Balance of Power

needs it most. Pray for Spain.”

Less than two minutes later they were back in the car and heading northeast across the river.

“Are you really just going to talk to the factory workers?” Aideen asked.

Maria nodded once. “Do me a favor?” she said. “Call Luis. Autodial star-seven. Ask him to locate General Rafael Amadori. Tell him why.”

“No encryption?”

Maria shook her head. “If Amadori is listening somehow and comes after us, so much the better. It’ll save us the trouble of finding him.”

Aideen punched in the code. Luis’s cellular beeped and he answered at once. Aideen passed along Maria’s request and told him about Adolfo. Luis promised to get right on it and call them back. Aideen folded away the phone.

“Who is Amadori?” she asked.

“A scholar,” she said. “He’s a military general too, but I don’t know much about his career. I only know him as a published author of articles about historic Spain.”

“Obviously, they alarm you.”

“Very much so,” Maria said. She lit a cigarette. “What do you know about our national folk hero El Cid?”

“Only that he beat back the invading Moors and helped unify Spain around 1100. And there was a movie about him with Charlton Heston.”

“There was also an epic poem and a play written by Corneille,” Maria said. “I staged it once at my theater. Anyway,” she went on, “you are partly right about El Cid. He was a knight — Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar. From around 1065 to his death in 1099 he helped the Christian king, Sancho II, and then his successor, Alfonso VI, regain the kingdom of Castile from the Moors. The Moors called him el cid—‘the lord.’ ”

“Honored by his enemies,” Aideen said. “Impressive.”

“Actually,” Maria said, “they feared him, which was his intention. When the Moorish stronghold of Valencia surrendered, El Cid violated the peace terms by slaughtering hundreds of people and burning the leader alive. He was not the pure knight that legend has made him — he would do anything to anybody to protect his homeland. It’s also a myth that he fought to unify Spain. He fought for Castile. As long as the other kingdoms remained at peace with Alfonso, as long as they paid him tribute, neither Alfonso nor El Cid cared what happened to them.

“General Amadori is an authority on El Cid,” Maria continued. “But I’ve always detected in his writings the desire to be something more.”

“You mean, to be El Cid,” Aideen said.

Maria shook her head. “El Cid was a glorified soldier of fortune. There is something more to General Amadori than waging war. If you read his essays in the political journals you’ll find that he is a leading proponent of what he calls ‘benevolent militarism.’ ”

“Sounds like a fancy name for a police state,” Aideen said.

“It is,” Maria agreed. She took a long drag on her cigarette then flicked it out the window. “But he has given the models of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia a new-old twist: militarism without conquest. He believes that if a nation is strong, there is no need to conquer other nations. Those nations will come to him to trade, to seek protection, to be aligned with greatness. His power base will grow by accretion, not war.”

“So General Amadori doesn’t want to be like Hitler,” Aideen said. “He wants to be like King Alfonso.”

“Exactly,” Maria replied. “What we may be seeing is the start of an effort to make Amadori the absolute leader of Castile and to make Castile the military hub of a new Spain. A hub which will dictate to the other regions. And Amadori has chosen this time—”

“Because he can move troops and influence events while appearing to stop a counterrevolution,” Aideen said.

Maria nodded.

Aideen looked out at the brightening sky. Her eyes lowered and her gaze ranged across the beautiful fishing village. It seemed so peaceful, so desirable, yet it had been corrupted. Here, in less than a day, over a dozen people had already died or been brutally injured. She wondered if there had ever been a time, since people first descended from trees and began despoiling Eden, if manifest destiny had ever come cheaply.

“The price in blood will be very high before Amadori can realize his dream,” Maria said, as though reading Aideen’s mind. “I am Andalusian. My people and others will fight — not to keep Spain unified but to keep Castile from becoming the heart and soul of a new Spain. It’s a rivalry which dates back to the time of El Cid. And unless we find a way to stop men like Amadori, it will continue long after we’re gone.”

No, Aideen decided. There had never been a time when people graciously accomodated other people and other ways. We were still too close to the trees for that. And among us, there were too many bull-apes who were unhappy with the size and makeup of the tribe.

But then she thought about Father Alcazar. There was a man still trying to do God’s work while in the grip of his own suffering. There were good people among the territorial carnivores. If only they had the power.

But if they did, Aideen asked herself, wouldn’t they wield it like all the rest?

She didn’t know — and after being awake for nearly twenty-four hours this wasn’t the best time to ponder the question. However, as she sat there squinting out at the blue-gold sky, thinking about what Maria had just said, she was reminded of another question.

Think about it, Martha had said to her when they were still back in the U.S. Think about how you handle someone’s agenda.

Just the way Rodgers had said, Aideen thought: with a better agenda.

The trick now was to come up with one.

NINETEEN

Monday, 9:21 P.M. Washington, D.C.

Intellectually, Paul Hood knew that the United Nations was a good idea. But emotionally, he did not have much respect for the institution. It had proven itself ineffective in war and largely ineffective in peace. It was a forum for posturing, for making accusations, and for getting a nation’s views into the press with the best possible spin.

But he had a great deal of admiration for the cool-headed new Secretary-General, Massimo Marcello Manni of Italy. A former NATO officer, senator in the Italian parliament, and ambassador to Russia, Manni had worked mightily the previous year to keep Italy from tumbling into the kind of civil war for which Spain seemed headed.

At Manni’s request, a teleconference had been arranged for 11:00 P.M. by National Security head Steve Burkow. Secretary-General Manni had been talking to the intelligence and security chiefs of all the Security Council nations to discuss the deteriorating situation in Spain. Burkow, Carol Lanning at the State Department, and new Central Intelligence Director Marius Fox — the cousin of Senator Barbara Fox — would be in on the call.

Shortly before Burkow’s office called at 8:50, Hood had already informed Bob Herbert and Ron Plummer that he wanted Darrell to remain in Madrid and Aideen to stay in the field.

“If Spain is coming apart,” Hood told his team, “then HUMINT is more important than ever.” Hood asked Herbert to make sure that Stephen Viens remained in contact with his loyal colleagues at the Pentagon-based National Reconnaissance Office. Viens was a longtime friend of Op-Center’s Matt Stoll and had always been a steadfast ally during all previous surveillance efforts. Though Viens had been temporarily relieved of his NRO duties because of an ongoing Senate investigation into funding abuses, Hood had quietly given him an office at Op-Center. Unlike most people in Washington, Hood believed in repaying devotion. The NRO had begun conducting satellite reconnaissance of military movements in Spain some forty minutes before. Hood wanted that photographic surveillance to become part of Herbert’s database. He also wanted copies of the pictures sent to McCaskey in Spain, via the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, and to the Striker team, which was airborne. At other intelligence organizations in Washington, department heads tended to covet information to give their groups an edge. But Hood believed in