The Sum of All Fears Page 20

  The farmer grew his vegetables and grazed his few head of stock on his rocky patch close to the Syrian-Lebanese border. He didn’t persevere, didn’t really endure, and even survival was an overstatement of his existence. Life for the farmer was nothing more than a habit he could not break, an endless succession of increasingly weary days. When each spring his ewes produced new lambs, he prayed quietly that he’d not live to see them slaughtered—but he also resented the fact that these meek and foolish animals might outlast himself.

  Another dawn. The farmer neither had nor needed an alarm clock. When the sky brightened, the bells on his sheep and goats started to clatter. His eyes opened, and he again became conscious of the pain in his limbs. He stretched in his bed, then rose slowly. In a few minutes he’d washed and scraped the gray stubble from his face, eaten his stale bread and strong, sweet coffee, and begun one more day of labor. The farmer did his gardening in the morning, before the heat of the day really took hold. He had a sizable garden, because selling off its surplus in the local market provided cash for the few things that he counted as luxuries. Even that was a struggle. The work punished his arthritic limbs, and keeping his animals away from the tender shoots was one more curse in his life, but the sheep and goats could also be sold for cash, and without that money he would long since have starved. The truth of the matter was that he ate adequately from the sweat of his wrinkled brow, and had he not been so lonely, he could have eaten more. As it was, solitude had made him parsimonious. Even his gardening tools were old. He trudged out to the field, the sun still low in the sky, to destroy the weeds that every day sprang up anew among his vegetables. If only someone could train a goat, he thought, echoing words of his father and grandfather. A goat that would eat the weeds but not the plants, that would be something. But a goat was no more intelligent than a clod of dirt, except when it came to doing mischief. The three-hour effort of lifting the mattock and tearing up the weeds began in the same corner of the garden, and he worked his way up one row and down the next with a steady pace that belied his age and infirmity.

  Clunk.

  What was that? The farmer stood up straight and wiped some sweat away. Halfway through the morning labor, beginning to look forward to the rest that came with attending to the sheep ... Not a stone. He used his tool to pull the dirt away from—oh, that.

  People often wonder at the process. Farmers the world over have joked of it since farming first began, the way that farm fields produce rocks. Stone fences along New England lanes attest to the superficially mysterious process. Water did it. Water falling as rain seeps into the soil. In the winter the water freezes into ice, which expands as it becomes a solid. As it expands, it pushes up rather than down, because pushing up is easier. That action moves rocks in the soil to the surface, and so fields grow rocks, something especially true on the Golan region of Syria, whose soil is a geologically recent construct of volcanism, and whose winters, surprisingly to many, can grow cold and frosty.

  But this one was not a rock.

  It was metallic, a sandy brown color, he saw, pulling the dirt away. Oh, yes, that day. The same day his son had been—

  What do I do about this damned thing? the farmer asked himself. It was, of course, a bomb. He wasn’t so foolish that he didn’t know that much. How it had gotten here was a mystery, of course. He’d never seen any aircraft, Syrian or Israeli, drop bombs anywhere close to his farm, but that didn’t matter. He could scarcely deny that it was here. To the farmer it might as well have been a rock, just a big brown rock, too big to dig out and carry off to the edge of the field, big enough to interrupt two rows of carrots. He didn’t fear the thing. It had not gone off, after all, and that meant that it was broken. Proper bombs fell off airplanes and exploded when they hit the ground. This one had just dug its small crater, which he’d filled back up the next day, unmindful at the time of the injuries to his son.

  Why couldn’t it have just stayed two meters down, where it belonged? he asked himself. But that had never been the pattern of his life, had it? No, anything that could do him harm had found him, hadn’t it? The farmer wondered why God had been so cruel to him. Had he not said all his prayers, followed all of the strict rules of the Druse? What had he ever asked for? Whose sins was he expiating?

  Well. There was no sense asking such questions at this late date. For the moment, he had work to do. He continued his weeding, standing on the exposed tip of the bomb to get a few, and worked his way down the row. His son would visit in a day or two, allowing the old man to see and beam at his grandchildren, the one unqualified joy of his life. He’d ask his son’s advice. His son had been a soldier, and understood such things.

  It was the sort of week that any government employee hated. Something important was happening in a different time zone. There was a six-hour differential, and it seemed very strange to Jack that he was being afflicted with jet lag without having traveled anywhere.

  “So how’s it going over there?” Clark asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Damned well.” Jack flipped through the documents. “The Saudis and Israelis actually agreed on something yesterday. They both wanted to change something, and both actually proposed the same change.” Jack chuckled at that. It had to be accidental, and if they’d known, both sides would have changed their positions.

  “That must have embarrassed the hell out of somebody!” Clark laughed aloud, thinking the same as his boss. It was still dark, and the one good thing about the early days was that the roads were empty. “You really liked the Saudis, didn’t you?”

  “Ever been over there?”

  “Aside from the war, you mean? Lots of times, Jack. I staged into Iran from there back in ‘79 and ’80, spent a lot of time with the Saudis, learned the language.”

  “What did you think of the place?” Jack asked.

  “I liked it there. Got to know one guy pretty well, a major in their army—spook really, like me. Not much field experience, but a lot of book learning. He was smart enough to know that he had a lot to learn, and he listened when I told him stuff. Got invited to his house a coupla-three times. He had two sons, nice little kids. One’s flying fighters now. Funny how they treat their women, though. Sandy’d never go for it.” Clark paused as he changed lanes to pass a truck. “Professionally speaking, they were cooperative as hell. Anyway, what I saw I sort of liked. They’re different from us, but so what? World ain’t full of Americans.”

  “What about the Israelis?” Jack asked as he closed the document case.

  “I’ve worked with them once or twice—well, more than that, doc, mainly in Lebanon. Their intelligence guys are real pros, cocky, arrogant bastards, but the ones I met had a lot to be cocky about. Fortress mentality, like—us-and-them mentality, y’know? Also understandable.” Clark turned. “That’s the big hangup, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Weaning them away from that. It can’t be easy.”

  “It isn’t. I wish they’d wake up to the way the world is now,” Ryan growled.

  “Doc, you have to understand. They all think like front-line grunts. What do you expect? Hell, man, their whole country is like a free-fire zone for the other side. They have the same way of thinking that us line animals had in ‘Nam. There are two kinds of people—your people and everybody else.” John Clark shook his head. “You know how many times I’ve tried to explain that to kids at the Farm? Basic survival mentality. The Israelis think that way ’cause they can’t think any other way. The Nazis killed millions of Jews and we didn’t do dick about it—well, okay, maybe we couldn’t have done anything ’cause of the way things were at the time. Then again, I wonder if Hitler was all that hard a target if we woulda ever got serious about doing his ass.

  “Anyway, I agree with you that they have to look beyond all that, but you gotta remember that we’re asking one hell of a lot.”

  “Maybe you should have been along when I met with Avi,” Jack observed with a yawn.

  “General Ben Jak
ob? Supposed to be one tough, serious son of a bitch. His troops respect the man. That says a lot. Sorry I wasn’t there, boss, but that two weeks of fishing was just about what I needed.” Even line animals got vacations.

  “I hear you, Mr. Clark.”

  “Hey, I gotta go down to Quantico this afternoon to requalify on pistol. If you don’t mind me saying so, you look like you could use a little stress-relief, man. Why not come on down? I’ll get a nice little Beretta for you to play with.”

  Jack thought about that. It sounded nice. In fact it sounded great. But. But he had too much work to do.

  “No time, John.”

  “Aye aye, sir. You’re not getting your exercise, you’re drinking too goddamned much, and you look like shit, Dr. Ryan. That is my professional opinion.”

  About what Cathy told me last night, but Clark doesn’t know just how bad it is. Jack stared out the window at the lights of houses whose government-worker occupants were just waking up.

  “You’re right. I have to do something about it, but today I just don’t have the time.”

  “How about tomorrow at lunch we take a little run?”

  “Lunch with the directorate chiefs,” Jack evaded.

  Clark shut up and concentrated on his driving. When would the poor, dumb bastard learn? Smart a guy as he was, he was letting the job eat him up.

  The President awoke to find an unkempt mountain of blond hair on his chest and a thin, feminine arm flung across him. There were worse ways to awaken. He asked himself why he’d waited so long. She’d been clearly available to him for—God, for years. In her forties, but lithe and pretty, as much as any man could want, and the President was a man with a man’s needs. His wife, Marian, had lingered for years, bravely fighting the MS that had ultimately stolen her life, but only after crushing what had once been a lively, charming, intelligent, bubbling personality, the light of his life, Fowler remembered. What personality he’d once had had largely been her creation, and it had died its own lingering death. A defense mechanism, he knew. All those endless months. He’d had to be strong for her, to provide for her the stoic reserve of energy without which she would have died so much sooner. But doing that had made an automaton of Bob Fowler. There was only so much personality, so much strength, so much courage a man contained, and as Marian’s life had drained away, so had his humanity ebbed with it. And perhaps more than that, Fowler admitted to himself.

  The perverse thing was that it had made him a better politician. His best years as governor and his presidential campaign had displayed the calm, dispassionate, intellectual reason that the voters had wanted, much to the surprise of pundits and mavens or whatever you called the commentators who thought they knew so much but never tried to find out themselves. It had also helped that his predecessor had run an unaccountably dumb campaign, but Fowler figured he would have won anyway.

  The victory, almost two Novembers ago, had left him the first President since—Cleveland, wasn’t it?—without a wife. And also without much of a personality. The Technocrat President, the editorial writers called him. That he was by profession a lawyer didn’t seem to matter to the news media. Once they had a simple label that all could agree on, they made it truth whether it was accurate or not. The Ice Man.

  If only Marian could have lived to see this. She’d known he wasn’t made of ice. There were those who remembered what Bob Fowler had once been like, a passionate trial lawyer, advocate of civil rights, the scourge of organized crime. The man who cleaned up Cleveland. Not for very long, of course, for all such victories, like those in politics, were transitory. He remembered the birth of each of his children, the pride of fatherhood, the love of his wife for him and their two children, the quiet dinners in candlelit restaurants. He remembered meeting Marian at a high-school football game, and she’d loved the spectacle as much as he ever had. Thirty years of marriage which had begun while both were still in college, the last three of which had been an ongoing nightmare as the disease that had manifested itself in her late thirties had in her late forties taken a dramatic and downward turn and, finally, a death too long in coming but too soon in arriving, by which time he’d been too exhausted even to shed tears. And then the years of aloneness.

  Well, perhaps that was over.

  Thank God for the Secret Service, Fowler thought. In the governor’s mansion in Columbus it would quickly have gotten out. But not here. Outside his door was a pair of armed agents, and down the hall that Army warrant officer with the leather briefcase called the Football, an appellation which did not please the President, but there were things even he could not change. His National Security Advisor could, in any case, share his bed, and the White House staffers kept the secret. That, he thought, was rather remarkable.

  Fowler looked down at his lover. Elizabeth was undeniably pretty. Her skin was pale because her work habits denied her sunlight, but he preferred women with pale, fair skin. The covers were askew because of the previous night’s gyrations, and he could examine her back; the skin was so smooth and soft. He felt her relaxed breath on his chest, and the way her left arm wrapped around him. He ran a hand down her back and was rewarded by a hmmmmm and a slight increase in pressure from the sleeping hug she gave him.

  There was a discreet knock at the door. The President pulled the covers up and coughed. After a five-count, the door opened, and an agent came in with a coffee tray with some document printouts before withdrawing. Fowler knew he couldn’t trust one of the ordinary staff that far, but the Secret Service really was the American version of the Praetorian Guard. The agent never betrayed his emotions, except for a good-morning nod at the Boss, as the agents referred to him. The devotion they gave him was almost slavish. Though well-educated men and women, they really did have a simple outlook on things, and Fowler knew that there was room in the world for such people. Someone, often someone quite skilled, had to carry out the decisions and orders of his or her superiors. The gun-toting agents were sworn to protect him, even to interpose their bodies between the President and any danger—the maneuver was called “catching the bullet”—and it amazed Fowler that such bright people could train themselves to do something so selflessly dumb. But it was to his benefit. As was their discretion. Well, the joke was that such good help was hard to come by. It was true: you had to be President to have that kind of servant.

  Fowler reached for his coffee and poured a cup one-handed. He drank it black. After his first sip he used a remote-control to switch on a TV set. It was tuned to CNN, and the lead story—it was two in the afternoon there—was Rome, of course.

  “Mmmmm.” Elizabeth moved her head, and her hair swept across him. She always awoke slower than he. Fowler ran a finger down her spine, earning himself a last cuddle before her eyes opened. Her head came up with a violent start.

  “Bob!”

  “Yes?”

  “Somebody’s been here!” She pointed to the tray with the cups, and knew that Fowler hadn’t fetched it himself.

  “Coffee?”

  “Bob!”

  “Look, Elizabeth, the people outside the door know that you’re here. What do you think we are hiding, and from whom are we hiding it? Hell, they probably have microphones in here.” He’d never said that before. He didn’t know for sure, and had studiously refrained from inquiring, but it was a logical thing to expect. The institutional paranoia of the Secret Service denied the agents the ability to trust Elizabeth or anyone else, except the President. Therefore, if she tried to kill him, they needed to know, so that the agents outside the door could burst in with their guns and save HAWK from his lover. There probably were microphones. Cameras, too? No, probably not cameras, but surely there had to be microphones. Fowler actually found that thought somewhat stimulating, a fact that editorial writers would never have believed. Not the Ice Man.

  “My God!” Liz Elliot had never thought of that. She hoisted herself up, and her breasts dangled deliciously before his eyes. But Fowler was not that sort of morning person. Mornings were for work.<
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  “I am the President, Elizabeth,” Fowler pointed out as she disengaged herself. The idea of cameras occurred to her, too, and she quickly rearranged the bedclothes. Fowler smiled at the foolishness of it. “Coffee?” he asked again.

  Elizabeth Elliot almost giggled. Here she was, in the President’s bed, naked as a jaybird, with armed guards outside the door. But Bob had let someone in the room! The man was incredible. Had he even covered her up? She could ask, but decided not to, fearing that he might display his twisted sense of humor, which was at its best when it was slightly cruel. And yet. Had she ever had so good a lover as he? The first time—it must have been years, but he was so patient, so ... respectful. So easy to manage. Elliot smiled her secret smile to herself. He could be directed to do exactly what she wanted, when she wanted it, and do it consummately well, for he loved to give pleasure to a woman. Why? she wondered. Perhaps he wanted to be remembered. He was a politician, after all, and what they all craved was a few lines in history books. Well, he’d have those, one way or another. Every president did, even Grant and Harding were remembered, and with what was happening. ... Even here he craved being remembered, and so he did what the woman wanted, if the woman had the wit to ask.