LATE NIGHT IN THE WHITE
HOUSE
The colonel is
febrile, jittering about the room with gung ho enthusiasm. “That
was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!” He paces
over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall,
turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You
understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you
running the company, and we wouldn’t have this fuckup in Tehran.”
He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm,
burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger
on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to
bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel
“sir”—he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command. “That’s why
I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office,
to work on my team as company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that
he’s agreed.”
Roger can’t stop
himself. “To work here, sir?” Here is
in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension
hanging off the White House. Whoever the colonel is, he’s got
pull, in positively magical quantities.
“What will I be doing, sir? You said your team—”
“Relax a bit. Drink
your coffee.” The colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down.
Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the
Marine Corps crest. “The president told me to organize a team,”
says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his
coffee, “to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole
commies down in Nicaragua. ‘We’re eyeball-to-eyeball with an Evil
Empire, Ozzie, and we can’t afford to blink’—those were his exact
words. The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we’re better
than they are: buncha hicks, like some third-world
dictatorship—Upper Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down
and cut them up. Don’t give them a chance to whack the shoe on the
UN table, demand concessions. If they want to bluff, I’ll call ’em
on it. If they want to go toe-to-toe, I’ll dance with ’em.” He’s up
and pacing again. “The company used to do that, and do it okay,
back in the fifties and sixties. But too many bleeding hearts—it
makes me sick. If you guys went back to wet ops today, you’d have
journalists following you every time you went to the john in case
it was newsworthy.
“Well, we aren’t
going to do it that way this time. It’s a small team, and the buck
stops here.” The colonel pauses, then glances at the ceiling.
“Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone who
knows the Company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who
can go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking
committee of ass-watching bureaucrats. I’m also getting someone
from the Puzzle Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big
Black.” He glances at Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he’s cleared
for National Security Agency—Puzzle Palace—intelligence, and knows
about Big Black, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is so
secret that even its existence is still classified.
Roger is impressed by
this colonel, despite his better judgment. Within the byzantine
world of the US intelligence services, he is talking about building
his very own pocket battleship and sailing it under the Jolly Roger
with letters of marque and reprise signed by the president. But
Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the limits of
what Colonel North is capable of. “What about FEVER DREAM,
sir?”
The colonel puts his
coffee cup down. “I own it,” he says, bluntly. “And NIGHTMARE. And
PLUTO. Any means necessary, he said,
and I have an executive order with the ink still damp to prove it.
Those projects aren’t part of the national command structure
anymore. Officially they’ve been stood down from active status and
are being considered for inclusion in the next round of
arms-reduction talks. They’re not part of the deterrent ORBAT
anymore; we’re standardizing on just nuclear weapons. Unofficially,
they’re part of my group, and I will use them as necessary to
contain and reduce the Evil Empire’s warmaking
abilities.”
Roger’s skin crawls
with an echo of that childhood terror. “And the Dresden Agreement .
. . ?”
“Don’t worry. Nothing
short of them breaking it would lead me
to do so.” The colonel grins, toothily. “Which is where you come in
. . .”