okay?'
'Oh, sweet Jesus! Where, where are you?'
'Mr Brown, you can't see her just yet. We will bring her to you just as soon as she's fully recovered. I worried about calling you before we could get you together, but - but we just couldn't not call you. I hope you understand.'
Sarah had to wait two minutes before she heard anything she could understand, but the sounds that came over the line touched her heart. In reaching into one grave, she had extracted two lives.
'She's really okay?'
'She's had a bad time, Mr Brown, but I promise you she will recover fully. I'm a good doc, okay? I wouldn't say that unless it were true.'
'Please, please let me talk to her again. Please!'
Sarah handed the phone over, and soon four people were weeping. Nurse and physician were the luckiest, sharing a hug and savoring their victory over the cruelties of the world.
Bob Ritter pulled his car into a slot in West Executive Drive, the closed-off former street that lay between the White House and the Executive Office Building. He walked towards the latter, perhaps the ugliest building in Washington - no mean accomplishment - which had once held much of the executive branch of government, the State, War, and Navy departments. It also held the Indian Treaty Room, designed for the purpose of overawing primitive visitors with the splendor of Victorian gingerbread architecture and the majesty of the government which had constructed this giant tipi. The wide corridors rang with the sound of his footsteps on marble as he searched for the right room. He found it on the second floor, the room of Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. 'Special,' perversely, made him a second-line official. The National Security Advisor had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House. Those who reported to him had offices elsewhere, and though distance from the Seat of Power defined influence, it didn't define arrogance of position. MacKenzie had to have a staff of his own in order to remind himself of his importance, real or illusory. Not really a bad man, and actually a fairly bright one, Ritter thought, MacKenzie was nonetheless jealous of his position, and in another age he would have been the clerk who advised the chancellor who advised the King. Except today the clerk had to have an executive secretary.
'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.'
