Ralph Peters (23 page)

President Waters felt greater confidence than ever in this man with the ruined face and the firm voice. As a politician, he recognized that he had been a bit taken in by his own desire to believe that all would go well, coupled with the infectious persuasiveness of this colonel in the odd foreign uniform. He had been listening to exactly the sort of speech he wanted to hear, a speech in which the spoken words themselves were far less important than the manner in which they were spoken. Yet, this recognition of his own weakness did little to dilute the new confidence he felt. That, too, would slip away. But, for the moment, he felt that things might not go so badly after all.

He wondered if he should tell this hard-eyed colonel about the Scrambler business, to warn him, just in case there was something to it. But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended against bringing up the matter. And, surely, these military people knew among themselves what was best for their own.

Still, the Scrambler business nagged at him. The instincts that had led him to the White House said,
"
Tell him. Right now.
"

The briefing room door opened, and John Miller poked his head inside.

"
Excuse me. Mr. President, if we could clear the monitors for a moment, the sandwiches are here. And your salad.
"

President Waters nodded. But he held up his finger to the communications officer. Wait.

The President stared into the central monitor, where Colonel George Taylor's discolored face waited impassively, larger than life-size.

"
Colonel Taylor,
"
the President said,
"
we're going to blank the system out for just a moment. But I'd like you to stand by. We have an intelligence briefing coming up, and I'd like you to listen in. To ensure that we all have exactly the same picture of what's going on.
"

Waters thought that his logic sounded pretty good. But, in his heart, he knew that the intelligence update was only a pretext. He simply was not quite ready to release this man who had so much confidence to share.

When the monitor came back to life, Taylor saw the President with a forkful of lettuce in his right hand. The man looked surprised, and Taylor figured that the sudden reappearance of his face was not particularly good for anyone's appetite. The monitor system was superb—state of the art—and keyed to respond to certain registered voices, giving the effect of brisk, clean editing. But it had not been programmed to beautify its subjects.

"
Colonel Taylor,
"
the President said.
"
You're back with us. Good. We're just about to begin the intelligence update. It will probably mean more to you than to me.
"
The President's eyes strayed from contact with the monitor, hunting more deeply into the briefing room.
"
Miss Fitzgerald?
"
he said.

Before Taylor could prepare himself, the monitor filled with a shot of Daisy, showing her from mid-thigh upward. For an instant it seemed as though their eyes made contact, then Taylor realized, thankfully, that it was merely an illusion. His face would no longer be on the monitor now. Only the intelligence briefer and the visual supports.

He relaxed slightly.
Daisy.
He had tried so hard not to think of her. There was too much to resolve, too much to fear—and he had far more important matters with which to occupy his mind. But, watching her now, as she went through the formalities of opening her portion of the briefing, he was struck by how weary she, too, looked, and by how much, and how helplessly, he loved her.

A map of the south-central Soviet Union replaced Daisy on the screen, while her voice oriented the President to the location of cities, mountains, and seas. She swiftly recapitulated the most significant developments, speaking in terms far simpler than those she had used when briefing Taylor on the developing situation in her office in the old CIA building in Langley, now property of the Unified Intelligence Agency that had been formed to eradicate interagency rivalry and parochialism in the wake of the African disaster and the unforeseen dimensions of the trade war with the Japanese. Taylor smiled to himself. He remembered how her hair had been pinned up, as though in haste, and the visible smudge on the corner of her oversize glasses. She had not reacted to the sight of him with any special distaste. She had hardly reacted at all. He had been merely another obligation in the course of a frantic day. And he remembered the first remotely personal thing she had said to him, an hour into the briefing that had been scheduled to take up thirty minutes of her time:
"
Well,
"
she had said, looking at him through those formidable glasses,
"
you certainly do your homework, Colonel. But I don't think you really understand the background of all this.
"

She was behind in her work. Far behind. And what she believed he needed to understand was not really classified, not of immediate importance. Perhaps they could put it off until another time?

Taylor had stared at her for a long, long moment, mustering his courage. Professionally, she was fierce, merciless. Yet, he imagined that he sensed something else about her too. Something he could not quite explain to himself. In the end, his voice shook as he offered her the sort of invitation he had not spoken in many years.

"
Maybe ... we could talk about it over dinner?
"

She simply stared at him. And he felt himself shrinking inside. A foolish, foolish man. To imagine that even this plain girl with the loose strands of hair wandering down over her ears would, of her own volition, face him across a dinner table. Then, without warning, without giving him time to prepare himself for the shock, she said:

"
Yes.
"

He was so surprised that he merely fumbled for words. Until she came to his aid:

"
You might as well come over to my place. It's far more private than a restaurant. We can talk shop.
"
She considered for a moment.
"
I'm not much of a cook, I'm afraid.
"

"
It doesn't matter.
"

She made a frumpy, disapproving face, as though he did not fully realize the risk he was taking.

"
Pasta all right?
"
she asked.

"
Terrific.
"

"
This is,
"
she said,
"
strictly business, of course.
"

"
Of course.
"

He had spent the rest of the day tormenting himself. It had not mattered to him before that his one decent suit did not fit very well. Neither did he know what sort of tie was in fashion. He had always accepted that these more polished men who hastened down the corridors and sidewalks of the District were a different breed, that he would never look like them, that he was meant to appear in his uniform. But he could not go to dinner in uniform. Instead of stopping by the office of an acquaintance in the Pentagon as planned, he went downtown and bought himself a new shirt and tie, relying on the salesman's recommendations.

Only when he was dressing in his hotel room, did he realize that the shirt would not do without being pressed. And there was no time to use the valet service. He settled for the bright new tie on an old shirt that had made the trip to Washington without too many wrinkles, and as he fumbled with the knot in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to him that this probably
was
strictly business on her part and that she had probably invited him to her home because she was ashamed to be seen with him in public. The thought made him sit down on the closed lid of the commode, tie slack around his collar. He considered phoning her and canceling. But the thought of another evening alone in his room with his portable computer seemed impossible to bear.

He appeared at her door with flowers and a bottle of wine. To his relief, she smiled, and hurried to put the flowers in water. She glanced at the wine, then quietly put it aside, calling out to him,
"
Please. Sit down. Anywhere. I'll just be a minute.
"
And he sat down, uncomfortable in his suit, admiring the surroundings of this woman's life, not because they were especially beautiful or aesthetically appealing, but simply because the ability to sit in the intimacy of a woman's rooms, the object of her attentions on any level, was a forgotten pleasure. He could not sit for long, though. The spicy smell and the noises from the kitchen made him move, and he examined the prints on her walls without really seeing them, glanced over the titles of her books without really registering them, waiting for the moment when she would come back through the doorframe.

He had not had the courage to kiss her that first night, nor even to ask her if he might see her again. He had tortured himself through the night and morning until
he finally found the strength to dial her number at work. She wasn't in. He did not have the firmness to leave a message, convinced she would not return the call. Later, he tried
again—and reached her.

"
Listen ... I thought that perhaps ... we could have
dinner again?
"

The distant, disembodied voice replied quickly:

"
I'm sorry, I've got something on for tonight.
"

That was it, then.

"
Well . . . thanks for last night. I really enjoyed it.
"

Goodbye.

"
Wait,
"
she said.
"
Could you make it tomorrow night instead? I know a place over in Alexandria
...
"

Later, when he began to learn of her reputation, the effect upon him was brutal. For all his age and ordeals, he was little more than a schoolboy emotionally. The sexual escapades of his youth were enshrined in his memory, but the following years of loneliness had brought with them a sort of second virginity, and the thought that the woman he loved, whom he had even imagined he might marry, could be the butt of other men's jokes, little more than a creature they used and discarded, burned horribly in him. But he could not, would not, give her up. He tried to reason with himself. These were modem times. Everybody slept around. Anyway, what did it matter? In what way did it diminish her as a person, or lover, if she had shared her bed with others? Could you physically feel their leavings on her skin? Could you taste them? Did it really change anything about her when you were with her? How did the past matter, anyway? What mattered, after all, was the present—not who you had been, but who you had become. And who was he to criticize her? A wreck of a man? A fool, with the face of a devil? What right did he have?

Yet, the thought of her past would not let him be. He held her tightly, fearing she would be gone, but also trying somehow to make her his property and his alone, to make all of the ghosts disappear. In the darkness he would torment himself with the images of his beloved with other men, and he wondered, too, how he could possibly compare with those other men, the well-dressed, handsome men who knew from birth how to do everything correctly. Into whose arms would she tumble when he was gone?

He remembered the morning when they had said goodbye. The look of her, unpolished, askew, not quite awake, and the rich long-night smell in the air around her and on his hands. She seemed more beautiful to him in that slow gray light, in her spotted robe, than any woman he had ever seen. He did not want to leave her, did not want to go to some distant land to fulfill the long-held purpose of his life. He only wanted to sit and drink one more cup of coffee with her, to capture indelibly in his memory the wayward confusion of her hair and the disarray of the tabletop on which she rested her hand. But there had been no more time. Only one last moment wrenched from duty, the time needed to say,
"
I love you.
"
And she did not really reply. He ached to hear those words from her. In a sense, that was why he had spoken them. But she only waited, pretending she was still more asleep than in fact she was. He had repeated himself, trying to bully the words out of her. But she only mumbled a few half-promises, and he left her like that: an indescribably beautiful plain woman in a soiled bathrobe, slumped by a littered kitchen table. He went out into a drizzling rain, telling himself that the words did not matter. She had filled so much of his emptiness with color and beauty that the words did not matter at all.

Now Taylor sat in a secure bubble in a tin cavern in the wastes of Siberia, listening from half a world away to the words of the woman he loved. She spoke in her brisk, assured, professional voice, the bit of low raspiness that was so erotic under other circumstances merely masculine now. Nothing in her tone, or her demeanor, gave the slightest hint that she knew he was listening, that she had watched him while he had been unaware. He was glad he had not known she was in the room while he had been speaking with the President. Somehow, he was certain, he would have collapsed into folly and incapability in the knowledge of her presence.

But she was stronger. She was every bit as serious as her subject, as her voice intoned over the succession of maps, films, and photos on the monitor. Taylor listened,
fighting to pay attention.

"
... The last pause in ground operations by the enemy seems to have had a more complex purpose, however. During the lull, the opposing coalition moved all of the Soviet rebel forces up to the front—forces that are still nominally Soviet and that are native to the region, in a broad sense. Such a move accomplishes two things. First, it allows indigenous 'liberating' forces to lead the attack northward out of Kazakhstan and across the border into western Siberia, and second, it bleeds the rebel forces white, ensuring that, when the smoke clears, the Iranians and the Islamic Union will clearly be militarily preeminent and that, thus, there will be less of a likelihood of any effective indigenous reaction against foreign exploitation of the mineral wealth of both Kazakhstan and Siberia. The Iranians and the Islamic Union will effectively control the key territories east of the Urals—and the Japanese will exercise a significant measure of control over them, in turn, since their military power would collapse without continued Japanese assistance. There is strong evidence, for instance, to support the theory that every military system exported by Japan has a sleeper virus buried in its electronics, which, if triggered, destroys the utility of the system. No matter what nominal government might be in place east of the Urals, the Japanese would be the de facto masters of northern Asia.
"

The monitor filled with Daisy's image. Intense, determined, her personal vulnerability was hidden behind the set of her chin and the armor of those oversize glasses. But she looked so tired. Taylor wished he could fold her in his arms. Just for a moment.

Had she forgotten him? Already?

"
Unless we stop them, of course,
"
a voice said. The secretary of defense. Another lawyer who had not spent a single day of his life in uniform. Taylor had to give the man credit, though. He had acquired a surprising grasp of his responsibilities. Unlike the secretary's old friend, the President himself.