Dominika sagged against him, her body trembling and voice shaking. “We were in your room, making love, while she was being tortured, stalling for time, giving herself to save me,” she sobbed. “She had the courage to describe the man who was torturing her, even though she knew she was going to die. Oh, neschastnyy Ioana, poor ill-fated sister. We should have been there.”
“We didn’t know, and if we had been there, we’d be in the river too,” said Nate. “That guy wasn’t going to let anyone walk away.”
“I should have been there,” said Dominika.
Nate stopped in the middle of the pathway and shook her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Not your fault. A little less guilt and a lot more thinking about surviving. Will this Shlykov take a whack at you in Moscow?”
Dominika shrugged and shook him off. “In the Rodina anything can happen.”
“Then fucking him up in Istanbul is critical. Will you be able to finish him if we can complicate his life?”
“If he fails and embarrasses the president, he is lost. But what will you do?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Nate. As they walked, he outlined the plan to burn Major Shlykov, and her part in the operation. She stopped crying, her eyes blazed, and she thought of Ioana.
In Washington, the ponderous process of selecting a new DCIA heated up and Langley was told to prepare for briefings for the candidates’ use during congressional testimony. Benford contemplated this requirement with unease.
The only policy position of the president that preoccupied Benford was the former’s oft-stated distrust of CIA and the president’s conviction that it was an anachronistic organization, organically prone to misdeeds and illegal acts and, consequently, overdue for demolition and a thorough reorganization. Happily, said the president, a new DCIA would begin critical reforms. To this end, the White House was putting forward three candidates for DCIA, one of whom would be selected by his staff for Senate confirmation. The unsympathetic SSCI approved the plan and ordered CIA to brief the three candidates equally in preparation for confirmation hearings. Briefing sources and methods to candidates before a formal nominee had been selected was heresy, but both the sitting director and the congressional bootlicker Duchin saw to it that division chiefs complied.
Benford sat at the end of the massive oval conference table on the seventh floor of Headquarters, sourly listening to Forsyth finish briefing the three nominees for DCIA on a sensitive EUR Division asset—the representative of the Palestinian Authority to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which case was producing voluminous intelligence on Iranian support to the PLO and Hezbollah. Forsyth’s presentation had been preceded by a briefing from Chief of Latin America Division, the garrulous Johnny Cross—with a pencil mustache and as handsome as a matinee idol—on a case in Caracas, the recruited deputy minister of Petroleum, who had developed into a gold mine of information on the moribund Venezuelan petrochemical industry, including secret payments in the billions from China to keep the spavined government afloat. Next up was Chief of East Asia Division Brenda Neff, blond, busty, and profane, who would tell the nominees about an EA asset, a captain in the Philippine navy who was providing useful assessments and imagery of the fortified atolls in the South China Sea being constructed by Beijing.
Benford wryly noted that his colleagues were briefing on important, but midlevel assets. No division chief was going to totally lift his or her skirt and give up any crown jewels, at least not yet. Duchin knew enough to suspect they were slow rolling, and when the Acting Director heard—as he certainly would from that woodpecker Duchin—the chiefs would be ordered to open the books to the nominees completely. Only a matter of time.
The three nominees sat at the opposite far end of the table, respectively bored, attentive, and mystified. US Senator Celia Feigenbaum was seething: based on her many years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, she was utterly convinced that duplicitous CIA needed to be radically downsized if not abolished, commencing with the ceding of various Directorates to the DOD, the NSA, and the FBI. If confirmed as DCIA, she was determined to clean house, and to Benford, this was a calamitous notion, made trebly astounding by the senator’s expressed view that the abiding clandestine tenets of the Agency—stealing secrets and exploiting vulnerabilities to suborn human targets—were immoral. “It’s not who we are, it’s not what America stands for,” purred the senator frequently and piously to any reporter who thrust a microphone in her face. She was a leading contender, in part because her Pecksniffian views mirrored the president’s.
The senator had arrived with her senior staff director, Robert Farbissen, and she blithely demanded he receive the same briefings as the nominees, to which Congressional Affairs Chief Duchin immediately agreed, seeing as how Rob also had TS clearances. Benford gritted his teeth; it was an outrageous concession. He knew all about Farbissen: he’d been a fixture in Washington for decades, flitting from staff to staff, wreaking havoc with his revanchist fevers and partisan distemper. Short, and squat, with a lopsided mouth and capped teeth beneath a hedge-apple nose, Farbissen triumphantly sat down at the conference table to listen to the cherished secrets from the vaults of the detested CIA. He turned to notice for the first time that Simon Benford was sitting next to him, made a face of great distaste, got up, and moved three seats away, as if Benford were “patient zero” in a plague ward. The measure of the man, thought Benford, is the distance of three seats at the table.
More attentive was US Navy Vice Admiral Audrey Rowland. Trim in her service dress dark-blue uniform, she sat with hands folded on the table, the thick gold sleeve stripes of her three-star rank resplendent against the dark walnut conference table. She had been named Distinguished Student after advanced studies at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair in Washington. During the next twenty years, she’d held increasingly more important positions, most recently as commander of the Office of Naval Research on the shores of the Potomac River in Virginia. At ONR, she energetically supervised nearly three thousand scientists, permanent civilian researchers and contractors, while managing an annual research budget of more than a billion dollars.
Audrey had risen meteorically, passing through flag ranks of rear admiral (bottom half) to rear admiral in two years, and three years later, her third star as vice admiral was awarded. Benford watched her through lowered lashes, noting that she wore more fruit salad on her chest than Bull Halsey, including the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal (three awards), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (four awards), and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. None was an award for combat or sea duty.
At forty-nine years old, VADM Aubrey Rowland was the modern empowered woman of the twenty-first-century US Navy: brilliant, an able administrator, and decorous. She had never married—the inevitable gossip occasionally floated around, mainly among envious male peers who were still lowly captains commanding destroyer groups out of Yokosuka—but VADM Rowland otherwise was discreetly considered a benign maiden, totally dedicated to the navy and its mission. When the call went out for prospective nominees for DCIA, Rowland’s name was immediately proposed by the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of the Navy, and seconded by POTUS.