'Tough job, but you know—Murray's right. I've met worse men. He's smarter than he lets on, too.'
'The times I've been around him, he listens well.'
'Better than that, he asks questions.' They both turned when a kid yelled, swept the room at the same time and in the same way, then turned back to the two little girls, who were sharing crayons for their respective works of art. 'Yours and ours seem to get along.'
Ours, Pat thought. That said it all. The big old bruiser at the door, Russell, she'd said. He'd be the chief of the sub-detail, and sure as hell that was one experienced agent. They'd have selected younger ones, both women, for inside work, the better to blend in. They'd be good, but not as good as he was. Ours was the key word, though. Like lions around their cubs, or just one cub in this case. O'Day wondered how he'd handle this job. It would be boring, just standing post like that, but you couldn't allow yourself to get bored. That would be a fight. He'd done his share of 'discreet surveillance' assignments, quite a feat for one of his size, but this would be far worse. Even so, a cop's eye saw the difference between them and the other preschool teachers in the room.
'Andrea, looks to me like your people know their job. Why so many?'
'I know we have this one overmanned.' Price tilted her head. 'We're still figuring this one out. Hey, we took a big hit on the Hill, y'know? Ain't gonna be any more, not on my watch, not while I run the Detail, and if the press makes noise about it, fuck 'em.' She even talked like a real cop.
'Ma'am, that's just fine with me. Well, with your permission, I have to go home and make cheese and macaronis.' He looked down. Megan was about finished with her masterpiece. The two little girls were difficult to tell apart, at least for the casual observer. That was distantly worrisome, but that was also the reason the Service was here.
'Where do you practice?' He didn't have to say practice what.
'There's a range in the old Post Office building, convenient to the White House. Every week,' she told him. 'There's not an agent here who's short of'expert, and I'll put Don up against anybody in the world.'
'Really.' O'Day's eyes sparkled. 'One day we'll have to see.'
'Your place or mine?' Price asked, with a twinkle of her own.
'MR. PRESIDENT, Mr. Golovko on three.' That was the direct line. Sergey Nikolayevich was showing off again. Jack pushed the button.
'Yes, Sergey?'
'Iran.'
'I know,' the President said.
'How much?' the Russian asked, his bags already packed to go home.
'We'll know in ten days or so for sure.'
'Agreed. I offer cooperation.' This was getting to be habit forming, Jack thought, but it was always something to think over first.
'I will discuss that with Ed Foley. When will you be back home?'
'Tomorrow.'
'Call me then.' Amazing that he could speak so efficiently with a former enemy. He'd have to get Congress trained that way, the President thought with a smile. Ryan stood from his desk and headed into the secretaries' room. 'How about some munchies before my next appointment—'
'Hello, Mr. President,' Price said. 'Have a minute?'
Ryan waved her in while his number-two secretary called the mess. 'Yes?'
'Just wanted to tell you, I looked over the security arrangements for your children. It's pretty tight.' If this was supposed to please POTUS, he didn't show it, Andrea thought. But that was understandable. Hey, we have enough bodyguards on your children. What a world it was. Two minutes later, she was talking with Raman, who was ready to head off duty, having arrived in the White House at 5:00 A.M. There was, as usual, nothing to report. It had been a quiet day in the House.
The younger agent walked out to his car and drove off the compound, first showing his pass to the gate guards and waiting for the fortified gate to open—a nine-inch-square post held the leaves in place, and looked strong enough to stop a dump truck. From there he made his way through the concrete barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue—which until fairly recently had been a public street. He turned west and headed toward Georgetown, where he had a loft apartment, but this time he didn't go all the way home. Instead he turned onto Wisconsin Avenue, then right again to park.
It was vaguely amusing that the man should be a rug merchant. So many Americans thought that Iranians became either terrorists, rug merchants, or impolite physicians. This one had left Persia—but most Americans didn't connect Persian rugs with Iran, as though they were two distinct nations—more than fifteen years before. On his wall was a photograph of his son who, he told those who asked, had been killed in the Iran-Iraq war. That was quite true. He also told those who expressed interest that he hated the government of his former country. That was not true. He was a sleeper agent. He'd never had a single contact with anyone even connected at third hand with Tehran. Maybe he'd been checked out. More likely he had not. He belonged to no association, didn't march, speak out, or otherwise do anything but conduct a prosperous business—like Raman, he didn't even attend a mosque. He had, in fact, never met Raman, and so when the man walked in the front door, his interest only concerned which of his wide selection of handmade rugs the man might want. Instead, after determining that there was no one else in the shop at the moment, his visitor went directly to the counter.
'The picture on the wall. He looks like you. Your son?'
'Yes,' the man replied with a sadness which had never left him, promises of Paradise or not. 'He was killed in the war.'
'Many lost sons in that conflict. Was he a religious boy?'
'Does it matter now?' the merchant asked, blinking hard.
'It always matters,' Raman said, in a voice that was totally casual.
With that, both men went over to the nearer of two rug piles. The dealer flipped a few corners.
'I am in position. I require instructions on timing.' Raman didn't have a code name, and the code phrase he'd just exchanged was only known to three men. The dealer didn't know anything beyond that, except to repeat the nine words he'd just heard to someone else, then wait for a reply, and pass that along.
'Would you mind filling out a card for my client list?'
That Raman did, putting down the name and address of a real person. He'd picked the name in the phone book—actually a crisscross directory right in the White House, which had made it easy to select a number that was one digit off his own. A tick mark over the sixth digit told the dealer where to add 1 to 3 to get 4 and so complete the call. It was excellent tradecraft, taught to his Savak instructor by an Israeli more than two decades earlier and not forgotten, just as neither man from the holy city of Qom had forgotten much of anything.
22 TIME ZONES
THE SIZE OF THE EARTH and the location of the trouble spots made for great inconvenience. America was going to sleep when other parts of the world were just waking up to a new day, a situation made even more difficult by the fact that the people eight or nine hours ahead were also the ones making decisions to which the rest of the world had to react. Added to that was the fact that America's vaunted CIA had little in the way of agents or officers to predict what was happening. That left to STORM TRACK and PALM BOWL the duty of reporting mainly what the local press and TV were saying. And so while the U.S. President slept, people struggled to collect and analyze information which, when he saw it, would be late by a working day, and the analysis of which might or might not be accurate. Even then, the best of the spooks in Washington were in the main too senior to be stuck with night duty —they had families, after all—and so they also had to be brought up to speed before they could make their own pronouncements, which involved discussion and debate, further delaying presentation of vital national-security information. In military terms it was called 'having the initiative' — making the first move, physical, political, or psychological. How much the better if the other side in the race started off a third of a day behind.
Things were slightly better in Moscow, which was only an hour off Tehran time, and in the same time zone with Baghdad, but here for once the RVS, successor to the KGB, was in the same unhappy position as CIA, with nearly all of its networks wiped out in both countries. But for Moscow the problems were also somewhat closer to
