'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 ashell 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.
Thiscould 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.
'Warm day for London,' another tourist said.
'I wonder if they get thunderstorms here,' the American replied casually, examining Henry VIII's immense suit of armor.
'They do,' the man replied, 'but not as severe as those in Washington.'
Henderson looked for an exit and headed towards it. A moment later he was strolling around Tower Green with his new companion.
'Your English is excellent.'
'Thank you, Peter. I am George.'
'Hi, George.' Henderson smiled without looking at his new friend. It really was like James Bond, and doing it here - not just in London, but in the historical seat of Britain's royal family - well, that was just delicious.
George was his real name - actually Georgiy, which was the Russian equivalent - and he rarely went into the field anymore. Though he'd been a highly effective field officer for KGB, his analytical ability was such that he'd been called back to Moscow five years earlier, promoted to lieutenant colonel and placed in charge of a whole section. Now a full colonel, George looked forward to general's stars. The reason he'd come to London, via Helsinki and Brussels, was that he'd wanted to eyeball cassius himself - and get a little shopping done for his own family. Only three men of his age in KGB shared his rank, and his young and pretty wife liked to wear Western clothes. Where else to shop for them but London? George didn't speak French or Italian.
'This is the only time we will meet, Peter.'
'Should I be honored?'
'If you wish.' George was unusually good-natured for a Russian, though that was part of his cover. He smiled at the American. 'Your senator has access to many things.'
'Yes, he does,' Henderson agreed, enjoying the courtship ritual. He didn't have to add, and so do I.
'Such information is useful to us. Your government, especially with your new president - honestly, he frightens us.'
'He frightens me,' Henderson admitted.
'But at the same time there is hope,' George went on, speaking in a reasonable and judicious voice. 'He is also a realist. His proposal for detente is seen by my government as a sign that we can reach a broad international understanding. Because of that we wish to examine the possibility that his proposal for discussions is genuine. Unfortunately we have problems of our own.'
'Such as?'
'Your president, perhaps he means well. I say that sincerely, Peter,' George added. 'But he is highly... competitive. If he knows too much about us, he will press us too hard in some areas, and that might prevent us from reaching the accommodation that we all desire. You have adverse political elements in your government. So do we - leftovers from the Stalin era. The key to negotiations such as those which may soon begin is that both sides must be reasonable. We need your help to control the unreasonable elements on our side.'
Henderson was surprised by that. The Russians could be so open, like Americans. 'How can I do that?'
'Some things we cannot allow to be leaked. If they are, it will poison our chances for detente. If we know too much about you, or you know too much about us, well, the game becomes skewed. One side or the other seeks too much advantage, and then there can be no understanding, only domination, which neither side will accept. Do you see?'
