The Sum of All Fears Page 19

  “Never! Never will I bow to this infamy!” the Defense Minister shouted. It was a dramatic performance, even for him. He’d pounded the table hard enough to upset his water glass, and the puddle from it threatened to seep over the edge and into his lap. He studiously ignored it as his fierce blue eyes swept around the cabinet room.

  “And what if Fowler is serious with his threats?”

  “We’ll break his career!” Defense said. “We can do that. We’ve jerked American politicians into line before!”

  “More than we’ve been able to do here,” the Foreign Minister observed sotto voce to his neighbor at the table.

  “What was that?”

  “I said it might not be possible in this case, Rafi.” David Askenazi took a sip from his glass before going on. “Our ambassador in Washington tells me that his people on the Hill find real support for Fowler’s plan. The Saudi Ambassador threw a major party last weekend for the congressional leadership. He performed well, our sources tell us. Right, Avi?”

  “Correct, Minister,” General Ben Jakob answered. His boss was out of the country at the moment, and he spoke for the Mossad. “The Saudis and the rest of the ‘moderate’ Gulf states are willing to end their declared state of war, to institute ministerial relations with us preparatory for full recognition at an unspecified later date, and to underwrite part of the American costs for stationing their troops and planes here—plus, I might add, picking up the entire cost of the peacekeeping force and the economic rehabilitation of our Palestinian friends.”

  “How do we say no to that?” the Foreign Minister inquired dryly. “Are you surprised at the support in the American Congress?”

  “It’s all a trick!” Defense insisted.

  “If so, it’s a damnably clever one,” Ben Jakob said.

  “You believe this twaddle, Avi? You?” Ben Jakob had been Rafi Mandel’s best battalion commander in the Sinai, so many years before.

  “I don’t know, Rafi.” The Deputy Director of the Mossad had never been more cognizant of his position as a deputy, and speaking in the name of his boss did not come easy.

  “Your evaluation?” the Prime Minister asked gently. Someone at the table, he decided, had to be calm.

  “The Americans are entirely sincere,” Avi replied. “Their willingness to provide a physical guarantee—the mutual-defense treaty, and the stationing of troops—is genuine. From a strictly military point of—”

  “I speak for the defense of Israel!” Mandel snarled.

  Ben Jakob turned to stare his former commander down. “Rafi, you have always outranked me, but I’ve killed my share of enemies and you know it well.” Avi paused for a moment to let that rest on the table. When he went on, his voice was quiet and measured and dispassionate as he allowed his reason to overcome emotions no less strong than Mandel’s. “The American military units represent a serious commitment. We’re talking about a twenty-five-percent increase in the striking power of our Air Force, and that tank unit is more powerful than our strongest brigade. Moreover, I do not see how that commitment can ever be withdrawn. For that to happen—our friends in America will never let it happen.”

  “We’ve been abandoned before!” Mandel pointed out coldly. “Our only defense is ourselves.”

  “Rafi,” the Foreign Minister said. “My friend, where has that led us? You and I have fought together, too, and not merely in this room. Is there to be no end to it?”

  “Better no treaty than a bad treaty!”

  “I agree,” the Prime Minister said. “But how bad will this treaty be?”

  “We have all read the draft. I will propose some modest changes, but, my friends, I think it is time,” the Foreign Minister said. “My advice to you is that we accept the Fowler Plan, with certain conditions.” The Foreign Minister outlined them.

  “Will the Americans grant those, Avi?”

  “They’ll complain about the cost, but our friends in their Congress will go along, whether President Fowler approves them or not. They will recognize our historic concessions, and they will wish to make us feel secure within our borders.”

  “Then I will resign!” Rafi Mandel shouted.

  “No, Rafi, you will not,” the Prime Minister said, growing a little tired of his histrionics. “If you resign, you cast yourself out. You want this seat someday, and you will never have it if you leave the cabinet now.”

  Mandel flushed crimson at that rebuke.

  The Prime Minister looked around the room. “So what is the opinion of the government?”

  Forty minutes later, Jack’s phone rang. He lifted it, noting that it was his most secure line, the direct one that bypassed Nancy Cummings.

  “Ryan.” He listened for a minute and made some notes. “Thanks.”

  Next the DDCI rose and walked into Nancy’s office, then turned left through the door into Marcus Cabot’s more capacious room. Cabot was lying on the couch in the far corner. Like Judge Arthur Moore, his predecessor, Cabot liked to smoke the occasional cigar. His shoes were off, and he was reading over a file with striped tape on the borders. Just one more secret file in a building full of them. The folder dropped, and Cabot, looking like a pink, chubby volcano, eyed Ryan as he approached.

  “What is it, Jack?”

  “Just got a call from our friend in Israel. They’re coming to Rome, and the cabinet voted to accept the treaty terms, with a few modifications.”

  “What are they?” Ryan handed over his notes. Cabot scanned them. “You and Talbot were right.”

  “Yeah, and I should have let him play the card instead of me.”

  “Good call, you predicted all but one.” Cabot rose and slipped into his black loafers before walking to his desk. Here he lifted a phone. “Tell the President I’ll meet him at the White House when he gets back from New York. I want Talbot and Bunker there also. Tell him it’s a go.” He set the phone back in the cradle. He grinned around the cigar in his teeth, trying to look like George Patton, who hadn’t smoked to the best of Ryan’s knowledge. “How about that?”

  “How long you figure to finalize it?”

  “With the advance work you and Adler did, plus the finishing work from Talbot and Bunker . . . ? Hmm. Give it two weeks. Won’t go as fast as it did with Carter at Camp David, because too many professional diplomats are involved, but in fourteen days the President takes his seven-four-seven to Rome to sign the documents.”

  “You want me to go down with you to the White House?”

  “No, I’ll handle it.”

  “Okay.” That wasn’t unexpected. Ryan left the room the same way he’d come in.

  7

  THE CITY OF GOD

  The cameras were in place. Air Force C-5B Galaxy transports had loaded the newest state-of-the-art ground-station vans at Andrews Air Force Base and flown them to Leonardo da Vinci Airport. This was less for the signing ceremony—if they got that far, commentators worried—than what wags called the pre-game show. The fully digital improved-definition equipment just coming on line, the producers felt, would better depict the art collections that litter Vatican walls as trees line national parks. Local carpenters and specialists from New York and Atlanta had worked around the clock to build the special booths from which the network anchors would broadcast. All three network morning news shows were originating from the Vatican. CNN was also there in force, as were NHK, BBC, and nearly every other television network in the world, all fighting for space in the grand piazza that sprawls before the church begun in 1503 by Bramante, carried on by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini. A brief but violent windstorm had carried spray from the central fountain into the Deutsche Welle anchor booth and shorted out a hundred thousand marks’ worth of equipment. Vatican officials had finally protested that there would be no room for the people to witness the event—for which they prayed—but by then it had been far too late. Someone remembered that in Roman times this had been the site of the Circus Maximus, and it was generally agreed that this was the grandest circus of recent years. Ex
cept that the Roman “circus” was mainly for chariot races.

  The TV people enjoyed their stay in Rome. The crews for Today and Good Morning America were able, for once, to rise indecently late instead of before the paperboy, to begin their broadcasts after lunch—!!!—and finish in time for afternoon shopping, followed by dinner at one of Rome’s many fine restaurants. Their research people scoured reference books for historical remote locations like the Colosseum—correctly called the Flavian Amphitheater, one careful back-room type discovered—where people waxed rhapsodic on the Roman substitute for NFL football: combat, to the death, man against man, man against beast, beast against Christian, and various other permutations thereof. But it was the Forum that was the symbolic focus for their time in Rome. Here were the ruins of Rome’s civic center, where Cicero and Scipio had walked and talked and met with supporters and opponents, the place to which visitors had come for centuries. Eternal Rome, mother of a vast empire, playing yet another role on the world stage. In its center was the Vatican, just a handful of acres, really, but a sovereign country nonetheless. “How many divisions has the Pope?” a TV anchorman quoted Stalin, then rambled into a discourse on how the Church and its values had outlasted Marxism-Leninism to the extent that the Soviet Union had decided to open diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and had its own evening news, Vremya, originating from a booth less than fifty yards from his own.

  Additional attention was given to the two other religions present in the negotiations. At the arrival ceremony, the Pope had recalled an incident from the earliest days of Islam: a commission of Catholic bishops had traveled to Arabia, essentially on an intelligence-gathering mission to see what Mohammed was up to. After a cordial first meeting, the senior Bishop had asked where he and his companions might celebrate mass. Mohammed had immediately offered the use of the mosque in which they stood. After all, the Prophet had observed, is this not a house consecrated to God? The Holy Father extended the same courtesy to the Israelis. In both cases there was some measure of discomfort to the more conservative churchmen present, but the Holy Father had swept that aside with a speech characteristically delivered in three languages.

  “In the name of the God Whom we all know by different names, but Who is nevertheless the same God of all men, we offer our city to the service of men of goodwill. We share so many beliefs. We believe in a God of mercy and love. We believe in the spiritual nature of man. We believe in the paramount value of faith, and in the manifestation of that faith in charity and brotherhood To our brothers from distant lands, we give you greetings and we offer our prayers that your faith will find a way to the justice and the peace of God to which all of our faiths direct us. ”

  “Wow,” a morning-show anchor observed off-mike. “I’m beginning to think this circus is serious.”

  But coverage didn’t stop there, of course. In the interest of fairness, balance, controversy, a proper understanding of events, and selling commercials, the TV coverage included the head of a Jewish paramilitary group who vociferously recalled Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews from Iberia, the czar’s Black Hundreds, and, naturally, Hitler’s Holocaust—which he emphasized further because of German reunification—and concluded that Jews were fools to trust anyone at all except the weapons in their own strong hands. From Qum, the Ayatolla Daryaei, the religious leader of Iran and long an enemy of everything Americans did, railed against all unbelievers, consigning each and every one to his personal version of hell, but translation made understanding difficult for American viewers, and his grandiloquent ranting was cut short. A self-styled “charismatic Christian” from the American South got the most air time. After first denouncing Roman Catholicism as the quintessential Anti-Christ, he repeated his renowned claim that God didn’t even hear the prayers of the Jews, much less the infidel Muslims, whom he called Mohammedans as an unnecessary further insult.

  But somehow those demagogues were ignored—more correctly, their views were. The TV networks received thousands of angry calls that such bigots were given air time at all. This delighted the TV executives, of course. It meant that people would return to the same show seeking further outrage. The American bigot immediately noticed a dip in his contribution envelopes. B‘nai B’rith raced to condemn the off-the-reservation rabbi. The leader of the League of Islamic Nations, himself a distinguished cleric, denounced the radical imam as a heretic against the words of the Prophet, whom he quoted at length to make his point. The TV networks provided all of the countervailing commentary also, thus showing balance enough to pacify some viewers and enrage others.

  Within a day, one newspaper column noted that the thousands of correspondents attending the conference had taken to calling it the Peace Bowl, in recognition of the circular configuration of the Piazza San Pietro. The more observant realized that this was evidence of the strain on reporters with a story to cover but nothing to report. Security at the conference was hermetically tight. Those participants who came and went were carried about by military aircraft via military air bases. Reporters and cameramen with their long lenses were kept as far from the action as possible, and for the most part travel was accomplished in darkness. The Swiss Guards of the Vatican, outfitted though they were in Renaissance jump suits, let not a mouse pass by their lines, and perversely when something significant did happen—the Swiss Defense Minister discreetly entered a remote doorway—no one noticed.

  Polling information in numerous countries showed uniform hope that this would be the one. A world tired of discord and riding a euphoric wave of relief at recent changes in East-West relations somehow sensed that it was. Commentators warned that there had been no harder issue in recent history, but people the world over prayed in a hundred languages and a million churches for an end to this last and most dangerous dispute on the planet. To their credit, the TV networks reported that, too.

  Professional diplomats, some of them the most certified of cynics who hadn’t seen the inside of a church since childhood, felt the weight of such pressure as they had never known. Sketchy reports from Vatican custodial staffers spoke of solitary midnight walks down the nave of Saint Peter’s, strolls along outside balconies on clear, starlit nights, long talks of some participants with the Holy Father. But nothing else. The highly paid TV anchors stared at one another in awkward silences. Print journalists struggled and stole any good idea they could find just so that they could produce some copy. Not since Carter’s marathon stint at Camp David had such weighty negotiations proceeded with so little reportage.

  And the world held its breath.

  The old man wore a red fez trimmed with white. Not many continued the characteristic manner of dress, but this one kept to the way of his ancestors. Life was hard for the Druse, and the one solace he had lay in the religion he’d observed for all of his sixty-six years.

  The Druse are members of a Middle Eastern religious sect combining aspects of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, founded by Al-hakim bi’amrillahi, Caliph of Egypt in the 11th century, who had deemed himself the incarnation of God Himself. Living for the most part in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, they occupy a precarious niche in the societies of all three nations. Unlike Muslim Israelis, they are allowed to serve in the armed forces of the Jewish state, a fact that does not engender trust for the Syrian Druse in the government that rules over them. While some Druse have risen to command in the Syrian Army, it was well remembered that one such officer, a colonel commanding a regiment, had been executed after the 1973 war for being forced off a strategic crossroads. Though in strictly military terms he’d fought bravely and well, and had been lucky to extract what remained of his command in good order, the loss of that crossroads had cost the Syrian Army a pair of tank brigades, and as a result the Colonel had been summarily executed ... for being unlucky, and probably for being a Druse.

  The old farmer didn’t know all of the details behind that story, but knew enough. The Syrian Muslims had killed another Druse then, and more since. He accordingly trusted no one from the
Syrian Army or government. But that did not mean that he had the least affection for Israel, either. In 1975 a long-barreled Israeli 175mm gun had scoured his area, searching for a Syrian ammunition depot, and the fragments from one stray round had mortally wounded his wife of forty years, adding loneliness to his surfeit of misery. What for Israel was a historical constant was for this simple farmer an immediate and deadly fact of life. Fate had decided that he should live between two armies, both of which regarded his physical existence as an annoying inconvenience. He was not a man who had ever asked much of life. He had a small holding of land which he farmed, a few sheep and goats, a simple house built of stones he’d carried from his rocky fields. All he wanted to do was live. It was not, he’d once thought, all that much to ask, but sixty-six turbulent years had proven him wrong and wrong again. He’d prayed for mercy from his God, and for justice, and for just a few comforts—he’d always known that wealth would never be his—so that his lot and that of his wife would be just a little easier. But that had never happened. Of the five children his wife had borne him, only one had survived into his teens, and that son had been conscripted into the Syrian Army in time for the 1973 war. His son had more luck than the entire family had known: when his BTR-60 personnel carrier had taken a hit from an Israeli tank, he’d been thrown out the top, losing only an eye and a hand in the process. Alive, but half-blinded, he’d married and given his father grandchildren as he lived a modestly successful life as a merchant and money-lender. Not much of a blessing, in contrast to what else had happened in his life, it seemed to the farmer the only joy he’d known.