“Good idea,” said the policeman, whose hand remained poised near his weapon as the FBI agent walked out. The small concrete patio near the sidewalk was crowded with smoking refugees, but Fisher found an unoccupied table near the Dumpster, where the refreshing aroma of spent coffee beans mixed with more earthly scents.
“Fisher.”
“McDonald.”
“Betty, how are you?” he asked, starting to sip the coffee. “Did the GSA help?”
“About as much as Congressman Taft,” she said.
“Good,” said Fisher. It was best not to acknowledge sarcasm in an amateur.
She sighed. Fisher recognized the sound of a Tootsie Roll being unwrapped.
“We persevered despite your help. There are some interesting intersections,” she said between chews. “Ferrone Radiavonics, which according to your papers worked on the F/A-22V’s radar.”
“Yup?”
“They’re owned by a company which is owned by another company which is part of a trust controlled by the people who control El-Def.”
“This is going somewhere, right?”
“Megan York’s family and friends have an important interest in about half a dozen defense projects besides Cyclops,” she told him.
“Controlling interests?”
“Big interests.”
“Like which ones?”
“God, Fisher, do you do anything besides drink coffee and smoke cigarettes all day?”
“Nope.”
“The augmented-ABM project is the biggest. The connection’s rather convoluted.”
“Bonham’s involved?”
“He has stock in some of the companies. His stake is unclear. There are others.” Betty ran down a list that included an unmanned submarine project and a satellite network. “Awful lot of stock to own, given his supposed net worth. Get this: He claims his condo cost under two-fifty. Can’t possibly be, not near the Beltway. No way.”
As she talked the call-waiting feature beeped Fisher’s line with another call.
“Gotta get going, Betty. Keep digging.”
“Digging for what?”
He clicked onto the other line and immediately regretted doing so.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Why, Jemma, hello to you. Actually, I am in a coffee emporium in downtown central north Alexandria. I think it’s downtown. Hard to tell.”
“I need you to get on a plane right away. You have to go to Afghanistan. Did you catch the President’s speech?”
“The President?”
“Fisher, I don’t have any time for your bullshit.”
“Such language. I bet there’s an ordinance against it here.”
“Fisher — I’m going to give you twenty minutes to get over to Andrews. There’s a plane waiting.”
“A big one, I hope.”
Chapter 5
Blitz had expected some of the criticism. It was mostly knee-jerk anti-Americanism, the kind that would interpret a cure for cancer as somehow part of a plot to bring a McDonald’s restaurant to every intersection in the world. A few of the sources were surprising, or at least ironic: A German newspaper accused the U.S. of trying to enforce its “ethos” on the world, as if eliminating all life-forms from several hundred thousand square miles was a lifestyle choice.
But there were a few nuanced opinions — he couldn’t call them criticisms exactly — that did disturb him. One, recognizing that mankind now stood at the precipice of a new age, went on to warn that the shape of this age was not so clear-cut:
One of the lessons that seems not to be understood about the use of the atomic bombs against Japan was that they helped end the war precisely because they were weapons of indiscriminate annihilation. They made possible the erasing of an entire people — not simply the removal of combatants, but of all people. World War II to a great degree erased the line between combatant and noncombatant. The Allied powers involved in the fight understood — though they could not admit it publicly — that the only real way to win the war was to combine military victory with severe crippling of the civilian population. The atomic bombs were the culmination of that, a step further along the line that led from Dresden to the firebombing of Tokyo. There would have been no final victory without these mass destructions, just more in the cycle of engagements that had wracked the world for one hundred, two hundred years.
And so, when the possibility of complete destruction is removed, what then? Does it lead to more stability — to no more war, as the President declared in his forceful speech last night? Or does it lead paradoxically to an era of more instability? If a country can only be defeated in war by total annihilation — the lesson of World War II — what happens when that possibility is removed? Is the answer truly peace? Or is the result more cycles of violence? Low-grade violence compared to world wars, certainly, but inevitable and intractable nonetheless.
The American action against Iraq in the first Gulf War is a case in point. By limiting their objectives in the war, America and its allies inadvertently set the stage for years of continued conflict and great suffering, necessitating actions in 2003 which even now we do not fully understand the ramifications of. Would the result have been so much different if Saddam Hussein — or, better, a successor who rose to power by assassinating the despised leader — swore off weapons of mass destruction? Would the Kurds have been freed, the Shiite majority unchained? The Cyclops weapon — along with the ABM and augmented ABM system currently envisioned — can eliminate nuclear war. But will they make the world safer? And in pursuing this safety — admittedly a seemingly glorious goal — are we actually making ourselves less secure?…
Not only did Blitz disagree with some of the essay’s conclusions; it bothered him considerably that the essay had been written by one of his mentors, Donald Byrd, who had preceded him at Harvard and in his estimation remained his teacher. In essence, his friend was saying he had done the opposite of what he had intended.
But what was the alternative? What would he have said if they let the war go on?
“Lost in thought?” asked the President as he entered the East Sitting Room on the second floor of the White House. The President pulled one of the ornate wooden chairs from the table where one of the aides had stacked the newspapers and printouts. A silver coffee service sat on the floor; D’Amici bent over and helped himself. “So?” he said finally. “What’s the verdict?”
“Mostly positive,” said Blitz.
“I don’t mean the press reaction,” said D’Amici. He waved his hand dismissively. “Will the cease-fire hold or not?”
“I think it will,” said Blitz. “They sound scared.”
“What about the other plane? Was it Cyclops?”
D’Amici hadn’t slept — Blitz knew this for a fact, since he hadn’t himself — but he looked as if were rested and ready to go bicycling or on a picnic. The doubt he’d seen the other night was gone. He’d made the right decision, and his people had executed it perfectly.
“We’re still going through the satellite photos,” said Blitz. “Colonel Howe should be conducting the search by now.”
“Howe’s still in Afghanistan?”
“Yes, sir. The Pentagon…His aircraft have the most advanced gear available. And he volunteered.”
“He’s got a future.” The President smiled in a way that suggested he might consider adopting the colonel —
