Deadly Waters (5 page)

VII

06/14/06 12:56 Eastern Daylight Time

Assistant Undersecretary of Defense in Charge of Post-Terrorist Domestic Reactions Margaret Smythe scanned through the first forty-two pages of the new CIA sub-director’s report on the possibilities of future terrorist events in approximately ninety seconds. Then she ate lunch at her desk and had a glance at the far more readable document on the same subject she had written herself. Within the first ten words of her first paragraph she had dragged in the name of the U.S. senator whose committee would oversee both reports. Ten words later she had called the same senator “brilliant.” The CIA report did not drop a single prominent name until page four, and then the author had cited something the president had said, as if the president, or anyone else at the White House, was going to look at a sub-director’s report!

A glance at her watch told Ms. Smythe the DoD’s Department of Counter Terrorism, Chief Samuel Bunker, and Ronald Goodman, a title-less functionary from the National Security Administration, were twenty-six minutes late for their meeting to discuss the possibility of weapons of mass destruction being used within the United States. Bunker was a man with some clout and was someone she had to pretend to respect. Goodman she simply could not abide. Another typical Yalie, she thought and unconsciously wrote “Eli” and “Skull and Bonehead” in the margin of her report. She immediately scribbled the words out when she considered that a committee aide might actually read that far. She decided while she waited she would have nothing more to do with him. Her assistant had told her two days before that the DoD rumor mill said Goodman no longer had the ear of the best friend of the Secretary of Defense’s best friend. Ms. Smythe regretted she had ever gone to bed with him.

Margaret put everything aside upon hearing conversation outside her office door at the receptionist’s desk. Ronald Goodman entered her doorway a moment later, briefcase in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. His manner, as Margaret had come to expect, was entirely too familiar to please her.

“Terribly sorry, Maggie,” he said in the quasi-English accent he sometimes affected. “Had to chat up Admiral Rollington this A.M. The old tar got to talking and I couldn’t get up. Oh, Bunky”-he meant Samuel Bunker-“won’t be joining us today.”

“Security Council meeting?” asked Margaret.

“In point of fact, golf,” said Ron and found himself a chair at the front of her small room. “He, Dryer from
The
Post
, Ruben Mitchell and Congressman Somebody are making a foursome.”

From the logo on his paper cup she knew that for the past half hour Ron had been inside the Starbucks twenty blocks from the Pentagon. Nonetheless, she went across the room and kissed him on the lips. “I’ve missed you, Ronnie,” she lied.

“Maggie,” he said, “the name is Ronald. Only my mother calls me Ronnie.”

“I want it to be Ronnie,” said Margaret. “I outrank you. I can call you by the diminutive. And it’s not Maggie. Father called me that, and you aren’t he.”

Margaret Rawling Smythe’s father, Russell Farthington Smythe (nee Smith), was a retired G-7 who worked in the days of Camelot. Ronald Goodman was hardly flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as the lowly functionary. Margaret Smythe slid onto his lap and removed his tie. “Red ties are for powerful men, Ronnie,” she chided him. “Besides, this one’s too long. Long things look out of place on you.”

“Did you get a chance to peruse Galenger’s report, Miss Smythe?” he asked.

“You mean the stupid CIA brief?” she asked. “It’s a piece of trash. What’s it doing making the rounds?”

“I’m afraid the President’s people disagree with you,” said Goodman, making a

resolute facial expression he likewise thought was British. “Galenger has hit upon the nuclear weapons in hands of Arab terrorists theme. Very hot at the moment, Miss Smythe. He throws in militia men poisoning the water supply, the IRA setting off bombs in Manhattan, disappointed Y2K nuts conspiring with out-of-work Russian scientists to start a new plague. He covers all the bases. The security advisors think he’s hot.”

Margaret pondered how much she hated Ronald for telling her this when he knew the powers that be were ignoring her latest report, some of which she had actually written herself. She returned to her desk and put her hand on her document, as if to comfort the poor neglected creature. “Has Senator Hasket seen Galenger’s stuff?” she asked, referring to the committee chairman she hoped to impress in the coming week.

“Old Hasket reads his daily horoscope and not much else,” said Goodman. “He does listen at hearings, until he drifts off to sleep.”

“Is there something not in Galenger I could bring to the senator?” she asked. “Something new that will get attention?”

“There is nothing new,” said Goodman. “Martians landing in DC, perhaps.”

“There’s always something overlooked,” said Margaret, assuming a thoughtful pose. “Something the pols and the media could both run with...”

She hated him more when he drew his chair close to the front of her desk and leaned forwards in expectation of the intimate conversation he and she were not going to have. If he can’t come up with something big right away, she thought, Ronald was never going to see her bedroom again.

“Wait, how about Red Plutonium?” he said.

“Been there; done that,” she said. “Don’t you remember the memo we leaked back in ‘99?”

“There’ve been so many,” said Ronald in his defense. “Plutonium and atomic bombs per se have been done to death. How about this: a sonic bomb that causes internal injuries and death to humans but leaves buildings intact?”

“Do such devices exist?” she asked.

“Do they really have to?”

“This is better,” she said. “Boston Harbor, a major port for liquid methane. Terrorists blow up a whatsyoumacallit, a refinery or storage tank or something, and that sets off a chain reaction!”

“That destroys the entire city,” said Goodman, completing the scenario for her. “I won’t hold this against you, Miss Smythe, but when I was at Rand we floated that one way back during the first Bush administration.”

“Railroad bridges?” asked Margaret, drawn farther across the desk toward Ronald.

“There’s a single railroad bridge across the Ohio River,” said Ronald. “Blow it up and three fourths of the rail traffic east of the Mississippi is interrupted. That one’s so old it made the railroad trade newsletters.”

He and Margaret were this point in the conversation so close their mouths were nearly touching, and they both despised each other with such intensity they could barely stop themselves from making love right there on her desk top.

“Did you ever read
Cadillac
Desert
?” she breathed to him.

“The entire book?” he asked.

“I didn’t read it either. They made a documentary about it on PBS. The book’s mostly about conserving water in the American southwest and other boring stuff. I remember this bit from the film: They said that if something happened to Glen Canyon Dam, the weight of the on rushing water would break Hoover Dam and all the other dams on the lower Colorado.”

The information broke the romantic spell she had on Ronald. “All what dams in Colorado?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

Margaret cringed to think the fate of the nation depended on men this stupid. “I’m talking about the river, not the state,” she explained, drawing herself back. “This is how it works.”

She laid the edge of her left hand on her desk top and made a fist with her right and pushed it into her left. “You see,” she said, “Hoover Dam is made to withstand so much water. The reservoir behind it is called Lake Mead.”

“Yes...?” said Ronald. “Wait. Isn’t this by Las Vegas? I think I’ve seen the place.”

“The author of this book,” narrated Margaret, “says if the Glen Canyon Dam—that’s the one up river, up above the Grand Canyon; it makes Lake Powell—”

“So many names. It’s damned impressive you can keep them straight.”

“He says that if something should happen to the Glen Canyon thingee,” continued Margaret, “then the added weight would burst Hoover,” she pushed her left hand over with her fist. “And so go the rest of the dams on the river down to the Sea of Cortez.”

“I see!” exclaimed Ronald, suddenly enraptured once more by the assertive Margaret. “I can see it now.” He framed the air in front of him with his thumbs and index fingers, the way a movie director would frame a scene. “We have terrorists blow up this Glen Canyon Dam with...an atomic bomb.”

“You just said atom bombs were old hat,” said Margaret. “Think of something else.”

“How about this,” suggested Goodman: “we get some engineers, and they could think of something. I’m sure there’s a conventional bomb in some nation’s inventory that’s big enough. We have forty-eight hours before we go before Hasket’s committee, time enough to draw up an evacuation plan. What is it we’ll have to evacuate?”

They found a road atlas in Margaret’s meager office library and located where the water would go.

“Las Vegas! It is right there!” squealed Margaret, since a city that big necessitated a very big plan.

“Fantastic!” exalted Ronald. “Senator O’Brian is from Las Vegas. Sweet God, he’s a complete idiot. He’ll vote for anything if we get him scared. What else is there?”

Margaret Smythe drew her green, manicured fingernail down the course of the Colorado and read the names of the endangered cities. “Boulder City, Willow Beach, Laughlin, Riviera, Bullhead City…”

“Is there really a place called Bullhead City?” asked Ronald, peering closely at the map. “Jeez. I think we should let anybody living there drown.”

They both thought he was hilarious.

“This is going to look great in my report,” said Margaret.

“Our report,” said Ronald.

“What?”

“You said, ‘my report;’ we’ll be preparing this together,” said Ronald.

“Since when?”

“Since I got a memo from Senator Hasket,” he let fall a slip of paper on Margaret’s desk. “Seems his chief of staff and I were best friends, sort of, back at Andover.”

Being an agile combatant, Margaret quickly retreated to a defensible position and regrouped while she tried to make sense of the changing conditions on the battlefield.

“I think I said
our
report, Ronald,” she said. “I know I did. God, this is quite wonderful. We’ll be the experts on this scenario. The powers that be…” she began but had a disparaging thought before she could complete the sentence. “We’ll have to go to the uniformed military for our consultants. Anybody else would claim credit.”

“Make sure they aren’t generals,” sighed Ronald. “You know what happened to Stevens when he brought in General Abraham on the proposed missile defense program. Talk only to middle-aged lieutenant colonels."

“The passed over and bitter,” agreed Margaret. “That’s very good, Mr. Goodman.”

“You should make better use of me,” he said, sounding the most British he could.

He had stolen a march on her in regards to Hasket’s chief of staff and weaseled his way into having his name on the report. Soon, she sensed, the Pentagon would be giving him a real title. Every cell in her body, every corpuscle and sinew shivered with disgust for him at that moment.

“Are you free tonight?” she asked him.

“I have a family thing. How about I drop by sometime after eleven-thirty?”

First he had defeated her and now he insulted her by making her wait for him that night. He was, thought Margaret, the vilest, most conniving human being she knew, other than herself.

“That would be wonderful,” she said and gave him a long, wet kiss.

VIII

06/17/06 14:15 PDT

John Taylor’s young Russian instructor was certainly as pretty as Mondragon had promised. She was a comely Ukrainian blonde of twenty-seven years. For most of those years she apparently had been reading classic nineteenth century novels and practicing being petulant. She taught Taylor enough Russian to get through his role as the elderly butler in
The
Cherry
Orchard
. She had made it clear to Taylor during their first lesson that she was there to teach and to do nothing else. She would not drink the iced tea he offered her because, she explained in no uncertain terms, Americans did not know how to make tea. Nor would she make conversation with him before and after their lessons since, in her opinion, Americans were a vapid, shallow people unable to speak of higher things. She did take time to tell him she thought his home and those of his suburban neighbors were unbelievably vulgar, which befit citizens of a nation that had far more money than taste. Taylor was thankful pretty Alexandra Lubov did not teach him enough to understand the invectives she spat at him as he struggled to pronounce the difficult Russian vowels.

When Taylor began rehearsing with the other actors in the amateur troupe, the ferocious ash blonde instructor with flashing gray eyes attended each session and was appalled at what she saw and heard.

“You and your colleges are like the geese,” she told Taylor. “Onk, onk, onk!” She furiously waved her arms like a goose beating its wings. “This is not Russian. This is noise you make.”

“See here, Miss Lubov,” said Taylor, “we’re beginners. We shouldn’t be expert speakers. I wouldn’t expect you to know how to run a business right off the blocks.”

“You and your bourgeois concerns with business,” she hissed. “Thees is not the concern of an artist.”

“I think the word is ‘this’,” said Taylor, who should not have said anything.

“I am to teach you Russian,” she shrieked at him. “Do not presume to tell me English!” She put her hands over her ears for several sessions; whenever she pulled them away her face contorted into expressions John Taylor had not seen in his sixty-three years of life.

“You are all barbarians,” she told him. “You have no maturity. No élan-that word is French; you do not know that either. You know only money and sex, the two-headed hydra of materialism.”

“When I was at Stanford,” said Taylor, “the hydra, I think, had more than two heads.”

She took off her shoe and beat it on Taylor’s coffee table the way a former premier of the Soviet Union had once beaten a table at the UN. Miss Lubov screamed some words in Russian Taylor was glad he did not understand and walked out the door. Twenty-three hours later she returned to his house to ‘teach’ and to yell at him some more.

John felt he did as well as, if not better, than most of the other actors in his group. Nonetheless he was discouraged whenever he heard Mondragon perform, for his old friend from college enunciated the language of Chekhov like a native speaker. He alone made Miss Lubov’s bosom swell with approval when he recited the few lines the station master is given in the play. Though Mondragon did not converse with John much during rehearsals, Erin made a point of coming to see him backstage before the performance. Erin brought Miss Lubov with him and saw to it that she was more civil to John than she had been on previous occasions.

“You need to forget yourself,” Mondragon advised him as they were putting on stage make-up together. “Older Russians are bold, presumptive. So are young Russians. You must emote. Be a ham. Let your hot Scythian blood dominate your personality.”

“I’m an old school Wasp, not Russian,” said Taylor, although John Taylor in truth had no cultural identity, no religion, no traditions, no sense of history beyond the history of the family business.

“You’re an actor,” said Mondragon, speaking with more passion than the moment should have demanded. “You’re a blank slate on which a world of possibilities can be projected.”

The two men and Miss Lubov were in an elementary classroom, near the school auditorium containing the stage on which the play was to take place. There were children’s crayon drawings on the wall and perhaps three dozen people, mostly relatives and friends of the performers, gathering in the hallway outside. Taylor did not see why in such a setting Mondragon cared so much about a production almost no one would see.

The performance went as well as could be expected. The non-Russian actors butchered their lines. The handful of Russian speakers in the audience at first laughed and then occasionally booed as the play progressed and more words were mangled. The majority of the performers were nonplussed by everything that happened. They were mostly North Beach bohemians, and they and their friends in the audience were good-natured sorts having great fun speaking and hearing a new kind of gibberish. At the final curtain the friends in attendance cheered for a couple minutes before they went off en mass with the performers for late dinners and some recreational drinking.

“You were not too bad, John,” Mondragon consoled Taylor. “Alexandra will still, of course, have to work with you some more.”

“We’re putting on the other play?” asked Taylor. He was so happy to be getting out of the heavy greatcoat he had worn on stage and his thick pancake make-up that he could not bear to think of several more months of Miss Lubov’s company.

“Yes,
The
Seagull
,” said Mondragon. “You will be Shameyef, the estate manager. A retired lieutenant, a man of the world, but a bit set in his ways.”

“Shouldn’t the director decide who gets what part?” asked Jack, amazed that Mondragon could tell what role Taylor would be playing when auditions had not yet been held.

“Well,” said Mondragon, “I have a part in managing the troupe. You’ll see: Shameyef will be fine for you.”

On the first Monday following the performance Miss Lubov again brought her morose, disappointed person to Taylor’s home. She brought with her another vocabulary list, some new verb conjugations for Taylor to learn, and scores of angry outbursts she released in Taylor’s living room.

“Why do Americans not learn?” she asked him at one juncture. “Is it in the water you drink that you are stupid?”

“Since I am such a burden to you, why do you come here?” Taylor asked.

“Mr. Mondragon,” she said, “promises he is going to gain for my father the general a visa.”

“Is he former KGB?” asked Taylor, thinking that the father’s profession might explain the daughter’s personality.

“Mr. Mondragon is not even a Russian,” said Alexandra. “Why do you ask such an odd question?