War of Eagles

“This isn’t easy, Mike. Being here, talking to you, none of it. The six months of silence — that wasn’t something I wanted.”

“Okay,” Rodgers said. “But out of curiosity, Paul, if you didn’t want the silence, why the hell didn’t you pick up the phone?”

“Embarrassment? Discomfort? Maybe a little envy because I left the high road and you still had it?”

“You could have talked to me about that,” Rodgers said.

“We talked when you left. It didn’t change anything,” Hood said. “I wasn’t happy about the way things went down. Who could be? Then it became awkward because so much time did pass.”

“And now?” Rodgers asked.

“Has this been easy for you?”

“No,” Rodgers admitted.

“There’s your answer,” Hood said. “Look, I’ve got Sanders coming, and I want to get into this situation of yours. I’ll be in touch after the meeting.”

Rodgers thanked him and hung up.

Conflicted did not begin to describe how Rodgers felt at the moment. It began to look as if Hood had been demoted upward. Part of Rodgers felt bad for him. A smaller, more insistent part of him did not. Yet what had been the oddest part of the conversation had nothing to do with that. It happened when they were talking about Herbert and his limited HUMINT capabilities.

Rodgers had called them “our” resources.

Even six months later, it was difficult not to think of them all as a team. Hood, Herbert, and Rodgers had gone through a lot together, more than most men got to experience in a lifetime. The deaths of coworkers, family crises, fighting the clock to prevent civil wars and nuclear attacks. Maybe Op-Center was an idea as well as a place. Maybe it was hardwired, like Rodgers’s need to wear a uniform of some kind even if it was a suit. Perhaps they always would be a team, despite working from different places toward different ends.

And perhaps what the sage once said of divorce was also true of Mike Rodgers and Paul Hood. That going separate ways wasn’t a sign two people didn’t understand one another but just the opposite.

An indication that they had begun to.

SIXTEEN

Washington, D.C. Monday, 3:18 P.M.

Of all the people General Carrie had met at Op-Center, the one she had enjoyed the most was Liz Gordon. The two women sat in facing armchairs in front of the desk. Carrie felt it might make these talks less intimidating than if she were behind the desk. Liz was the only one who moved her chair, turning it so that she was facing the new director rather than sitting at an angle. The staff psychologist also offered her viewpoints without having to be asked. She was the only one who did not say exactly what she thought the new director wanted to hear. They talked about Paul Hood and his impact on the organization before moving on to the existing personnel.

“The senior staff is going to want to please you,” Gordon told Carrie a few minutes into their informal chat. “But they will also resent you.”

“Because I replaced Paul Hood or because I replaced a man?” Carrie asked.

“Both,” Liz said. “And also because you were given the job most of them would have wanted.”

“I earned this position,” Carrie replied. She jabbed the desk with an index finger. “I also earned the three stars I’m wearing, something no other woman ever accomplished.”

“You see, General, that is part of the problem,” Liz replied. “You are a woman with three stars. I know Bob, Darrell, Lowell, Ron, and Matt. I know them very well. To the first two, at least, your promotion represents a bone to our gender and not a real accomplishment.”

“That would be their problem, not mine,” Carrie said. “Do you think they will work less for me than they did for Hood?”

“As I said, they still need the director’s approval if they want to keep their jobs. I’m sure they feel as if they are all on probation.”

“They are,” Carrie replied.

They were interrupted by a call from Bob Herbert. He brought Carrie up to date on the conversation with Mike Rodgers. Rodgers had also spoken with Paul Hood and had phoned to tell Herbert about that. Hood was going to see what he could do about getting intel from the Chinese prime minister.

Carrie thanked Herbert and hung up. There was a very strange mix of resentment and suck-up in Herbert’s brusque but meticulously complete briefing.

“None of them is in danger of being dismissed, and I don’t care whether they like me or not,” the general went on. “But I want to be sure I can count on them to give the job everything they’ve got.”

“You can,” Liz said confidently. “Bob and Darrell are competitive with each other and themselves, so they will always overreach—”

The conversation was interrupted by a beep on the intercom.

“Yes?” Carrie said.

“General, Darrell McCaskey and Matt Stoll are here to see you,” Bugs Benet informed her.

“Thank you. Send them in,” Carrie said.

“I’ll leave,” Liz said, rising.

“I appreciate your input, Liz. We’ll finish this later.”

“I look forward to it,” the psychologist replied.

Liz stepped out as McCaskey walked in. Carrie noticed McCaskey fire the psychologist a short, narrow look. It was the kind of look soldiers going into interrogation gave to soldiers leaving interrogation: Did you crack? Did you tell them something I should know about?

The moment passed quickly. As McCaskey entered, he was back on the job. Matt Stoll came in behind him. Carrie had not yet met the scientist alone. The MIT graduate was a lumpy man with eyes that saw elsewhere. Stoll struck her as a man who used his senses to guide him through this world while his mind lived in another, far more interesting place. He was carrying a compact disk on his index finger.

Carrie stood and went behind her desk. She did not want to be an armchair general when she received an official update.

“We may have caught a break,” McCaskey said. He stopped in front of the desk and remained standing. “There was a man at the club who Interpol and the Taipei police were watching. He was a reputed slave trader by the name of Hui-ling Wong, aka Lo Tek. He died in the blast. The coastal patrol had seen his boat arrive, and officers were dispatched to all the clubs he usually frequents.”

“Why didn’t they arrest him en route?” Carrie asked.

“Because they have no evidence,” McCaskey said. “The agents were at the nightclub with acoustic devices, hoping he would say something that would give them a reason to arrest him.”

“Did he?” Carrie asked, looking at the CD.

“No,” McCaskey replied. “But the agents were wearing wide wires, digital, wide-frequency recorders that collect every sound in a room and send it to a central location where the extraneous noises are removed.”

“That’s the only way to collect specific conversations without using a parabolic dish,” Stoll said.

“The agents were killed in the blast, but everything they recorded was sent to a mobile unit not far from the club,” McCaskey said. “Through my Interpol connections we got a copy.”

Stoll held up the CD on his finger.

“The explosion destroyed everything within one hundred yards of the epicenter,” McCaskey went on. “The bombers would have known the blast radius and made sure they were beyond that. But they would have had to be within three hundred fifty yards to detonate a radiocontrolled device. Matt executed a thorough acoustic search in that window and managed to pick up the very faint trigger ping, the signal sent to activate the bomb.”

“We got the guys talking on the stairwell, Madam General,” Stoll said, “They were breathing hard, moving real fast, and speaking Cantonese.”

“So they were probably from the mainland,” the general remarked. “What did you get?”