“Do it.” Rubens looked at Telach. “Whatever it takes, Marie.”
“Thank you,” said Telach.
Rubens wanted to stay, but the meeting was far too important.
Surely his boss could handle it. Rubens’ place was here.
“We have the terminal manager back,” said Rockman. “He says there was a mix-up in papers, but she is fine.”
“Tell him there is another plane on the way. Imply very strongly that she must be on it. No — state that directly. And there will be no repercussions so long as she is. And alive.”
“Go,” said Rockman to the translator. The runner looked at his screen — the words were being translated there by a special program — then held up his thumb.
“I’m going to the White House,” Rubens told Telach. “Keep me informed.”
Traveling to the White House with his boss, Vice Admiral Devlin Brown, meant a quick helicopter ride rather than the more tiresome car caravan down to D.C. It also meant a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation, a rare occurrence in a typical workday.
“I saw the General this morning,” said Rubens as the helicopter, a specially equipped civilian version of the Sikorsky Blackhawk, lifted off.
“How is he?” asked Brown.
“Very bad,” said Rubens.
“A shame. A friend of mine’s mother had Alzheimer’s. She was very violent toward the end.”
“He’s not that, thank God. Not in his nature, I think.”
“A feisty old bird like him, not violent?” There had been several directors between Brown and Rosenberg, but many tales about him still circulated.
“I don’t know if he was so much feisty as determined,” said Rubens. “If you crossed him, I would imagine then it might seem like uncomfortable.”
“I hope you stick up for me as well when I’m packed on the top floor of a nursing home.”
“His daughter has gone ahead with her threat,” said Rubens. “I expect the suit will be filed any day. I’m to talk to the attorney about it tomorrow.”
“She really is a piece of work, isn’t she? Very greedy. How much is his cousin worth?”
“Fifteen million, in that neighborhood.” The General stood to inherit everything his slightly older cousin owned when he died. The cousin was also in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimer’s; physically, he was in somewhat worse shape, and not given very long to live.
“If we make it clear that she can have access to the money, will she drop the suit?”
From Brown’s point of view — and the NSA’s — the proceeding wasn’t about the General at all. The General had a vast store of personal papers and other effects, presumably containing a great deal of information about the agency. It was rumored that he had been working on a memoir before he got sick. Rubens’ protests to the contrary, General Rosenberg was a feisty old bird, and it was very possible that he had recorded his thoughts on a wide range of agency projects. The agency had a series of confidentiality agreements and the resources to legally prevent anything he wrote or said from being published, and there was no question it would move to do so if necessary. However, discretion was always the better part of valor as far as the NSA was concerned, and heading off a potentially messy — and public — confrontation was infinitely better than arming the men in black with subpoenas and sending them to confiscate a moving van’s worth of uninventoried papers, notes, tapes, and computer disks.
But in this matter, Rubens was
“I don’t know that there is a basis for compromise with her,” said Rubens.
“She’s that much of a witch, eh?” asked the admiral.
“Stubborn. Like her father,” he answered.
“Is his care adequate? Perhaps we could arrange for him to be moved to the facility she suggested. Mount Ina, was it?”
The facility in question was a private nursing home where care cost about ten thousand dollars a month. It was an excellent facility, and if the decision had been his, Rubens would have gladly moved the General — and footed the bill personally, if necessary. But the General had expressly forbidden it: his cousin was there, and whether the General stood to inherit his money or not, he hated him. In fact, if he were in his right mind, he probably would have denounced the inheritance somehow or given it away to a charity — preferably one his cousin couldn’t stand.
“Have you thought about moving him?” asked Brown when Rubens didn’t answer his question.
“Yes.”
“You’d pay with your own money, wouldn’t you?”
“For the General there is nothing that I would not do. He would, however, have felt betrayed if I offered it. He did not take charity. But from an objective point of view, his care now is as good as is possible. The people who watch him are decent people. They are genuinely concerned. That would appear the most important thing.”
“Do you need additional legal help?”
“I believe the lawyer I retained will be sufficient,” said Rubens. “And a lawyer from the NSA would only help Rebecca make her case.”
“Keep me informed,” said Brown, turning his attention to the papers he’d brought along.
Despite the fact that the two NSA officials were running ten minutes ahead of schedule, Secretary of State James Lincoln and his two aides had beaten them into the Oval Office. Lincoln was holding forth on the importance of rewarding France for its steps over the past year to align more closely with American Middle Eastern policies — a relevant if not uncomplicated point, given the President’s pending visit to France at the end of the week.
“Ah, there you are, Admiral. Billy, hello,” said President Jeffrey Marcke, swinging upright in his chair. “Secretary Lincoln is just reminding me that the French helped with our Revolution.”
Lincoln’s smile seemed a little pained.
“Maybe Admiral Brown will tell us about John Paul Jones,” added the President. He loved to tweak his advisers, and Lincoln was an easy mark. “Didn’t the French give him a ship?”
“The French have been interesting allies throughout history,” admitted Lincoln. “But they are coming around. They’re trying to make up for their miscues before the Second Gulf War. Better late than never.”
“Billy has a chateau in France, don’t you?” said the President, changing targets.
Rubens winced internally but tried to act nonplussed. “To be more precise, the chateau is my mother’s.”
“It overlooks the Loire near Montbazon. Heck of a view,” said Marcke. He had been there when he was still a senator, a few years before. “But if I recall, William, you don’t particularly like the French.”
“I try not to let personal opinions cloud professional judgment,” said Rubens.
Jake Namath, the head of the CIA, appeared at the doorway, followed by the deputy director of the CIA for operations, Debra Collins. George Hadash, the national security adviser, was right behind them.
“Gentlemen, Ms. Collins. Please sit down,” said the President. “The Secretary of State and I have been discussing French history. Mr. Rubens has come to talk about something slightly more recent, with unfortunate implications for the future. William, you have the floor.”
“In the late nineteen-fifties, the French shifted their nuclear weapons program into high gear,” Rubens said, launching into his brief. “They began refining plutonium and shifted to that as a basic weapons material after working with uranium. In 1960, they exploded a sixty- to seventy-kiloton weapon in Algeria near Reggane in the Sahara. Within roughly a year’s time, there were three more explosions. These were billed as tests, although at least one was a hastily arranged detonation to keep a half-finished weapon from falling into the hands of the so- called mutineering generals.”
Rubens glanced at Hadash. The revolt of the French generals was not well known outside of France and Africa, and even some of the histories that reported it confused basic information such as the dates and locations. Rubens and Hadash, however, knew it all very well: Fifteen years before, Hadash had devoted an entire week of his seminar at MIT talking about it. In his opinion, it not only represented Europe’s last attempt to hold on to African colonies; it also showed the futility of military insurrections in an industrialized democracy.
That was Hadash’s view. Rubens had written a rather long paper arguing that it did not.
