Florence of Arabia (5 page)

it
was
a
stunning,
crisp fall day,
and feeli
ng liberated alter dropping off
her letter of resignation. Florence zipped up her black leather jumpsuit— the sight of which caused cricks in many a male neck—tied her hair in a pony-tail, donned the red helmet, flipped down the visor, pressed the start button on her motorcycle and screamed out of the city at a deliciously breakneck speed.

At the end of River Road, she turned left and roared deeper into country. She glanced down at the speedometer and saw that she was going almost ninety miles per hour, too fast, but what bliss! The fall leaves went
by in a lush slipstream blur of
gold and red and orange.

Another color suddenly appeared in her rearview mirror, not found in nature, electric blue and flashing. For a moment she considered trying to outrun it, but then she let up on the throttle and rumbled over to the shoulder to await the inevitable
Do you have any idea how fast you were going, ma'am?

The man who got out of the unmarked car was not in uniform. The first discordant note that struck her was his age. He was i
n his mid-sixties, at least. H
e was trim, with the body of someone who had once been an athlete or in the military, gray about the temples, with wire-rimmed glasses perched on a sharp nose. The eyes, now close enough for her to see, were bright blue and twinkled. His lips were pursed, but pleasantly, in something like a smile. It didn't compute. Florence looked at the flashing blue light mounted on his dashboard. Some county supervisor or sheriff?

"Goodne
ss gracious, young lady. Ninety
miles an hour—on a road teeming with deer? You could have been killed."

It was said in an avuncular way.

"And what a waste
that
would be." H
e was grinning at her. "Excuse me," she said, "who are you?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" He chuckled. "That's quite a machine you have there. Used to
do a bit of motorcycling myself
. Oh, yes, yes."

Still astride the bike, Florence moved her thumb over the starter button.

"O
h
now, don't be in such a big ru
sh. I should think you'd be very
interested to hear what I have to say. Very interested."

Something kept her from pressing the button. "Could I see some identification?" she said gently.

The man seemed to find this amusin
g. "Oh,
certainly, certainly. What sort did you have in mind?"

"Look, sir—"

"We read your proposal, Florence." Florence stared.

"On achieving stability in the Middle Fast? Ver
y interesting, original. And, by
gosh, out of the box. Not at all your usual State Department pap. No wonder they wanted to transfer you to Cape Verde! I had to look it up on a map. My goodness, it's a long way from now
here. May I buy you a cup of coffee
? This must seem very forward, I know."

"Are y
ou
with
the
State
Department?" Florence asked.

"H
ardly. Come on. I'll buy. There has to be a Starbucks around here."

"I don't—"

"Do you remember the Starbucks in Kaffa?" "What?"

"The one at the corne
r of Alkakazir and Ben Qatif? H
ow the
mukfelleen
made them cover the mermaid's boobs on the logo? Now, whenever I go to a Starbucks. I check for her boobs. Silly, I know. Do you want to follow me, or shall 1 follow you?"

"I..."

"I know. You came out here to feel the wind in your hair, the road rise up to greet vou. But all I'm asking for is ten minutes of your time at a neu
tral, well-lit public place. If,
after that, you want to walk away, no one's going to stop you
. and I'll still pay for the lat
te. You like tall non
-
fat double-shot, yes? And sugar substitute, preferably not in lieu of birth-control pills?"

The only
human being to whom she had confided that detail was the State Department polygraph operator during her background check. She didn't know what to say, so she followed him on her motorcycle to a suburban Starbucks.

They sat outside, by a parking lot full of expensive cars drive
n by people who looked like they
had something to do with horses.

"Look, before we go any further, who are you?" she asked.

The man appeared to consider the question. He said thoughtfully, "Why don't you just call me Uncle Sam?"

"I
take it you're with the government. What is it you want?"

"Quite possibly, the same thing you do. Long-term political stability in the Middle Hast. Now.
there's
a goal. Oh. yes."

"You agree with my proposal?"

"We've
tr
ied pretty much everything else, haven't we? And
what
a pig's breakfast we've
made. Dear, dear, dear. Well, I
always say, if you can't solve a problem, make it larger. The remarkable thing is how
well
we mean. A
merica. And yet it always turns out so—badly
. But I
didn't come out here to bore y
ou to death, no, no. I suppose y
ou'll be wanting some bona fides. You'd be foolish not to. And we kn
ow you're not that. Let's see. I
know—given the region we're dealing with, why don't we use the Thousand and One Nights as a model. I'll be the djinn in the lamp. Ask me for three things that only the good old U.S. government could provide. If you're still not satisfied, then you're still one tall latte ahead, right?"

Florence considered. "Tomorrow's PDB."

Uncle Sam chortled. "Ouch."

Every
morning, the president of the United States received the presidential daily briefing, the most highly classified document in the government, seen by fewer than a half-dozen pairs of eyeballs.

"Thank you for the coffee."

"Drive safely, young lady."

THE NEXT MORNING Florence rose as usual at five-thirty for her five-mile run. On her way out. she saw that an envelope had been inserted under the door. She opened it and saw across the top page:
for the president's eyes only
. The date was today's.

She read. The Kremlin was planning to use nerve gas on a Chechen stronghold. The president of Venezuela was... Florence's eyes widened. In the Sea of Japan, a U.S. submarine was shadowing a North Korean freighter thought to be carrying... Jesus. And yet I here was no way of knowing whether the doc
ument was a fake. She regretted,
like so many who have rubbed the lamp, having thrown away a perfectly good wish.

Two days later, she picked up her morning newspaper and saw the headline:

NAVY INTERCEPTS
JAPAN-BOUND
NORTH KOREAN FREIGHTER CARRYING NUCLEAR DEVICE

An hour later, wh
ile she was still digesting this along with her bran muffin, her phone rang. It was Uncle Sam.

"Could you make your second wish just a tad easier?"

"All right." she said. "Ten million dollars in Wasabi gold sovereigns."

"You'll give them back, yes?"

"Maybe."

The next afternoon there was a knock on her door. She looked out the peephole and saw a FedEx man with three large boxes on a hand dolly.

"Farfaletli? Sign here, please. They're kind of heavy."

Florence was in her living room staring at piles of gleaming gold Wasabi sovereigns bearing the roy
al crest when the phone rang. U
nclc Sam.

"FedFx. Nice touch, don't you think?"

"All right," she said. "I'm convinced."

"Don't you want your third wish?"

"Why don't I
save that."

"That's
a
r
elief. I thought you might ask for a nuclear warhead. You're a very demanding young lady. Welcome aboard." "Aboard what, exactly?"

"Don't ask, don't tell. All you need to know is that you now have the best job in the United
State
s government. No Charlie Duckett looking over your shoulder, no endless reports and memos and all that razzmatazz. No inspector generals, no Senate committees. Anything you need to do the job, you just ask your uncle. Within reason, please. I don't want to be getting bills from Maserati or Chanel or Van Cleef and Arpels. thank you very much."

"What part
of the government am I working for?" "The Department of Outside the Box." "Come on. I want to know."

"Young
lady, you've been handed the ult
imate credit card. Why question
it?"

"What if I'm caught?"

"Well"—he chuckled—"exactly my point. Not to make light of it." "For a second there, you sounded like Satan."

"Satan? That's a terrible thing to say. I'm one of the nicest people you'll ever meet."

"Why me?"

"It was your idea, wasn't it? You know the language. The region."

"So do a lot of people."

"It's a vendetta. You're Italian."

"I'd file a discrimination complaint, if I knew where to find you."

"Oh,
all right—you're passionate to emancipate women throughout the Arab world. As a means toward achieving lasting political stability in the region. Docs that assuage your outraged ethnic pride?"

"It's a start."

"I'll pin ten dollars on the Virgin Mary at the next wop street fair I come across."

"That will cost you twenty bucks."

"For someone whose grandfather helped Benito Mussolini try to conquer North Africa, you pack plenty of altitude, young lady. All right, let's talk about your team."

CHAPTER
FOUR

R
ick Renard had learned his trade under the best—or worst, depending
on where you set the bar integrity-wise—public relations man in the business: Nick Naylor. Naylor had gained notoriety as chief spokesman for the U.S. tobacco industry during its last Herculean struggle against the armies of neo-puritanism. lie ended up serving a twenty-month sentence in a federal prison—minimum security, he would point out as a matter of pride—for allegedly arranging his own kidnapping by anti-smoking terrorists. Now Naylor ministered in the rich loamy pastures of Hollywood, Lending to the vanities of the celluloidariat, a type of client whose needs could never be met and thus guaranteed life
time employment. Lobbying to get
your client nominated for an Oscar, or planting a prejudicial item in the gossips about the spouse currently being dumped, was not, Nick confided to his protege, the heroic stuff of Washington lobbying, yet it was pleasant enough in L.A.'s balmy, moisturized clime. Whenever he reached Nick on his cell phone. Rick could hear the soli, high-pitched whine of German automotive engineering idling on the freeway. "I spent a hundred and twenty thousand on this car," Nick would say. "And do you know, it can go from zero to four miles per hour in twenty minutes."

Nick had been trying to persuade Renard to come join him. The money! The pools! The women! But Rick was not yet ready to surrender to those blandishments, to have his still-sharp edge be filed down by pedicurists in striped

cabanas by turquoise rooftop pools. He had apprenticed well under Nick Naylor. At this point in his career, he was acknowledged by even the most grudging of his peers to be the capital's premier champion of causes so devoid of hope, so lacking in integrity, there was a kind of gallantry to it that aspired to the level of grandeur.

For instance, it was to Renard that the American College of Princes of the Church had turned, hoping to put behind it
—to use an apposite word—the alt
ar-boy-groping scandal
s. They
had quietly engaged him to get an American cardinal elected pope. Rick did not succeed at this quest. Being arrested by the Swiss Guard, escorted to the limits of Vatican City and barred ever from re
-
entering the holy city cannot be said to constitute a public relations triumph, especially when the next pope hailed from Madagascar. And yet he succeeded at changing the conversation back home. No longer were pallid, twitchy former altar boys and their posse of expensive lawyers Topic A.

Bui it was Re
nard
's handling of another steaming-hot religious tuber that had gotten Florence's attention.

A year be
fore, the Reverend Roscoe G. H
olybone—"'the G stands for God," as his literature humbly put it—spiritual leader of several hundred thousand devout anil fanatically devoted Southern Baptists, declared from his televised pulpit in Loblolly, Georgia, that the prophet Mohammed was a "degenerate." It was the
consensus, even among the stiff
er evangelical element, that the Reverend had gone off his metis, but this was scant comfort to the prophet's 1.5 billion followers. Fatwas were issued from a hundred minarets, which seemed only to inflame the Reverend Holybone and his minions, who. like mailed crusaders on the parapets of Acre, responded with burning pitch and missiles, shouting defiance.