hand. “You may feel free to pay me whatever you think fair”—it would be plenty, more than a mere million D- Mark! — “but please understand that I do not sell myself for money.”
“It is a pleasure to meet an honorable man,” Ghosn said, with a satisfied look.
Bock thought they had both laid it on rather thick, but kept his peace. He already suspected how Fromm would be paid.
“So,” Ghosn said next. “Where do we begin?”
“First, we think. I need paper and pencil.”
“And who might you be?” Ryan asked.
“Ben Goodley, sir.”
“ Boston?” Ryan asked. The accent was quite distinctive.
“Yes, sir. Kennedy School. I'm a postdoctoral fellow and, well, now I'm a White House Fellow also.”
“ Nancy?” Ryan turned to his secretary.
“The Director has him on your calendar, Dr. Ryan.”
“Okay, Dr. Goodley,” Ryan said with a smile, “come on in.” Clark took his seat after sizing the new guy up.
“Want some coffee?”
“You have decaf?” Goodley asked.
“You want to work here, boy, you'd better get used to the real stuff. Grab a seat. Sure you don't want any?”
“I'll pass, sir.”
“Okay.” Ryan poured his customary mug and sat down behind his desk. “So, what are you doing in this puzzle palace?”
“The short version is, looking for a job. I did my dissertation on intelligence operations, their history and prospects. I need to see some things to finish my work at Kennedy, then I want to find out if I can do the real thing.”
Jack nodded. That sounded familiar enough. “Clearances?”
“TS, SAP/SAR. Those are new. I already have a 'secret', because some of my work at Kennedy involved going into some presidential archives, mainly in D.C., but some of the stuff in Boston is still sensitive. I was even part of the team that FOI'd a lot of stuff from the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Dr. Nicholas Bledsoe, his work?”
“That's right.”
“I didn't buy all of Nick's conclusions, but that was a hell of a piece of research.” Jack raised his mug in salute.
Goodley had written nearly half of that monograph, including the conclusions. “What did you take issue with — if I may ask?”
“Khrushchev's action was fundamentally irrational. I think — and the record bears this out — that his placing the missiles there was impulsive rather than reasoned.”
“I disagree. The paper pointed out that the principal Soviet concern was our IRBMs in Europe, especially the ones in Turkey. It seems logical to conclude that it was all a ploy to reach a stable situation regarding theater forces.”
“Your paper didn't report on everything,” Jack said.
“Such as?” Goodley asked, hiding his annoyance.
“Such as the intel we were getting from Penkovskiy and others. Those documents are still classified, and will remain so for another twenty years.”
“Isn't fifty years a long time?”
“Sure is,” Ryan agreed. “But there's a reason. Some of that information is still — well, not exactly current, but it would reveal some tricks we don't want revealed.”
“Isn't that just a little extreme?” Goodley asked, as dispassionately as he could manage.
“Let's say we had Agent B ANANA operating back then. Okay, he's dead now — died of old age, say — but maybe Agent P EAR was recruited by him, and he's still working. If the Sovs find out who B ANANA was, that might give them a clue. Also you have to think about certain methods of message-transfer. People have been playing baseball for a hundred fifty years, but a change-up is still a change-up. I used to think the same way you do, Ben. You learn that most of the things that are done here are done for a reason.”
Captured by the system, Goodley thought.
“By the way, you did notice that Khrushchev's last batch of tapes pretty much proved Nick Bledsoe wrong on some of his points — one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Let's say that John Kennedy had hard intel in the spring of 1961, really good stuff that Khrushchev wanted to change the system. In '58, he'd effectively gutted the Red Army, and he was trying to reform the Party. Let's say that Kennedy had hard stuff on that, and he was told by a little bird that if he cut the Russkies a little slack, maybe we could have had a rapprochement in the 6os. Glasnost, say, thirty years early. Let's say all that happened, and the President blew the call, decided for political reasons that it was disadvantageous to cut Nikita a little slack… That would mean that the 1960s were all a great big mistake. Vietnam, everything, all a gigantic screwup.”
“I don't believe it. I've been through the archives. It's not consistent with everything we know about—”
“Consistency in a politician?” Ryan interrupted. “There's a revolutionary concept.”
If you're saying that really happened—'
“It was a hypothetical,” Jack said with a raised eyebrow. Hell, he thought, the information was all out there for anyone who wanted to pull it together. That it had never been done was just another manifestation of a wider and more troubling problem. But the part that worried him was right in this building. He'd leave history to historians… until, someday, he decided to rejoin their professional ranks. And when will that be, Jack?
“Nobody'd ever believe it.”
“Most people believe that Lyndon Johnson lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy because of the Tet Offensive, too. Welcome to the world of intelligence, Dr. Goodley. You know what's the hard part of recognizing the truth?” Jack asked.
“What's that?”
“Knowing that something just bit you on the ass. It's not as easy as you think.”
“And the breakup of the Warsaw Pact?”
“Case in point,” Ryan agreed. “We had all kinds of indicators, and we all blew the call. Well, that's not true, exactly. A lot of the youngsters in the DI — Directorate of Intelligence,” Jack explained unnecessarily, which struck Goodley as patronizing “were making noise, but the section chiefs pooh-poohed it.”
“And you, sir?”
“If the Director's agreeable, we can let you see some of that. Most of it, in fact. The majority of our agents and field officers got faked out of their jockstraps, too. We all could have done better, and that's as true of me as it is of anybody else. If I have a weakness, it's that I have too tactical a focus.”
“Trees instead of the forest?”
“Yep,” Ryan admitted. “That's the big trap here, but knowing about it doesn't always help a whole hell of a lot.”
“I guess that's why they sent me over,” Goodley observed.
Jack grinned. “Hell, that's not terribly different from how I got started here. Welcome aboard. Where do you want to start, Dr. Goodley?”
Ben already had a good idea on that, of course. If Ryan could not see it coming, that was not his problem, was it?
“So, where do you get the computers?” Bock asked. Fromm was closeted away with his paper and pencils.
“ Israel for a start, maybe Jordan or Turkey,” Ghosn replied.
“This will be rather expensive,” Bock warned.
“I have already checked out the computer-controlled machine tools. Yes, they are expensive.” But not that expensive. It occurred to Ghosn that he had access to hard-currency assets that might boggle the mind of this unbeliever. “We will see what your friend requires. Whatever it is, we will get it.”
