'If you're referring to the time I spent in the Arab Emirates, please remember I was a construction engineer whose only concerns were jobs and profits.'
'Is that so?'
'The average tourist knew more about the politics and cultures of those countries than I did. All of us in construction kept pretty much to ourselves; we had our own circles and rarely stepped outside them.'
'I find that hard to believe—damn near impossible, in fact. I got the congressional background report on you, young fella, and I tell ya it blew my good New England socks off. Here you are right here in Washington and you built airfields and government buildings for the Arabs, which certainly means you had to have a hell of a lot of conversations with the high mucky-mucks over there. I mean airfields; that's military intelligence, son! Then I learn you speak several Arab languages, not one but several!'
'It's one language, the rest are simply dialects—'
'I tell you you're invaluable, and it's no less than your patriotic duty to serve your country by sharing what you know with other experts.'
'I'm not an expert!'
'Besides,' broke in the Speaker, leaning back in his chair, his expression pensive, 'under the circumstances, what with your background and all, if you refused the appointment it'd look like you had somethin' to hide, somethin' maybe we ought to look into. You got somethin' to hide, Congressman.' The Speaker's eyes were suddenly levelled at Evan.
Something to hide? He had everything to hide! Why did the Speaker look at him like that? No one knew about Oman, about Masqat and Bahrain. No one would ever know! That was the agreement.
'There's not a damn thing to hide, but there's everything to let hang out,' said Kendrick firmly. 'You'd be doing the subcommittee a disservice based on a misplaced appraisal of my credentials. Do yourself a favour. Call one of the others.'
'The beautiful book, that most holy of books, has so many answers, doesn't it?' asked the Speaker aimlessly, his eyes once again straying, 'Many might be called, but few are chosen, isn't that right?'
'Oh, for God's sake—’
'That might well be the case, young fella,' broke in the old Irishman, nodding his head. 'Only time will tell, won't it? Meanwhile, the congressional leadership of your party has decided that you're chosen. So you're chosen—unless you've got something to hide, something we ought to look into… Now, skedaddle. I've got work to do.'
'Skedaddle?'
'Get the fuck out of here, Kendrick.'
The Icarus Agenda
Chapter 20
The two bodies of Congress, the Senate and the House, have several committees of matching purpose with similar or nearly similar names. There is Senate Appropriations and House Appropriations, the Senate Foreign Relations and the House Foreign Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, this last with a powerful Subcommittee on Oversight and Evaluation. This counterpartism is one more example of the republic's effective system of checks and balances. The legislative branch of government, actively reflecting the current views of a far wider spectrum of the body politic than either an entrenched executive branch or the life-tenured judiciary, must negotiate within itself and reach a consensus on each of the hundredfold issues presented to its two deliberative arms. The process is patently frustrating, patently exasperating, and generally fair. If compromise is the art of governance within a pluralistic society, no one does it better, or with more aggravation, than the legislative branch of the United States government with its innumerable, often insufferable and frequently ridiculous committees. This assessment is accurate; a pluralistic society is, indeed, numerous, usually insufferable to would-be tyrants, and almost always ridiculous in the eyes of those who would impose their will on the citizenry. One man's morality should never by way of ideology become another's legality, as many in the executive and the judiciary would have it. More often than not these quasi-zealots grudgingly retreat in the face of the uproars emanating from those lower-class troublesome committees on the Hill. Despite infrequent and unforgivable aberrations, the vox populi is usually heard and the land is better for it.
But there are some committees on Capitol Hill where voices are muted by logic and necessity. These are the small, restricted councils that concentrate on the strategies formed by the various intelligence agencies within the government. And perhaps because the voices are essentially quiet and the members of these committees are examined in depth by stringent security procedures, a certain aura descends over those selected to the select committees. They know things others are not privileged to know; they are different, conceivably a better breed of men and women. There also exists a tacit understanding between the Congress and the media for the latter to restrain themselves in areas concerning these committees; a senator or a congressman is appointed, but his or her appointment does not become a cause celebre. Yet neither is there secrecy; the appointment is made and a basic reason given, both the act and reason stated simply, without embellishment. In the case of the representative from the ninth district of Colorado, one Congressman Evan Kendrick, it was put forth that he was a construction engineer with extensive experience in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf. Since few knew little or anything about the area, and it was accepted that the congressman had been an executive employed somewhere in the Mediterranean years ago, the appointment was considered reasonable and nothing unusual was made of it.
However, editors, commentators and politicians are keenly aware of the nuances of growing recognition, for recognition accompanies power in the District of Columbia. There are committees and then again there are committees. A person appointed to Indian Affairs is not in the same league with another sent to Ways and Means—the first does the minimum to look after a discarded, basically disenfranchised people; the latter explores the methods and procedures to pay for the entire government to stay in business. Nor is Environment on a par with Armed Services—the former's budgets are continuously, abusively reduced, while the expenditure on weaponry reaches beyond all horizons. The allocation of moneys is the mother's milk of influence. Yet, simply put, few committees on the Hill can match the nimbus, the quiet mystique, that hovers over those associated with the clandestine world of intelligence. When sudden appointments are made to these select councils, eyes watch, colleagues whisper in cloakrooms, and the media is poised at the ready in front of word processors, microphones and cameras. Usually nothing comes of these preparations and the names fade into comfortable or uncomfortable oblivion. But not always, and had Evan Kendrick been aware of the subtleties, he might have risked telling the crafty Speaker of the House to go to hell.
However, he was not aware, and it would not have made any difference if he had been; the progress of Inver Brass was not to be denied.
It was six-thirty in the morning, a Monday morning, the early sun about to break over the Virginia hills, as Kendrick, naked, plunged into his pool, trusting that ten or twenty laps in the cold October water would remove the cobwebs obscuring his vision and painfully spreading through his temples. Ten hours ago he had been drinking far too many brandies with Emmanuel Weingrass in Colorado while sitting in a ridiculously opulent gazebo, both laughing at the visible streams rushing below the glass floor.
'Soon you will see whales!' Manny had exclaimed.
'Like you promised the kids in that half dried-up river wherever it was.'
'We had lousy bait. I should have used one of the mothers. That black girl. She was gorgeous!'