“I sort of pride myself on doing good fundamental police work,” Clyde said. “And I don’t have what it takes right now. I don’t have solid evidence. They’ll laugh at me.”
“They may laugh at you because that’s part of the game they have to play,” Fazoul said. “But everything you tell them is going to end up in Washington, on the desks of people who aren’t laughing.”
“Fazoul, who the heck are you?” Clyde said. It felt good finally to ask this question.
Fazoul said, “You saw the photograph. You have seen my new son. That’s who I am.”
“But beyond that—”
“I have friends with access to more information about this matter,” Fazoul said. “Since our chat at the Stonefields’ I have been in communication with these friends, over channels that neither the FBI nor the Iraqis nor anyone else can monitor. They tell me that your wild idea is quite plausible.”
Another long silence. Clyde finally forced himself to say something. He spoke through clenched teeth.” The FBI fellow looked at my report on the horse mutilation and said it was very well done,” he said. “I don’t like to toot my own horn, but that’s what he said. He told me that I should consider sending in an application to the FBI someday.”
“Ah,” Fazoul said very quietly.
“I’m going to lose the election, Fazoul. I’m just going to get my ass kicked.”
“So they say.”
“And it got me to thinking, well—”
“I see,” Fazoul said. “The FBI thing is very important to you.”
“Yeah,” Clyde confessed, feeling kind of thick in the throat. “I didn’t realize it until now. The idea of coming in with a half-assed report—something that would go into my file—”
“Would it help,” Fazoul said, “if I told you that the local FBI man might not have been entirely sincere?”
“Well, that did occur to me,” Clyde allowed. “All I’m saying is that it’s a point of pride for me not to hand in a Mickey Mouse report.”
Fazoul was silent for a minute. Then he said, “They tell me that, in the middle of July, three men carrying Jordanian passports came to Eastern Iowa University in the guise of graduate students. The late Dr. Vandeventer arranged the entire business. These men are not really Jordanians. They are Iraqis. One of them is a very highly placed member of Saddam’s inner circle—a man who was involved with the Supergun program and other such adventures. One is a security man acting as bodyguard and muscle for the first. The third is a biological-weapons expert.”
“You say they came in mid-July. Two weeks before the invasion.”
“Saddam made the final decision to invade Kuwait in mid-July,” Fazoul said. “At that moment any number of contingency plans went into effect. This was one of them.”
“Why are you telling me this? To fill out my report?”
“Yes. You said you lacked hard evidence.”
“But you said that the FBI already knows about all of this.”
“Someone at the FBI probably does. Others do not—or perhaps they are unwilling to believe in it for reasons of their own.”
“Are you talking about, like, internal politics?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve never been very good at playing politics. You can ask Mullowney.”
“Think of it like football. You don’t have to be the coach or even the quarterback. Those roles are being played by people you don’t know, people in Washington. You are like a center. All you have to do is snap the ball on cue.”
“And then get hammered into the ground by a three-hundred-pound defensive lineman.”
“Something like that,” Fazoul said. “I cannot promise an easy resolution, or even a safe one.”
They came over a subtle rise, and suddenly the lights of Nishnabotna were laid out before them.
“The Velcro diaper covers are handy,” Clyde said, “if you can afford them.”
November
Chapter Fourty