“Tell you later.”
They found Witwans on the living room couch, staring at the television. His face was flushed, his cheeks swollen, his eyes wide and watery.
“You know why we’re here, Rand?”
His head bobbed yes over his slumped shoulders. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.” Thinking about himself to the end. Nothing about anyone else in the house. Hard to believe that this pathetic specimen was their only chance to stop a war. But they didn’t need him to be a hero. They just needed him to tell the truth about what he’d done to the President. Looking at him, Wells knew he would.
Rand Witwans didn’t have the strength to lie.
“Lucky man,” Duto said to Wells. “Going to the White House.”
Without waiting for Witwans to answer, they pulled him off the couch to begin his trip.
EPILOGUE
ONE HOUR…
Donna Green trudged down the West Wing corridor that led to the Oval Office. The first fighters were about to take off from Incirlik. She ought to be running. But every step came harder than the one before.
What she wanted, more than anything, was to turn the other way. Walk to the Farragut West Metro stop, three blocks away at 17th and I. Step to the edge of the platform. She might have to wait a few minutes. But soon enough a train would come. And before it reached her, she would step off.
She wasn’t a suicidal type. She’d never even considered the act before. But anything at all, even nothing, had to be better than the conversation she was about to have. She remembered the stupid threat Duto had made in the parking lot, Bend you over so hard you won’t sit for a month, and how tonight on the tarmac at Dulles, Duto hadn’t bothered to hide his smile as Witwans choked out the truth.
Suddenly, she couldn’t move, not forward or back.
Elizabeth Hoyt, the President’s chief speechwriter, strode past, nearly knocking her down. “Sorry, Donna.”
“How’s the speech?” Might want to start a rewrite.
“Not bad. Our brave troops. Protecting the homeland. Et cetera. I gotta—”
“Go, go.”
Our brave troops. Tens of thousands of men and women were about to risk their lives for a lie she should have uncovered. Cowardice now would only compound her failure.
Too soon and too late, she came to the outer office.
“I need to see him.”
“Liz just went in — he’s working on his speech—”
“Now.”
“Tell me you’re joking,” the President said three minutes later.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Fuck you, Donna. Fuck you.”
He had never spoken that way to her before.
“You’re sure?”
She squeezed her hands tight, made herself stay steady. “He’s a mess, Witwans, an alcoholic, but not a liar. He showed me the bank transfers. We can trace that money. And I talked to Rudin — the Mossad guy — and he confirms that Witwans is the one who delivered the stuff to Israel.”
What she didn’t say, what she couldn’t make herself say, was: And it makes sense. It answers a lot of questions that we should have asked but didn’t, because we were so sure that the uranium was from a government.
The President spewed a stream of curses, picked up the five-page speech on his desk, tore it in half. He tore the halves in half again, balled up a piece as if to throw it across the room. Then put it down.
“Okay. Tantrum over. I’m asking for real, any way we go ahead?”
She didn’t want him to rip her again, but the question had only one answer.
“No, sir. Even forgetting about morality, Duto destroys us.”
“Then let’s solve that problem first.” The President reached for his phone. “I need Belk.” The Secretary of Defense. “Roger. Call it off.” A pause. “No. I am not. Call it off. We are not invading Iran—
“Ask me again if I’m joking, I’ll fire you. Nothing’s happened we can’t undo, right?” He listened.
“Then keep it that way. I promise I’ll tell you why later, but for now just land the drones, unscramble the jets, whatever you do when you change your mind about a war. Now now now. Am I clear, Roger?”
He slammed down the phone without waiting for an answer, reached into his desk for the Zippo and the pack of Marlboro Lights she knew were inside. He lit up, offered her the pack. She shook her head.
“You just destroyed my presidency, Donna. My reputation for the next hundred years. You should at least join me in a cancer stick.”
They smoked in silence, the President puffing viciously.
“That was the easy part,” he said. “The hard part is, how do we explain?”
“The truth—”
“They will impeach me, Donna. It’s not just that we got suckered. It’s who did it. What did Duto say he wanted, Donna?”
“Nothing specific. He said he knew you would do the right thing.”
“That’s funny.”
“Isn’t it.”
“He say he was going public?”
“He said it would depend. I didn’t push. I was mainly worried about getting back here.”
The President stubbed out his cigarette, lit another.
“He goes public, there’s nothing we can do. Let’s assume he’s keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he thinks I can help him get—” He wagged the cigarette around the room. “Seems to me my only play is to make it look like I blinked at the last minute. Lost faith in the lightfoot strategy.”
“So we pack up the Marines and the Rangers and the Airborne?”
“Soon. For now. We leave them all, but announce a new deadline, a nice long one, six months. Everyone will know what that means. Congress will pummel me, the media. Say I got scared. But it’s better than the truth. In a day or two, we start to leak concerns about the evidence. And in a week, you go to Tehran and you lick their boots and tell them we don’t want a war—”
“What about the planes?”
“We started this, Donna. Two weeks ago. We bombed their capital with no warning, and I don’t care if it was just the airport. You tell them we view the planes as a stand-alone act of terror and we will investigate that way. You make sure they understand that means we aren’t invading them. In a month or so, I fire Hebley and all his boys, they don’t resign, I fire them. We buy time, we pull back, and in a couple more months this becomes the war that wasn’t.”
The consequences would be devastating. The Iranians would be equal parts furious and triumphant. They wouldn’t understand why the United States had picked a fight with them. But they would know that they’d won. They’d believe they had carte blanche all over the Middle East.
“What if we tell the truth, the real truth, the whole story, blame Duberman?”
The President shook his head.
“No. First of all we don’t even have it yet. Second, at best I look like a dupe instead of a co-conspirator. Get impeached anyway. Third, it means admitting our intel on Iran is so terrible that we fell for this. And last, you want me to blame a Jewish billionaire for trying to start a war. The world already doesn’t like Jews much. This takes it to Elders of Zion territory.” The President paused. “I promise. Duberman will pay. The highest penalty. But not now. When the time is right.”
If there was a better answer, she couldn’t see it.
His phone rang.
He picked it up, listened briefly. “Thank you, Roger. I’m sure you must have questions. We’ll talk later.” He hung up, pointed at the door. Like she was a secretary. “Go get Liz. Quickest speech ever written.”