Balance of Power

windows, looking down at the women.

Martha regarded her assistant. Despite the reprimand, Aideen’s gray eyes still had a glint of steel beneath her lightly freckled lids.

“Look,” Martha said, “you’re new in this arena. I brought you along because you’re a helluva linguist and you’re smart. You have a lot of potential in foreign affairs.”

“I’m not exactly new at it,” Aideen replied defensively.

“No, but you’re new on the European stage and to my way of doing things,” Martha replied. “You like frontal assaults, which is probably why General Rodgers hired you away from Ambassador Carnegie. Our Deputy Director believes in attacking problems head on. But I warned you about that when you came to work for me. I told you to turn down the heat. What worked in Mexico is not necessarily going to work here. I told you when you accepted the position that if you work for me you have to do things my way. And I prefer end runs. Skirt the main force. Finesse the enemy rather than launch an assault. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here.”

“I understand,” Aideen said. “Like I said, I may be new at this type of situation. But I’m not green. When I know the rules I can play by them.”

Martha relaxed slightly. “Okay. I’ll buy that.” She watched as Aideen tossed the tattered towelette into a trash can. “Are you okay? Do you want to find a restroom?”

“Do I need one?”

Martha sniffed the air. “I don’t think so.” She scowled. “You know, I still can’t believe you did what you did.”

“I know you can’t and I’m truly sorry,” Aideen said. “What else can I possibly say?”

“Nothing,” Martha said. She shook her head slowly. “Not a thing. I’ve seen street fighters in my day, but I have to admit I’ve never seen that.”

Martha was still shaking her head as they turned toward the imposing Palacio de las Cortes, where they were scheduled to meet very unofficially and very quietly with Deputy Serrador. According to what the veteran politician had told Ambassador Barry Neville in a very secret meeting, tension was escalating between the impoverished Andalusians in the south and the rich and influential Castilians of northern and central Spain. The government wanted help gathering intelligence. They needed to know from which direction the tension was coming — and whether it also involved the Catalonians, Galicians, Basques, and other ethnic groups. Serrador’s fear was that a concerted effort by one faction against another could rend the loosely woven quilt of Spain. Sixty years before, a civil war, which pitted the aristocracy, the military, and the Roman Catholic Church against insurgent Communists and other anarchic forces, had nearly destroyed Spain. A modern war would draw in ethnic sympathizers from France, Morocco, Andorra, Portugal, and other nearby nations. It would destabilize the southern flank of NATO and the results would be catastrophic — particularly as NATO sought to expand its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

Ambassador Neville had taken the problem back to the State Department. Secretary of State Av Lincoln decided that the State Department couldn’t afford to become involved at this early stage. If the matter exploded and they were shown to have had a hand in it, it would be difficult for the United States to help negotiate a peace. Lincoln asked Op-Center to make the initial contact and ascertain what, if anything, the United States could do to defuse the potential crisis.

Martha zipped her blue windbreaker against the sudden chill of night. “I can’t stress this enough,” she said. “Madrid is not the underbelly of Mexico City. The briefings at Op-Center didn’t cover this because we didn’t have time. But as different as the various peoples of Spain are, they all believe in one thing: honor. Yes, there are aberrations. There are bad seeds in any society. And yes, the standards aren’t consistent and they definitely aren’t always humanistic. There may be one kind of honor among politicians and another kind among killers. But they always play by the rules of the profession.”

“So those three little pigs who insisted that they show us around when we left the hotel,” Aideen said sharply, “the one who put his hand on my butt and kept it there. They were acting according to some kind of honorable sexual harassers’ code?”

“No,” Martha said. “They were acting according to a street extortionists’ code.”

Aideen’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“Those men wouldn’t have hurt us,” Martha said. “That would have been against the rules. And the rules are that they follow women, pester them, and keep at it until they get a payoff to leave them alone. I was about to give them one when you acted.”

“You were?”

Martha nodded. “That’s how it’s done here. As for the police you would have gone to, many of them collect kickbacks from the street extortionists to look the other way. Get it through your head. Playing the game, however corrupt it seems, is still diplomacy.”

“But what if you hadn’t known about their ‘profession,’ their code? I didn’t.” Aideen lowered her voice. “I was worried about having our backpacks stolen and our covers blown.”

“An arrest would have blown our covers a whole lot faster,” Martha said. She took Aideen by the arm and pulled her aside. They stood next to a building, away from pedestrian traffic. “The truth is, eventually someone would have told us how to get rid of them. People always do. That’s how the game is played, and I believe in obeying the rules of whatever game or whatever country I’m in. When I started out in diplomacy in the early 1970s on the seventh floor of the State Department, I was excited as hell. I was on the seventh floor, where all the real, heavy-duty work is done. But then I found out why I was there. Not because I was so damn talented, though I hoped I was. I was there to deal with the apartheid leaders in South Africa. I was State’s ‘in-your-face’ figure. I was a wagging finger that said, ‘If you want to deal with the U.S., you‘ll have to deal with blacks as equals.’ ” Martha scowled. “Do you know what that was like?”

Aideen made a face. She could just imagine.

“It’s not like having your fanny patted, I can tell you that,” Martha said. “But I did what I was supposed to do because I learned one thing very early. If you infract the rules or bend them to suit your temperament, even a little, it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit you get sloppy. And a sloppy diplomat is no use to the country — or to me.”

Aideen was suddenly disgusted with herself. The thirty-four-year-old foreign service officer would be the first to admit that she wasn’t the diplomat her forty-nine-year-old superior was. Few people were. Martha Mackall not only knew her way around European and Asian political circles — partly the result of summers and vacations she’d spent touring the world with her father, popular 1960s soul singer and Civil Rights activist Mack Mackall. She was also a summa cum laude MIT financial wizard who was tight with the world’s top bankers and well connected on Capitol Hill. Martha was feared but she was respected. And Aideen had to admit that in this case she was also right.

Martha looked at her watch. “Come on,” she said. “We’re due at the palace in less than five minutes.”

Aideen nodded and walked alongside her boss. The younger woman was no longer angry. She was disgusted with herself and brooded, as she usually did when she screwed up. She hadn’t been able to screw up much during her four years in army intelligence at Fort Meade. That was paint-by-numbers courier work, moving cash and top secret information to operatives domestically and abroad. Toward the end of her tenure there she interpreted ELINT — electronic intelligence — and passed it on to the Pentagon. Since the satellites and computers did all the heavy lifting there, she took special classes on elite tactics and stakeout techniques — just to get experience in those areas. Aideen didn’t have a chance to mess things up either when she left the military and became a junior political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. Most of the time she was using ELINT to help keep track of drug dealers in the Mexican military, though occasionally she was permitted to go out in the field and use some of the undercover skills she’d acquired. One of the most valuable aspects of the three years Aideen had spent in Mexico was learning the ploy that had proved so effective this afternoon — as well as offensive to Martha and the busload of commuters. After she and her friend Ana Rivera of the Mexican attorney general’s office were cornered by a pair of drug cartel muscle-men one night, Aideen discovered that the best way to fight off an attacker wasn’t by carrying a whistle or knife or by trying to kick them in the groin or scratch out their eyes. It was by keeping moist towelettes in your handbag. That’s what Ana used to clean her hands and arms after tossing around some mierda de perro.

Dog droppings. Ana had casually scooped them off the street and flung them at the toughs who were following them. Then she’d rubbed some on her arms to make sure no one grabbed them. Ana said there wasn’t an