The main entrance of the Castleman would get you only to the bank. Betsy entered via the parking ramp instead, walked through an unmarked, windowless steel door, and showed her credentials to a guard, who allowed her into the elevator lobby. She got off at the seventh floor, displayed her ID to another guard, and walked halfway down a corridor punctuated at wide intervals by heavy doors with electronic locks. Each door gave access to a vault of offices, each vault hermetically sealed from the next. Betsy punched the code de semaine into one such lock and pushed the door open. A few greeting cards, and notes of congratulations, had been slipped under her door by colleagues who worked in other vaults and who hadn’t been able to make it to yesterday’s celebratory lunch at the Pawnbroker.
Betsy had passed her five-year polygraph test brilliantly. Perhaps, she mused, the same low basal metabolism that made her prone to gaining weight also produced the steady traces on the polygraph that were so reassuring to her employers. The examiner had been so impressed—her responses so perfectly matched the baseline established five years earlier on her entry poly—that he had set Betsy’s test aside as an example for others to aspire to.
The vault consisted mostly of open cubicles—eight in all, each equipped with a Sun workstation. These were mostly in the back, near windows. In the front were two desks for the secretarial staff. In the back corner was an office enclosed by glass walls, the domain of the branch chief, Howard King. Betsy’s cubicle was gaudy with Mylar balloons and congratulatory bouquets. From her armless swivel chair she had a view over I-66, and if she put her face close to the mysterious surveillance-proof window, she could make out one tower of the National Cathedral. She took a moment to enjoy this panorama before sitting down to work.
All the way to work Betsy had been rehearsing in her head the agenda for today’s Interagency Study Group over at Ag.
Betsy’s mental prep for the meeting at Ag was important—she never did anything until she had run through it in her head several hundred times. Frequently she would get so muddled that, in an effort to clarify things in her own mind, she would resort to having imaginary conversations with her mother, pretending that she was at home having a cup of coffee on the breakfast table in the kitchen. “The government has been sending a lot of money to Iraq—mostly, but not exclusively, from the Agriculture Department. We do this with the understanding that the Iraqis will use the money to buy agricultural products from the U.S. So it’s actually a subsidy for American farmers as much as it is a foreign-aid program. Four times a year all of the departments that are sending money to Iraq, as well as some other agencies, have a meeting to evaluate this program and to set policy objectives for the next quarter.”
Simple and logical it was—a model of rational government procedure. But there was always more to it than that. If it had really been possible for her to talk about such things to her mother, and if she’d wanted to level with her, she would have had to do a lot more talking. The talk would have sounded less like a civics textbook and more like vicious gossip. Betsy had learned that these meetings usually turned out to be a chance for the various division chiefs to strut their stuff, score cheap points on crosstown competitors, and defend, or enlarge, their turf.
And when Betsy logged onto her workstation and began scanning through her waiting mail, she realized that today there was even more to it than that. One piece of mail was a list of participants in today’s meeting. It had been suddenly and drastically revised. Today it wouldn’t be just the usual division chiefs and their analyst minions. Today it went much higher. It was going to be controlled straight from the White House, and it wasn’t going to be a meeting so much as a damage-control session.
The New York Times bureau chief in Cairo, acting on a leak by the Egyptians, had blown the whistle on the Iraqis. Saddam Hussein was being a very bad boy. He was using U.S. dollars not to buy food from American farmers but for other things. It did not take a huge exercise in forward-leaning analysis to know that he was stocking up on weapons again.
What to do about that was a policy question, and it was not for people at her level to discuss policy. It was for her and her colleagues at similar-level desks around town only to monitor cash and weapons flows, and she expected that those would be the marching orders today.