“Sooner or later, the Arabs had to wise up,” Jack said. Alden nodded agreement. It was gracious of him, Jack noted. He'd said the same thing in one of his books several years earlier.
“I think Israel can weather this, they always have—” Jack cut his Director off.
“No way, boss,” Ryan said. Someone had to straighten Cabot out. “It's what Napoleon said about the moral and the physical. Israel depends absolutely on having the moral high-ground. Their whole cachet is that they are the only democracy in the region, that they are the guys in white hats. That concept died about three hours ago. Now they look like Bull — whoever it was — in Selma, Alabama, except he used water hoses. The civil-rights community is going to go berserk.” Jack paused to sip at his coffee. “It's a simple question of justice. When the Arabs were throwing rocks and cocktails, the police could say that they were using force in response to force. Not this time. Both the deaders were sitting down and not threatening anybody.”
“It's the isolated act of one deranged man!” Cabot announced angrily.
“Not so, sir. The one shot with a pistol was like you say, but the first victim was killed with two of those rubber bullets at a range of more than twenty yards — with two aimed shots from a single-shot weapon. That's cold, and it wasn't any accident.”
“Are we sure he's dead?” Alden asked.
“My wife's a doc, and he looked dead to her. The body spasmed and went limp, probably indicating death from massive head trauma. They can't say this guy tripped and fell onto the curb. This really changes things. If the Palestinians are smart, they'll double-down their bets. They'll stay with this tactic and wait for the world to respond. If they do that, they can't lose,” Jack concluded.
“I agree with Ryan,” Alden said. “There'll be a UN resolution before dinner. We'll have to go along with it, and that just might show the Arabs that non-violence is a better weapon than rocks are. What will the Israelis say? How will they react?”
Alden knew what the answer was. This was to enlighten the DCI, so Ryan took the question. “First they'll stonewall. They're probably kicking themselves for not intercepting the tape, but it's a little late for that. This was almost certainly an unplanned incident — I mean that the Israeli government is as surprised as we are — otherwise they would have grabbed the TV crew. That police captain is having his brain picked apart now. By lunchtime they'll say that he's crazy — hell, he probably is — and that this is an isolated act. How they do their damage control is predictable, but—”
“It's not going to work,” Alden interrupted. The President's going to have to have a statement out by nine. We can't call this a 'tragic incident.' It's cold-blooded murder of an unarmed demonstrator by a state official.'
“Look, Charlie, this is just an isolated incident,” Director Cabot said again.
“Maybe so, but I've been predicting this for five years.” The National Security Advisor stood and walked to the windows. “Marcus, the only thing that has held Israel together for the past thirty years has been the stupidity of the Arabs. Either they never recognized that Israeli legitimacy is based entirely on their moral position or they just didn't have the wit to care about it. Israel is now faced with an impossible ethical contradiction. If they really are a democracy that respects the rights of its citizens, they have to grant the Arabs broader rights. But that means playing hell with their political integrity, which depends on soothing their own extreme religious elements — and that crowd doesn't care a rat's ass about Arab rights, does it? But if they cave in to the religious zealots and stonewall, try to gloss over this thing, then they are not a democracy, and that imperils the political support from America without which they cannot survive economically or militarily. The same dilemma applies to us. Our support for Israel is based on their political legitimacy as a functioning liberal democracy, but that legitimacy just evaporated. A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy, Marcus. We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator—”
“God damn it, Charlie! Israel isn't—”
“I know that, Marcus. They're not. They're really not. But the only way they can prove that is to change, to become true to what they have always claimed to be. If they stonewall on this, Marcus, they're doomed. They'll lean on their political lobby and find out it isn't there anymore. If it goes that far, then they embarrass our government even more than it already is, and we'll be faced with the possible necessity of overtly cutting them off. We can't do that either. We must find another alternative.” Alden turned back from the window. “Ryan, that idea of yours is now on the front burner. I'll handle the President and State. The only way we can get Israel out of this is to find some kind of a peace plan that works. Call your friend at Georgetown and tell him it's no longer a study. Call it Project PILGRIMAGE. By tomorrow morning I need a good sketch of what we want to do, and how we want to do it.”
That's awful fast, sir,' Ryan observed.
“Then don't let me stop you, Jack. If we don't move quickly on this, God only knows what might happen. You know Scott Adler at State?”
“We've talked a few times.”
“He's Brent Talbot's best man. I suggest you get together with him after you check with your friends. He can cover your backside on the State Department flank. We can't trust that bureaucracy to do anything fast. Better pack some bags, boy, you're going to be busy. I want facts, positions, and a gold-plated evaluation just as fast as you can generate it, and I want it done black as a coal mine.” That last remark was aimed at Cabot. “If this is going to work, we can't risk a single leak.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said. Cabot just nodded.
Jack had never been in the faculty residence at Georgetown. It struck him as odd, but he shoved that thought aside as breakfast was served. Their table overlooked a parking lot.
“You were right, Jack,” Riley observed. “That was nothing to wake up to.”
“What's the word from Rome?”
“They like it,” the president of Georgetown University replied simply.
“How much?” Ryan asked.
“You're serious?”
“Alden told me two hours ago that this is now on the front burner.”
Riley accepted this news with a nod. “Trying to save Israel, Jack?”
Ryan didn't know how much humor was in the question, and his physical state did not allow levity. “Father, all I'm doing is following up on something — you know, orders?”
“I am familiar with the term. Your timing was pretty good on floating this thing.”
“Maybe so, but let's save the Nobel Prize for some other time, okay?”
“Finish your breakfast. We can still catch everybody over there before lunch, and you look pretty awful.”
“I feel pretty awful,” Ryan admitted.
“Everybody should stop drinking about forty,” Riley observed. “After forty you really can't handle it anymore.”
“You didn't,” Jack noted.
“I'm a priest. I have to drink. What exactly are you looking for?”
“If we can get preliminary agreement from the major players, we want to get negotiations going ASAP, but this end of the equation has to be done very quietly. The President needs a quick evaluation of his options. That's what I'm doing.”
“Will Israel play?”
“If they don't, they're fucked — excuse me, but that's exactly where things are.”
“You're right, of course, but will they have the sense to recognize their position?”
“Father, all I do is gather and evaluate information. People keep asking me to tell fortunes, but I don't know how. What I do know is that what we saw on TV is going to ignite the biggest firestorm since Hiroshima, and we sure as hell have to try to do something before it burns up a whole region.”
“Eat. I have to think for a few minutes, and I do that best when I'm chewing on something.”
It was good advice, Ryan knew a few minutes later. The food soaked up the coffee acid in his stomach, and the energy from the food would help him get through the day. Inside an hour, he was on the move again, this time to the State Department. By lunch he was on his way home to pack, managing to nap for three hours along the way. He stopped back at Alden's White House office for a session that dragged far into the night. Alden had really taken charge there, and the skull session in his office covered a huge amount of ground. Before dawn Jack headed off to Andrews Air Force Base. He was able to call his wife from the VIP Lounge. Jack had hoped to take his son to a ball game over the weekend, but for him there wouldn't be a weekend. A final courier arrived from CIA, State, and
