“Affirmative, as per your orders.”
“Then I would like for you to investigate the possibility,” Millikan said, “of making Hennessey’s life very complicated and unpleasant for a while—using Vandeventer as the smoking gun. This pretense of working for the FBI is a paper-thin charade. Anyone with an IQ out of the single digits knows he’s really CIA. And I didn’t care as long as he was chasing Turks around, or whatever he was doing.”
“Yes, sir. Chasing Vakhan Turks.”
“But now he’s stepped into this other business. And I think he’s got rather careless by dealing so openly with a woman who is only a few hours out of the Agency. Really, what is the point of having a law against the Agency operating within the United States if this kind of leakage is tolerated? I think that Hennessey’s actions in this case raise deeply troubling ethical issues that would make a much better newspaper scoop than any of this nonsense about Iraqis and botulism.”
“I know of some editors who are highly sensitive to issues of government ethics,” Dellinger said, “and who have no love for Republican administrations in general. If you don’t mind, I will pass your insight on to them—anonymously, of course.”
But Millikan was just warming to the task. The more he thought about it, the broader the horizons that seemed to open before him. A wonderful idea came to him, and he toyed with it for a few moments before voicing it. “In fact, I think that this is just the sort of thing that we have inspectors general for.” He raised an eyebrow at Dellinger, who looked stunned at the audacity of this notion.
But Dellinger’s astonishment rapidly developed into a sort of mischievous excitement. “That’s rather heavy artillery,” he said.
“We’re at war,” Millikan said. “That ups all antes.”
“Then I will look into the idea,” Dellinger said, and threw his boss a crisp salute. He exited the White House and headed for his car at a run, off in search of inspectors general.
Chapter Fourty-Eight
_We are all miffed at our Saudi hosts. They invited us here to protect their country, but they don’t want us to mingle with their people and so they have put us on sort of a reservation—an old cement factory on the edge of Dhahran. We are in long rows of tents living on this great big slab of dust while we wait for the Big Green Machine to get us sorted out and sent off to the desert. Was sitting in the mess tent yesterday waving both hands over my plate trying to shoo all the flies away. Then the wind shifted and I smelled something foul and saw the latrines only a few yards away, with the same flies swarming around them. Pointed this out to my commanding officer (not that I was the only nurse or doctor who had noticed it!), and now the whole Medical Corps is in an uproar over what some people are calling “Civil War Hygiene.” But that’s not entirely the Saudis’ fault. It’s pure Army._
Clyde had arrived at the Happy Chef a few minutes early, and read this and two other letters from Desiree as he sat on the bench just inside the entrance, waiting for his breakfast date to arrive.
Happy Chefs always had to be close to the highway, because each one was marked by a giant fiberglass effigy of an ebullient, potbellied chef in a big white hat, holding a huge wooden spoon over his head, much like a Civil War colonel brandishing his cavalry saber. This one looked pretty big as Happy Chefs went; it had to be, in order not to be dwarfed by the Wal-Mart behind it, which looked like something out of Abu Simbel.
It was the first week in December, and the Happy Chef (both the fiberglass statue and the restaurant itself) had been adorned with garlands of emerald-green tinsel and blinking lights. Christmas advertising supplements to the Des Moines Register and the local paper were strewn like red-and-green chaff all over the bench and the lunch counter, reminding Clyde of the illfated business with Jonathan Town. Town had called him a few days ago, sounding irritated. “Thanks for nearly getting me fired,” he had said.
“You in trouble at school?”
“No, no, I’m talking about my stringer job.”
“The Register?”
“Yeah. I talked to my editor in Des Moines about your Iraqi thing. He said he’d take it the next level up. Four days later I hear from my boss’s boss’s boss directly—he calls me on a damn cell phone from Washington. He reads me the riot act, tells me that if I breathe a word about the story to anyone, they will disavow any knowledge of my actions, fire me instantly, and let it be known that I’m some sort of a crackpot who has no connection with the Des Moines Register whatsoever.”
Clyde had mulled this over. “I suppose this isn’t a normal way for them to reject a story idea.”