War of Eagles

“This is an embassy, sir,” Chase smiled. “Something is always wrong. But Mr. Hasen said that if he does not see you before then, he will see you tonight at the reception.”

“For—?”

“The start of the celebration of the fifty-eighth Chinese National Day,” Chase informed him. “He will be there, along with the prime minister and other dignitaries. He said this will give you a chance to talk to Mr. Le Kwan Po.”

“Does he speak English?”

“No. But there will be translators, including his daughter Anita. I will give you a full briefing on the personnel before you go. In the meantime, he asked that an office be placed at your disposal. The driver who met you at the airport will also be free to take you anywhere you may want to go.”

“I may take you up on the sightseeing later,” Hood said. “In the meantime, I’d like to go to the office.”

Chase extended an arm down the hallway. Hood went back to his room to get his briefcase. Then he let the ambassador’s executive assistant show him to the guest office.

“Is the ambassador available by phone?” Hood asked.

“The ambassador went to see the prime minister with his translator, no one else,” Chase told him. “The president and I have a cell phone number in the event of a crisis. Short of war or a death, neither of us would interrupt the ambassador during a mission of state.”

“Don’t you usually go with him to these meetings, just in case someone has an emergency that does not quite qualify as a crisis?” Hood was not being facetious. It was unusual for an aide not to be present to tug on an ambassador’s sleeve in case information or an opinion were needed.

“I usually go with him but not this time,” Chase admitted.

“May I ask why?”

“You may, but I don’t have an answer,” Chase said. “The ambassador did not ask me to go.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about the ambassador’s morning?” Hood pressed.

“To tell the truth, Mr. Hood, I do not know very much, and what I do know I am not at liberty to discuss. I am sure you understand.”

“Actually, I don’t. I am here at the request of the president—” Hood went silent. Suddenly, he understood. He was here to talk to the prime minister, which was typically the ambassador’s job. Joseph Hasen had gone to see the prime minister first. He was probably being territorial if not downright preemptive. “You know what? It isn’t important why he went,” Hood said.

Chase gave him a puzzled look as they walked. Hood ignored him. The former head of the underground NCMC was going to have to get better at being an aboveground diplomat.

The office was located just around the corner, past the oil portraits of former ambassadors. The large canvases were hung on ivory white walls. The walls were plain, save for the ornate crown molding along the top. The door to the office had marble pilasters topped by a frieze of junks sailing from east to west. Hood tried not to read any warnings of conquest into that.

“My intercom number is four twelve,” Chase said as he left. “Is there a message in case the ambassador calls?”

“Only that I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible,” Hood replied.

“I’ll tell him,” Chase promised.

The aide left the door open behind him. Hood closed it. The office was actually a desk stuck in a small library. There was no computer, just a phone on the desk. Visitors probably brought their own laptops. Hood felt a chill of disorientation. The office underscored how different his life was now from only two days ago. He walked slowly across the Persian rug. It was a silk tribal rug from K’om, patterns of dark earth colors surrounding the portrait of a woman. There were burn marks along the edges and bloodstains on the woman’s cheek. Hood had read about the rug in the briefing folder. It had once been in the ambassador’s office in Teheran. Hasen’s brother-in-law had been an attache there when the Iranians took over the embassy. He managed to escape by pretending to be Iranian. He had wrapped the body of a dead “freedom fighter” in the rug and dragged it out to make his story more convincing.

There wasn’t an office like this at Op-Center, one with history on the floor and volumes stacked on seven tiers of built-in bookcases. Even the records room was mostly digital. It was erased during the e-bomb attack, then replaced with copies from other agencies. Looking around, Hood got a sense of the magnitude of loss the Egyptians experienced when the library at Alexandria burned.

When was that? Hood wondered.

That information was somewhere in here, in one of the encyclopedias or dictionaries. He would have to go and find it if he wanted to know, not plug keywords into a search engine.

Like this mission, he thought. He had to go somewhere, and now he had to search for information. That was his new life. He would no longer be struggling against the chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee for funding, he would be trying to run the ball around ambassadors and their staff, heads of state and their staff, and every organization in Washington that had information he might need. The size of the task suddenly became very apparent.

And daunting, bordering on frightening. It was astonishing that anything got done. He looked down at the rug. He did not approve or sympathize, but he understood the frustration that pushed radicals to do what they did.

“Which means you’ve got to push back,” he murmured.

As he thought that, his brain shifted to a default setting: Sharon. He did not like the fact that his subconscious apparently regarded her as an anarchist. He felt ashamed. He went to the desk and sat in the leather seat and decided to push back. At the real enemy, not the one in his head.

It was very early in the morning in Washington. Hood called Bob Herbert at Op-Center. If he did not find the intelligence chief at the office, he would not bother him at home.

Herbert was there.

“This is why bureaucracy sucks,” the intelligence chief said.

Declarative statements like that passed for “Hello” from Bob Herbert, especially when he was working on a project. Caller ID had liberated him even further. It allowed him to vault right into a complaint without the inconvenience of having to wait for an answer to “Who’s this?”

“What’s wrong?” Hood asked.

“The retooling of Op-Center, which was done to streamline our operation, has left me with all my old associates plus a new one,” he said. “It’s a good thing I’m in my chair, because this Mississippi boy ain’t finding his footing.”

“You want to talk about it?” Hood asked.

“No. I’m done.”

Herbert was always blunt and aggressive, but he never whined. And he did not displace his anger the way Hood did. He smacked the source, hard.

“Are we getting anywhere?” Hood asked.

“No, as I just told Frau Feldherr,” Herbert replied.

Well, at least Hood knew who had triggered this outburst. General Carrie had been at Op-Center two days, and Herbert already saw her — or the people she represented — as the gestapo.

“I heard from Mike a few minutes ago,” Herbert went on. “He’s in Beijing at the Grand National Hotel. He was going to catch some winks, then meet up with his Xichang people. What about you?”

“Apparently, I won’t know anything new until I go to the National Day reception tonight,” Hood told him.

“I wonder when we’re going to know anything, and if we’re going to like what we find out,” Herbert said.

“You lost me.”

“About Op-Center,” he said. “Maybe you and Mike are lucky to be out there, doing something else.”

“Did something happen?” Hood asked.

“Not really. Some words with Carrie, then with Darrell.”

“That’s nothing new for you, Bob,” Hood said.

“I know. I just get this sense that something is ramping up,” Herbert told him. “Something not good. The