Balance of Power o-5 Read online

  “I know,” María said.

  “What do you want with his people?”

  “To talk to them,” María said. “To see if they were involved in this.” She nodded toward Adolfo. “To see if we can prevent more murders, stop the fighting from escalating.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “If we get to them in time,” María said. “If we learn what they know about Amadori and his people. But please, Father. We must hurry. Do you know where the factory is?”

  Norberto took another deep breath. “It’s northeast along the shore. Let me come with you.”

  “No,” said María.

  “This is my parish—”

  “That’s right,” she said, “and your parish desperately needs your help. I don’t. If the people panic, if their fear frightens away tourists, think what will happen to the region.”

  Norberto bowed his forehead into his hand.

  “This is a lot to ask of you now, I know,” María said. “But you have to do this. I’m going to go to the factory to talk with the workers. If what I think is happening is happening, then I know who the enemy is. And maybe it’s not too late to stop him.”

  Norberto looked up. He pointed behind him without turning. “Dolfo thought he knew who the enemy was. He paid for that belief with his life. Perhaps with his soul.”

  María locked her eyes on his and held them. “Thousands of others may join him if I don’t hurry. I’ll phone the local police from the car. They’ll take care of your brother.”

  “I’ll stay with him until then.”

  “Of course,” María said, turning toward Aideen.

  “And I will pray for you both.”

  “Thank you,” María said. She stopped and turned back. “While you’re at it, Father, pray for the one who needs it most. Pray for Spain.”

  Less than two minutes later they were back in the car and heading northeast across the river.

  “Are you really just going to talk to the factory workers?” Aideen asked.

  María nodded once. “Do me a favor?” she said. “Call Luis. Autodial star-seven. Ask him to locate General Rafael Amadori. Tell him why.”

  “No encryption?”

  María shook her head. “If Amadori is listening somehow and comes after us, so much the better. It’ll save us the trouble of finding him.”

  Aideen punched in the code. Luis’s cellular beeped and he answered at once. Aideen passed along María’s request and told him about Adolfo. Luis promised to get right on it and call them back. Aideen folded away the phone.

  “Who is Amadori?” she asked.

  “A scholar,” she said. “He’s a military general too, but I don’t know much about his career. I only know him as a published author of articles about historic Spain.”

  “Obviously, they alarm you.”

  “Very much so,” María said. She lit a cigarette. “What do you know about our national folk hero El Cid?”

  “Only that he beat back the invading Moors and helped unify Spain around 1100. And there was a movie about him with Charlton Heston.”

  “There was also an epic poem and a play written by Corneille,” María said. “I staged it once at my theater. Anyway,” she went on, “you are partly right about El Cid. He was a knight — Rodrigo Díaz of Vivar. From around 1065 to his death in 1099 he helped the Christian king, Sancho II, and then his successor, Alfonso VI, regain the kingdom of Castile from the Moors. The Moors called him el cid—‘the lord.’ ”

  “Honored by his enemies,” Aideen said. “Impressive.”

  “Actually,” Maria said, “they feared him, which was his intention. When the Moorish stronghold of Valencia surrendered, El Cid violated the peace terms by slaughtering hundreds of people and burning the leader alive. He was not the pure knight that legend has made him — he would do anything to anybody to protect his homeland. It’s also a myth that he fought to unify Spain. He fought for Castile. As long as the other kingdoms remained at peace with Alfonso, as long as they paid him tribute, neither Alfonso nor El Cid cared what happened to them.

  “General Amadori is an authority on El Cid,” Maria continued. “But I’ve always detected in his writings the desire to be something more.”

  “You mean, to be El Cid,” Aideen said.

  María shook her head. “El Cid was a glorified soldier of fortune. There is something more to General Amadori than waging war. If you read his essays in the political journals you’ll find that he is a leading proponent of what he calls ‘benevolent militarism.’ ”

  “Sounds like a fancy name for a police state,” Aideen said.

  “It is,” María agreed. She took a long drag on her cigarette then flicked it out the window. “But he has given the models of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia a new-old twist: militarism without conquest. He believes that if a nation is strong, there is no need to conquer other nations. Those nations will come to him to trade, to seek protection, to be aligned with greatness. His power base will grow by accretion, not war.”

  “So General Amadori doesn’t want to be like Hitler,” Aideen said. “He wants to be like King Alfonso.”

  “Exactly,” María replied. “What we may be seeing is the start of an effort to make Amadori the absolute leader of Castile and to make Castile the military hub of a new Spain. A hub which will dictate to the other regions. And Amadori has chosen this time—”

  “Because he can move troops and influence events while appearing to stop a counterrevolution,” Aideen said.

  María nodded.

  Aideen looked out at the brightening sky. Her eyes lowered and her gaze ranged across the beautiful fishing village. It seemed so peaceful, so desirable, yet it had been corrupted. Here, in less than a day, over a dozen people had already died or been brutally injured. She wondered if there had ever been a time, since people first descended from trees and began despoiling Eden, if manifest destiny had ever come cheaply.

  “The price in blood will be very high before Amadori can realize his dream,” María said, as though reading Aideen’s mind. “I am Andalusian. My people and others will fight — not to keep Spain unified but to keep Castile from becoming the heart and soul of a new Spain. It’s a rivalry which dates back to the time of El Cid. And unless we find a way to stop men like Amadori, it will continue long after we’re gone.”

  No, Aideen decided. There had never been a time when people graciously accomodated other people and other ways. We were still too close to the trees for that. And among us, there were too many bull-apes who were unhappy with the size and makeup of the tribe.

  But then she thought about Father Alcazar. There was a man still trying to do God’s work while in the grip of his own suffering. There were good people among the territorial carnivores. If only they had the power.

  But if they did, Aideen asked herself, wouldn’t they wield it like all the rest?

  She didn’t know — and after being awake for nearly twenty-four hours this wasn’t the best time to ponder the question. However, as she sat there squinting out at the blue-gold sky, thinking about what María had just said, she was reminded of another question.

  Think about it, Martha had said to her when they were still back in the U.S. Think about how you handle someone’s agenda.

  Just the way Rodgers had said, Aideen thought: with a better agenda.

  The trick now was to come up with one.

  NINETEEN

  Monday, 9:21 P.M. Washington, D.C.

  Intellectually, Paul Hood knew that the United Nations was a good idea. But emotionally, he did not have much respect for the institution. It had proven itself ineffective in war and largely ineffective in peace. It was a forum for posturing, for making accusations, and for getting a nation’s views into the press with the best possible spin.

  But he had a great deal of admiration for the cool-headed new Secretary-General, Massimo Marcello Manni of Italy. A former NATO officer, senator in the Italian parliament, and ambassador to Russia, Manni had wor
ked mightily the previous year to keep Italy from tumbling into the kind of civil war for which Spain seemed headed.

  At Manni’s request, a teleconference had been arranged for 11:00 P.M. by National Security head Steve Burkow. Secretary-General Manni had been talking to the intelligence and security chiefs of all the Security Council nations to discuss the deteriorating situation in Spain. Burkow, Carol Lanning at the State Department, and new Central Intelligence Director Marius Fox — the cousin of Senator Barbara Fox — would be in on the call.

  Shortly before Burkow’s office called at 8:50, Hood had already informed Bob Herbert and Ron Plummer that he wanted Darrell to remain in Madrid and Aideen to stay in the field.

  “If Spain is coming apart,” Hood told his team, “then HUMINT is more important than ever.” Hood asked Herbert to make sure that Stephen Viens remained in contact with his loyal colleagues at the Pentagon-based National Reconnaissance Office. Viens was a longtime friend of Op-Center’s Matt Stoll and had always been a steadfast ally during all previous surveillance efforts. Though Viens had been temporarily relieved of his NRO duties because of an ongoing Senate investigation into funding abuses, Hood had quietly given him an office at Op-Center. Unlike most people in Washington, Hood believed in repaying devotion. The NRO had begun conducting satellite reconnaissance of military movements in Spain some forty minutes before. Hood wanted that photographic surveillance to become part of Herbert’s database. He also wanted copies of the pictures sent to McCaskey in Spain, via the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, and to the Striker team, which was airborne. At other intelligence organizations in Washington, department heads tended to covet information to give their groups an edge. But Hood believed in sharing information among his people. To him and to the unique personnel working with him, the job was not about personal glory. It was about protecting Americans and national interests.

  In addition to satellite reconnaissance, Op-Center drew on international news reports for information. Raw TV footage was especially valuable. It was plucked from satellite feeds before it could be edited for broadcast. The uncut footage was then analyzed by Herbert’s team and also by Laurie Rhodes in the Op-Center photographic archives. Often, camouflaged weapons bunkers were constructed well prior to military actions. While these facilities might not always be visible from space, they often showed up in slightly altered topography, which could be seen in comparative studies from the ground.

  Hood took a short dinner break in the commissary, where he read the Sunday comics someone had left lying around. He hadn’t looked at them in a while and he was amazed at how little they’d changed from when he was a kid. Peanuts and B.C. were still there, along with Tarzan and Terry and the Pirates and The Wizard of Id. It was comforting, just then, to visit with old friends.

  After dinner, Hood had a short briefing from Mike Rodgers in the general’s office. Rodgers told him that Striker would reach Madrid shortly after 11:30 A.M., Spanish time. Options for Striker activities would be presented to Hood as soon as they were available.

  After the briefing, Hood checked in with the night crew. While the day team continued to monitor the Spanish situation, Curt Hardaway, Lt. Gen. Bill Abram, and the rest of the “P.M.Squad,” as they called themselves, were overseeing the routine domestic and international activities of Op-Center. Lieutenant General Abram, who was Mike Rodgers’s counterpart, was especially busy with the Regional Op-Center. The mobile facility had been returned from its Middle East shakedown and was undergoing repair work and fine tuning. Everything was under control. Hood returned to his office to try to rest.

  He shut off the light, threw off his shoes, and lay back on his couch. As he stared at the dark ceiling his mind went to Sharon and the kids. He glanced at his luminous watch — the one Sharon had bought him for their first anniversary. They would be coming into Bradley International soon. He played with the notion of borrowing an army chopper and flying up to Old Saybrook. He’d buzz his in-laws and use a megaphone to beg his wife to come home. He would be dismissed for all that but what the hell. It would give him plenty of time to stay home with the family.

  Of course Hood had no intention of doing that. He was romantic enough to want to play the modern-day knight, but he wasn’t reckless enough. And why bother going up to Old Saybrook if he couldn’t promise to slow down? He liked his work. And shorter hours were something the job just wouldn’t permit. Part of him felt that Sharon was being vindictive because she’d had to cut way back on her career activities in order to raise the kids. But even if he’d wanted to stop working and raise a family — which he didn’t — they couldn’t have lived on Sharon’s salary. That was a fact.

  He shut his eyes and dropped his arm across them. But facts don’t always matter in situations like this, do they?

  Hood’s mind was too busy to allow him to sleep. He alternated between feeling angry, guilty, and utterly disgusted. He decided to give up trying to rest.

  He made himself a pot of coffee, poured it black into his memorial WASHINGTON SENATORS baseball mug, and went back to his desk. He spent some time with the computer files of Manni’s Italian secessionist movement. He was curious to see what, if any, intelligence work had been done to stopgap the collapse of Italy.

  There was nothing on file. It was a nearly six-year-long process, which began in 1993 as an offshoot of voter unhappiness over increasing political corruption scandals. Smaller communities claimed that they weren’t being adequately represented and so members of parliament were elected from individual districts rather than through proportional representation as before. That caused a fragmentation of power among the major parties which allowed smaller groups to flourish. Neo-Fascists came to power in 1994, business interests of the Forza Italia party wrested power from them a year later, and then the fall of Yugoslavia caused unrest all along the Istrian Peninsula in the north — unrest that the Rome-based Forza Italia was ill equipped to handle. For help the premier turned to parties that had a power base there. But those groups were interested in building their own strength and fanned the rebelliousness. Violence and secessionist talk flourished in Trieste and moved west to Venice and slingshot south as far as Livorno and Florence.

  The Milan-born Manni was recalled from Moscow to try to negotiate a fix to the deteriorating situation. His solution was to draft a pact that made northern Italy a largely autonomous political and economic region, with a congressional government in Milan to replace the bloc in the parliament in Rome. Both groups worked independently with the elected premier. While the Italians above the Northern Apennines paid taxes to their own capital, they used the same currency as the south; the two regions remained militarily intact; and the nation was still referred to as Italy.

  No military action was taken by Rome and no foreign intelligence services were involved to any great extent. The Italian Entente, as it was called, provided no model for the situation in Spain. And they lacked the one thing that had made Manni’s efforts workable: he was only dealing with two factions, north and south. The Spanish conflict involved at least a half dozen ethnic groups who had rarely if ever been comfortable together.

  The call came through ten minutes late. Hood called Rodgers in to listen on the speakerphone. As Rodgers arrived and took a seat, Manni was explaining in English that the reason he was late was because Portugal had just asked the United Nations for help.

  “There has been violence along the border between Salamanca and Zamora,” Manni said.

  Hood glanced at the map on his computer. Salamanca was located just below Zamora in central and northwestern Spain. Together, the regions shared about two hundred miles of border with Portugal.

  “The unrest began about three hours ago when anti-Castilians held a candlelight rally at the Postigo de la Traición — the Traitor’s Gate. That’s the spot by the city wall where the Castilian king Sancho II was assassinated in 1072. When police attempted to break up the rally, stones and bottles were thrown and the police fired several shots into the air. Someone in the crowd fire
d back and an officer was wounded. The police are mostly Castilian and they immediately turned on the ralliers — not as peacekeepers but as Castilians.”

  “With guns?” Hood asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Manni.

  “Which is like dropping a lighted match on gas,” said hawkish National Security advisor Burkow.

  “Mr. Burkow, you are correct,” said Manni. “Like a firestorm, riots spread westward to Portugal. The police called for military help from Madrid and it is being provided. But Lisbon is concerned that they may not be enough to contain the fighting and also to stop refugees from crossing the border. They’ve just asked the United Nations to create a buffer zone.”

  “How do you feel about Portugal’s request, Mr. Secretary-General?” Carol Lanning asked.

  “I am opposed,” he replied.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Burkow. “Lisbon’s got an army, an air force, and a navy. Let them field a force.”

  “No, Mr. Burkow,” Manni said. “I am uneasy about having any army on the border. Placing a force there would legitimize the crisis. It would acknowledge that a crisis exists.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Lanning asked.

  “It does,” Manni agreed. “But to millions of Spaniards the crisis is still a highly localized one. It’s a provincial matter, not a national or international one. And officially, it is still under control. If they learn that an army is gathered on the border — any army — there will be misinformation, confusion, and panic. The situation will become even worse.”

  “Mr. Manni,” Burkow said tensely, “this may all be academic. Are you aware that Prime Minister Aznar has spoken with President Lawrence and asked for a U.S. military presence offshore?”

  “Yes,” Manni said, “I am aware of this. Ostensibly, the force is there to defend and evacuate American tourists in the wake of the killing.”

  “Ostensibly,” Burkow agreed.

  “Has the President made a decision?”

  “Not yet,” said Burkow, “but he’s leaning toward it. He’s waiting for intelligence to determine whether American interests are, in fact, in danger. Paul? Marius? Do either of you have anything to say about that?”